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INTRODUCTION

The New Century

On 10 April 1899, on the eve of a new century and enthused by his personal triumph with the Rough Riders in the Spanish-American War, a young Theodore Roosevelt called on his fellow Americans to meet the challenges of the dawning age. "The twentieth century looms before us big with the fate of many nations," he said. "If we stand idly by, if we seek merely swollen, slothful ease and ignoble peace, if we shrink from the hard contests where men must win at hazard of their lives and at the risk of all they hold dear, then the bolder and stronger peoples will pass us by, and will win for themselves the domination of the world." While many of Roosevelt's contemporaries worried less about the struggle for world power than about the struggle for daily survival, they would embrace the bold dynamism he brought to the office of the presidency two years later. The United States in the 1900s was a nation sharply conscious of its place on the world stage, even if it was uncertain and divided about the role it would play. Roosevelt's challenge to an older opponent in a debate over war with Spain captured this spirit: "You and your generation have had your chance.… Now let us of this generation have ours!"

Growth and Transformation

Americans in the 1900s experienced changes that would have been incomprehensible to earlier generations. The population grew 21 percent in these years, from 75,994,575 to 91,972,266. This growth was driven in large measure by the single greatest influx of immigrants to the United States in its entire history. Between 1901 and 1910 some 8,795,386 immigrants entered the country, more than half of them from eastern, central, and southern Europe. Many of these new Americans, driven from their homelands by violence or poverty and lured by the promise of freedom and opportunity, were drawn to industrial jobs in the Northeast and Midwest, adding velocity to a process of urbanization that was drastically altering the American landscape, American politics, and the way of life of the average person. A nation that was 40 percent urban and 60 percent rural in 1900, the United States by 1910 would be 46 percent urban and 54 percent rural. Like the immigrants from foreign shores, America's internal migrants were drawn from farms and small towns by the lure and luster of the booming cities and by the hope that a job in one of the nation's factories would provide a better living for their families. The scale and rapidity of these upheavals, and the growing diversity of the American population, left many feeling uneasy and uncertain even as they pursued new opportunities for security and prosperity.

Big Business Consolidates

When Alexis de Tocquevill visited the United States in the 1830s, he wrote regarding the nation's economy that "what most astonishes me … is not so much the marvelous grandeur of some undertakings, as the innumerable multitudes of small ones." Had one of his descendants returned seventy years later he surely would have reversed the equation: a nation of small farmers, shopkeepers, and mill owners had become a land of industrial giants whose size dwarfed every other social and political institution. Before the Civil War even the largest manufacturing enterprises—such as the textile mills of Lowell and Lawrence, Massachusetts—were worth less than __BODY__ million, and most manufacturing firms were considerably smaller. When the United States Steel Corporation was formed in 1901, it was capitalized at __BODY__ billion, a sum more than twice the annual budget of the federal government in that year. In transportation, steel, meatpacking, oil refining, and other sectors of the U.S. economy, large corporations dominated relatively new national markets for goods and services. The impact of this consolidation was felt throughout the country, as revolutions in communication and transportation made it possible for businesses to span the continent. Not everyone welcomed this change: local merchants found themselves competing with mail-order houses such as Montgomery Ward and Sears Roebuck; farmers continued to chafe at their dependence on the railroads; city dwellers found themselves at the mercy of monopolistic streetcar and utility companies; and local and state governments struggled to control the behavior and mitigate the impact of towering corporate enterprises. But while some Americans protested the growing power of the trusts, their protest was muted by a rising level of prosperity and material well-being. Despite the disruptions associated with the Panic of 1907, the American economy, as measured by the gross national product, nearly doubled during the decade, from $18.7 billion in 1900 to $35.3 billion in 1910.

A World Power

The emergence of the United States as an industrial giant on a par with Germany and Great Britain also sustained the nation's new role in international affairs. The victory of the United States over a decaying Spanish Empire in the Spanish-American War thrust the country into an unaccustomed position as an imperial power. New territories in the Caribbean and the Pacific, a stubborn insurrection against U.S. control in the Philippines, and economic ambitions in China signaled the end of a century of isolationism as official policy. Theodore Roosevelt proved himself to be an activist president abroad as well as at home, reasserting U.S. prerogatives in Latin America, pressing his predecessor's demand for an "Open Door" in China, securing American rights to build the Panama Canal, and sending the U.S. Navy on an around-the-world cruise to signal to the world and to critics of imperialism at home his determination to wield American power abroad.

The Crisis of the 1890s

The last decade of the nineteenth century, despite American triumphs overseas, had been a decade of sometimes violent upheaval and social crises. The worst depression in the nation's history prior to the Great Depression of the 1930s struck in 1893, throwing millions out of work when such things as unemployment insurance and old-age pensions were unheard of. Violent strikes against the Pullman Company in Chicago and Carnegie Steel in Homestead, Pennsylvania, seemed to signal to an anxious middle class a dawning era of bitter class conflict. Government in the nation's cities often made a mockery of the democratic process. Where urban political machines and bosses ruled, votes were bought and sold, insiders reaped windfalls from graft and corruption, and the desperate needs of urban residents for clean air and water, sewer systems, clean streets, and other services were either ignored or contracted to the highest bidder. On the farms of the South and Midwest, populist protest erupted over the power of the railroads, the financiers, and the middlemen who in the eyes of angry farmers were nothing but parasites who fed off their harvests. Together these events suggested a society in peril, and by the turn of the century a host of reformers were busily trying to save America from itself.

An Age of Reform

Reformers dramatically altered American politics and society in the 1900s. Most leaders of what historians refer to as the progressive movement were American-born, urban, and middle class. Many were the sons and daughters of ministers and professionals. They were themselves journalists, lawyers, social workers, politicians, and sometimes businesspeople. The reforms they initiated began in the mid 1890s and achieved their greatest impact during the first two decades of the twentieth century. Their goals were diverse and often contradictory. Some wanted to stamp out vice and corruption in the nation's growing cities: they demanded the prohibition of alcohol, the shutting down of brothels, and the prosecution of crooked cops and politicians. Others were mainly concerned with curbing the power of the trusts and used first state and then federal law to try to restore a competitive economic marketplace. Other reformers wanted to make American society and politics more efficient, to curb the waste of natural resources and human life. Many of the reformers were educated women who believed they had a moral responsibility to put their knowledge to work in the service of society. While reform activities often began as efforts by voluntary associations of individuals (or within professions such as law and medicine), by the time Theodore Roosevelt became president in 1901 most progressives were looking to government as a potential force for change rather than a source of oppression. In the 1900s they achieved major gains in regulating unscrupulous business practices, protecting natural resources and wilderness, reforming city governments across the country, making the electoral process more open, and improving the working conditions of women and children. In these and other areas the progressive legacy would remain powerful for the rest of the twentieth century.

Progressive Beliefs

Despite important differences, progressives shared central beliefs that shaped their activism in the 1900s. They believed that human behavior was shaped by the surrounding environment, and they rejected both the Calvinist doctrine of immutable sin and predestination and the emphasis placed by many nineteenth-century theorists on heredity. They believed that human nature could be improved by changing the conditions under which people lived and worked. They borrowed from the scientific method a belief in experimentation and trial and error. Rather than clinging to unshakable "truths" and immutable laws, they believed that their ideas and values had to withstand the test of experience. While many progressives were nostalgic for an earlier time when it seemed that individuals could control their own destiny, they rejected the "rugged individualism" of earlier generations, believing that cooperation and social control had to replace the survival of the fittest as guiding principles of American society. Many were believers in the "Social Gospel"—which emphasized the need to put Christian principles of human brotherhood, equality, and responsibility for one's fellow human beings into practice. Finally, progressives were firmly convinced that education was the most powerful tool for social change. Following the lead of the philosopher and educator John Dewey, they worked to overhaul the nation's schools so that they would become, as Dewey phrased it, "the deepest and best guarantee of a larger society which is worthy, lovely and harmonious."

The Forces of Tradition

Many Americans embraced the new and the modern and recognized that social and political institutions had to adapt to the changed circumstances of twentieth-century life. But nostalgia for old ways and customs, and strongly held beliefs that the United States was changing in unwelcome and unwanted ways, remained powerful elements in the culture of the 1900s. Religious fundamentalists, of whom there were millions, fiercely resisted any accommodation of empirical science, Darwinian theories of human evolution in particular. In law, the judiciary remained a bulwark of limited government, resisting the efforts of states and the federal government to regulate business but sanctioning government repression of labor unions, especially radical unions such as the Industrial Workers of the World, which judges perceived as a threat to the established social order. In the arts, the 1900s witnessed a fierce and contentious debate between young modernists eager to experiment with new subject matter and novel forms of expression and a strongly entrenched establishment anxious to defend a "genteel tradition" built around "the best that has been thought and said." In politics even the most ardent progressive often simply wanted to return to an imagined simpler past, when neighbors knew one another and social and economic power was localized and personal.

Race

For African Americans, the past was rarely the object of nostalgia, and the future was as much a source of concern as of hope. "The problem of the twentieth century," the African American intellectual, historian, and critic W. E. B. Du Bois wrote in The Souls of Black Folk (1903), "is the problem of the color line." Du Bois's prescient remark was born of the bitter experience of African Americans in the decades that followed Reconstruction and in the first decade of the twentieth century. During these years, particularly in the late 1890s and early 1900s, blacks were systematically stripped of their political and civil rights throughout the southern United States. Segregation in public facilities, transportation, and housing, already the norm in much of the South when the Supreme Court declared in 1896 that "separate but equal" facilities did not violate the Constitution, became firmly entrenched in state laws throughout the region (where more than two-thirds of the nation's black population lived in 1900). As blacks began to move north in search of opportunities, they found the doors of some northern communities closed to them altogether. The most extreme form of racial antagonism was violence against individuals and entire communities, an all-too-frequent occurrence in the old century and the new. In the last sixteen years of the nineteenth century there were 2,500 lynchings in the United States; there were 100 in 1900 and 1,100 between the turn of the century and the beginning of World War I. During the 1900s there were race riots in New York City; Brownsville, Texas; Atlanta; Springfield, Ohio; and Springfield, Illinois, the birth-place of Abraham Lincoln. Despite violence and segregation, however, growing African American communities in urban America were finding their voice in churches, schools, colleges, newspapers, and other institutions that would nurture and sustain a persistent demand for equality.

The Culture of Cities

American cities in the 1900s, particularly those in the Northeast and the industrial Midwest, teemed with new inhabitants, new languages, and a new culture. As capitals of the new industrial economy they symbolized its promise and contained many of its problems. Along New York City's Fifth Avenue, on Chicago's Gold Coast, atop Nob Hill in San Francisco, the mansions of a wealthy elite testified to the staggering wealth concentrated in relatively few hands. The crowded tenements of New York City's Lower East Side, the brothels of New Orleans's Storyville, the swarming out-door markets on Maxwell Street in Chicago's immigrant Jewish neighborhood, typified the lives of the urban working class. New museums, opera houses, and symphony halls housed the high culture of urban elites who had the wealth and leisure time to enjoy them, while baseball parks, saloons, movie houses, and amusement parks such as Dream City (1906) in Pittsburgh and Coney Island in New York were physical emblems of an emerging mass culture. Metropolitan newspapers, locked in a fierce battle for readers, trumpeted the glories and vulgarities, the delights and the dangers of urban life to an eager audience. Skyscrapers and subways were beginning to transform the way cities looked and worked, while streetcars carried the middle class into the expanding suburbs of Boston, Los Angeles, and countless cities in between. Urban schools became central institutions in this decade as they experimented with new forms of education to prepare students for work and citizenship in a complex society and struggled to Americanize immigrant children. For all of their problems, from political corruption to pollution and overcrowding, American cities were magnets, pulling in aspiring artists, steelworkers, shop girls, journalists, and those just plain tired of life on the farm. William Allen White of Kansas, one of the decade's most prominent journalists, captured the nation's ambivalence about its cities when he wrote at the end of the decade that "these cities of ours—spindles in the hands of fate—dirty though they are, and befouled, must keep moving incessantly as they weave the garment."

The Lively Arts

One observer of the artistic and literary scene in the United States at the end of the 1900s is reported to have remarked to a gathering of young artists and intellectuals in New York City that "the fiddles are tuning all over America." There was a palpable sense of excitement in the air as like-minded men and women began to discover one another, to learn that they were not alone in their interest in experimentation with new subject matter and styles. In architecture a distinctively American style was emerging in the Prairie Style houses of Frank Lloyd Wright and the California bungalows of Bernard Maybeck. The Arts and Crafts movement turned up its nose at Victorian ornamentation and championed designs that reflected the ideals of simplicity and craftsmanship. Young American painters and photographers were turning from pastoral scenes to back alleys, tenements, and the boxing ring. Young writers such as Theodore Dreiser—whose Sister Carrie (1900) was a frank tale of a young woman's fall from grace and rise to fame—rejected the genteel notion that literature should beautify and uplift and adhered instead to the credo that modern urban life should be portrayed unflinchingly and realistically. In the case of Upton Sinclair's The Jungle (1906), life seemed to imitate art, as this fictional portrayal of conditions in the Chicago meatpacking industry revolted consumers and sparked political action.

Invention and Expectancy

Throughout the 1900s Americans in many walks of life seemed animated by the sense that in crossing from one century to the next they had entered a markedly different era. They had only to look about them or read the daily newspaper to see living proof. Orville and Wilbur Wright had taken to the sky in an airplane—and stayed up long enough to demonstrate to the world that flight was no longer a dream. The automobile was becoming a more common sight on city streets and country roads and promised to transform fundamentally patterns of life and leisure, not to mention romance. If one listened closely enough, one could hear radio in the not-so-distant future. That future beckoned, but many believed, like the journalist Herbert Croly, that it would have to be seized and shaped, and would demand fresh approaches and bold action. In The Promise of American Life (1909) Croly conveyed this mood when he wrote the following words:

There comes a time in the history of every nation, when its independence of spirit vanishes, unless it emancipates itself in some measure from its traditional illusions; and that time is fast approaching for the American people. They must either seize the chance of a better future, or else become a nation which is satisfied in spirit merely to repeat indefinitely the monotonous measures of its own past.