The American Yawp — Chapter Seventeen: New Lives
Abridged for Intermediate-High Learners

The United States changed completely after the Civil War. In 1900, the historian Henry Adams wrote, "My country in 1900 is something totally different from my own country of 1860. I am wholly a stranger in it." Cities grew quickly. Millions of immigrants arrived. Workers labored in giant factories while a few businessmen built enormous fortunes. Poor families crowded into dirty slums.

Between 1870 and 1920, more than twenty-five million immigrants came to the United States. Before 1900, most had come from Ireland and Germany, but afterward most came from southern and eastern Europe. In 1883, the poet Emma Lazarus called the Statue of Liberty the "Mother of Exiles" welcoming the world's poor. People left home to escape poverty or to flee persecution. But the strongest reason was work. The typical immigrant settled in an ethnic enclave, where they kept their languages and traditions. Some Americans demanded that newcomers quickly assimilate, but many held on to their old ways.

Life was hard for the newcomers. In 1890, the journalist Jacob Riis published How the Other Half Lives, showing New York's terrible slums. His work helped bring housing reform. But many native-born Americans feared the immigrants. Each nativist worried that newcomers took jobs, lowered wages, or carried dangerous ideas. Congress restricted immigration. The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 banned Chinese laborers entirely — the first American law to exclude people because of their race. An 1882 immigration law also barred the poor, criminals, and the mentally ill. In 1907, the Gentlemen's Agreement with Japan stopped Japanese workers from coming.

Industry pulled millions into the cities, and America's urban population grew sevenfold in fifty years. Chicago showed the change: from 30,000 people in 1850 to 1.7 million in 1900. Its giant Union Stock Yards made Chicago "America's butcher." The Great Fire of 1871 destroyed much of the city, yet Chicago rebuilt and kept growing. By 1920, most Americans lived in towns or cities. In New York, the Democratic political machine called Tammany Hall traded jobs and favors for votes. The machine was full of corruption. Still, it built water systems, schools, parks, and bridges. The suburb grew on the edges of cities.

In the South, about 90 percent of African Americans still lived in 1900. Most were farmers who owned no land; as sharecroppers, they paid landlords with part of their crops. Black workers faced Jim Crow segregation and constant racial violence. White mobs carried out lynching — murder without trial — killing roughly five thousand Black Americans from the 1880s to the 1950s. Journalist Ida B. Wells investigated these murders and published Southern Horrors in 1892. Southern states also passed laws to disenfranchise Black voters with poll taxes and literacy tests. White leaders promised a "New South," but it still rested on white supremacy. In 1915, the film The Birth of a Nation praised the Ku Klux Klan and spread racist lies.

Women fought for greater freedom. Victoria Woodhull became the first woman to run for president, in 1872, and demanded women's suffrage — the right to vote. Others joined the temperance movement against alcohol, and Jane Addams opened Hull House in Chicago in 1889, a settlement house that helped poor immigrants. New technologies created a mass culture. Thomas Edison's phonograph brought music into homes, his motion pictures drew crowds into theaters, and vaudeville shows entertained millions. Some Christians preached the "social gospel" of helping the poor, while Andrew Carnegie said the rich had a duty to give money to charity.

In 1893, Chicago hosted the World's Columbian Exposition, a great fair celebrating American industry. Millions of visitors saw electric lights, powerful machines, and the first Ferris wheel. The fair showed how completely American life had been remade.