SECTION 3: Social and Cultural Trends
WITNESS HISTORY 
AUDIO
America Takes to Wheels
In the 1880s, the “safety bicycle” gained popularity in the United States. Cheaper than a horse, it offered an easy mode of transportation in the period before automobiles and mass transit became widespread.
“By 1893 a million bicycles were in use. It seemed as though all America had taken to wheels…. By physicians the therapeutic benefits were declared to be beyond compare, while dress reformers welcomed cycling as an aid to more rational fashions…. ‘It is safe to say,’ declared an expert of the census bureau in 1900, ‘that few articles ever used by man have created so great a revolution in social conditions as the bicycle.’”
—Arthur M. Schlesinger, Sr., The Rise of the City, 1878–1898
Objectives
- Explain how new types of stores and marketing changed American life.
- Analyze the ways in which Americans developed a mass culture.
- Describe the new forms of popular entertainment in the late 1800s.
Terms and People
- Mark Twain
- Gilded Age
- conspicuous consumerism
- mass culture
- Joseph Pulitzer
- William Randolph Hearst
- Horatio Alger
- vaudeville
NoteTaking
Identify Main Ideas Record the main ideas of this section in a table.
| Consumerism | Mass Culture | Entertainment |
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Why It Matters Novelist Mark Twain satirized American life in his 1873 novel, The Gilded Age. He depicted American society as gilded, or having a rotten core covered with gold paint. Most Americans were not as cynical. The dizzying array of things to do and buy convinced the growing middle class that modern America was in a true golden age. Still, Twain’s label stuck, and historians refer to the last decades of the nineteenth century as “the Gilded Age.” The new lifestyle that middle-class Americans adopted during this period—shopping, sports, and reading popular magazines and newspapers—contributed to the development of a more commonly shared American culture that would persist for the next century. Section Focus Question: What luxuries did cities offer to the middle class?
Americans Become Consumers
Industrialization and urbanization changed the lives of American workers. More people began to work for wages rather than for themselves on farms. Some people worked in offices, drove trolleys, or became factory foremen. Even farmers made more cash as machinery improved and they sold more crops. At the same time, more products were available than ever before and at lower prices. This led to a culture of conspicuous consumerism, in which people wanted and bought the many new products on the market. All but the very poorest working-class laborers were able to do and buy more than they would have in the past.
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