- Подробности
-
Категория: Английский язык
The economic growth found its expression in the giant industrial metropolises, which were cities of more than a million inhabitants. They acquired a completely different view with skyscrapers, offices, department stores, dense streets of workers' houses, and
miles of rail yards bounded by mills and warehouses. By the 1930 this process had thrown up five cities of the unimaginable size of more than a million inhabitants: New York had grown to 6,930,000, Chicago to 3,376,000, Los Angeles to 2,208,000, Philadelphia to 1,951,000, and Detroit to 1,569,000. By different measure, in 1925 New York was the largest metropolis, Chicago the sixth, Philadelphia the tenth, Boston the twelfth, Detroit the nineteenth, and Los Angeles the twenty-seventh.
As cities grew, landlords took advantage of shortages in low-cost rental housing by splitting up existing buildings to house more people. Thus it became common in many big cities for a one family flat to be occupied by two or three families plus a number of paying boarders. But, scientific and technological advances, however, enhanced the quality of urban life. Following the general acceptance of the bacteria theory of disease, cities established more efficient water purification and sewage disposal systems. Public health regulations helped to reduce the death rate for tuberculosis and to control such diseases as cholera, typhoid fever, and diphtheria.
The more cities grew, it seemed, the more they shook with violence. Urban wealth and the mingling of different kinds of people provided new opportunities for organized thievery, vice, and violent grudge-settling. Besides the violence that often erupted during strikes or times of depression, there were race riots. In connection with these problems city governments passed more laws and ordinances that regulated housing, provided poverty relief, and expanded police power.
One more troublesome issue of the city was ghetto. If the term ghetto is defined as "a place of enforced residence from which escape is at best difficult" only nonwhites in this era had a true ghetto experience. Whites, who wanted to limit the residential opportunities of blacks, often used violence to scare away black families who tried to move in white neighborhood. It seldom worked, though. Whites who lived on the edge of black neighborhoods often fled, leaving their homes and apartments to be sold and rented to black occupants.
The problems of urban growth pushed the local authorities to start reforms. However, due to the complexity of their structure and widespread corruption a few attempts to improve life in the cities led nowhere. Gradually, the initiative emerged outside politics. The urban social reformers, who were mostly young and middleclass people, operated within a variety of fields and sought solutions to a variety of problems. Housing reformers wanted local government to pass building codes to ensure safety in tenements; protestant reformers built churches in slum neighborhoods and urged businesses to be socially responsible. Educational reformers saw public schools as a means of preparing immigrants and their children for citizenship by teaching them American values as well as the English language. Perhaps the most ambitious and inspiring feature of the urban reform movement was the settlement house, the founders of which wanted to improve the lives of working-class people by helping them to obtain an education, an appreciation of arts, better jobs, and better housing. Urban reformers wanted to save cities, not to abolish them. They believed that urban life could be improved by restoring feelings of service and cooperation among the citizens.
