American History 102: 1865 to the Present
Stanley K. Schultz, Professor of History
William P. Tishler, Producer
Shane Hamilton, Web Editor

Lecture 08
[Graphics Version]

Foreign Immigrants in Industrial America

While conditions in 19th century Europe worsened for millions of her inhabitants, the United States entered a period of incredible prosperity. Millions of Europeans, unable to bear the pressures of the Industrial Revolution, depressions, and famines, began to envision America as a land of opportunity. Unfortunately, their dreams of gold-paved streets and free land were often dashed as they arrived in a society that was experiencing unprecedented turmoil. Many Americans, seeking scapegoats, pointed to the immigrants as the source of the nation's problems.

A special thanks is due to the Wisconsin Hoofers for providing these images.

Lady Liberty, standing tall above the algae of Lake Mendota, was once the first sight immigrants to America saw as they neared America's gold-paved shores. Foreigners unaccustomed to the beauty of such a statue often broke down in joyous tears at the sight of her mighty torch. Immigrants escaping autocratic regimes wept at the thought of an egalitarian, democratic society; those escaping famines and poverty wept at the thought of riches and an easy life. To all of them, Lady Liberty on Lake Mendota symbolized a new beginning.

Little did they know that soon the statue, like their dreams of gold-paved streets, would crumble and vanish...


(OK, maybe that's not exactly how it went...)

The Nature of 19th-Century Immigration

Although it took "native" Americans a bit of time to realize that immigrants from southeastern Europe were "undesirable," politicians and community leaders were quick to realize the horrific dangers of actually allowing Chinese and Japanese immigrants into the country. The implicit racism of immigration restriction is most clear in the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act which made immigration from China illegal and the 1906 "Gentleman's Agreement" which gave the U.S. the right to exclude Japanese immigrants. This lecture, therefore, will not cover Asian immigration during the late 19th and early 20th century, since the federal government decreed that none should have occurred.

The Dillingham Commission

The Dillingham Commission was appointed in 1907 by the U.S. Senate to study immigration patterns. The Commission's appointment was largely due to the pressures of groups like the Immigration Restriction League. Such groups claimed that untrammelled immigration into the United States caused unmanageable social problems. In its reports published in 1910-11, the Dillingham Commission concluded that since the 1880s, immigrants had been mainly of southern and eastern European stock. The Commission assumed that immigrants from places like Austria-Hungary, Russia, Italy, Turkey, Lithuania, Rumania, and Greece were inferior compared to the immigrants who had come before 1880, who were assumed to be of mainly northern and western European descent. The Commission's 42-volume report recommended that literacy tests be used to deny inferior immigrants from entering the country.

Three great waves of immigration

  1. c. 1815-1860----5 million immigrants settled permanently in the U.S., mainly English, Irish, Germanic, Scandinavian, and others from northwestern Europe.
  2. c. 1865-1890----10 million immigrants settled permanently, again mainly from northwestern Europe
  3. c. 1890-1914----15 million immigrants, many of whom were Austro-Hungarian, Turkish, Lithuanian, Russian, Jewish, Greek, Italian, Romanian

However, it was not until the 20th century that the majority of immigrants were from southeastern Europe; until that time, more immigrants came from places like England, Ireland, and Scandinavia than from southeastern Europe.
Why did the Dillingham Commission point to 1880 as the beginning of a great wave of southeastern European immigration?
The 1880s, for a variety of reasons, saw an increase in strikes, unemployment, alcoholism, illiteracy, prostitution, welfare, and crime. These problems would more than likely have occurred even if immigrants from southeastern Europe had been excluded, simply because this period was a time of urbanization, industrialization, and political corruption, and Americans were having a difficult time adjusting to the new social climate. However, many Americans were eager to blame immigrants from southeastern Europe as the culprits behind the new problems.

The Causes of Immigration

"America was built by immigrants. From Plymouth Rock in the seventeenth century to Ellis Island in the twentieth, people born elsewhere came to America. Some were fleeing religious persecution and political turmoil. Most, however, came for economic reasons and were part of extensive migratory systems that responded to changing demands in labor markets....The American economy had needed both unskilled and skilled workers through much of the nineteenth century. But after the 1880s, the demand was almost exclusively for unskilled workers to fill the growing number of factory jobs. Coinciding with this were conditions in some areas of Europe, which were undergoing substantial economic changes in the 1880s. Southern and eastern Europeans, dislocated from their land and possessing few skills, were attracted to the burgeoning industries in the United States.

Four major factors had altered their society in Europe: a dramatic population increase, the spread of commercial agriculture, the rise of the factory system, and the proliferation of inexpensive means of transportation such as steamships and railroads.

Agricultural regions, the crucibles in which these factors were mingled, had become linked to cities by the new transportation routes. The increasing need of growing cities like London, Budapest, and Berlin for foodstuffs encouraged farmers to acquire more land in order to expand production for distant markets. But commercial rather than mere subsistence farming stimulated the rise of large estates and increased the overall price of land. Small owners or aspiring owners found it increasingly difficult to acquire sufficient land to support themselves. The problem for these small owners was compounded by the dramatic rise in Europe's population after the Napoleonic Wars. Food supplies became more plentiful, diets improved, and life expectancy increased. Population pressures were further heightened because, with less land to transmit, young people had less reason to wait for the landed inheritance once needed to start a family. Many simply went ahead and married. Earlier family formations, in turn, meant that women gave birth over a longer portion of their lives and more children were born. People of modest means then began to move in search of opportunities at home and in the United States...."
(Source: The Reader's Companion to American History, edited by E. Foner and J.A. Garraty. Published in Boston by Houghton Mifflin. ©1991.)

Immigrants and Urban Settlement

Although many immigrants did settle in rural America, a great majority of immigrants settled in cities. Concentration of immigrant populations was highest in four of America's largest cities at the time (New York, Boston, Pittsburgh, and Chicago). Five out of every six Irish and Russian immigrants lived in a city. Three out of four Italian and Hungarian immigrants became urban dwellers, as did seven of ten English immigrants.

Why did immigrants settle in cities?

Many immigrants came to America with very little money to buy farms or expensive farming equipment. Others settled in cities because farming in America was far different from what they had grown accustomed to in Europe. Some immigrants, such as many Slavs, simply came to America too late to acquire free or cheap land. Some, such as Irish and Jewish immigrants, preferred the city because it provided a chance to worship with other Jews without fear of persecution. One reason so many Irish settled in the city was that working the land reminded them painfully of home, where English landlords kept Irish tenant farmers in a constant state of oppression. Jews were also reminded of centuries of oppression and persecution, and often preferred cities to rural areas because cities afforded them the opportunity to recreate a mini-society of their own which emphasized religion, community, and education.

Reactions of "Native" Americans to Immigration

The term "native" in this context refers not to Indian tribes but rather to Americans who, although their ancestors had been immigrants just generations before, considered themselves "true Americans."

At first, many American leaders felt that immigration was highly beneficial to the United States economy. Businessmen who read The Commercial and Financial Chronicle in 1882 were told that immigration was essential to American prosperity. As American industry grew, so did its need for unskilled labor. Businessmen were all too happy to exploit the new labor pool created by rising tides of immigration.

However, businessmen began to change their minds as strikes became more common and labor unions grew larger and more powerful. Even though union leaders often disliked immigrants as much or more than business leaders, Americans assumed that the "anarchist" immigrants from countries like Russia were the driving force behind the increase in labor unrest. An example of this type of thinking was the reaction to the Haymarket Square bombing.

Haymarket Square Riot (May 4, 1886)

"The Haymarket affair began when a bomb exploded among a squad of policemen at a workers' rally in Haymarket Square, Chicago, on May 4, 1886. Since May 1, a loosely organized national strike for the eight-hour day had been gaining momentum in Chicago. On May 3 strikers had come to the support of an already-existing strike at the McCormick Harvesting Machine Company; police had fired on the crowd and four people had been killed. The Haymarket rally, organized by a small anarchist group, was one of many called to protest the killings. Only thirteen hundred people attended, and most left when it began to rain. About three hundred remained when 180 police arrived and demanded that they disperse. Suddenly a bomb exploded among the policemen, killing one and wounding many more, including seven who died later. The police responded with wild gunfire, killing seven or eight people in the crowd and injuring about a hundred, half of them fellow officers.

The Haymarket bombing triggered a national wave of fear; public officials, civic leaders, the press, and some union leaders joined in equating foreign birth with anarchism and terror. In Chicago hundreds of socialists, anarchists, and other radicals were rounded up. Eight anarchists (all but one of them German immigrants) were indicted for conspiracy, though none was charged with throwing the bomb. After a conspicuously biased trial, seven were condemned to hang; the eighth was given a long prison sentence...."
(Source: The Reader's Companion to American History, edited by E. Foner and J.A. Garraty. Published in Boston by Houghton Mifflin. ©1991.)

Justifications for excluding immigrants

As we have noted before, the ideas of Charles Darwin sparked great controversy, and many different (and sometimes fantastical) interpretations of evolution found their way into the public discourse. One of these interpretations became what we now call the "Anglo-Saxon myth."

Anglo-Saxon Myth
Intellectuals like John Fiske, college professors, scientists and others promoted the idea that the process of evolution had culminated in the "Anglo-Saxon race" which was far superior to any other race on the planet. Such thinkers claimed that more "primitive" races (i.e., any "race" that didn't originate in northwestern Europe) did not possess the mental, physical, or social capacities of "Anglo-Saxons." The "Anglo-Saxons" or "Teutons" or "Aryans" were responsible for all the finer points of civilization. "Scientific evidence" of the superiority of the "Anglo-Saxon race" was hardly evidence at all; for instance, some believed the angle of slope on the human forehead was a reliable indicator of human intelligence. "Anglo-Saxons" were more likely to have a high forehead with a more vertical angle of slope than other races; therefore, "scientists" conjectured that "Anglo-Saxons" were necessarily more intelligent.

Francis A. Walker was a leading proponent of immigration restriction at the time. An article he wrote for the Atlantic Monthly in 1896 indicates his general belief that immigrants not of "Anglo-Saxon" origin were of inferior stock and threatened the social, political, and economic well-being of the nation:

Eugenics

The "science" of eugenics claimed that cultural and social patterns were a result of heredity, and hence controllable through selective breeding. Americans seized upon eugenics as a means of rationalizing their racism "scientifically." Eugenicists could claim, with "science" and "empirical evidence" backing them up, that some humans with "inferior traits" were causing America's social problems. Since many Americans already assumed that southeastern Europeans, African-Americans, Jews, Asians, Middle Easterners, and Indians were of "inferior" blood, eugenics simply gave them "scientific proof" that these "inferiors" were causing America's social problems.

One leading proponent of eugenics theory was Dr. Charles Benedict Davenport. Davenport argued in a 1911 book, Heredity in Relation to Eugenics, that weaknesses in society were due to the unnatural preservation, by the use of modern medicine, of the "feeble-minded" and "unfit." In his 1911 book, written at a time when Italians, Poles, Greeks, Russians and Jews were the targets of anti-immigrant phobia, Davenport argued that "the population of the United States will, on account of the great influx of blood from South-eastern Europe, rapidly become darker in pigmentation, smaller in stature, more mercurial, more attached to music and art, [and] more given to crimes of larceny, kidnapping, assault, murder, rape and sex-immorality" and that "the ratio of insanity in the population will rapidly increase."

Advocates of the new "science" of eugenics called for more than simple immigration restriction, however. Scientists, politicians, and others relied upon the "evidence" of heredity to call for such drastic measures as sterilization, controlled breeding, institutionalization, and even the death penalty. Again, such measures are most often thought of in connection with the Nazi regime and their methods of "racial purification."

Immigration Restriction League

"This organization was founded in 1894 by a group of Boston lawyers, professors, and philanthropists who were alarmed by the large number of immigrants entering America each year. The league urged that immigrants be required to demonstrate literacy in some language. In theory a literacy test would not discriminate against the people of any particular race, creed, or color. But in reality it would keep out many of the "new" immigrants from southern and eastern Europe---whom league members considered inferior beings, likely to become criminals or public charges if admitted.

A literacy bill was passed by Congress in 1897, but President Grover Cleveland vetoed it. In 1917, however, as wartime hysteria fed American xenophobia, another literacy bill was signed into law by President Woodrow Wilson. After 1917, as key members lost interest or passed away, the Immigration Restriction League declined in influence."
(Source: The Reader's Companion to American History, edited by E. Foner and J.A. Garraty. Published in Boston by Houghton Mifflin. ©1991.)

"It's the object [of the Immigration Restriction League]not to advocate the exclusion of laborers or other immigrants of such character and standards that fit them to become citizens, but public opinion must be made to recognize the necessity of a further exclusion of elements undesirable for citizenship or injurious to our national character."--Henry Cabot Lodge, Sr.

Immigrants from Europe were not the only new faces to arrive on the urban and industrial scene around the turn of the century. Beginning in the 1890s and lasting until the 1970s, a large number of black Americans began moving from the rural South to the urban areas of the North. Like the Europeans who came to America to find work and escape oppression, Southern blacks moved to Northern cities to work in the burgeoning factories and escape racial strife. The story of this mass exodus, often called the "Great Migration," is a fascinating and important aspect of American history; so important, in fact, that it is the subject of the next lecture: Lecture 09: The Great Migration: Blacks in White America.

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