Hist 1302 Chapter 18 Summary

Chapter 18 outline
An urban age and a consumer society
 Farms and cities
 Farms and cities grew together
 Farm prices recovered from the great depression.
 Entered golden age
 Urban expansion increased demand
 Immigrant families lived in downtown tenements that had
no electricity or indoor toilets
 The city became an attraction for artists, writers, and
reformers.
 The muckrakers
 Some saw cities as a place for corporate greed to
undermine traditional American values
 Muckraking is Writing that exposed corruption and abuses
in politics, business, meatpacking, child labor, and more,
primarily in the first decade of the twentieth century;
included popular books and magazine articles that spurred
public interest in reform
 Immigration as a global process
 New immigration began in 1890 and peaked during the
progressive era
 Europeans entered Ellis Island which is a Reception center
in New York Harbor through which most European
immigrants to America were processed from 1892 to 1954.
Only 2% arrived
 Asians and Mexicans immigrated into the west
 The immigrant quest for freedom
 Immigrants arrived imagining the United States to be the
land of freedom with equality
 New immigrated formed close knit ethnic neighborhoods
 They got low wages, worked long hours, and were in
dangerous conditions

,  Consumer freedom
 Cities became the birthplace of a mass consumption
society
 department stores, chain stores in urban neighborhoods,
and retail mail-order houses for farmers and small-town
residents
 Low wages, the unequal distribution of income, and the
South’s persistent poverty limited the consumer economy
 Leisure activity related to mass consumption
 The working woman
 The new visibility of women in urban public places showed
that gender roles were changing
 Jobs only expanded for white women
 Working women became a symbol of female emancipation
 The desire to participate in new society caused conflict
within immigrant families
 The rise of Fordism
 Ford Motor company
 Ford focused on standardizing output and lowering prices
 Fordism- Early twentieth-century term describing the
economic system pioneered by Ford Motor Company
based on high wages and mass consumption
 The promise of abundance
 The new advertising industry perfected ways of increasing
sales, often by linking goods with the idea of freedom.
 Economic abundance resulted in personal fulfillment with
having material things.
 Inspired political activism – exclusion from mass
consumption was almost like a denial of rights
 An American standard of living
 American standard of living- The Progressive-era idea that
American workers were entitled to a wage high enough to



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