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San Francisco: Historical Overview

Encyclopedia of the American West

The city of San Francisco is located on a great bay, sixty miles long and up to fourteen miles wide, connected to the Pacific Ocean through the Golden Gate, a narrow opening in the high hills that line most of the northern California coast. The bay has given the city most of its economic reason for existence, as well as its dramatic vistas of sky, land, and water.

The people living in the bay area when the first Europeans arrived were called Costeños (people living along the coast) by the Spanish and Costanoans by early anthropologists. More recently, they have been known as the Ohlone. They lived in small villages and subsisted by hunting, fishing, and gathering.

Spanish explorers first took note of the bay in 1769, and an expedition, in 1776, established a military post (the Presidio) and a mission (San Francisco de Asis--usually called Mission Dolores), but neither thrived. In 1835, a pueblo or village was established and named Yerba Buena ("good herbs") after lush growths of wild mint. Many who settled there were English-speaking entrepreneurs, eager to sell goods to the ships that arrived in the bay and to trade with Bay Area ranchos. When the United States went to war with Mexico in 1846, a naval task force was immediately dispatched to claim the Bay Area. Early in 1847, Washington Bartlett, the naval officer in charge, changed the pueblo's name from Yerba Buena to San Francisco.

In March 1848, the population of San Francisco stood around eight hundred. Then discovery of gold in the interior provoked a massive influx of fortune-seekers. All transportation routes to California were difficult and dangerous, especially the overland route. Most immigrants came by sea and landed at San Francisco, crowding its bay with ships and transforming it into an "instant city." By mid-1849, the city's population had boomed to five thousand, and many residents lived in hastily built shanties and tents. By 1860, the city counted fifty thousand people and had acquired a more substantial appearance.

With the rapid growth of the 1850s came social, economic, and political instability. Many fortune-hunters passed through the city quickly and rushed off to the gold fields. Others hoped to prosper as merchants, but the city's mercantile economy repeatedly boomed and burst due to uncertainties in supply and demand. Some successful merchants moved into banking, thus laying the foundation for the city's financial preeminence. Charters in 1850 and 1851 specified the city's formal institutions of government, and a third charter in 1856 consolidated city and county governments. The city's merchants demonstrated their impatience with such formalities by forming in 1851 and 1856 Committees of Vigilance, which operated outside the law to banish or execute those whom they deemed inimical to the city's orderly development.

Economic developments in the 1850s and 1860s marked San Francisco's emergence as financial and commercial center of the West, as well as the region's preeminent port. The transcontinental telegraph in 1861 and the railroad in 1869 provided reliable connections to the East. As Western mining increasingly required large amounts of capital and technologically advanced equipment, San Francisco banks--in particular the Bank of California, led by William Chapman Ralston--quickly came to dominate much of Western mining, especially the phenomenally rich silver mines of Nevada. The city's foundries produced some of the world's most advanced mining equipment. When large-scale agricultural developments in California's Central Valley demanded extensive capital and elaborate equipment, San Francisco entrepreneurs again led the way. San Francisco's economic leadership was ensured by the time the Central Pacific Railroad (later Southern Pacific Railroad) moved its headquarters there from Sacramento in 1873.

Throughout the late nineteenth century, San Francisco reigned as the metropolis of the West. Corporations with headquarters in the city dominated the economic life of much of the Pacific Coast, the intermountain West, Alaska, and Hawaii. From throughout the West, commerce flowed through the Bay Area--minerals from Western mines, wheat and other agricultural produce from California's Central Valley, timber from the Northwest, salmon from Alaska, sugar from Hawaii. Successful Western entrepreneurs often built luxurious homes in San Francisco, especially on Nob Hill. The Pacific Stock Exchange (founded in 1875), Customs House, and Mint all confirmed the city's prominence. Perhaps the best-known symbol of the city's position as the glittering queen of the West was the Palace Hotel, built in the mid-1870s and modeled after the most modern European luxury hotels. By 1900, San Francisco was the eighth largest city in the nation and also one of the most ethnically diverse, home to large numbers of immigrants from Ireland, Germany, Italy, Great Britain, Scandinavia, and China.

For nearly twenty years after the vigilante actions of 1856, a succession of merchants occupied the mayor's office and dominated the Board of Supervisors, as San Francisco called its city council. From 1877 to 1879, however, a depressed economy contributed to the rise of Denis Kearney and his Workingmen's Party of California (WPC). Kearney appealed to Euro-American workers and blamed their misfortunes on the machinations of great capitalists and especially their use of Chinese immigrant laborers, who, Kearney asserted, drove down wage levels for white workers. Such scapegoating was not new to California labor and politics, and anti-Asian agitation formed a staple in most labor and political activity for the next half-century.

The WPC rapidly waned, and the Democratic party--led by Christopher Augustine Buckley, a blind saloonkeeper--dominated city government throughout the 1880s. Charged with corruption, Buckley lost power after 1890. Reformers fought for control of city politics, notably Adolph Sutro, elected to the mayor's office as a Populist in 1894, and James Duval Phelan, a Democrat who won the mayoralty in 1896 and promoted a new, progressive city charter. In 1901, organized labor flexed its political muscle to elect, as mayor, Eugene Schmitz, nominee of the Union Labor Party (ULP), but charges of corruption brought the downfall in 1906 of Schmitz and Abraham (Abe) Ruef, his close advisor. In 1911, James Rolph became mayor; a leader in business and civic affairs, he stabilized city politics as he repeatedly won reelection.

Before Rolph came to power, however, the city of San Francisco faced one of its greatest challenges. On April 18, 1906, the city was jolted awake by a powerful earthquake, equivalent to 8.3 on the Richter scale. Fires quickly erupted throughout the city. Hundreds of people died, and thousands of buildings were destroyed, including nearly all of the city's center. The city rebuilt quickly, prompted by business leaders' anxieties that the disaster might erode the city's financial and commercial leadership. In 1915, the city celebrated both the opening of the Panama Canal and its own reconstruction by hosting the Panama-Pacific International Exposition. Despite such efforts, the city's economic prominence inevitably declined as other Western cities matured.

Phelan's reform charter of 1900 had committed the city to acquire ownership of its public utilities, and city politics before the 1930s witnessed repeated efforts to implement those provisions. A city-owned streetcar line, the Municipal Railway, was initiated in 1909, to compete with privately owned lines and was gradually extended. Creation of a city reservoir in the Hetch Hetchy Valley led to the city's acquisition of the company that supplied its water. Several efforts to attain public ownership of the electrical system failed. A new charter in 1932 omitted the public-ownership provision, but high profits on the Municipal Railway during World War II permitted it to purchase all remaining privately owned lines. During the 1930s, the city championed the building of two great bridges, the Golden Gate Bridge north to Marin County and the Bay Bridge to Oakland and the East Bay.

Throughout the first half of the twentieth century, tensions between unions and employers ran high. From 1900 to 1919, the city was one of the most unionized in the nation, but in the 1920s, an antiunion drive by the Industrial Association of San Francisco reduced union power and membership. Encouraged by New Deal policies, unions revived in the early 1930s. In 1934, a strike by longshoremen and seafaring unions spawned a brief general strike in San Francisco after police killed two strike supporters. By the late 1930s, San Francisco was again one of the nation's most unionized cities.

During World War II, the Bay Area emerged as the world's leading shipbuilding region. Fed by migrants from across the nation, including many African Americans from the South, the Bay Area's population boomed. After the war, business leaders formulated plans intended to guarantee the city's role as center of the regional economy--including creation of the Bay Area Rapid Transit system, a high-speed rail network centered on downtown San Francisco, and expansion of the financial district through extensive high-rise construction. From the late 1950s through the late 1980s, city politics was usually dominated by a coalition of liberals, unions, and advocates of high-rise development, especially during the mayoralties of Joseph Alioto (from 1968 to 1976) and Dianne Feinstein (from 1978 to 1988). Eventually neighborhood and environmental groups coalesced in 1986 to approve Proposition M, a "slow-growth" initiative that created the nation's most stringent limits on development.

By the 1950s and 1960s, the city had acquired a reputation for toleration of social diversity that attracted both cultural dissidents, notably Beatniks in the 1950s and hippies in the 1960s, and gays and lesbians from at least the 1950s onward. By the 1970s, the city's gay and lesbian communities had become one of the largest in the nation and had begun to make their mark on city politics. Changes in national immigration laws in the 1960s led to increased immigration from Latin America and eastern Asia.

-- Cherny, Robert W.

Source Citation: "San Francisco: Historical Overview." Encyclopedia of the American West. 4 vols. Macmillan Reference USA, 1996. Reproduced in History Resource Center. Farmington Hills, MI: Gale. http://galenet.galegroup.com.access-proxy.sno-isle.org/servlet/HistRC/


The San Francisco Bay Area

Encyclopedia of American Cultural and Intellectual History

The public culture of San Francisco has been marked above all by ethnic and religious diversity and by robust social movements and political reform efforts. Reformers since the gold rush era have worked to make San Francisco public life open to all residents without respect for race, color, or creed. To a greater extent than in other American cities, the public culture and the intellectual life of San Francisco have been continuously infused by energies associated with this boisterous struggle over the question of who belonged in the city's mainstream and who should be kept on the margins. For this reason, the city of San Francisco and the Bay Area have earned an international reputation for liberalism and toleration.

Gold Rush Emporium, 1848-1890

The Spanish established the first European settlement on the peninsula where the San Francisco Bay meets the Pacific Ocean in 1776, when members of an expedition dispatched from Mexico City established a presidio and a mission. The Ohlone, or Costanoan, people living in the area at the time numbered about five hundred. The first municipal survey was done in 1835, when the settlement was called the village of Yerba Buena, and the village became part of a coastal trading network that brought Yankee Americans, English, and other Europeans--some from South America--to the Pacific coast.

The American flag was raised at the Yerba Buena Plaza in July 1846, symbolizing the transfer of the settlement from Mexico to the United States. The change of name from Yerba Buena to San Francisco occurred in January 1847. One year later, gold was discovered near Sacramento on land owned by John A. Sutter, a Swiss immigrant. Because of the virtual flood of gold seekers passing through the port of San Francisco, the city population soared from one thousand to twenty-five thousand between January 1848 and December 1849, and the city joined the front ranks of urban America.

Fortune seekers from all over the world turned San Francisco into a major city during the decades after the gold rush. By 1890 San Francisco's population had increased to 299,000, and the city became the dominant urban settlement of the western United States and the eighth largest in the United States. Mansions and hotels rivaling those in New York City marked the business district and Nob Hill. The first grand opera, Vincenzo Bellini's La Sonnambula, was performed at the Adelphi Theatre in 1851, launching San Francisco on its long career as the opera capital of the West. The San Francisco Art Association began its work in 1871, and the Palace Hotel, the largest grand hotel in the nation, opened in 1875.

During this period, the population was well over 90 percent European American, and it remained so until the mid-twentieth century. In addition, Chinese, Japanese, and Filipino immigrants, along with Central Americans and South Americans, made their way to San Francisco. (African Americans did not comprise more than a fraction of 1 percent of the population until the years of World War II.) Chinatown, until late in the twentieth century the nation's largest, originally provided services to Chinese employed in the gold mines and expanded after unemployed Chinese construction workers moved to the crowded streets adjacent to the old Plaza after the completion of the transcontinental railroad in 1869.

San Francisco experienced something of a literary golden age during the 1860s. Bret Harte, the first editor of the Overland Monthly, chronicled the lore of the mining camps and the bawdy humor of city saloons to armchair adventurers all over the country. Mark Twain lived and worked in the city for two years in the mid-1860s as a journalist for the Morning Call, Golden Era, and Alta California. Twain wrote "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County" while in San Francisco, and its publication in a New York newspaper made him a national celebrity.

By the early 1870s Irish and German immigrants and migrants, from New York especially, a large proportion of whom were Roman Catholic and a sizable minority Jewish, had established themselves in the top echelons of San Francisco business, society, and culture. With the notable exception of the 1856 Committee of Vigilance, which for nearly a decade dampened Irish Catholic participation in local politics as a result of the nativist dimensions of its activities, Catholics and Jews enjoyed relative freedom from public displays of prejudice and discrimination. The Chinese population, on the other hand, experienced both routine and riotous racist attacks. This was particularly the case during the hard times of the middle to late 1870s.

From its earliest days, however, San Francisco had a notable population of European Americans inspired by a belief in democracy and equality for all, who, along with African American and Asian residents, challenged racism and white supremacy. The distance from "back east," the young male character of the population, and the emphasis on achievement rather than group identity as the basis of status and prestige all played a part in this. So did the explicit dedication of large numbers of residents to making liberty a practical reality rather than a theory. In addition, trade unionists built the foundations for the city's labor movements; socialists and anarchists campaigned for proletarian revolution and the overthrow of the state. Women campaigned for the vote, gained a foothold in the paid workforce, and demanded equality in the union movement, the professions, and the arts. In fact, San Francisco women organized the first state organization in the United States dedicated to the furtherance of woman suffrage in the summer of 1869.

Complexities, ironies, and limitations abounded in the city's social movements and political reforms in the middle and the late nineteenth century. For example, San Francisco's most powerful politician in the mid-1850s, Senator David C. Broderick, devoted himself to building an Irish Catholic political machine as well as to fighting for the abolition of slavery. At the same time, however, during that tumultuous decade before the Civil War, thousands of San Franciscans joined the raucous vigilante movement. Ostensibly a campaign to purify the city's politics, vigilantism also targeted Irish Catholic politicians such as Broderick.

San Franciscans also debated the rights of African Americans as the nation moved inexorably toward civil war. White supremacy advocates unsuccessfully tried to exclude free African Americans from the state, and they did prohibit nonwhites from testifying in court. African American activists in the Franchise League (1852) and the Colored Convention (1855), with the support of white allies in the state legislature, succeeded in exempting blacks from the testimony law during the Civil War. African Americans won the right to vote after the ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment to the Constitution in 1870, and after 1872 Chinese and Native Americans could testify in court on their own behalf.

During the Civil War two African American women, Emma Turner and Charlotte Brown, successfully sued for damages when they were put off streetcars, but segregated service continued. African Americans and Chinese residents fought, with mixed results, against segregated schools. A San Francisco challenge led to a state "separate but equal" doctrine twenty-two years before the more famous Plessy v. Ferguson Supreme Court decision of 1896, but in 1875 the city allowed black and white school integration. However, when the Tape v. Hurley decision in 1885 affirmed the right of a Chinese girl named Mamie Tape to attend city public schools, the city established a separate "Oriental" school.

During the 1870s the Workingmen's Party of California, led by Denis Kearney, accused several Nob Hill millionaires of using their Central Pacific Railroad to impose monopoly capitalism on California. According to critics, the railroad sought to squelch all competitors in land and sea transportation. Kearney also condemned San Francisco's Chinese workers (who were barred from citizenship) for allegedly taking jobs away from white Americans. Kearney and his followers contributed to the agitation that led to passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882.

The journalist and reformer Henry George wrote Progress and Poverty (1879) after deciding that eradicating the economic inequality he witnessed as a Bay Area journalist required radical measures. He advocated a single tax on land that would discourage land speculation and sever the perverse correlation whereby progress and population growth led to poverty. Trade unionists organized a San Francisco branch of the Knights of Labor, and socialists influenced by Karl Marx's First International founded the International Workingmen's Association in 1882. One of the leaders of the Knights was Kate Kennedy, an advocate for woman suffrage and a leader of the successful campaign for equal pay for the city's women teachers. The Art Association (1871) and the Bohemian Club (1872) entertained the Irish poet and dramatist Oscar Wilde when he visited the city in 1882. The Sailors' Union of the Pacific, destined to be among the largest unions on the West Coast, organized in 1891, and in 1893 the San Francisco Labor Council, forerunner of today's institution of the same name, was founded.

By the end of the century, the San Francisco Bay area contained a volatile and unstable mix of conservative and radical impulses. The conservatism stemmed from the large and influential numbers of businesses and family-oriented Irish Catholic, German, Jewish, and Asian residents. The radicalism derived from the degree to which the region's gold rush experience, with its tradition-flouting and adventure-oriented individualism, continued to attract young and experimental individuals looking for alternatives and hoping to begin life anew in a place associated with exoticism and excitement.

-- Issel, William

Source Citation: "The San Francisco Bay Area." Encyclopedia of American Cultural and Intellectual History. 3 vols. Charles Scribner's Sons, 2001. Reproduced in History Resource Center. Farmington Hills, MI: Gale. http://galenet.galegroup.com.access-proxy.sno-isle.org/servlet/HistRC/


Encyclopedia of the United States in the Nineteenth Century

A dilapidated collection of military, religious, and commercial buildings housed several dozen residents on the windswept peninsular site at the entrance to the San Francisco Bay when the nineteenth century began. By the Mexican War (1846-1848) the settlement housed a motley collection of adventurers and entrepreneurs lured by profits from trade and commerce. The California gold rush brought the world's fortune seekers to the trading village, and during the thirty years between 1849 and 1879 the city played emporium and factory town to the gold and silver miners, railroaders, real estate developers, and farmers of the Pacific Coast region. People and profits poured into the city during those years, providing San Francisco the talent and the capital that allowed it to blossom into a cosmopolitan metropolis during the 1880s. By 1900 San Francisco dominated the Pacific Coast as the region's chief economic and cultural metropolis.

War and Gold

The gold rush transformed what had been a tiny trading village into a major city. While the influx of gold seekers provided the crucial spark for this transformation, nature contributed the necessary ingredients by creating the bay and a protected port. Military necessity and religion also contributed, for when the Spanish first arrived in the 1770s, soldiers fortified the entrance to the bay with a presidio, and Franciscan priests built Mission Dolores (1776).

By the 1830s Mexicans had replaced the Spanish as rulers, and the bay had become an important stopping point for ships plying the Pacific. Yerba Buena cove, which eventually was filled in, became the favored anchorage, and a small village grew up, named for the cove and dominated by English and American merchants. During the Mexican War, U.S. naval forces occupied Yerba Buena, and in 1847 local merchants persuaded the naval officer in charge of the port to change the name of the village to San Francisco. A year later James Marshall discovered gold at Sutter's Mill near Sacramento, and thousands thronged to California to make their fortunes. Given the rudimentary state of land transportation, most of the hopeful miners and nearly all of their supplies came by sea and disembarked in San Francisco.

By the summer of 1849 Yerba Buena cove was clogged with ships, some deserted by their gold- seeking crews. Within a year the village of 800 became a city of 8,000. In 1852 the first census counted 35,000 people, and by 1860 San Francisco ranked fifteenth among U.S. cities with 56,802 residents. In 1900 the city ranked number nine among the nation's cities with a population of 342,782 people.

Society and Economy

Besides its large number of residents, the city's economic power contributed to its development into a commercial metropolis on the Pacific Coast during the late nineteenth century. More than 20 percent of the total population of California, Oregon, and Washington lived in San Francisco during the last forty years of the century. The city controlled local trade with Bay Area counties, as well as coastal trade from Panama to Alaska. San Francisco manufacturers produced two-thirds of the region's goods, five railroad lines radiated from the city to its hinterland, and five ferry lines connected the city to other Bay Area communities. The city had more factories and workers, capital and value of products than all of the other twenty-four cities west of the Mississippi River combined. In 1875 the Palace Hotel, then the largest and most luxurious hotel in the nation, opened on Market Street, a short walk from the bustling waterfront, the commercial heart of the city. Ninety-nine percent of all imports to the Pacific Coast states and 83 percent of all exports passed over the city docks. By the beginning of the twentieth century San Francisco's corporate boardrooms held sway over the economy of the West, from salmon canneries in Alaska, to sugar plantations in Hawaii, logging in Washington State, the Coronado Hotel in San Diego, and mines throughout the western part of the nation.

San Francisco's diverse population and its cultural amenities earned the city a reputation for cosmopolitanism. With an opera house and numerous legitimate theaters, French restaurants, world-class hotels, and a Barbary Coast entertainment district, where anything and everything could be purchased, San Francisco ranked among the most famous international seaports of the second half of the nineteenth century. Chinatown became a tourist destination by the 1880s. Residents of foreign birth made up well over half of the population and at times more than 70 percent. The Irish arrived during the gold rush and remained numerically dominant throughout the century. Germans, including Protestants, Catholics, and Jews, made up the next largest group. Scandinavians and Italians were comparative latecomers, arriving in significant numbers only toward the end of the century. Most San Franciscans were white, especially after the 1890s, when the Chinese population declined from 8 percent of the total to just above 4 percent. Only a minuscule number of African Americans lived in the city.

Politics

San Francisco's politics reflected national trends with a few exceptions related to its gold rush experience, location, and population. Vigilantism erupted in 1851 and 1856, and former vigilantes dominated city government through the Civil War years. In the late 1870s the Workingmen's Party clamored for government controls on railroad monopolists and for exclusion of the Chinese workers first employed by the Central Pacific Railway and later by the city's factory owners. In 1869 San Francisco women organized the nation's first statewide organization dedicated to the cause of woman suffrage. Radical trade unionists established a branch of Karl Marx's First International, the International Workingmen's Association, in 1882. Ten years later John Muir and a handful of outdoor enthusiasts organized the Sierra Club, devoted to the preservation of the natural environment. By 1898, as the United States assembled its new overseas empire, San Francisco's leaders declared their metropolis to be America's Imperial City, the Paris of the Pacific.

-- Issel, William

Source Citation: "San Francisco." Encyclopedia of the United States in the Nineteenth Century. 3 vols. Charles Scribner's Sons, 2001. Reproduced in History Resource Center. Farmington Hills, MI: Gale. http://galenet.galegroup.com.access-proxy.sno-isle.org/servlet/HistRC/


1880–1899

Working Americans, 1880-2005

The final two decades of the nineteenth century danced in the reflected glow of the Gilded Age, when the wealth of a tiny percentage of Americans knew no bounds. The role of women was still strictly defined and most women were forced to choose between a profession and marriage. Few were encouraged to attend college; still fewer attended. Women teachers who married were expected to surrender their jobs as an accepted part of the nuptials. Those who rubbed against the edges of these restrictive rules were derisively branded "mannish" or "new women." At the same time, women were beginning to play a more visible role in recreational sports, international travel and the emerging field of journalism. During this age, children of the working class routinely left school in their teens to work, the middle class was small and college was largely reserved for the elite and wealthy men of America. It was also a time marked by an abundance of emerging technology and changing opportunities, symbolizing the restless spirit of the American people. The highly popular children's books featuring Horatio Alger reinforced the notion that opportunity and wealth lured around every corner.

The rapid expansion of railroads opened up the nation to new industries, new markets and the formation of monopolistic trusts that catapulted a handful of corporations into positions of unprecedented power and wealth. This expanding technology also triggered the movement of workers from farm to factory, the rapid expansion of wage labor, and the explosive growth of cities. Farmers, merchants and small-town artisans found themselves increasingly dependent on regional and national market forces. The shift in the concentrations of power was unprecedented in American history. At the same time, professionally trained workers were reshaping America's economy alongside business managers or entrepreneurs eager to capture their piece of the American pie. It was an economy on a roll with few rudders or regulations.

Across America the economy—along with its work force—was running away from the land. Before the Civil War, the United States was overwhelmingly an agricultural nation. By the end of the century, non-agricultural occupations employed nearly two thirds of the workers. As important, two of every three Americans came to rely on wages instead of self-employment as farmers or artisans. At the same time, industrial growth began to center around cities, where wealth accumulated for a few who understood how to harness and use railroads, create new consumer markets, and manage a ready supply of cheap, trainable labor. Jobs, offering steady wages and the promise of a better life for workers' children, drew people from the farms into the cities, which grew at twice the rate of the nation as a whole. A modern, industrially-based work force emerged from the traditional farmlands, led by men skilled at managing others and the complicated flow of materials required to keep a factory operating. This led to an increasing demand for attorneys, bankers, and physicians to handle the complexity of the emerging urbanPage 2 | Top of Article economy. In 1890, newspaper editor Horace Greeley remarked, "We cannot all live in cities, yet nearly all seem determined to do so."

The new cities of America were home to great wealth and poverty—both produced by the massive migrations and influx of immigrants willing to work at any price. It was a time symbolized by Andrew Carnegie's steel mills, John D. Rockefeller's organization of the Standard Oil monopoly, and the manufacture of Alexander Graham Bell's wonderful invention, the telephone. By 1894, the United States had become the world's leading industrial power, producing more than England, France, and Germany—its three largest competitors—combined. For much of this period, the nation's industrial energy focused on the need for railroads requiring large quantities of labor, iron, steel, stone, and lumber. In 1883, nine tenths of the nation's entire production of steel went into rails. The most important invention of the period—in an era of tremendous change and innovation—may have been the Bessemer converter, which transformed pig iron into steel at a relatively low cost, increasing steel output 10 times from 1877 to 1892.

The greatest economic event during the last two decades of the nineteenth century was the great wave of immigration that swept America. It is believed to be the largest worldwide population movement in human history, bringing more than 10 million people to the United States to fill the expanding need for workers. In the 1880s alone, 5.25 million immigrants arrived, more than in the first six decades of the nineteenth century. This wave was dominated by Irish, German, and English workers. Scandinavia, Italy, and China sent scores of eager workers, normally men, to fill the expanding labor needs of the United States. To attract this much-needed labor force, railroad and steamship companies advertised throughout Europe and China the glories of American life. To an economically depressed world, it was a welcome call.

Despite all the signs of economic growth and prosperity, America's late-nineteenth-century economy was profoundly unstable. Industrial expansion was undercut by a depression from 1882 to 1885, followed in 1893 by a five-year-long economic collapse that devastated rural and urban communities across America. As a result, job security for workers just climbing onto the industrial stage was often fleeting. Few wage-earners found full-time work for the entire year. The unevenness in the economy was caused both by the level of change under way and irresponsible speculation, but more generally to the stubborn adherence of the federal government to a highly inflexible gold standard as the basis of value for currency.

Between the very wealthy and the very poor emerged a new middle stratum, whose appearance was one of the distinctive features of late-nineteenth-century America. The new middle class fueled the purchase of one million light bulbs a year by 1890, even though the first electric light was only 11 years old. It was the middle class also that flocked to buy Royal Baking Powder, (which was easier to use and faster than yeast) and supported the emergence and spread of department stores that were sprouting up across the nation.

Source Citation: "1880–1899." Working Americans, 1880-2005. Ed. Scott Derks. Vol. 6: Women at Work. Millerton, NY: Grey House Publishing, 2005. [1]-2. Gale Virtual Reference Library. Gale. SNO-ISLE LIBRARIES. 6 Jan. 2010 <http://go.galegroup.com.access-proxy.sno-isle.org/ps/start.do?p=GVRL&u=sirls_main>.
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