Well hey there and welcome back to Heimler's History. Now we've been going through Unit 4 of the AP US History curriculum, and in the last video we dealt with all the technological and agricultural innovations that led to the market revolution. And this video is basically part two, and we're going to talk about how the market revolution affected society and culture in the first half of the 19th century. So get them brain cows ready, because I'm about to milk them.
So, in case you forgot, let's start with the definition of the market revolution. Essentially, it was the linking of northern industries with western and southern farms, which was created by advances in agriculture, industry, and transportation. With all this change going on, you didn't think it wasn't going to affect society, did you?
So let's have a look. First, let's talk about migration. Across the northern part of the country, industrial cities exp— exploded in both size and diversity. And a hulking portion of this growth was thanks to European immigrants, especially Irish and German folks who were flooding the shores of the United States. The Irish came in large part because of the Irish potato famine, which led to hunger and starvation throughout Ireland.
And the Germans came for less dramatic reasons, like many of them were just displaced farmers whose crop failures invited them to look elsewhere to settle. Others were disillusioned by the failure of the democratic revolutions in 1848 and sought a land where a democratic way of life was flourishing. And so in the 1820s, 150,000 Irish people were displaced. By the 1830s, 600,000 immigrants were registered on the rolls, and by the 1840s, 1.7 million.
That's a lot of immigrants, Tony. It was indeed. Now many of these folks settled on the eastern seaboard and went to work in the industrial sector. And because manufacturers now had an expanding pool of cheap labor, because hey, what's the use of hiring an immigrant if you can't underpay them and expose them to dangerous working conditions?
I mean, am I right? Anyway, as a result of all that, northern industry expanded greatly. But these immigrants didn't simply provide labor, they also changed the urban landscape and the places where they settled.
Often crowded into poorly ventilated high capacity building units, they actually brought their culture with them. Jews, for example, established synagogues, and Catholics established churches and convents. Others of these immigrants sought to settle on some land out west, and so they moved west of the Appalachians and developed new communities along the Ohio and Mississippi rivers.
But it probably won't surprise you to find out that not everyone was too excited about these immigrant cultures establishing themselves in their towns. Nativists flourished in the 1830s and 1840s, spewing stereotypical invective against the Catholics and the Jews. Jews they portrayed as avaricious, underhanded moneylenders, and Catholics were accused of being agents of the Pope sent to overturn American culture.
Now, of course, these stereotypes were not true, but, you know, nativists be nativists, as nobody says. Now, thanks to this expansion of industry on the backs of all those immigrants and its accompanying expansion of prosperity, an emerging middle class developed first in the North. The middle class included folks like businessmen and shopkeepers and journalists and doctors, and the middle class developed its own kind of society with its own norms. For example, education was a big deal for them, and so was temperance, which is to say moderation in alcohol consumption.
Additionally, religious affiliation meant a great deal to the middle class, especially Protestant affiliation. And, you know, it really didn't matter what kind of Protestant you were, just as long as you weren't a Catholic. And so if you had enough money and you adhered to these social markers, well, maybe you're in the middle class.
And one of the main distinguishing factors that the middle class had from the lower, laboring classes is that they had money to spend on leisure. And they spent that money attending plays and going to circuses and spectating sporting events. Now, since we're talking about how the market revolution changed culture, we also have to talk about how things change for women.
And here's where I tell you about the Cult of Domesticity. Now, this idea was presented to women through an increasing number of books and magazines, and it basically said this. A woman's identity and purpose is to have babies, raise them, and provide a home that was a haven of rest to her husband.
Her husband, on the other hand, was out doing the real work in the world, and this idea of the separation of public and private spheres and that one gender was assigned to each took firm hold of the especially in the middle class. I mean, laboring class women actually had nothing to do with that because they didn't have the excess income that allowed them to stay home and make their husbands sandwiches all day. They were off, like their husbands, working in the factories all day or out plowing the fields.
Speaking of women in factories, we should probably look at that for a minute. Women who worked in factories typically worked six days a week for exceedingly meager wages, for twelve to thirteen hours a day. The Lowell factory in Massachusetts was the kind of showcase for this situation, and mostly was staffed by former New England farm girls who were closely supervised by bosses who also effectively controlled every aspect of their lives, including what they did with their leisure time. So all this to say, the market revolution