Tensions had long existed between rural and urban America. The nation had been overwhelmingly rural for most of its existence, but as industrialization shifted the demographic balance toward urban areas, society grew more fragmented. As new technologies quickened the pace of change in American life, the gap between urban and rural folk widened into a chasm. Change came slowest to rural and small-town America, what historian Robert Wiebe aptly called “island communities” dominated by local elites, where people clung to familiar customs and life went on much as before with occasional but growing intrusions from the storm of change engulfing the distant cities. From this ever widening clash of values arose the cultural wars that exploded after 1880.

Urban America emerged as the heart of a powerful new ethos that defined progress in material terms. The corporations made their headquarters there and new technologies first flourished there. Cities were home to the big department stores, an incredible array of shops and goods, amusements of every kind from the opera to the dance hall, a smorgasbord of restaurants offering cuisines of all kinds, an endless parade of fads and fashions, trappings of wealth beyond the wildest imaginations of rural folk, hordes of carriages filling the streets, and crowds of people scurrying along sidewalks.