When I get to the subject of industrialization in my US history classes, we take a long time to work through all its ramifications. The transformation the United States underwent in the last decades of the 19th century touched all aspects of life. We talk about new methods of factory production and what it did to workers; we talk about the immense influence of new corporations and attempts to form strong labor unions to protect workers from this influence. We talk about the rise of consumer culture and the decline of producer culture. We talk about the beginnings of pop culture. Every one of these topics could really be an upper-level class just in itself. But it always surprises my students, at least it seems to, when they discover we talk about art as well.
Specifically, we talk about the work of a group of artists called the Realists, particularly writers and painters. Together, the Realists rebelled against the dominant styles that dictated what was expected of art. Instead, they sought to create something much more true, much more reflective of the real human experience in the last 30 years of the 1800s—the years of industrialization.
The work of the realists often took people by surprise because of the unflinching way these artists looked at the grittiness of life. Life was ugly in the new urbanizing world and art that looked away or denied that was misleading, untrue, and deeply fraudulent. The novelist Stephen Crane (probably most famous as the author of The Red Badge of Courage) portrayed in his Tales of New York the cruelty of the new urban world, the disregard for human life prevalent in the crowded slums, and the widening chasm between the haves and the have-nots.
By contrast, the rapidly growing Pop culture against which Realists rebelled churned out simplistic dime novels in which good and bad were starkly delineated and the good guy in the white hat always triumphed in the end. Another style of novels told of the poor lower-class kid who had nothing but his honesty and work ethic and who, by being at the right place at the right time—and by working hard and playing by the rules—rose through the ranks to enter the world of middle class respectability and comfort by the end of the story. Real life in the big new cities worked nothing like that.
Realists wanted no part in perpetuating what to them amounted to a cruel hoax that did nothing but give people a false representation of the world. Through their art, they wanted to show those who lived in relative comfort and splendor, what life was really like for most people in Modern America.