What was going on in the East while the Wild Wild West was in full swing?

The industrialization was happening! More people were moving into cities from the country and moving to American cities from other countries. The cities were packed to the gills, mostly with very poor people whose labor kept industry running a rich people loaded. The rise of cities allowed for both young men and women to leave home for real to get jobs in the city. Though women did better economically in the worlds oldest profession than any other sort of work available to them.

For the first time printing became cheap (in the 1840’s) and literacy skyrocketed. Of course the sort of stuff being published was mostly trash. There was no concept of journalistic integrity or objective reporting. Every major political candidate had a paper that sponsored him and papers had a habit of printing lies and then charging the wronged party to print a retraction.

Considering the filth, sickness, poverty and general unfairness of city life it’s really no wonder life in the west was idealized. In fact I’m certain some higher ups encouraged the romance of the west to draw some of the immigrants and undesirables out of their cities.

This isn’t for your homework is it?

Just cut and pasted. This better be an A.

Nah, it something I always wondered.

It’s an interesting period on time, I’m planning on reading more on it. I have no idea how people got to thinking labor and industrialization was boring. It’s bloody as hell, all rich people taking advantage of poor folk and extremist reformers bombing stuff. It’s crazy.

I read Dark Tide: the Great Boston Molassas Flood of 1919 and that gets into the nitty gritty of early corporate negligence and the tragic results of it. ie, a 20 foot wave of molasses flooding Boston, killing people and washing away entire buildings. I’ve got another book on the Triangle Fire waiting to be read. That was the one where factory workers were killed in a fire because it was company policy to keep them locked in.

They’re are a little later in history, but reflect the difficulty, danger and injustice facing the lower classes. Prior to the passage of labor laws.

Drinking tea and being very curt.

The simple answer – the entire Industrial Revolution!

The grand migration began with the surrender by Mexico, which took place on September 17, 1847. The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, signed in 1848, ceded the territories of California and New Mexico (which included the states-to-be of Utah, Arizona, Nevada, New Mexico, and parts of Colorado and Wyoming), and swelled to a flood with the discovery of gold in California and silver in Colorado.

Meanwhile, back home, immigrants continued to pour into New York and many other eastern cities. The government hired many of them to help build the Erie Canal, and of course, the Government fought the Civil War, between 1861 – 1865. The trans-continental railroad was built to ensure the safe transport of gold from California to the US government to help finance the war.

While it was not as exciting as the stories presented by Mark Twain and Horace Greely (“go West, young man, go West”), this is what wikipedia has to say:
“The new European immigration brought further social upheaval, and old world criminal societies rapidly exploited the already corrupt municipal machine politics of Tammany Hall, while local American barons of industry further exploited the immigrant masses with ever lower wages and crowded living conditions. In a city of tenements packed with cheap foreign labor from dozens of nations, the city was a hotbed of revolution, syndicalism, racketeering, and unionization. In response, the upper classes used partisan hand-outs, organized crime groups, heavy handed policing and political oppression to undermine groups which refused to be coopted. Groups such as anticapitalist labor unions, native American patriot organizations such as the American Protective Association, and reformers of all stripes were fiercely repressed, while crime lords that became too independent disappeared.”.

With the mass immigration American nationalism/racism was alive and well in the East and of course all over. Some of the newly arriving Italian and Irish immigrants in late 19th century America were extremely discriminated against and such films as Gangs of New York highlight this. The brilliant Daniel Day Lewis did a great job as good ole boy connected Uncle Sam character. And of course Leonardo DiCaprio as the Irish outsider.
Here’s an old cast iron bank from the 1800’s called Paddy and the Pig. – an obvious dig.

@SeventhSense Well everyone knows pigs and the Irish go together like whiskey in the jar.