HIS CH 7-2 THE CITIES

LAST: FIRST:

PERIOD:

Multiple Choice
Identify the choice that best completes the statement or answers the question.

Making a living in the late 19th and early 20th centuries was not easy. Natural and economic disasters had hit farmers hard, both in Europe and in the United States, and the promise of industrial jobs drew millions of people to American cities. The urban population exploded, jumping from 10 million to 54 million between 1870 and 1920. This rapid urban growth not only revitalized the cities but also created serious problems.

Urban Opportunities

The lure that drew people to the cities was largely the same one that had attracted settlers to the West and immigrants to America-opportunity. The technological boom in the 19th century not only revolutionized age-old occupations, such as farming, but also contributed to the growing industrial strength of the United States. While many settlers were pushing westward to start new lives on the frontier, thousands of other people were drawn to the Northeast and Midwest. The result was rapid urbanization, or growth of cities, in those regions.

Why did farmers and others in America and Europe move to the cities at the turn of the century?

a.	there was law and order in the cities	c.	mostly to be with relatives
b.	promise of jobs	d.	the cities were more exciting

Which statement is true about cities at the turn of the century?

a.	The growth of the cities exploded and created many problems	c.	The cities experienced many problems because of limited growth
b.	The cities experienced moderate growth which also presented many problems	d.	The cities grew rapidly and there were few problems

Which statement is true about the turn of the century?

a.	though there were technological changes people worked about the same as they always had	c.	there were few technological changes but many changes in the workplace
b.	technology had a huge impact on the way people worked	d.	none of these are true

As people moved into the Northeast and Midwest, what was the effect on the cities?

a.	a growth in Noreastern small towns	c.	a growth in urbanization
b.	a growth in Northeast and Midwest farming areas	d.	a growth in ruralization

IMMIGRANTS SETTLE IN CITIES
Most of the immigrants who streamed into the United States in the late 19th century became city dwellers because cities were the cheapest and most convenient places to live. Cities also offered unskilled laborers steady jobs in mills and factories and provided the social support of other immigrant families. By 1890, there were twice as many Irish residents in New York City as in Dublin, Ireland, and the world's largest Polish population was not in Warsaw, Poland, but in Chicago. By 1910, immigrant families made up more than half the total population of 18 major American cities

Most of the immigrants who streamed into the United States in the late 19th century became city dwellers because cities were the cheapest and most convenient places to live. Cities also offered unskilled laborers steady jobs in mills and factories and provided the social support of other immigrant families. By 1890, there were twice as many Irish residents in New York City as in Dublin, Ireland, and the world's largest Polish population was not in Warsaw, Poland, but in Chicago. By 1910, immigrant families made up more than half the total population of 18 major American cities.

Immigrants often clustered in ethnic neighborhoods with others from the same country-or even from the same province or village. Living among people who shared their background enabled the newcomers to speak their own language and practice their customs and religion.

At the same time newcomers were able to learn about their new home through a program of education known as the Americanization movement. Schools and voluntary associations provided programs aimed at teaching immigrants the English language as well as American history and government-subjects that were necessary to help the newcomers become citizens. The movement also included the teaching of other subjects, such as cooking and social etiquette, designed to assist the immigrants in assimilating into American culture.

Unfortunately, many native-born Americans felt threatened by these mushrooming ethnic communities and expressed their fear by becoming hostile. Overcrowding soon became a problem as well, one that was intensified by the arrival of new urbanites from America's rural areas.

Which statement is true

a.	most of the new immigrants spread out across America into the rural areas	c.	immigrants had little impact on city life at the turn of the century
b.	the immigrants added to the population explosions in the cities	d.	none of these statements are true

Immigrants who settled in the cities grouped into ethnic neighborhoods and this helped them to feel more at ease in their new country

true

false

Which statement below is true?

a.	The cities ignored the new immigrants	c.	None of these statements are true
b.	The government tried to provide service that would help the immigrants to assimilate into American culture	d.	The government went out of its way to make the new immigrants feel unwelcome in America

What did the call the movement to assimilate new immigrants into U.S. culture?

a.	citizenship	c.	Americanization
b.	forced culturalization	d.	cultural erradication

IMMIGRATION FROM COUNTRY TO CITY

The rapid improvements in farming technology during the second half of the 19th century were good news for some farmers but bad news for others. Inventions such as the McCormick reaper and the steel plow made farming more efficient but meant that fewer laborers were needed to work the land. As use of the new equipment spread across the country, farms merged, and many rural people could not find jobs in agriculture. They left their land and agricultural way of life and made their way to cities to find whatever jobs they could.

Many of the Southern farmers who lost their jobs were African Americans. Other African Americans in the rural South also became aware of the opportunities in large cities. Between 1890 and 1910, about 200,000 African Americans moved north and west, to cities such as Chicago and Detroit, in an effort to escape racial violence, economic hardship, and political oppression. Many found conditions in the cities only somewhat better than those they had left behind. Because of racial prejudice and their inadequate education, they were often forced to take low-paying factory jobs or to work as domestic servants.

URBAN CULTURAL OPPORTUNITIES

Although people moved to cities for economic reasons, cultural opportunities offered an additional attraction. In contrast to the relatively slow-paced life in both immigrants' native villages and American rural communities, life in a city was varied and exciting. Each city had a personality all its own. In New York City, you had an opportunity to see the first moving pictures. In Chicago, you could join your neighbors on an outing to the Columbian Exposition or to Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show.

In Boston, you could travel to the ball park and watch the hometown Boston Nationals battle their way to a championship. Cultural attractions such as these sometimes made up for the hardships that life in the city presented.

Which statement is true about rural life at the turn of the century

a.	technology had a positive effect on rural poor people	c.	technology had a negative effect on rural poor people who could not merge their farms
b.	technology had no effect on rural life	d.	none of these is correct

10.

Which statement is true

a.	technology had little effect on African Americans living in the South	c.	many African Americans migrated North because of technology where they found good paying jobs in the cities
b.	technology improved the lives of African Americans living in the South	d.	none of these statements are true

11.

Which statement is true about life in the cities at the turn of the century?

a.	Life in the cities was boring	c.	Life in the cities was exciting and full of new experiences
b.	Life in the cities provided fewer opportunities for excitement than living in rural areas	d.	none of these statements are true

Urban Problems

As the urban population skyrocketed, city governments faced serious problems, such as how to provide adequate housing, transportation, water, and sanitation and how to deal effectively with fire and crime.

HOUSING

When the industrial age began, housing options for working-class families in major cities were few and far from satisfactory. A family could buy a house on the outskirts of town, but its members would have to commute to work on often inadequate public transportation. A family could also rent rooms in a boardinghouse in the central city, sharing kitchen and dining-room facilities with other families. As the urban population increased, however, new types of housing were designed to eliminate some disadvantages of these options. For example, row houses-single-family dwellings that shared side walls with other similar houses-packed many single-family residences onto a single block.

After working-class families moved away from the central city, immigrants often took over their old housing, sometimes with two or three families occupying a one-family residence. As Jacob Riis noted, these multifamily dwellings, called tenements, were overcrowded and unsanitary.

In 1879, to improve such slum conditions, New York City passed a law that set minimum standards for plumbing and ventilation in apartment buildings. To meet these standards, landlords began building dumbbell tenements-long, narrow, five- or six-story buildings that were shaped like barbells. The central part was indented on either side to allow for an air shaft and, thus, an outside window for each room.
Since garbage was picked up infrequently, people sometimes dumped it into the air shafts, where it attracted rats and vermin. To keep out the stench, residents nailed windows shut. Though established with good intent, dumbbell tenements soon became even worse places to live than the converted single-family residences.

TRANSPORTATION

Getting around a city safely and efficiently was as much of a problem as finding a steady job and a decent place to live. Before industrialization, people went on foot or in horse-drawn vehicles. But innovations in mass transit enabled large numbers of workers to go to and from jobs more easily. Street cars attached to moving underground cables were introduced in San Francisco in 1873. In 1888, the first practical electric streetcar line began operating in Richmond, Virginia. In addition, new modes of transportation were developed to take advantage of space available above and below street level. In Boston, for example, electric subways began running underneath the city's busy streets in 1897. By the early 20th century, masstransit networks in many urban areas linked city neighborhoods to one another and outlying communities to the central business district and other focal points. As urban populations kept expanding, cities were hard-pressed to keep old transportation systems in good repair and to build new ones to meet the growing demand.

12.

Which statement is true about housing in the cities

a.	city housing was far superior to rural housing	c.	wealthy and middle class residents tended to remain in their houses making the housing shortage worse
b.	the barbell housing units provided clean safe housing for those lucky enough to get a unit	d.	none of these statements are true

13.

The cities made no attempt to improve housing for the poor immigrants.

a.	true	c.	no way to tell
b.	false

14.

Which statement is true

a.	The cities built underground subways to improve transportation in the croweded cities	c.	Population growth put many demands on the city transportation system
b.	all of these are true	d.	The horse and buggy was not a practical method of transportation in the new cities

WATER

Cities also faced the problem of supplying fresh water that was safe to drink. Before industrialization, many people bought water for drinking and cooking from vendors on horse-drawn carts. As the urban population grew in the 1840s and 1850s, cities such as New York and Cleveland built public waterworks to handle the increasing demand. As late as the 1860s, however, the residents of many cities had grossly inadequate water mains and piped water-or none at all. Even in large cities like New York, homes seldom had indoor plumbing, and residents had to collect water in pails from faucets on the street and heat it for bathing. The necessity of improving water quality to control diseases such as cholera and typhoid fever was obvious. To make city water safer, chlorination was introduced in 1893 and filtration in 1908. These innovations spread slowly, however. In the early 20th century, many city - dwellers still had no access to safe water.

SANITATION

As the cities grew, so did the challenge of keeping them clean. In most, unsanitary conditions were all too widespread. Horse manure piled up on the streets, sewage flowed through open gutters, and factories spewed foul smoke into the air. Without a dependable system of trash removal, people dumped their garbage into alleys and streets. Although private contractors called scavengers were hired to sweep the streets, collect garbage, and clean outhouses, they often did not do the jobs they were paid to do. Sewer lines and sanitation departments, which many cities had instituted by 1900, helped somewhat in keeping cities clean, but the task of providing healthful urban living conditions was an ongoing challenge for urban leaders.

15.

Which statement is true

a.	the abundant rainfall in the East minimized the negative effects of water shortages	c.	none of these statements are true
b.	everyone had fresh running water in their houses and apartments	d.	to cope with the growing population the cites built new water systems to deliver water to the people

16.

Which statement is true

a.	Sanitation was not a major problem for the cities because most cities were built near rivers	c.	Sanitation was a major problem for the cities because of the large populations a lack of sanitation facilities
b.	Sanitation was not a major problem for the cities because most people took care of their own sanitation	d.	Sanitation was a problem for the cities because many immigrants from Europe were unclean

FIRE

The limited water supply in many cities contributed to another menace: the spread of fires. Major fires occurred in almost every large American city during the 1870s and 1880s. In addition to lacking water with which to combat blazes once they started, most cities were packed with wooden dwellings, which were like kindling waiting to be ignited. The use of candles and kerosene heaters was also a fire hazard. In San Francisco, deadly fires often broke out in the aftermath of earthquakes. Jack London described the fires that broke out during the San Francisco earthquake of 1906.

At first, most firefighters were volunteers and not always available when their services were needed. Cincinnati, Ohio, tackled this problem when it established the nation's first paid fire department in 1853. By 1900, most cities had full-time professional fire departments. The invention of the automatic fire sprinkler in 1874 and the replacement of many wooden buildings with structures made of brick, stone, and concrete also made cities safer. Despite these various improvements, however, blazes still got out of control. John R. Chapin, an artist for Harper's Weekly, described the destruction done by the Great Chicago Fire of 1871: "[The blaze] was devouring the most stately and massive buildings as though they had been the cardboard playthings of a child.... One after another they dissolved, like snow on a mountain."

CRIME

As the populations of cities increased, so did crime. Pickpockets and thieves flourished in urban crowds, and con men fooled non-English-speaking immigrants and naive country people with clever scams. Crime-ridden areas of certain cities, which were controlled by gangs of young toughs, became known as Murderers' Alleys or Robbers' Roosts. Although New York City organized the first full-time, salaried police force in 1844, it and most other city law enforcement units were too small to adequately protect residents from rising crime and violence.

17.

Which factors contributed to the fire problem in the cities in the 1800’s?

a.	methods used by people for lighting and cooking	c.	poor water supplies in all areas of the cities
b.	building structures	d.	all of these are true

18.

The fires from the San Francisco earthquake and the Great Chicago Fire of 1871 were the two great fires in America during the late 1800’s and turn of the century

true

false

Reformers Mobilize

As problems in cities mounted, some Americans worked to find solutions. Social reformers-mostly young, educated men and women from the middle class-established programs to aid the poor and to improve urban life.

THE SOCIAL GOSPEL MOVEMENT

Social welfare reformers targeted their efforts at relieving the poverty of immigrants and other city dwellers. An early reform program, the Social Gospel movement, preached salvation through service to the poor. Social Gospel ministers such as Walter Rauschenbusch of New York City and Washington Gladden of Columbus, Ohio-who called his teachings Applied Christianity- inspired followers to erect churches in poor communities and persuaded some business leaders to treat workers more fairly.

THE SETTLEMENT HOUSE MOVEMENT

Inspired by the message of the Social Gospel movement, many 19th-century reformers responded to the call to help the urban poor. In the late 1800s, a few reformers established settlement houses, community centers in slum neighborhoods that provided assistance and friendship to local men, women, and children-especially immigrants. Many settlement workers lived at the houses so that they could learn firsthand about the problems caused by urbanization and help create solutions.

Run largely by middle-class, college-educated women, settlement houses provided educational, cultural, and social services. They provided classes in such subjects as English, health, crafts, drama, music, and painting, and offered college extension courses. They sponsored reading circles in which volunteers read books aloud to help educate the illiterate. Settlement houses also sent visiting nurses into the homes of the sick and provided whatever aid was needed to secure "support for deserted women, insurance for bewildered widows, damages for injured operators, furniture from the clutches of the installment store."

Early settlement houses in the United States, founded by Charles Stover and Stanton Coit, opened in New York City in 1886. Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr founded Chicago's Hull House in 1889, and Lillian D. Wald established New York's Henry Street Settlement House in 1893. In 1890, Janie Porter Barrett founded Locust Street Social Settlement in Hampton, Virginia-the first settlement house for African Americans. By 1910, about 400 settlement houses were operating in cities across the country.

The Social Gospel and settlement-house movements firmly established the need for social responsibility toward the urban poor and provided means of addressing some of the ongoing problems of urbanization. A new type of political structure also developed in response to these urban issues. But it soon created problems of its own. These new structures were the big city political machines.

19.

What motivated the Gospel Reformers to work with the poor people of the cities?

a.	they believed they could reach heaven by helping the poor	c.	working with the poor provided an income tax deduction for their churches
b.	they wanted to make money	d.	none of these answers are true.

20.

Which statement is true

a.	Most of the social reformers were from poor families themselves	c.	Most of the social reformers were not Americans
b.	Most of the social reformers were immigrants	d.	Most of the social reformers were young middle class Americans

21.

The Settlement House movement proved

a.	that most Americans did not care for the inner city poor	d.	all of these statements are true
b.	that most Americans were racist	e.	all of these statements are false
c.	that Christians did not really care for the poor

22.

Which statement is true

a.	Settlement Houses were new immigrants went to live after arriving in America	c.	Settlement houses were places where the inner-city poor could go for help
b.	Settlement Houses were also called “dumbell buildings” because of their shape	d.	all of these statements are true

Jane Addams was a community worker, a champion of organized labor, and a peace advocate. She believed that in all things the best approach to problem solving was to "learn from life itself."

During a trip overseas, she visited England's Toynbee Hall, the first settlement house. She viewed the problems of urban life firsthand-and resolved to do something about them. She cofounded Hull House in Chicago, where she began working to solve neighborhood problems. In time her concerns expanded. She became an antiwar activist, a spokesperson for racial justice, and an advocate for quality-of-life issues, from infant mortality to better care for the aged. In 1931 she was a co-winner of the Nobel Peace Prize.

Until the end of her life, Addams insisted that she was just a "very simple person." But many who know what she accomplished consider her a source of continuing inspiration.

23.

Jane Addams was an advocate for labor, a peace advocate and someone who tried to help the poor. She was an intellectual who relied on her college work to learn about the poor.

a.	all true	c.	part true
b.	all false

24.

Jane Addams was most likely in favor of World War I because the Germans were so cruel.

true

false

25.

Jane Addams co-founded Hull House in Chicago

a.	true	c.	partly true
b.	false