Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Series Editor's Foreword
- Introduction: The Business of America
- Prologue: A Hothouse for Economic Growth
- 1 The Marvel of Men and Machines
- 2 The Lure of Lovely and Lucrative Land
- 3 The Defeat of Distance and Desolation
- 4 The Potential of Plentiful Power
- 5 The Fabrication of Familiar Forms
- 6 Bargaining with Behemoths
- 7 The Collision of City and Country
- 8 The Mastery of Mass Markets
- Epilogue: The Boundaries of Big Business
- Sources and Suggested Readings
- Index
7 - The Collision of City and Country
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Series Editor's Foreword
- Introduction: The Business of America
- Prologue: A Hothouse for Economic Growth
- 1 The Marvel of Men and Machines
- 2 The Lure of Lovely and Lucrative Land
- 3 The Defeat of Distance and Desolation
- 4 The Potential of Plentiful Power
- 5 The Fabrication of Familiar Forms
- 6 Bargaining with Behemoths
- 7 The Collision of City and Country
- 8 The Mastery of Mass Markets
- Epilogue: The Boundaries of Big Business
- Sources and Suggested Readings
- Index
Summary
A government is nothing but a business, and you can't do business with a lot of officials, who check and cross one another and who come and go, there this year, out the next. A business man wants to do business with one man, and one who is always there to remember and carry out the – business.
– Richard Croker, Tammany Hall bossTensions had long existed between rural and urban America. The nation had been overwhelmingly rural for most of its existence, but as industrialization shifted the demographic balance toward urban areas, society grew more fragmented. As new technologies quickened the pace of change in American life, the gap between urban and rural folk widened into a chasm. Change came slowest to rural and small-town America, what historian Robert Wiebe aptly called “island communities” dominated by local elites, where people clung to familiar customs and life went on much as before with occasional but growing intrusions from the storm of change engulfing the distant cities. From this ever widening clash of values arose the cultural wars that exploded after 1880.
Urban America emerged as the heart of a powerful new ethos that defined progress in material terms. The corporations made their headquarters there and new technologies first flourished there. Cities were home to the big department stores, an incredible array of shops and goods, amusements of every kind from the opera to the dance hall, a smorgasbord of restaurants offering cuisines of all kinds, an endless parade of fads and fashions, trappings of wealth beyond the wildest imaginations of rural folk, hordes of carriages filling the streets, and crowds of people scurrying along sidewalks.
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- Information
- The Genesis of Industrial America, 1870–1920 , pp. 153 - 176Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2007