USA history: 1900-1910

In the United States, at the beginning of the 1900s, major changes are taking place in the way people live and work. Until recently, the majority of Americans have lived on farms or in small towns. Now, new factories are opening in cities, producing the first telephones, automobiles, and electric lights. People are rushing to cities to take jobs in these factories and with the companies who own them. Urbanisation is underway.

By 1910, over half the United States’ population will live in an urban area. In the same decade, nearly 9 million immigrants arrive — from Italy, Poland, Russia... Most of them settle in the growing cities. The urban population becomes a mix of many ethnicities and cultures. The nature of the country’s population — its demography — is changing.

City life for the rich is grand and exciting. They live in mansions and work in the first skyscrapers. But the poor work long hours and share cramped rooms within larger houses, called tenements. The factories they work in are crowded, noisy, and dangerous; the companies who own the factories pay little attention to the workers’ health and safety. These companies are focused on producing more and more goods, growing larger, and increasing profits.

Companies that produce similar products often merge so that they don’t have to compete with one another. The United States enters a period of ‘big business’. Leading the country through this time of change is the United States’ youngest ever president: Theodore Roosevelt. Roosevelt worries that some large companies have too much power: they wipe out smaller companies and drive up the price of goods for consumers. So Roosevelt takes several merged companies, sometimes called trusts, to court.

When they are found to break laws around fair business, the courts order the companies to break up. Political changes like these, aimed at helping society as a whole, are known as progressive and Roosevelt’s presidency is part of the Progressive Era. During this decade of demographic, economic, and political change, American popular culture is transforming, too. National magazines like the Saturday Evening Post and Argosy contain a growing number of advertisements for products available everywhere in the country like Kellogg’s cereals and Coca-Cola. The Sears Catalog lets shoppers order everything from underwear to bicycles to be delivered right to their door, wherever they live.

And in 1903, the groundbreaking silent film The Great Train Robbery thrills audiences and starts a wave of new movie releases across the country. But this new shared culture is not open to all Americans. Racist laws and practices bar Black people from many public spaces, like movie theatres. African Americans are mostly excluded in advertising, sports, and book publishing too… with some notable exceptions. Black boxer Jack Johnson gains national fame when he beats a white boxer to gain the heavyweight championship.

Author Charles W. Chesnutt writes on racial problems in America’s South and is reviewed extensively across the country. And in towns in the South, where Black sports players are banned from joining white teams, Black baseball leagues produce several of the country’s top players. In 1901, Roosevelt exclaimed that the new century “must inevitably be one of tremendous triumph or tremendous failure for the whole human race”. In the first decade of this new century, rapid advances in industry and the beginnings of major social reform make triumph seem inevitable… but a darker side of the industrial revolution is looming.

In the next decade, the United States will be involved in the first global tragedy of the 1900s.