McCormick writes that "virtually every man, woman, and child in America had to face the unsettling consequences of industrialization."1 In fact scarcely one person in America "remained unaffected," McCormick explained. Daily lives changed because of the emerging "social forces" around them; those forces were due to railroad and telegraph lines crisscrossing the country, factories popping up everywhere, and new things to do with one's time.

             Those new things that altered perceptions of time included working long shifts in factories, joining organizations, raising families under different - and often more stressful - circumstances. The word "modernization" is used by McCormick in his essay - rather than "industrialization" - to better describe the radically changing conditions in America, which was being "transformed" from a land of "island communities" (108) to a nation where organized, cosmopolitan interests held sway.".

             When muckrakers began, in the late 1800s, about corruption in the government, and the building of Standard Oil, about "how badly children were injured in factories," Americans took time to read their papers, some of them reading every day's newspaper cover-to-cover, "not only to entertain themselves, but also to gain some understanding of how modern America worked," McCormick continues.

             But they weren't just reading the morning newspapers, rushing off to the assembly line and then home again for supper and bedtime. Men and women - "from virtually every segment of society" - were using their available time to "plunge into public life," in order to defend, or promote, their "private values," the author continues (109). He gives examples of how people used their time; "torchlight paraders" in Connecticut rallied for political candidates; women "crusaded for temperance" in Ohio; in Texas, cotton farmers organized into unions and cooperatives; "angry mobs lynched rapists in South Carolina"; elite business-minded people "reformed New York City" (110).