AMERICA 1900-1910 - 'THE COCKSURE ERA' (Part 3)

SEIFERT

Posted By: David (email)
Date: 3/7/2004 at 21:05:25

'AMERICA 1900-1910'

'The Cocksure Era'

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The statistics told an ominous story to rural America. While 60 per cent of the U.S. population in l900 lived on farms or in communities with less than 2,500 inhabitants, that percentage represented a nationwide shrinkage over the previous three decades. Rural New England had long since lost much of its population to the cities and to the Midwest; in turn, the rural Midwest had begun losing population in the cities and to the West as early as the l870s. A survey of 6,291 small towns in five Midwestern states for the decade ending in l890 revealed that fully 3,144 communities had recorded appreciable losses in population. By 1908, the continuing decline of the small town was causing such concern that President Theodore Roosevelt set up a commission to make an investigation.

Nevertheless, magazine articles announcing "The Doom of the Small Town" proved premature. It was true that many young men, attracted by the opportunities and excitement of the cities, departed on that classic journey by day coach to make a name or a fortune on the urban frontier; many rural towns, stripped of their most promising people, became, as an unfriendly observer put it, "fished-out ponds populated chiefly by bullheads and suckers." But at the same time many country towns attained a kind of stability and fulfilled useful purposes even in eclipse. Resolutely conservative in all things, they served as restraints on the pace of progress, as strongholds of the stern old-time religion, as custodians of homely virtues and ideals taught generations by McGuffey's Readers, as islands of security and leisure amid the hustle and hazards of modern times. In rural America God was surely in His heaven and all was right with the world.

Nostalgia for the country hometown staked a permanent claim on the American imagination. The close-knit relationships of rural life -- that sense of belonging which author Zona Gale glorified under the name of "Togetherness" -- cast a spell on even those who had never lived in a small town. Five former country boys,
yearning for lost Togetherness in Chicago, manufactured an urban substitute in l905; they founded the Rotary Club, whose membership grew in coldly impersonal cities from coast to coast. Many a man made a sentimental journey to his rural hometown, there to savor again its changeless peace and order, the kindness and informality of its people.

Despite the appeal of country towns, the cities grew ever more populous. They received a vastly disproportionate share of the 8.8 million immigrants who arrived in America during the decade. The newcomers, most of them poor Italians and Russians and Poles and Jews, found plenty of work in the mining towns of Pennsylvania and West Virginia, in the sweatshops of New York and Chicago, in the mills and plants of Pittsburgh, St. Louis and Cincinnati. Here the newcomers also found plenty of countrymen; immigration in the l9th Century had been so heavy that one third of the people in the United States in 1900 were foreign born or were the children of foreign born.

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"The rights and interests of the laboring man will be protected and cared for -- not by labor agitators, but by the Christian men to whom God in His infinite wisdom has given the control of the property interests of the country."

-- George F. Baer, President, Philadelphia

& Reading Railway.

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The cities bulged upward in skyscrapers and tall apartment houses, and outward in jumbles of slums and mansions, grimy factories and cheap-Jack entertainment centers. The population of three cities - New York, Chicago and Philadelphia - had topped the million mark by 1900. Secondary cities - Cleveland, St. Louis and Los Angeles - were much smaller but growing fast.

Growth rates could be used to form a general notion of the city's future, but they were inaccurate indicators. Nevertheless, at the turn of the century, when civic pride and boisterous optimism inspired a spate of futuristic articles and illustrations, local experts applied the figures with great self-confidence. Various New Yorkers, attempting to calculate the population of their metropolis in the year 1999, arrived by way of the same statistics at predictions ranging anywhere from eight to 45 million. One oracle, noting that automobiles were shorter than horse-drawn vehicles and that auto engines were cleaner than horses, reached the wild conclusion that the cities of tomorrow would have immaculate streets and no traffic jams.

To Be Continued . . .

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Copied by Nancee(McMurtrey)Seifert
February 22, 2004