Chapter 18: The Victorians Make the Modern (1880-1917) PDF

C HAP TER 18 The Victorians Make the Modern 1880–1917. CHAPTER OUTLINE 7. Department stores lured middle-class...

C HAP TER 18 The Victorians Make the Modern 1880–1917. CHAPTER OUTLINE 7. Department stores lured middle-class women by offering tearooms, day care, The following annotated chapter outline will help wrapping and carrying services, as well as you review the major topics covered in this chapter. credit plans. I. Commerce and Culture 8. Although shopping in department stores A. Consumer Spaces remained the privilege of middle-class 1. During industrialization, members of the women, working-class women could work middle and working classes distinguished as clerks and cashiers in these each other not just through work but also establishments and use employee through consumerism and leisure. discounts to purchase the latest fashions. 2. Entrepreneurs like Thomas Edison 9. Technology widened the gap between the developed products such as the classes. Washing machines, vacuum incandescent light bulb and phonograph cleaners, and telephones eased life and for the consumer. changed social relations for the middle 3. Consumer culture appeared democratic class but also offered new employment because even working-class Americans opportunities for the working class. could purchase cheap mass-produced 10. Railroad companies appealed to middle- goods and watch moving pictures. class consumers and travelers with 4. In reality, consumerism evidenced class stations that offered modern amenities and inequalities, race privilege, and traditional railcars, such as the Pullman cars, that gender roles. provided comfort in elegant surroundings. 5. Consumer-oriented businesses enticed 11. It was a struggle for wealthy African middle class women and families to Americans to find seats in first-class change their old shopping and leisure railcars because white ladies and habits. gentlemen opposed racial equality. 6. P. T. Barnum advertised his traveling 12. The United States Supreme Court decided circus as respectable and educational in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) that family entertainment. segregation, such as separate cars on trains  C HAPTER 18 T HE V ICTORIANS M AKE THE M ODERN for African Americans, was constitutional a. Before the Civil War, there were no as long as accommodations were equal. In distinctly American games except for reality, segregated facilities were inferior. Native American lacrosse. European 13. This court decision upheld Jim Crow Americans preferred to play cricket. legislation that segregated all public and b. The rules for a new team sport, commercial spaces in the South and baseball, were developed during the evidenced that racial and class injustices 1840s and 1850s, and the game’s shaped business and consumer culture. popularity spread in military camps B. Masculinity and the Rise of Sports during the Civil War. In the postwar 1. “Muscular Christianity” years, it became the most popular sport a. Gender expectations also changed for in America. men. Traditionally, a successful man c. Although developed by independent was his own boss and economically craftsmen and adopted by middle-class independent. By 1900, more and more and elite men to prove strength and men worked in salaried positions or for fitness, employers also encouraged wages. An increasing number also did working-class men to play baseball “brain work” in offices and no longer because it promoted discipline and used their muscles. Athletics became teamwork. the preferred way for men to prevent d. Big-time professional baseball arose weakness and decay and to maintain with the launching of the National their toughness and strength. League in 1876; during the first World b. One of the first promoters of physical Series in 1903, the Boston Americans fitness was the Young Men’s Christian defeated the Pittsburgh Pirates. Profit- Association (YMCA). Introduced in minded entrepreneurs shaped the sport Boston in 1851, the YMCA combined to please a new type of consumer, the vigorous activities with an fan. evangelizing appeal. 3. Rise of the Negro Leagues c. Business leaders hoped that sports a. Although a few African Americans had taught discipline and established initially been able to play for major employer-sponsored teams to instill a league teams, by the early 1900s, competitive spirit, teamwork, and baseball had become a segregated company pride. sport. d. YMCA leaders also offered working- b. Shut out of white leagues, black class men opportunity for leisure players and fans turned instead to all- activities and developed the new black professional teams, which indoor games of basketball and organized into separate Negro Leagues volleyball to offer its membership to celebrate athletic talent and race winter activities. pride. e. Elite men and women enjoyed tennis, 4. American Football golf, swimming, and social gatherings a. The most controversial sport was at country clubs. Elite men also football, which began at elite Ivy pursued more aggressive physical League schools during the 1880s. sports including boxing, weightlifting, b. Like baseball and the YMCA, football and martial arts. soon attracted business sponsorship. 2. America’s Game c. The first professional teams emerged around the turn of the century in  C HAPTER 18 T HE V ICTORIANS M AKE THE M ODERN western Pennsylvania’s steel towns. of historic and scientific interest” without Executives of Carnegie Steel organized congressional approval, to preserve the teams in Homestead and Braddock, Grand Canyon. and the first league appeared during the 8. Although the great outdoors provided new anthracite coal strike in 1902. leisure opportunities for women as well as C. The Great Outdoors working-class tourists, elite visitors also 1. By the 1880s and 1890s, elite and middle- maintained segregation practices. class Americans began to view Victorian 9. New state game laws, which redefined culture as stuffy and claustrophobic, and hunting and fishing as recreational not they revolted by heading outdoors. subsistence activities to protect animals 2. A craze for bicycling swept the nation, from extinction, triggered controversy and women took up athletic activities such over the uses of wildlife. as archery and golf. II. Women, Men, and the Solitude of Self 3. The outdoors took on a new meaning: A. Changes in Family Life instead of danger and hard work, it 1. The average family—especially in the reflected leisure and renewal. Those with middle class—continued to get smaller in leisure time accomplished this by using the post-Civil War decades. A long the railroad networks to go to national decline in the birth rate, which began in parks. People of modest means went the late eighteenth century, continued in camping and rented cottages. this era. In 1800, white women who 4. As Americans went searching for renewal survived to menopause had borne an in nature, the nation’s conservation average of 7.0 children; by 1900, the movement arose. Organizations such as average was 3.6. the Appalachian Mountain Club (1876) 2. Several factors limited childbearing. and the Sierra Club (1892) dedicated Americans married at older ages, and themselves to preserving and enjoying many mothers tried—as they had for America’s great mountains. decades—to space pregnancies more 5. National and state governments set aside widely by nursing young children for more public lands for preservation and several years, which suppressed fertility. recreation. The United States substantially By the late nineteenth century, couples expanded its park system, requiring more also used a range of other contraceptive comprehensive oversight, which President methods, such as condoms and Woodrow Wilson established by signing diaphragms. an act creating the National Park Service 3. In 1873, Anthony Comstock, the in 1916. crusading secretary of the New York 6. Conservationists also worked to protect Society for the Suppression of Vice, wildlife. Preservation efforts resulted in secured a federal law that banned the passage of the Lacey Act in 1900, the “obscene materials” from the U.S. mail. creation of the National Audubon Society The law prohibited circulation of almost in 1901, and President Theodore any information about sex and birth Roosevelt’s establishment of the first control. National Wildlife Refuge at Pelican B. Education Island, Florida, in 1903. 1. For young people who hoped to secure 7. In 1908, Roosevelt used the powers of the respectable and lucrative jobs, the Antiquities Act (1906), which gave U.S. watchword was education. A high school presidents the ability to set aside “objects education was particularly valuable for C HAPTER 18 T HE V ICTORIANS M AKE THE M ODERN boys from affluent families who hoped to convinced younger African Americans enter professional or managerial work. that Washington had accommodated Daughters attended in even larger whites too much. numbers than their brothers. 9. In the Northeast and South, women most 2. By 1900, 71 percent of Americans often attended single-sex institutions or between the ages of five and eighteen teacher-training colleges where the attended school. That figure rose even student body was overwhelmingly female. further in the early twentieth century, as 10. For female students from affluent public officials adopted and enforced laws families, private colleges offered an requiring school attendance. education equivalent to men’s. Vassar 3. Most high schools were co-educational, College started the trend when it opened and almost every high school featured in 1861; Smith, Wellesley, and others athletics. soon followed. 4. Some high school graduates sought further 11. Co-education was more prevalent in the degrees, as the higher education system Midwest and West, where state expanded rapidly. The percentage of universities opened their doors to female Americans who attended college rose students after the Civil War. Women were during the 1880s from around 2 percent to also admitted to most of the southern 8 percent by 1920. Attendance at business African American colleges founded and technical schools rose as well. during Reconstruction. 5. The economy shaped curriculum at most 12. The Association for the Advancement of state universities stressing technical Women, founded in 1873 by women’s training. The curriculum at private college graduates, defended women’s colleges also changed. Under dynamic higher education and argued that women’s president Charles Eliot, between 1869 and paid employment was a positive good. As 1909, Harvard College pioneered the use women began to earn degrees and work of liberal arts. for wages, it became more difficult to 6. In the South, one of the most famous argue that women were “dependents” who educational projects was Booker T. did not need to vote. Washington’s Tuskegee Institute, founded C. From Domesticity to Women’s Rights in 1881. Washington, born in slavery, not 1. The Woman’s Christian Temperance only taught but also exemplified the goal Union of self-help. a. During industrialization, middle-class 7. Washington became the most prominent women sought to expand their place black leader of his generation. His 1895 beyond the household, building reform Atlanta Compromise address intended to movements and taking political action. show racial progress in the South and Starting in the 1880s, women’s clubs seemed to support segregation. sprang up and studied social problems 8. Washington’s style of leadership, based such as pollution, unsafe working on avoiding confrontation with whites and conditions, and urban poverty. By cultivating patronage and private 1890, they created a nationwide influence, was well suited to the difficult General Federation of Women’s Clubs. era after Reconstruction. He represented b. Women frequently made maternalist the hope that education and hard work arguments; they justified their work would erase white prejudice, but the tide based on their role as mothers. of disfranchisement and segregation  C HAPTER 18 T HE V ICTORIANS M AKE THE M ODERN c. One of the first places women sought b. African American women did not sit to reform was the saloon. The idle and in 1896 created the National Woman’s Christian Temperance Union Association of Colored Women, a (WCTU), founded in 1874, spread network of local women’s clubs that rapidly after 1879, when the focused their attention on community charismatic Frances Willard became its support. leader. c. Using the language of domesticity and d. It became the leading organization respectability to justify their work, advocating prohibition of liquor. The black club women arranged for the WCTU, more than any other group of care of orphans, founded homes for the the late nineteenth century, launched elderly, worked for temperance, and women into public reform. undertook public health campaigns. e. Although the prohibition movement d. One of the most radical voices was Ida drew many supporters, it also attracted B. Wells, who launched a one-woman many critics, and attitudes toward campaign against lynching. Her prohibition diverged along ethnic, investigations revealed that labor religious, and class lines. disputes, economic competition, and f. Frances Willard declared herself a consensual relationships between white Christian Socialist and urged her women and black men, not interracial followers to tackle other problems, rape, were the reasons why white mobs such as poverty, hunger, lack of lynched black men. libraries, prison conditions, and e. The largest black women’s group arose workers’ plight. within the National Baptist Church g. The WCTU advocated women’s voting (NBC), which by 1906 represented 2.4 rights and supported the Prohibition million African American churchgoers. Party which accepted women as f. Founded in 1900, the Women’s speakers, convention delegates, and Convention of the NBC promoted and local candidates. funded night schools, health clinics, h. The WCTU served as a springboard for kindergartens, day care centers, and many women to not only raise money prison outreach programs. but to become more politically 3. Women’s Rights involved, join the People’s Party or a. Although it divided into two rival groups such as the National Congress organizations during Reconstruction, of Mothers, and run for office. the movement for women’s suffrage 2. Women, Race, and Patriotism reunited in 1890 in the National a. Like temperance work, patriotic American Woman Suffrage activism became women’s special Organization (NAWSA). province in the post-Civil War b. Soon afterward, suffragists won decades. The Daughters of the victories in the West, winning full American Revolution, founded in ballots for women in Colorado in 1893 1890, devoted themselves to and Idaho as well as Utah in 1896. By celebrating the memory of 1913, most women living west of the Revolutionary War heroes, and the Mississippi River had the ballot and in United Daughters of the Confederacy, other localities could participate in founded in 1894, extoled the South’s municipal elections, school elections, “Lost Cause.” or liquor referenda.  C HAPTER 18 T HE V ICTORIANS M AKE THE M ODERN c. Ironically, the prominence of the in the late nineteenth century. The term movement also encouraged women and was widely associated with British men to oppose it. Antisuffragists naturalist Charles Darwin and his argued that women voters would just immensely influential book, On the Origin double their husbands’ votes, subject of Species (1859), which proposed the men to “petticoat rule,” and undermine theory of natural selection. women’s special roles as disinterested 4. In nature, Darwin argued, all creatures reformers. struggle to survive. Individual members of d. By the 1910s, some women took a a species are born with random genetic stand for feminism—women’s full mutations that better fit them for their political, economic, and social particular environment. equality. 5. Social Darwinism, as Spencer’s idea e. A famous site of sexual rebellion was became known, found its American New York’s Greenwich Village, where champion in William Graham Sumner, a radical intellectuals, including many sociology professor at Yale. Competition, gays and lesbians, created a vibrant said Sumner, was a law of nature, like community. gravity, and the success of millionaires f. Along with many other political demonstrated to him that they were activities, women in Greenwich “naturally selected.” Village founded the Heterodoxy Club 6. Sumner’s views created controversy, as (1912), which was open to any woman intellectuals argued that Social Darwinism who pledged not to be “orthodox in her was an excuse for the worst excesses of opinions.” industrialization. g. As women entered the public sphere, 7. The most dubious applications of feminists argued that they should not evolutionary ideas were codified into new just fulfill Victorian expectations of reproductive laws based on eugenics, an self-sacrifice for others; they should emerging “science” of human breeding. work on their own behalf. Eugenicists proposed sterilizing those III. Science and Faith deemed “unfit,” especially residents of A. Darwinism and Its Critics state asylums for the insane or mentally 1. Amid rapid change, the United States disabled. continued to be a deeply religious nation. 8. In the early twentieth century, almost half However, the late nineteenth century of U.S. states enacted eugenics laws. By brought increasing public attention to the time eugenics subsided in the 1930s, another kind of belief: faith in science. about 20,000 people had been sterilized, 2. Researchers in many fields became with California and Virginia taking the converts to the doctrine of “fact worship”: lead. Eugenicists also supported the belief that one could rely only on hard segregation and racial discrimination and facts and observable phenomena. Fiction advocated immigration restrictions. writers and artists used close observation B. Realism in the Arts and attention to real-life experience to 1. Inspired by the quest for facts, American create works of realism. Others struggled authors rebelled against romanticism and to reconcile science with religion. Victorian sentimentality and took up 3. Evolution—the idea that species are not literary realism. fixed, but ever-changing—was not a 2. By the 1890s, a younger generation of simple idea that scientists all agreed upon writers took up the call by editor and  C HAPTER 18 T HE V ICTORIANS M AKE THE M ODERN novelist William Dean Howells “to picture photographers argued that the rise of the daily life in the most exact terms photography made painting obsolete. possible.” Theodore Dreiser dismissed 9. Painters invented their own form of unrealistic novels that always had “a realism. In 1913, New York Realists happy ending.” participated in one of the most 3. Stephen Crane’s Maggie: A Girl of the controversial events in American art Streets (1893) described the seduction, history, the Armory Show. abandonment, and death of a slum girl. 10. Housed in an enormous National Guard Hamlin Garland conveyed the hardships building in New York, the show of rural life in Main-Travelled Roads introduced America to modern art, (1891), a collection of stories based on his including experiments with such styles as family’s struggle in Iowa and South cubism, characterized by abstract, Dakota. geometric forms. 4. Some authors believed realism did not go 11. A striking feature of both realism and far enough to overturn Victorian morality. modernism, as they developed, was that Jack London, who spent his teenage years many of their leading writers and artists as a factory worker, sailor, and tramp, were men. They denounced nineteenth- dramatized what he saw as the harsh century culture as hopelessly feminized. reality of an uncaring universe in stories In making their work strong and modern, such as “The Law of Life” (1901). these men also contributed to the broader 5. London and Crane helped create literary movement to masculinize America. naturalism. They suggested that human C. Religion: Diversity and Innovation beings were not so much rational agents 1. By 1900, new scientific, literary, and and shapers of their own destinies, but artistic ideas posed a significant challenge blind victims of forces beyond their to religious faith. Although some control—including their own Americans argued that science would subconscious impulses and desires. sweep away religion altogether, American 6. America’s most famous fiction writer, religious practice remained vibrant. Mark Twain (Samuel Langhorne Protestants developed creative new Clemens), came to take an equally bleak responses to the era of industrialization, view. In The Adventures of Huckleberry while millions of newcomers built their Finn (1884), he condemned slavery and own institutions for worship and religious racism, and in A Connecticut Yankee in education. King Arthur’s Court (1889), he bitterly 2. Immigrant Faiths critiqued America’s idea of progress. a. By 1920, almost two million children 7. By the time Twain died in 1910, realist attended Catholic elementary schools and naturalist writers had laid the instead of public schools, and Catholic groundwork for literary modernism. dioceses across the country operated Modernists rejected traditional canons of fifteen hundred high schools. literary taste, tended to be religious b. Like Protestants, some Catholics and skeptics or atheists, questioned the whole Jews succumbed to secular pressures idea of progress and order, and focused and fell away from religious practice. their attention on the subconscious and c. Those immigrant Catholics who “primitive” mind. remained faithful to the Church were 8. In the visual arts, technological changes anxious to preserve what they had influenced aesthetics. By 1900, some known in Europe, and they generally C HAPTER 18 T HE V ICTORIANS M AKE THE M ODERN supported the Church’s traditional fear that Catholics and Jews may limit wing. But they also wanted religious that dominance. life to express their ethnic identities. e. While some Protestants enlisted in The Catholic hierarchy agreed to foreign missions, others responded by appoint immigrant priests as auxiliary evangelizing among the unchurched bishops within existing dioceses. and indifferent. They provided reading d. In the late nineteenth century, many rooms, day nurseries, vocational native-born, prosperous American classes, and other services. Jews embraced Reform Judaism, f. This movement to renew religious faith abandoning such religious practices as through dedication to public welfare keeping a kosher kitchen and and social justice became known as the conducting services in Hebrew. Social Gospel. e. But this was not the way of Yiddish- g. Its goals were epitomized by Charles speaking Jews from Eastern Europe. Sheldon’s novel In His Steps (1896), Generally much poorer and also eager which told the story of a congregation to preserve their own traditions, they whose members resolved to live by founded Orthodox synagogues, often Christ’s precepts for one year. in vacant stores, and practiced Judaism h. An example of the Social Gospel at as they had at home. work, the Salvation Army, which 3. Protestant Innovations arrived from Great Britain in 1879, a. Facilitated by global steamship and spread a message of repentance among telegraph lines, Protestant foreign the urban poor, offering assistance missions in Asia, Africa, and the programs that ranged from soup Middle East grew rapidly after the kitchens to shelters for former Civil War. Missionaries were prostitutes. supported at home by millions of i. Disturbed by what they saw as rising armies of volunteers, including many secularism and abandonment of belief, women. some conservative ministers and their b. Missionaries won converts by offering allies held an annual series of Bible medical care and promoting women’s Conferences at Niagara Falls. The education. Some missionaries came to resulting “Niagara Creed” reaffirmed love and respect the people among the literal truth of the Bible and the whom they served. But others became certainty of damnation for those not deeply frustrated. born again in Christ. These Protestants c. Militant Protestants created a powerful called themselves fundamentalists, political association, the American based on their belief in the essential Protective Association (APA). This truth of the Bible and its central place virulently nativist and anti-Catholic in Christian faith. group advocated that all public school j. Fundamentalists such as Dwight L. teachers be Protestants, no Catholics Moody and Billy Sunday made hold public office, and immigration be effective use of revival meetings, restricted. offering salvation to anyone and d. Although Protestants still accounted expressing political thoughts based on for 60 percent of Americans affiliated their Protestant beliefs. Sunday’s with a religious body, the formation of public support for progressive reforms groups such as the APA evidenced a and condemnation of Socialists  C HAPTER 18 T HE V ICTORIANS M AKE THE M ODERN anticipated the nativism and antiradicalism of the post-World War I era. k. Sunday also embodied the masculinized American culture through his commanding presence on stage, his fiery sermons, and his history as a baseball player. His revivals also represented modern marketing techniques, providing mass entertainment and the opportunity to meet a sports hero. Americans had adapted to modernity by adjusting the older beliefs and values, enabling them to endure in new forms.