By Patrick Allitt, Emory University
American cities grew very rapidly in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, concentrating and intensifying industrial life. They were often badly planned or not planned at all, and they became overcrowded, as immigrants and rural migrants poured in to work in the factories, the dockyards and the slaughterhouses.
Pollution and Unsanitary Conditions
The immigrants were dependent on coal fires for industry and also for domestic heating and cooking, with the result that the cities were very highly polluted, constantly covered with clouds of soot and ash and smoke.
Contaminated water supplies and very large numbers of animals—animals for food and also horses for transport—worsened public health conditions and shortened life expectancy because epidemics were so common.
Makeshift urban political machines like New York’s Tweed Ring provided rough-and-ready governments to city dwellers in return for their votes, but tended to retard urban reform efforts, until, in the late 19th century, a generation of white Anglo-Saxon Protestant reformers like Jane Addams—the founder of Hull House settlement in Chicago—tried to Americanize urban immigrants and transform city government, and Lincoln Steffens and other Progressive reformers campaigned for city government reform.
This is a transcript from the video series A History of the United States, 2nd Edition. Watch it now, on Wondrium.
Overcrowding and High Rents
The very rapid growth of cities was the first thing to come to terms with. They were very overcrowded and unhealthy. In most cities, there wasn’t any proper central authority to regulate what kinds of buildings got placed where, with very little zoning, and very little regulation of density of population, so that an individual entrepreneur would buy a patch of land and usually build housing on it as densely as he possibly could in order to get the maximum return from his investment.
Cramming lots of housing into a small space was therefore common; tenement buildings in the cities were a classic example of this.
Land values were very high in the middle of the cities, and rents were very high accordingly. There were hardly any parks, because to set aside land from building and to make it a park requires strong centralized control, withholding land from commercial uses. Recent immigrants living in city districts thus were often remote from any parkland.
Problems of Sewage
The reason urban populations tended to be so dense and so concentrated was because they had to live close to the place where they worked. Adequate water supplies were rare, and proper sanitation was very unusual, and this is particularly true of southern cities.
For example, in the 1880s, Baltimore, New Orleans and Mobile, all big cities, still had open sewers. Philadelphia had 82,000 cesspools, but no proper sewage system.
Boston simply used the harbor as its sewer, with the result that every time the tide flowed out, the sewage would be carried away, but every time the tide flowed in most of it would come back again in only a slightly diluted form, and this went on literally for generations.
The Problem of Fires
There was also an enormous amount of fire in American cities, because virtually every household would have an open fire for cooking and for heating purposes. Until electricity became common in the second or third decade of the 20th century, they had kerosene lamps as well. This meant that the fire risk was very high. It was extremely common for city dwellings to be burning down.
Until the development of municipal firefighting services, there were gangs of adolescent boys running in rival fire companies who’d rush to fires, and sometimes fight one another for the rights to extinguish a fire, rather than concentrating on extinguishing the flames.
Horses Were a Problem, Too
The cities were also full of animals. A city like Chicago, a big slaughterhouse center, had tens of thousands of farm animals coming into town. Farm animals were sometimes kept in urban conditions, and horses were used for transportation.
Horses in cities became more and more of a problem as cities got bigger, and in the 1870s, some urban planners said that places like New York and Chicago were just about as big as they’re ever going to get, because if they got any bigger, they were going to need more and more horses for transportation, and the horse manure problem was going to become completely unmanageable.
In 1872, there was an epidemic among the horses in Philadelphia, which killed 2,500 of them in the space of three weeks.
Impure Food
In addition, a lot of the food on sale in the cities was impure, and people died of food poisoning at a very high rate.
The impure food scandal came to a crisis in 1906 when an urban reformer named Upton Sinclair, a Socialist novelist, published a book called The Jungle, which finally prompted a round of legislation in favor of reforming food practices.
Sinclair, who prepared for writing the novel by investigating the Chicago slaughterhouses, gave lurid but very accurate descriptions of what they were like, alive with rats and flies, and stinking of blood and decay.
One of the people who read the novel was the president, Theodore Roosevelt. After reading the novel, he took the initiative to say to Congress, “We’ve got to start enforcing some regulations on the way in which mass-produced food is prepared.”
It’s from then on that the Pure Food and Drug Administration traces its origins; that’s when it began.
Common Questions about Issues in Early American Cities
The immigrants were dependent on coal fires for industry and also for domestic heating and cooking, with the result that the cities were very highly polluted, constantly covered with clouds of soot and ash and smoke.
The reason urban populations tended to be so dense and so concentrated was because they had to live close to the place where they worked.
The impure food scandal came to a crisis in 1906 when an urban reformer named Upton Sinclair published a book called The Jungle, which finally prompted a round of legislation in favor of reforming food practices.
