<Articles>The Birth of Metropolises and the American Working Class

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  • <論説>メトロポリスの誕生とアメリカ労働者階級
  • メトロポリスの誕生とアメリカ労働者階級
  • メトロポリス ノ タンジョウ ト アメリカ ロウドウシャ カイキュウ

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Abstract

In the process of transition from the implosive and socially intermixed "walking city " of the nineteenth century to the explosive and segregated metropolis of the twentieth, the skilled workers could afford to move out of the core and purchase their homes in the newly developed outer rings of the metropolis. And yet the less skilled workers were left in the slum areas of the inner city, being separated and segregated spatially as well as socially from those skilled workers in the outer rings. At the core of the metropolis where most workers had concentrated, oppositional working-class culture began to emerge at the end of the nineteenth century and forced manufacturing plants out of the central business district, but this exodus of factories into the periphery resulted in the dispersal of working-class districts, thereby separating workers of one area from those of another and diminishing chances of solidarity. Moreover, the metropolitan workers were mobilized as workers at work but as ethnics andresidents at home. They were thus unable to connect their struggles at the place of work with those at the place of life under the unified principle of class. And, as a result of structural reforms of city politics, especially a substitution of city-at-large election for the decentralized ward system, the political influences the working class had retained were reduced to a great extent. The American metropolitan workers at the turn of the century had great difficulties in developing class perspectives and consciousness as well as political strength.

Journal

  • 史林

    史林 74 (5), 709-740, 1991-09-01

    THE SHIGAKU KENKYUKAI (The Society of Historical Research), Kyoto University

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