When the nation began, the vast majority of citizens lived on farms. They could largely determine their own schedules. They decided when to chop wood, take care of the animals, tend the crops in the fields, and do housework. Farming families didn’t often look at their clocks.
When most people began living in cities, their schedule was determined by the starting times of the schools they attended, the streetcars and trolleys they rode, the opening and closing hours of stores and shops, and the working hours set by their employers. Clocks became important.
After the Civil War ended in 1865, the urbanization trend accelerated. While cities had grown slightly until that year, they expanded dramatically afterward.
This sudden growth was due in part to technology.
Farmhouses were rarely more than two stories tall. Early cities often featured five-storied buildings, and the invention of the elevator suddenly allowed for ten- and twenty-storied buildings.
Large-scale industrial factories became common in cities after 1865. This created a need for workers. Thousands of people moved to cities and got jobs in factories.
The need for workers created opportunities for individuals and families to improve their lives. A steady wage from a factory job, combined with lower prices for ordinary products, lured people from the poor parts of the country. Prices were lower because industrialization allowed for the mass production of basic goods, as historian Wilfred McClay writes:
In 1790, 3.3 percent of the population lived in cities, defined as a population of eight thousand or more. By 1890, that number was 33 percent. The nation grew, but cities grew faster; the nation’s population increased by 12 times between 1800 and 1890, but the population of cities increased by 87 times. By 1890, there were not merely six cities but 448 cities with greater than eight thousand in population. And there were six metropolises by 1900 with populations totaling more than a half million. Much of this growth took place in the postwar years; Chicago tripled its population between 1880 and 1900, while New York grew from two million to three and a half million in the same years.
People moved to the cities not only from other parts of the United States, but also from other countries around the world. A new wave of immigrants came to America. Until the Civil War, most immigrants came from northern and western Europe. They were called the “Old Immigration.”
After the Civil War, people from southern and eastern Europe began coming to America. They were called the “New Immigration.”
There were also immigrants from Japan and China.
Many immigrants faced difficulties when they first arrived. Some could not speak English. Others had no money at all. Sometimes, their new neighbors — people who’d already lived in the United States for a while — were not happy to see them make a new home here.
But in the long run, the advantages outweighed the disadvantages, as Wilfred McClay explains:
Why did they come? Some came for the same reasons that immigrants had always come to America: to escape the poverty, famine, and religious or political persecution of their native lands. But many more were pulled to America by its promise than were pushed to it by the conditions in their homelands. Those who had seen relatives become successful in America were inclined to follow in their wake, and in time whole extended families were affected. Real wages were relatively higher in the United States than in Europe, and burgeoning American industries, ever in need of fresh sources of unskilled labor, were only too happy to appeal to members of economically struggling groups in European countries with the promise of steady employment and an ability to rise in the world. Such companies sought out immigrants in their native lands and actively recruited them to come to America and work in the steel mills and on the railroads. Many did just that.
“In the experiences of these people,” McClay says, industrialization, urbanization, and immigration converged. To tell the story about why and how large cities grew in America, one must also tell the story about technological developments, and about immigrants from other nations.
New technology like the electric lights, telephones, and recorded music were a part of these large, new, and growing cities, as were the people who found opportunities for a better life by moving into those cities.
By the year 1900, a new way of life — an urban life in which people rode powered streetcars, spoke on telephones, listened to recorded music, had electric lights after dark — a life which was scheduled and organized by the operating hours of schools, stores, shops, factories, cable cars, and trams — was offering serious competition to the agricultural way of life. Life on a family farm, which had once been the only option for the majority of Americans, was now merely one option — and a shrinking one at that.
