When reading about Chicago at the Turn of the 20th Century, you always come across great changes and new developments in the means of transport, building and the stockyards; therefore, it can be assumed that these three fields influenced and shaped Chicago more than anything else in this period.
The first chapter deals with the mostly very difficult daily life of Chicagoans, their cost of living and the wages they earned at that time; besides that, a passage will be dedicated to people’s health conditions. Here, the focus lies on the poorer class of society which to a great extent consisted of immigrants who came to Chicago from all over the U.S. and Europe looking for jobs and hoping for a better life. When reading about the daily life of people it is very likely to come across the name Jane Addams, who helped the poor, and her Hull House.
The second chapter is about the means of transport, especially about the importance of the railroad that made it possible for the city to have a great economic growth and provided an access way to the city for the many immigrants arriving in town. Moreover, the invention of the elevated railroad is mentioned and the changes in local transport that resulted from it.
In the third chapter, Chicago’s development in building is described. Due to the fact that the city was growing very quickly, people needed cheap houses that were easy to build. After the Great Fire of Chicago in 1871, architects from all over the country came to Chicago to rebuild what had been destroyed in the city center. Their greatest innovation was the modern skyscraper. Furthermore, there were two major building projects in Chicago at the turn of the century, the White City for the World’s Columbian Exposition in 1893 and the Plan of Chicago.
The third very important fact about the Chicago of the time, the stockyards, is described in chapter four. The stockyards are typical for this city and offered to thousands of Chicagoans a possibility to find work; they were also in every one’s minds when thinking of Chicago and are representative for the problems of urban industrialization of that time.
Chapter five gives an overview of an important event that ended tragically in 1886, the Haymarket Riot, during which workers went out on strike for an eight-hour working day.
The last chapter deals with the name Pullman that has various meanings: a town, a railroad car, an industrialist.
Table of Contents
Introduction
1. Daily Life
1.1. Costs of Living and Wages
1.2. Health
1.3. Hull House
2. Means of Transport
3. Building
4. Stockyards
5. The Haymarket Riot –
6. Pullman
Conclusion
Bibliography
Introduction
The task of this paper is to present the city of Chicago at the turn of the 20th century since during these decades very much innovation and great changes took place.
When reading about the Chicago of the time, you always come across great changes and new developments in the means of transport, building and the stockyards; therefore, it can be assumed that these three fields influenced and shaped Chicago more than anything else in this period.
The first chapter deals with the mostly very difficult daily life of Chicagoans, their cost of living and the wages they earned at that time; besides that, a passage will be dedicated to people’s health conditions. Here, the focus lies on the poorer class of society which to a great extent consisted of immigrants who came to Chicago from all over the U.S. and Europe looking for jobs and hoping for a better life. When reading about the daily life of people it is very likely to come across the name Jane Addams, who helped the poor, and her Hull House.
The second chapter is about the means of transport, especially about the importance of the railroad that made it possible for the city to have a great economic growth and provided an access way to the city for the many immigrants arriving in town. Moreover, the invention of the elevated railroad is mentioned and the changes in local transport that resulted from it.
In the third chapter, Chicago’s development in building is described. Due to the fact that the city was growing very quickly, people needed cheap houses that were easy to build. After the Great Fire of Chicago in 1871, architects from all over the country came to Chicago to rebuild what had been destroyed in the city center. Their greatest innovation was the modern skyscraper. Furthermore, there were two major building projects in Chicago at the turn of the century, the White City for the World’s Columbian Exposition in 1893 and the Plan of Chicago.
The third very important fact about the Chicago of the time, the stockyards, is described in chapter four. The stockyards are typical for this city and offered to thousands of Chicagoans a possibility to find work; they were also in every one’s minds when thinking of Chicago and are representative for the problems of urban industrialization of that time.
Chapter five gives an overview of an important event that ended tragically in 1886, the Haymarket Riot, during which workers went out on strike for an eight-hour working day.
The last chapter deals with the name Pullman that has various meanings: a town, a railroad car, an industrialist.
1. Daily Life
1.1. Costs of Living and Wages
When it comes to costs of living, housing costs were very often among the highest expenses for families. According to Robert Hunter in Tenement Conditions in Chicago the average rent paid in slum districts for an apartment in a run-down, two-storey, wooden tenement house was between eight and ten dollars a month (c.f. Benedict, Lyle; O’Brien, Ellen; Tiwana, Shah; “Family Economics” October 1999). These accommodations did not provide a bathroom or a heating system. They were heated by a coal stove and the toilets were either two hole outhouses underneath the stairs or the sidewalk, or they were water closets inside the tenements that had to be shared with the neighbors. Children had very little space to play since the apartments were cramped and the backyards had to be used for drying the laundry.
[illustration not visible in this excerpt] a backyard of tenement apartments
(http://condor.depaul.edu/~history/chicago/chicago_images/kids2.jpg)
For the working class, employment often resulted to be a problem. Most occupations required sixty hours weeks or even longer. These jobs were poorly paid, and in many cases they were hard as well as very dangerous. Employers hired and paid their workers on a weekly or even daily basis, and they often closed their factories for several months of the year due to bad weather or the lack of business without informing them beforehand. When the employer shut down or a worker was ill, s/he simply did not get paid. Therefore, it was completely normal that a worker spent a couple of months of the year without work and income. To survive, all members of the family had to work, even the youngest children who were also paid only a fraction of the man’s wages. In Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle you can read the following:
And then one afternoon, the ninth of his work in the place, when he went to get his overcoat he saw a group of men crowded before a placard on the door, and when he went over and asked what it was, they told him that beginning with the morrow his department of the harvester works would be closed until further notice! THAT WAS the way they did it! There was not half an hour’s warning – the works were closed! It had happened before, said the men, and it would happen that way forever. They had made all the harvesting machines that the world needed, and now they had to wait till some wore out! It was nobody’s fault – that was the way of it, and thousands of men and women were turned out in the dead of winter, to live upon their savings if they had any, and otherwise to die. So many tens of thousands already in the city, homeless and begging for work, and now several thousands more added to them!
(Sinclair 1981:213, 214)
To gain more money, it was also common to take in lodgers or boarders, even if the family lived in a rented two-room tenement that was actually even too small for the family itself. In slum districts, people even housed horses in the basements or slept in stables themselves.
Women earned far less than men, they faced wage discrimination, except when they had better occupations, such as teaching or clerical work. The 12th Biennial Report of the Illinois Bureau of Labor Statistics gives an idea of the differences between male and female wages earned in 1900 in general. Males working an average of 290 days a year earned about $553.52 annually; women in contrast worked even five days more per year but earned only $313.42 annually. According to the Chicago Budget for 1900 that gives some examples of the wages paid in the public sector, female stenographers earned $900 and male clerks in general between $900 and $1200 (c.f. Benedict, Lyle; O’Brien, Ellen; Tiwana, Shah; “Family Economics” October 1999). Therefore, it is not surprising that women could often not live on the income of their own employment without further support. Older people were also frequently unable to work, and so they were dependent upon their relatives and charity.
The middle class workers, such as owners of business like saloons, got on better. A misfortune could bring them nearer to the poverty boarder, but they usually had a steady employment and a higher income. However, these families formed less than half of the population. The upper classes, frequently called capitalists by the poor, often lived in an opulent and luxurious way.
1.2. Health
In 1900, Chicago’s reputation in the medical field was improving. Public and private hospitals, clinics, medical schools, and societies attracted the attention of health specialists in the U.S. and all over Europe. By 1896, Chicago had 62 licensed hospitals (c.f. Benedict, Lyle; O’Brien, Ellen; Tiwana, Shah; “Health” October 1999). The city also possessed an efficient and modern Department of Health in 1900 that had developed out of the need to fight the periodic outbreaks of cholera and later also smallpox. The Health Department kept typhoid under control through vaccination and provided an early diagnosis and treatment of diphtheria, the inspection of milk, ice, meat and other food products. It also performed a daily analysis of the water supply and published the results on a daily basis.
Medically speaking the general state of health of Chicagoans was quite good in 1900; child-mortality was decreasing and people were already living longer. Major epidemics occurred less often and for the first time, deaths were caused more frequently by degenerative diseases such as cancer and many people died from old age.
But of course, certain areas in Chicago were unsanitary and over-crowded. Most of their inhabitants were recently arrived immigrants who settled in these older and densely packed river districts. They lived in substandard conditions and the worst urban problems were concentrated here. Streets were unpaved and unclean, sidewalks were not safe, garbage removal was poor, and apartments in the basement or the cellar were damp, overcrowded, dark, and under-ventilated.
1.3. Hull House
[illustration not visible in this excerpt] Hull House
(http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/USAhullhouse2.JPG)
In 1889, Jane Addams and her college friend moved into the house that was originally built in 1856 for the wealthy real-estate businessman Charles J. Hull. Jane Addams wanted to live among Chicago’s poor immigrants and help their communities. In the following years, a dozen other buildings were built around the house, such as classes and clubs, a nursery school, one of the first gymnasiums in the country, and the only library in the neighborhood. By the turn of the century, the settlement complex consisted of thirteen buildings covering a whole city block.
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