486 Chapter 18 American Society in the Industrial Age
The Breakfast(1911), by William McGregor Paxton, shows a middle-class husband, absorbed in the newspaper and in the world beyond the home. His
wife, in a gorgeous dress, sits—very much a “bird in a gilded cage,” the title of a popular song in 1900. The servant girl, face unseen, cleans up the cage.
Source:The Breakfast, William McGregor Paxton, American, 1911 The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY, U.S.A. Image copyright ©The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Nineteenth-century cities, though noisy, chaotic,and often ill-governed, exerted a peculiar fascination.
In cities, workers, even immigrants and young women,
could more easily find jobs. Housing was cheap. Urban
problems were daunting, but the immense aggrega-
tion of peoples and their resources constituted a limit-
less potential for uplift and reform. City life was a
great spectacle, played out mostly in public spaces. ■
Middle-Class Life
“This middle-class country had got a middle-class
president, at last,” Ralph Waldo Emerson had noted
with satisfaction when Lincoln took office in 1861.
Lincoln, in contrast to the presidents who had been
wealthy planters or businessmen or high-ranking
military men, was a self-made man who embraced
middle-class values. Middle-class culture took the best
aspects of romanticism—the enshrinement of human
potential, the restless striving for personal better-
ment, the zest for competition and excitement—
and tempered them with a passion for self-control
and regularity.
But the Civil War sapped middle-class culture of
its reforming zeal. The vital energy that invigorated
antebellum reforms and had impelled the North to
war became dissipated by that war. Afterwards, middle-
class Americans focused their energies on building
institutions. American society and culture underwent
a process of “incorporation,” as the predominant
form of the business world seeped deep into the
American consciousness.
No institution was more central to middle-class
life than the family. After the Civil War, it lost some
of its moral fervor but gained a new substantiality.