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Worldwide Anxieties In Europe and North America, news of distant problems could be explained away, but political and economic signs of disruption at home could not.
Expansion and economic competition led to rising military competition across Europe and the rest of the globe. The consolidations of Italy and Germany disrupted the old balance of power and stimulated a massive arms race.
Financial, Industrial, and Technological Insecurities The dominance of huge capitalist firms over small entrepreneurs also gave cause for concern. By the end of the nineteenth century, economies were stuck in a cycle of boom and bust that ruined small operations and favored larger companies that concentrated economic power in the hands of a few. Free market competition dropped as huge industrial magnates came to control more and more of the economy, leading to widening disparities. Organizing to protect themselves, farmers formed cooperatives, while the big industrialists organized cartels. Some called for greater government intervention. Financial crises between 1890 and 1907 led the U.S. Congress to ratify the Federal Reserve Act to better manage financial problems. Economic crises also created ripple effects in Canada, Mexico, and other states relying on American capital. Industrialization spread in places like Russia, but lagged elsewhere, creating a gap in industrial capacity. Factories and railways brought opportunity, but also breaks with the past and, according to some, the reduction of humans to machine-like existences.
Urbanization and Its Discontents Urbanization, another symbol of modernity, also brought praise and criticism. Great cultural institutions arose, as seen in Buenos Aires, along with a new phenomenon: urban slums, as found in Rio de Janeiro. In cities, the conflict between rich and poor became particularly acute.
The changing roles of women in a modern world produced another source of anxiety. Job and educational opportunities expanded, allowing women to play a more active role in public life. As women found other occupations, birthrates dropped, thus providing more resources for the children that families raised. Political rights came slowly due to male resistance. Radical views stiffened male, and even female, reluctance to support dramatic change. Imperialists liked to claim they assisted women in their plight by attacking suppressing traditions like footbinding. Colonized women, however, noted that colonization just as often added to their struggles, for example, by taking the men out of the house to work in a factory or mine and leaving the women to labor by themselves on the farm.
Closed political systems, loss of confidence in capitalism, and rising inequalities led many radicals to reject the status quo and organize workers in an effort to agitate for change. Regimes successfully expanded the electorate in hopes of deflating support for the radicals, yet many outbursts still occurred among other groups not so favored. In the United States, laborers organized in increasingly greater numbers, leading to strikes such as the Pullman Strike. Although that strike collapsed, disruption from below, as seen in Russia after the Russo-Japanese War, did succeed for a brief time. The Mexican Revolution, in which impoverished people rose up to topple the regime of General Porfirio Díaz and sustain a populist political culture, signified to many what the lower classes could do when sufficiently motivated. Many more bottom-up revolutions did not fare so well. Unable to suppress agitation, some regimes instituted welfare changes to steal thunder from the socialists. Government regulation and oversight led to the correction of abuses and greater protection of workers and consumers. Reformers cleaned up urban vice, built parks, attacked corruption, and intervened to help the poor, sick, and aged, creating precedent for the modern welfare state. >> Continue to the next part of the Summary: Cultural Modernism
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