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In the early 1900s, the United States
entered a period of peace, prosperity, and progress. In the nation's growing cities,
factory output grew, small
businesses flourished, and incomes rose. As the promise of jobs and higher wages attracted
more and more people into the cities, the U. S. began to shift to a nation of city
dwellers. By 1900, 30 million people, or 30 percent of the total population, lived in
cities.
The mass migration of people into the cities enriched some
people but caused severe problems for others. For the emerging middle class, benefiting
from growing incomes and increases in leisure time, the expanding city offered many
advantages. Department stores, chain stores, and shopping centers emerged to meet the
growing demand for material goods. Parks, amusement parks, and baseball stadiums were
built to meet aesthetic and recreational needs. Transportation systems improved, as did
the general infrastructure, better meeting the increased needs of the middle and upper
class city dwellers.
Thousands of poor people also lived in the cities. Lured by
the promise of prosperity, many rural families and immigrants from throughout the world
arrived in the cities to work in the factories. It is estimated that by 1904 one in three
people living in the cities was close to starving to death. For many of the urban poor,
living in the city resulted in a decreased quality of life. With few city services
to rely upon, the working class lived daily with overcrowding, inadequate water
facilities, unpaved streets, and disease. Lagging far behind the middle class, working
class wages provided little more than subsistence living and few, if any, opportunities for
movement out of the city slums.
To find additional documents in
American Memory on this topic, you
might consider conducting searches using such terms as urbanization, urban
immigrants, progressivism, and the names of individual cities such as Cincinnati,
St. Louis, Philadelphia, and New Orleans.
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