Mulberry Street, New York City, c. Please click here to improve this chapter. When British author Rudyard Kipling visited Chicago in , he described a city captivated by technology and blinded by greed. They repeated their statements again and again. Chicago embodied the triumph of American industrialization. Its meatpacking industry typified the sweeping changes occurring in American life. The last decades of the nineteenth century, a new era for big business, saw the formation of large corporations, run by trained bureaucrats and salaried managers, doing national and international business.
The Chicago meat processing industry, a cartel of five firms, produced four fifths of the meat bought by American consumers.
In , Chicago had a population of about thirty thousand. Twenty years later, it had three hundred thousand. The Great Chicago Fire leveled 3. By the turn of the twentieth century, the city was home to 1.
By , a majority did. But if many who flocked to Chicago and other American cities came from rural America, many others emigrated from overseas. Chicago, like many other American industrial cities, was also an immigrant city.
Kipling visited Chicago just as new industrial modes of production revolutionized the United States. The rise of cities, the evolution of American immigration, the transformation of American labor, the further making of a mass culture, the creation of great concentrated wealth, the growth of vast city slums, the conquest of the West, the emergence of a middle class, the problem of poverty, the triumph of big business, widening inequalities, battles between capital and labor, the final destruction of independent farming, breakthrough technologies, environmental destruction: industrialization created a new America.
