508 Chapter 18 American Society in the Industrial Age
fellow countrymen the “most materialistic and money-
making people ever known”:
I say we had best look our times and lands searchingly
in the face, like a physician diagnosing some deep dis-
ease. Never was there, perhaps, more hollowness of
heart than at present, and here in the United States.By the late 1880s a well-known journalist could
write to a friend, “The wheel of progress is to be run
over the whole human race and smash us all.” Others
noted an alarming jump in the national divorce rate
and an increasing taste for all kinds of luxury. “People
are made slaves by a desperate struggle to keep up
appearances,” a Massachusetts commentator declared,
and the economist David A. Wells expressed concern
over statistics showing that heart disease and mental
illness were on the rise. These “diseases of civiliza-
tion,” Wells explained, were “one result of the contin-
uous mental and nervous activity which modern
high-tension methods of business have necessitated.”
Wells was a prominent liberal, but pessimism was
no monopoly of liberals. A little later, Senator Henry
Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts, himself a millionaire,
complained of the “lawlessness” of “the modern and
recent plutocrat” and his “disregard of the rights of
others.” Lodge spoke of “the enormous contrast
between the sanguine mental attitude prevalent in my
youth and that, perhaps wiser, but certainly darker
view, so general today.” His one-time Harvard profes-
sor, Henry Adams, was still more critical of the way
his contemporaries had become moneygrubbers. “All
one’s friends,” he complained, along with church and
university leaders and other educated people, “had
joined the banks to force submission to capitalism.”
Of course intellectuals often tend to be critical of
the world they live in, whatever its nature; Thoreau
denounced materialism and the worship of progress
in the 1840s as vigorously as any late-nineteenth-
century prophet of gloom. But the voices of the dis-
satisfied were rising. Despite the many benefits that
industrialization had made possible, it was by no
means clear around 1900 that the American people
were really better off under the new dispensation.
That the United States was fast becoming a mod-
ern nation no one disputed. Physician George M. Beard
contended that “modern civilization” overloaded the
human nervous system the way burning too many of
Thomas Edison’s lightbulbs overloaded an electrical
circuit. On the other hand, Edward Bellamy saw the
future as a “paradise of order, equity, and felicity.” Most
took a more balanced view, believing that the modern
world encompassed new possibilities as well as perils.
The future beckoned, and yet it also menaced.1858 English launch transatlantic liner Great Eastern
1870 Metropolitan Museum of Art and American
Museum of Natural History open in
New York City
1876 Eight teams form National Baseball League
1880 American branch of Salvation Army is founded
1880s New immigration begins
1882 John L. Sullivan wins heavyweight boxing
championship
Exclusion Act bans Chinese immigrants
1883 Roebling completes Brooklyn Bridge
1885 Foran Act outlaws importing contract skilled labor
1887 Nativists found American Protective Association
1888 Richmond, Virginia, opens first urban electric
streetcar system
1889 Jane Addams founds Hull House
Yale’s Walter Camp names first All-American
football team
1890s Louis Sullivan’s skyscrapers rise
1890 Jacob Riis publishesHow the Other Half Lives
1896 Charles M. Sheldon asks “What would Jesus do?”
in best-sellingIn His Steps
1897 Cleveland vetoes Congress’s literacy test billMilestones
Chapter Review
Key Terms
Nativism A fear or hatred of immigrants, ethnic
minorities, or alien political movements, 493
new immigration Reference to the influx of immi-
grants to the United States during the late nine-
teenth and early twentieth century predominantly
from southern and eastern Europe, 493
settlement houses Community centers, founded by
reformers such as Jane Addams and Lillian Wald
beginning in the 1880s, that were located in poor
urban districts of major cities; the centers sought
to Americanize immigrant families and provide
them with social services and a political voice, 506