694 ★ CHAPTER 18 The Progressive Erathe South. Growing numbers of native- born
Americans demanded that immigrants aban-
don their traditional cultures and become
fully “Americanized.” And efforts were made
at the local and national levels to place polit-
ical decision making in the hands of experts
who did not have to answer to the electorate.
The idea of freedom remained as contested as
ever in Progressive America.AN URBAN AGE AND A CONSUMER SOCIETY
Farms and Cities
The Progressive era was a period of explosive economic growth, fueled by
increasing industrial production, a rapid rise in population, and the contin-
ued expansion of the consumer marketplace. In the first decade of the twen-
tieth century, the economy’s total output rose by about 85 percent. For the
last time in American history, farms and cities grew together. As farm prices
recovered from their low point during the depression of the 1890s, American
agriculture entered what would later be remembered as its “golden age.” The
expansion of urban areas stimulated demand for farm goods. Farm families
poured into the western Great Plains. More than 1 million claims for free gov-
ernment land were filed under the Homestead Act of 1862—more than in the
previous forty years combined. Between 1900 and 1910, the combined pop-
ulation of Texas and Oklahoma rose by nearly 2 million people, and Kansas,
Nebraska, and the Dakotas added 800,000. Irrigation transformed the Impe-
rial Valley of California and parts of Arizona into major areas of commercial
farming.
But it was the city that became the focus of Progressive politics and of a new
mass- consumer society. The United States counted twenty- one cities whose
population exceeded 100,000 in 1910, the largest of them New York, with
4.7 million residents. The twenty- three square miles of Manhattan Island were
home to over 2 million people, more than lived in thirty- three of the states.
Fully a quarter of them inhabited the Lower East Side, an immigrant neighbor-
hood more densely populated than Bombay or Calcutta in India.
The stark urban inequalities of the 1890s continued into the Progressive
era. Immigrant families in New York’s downtown tenements often had no
electricity or indoor toilets. Three miles to the north stood the mansions of
Fifth Avenue’s Millionaire’s Row. According to one estimate, J. P. Morgan’s
financial firm directly or indirectly controlled 40 percent of all financial andFederal Reserve
established
1914 Ludlow Massacre
Federal Trade Commission
established
Clayton Act
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