Which demographic shift occurred in the US in the late 19th century due to industrialization?

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Introduction: An Overview of the Gilded Age

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Not every city in the country developed as fast as the largest cities did. Important regional differences existed in urbanization because of differences in the nature of industrial growth. The largest cities in the Northeast were manufacturing powerhouses that contained everything, from large factories building railroad locomotives to small shops producing textiles in people’s apartments. The Northeast also gave rise to smaller cities that concentrated on particular industries, like Rochester, New York, which specialized in men’s clothing, boots, and shoes. Following on a tradition of manufacturing from earlier in the century, New Bedford and Fall River, Massachusetts increased in size because of their cotton textile factories. Other cities, like Elizabeth, New Jersey, grew as byproducts of the expansion of their larger neighbors.

Chicago, the largest city in the Midwest, made its name processing natural resources from the Western frontier before those resources traveled eastward as finished products. Grain and lumber—two industries that had been crucial for Chicago’s early growth—relied on Chicago for marketing and storage. With perfection of the refrigerated railroad car, meat processing became such an enormous industry that the vast majority of the meat that Americans ate was processed in the stockyards on that city’s south side. (That activity would disperse again, after the turn of the 20th century, to other cities like Fort Worth and Kansas City.) Smaller cities in America’s industrial heartland would grow around other manufacturing pursuits like steel in Youngstown, and machine tools and cash registers in Dayton, Ohio.

What separates this period from earlier periods in urban and industrial history is that this was the first time in American history that cities had moved to the center of American life. Cities were where most of the new factories got built. Waves of immigrants settled in cities because that’s where the job openings in industrial factories were. Cities were also places where the effects of industrialization, especially the increased inequality of wealth, were most visible. That means that the problems of cities became the problems of America.

The Electrical Grid and Improvements in Transportation

This kind of growth required substantial improvement beyond Edison’s initial vision of an electrical system. The effects of a reliable electric grid on the cities where it first appeared were numerous, ranging from less coal smoke in the air to new sounds produced by various electrical creations—everything from streetcars to arc lights. Early arc lights were so bright people thought they could stop crime and vice by exposing the people who perpetrated these crimes. In smaller cities, obtaining electric light was a sign of modernization, which implied future growth. Modern light in urban workplaces made office work easier by lessening strain on the eyes. As electric light companies moved in, the much-hated urban gas companies lost a considerable amount of economic power. Since people preferred electric light to gas, it became increasingly popular, as the grid expanded and the costs dropped. Electric light even changed the way people lived inside their houses. For example, children could now be trusted to put themselves to bed since there was no longer a fire risk from the open flames that were once needed to get to bed in the dark.

The most noteworthy effect of high-quality, affordable lighting was the widespread practice of running factories twenty-four hours a day—which made them much more productive without any improvements in the technology of production. Replacing putrid gas lamps also made the smell of factories better for the workmen who worked there. As the electrical grid became more reliable, electric motors gradually began to replace steam engines as the source of power in manufacturing. Using small electric motors as a source of power freed factories from having to be located near water sources to feed boilers and made it possible for them to be smaller too.

Because factories were concentrated in or near cities, it was a lot cheaper to wire them than it was to wire farms or even smaller cities away from electrical generating stations. Many of the new factories built during this later period appeared outside city limits, another new development. Electrification allowed managers to automate jobs once done by hand labor, thereby eliminating inefficiency, gaining greater control over the production process, and boosting overall productivity. New devices like time clocks and even new modes of production like the assembly line also depended upon electric power.

The new suburbanites often traveled to and from work via new electric streetcars. The electrical equipment manufacturer Westinghouse was one of the major manufacturers of vehicles powered by an overhead wire. Electric streetcars had the advantage over horses of not leaving manure or of dying in the streets. Streetcars were more popular during weekends than during the week as working class people took advantage of low fares to explore new neighborhoods or to visit amusement parks, like Coney Island, generally built at the end of these lines.

Structural Steel and Skyscrapers

While retail emporiums could be blocks long and only a few stories tall, other business rented space in thinner buildings built much higher. By the late 1880s, structures that had once been built with iron began to be built with a structural steel—a new, stronger kind of steel. The practice had begun in Chicago, championed by the architect Louis Sullivan, who designed the first skyscrapers there. A skyscraper, Sullivan wrote, “must be every inch a tall and soaring thing, rising in sheer exultation that from bottom to top it is a unit without a single dissenting line.” That kind of design required a skeleton of structural steel upon which other substances like brick or granite could hang. Even then, such skyscrapers had to be tapered; otherwise, the weight from the top floors could make the whole structure collapse.

The construction of skyscrapers was itself a terrific example of the industrial age coordination of labor and materials distribution. Steel skeletons meant that the unornamented higher sections of a building could be worked on even before the inevitable elaborate ornamental fringes on the lower part of the building were finished. This saved both time and money. When New York got so crowded that there was no space to store raw materials, the appearance of those materials would be carefully choreographed, and they would be taken directly off of flatbed trucks and placed in their exact positions near the tops of new buildings. Around the turn of the 20th century, a major skyscraper could be built in as little as one year. The faster a building could be built, the faster an owner could collect rents and begin to earn back construction expenses.

Unburdened by the need to pay federal income tax, industrial titans from across the United States displayed their massive wealth by building lavish mansions along New York’s Fifth Avenue during the 1890s. By the 1920s, the value of land in Manhattan grew so fast because of its possible use for skyscrapers that second generation industrial families sold their mansions, since they no longer wanted to pay huge property taxes on them. Blocks of what was known as “Vanderbilt Alley,” named after the children of the steamship and railroad pioneer who had built mansions in the same area, were replaced by skyscrapers and high-end retail emporiums.

Apartment houses made it easier to pack people into small urban areas and therefore live closer to where they worked. Wealthy people could buy space and separation from one’s neighbors, while those middle class people who could not afford to live in suburbs lost the space they had before urbanization accelerated. To counter these unequal tendencies, New Yorkers developed the idea of the cooperative, where many people bought a single building and managed it themselves. Lavish apartments became alternatives for mansions once Manhattan real estate became too expensive for all except those with huge fortunes.

The Assembly Line

Ford could achieve both quality and a low price at scale because of the assembly line. This particular conceptual breakthrough owed much to the “disassembly lines” that had been pioneered in the meatpacking industry during the previous century. In the same way that a single carcass was picked apart by men with specialized jobs as it moved along a line, mounted upon a hook, Ford arranged his new factory at Highland Park so that men with highly specialized assignments could build an automobile much faster than before. The assembly line moved work to the men rather than forcing men to move to the work, thereby saving valuable time and energy. It also extended the concept of the division of labor to its logical extreme so that workers would only perform one function in a much larger assembly process all day, every day. The applicability of these principles to the manufacturing of just about everything is what made Ford such an important figure in the history of industrialization. Mass production became possible for all kinds of things that had once seemed far removed from the automobile.

Ford built Model Ts at three different facilities over the entire history of that vehicle. He improved his production methods over time (which included introducing and improving upon the assembly line) so that he could produce them more cheaply and efficiently. Efficiency depended on speed, and speed depended upon the exact place in the factory where those machines were placed. Because Ford made only one car, he could employ single-purpose machine tools of extraordinarily high quality. The company also used lots of other automated manufacturing equipment, like gravity slides and conveyors, to get parts of the car from one place to another in its increasingly large, increasingly mechanized factories.

Because the assembly line moved the work to the men rather than the men to the work, the company could control the speed of the entire operation. Like earlier manufacturers, Ford depended upon standardized, identical parts to produce more cars for less, but the assembly line also made it possible to conserve labor—not by mechanizing jobs that had once been done by hand, but by mechanizing work processes and paying employees just to feed and tend to those machines. This was not fun work to do. “The chain system you have is a slave driver!” wrote an anonymous housewife based on her husband’s experience working on the assembly line. “My God! Mr. Ford. My husband has come home and thrown himself down and won’t eat his supper–so done out! Can’t it be remedied?” Ford instituted an unprecedented wage of $5/day to keep workers on his assembly line, but this reward did not make the work any easier.

Before Ford came along, cars were boutique goods that only rich people could afford to operate. After Ford introduced the assembly line (actually a series of assembly lines for every part of the car), labor productivity improved to such a degree that mass production became possible. Perhaps more important than mass production was mass consumption, since continual productivity improvements meant that Ford could lower the price of the Model T every year, while simultaneously making small but significant changes that steadily improved the quality of the car. Mass production eliminated choice, since Ford produced no other car, but Ford built variations of the Model T, like the runabout with the same chassis, and owners retro-fitted their Model Ts for everything from camping to farming.

The increased number of automobiles on city streets further congested already congested downtown areas. Streetcars got blocked. Pedestrians died in gruesome traffic accidents. One of the basic requirements of having so many new cars on the roads was to improve the quality and quantity of roads. Local city planners tended to attack such problems on a case-by-case basis, laying pavement on well-traveled roads and widening them when appropriate. New traffic rules, such as the first one-way streets, appeared in an effort to alleviate these kinds of problems. Traffic control towers and traffic lights—the mechanical solution to a problem inspired by industrialization—also appeared for the first time during this era.

Cities grew when industries grew during this era. Since people had to live near where they worked (and few people lived in skyscrapers), many builders built out into undeveloped areas. If a city had annexed much of the land around it previous to these economic expansions (like Detroit), those areas became parts of a larger city. If they hadn’t, much of this growth occurred in new suburbs (like Philadelphia). Chicago was so confident of further growth during this period that it built streetcar lines into vacant fields. To meet rising demand for housing, homebuilders applied industrial principles to building—using standardized parts that were themselves the result of mass production techniques. By the 1920s, buying pre-cut mail order houses became big business.

The Origins of Mass Production

Discussion of the Literature

David Hounshell’s From the American System to Mass Production is simply the best comprehensive history of industrialization available. It covers a few very important industries in detail (like automobile manufacturing), but it is at its best when dealing with the similarities in production technologies from industry to industry. My own Industrialization and the Transformation of American Life is a simplified introduction to these principles and a summary of their effects on many aspects of American history during this period, including urbanization.

A number of excellent studies of important industries during this period show how industrialization progressed in some detail. Thomas Misa’s Nation of Steel is the definitive work on the technology of that essential industry. Ron Chernow’s Titan, a biography of John D. Rockefeller, Sr. will teach you everything you want to know about the oil industry during this period. Richard R. John’s Network Nation describes the intricacies of the telegraph and telephone industries. My own Refrigeration Nation is a close study of the American ice and refrigeration industries.

Sam Bass Warner Jr.’s The Urban Wilderness, an important history of urbanization throughout the United States, includes discussion of many problems unique to this time period. The best works of urban history published since then tend to deal with particular cities or with the relationship between cities and surrounding suburban communities. Warner’s Streetcar Suburbs, for example, covers the growth of Boston throughout the 19th century. Donald L. Miller’s Supreme City masterfully handles New York during the 1920s (and before, in order to set context). Miller’s City of the Century offers a similarly thorough treatment of Chicago during the 1890s. Perhaps the most-beloved work of urban history that covers cities around the country is Kenneth Jackson’s Crabgrass Frontier, which takes in both the growth of suburbia and the cities they surround throughout American history, but paying special attention to the years covered in this article. Building Suburbia by Dolores is a detailed work that covers a similar subject over the same time period. William Cronon’s Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West is the classic explanation of the relationship between the fastest-growing city of the late 19th century and all the natural resources that surrounded it.

The turn towards social history among historians since the 1960s has made studies of broad economic forces increasingly uncommon. Early labor history, for example, was often written by economists. Therefore, it showed a tendency towards looking at the effects of technological change upon workers. Early sociologists who practiced during this period used to do field work in the cities where their universities were located. While a return to this kind of study seems unlikely, more attempts to study the broader economic forces that made social change happen would likely be appreciated by scholars working in multiple disciplines.

Which demographic shift occurred in the US because of industrialization?

Which demographic shift occurred in the US in the late nineteenth century?

What demographic changes did industrialization contribute to in the United States during the late 1800s?

What shift was happening in America during the 19th century?