Chapter 20 Section 1- The New Immigrants
A Flood of Immigrants

• Before 1865, mostly from northern and western Europe
  • Protestant
  • Spoke English
• More immigrants started coming after the Civil War

 
New Immigration

• “New” immigrants started coming in the mid-1880s
  • Southern and eastern Europe (Greeks, Russians, Hungarians, Italians, Turks, Poles)
  • Many Catholics and Jews
  • Few spoke English
  • Clustered in urban neighborhoods made up of people from the same nationality
• “Old” immigrants started to decrease
• Immigration from Mexico, China, and Japan increased after 1900
  • Difficulty blending into American society

 
Leaving Troubles Behind

• Economic troubles
  • Overcrowding, poverty, scarce jobs
  • Not enough land for farmers
  • Crop failures
  • New machines put people out of work
• Persecution
  • Some countries had laws and policies against certain ethnic groups (Jews in Russia for example)

 
Seeking Opportunity

• Jobs, affordable land, opportunity for a better life

 
The Journey to America

• 12 days across the Atlantic or several weeks across the Pacific
• Usually traveled in steerage (cramped, noisy quarters on the lower decks)

 
The Statue of Liberty

• Most European immigrants arrived in New York City
• Statue of Liberty was a gift from France
  • Emma Lazarus’s poem welcomed immigrants

 
Entering America

• Immigrants had to register at government reception centers
  • Ellis Island in New York Harbor
  • Angel Island in San Francisco Bay
  • Examiners asked questions and gave health examinations

 
Finding Work

• Some immigrants had been recruited to be unskilled workers (unloading cargo, digging ditches, etc.)
• Fast-growing industries hired many immigrants (steel)
  • Might work 12 hours per day, seven days per week
• Sweatshops in the garment industry
  • Repetitious and hazardous work, low pay, long hours

 
Adjusting to America

• Immigrants tried to preserve some aspects of their own cultures
• Most wanted to assimilate (become part of American culture)
• Immigrant parents often spoke their native languages
  • Children spoke English and their native language
• Women had more freedom in America

 
Building Communities

• Most immigrants were from rural areas
  • Often settled in industrial cities
• Relatives helped new immigrants
• People from the same ethnic group formed neighborhoods
• Houses of worship built
  • Priests and rabbis were often community leaders
• Newspapers in native languages

Nativist Movement

• Some Americans worried immigrants would take away jobs and/or drive down wages
• Ethnic, religious, and racial differences created tension
• Immigrants blamed for crime, unemployment, other problems
• Nativist movement opposed immigration since the 1830s
  • Gained strength in the late 1800s

 
New Immigration Laws

• Chinese Exclusion Act (1882)
  • First law to limit immigration
  • Prohibited Chinese workers from entering the US for 10 years
    • Extended by Congress in 1892 and 1902
• “Gentleman’s agreement” with Japan (1907)
  • Limited Japanese immigration
  • Americans pledged fair treatment for Japanese Americans already here
• Tax on immigrants (1882)
• Criminals barred from entering (1882)
• Immigration Act of 1917 included a literacy requirement

 
Support for Immigrants

• Grace Abbott and Julia Clifford Lathrop helped found the Immigrants’ Protective League

 
Immigrants’ Contributions

• Provided workers that helped create economic growth
• Shaped American life
  • Major religious groups
  • Customs, culture, language, literature
  • Transformed cities

 
Section 2- Moving to the City
Growth of Cities

• 1870:  25% of Americans lived in cities
• 1910:  almost 50% lived in cities
  • US was changing from a rural to an urban nation
• Immigrants and their children made up 80% of the population or more in some cities
• Machines reduced the need for farm-workers
• African Americans moved to cities
  • Escaping poverty and discrimination
  • Looking for jobs

 
Transportation and Resources

• Trains carried people to cities and raw materials for industry
  • Chicago and Kansas City became meatpacking centers
• Iron ore and coal made Pittsburgh a center for iron and steel manufacturing
• Trade and immigration led to the development of New York and San Francisco (seaports)

 
Tenement Living

• Too many people in cities, not enough housing
• Poor people lived in tenements (small, dark rooms with many people) in the slums

 
Middle Class Comfort

• Growing middle class in cities
  • Doctors, lawyers, ministers, managers, office clerks
• Improvements in transportation led to the growth of suburbs
  • Houses with hot water, indoor toilets, and electricity

 
The Gilded Age

• Wealthy people built large mansions and estates
  • Lives of luxury
• Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner published The Gilded Age in 1873
  • Extravagant wealth with terrible poverty underneath

 
 
Cities in Crisis

• Overcrowding created sanitation and health problems
  • Diseases spread rapidly
• Fires were a problem
  • Chicago fire of 1870 destroyed 18,000 buildings and 100,000 people lost their homes

 
Health and Crime Problems

• Chicago:  babies often died of whooping cough, diphtheria, or measles
• New York:  tuberculosis “lung block”
• New York’s solutions
  • Schoolchildren screened for contagious diseases
  • Visiting nurses provided to mothers with young children
  • Public health clinics for the poor
• Poverty in cities led to crime

 
Seeking Solutions

• Religious groups aided the poor in orphanages, prisons, and hospitals
  • YMCA and YWCA
• Settlement houses provided medical care, playgrounds, nurseries, libraries, and classes in poor neighborhoods
  • Hull House founded in Chicago by Jane Addams in 1889

 
Building Up—Not Out

• Iron and the safety elevator made taller buildings possible
  • William LeBaron Jenney built the first skyscraper in Chicago in 1884
  • Woolworth Building in New York completed in 1913 (Cathedral of Commerce)

 
New Designs

• “City Beautiful” movement
  • Frederick Law Olmstead designed New York’s Central Park
• Chicago World’s Fair (1892-1893) showcased American architecture

New Forms of Transportation

• Streetcars pulled by horses were slow and left manure
• Cable-car lines in San Francisco in 1873
• Trolley car in Richmond, Virginia in 1888
• Subway in Boston (1897) and New York (1904)
• Asphalt used to pave streets

 
Building Bridges

• Steel bridges linked sections of cities
  • Eads Bridge across the Mississippi River in St. Louis (1874)
  • Brooklyn Bridge connected Manhattan and Brooklyn (1884)
• Suburbs developed along train or trolley lines

 
Section 3- A Changing Culture
Expanding Education

• 1865:  Most Americans had attended school for an average of four years
• 1914:  Most states required at least some schooling
  • 80% of children 5-17 in school

 
Public Schools

• 100 public high schools in 1860, 6,000 in 1900, 12,000 in 1914
  • Many teenagers still didn’t go to school
  • Majority of high school students were girls
    • Boys often worked to help their families
• African Americans in the South received little or no education
  • Segregated schools

 
Progressive Education

• New philosophy of education that emerged around 1900
  • Wanted to shape students’ characters and teach them good citizenship
  • Hands-on learning activities
• John Dewey criticized schools for overemphasizing memorization
  • Learning should be related to the interests, problems, and concerns of students

 
Higher Education

• Morrill Act (1862) gave states land that could be sold to raise money for education
  • Land-grant colleges started
• Wealthy people established and supported colleges (Cornell and Stanford for example)

 
Women and Higher Education

• Most colleges didn’t admit women in 1865
  • Land-grant schools did
• Women’s colleges founded in the late 1800s (Vassar, Smith, Wellesly, Bryn Mawr)
• Almost 40% of college students were women by 1910

 
Minorities and Higher Education

• New colleges provided higher education for African Americans and Native Americans (Hampton Institute and Howard University for example)
• Booker T. Washington founded the Tuskegee Institute in 1881
  • Trained teachers and provided practical education for African Americans
• George Washington Carver was part of the Tuskegee faculty
  • Developed hundreds of products from the peanut

 
Schools for Native Americans

• Reservation and boarding schools trained Native Americans for jobs in industry
  • Isolated Native Americans from their tribal traditions

 
Public Libraries

• Andrew Carnegie offered to build libraries in cities in 1881
  • Donated $30 million to found more than 2,000 libraries throughout the world
• Every state established free public libraries

 
Spreading the News

• Joseph Pulitzer bought the New York World in 1883
  • Used illustrations, cartoons, sensational stories, huge headlines
• Yellow journalism- writing which exaggerates sensational, dramatic, and gruesome events to attract readers
  • Used by William Randolph Hearst’s New York Morning Journal
• Ethnic and minority newspapers thrived
• Number of magazines rose quickly from 1865-1900

 
Changes in Literature

• Writers sought to describe the lives of people (realism) and/or focused on a particular region of the country (regionalism)
  • Mark Twain wrote about life along the Mississippi River (Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer)
  • Stephen Crane- city slums and the Civil War (The Red Badge of Courage)
  • Jack London- lives of miners and hunters in the far Northwest
  • Paul Laurence Dunbar- poetry and novels that used the dialects and folktales of Southern African Americans
• Paperback books were cheap and got more people to read
• Horatio Alger- young adult books
  • Wrote about hard work and honesty bringing success

 
American Artists

• American painters pursued realist themes
  • Thomas Eakins- human anatomy and surgical operations
  • Henry Tanner- African American families in the South
  • Frederic Remington- American West
  • Winslow Homer- Southern farmers, Adirondack campers, stormy seas
  • James Whistler- “Whistler’s Mother”
  • Mary Cassatt- Impressionist

 
Music in America

• John Philip Sousa- “The Stars and Stripes Forever”
• African American musicians in New Orleans developed Jazz in the late 1800s
• Scott Joplin- ragtime composer
• Symphony orchestras in New York, Boston, and Philadelphia

 
Leisure Time

• Middle class people and some factory workers had more leisure time
• Sports
  • Baseball became the most popular sport in America
    • First World Series in 1903
  • College football became popular by the 1890s
    • Notre Dame’s first football game in 1887
  • Basketball invented by Dr. James Naismith in Springfield, Massachusetts in the 1890s
  • Tennis and golf- popular among the wealthy
  • “Safety” bicycle made bicycling more popular

• Theaters in large cities
  • Vaudeville shows- variety shows with dancing, singing, comedy, and magic
• About 80 traveling circuses in 1910
• Thomas Edison invented “moving pictures” in the 1880s
  • “Movies” in nickelodeons were the beginning of the film industry