1. Chapter 22
A New Urban Culture

2. Introduction: Quality of life improved btwn 1900-1920
Jobs were plentiful
More and more people were entering professions (doctor, lawyer, teacher, engineer
Growing middle class
Mass production came with mass consumption

3. Production and Consumption
Business firms spent $95 million on advertising in 1900, by 1920 more than $500 million
Using new marketing techniques, they developed modern concepts of market testing and research
Sampling customers
Mass production swept the clothing industry
Americans dressed
better than any people
ever before
Using lessons learned making uniforms during the Civil War
Clothing manufacturers developed standard clothing and shoe sizes
Clothing prices dropped
“off the rack” clothes lessened distinctions between rich and poor
Wages
1900-$418 year, by 1920-$1342 a year
Middle class grew, & the rich grew richer
5% of the population received almost 1/4th of all income
In 1900

4. Living and Dying in an Urban Nation
1920-median age 25 (it is now 35)
Immigration accounted for part of the populations youthfulness
Most immigrants were young
Medical advances/better living conditions/higher birth rate/immigration
Death rate dropped
Life expectancy rose from years (wt women) and years (wt men), yrs for blacks
Infant mortality remained high; nearly 10% (white) and 20% (minority)
Fewer people survived beyond middle age-in 1900, the death rate among people between was more than twice the modern rate
4% of the population was older than 65 (13%today)

5. Demographics of the City
Systematic socioeconomic segregation, usually in “rings”
Innermost ring-immigrants
Circled by the working class
Remaining rings with rising affluence towards wealthy suburbs
Giant Industrial Cities
New York, Chicago, Philadelphia
Product: textiles to structural steel
All connected with the railroad
Modern Urban Zoning
Residential, Industrial & open area for residential businesses
Result: powerful social repercussions
Extended racial segregation

6. Popular Pastimes
Due to a decrease in the length of the work week, greater leisure time was available to workers
Baseball entrenched as the “national pastime”-attendance doubled
Movie theaters opened everywhere
Admission 5 cents
1915-DW Griffith, produced the first movie spectacular
“The Birth of the Nation”
Adopted new film techniques
Closeups
Fadeouts
Artistic camera angles
Staged battle scenes

7. “Birth of a Nation”

8. Vaudeville Increasingly popular after 1900, reached maturity in 1915
Drew from the immigrant experience
Voiced the variety of city life and included slapstick comedy
Skits, songs, comics, acrobats, and magicians
Music during this timeframe was strongly influenced by the African American experience
Ragtime and Jazz
Louis Armstrong
Bessie Smith “Empress of the Blues”

9. Writers of the Progressive Era
Ezra Pound-poet
Poets task was to capture fleeting images in verse
Robert Frost
North of Boston 1915
Carl Sandberg
Chicago poems 1916
T.S. Eliot
Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock in “Poetry”

10. Experimentation in the arts
Ferdinand “Jelly Roll” Morton
Music, pianist
George Bellows
Painter: “Realist” captured the color and excitement of the tenements
Isadora Duncan & Ruth St Denis
Dance. Departed from traditional ballet, “Listen to the music in your soul”
T.S. Eliot
Poet: rejected traditional meter and rhyme as artificial constraints

11. A ferment of Discovery and Reform
Manners and Mores change slowly, yet in these two decades sweeping change was underway
The ferment of progressivism reshaped the country
Reform burst forth
People built playgrounds
Restructured taxes
Regulated business
Altered political systems
Opened kindergartens
Improved factory safety
Across all walks of life people were experiencing a sense of excitement and discovery
Racism, repression, and labor conflict was still present but their was also talk of hope, progress and change
People felt that they could make a difference and in doing so they became the progressive generation