Industrial Revolution - Inventions2

Page
8

Middle-class Americans secured material comfort for themselves and education for their children, and they stressed discipline, morality, and hard work.

Slide 51

The business elite and the middle class celebrated work as the key to a higher standard of living for the nation and social mobility for the individual.

The ideal of the “self-made man” became a central theme of American popular culture.

Slide 52

Urban Workers and the Poor

The bottom 10 percent of the labor force, the casual workers, owned little or no property, and their jobs were unpredictable, seasonal, and dangerous.

Other laborers had greater job security, but few prospered; many families sent their children out to work, and the death of one parent often sent the family into dire poverty.

Slide 53

By the 1830s, urban factory workers and unskilled laborers lived in well-defined neighborhoods of crowded boardinghouses or tiny apartments, often with filthy conditions.

Many wage earners turned to alcohol as a form of solace; grogshops and tippling houses appeared on almost every block in working-class districts, and police were unable to contain the lawlessness that erupted.

Slide 54

The Benevolent Empire

During the 1820s, Congregational and Presbyterian ministers linked with merchants and their wives to launch a program of social reform and regulation.

The Benevolent Empire targeted drunkenness and other social ills, but it also set out to institutionalize charity and combat evil in a systematic fashion.

Slide 55

The benevolent groups encouraged people to live well-disciplined lives, and they established institutions to assist those in need and to control people who were threats to society.

Upper-class women were an important part of the Benevolent Empire through sponsorship of charitable organizations.

Some reformers believed that one of the greatest threats to morality was the decline of the traditional Sabbath.

Popular resistance or indifference limited the success of the Benevolent Empire.

Slide 56

Revivalism and Reform

Slide 57

To improve the living conditions and to balance the vices of the poor, upper-class Americans formed benevolent reform societies that promoted temperance, dispensed charity, and encouraged respect for the Christian Sabbath.

Simultaneously, Charles Grandison Finney and other evangelical clergymen gave new life to the Second Great Awakening, enlisting missions of propertied farmers and middle-class Americans in a massive religious revival movement.