The Century Opens:

No amplification had been invented. No radio. No television.
Public life sought organizations who brought citizens together and sponsored speakers to address public matters.
Power of organization was a major theme in the discourse.

Where did you go for public life at the turn of the 20th century? Because public life was lived in close contact with others, Americans encountered it in different discourse communities. Time to use your historical imagination to imagine youself living in each of these communities as the 20th century dawns.

Farms and Small Towns

Most Americans were still farmers.
These farmers gave life to small towns that supported agriculture.The town contained the services and merchants that now catered to the cash farmer and the banks that loaned them the capital needed on the mechanized farms.
Farmers (and their towns) were caught in a cycle of boom and bust as periods of high prices and prosperity were followed by financial panic, natural disasters, and bankruptcy.
Farmers were implicated in the problems of industrialization because they were dependent on the railroads and industrial development.
- The railroads were necessary to carry the produce of the farms to market, and the railroads charged exorbitant rates to carry the produce.
- Industrial development was transforming the farm into a mechanized business. Farmers had to borrow to buy the mechanization and the periods of bust meant that they could not pay back the loans and lost their farms.
Public Life in the farm communities occured in churches, Grange Halls (a farm organization), and town squares.
Subjects which gave shape to public discourse were:
- Scientific framing and technological change.
- The economic struggles. Often these were discussed within the rhetorical framework of:
  - Rugged individualism. Farmers believed that the great agricultural nation had been built on rugged individualism.
  - Organizing to addreess their problems. Now too many of those individuals were failing, becoming bankrupt and losing their farms. Was leaving that individualism behind for a unified movement the answer?
- Celebration of the farmer. Jefferson had believed the yeoman farmer would assure freedom to Americans. Pride in being a farmer was strong. They saw themselves as the reason for the strength of the nation.

Cities: Business communities

Great wealth had flowed to those who controlled capital in the industrial economy. The men of wealth built the factories, organized the industries, and built the railroads that transported the fruits of the industrial system and of agriculture. They competed with each other to control the economy. These were the "robber barens" of the gilded age
Public life was lived in exclusive business clubs in the cities. Their children met at the great educational complexes built by prep schools and the ivy league universities.
Who was listened to in these communities? Those who had achieved success, and those who could provide expertise.
Subjects which gave shape to public discourse were:
- Importance of technological progress. The next big idea that the wealthy could corner would enhance their wealth. What was that next idea?
- American progress and greatness. This discourse also celebrated the technology by linking it to the ideograph <progress> that had marked American discourse for a century. These entrepreneurs believed that they were the ones responsibility for the country's greatness.
- Cycle of risk, bust, and wealth. <Risk> was an ideograph that lionized those who would venture their wealth in the search for more. When the venture succeeded they were celebrated. When it did not they failed. With it they often lost their wealth and status in the community. But this motivational cycle required much rhetorical support.

Cities: The Immigrant Slums

Living within blocks of this great wealth were the rundown, crowded, tenement buildings of the poor.
- The immigrants flowed into crowded communities within the cities. Ethnic ties were strong in these slums.
- Others were internal migrants from the failing farms, particularly African Americans coming north from the sharecropping farms of the South.
The most important places for their public life were
- the stoop, the front steps of their tentament building.
- their churches, organized ethnically with services conducted in the language of their old country
- potentially, they could also find public life in their workplaces, but the workplaces of industrial economy were loud places where communication was difficult. If they achieved organization, there were union halls as public places.
Authority was tied to their ethnicity, often rooted in the traditions of the old country.
The subjects for public discourse:
- Pull between a wish to assimilate into the new culture and the memory of the old culture.
- A naive grand Americanism that celebrated the greatness of their new country.
- Discrepancy between their dream in immigration and the reality of the squalor within which they lived. What was responsible? How can they escape it?

Company Towns

Mines, lumber companies, and many industries located away from the urban areas in towns owned by the industrialists. They were filled with the immigrants and migrants from those same countries that populated the slums of the cities. But the interaction among those in the town was much higher than in the ethnic enclaves of the city.
Such places were filled with jobs, but the residents lived totally under control of the company. The only jobs were with the company. All that could be bought had to be purchased from the company store. Housing had to be rented from the company. All life was controlled by the company.
Public Life in the company town was lived in:
- the company store. Partcularly the women made public life here.
- Church. One building served as a church for all denominations. Each met with others of their faith.
- Streets.
Subjects for public discourse:
- Neighbors of the town vs. memories of the old country.
- Discrepancy between the dream that fueled their immigration or migration and the reality of their lives.
- Grimness of work and life
- Dangers and promise of worker's unity to confront their conditions.

African American Communities

By 1900, the South had established the "Jim Crow" system that disenfranchised the African Americans of the region politically, culturally, and economically. Communities of African Americans grew on both ends of the migration routes from the South into the cities of the North.
Places for public life in these communities. Above all was the African American church. But in the South there were also the places where the people gathered, forced by segregation, particularly service establishments.
Authority was acquired in the community by surviving the rigors of the segregated life. African American preachers acquired special authority. Education also enhanced the authority of those in the community.
Subjects you would hear in the public discourse:
- Washington versus DuBois. Booker Taliaferro Washington believed in cooperation with the white establishment and making the most of the place given to the community by segregation. His Tuskegee Institute prepared people for the kinds of places segregated permitted them. W.E.B. DuBois urged that the race unite and oppose the systems of racial difference. He founded the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.
- Escape to the North. The virtues of the Northern migration were debated long and hard.

Exigencies and Themes in the Rhetoric of 1900

As the century opened, there were several problems that faced the country with variations in the various discourse communities. These grew from material facts that gave rise to the need for discourse. But they often reflected the need to draw upon familiar rhetorical themes to address the crises of the time.

The Collapse of the Frontier

Material Fact: The Frontier had been declared closed by the census of 1890
Rhetorical Implication: The frontier had been the articulated vision of a growing America. Americans were motivated as their national public task to bring civilization to the American wilderness. As a result, the collapse was a motivational crisis for the culture. What marked the special mission of Americans?
Could the motivational power of the frontier be converted? What was the new American frontier?
- Is the world the new American frontier? Is the American mission to bring its wonder to the whole world?
- Is business the new American frontier? Is the expansion of American business the new advancement of progress that we can see, and measure, and through which we can become a success?
The motivational power of the frontier was a rhetorical resource available to be invoked by leaders to address the problems of the nation.

Immigration and the Historical Tie to Northern Europe

The United States was a nation founded and developed by immigrants from Northern and Western Europe. The immigration in its first century as a nation had been from those nations. But by 1900, the immigration that now flowed into the ports of America was from Eastern and Southern Europe.
Material Fact: Immigration to the US at the turn of the 20th century was massive.
- 9 million arrived between 1880 and 1900. Another 9 million from 1900 to 1910. And 7 million more from 1910 to 1920.
- This immigration was different. It came from a different part of Europe, was primarily Catholic and orthodox rather than Protestant, and flowed into the factories and the cities rather than onto the open land of the West.
Rhetorical Problem: Is this immigration good or bad?
- Immigrnats provided cheap labor to factories and sweat shops. They were providing the labor for the great industrialization.
- But, this great inflow of different immigrants, non-English, Catholic, governed by memory of homeland more than assimilating into Americans, bothered Americans. It was destroying the homogeniety of the culture. These immigrants were different.
- And, the steady flow of immigrants was economically disasterous for laborers already here, in their eyes, because it kept wages down and destroyed hopes for strikes and labor actions.

The Meaning of New Technology

Material Fact: The time around the turn of the century was a remarkable period of scientific and technological change. Inventions were coming rapidly: electricity, the phonograph, the telephone, the automobile, the airplane. The factories were churning out the new machines and business, including farming, was increasingly capital intensive, requiring large amounts of cash to mechanize its processes. The factories were also drawing large population from the farms and small towns into the cities to join the immigrants in mass production.
Rhetorical Problem: Is this new technology a sign of American <progress> or the cause of economic disparities?
- The meaning of this technology was an important theme for discourse. Some discourse saw this as the newest phase of American progress, saw the new scientific world as the venue for the continual betterment of human life. All problems would be solved by technology.
- Other speakers saw the horrors created by the new capital intensive world. Borrowed money, necessary to those seeking to participate in this world, led to their failure. Farmers lost farms; businessmen lost life savings; and small factory owners were forced out of business by the vagaries of the market.
- And it was the mine and the factory trapping workers into the evils of industrialization as the new technology became the output of the economy.

Disparity of Wealth and Power

Material Fact: The difference between opulence and squalor was especially evident in the cities of the United States.
- Great wealth was built by draining wealth from others. The great entrepreneuers used monopoly and combination to force competitors into failure. They used that power to draw ever greater wealth away from farmers and consumers. There seemed no check on this growing disparity. Owners of the factories that produced the new material wealth became exceptionally wealthy.
- Great concentrations of power located in the industrial system. Railroads and industrial barons that offered jobs easily controlled government and the economy. Competition disappeared in power to thwart opportunities.
Rhetorical Problem: Was the wealth the reward for successful businessmen? Or was it an abuse? What was the role of public will in controlling this maldistribution of wealth and power? What was the role of government as a location of public will?