Ellie's History Hub: Public Safety during Urbanization

During the time era of 1870-1915, urban growth was occurring rapidly. Since all the cities were growing at such a rapid pace, this caused the city to forget about the important things like public safety. During urbanization, public safety really wasn't a big concern, the different concerning matters that were present in this era includes disease, crime, transportation and fire. With the notice of these issues comes the organizations trying to battle against them, like the fire department or the police department.

Amongst the cities during urbanization, poverty was all over, with poverty comes illnesses and disease, easily passed on from one person to another. Sanitation was a massive problem during urbanization, without having proper plumbing systems all their waste would usually just go out onto the streets where people walked and other people slept at night (S#1). Massive outbreaks of yellow fever and cholera caused many cities to introduce systematic sewerage. Edwin Chadwick, was the creator of the water-carriage sewerage system, which saved thousands of lives from bacteria born viruses. The National Board of Health was also created during the era, to help contain and control outbreaks of illnesses such as the yellow fever.

Since the field of medicine and hygiene was not very significant, many people who got sick with smallpox or even the flu would usually die pretty early in their life. "Between 1840 and 1870, nearly 25% of 20 year olds did not make it to 30." (S#2) In that short time frame of 30 years, there were no such thing of grandparents, and since people died early in life, they had to have children at such a young age some would usually die during child birth. "Urban families realized that one of their children wouldn't make it past the age of 5." Having to accept that one of their children was gonna die must have been awful during this era, but with the advances in medicine and vaccinations, this helped raise the death ages up from dying at 30 to dying around 60 or 70 years. Not everyone was killed due to a virus, with the outbreaks of gangs, some people were murdered!

With the cities not having much protection around, crimes and violence run amongst the streets. The rise of gangs and criminal organization helped bring the police to the cities. Before urbanization, murder was very rare due to the towns being very spread out and having no place to hide. During the 1850s the police started to appear in the cities, but were not very active. Most detectives were only hired to retrieve stolen goods. Due to the lack of technology and intelligence, the detectives were not able to help with murders or kidnappings. During the 1870s, crime was marked more as an "organized violence". (S#3) Which means people wouldn't just go out murdering everyone in sight, they would create gangs and have to "lay low" so they wouldn't get caught by the police. But after the city started gaining more police officers, the crime rates started to dwindle in the 1880s. "There were 2.2 murders out of 100,000 people in the year 1890." (S#4) Due to public school and work in factories people became more robotic since their behavior was constrained by the boss. But when there was a murder by a gang or a homicide, transportation became an aid to felonious homicide since the revolver was invented.

During the beginning of urbanization, cars started to appear. Not having any laws for speed limits or having any traffic cops, people could drive however the wanted. This obviously caused many car accidents and a lot of people died due to this fault. Not only were people dying in car accidents but also in train accidents. These accidents were more fatal and caused more deaths due to the train being able to hold hundreds of people at one time and caused the destruction of towns if the train crashed through one. There were 9003 train accidents from 1870-1915, and there were 2089 car accidents from 1870-1915 (S#5). The numbers started to fall for car accidents when new improvements came about. Creations like the electric headlight in 1889 and pneumatic tires in 1895 helped the car accident reports to dwindle over the years (S#6). However, train accidents had bigger problems, it was harder to identify the problem with the train because the train is five times as big as a car. Not only were there hundreds of controls but the problem could've been caused by the tracks. If the train were to derail in or close to a town, major damage would not only be caused to the train but to the town also.

Due to buildings being made of wood, this caused many fires in the cities, and with all these fires, it caused destruction to the buildings, cities and people. One of the greatest but most terrifying example of a nasty fire outbreak, was the Chicago fire in 1871. This caused destruction to the entire town, houses, buildings and families were destroyed due to this great fire. Even though the first fire station was created in 1853, the fire was so hard to contain and control due to high winds and wood everywhere. (S#7) Fires weren't such a bad thing because once city planners and architects started noticing that the more buildings that were made of wood would burn down, they started making the buildings out of steel. Due to urban growth, steel became more available and it created more jobs for the homeless and unemployed. Fires became less of a concern during urbanization, but the fire departments were still very organized, "the fire department of New York was very well organised and divided that it may well be taken as a model for all cities." (S#8)

After all the outbreaks of disease, fires and crimes occurred, the government and the cities became more aware that they need to have laws to protect the public. Even though this protection detail came a little late, it is still saving lives today. We should thank the inventors of the stop light, modern plumbing and the fire extinguisher for saving thousands of lives each year. But we can't really blame the people in 1870-1915 because there were more important things happening around them like the first skyscraper and amusement parks were being invented and they were pretty cool back then. But thanks to this era of urban growth, we now have public safety laws that protect the people of the United States.

Sources:

S#1: Sanitation Reform in Wake of Epidemics
S#2: Immigrants, Cities, and Disease
S#3: Murder in America: A Historian's Perspectives
S#4: Homicide Trends in America: 1850-1950
S#5: Disasters of 1870
S#6: The History of Automobile Safety
S#7: Fire Prevention
S#8: Men of Valor: A History of Firefighting 1886-1986

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