Immigration 1875-1925
How did America respond to the issue of immigration from 1875-1925?
Using the documents and your knowledge of the time period, discuss the political, social, and cultural changes.
In 1886, France presented the United States with the Statue of Liberty as a symbol of eternal friendship between the two nations. At the base of the Statue read a poem that would forever transform the meaning of the gift: “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe fee, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore, send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed, to me; I lift my lamp beside the golden door.”(Doc G). Placed at the gates of America's golden doors on Ellis Island, New York, the Statue of Liberty became a symbol of hope and freedom to the hundreds of thousands of immigrants that would pass by it on their way into America from distant shores. To them, the Statue of Liberty symbolized a new beginning. These immigrants helped to transform the nation into the culturally rich society that it is today. While immigration has always been a large part of American history, the greatest wave of immigration was between 1875 and 1925. This period of massive immigration had a profound effect not only on American culture, but also on the political and social aspects of American life.
America was built by immigrants. From Jamestown to Ellis Island, America had attracted people in search of a new and better life like a giant magnet. Their reasons for coming in the early beginnings of the country were mainly for religious and political freedom. Most of these immigrants had been from northern and western Europe. For the first time, the 1860’s saw an increase of immigrants not only from southern and eastern Europe but also Asia and the Americas (Doc A). These immigrants were also arriving in much larger numbers than had ever been seen before (Doc A). The vast majority of these ‘new’ immigrants were coming from southern and eastern Europe in response to drastic changes in their homelands. After the Napoleanic Wars ended in 1815, there were dramatic population increases in the southern and eastern regions of Europe. The population boom was coupled with the spread of commercial agriculture, inexpensive transportation, and industrial growth. As the population grew, the number of jobs receded causing great social and economical turmoil. Many unlucky families started looking towards a distant shore that had always promised freedom and prosperity.
As Emma Lazarus wrote in her Statue of Liberty poem, Europe was teeming with the poor, tired, and wretched (Doc G). Europe was old, dirty, and crowded; America was fresh, new, and rich. After the Civil War and Reconstruction in America, the industrial revolution grew with amazing speed. New inventions, transportation advances, and the growth of jobs cried out for cheap, unskilled labor. The poor and destitute of Europe, who were unskilled yet willing to work, eagerly responded to the cry. Prospective immigrants were ready to shed the burden and strife of the Old World and start a new and promising life in America. They wanted to be part of something grand. America offered the promises of political and religious freedom as well as economic opportunity. The poor of Europe began to pour in through America’s golden gates. In a single year during the quarter century before the first World War, the number of immigrants passing through New York’s Ellis Island was greater than all of the barbarian forces that had brought about the fall of Rome.
The immigrants that responded to the cry for labor by American business created a new wave of immigration from southern and eastern Europe (Doc M). These new immigrants comprised two groups: birds of passage and permanent immigrants. Birds of passage never intended to stay in America and make it their home. They were usually young men who left their families, worked hard, saved their money, and returned home. They did not wish to make a home in America or become citizens, their only desire was to have an opportunity to work for a living and then return to a better life in their native home. They often sought the high paying jobs which were more dangerous and physically demanding. Many of these jobs included building railroads and skyscrapers which were essential to the growth of America. Since these men were seeking to make money fast and then return home, they usually lived in the cities, close to their work (Doc E). They primarily settled in four major cities: New York, Boston, Pittsburgh, and Chicago.
Another popular city was San Francisco. In California, thousands of Chinese birds of passage settled, mostly in San Francisco. These immigrants concentrated their efforts on building the Central Pacific Railroad and sent their wages back home. Unfortunately many of the Chinese birds of passage couldn’t return home. Businessmen found ways to suck all of the money out of them through low pay, high rents, and an expensive cost of living(Doc F). More and more Chinese immigrants kept arriving along the Pacific Coast willing to work for considerably less than the natives of California would. There was so much cheap labor in California that a popular 1870’s song expressed the woes of too much immigration: “California’s coming down, as you can plainly see. They are hiring all the Chinamen and discharging you and me...”(Doc J). Immigration was becoming a growing controversy and Americans responded negatively.
The American treatment of immigrants was outrageous and unfair, making life even more difficult for those already poor and unfortunate(Doc I). Many “native” Americans, whose ancestors only a few generations before had been immigrants as well, were very prejudiced against these new immigrants. They kept forgetting how America was a land of immigrants, it had and was continuing to be built with the blood, sweat, and tears of immigrants. Life was made so difficult for these new immigrants that in the end, only about twenty-five percent of ALL the birds of passage were able to return home. The irony lies in the fact that Americans prevented the immigrants from returning home yet they constantly complained about the problem of immigration, forming restrictive societies and trying to prevent further immigration (Doc C,Doc D,Doc O&Doc H).
For the permanent immigrants, or the birds of passage who were never able to return home again, making a new life in America was not an easy task. Immigrants suffered discrimination before they even got off of the boats at Ellis Island. The troubles of finding money for passage, luggage fees, physical inspections, and the crowded ships were just the beginning of their hardships. When they arrived, they had to wait to be inspected again, always fearing that they might be sent back to their miserable lives that they had come from(Doc K).
Once they passed through the golden gates, they entered the world of filthy tenements and hard labor. Entire families had to work in able to have enough money to survive, even the young children were sent to work in horrible and dangerous conditions (Doc N). The work for the children was so hard that John Spargo who went to find out what the conditions were like for working immigrant children remarked that, “I could not do that work and live, but there were boys of ten and twelve years of age doing it...some of them had never been inside a school; few of them could read...”(Doc N). The small joint housing complexes that the immigrants lived in, tenements, were filthy - devoid of air and light. One concentration of tenements in New York was even called the “Pig Market” to describe it’s filthiness.
As reports of the dreadful conditions surfaced, investigations were ordered and found that tenements were truly dirty, filthy, dangerous facilities, that promoted disease and malnutrition. After these investigations, laws were enacted in order to allow more room, light, and air. The Tenement Reform Law of 1879, stipulated that rooms have more air and light. Following that law, the Tenement House At of 1901 was passed to improve the sanitary arrangements, requiring each room have a window, stipulating the size of new tenements, and mandating changes in pre-existing tenements. Unfortunately, many of the laws weren’t enforced, they were ignored or just barely met. For example, in order to meet the one window per room requirement, some landlords simply cut windows in a wall between rooms, completely defeating the purpose of the window. Despite these hardships, the immigrants continued to fight for a better life, constantly struggling with the ‘native’ American enemy.
Even though they were highly prejudiced against these new immigrants, Americans benefited from their presence. The new immigrants contributed greatly to the growth of industrial America, mining gold and silver. They toiled in steel, coal, and oil productions. They built railroads and worked in factories that made men such as Rockefeller, Carnegie, Westinghouse, and J.P. Morgan millionaires. The immigrants took the jobs that nobody wanted because they offered good pay for hard work. These jobs were essential to the progression of America, and needless to say the business men were all too eager to exploit the new labor pool. Cities prospered, growing vertically with new skyscrapers, and horizontally with electric trolleys. In 1882, the “Commercial and Financial Chronicle” declared that immigration was essential to the prosperity of the country. The Industrial Commission declared that, “it would be a very difficult thing...to build a railroad of any considerable length without {immigrant} labor.”1 However, as immigration continued to grow, climbing towards it’s highest points in history in the first two decades of the twentieth century(Doc A), American’s cool feelings towards immigration grew bitterly cold.
As immigration grew, groups of the same ethnic backgrounds tended to form mini-societies. They spoke the same language and formed schools and
churches which were very different than American schools and churches. Inner cities became a plethora of cultural diversity. The ethnic neighborhoods, full of strange food, faces, religion, and languages concerned the Americans while it’s only purpose was to comfort the lonely immigrants.
In the 1880’s troubles began to start in America. New problems began to surface as a result of the massive expansion of urbanization and industrialization. Political corruption ran rampant through the cities. The political corruption was joined with moral decline among the citizens. Unions grew larger and more powerful in order to protect the immigrant work force from the corruption. All of the turmoil was a result of Americans having trouble adjusting to the new social climate that had replaced the old way of life. In the 1880’s and 1890’s, following a time of economic boom, a depression hit the country and suddenly the immigrants became the scapegoat for all of the ills of America. The quality of American citizenship, claimed Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, was being threatened by the injury of unrestricted immigration (Doc B). Lodge and others who felt the same way about the “ills of immigration” began forming restriction leagues. In 1893, the American Protective Society was formed in order to protect Protestants, restrict Catholics, and “wage a continuous warfare against ignorance and fanaticism” (Doc C). Soon other similar restriction groups began to spring up across the country.
The Ku Klux Klan, which originated from the post-Civil War South, formed groups in northern cities at unprecedented numbers. They marched down city streets, clad in their ominous white hoods and tunics in broad daylight, protesting immigrants as well as blacks. Another highly popular group was the Immigration Restriction League, which felt that unrestricted immigration was causing unmanageable social problems in America. Formed in 1894, by a group of prestigious Boston lawyers and philanthropists, the Immigration Restriction League felt that southern and eastern European immigrants were inferior to the traditional northern and western European immigrants, more likely to become criminals and unfit citizens. The IRL was the first to propose a literacy test that immigrants had to pass before they were able to come into the country. Their literacy test provided that any person over sixteen had to be able to read twenty five words of the United States Constitution (in any language) before they could be admitted into the country. While the literacy test, claimed the IRL, was only to keep out unfit citizens, it’s true intent was to keep out all of the new immigrants who came from poor and illiterate parts of Europe. The literacy test was vetoed many times, as it served only to prevent poor people from having a second chance. As President Cleveland said, “it is infinitely more safe to admit a hundred thousand immigrants who, though unable to read and write, seek among us only a home and opportunity to work, than to admit one of those unruly agitators and enemies of governmental control, who cannot only read and write, but delights in arousing, by inflammatory speech, the illiterate laborers.”(Doc O).
Still, American fears of untrammeled immigration permeated the nation. In 1885, Thomas Bailey Aldrich’s poem “Unguarded Gates” (Doc L), warned Americans again about the danger of keeping the door open to all. Comparing the immigrants to tigers who were wasting the gifts of freedom that America provided them with, and “bringing with them unknown gods and rites”, Aldrich’s poem amplified America’s growing concern about unrestricted immigration (Doc L). Americans were cautioned again by an 1896 article in the Atlantic Monthly about the impossibility of enforcing the immigration inspection requirements. By 1896, there were laws to keep out immigrants that would become a burden on the country yet still, “a few hundreds, or possibly thousands of persons, deaf, dumb, blind, idiotic, insane, pauper, or criminal....source{s} of mischief” were being allowed in because “when...more than five thousand persons have passed through the gates at Ellis Island...during the course of a single day...no very careful scrutiny is practicable.” (Doc D).
The APS, IRL, and KKK, were not alone in spreading their rumors, fears and prejudices. They were joined by the agitated writings of radicals such as Aldrich and Lodge. Concerned American citizens’ fears proliferated and the wave of immigration fear rapidly gained momentum. Rumors and prejudices were amplified into truths. The Italians were associated with crime. The Chinese were associated with sexual immorality. The Irish were associated with drunken rabble-rousers. To make matters worse a strike, arranged by a small anarchist group(comprised of several German immigrants) in Haymarket Square ended in disaster. On May 4, 1886, the last day of the four day strike, a bomb was thrown into the crowd. Most of the strikers had left due to the bad weather, only 300 out of 1300 remained when the bomb went off. After the explosion, the police fired into the crowd, killing eight and wounding over a hundred. When the American public found out that an anarchist group of German immigrants were at the root of the strike, a new wave of fear hit the country. Immigrants and foreign born people were associated with anarchism and terror. The blame for all of America’s problems was placed on the shoulders of the immigrants.
At a time when Darwin’s theories of evolution were starting to be accepted, Americans tried to use the theories to exclude immigrants. They claimed that the evolution process had culminated in the “Anglo Saxon race” which was superior to all other races. Any person of ethnic background from anywhere but northern or western Europe didn’t have the mental, social, or physical capabilities of the Anglo-Saxon’s and thus should be eliminated from the population of America. Other prejudiced Americans claimed that all of the social problems of rape, murder, larceny, kidnapping, assault, and drug use were the results of the immigrant’s inferior, bad blood. In order to lessen American fears, in 1907 the Senate appointed the Dillingham Commission to study immigration patterns.
In 1911, the Dillingham Commission claimed that the start of excessive immigration from southern and eastern Europe started in the 1880’s, when it was clear that it was actually during the first two decades of the 1900’s (Doc A). The Dillingham Commission knew the facts but it was simply easier to blame the immigrants from southern and eastern Europe for the problems than to accept responsibility themselves. One of the reasons that might have compelled the Dillingham Commission to make it’s assertions was the pressure it was receiving from the Immigration Restriction league. After the Dillingham Commission concluded it’s investigation, more pressure was placed on the government to restrict immigration.
During the last quarter of the nineteenth century, the immigration policy was the one issue that both parties clearly took different stands on. The Republicans tended to be opposed to continued immigration. The new immigrants, however, tended to gravitate towards the Democratic Party. Since the Democrats were able to gain votes by meeting the needs of the new immigrants, they tended to be more pro-immigration. However, as immigration swelled to an all time high in the early 1900’s and problems began springing up nationwide, both the Democratic and the Republican policies on immigration became more restrictive.
The first group of immigrants to be attacked were the Chinese because they were the most different. The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 prohibited any further admittance of Chinese immigrants for ten years. In 1902, the Act was renewed again and finally the act was replaced by the National Origins Act of 1924. After Chinese immigration was halted, the next targets were the southern and eastern Europeans.
In the Immigration Act of 1907, the government excluded all persons who were classified as: idiots, imbeciles, feeble-minded, insane, paupers, criminals, anarchists, and children under 16 unless accompanied by an adult. When the Immigration Act of 1907 didn’t seem to solve the problems of immigration the Emergency Quota Act was passed in 1921. In the Emergency Quota Act, the number of immigrants allowed into the country was limited to three percent of each ethnic background that was represented in the United States as of 1910. However, 1910 happened to be a period with the highest numkber of immigrants (Doc A), so the Emergency Quota Act of 1921 didn’t have the desired affect. While America came out of the post World War I depression, new conflicts arose as civil rights, the women’s rights movement, and the roaring twenties gained momentum. Once again, blame was placed on the “immoral” influence of the immigrants from southern and eastern Europe, or anywhere but the northern and western regions of Europe. The Emergency Quota Act wasn’t working and Americans again began to cry out for more restrictions.
In response to their cries, the National Origins Act of 1924 was passed to “limit the immigration of aliens into the United States”(Doc H). The National Origins Act changed the quota to two percent and changed the year to 1890. Since 1890 was before the great waves of southern and eastern European immigrants began coming, it was clear that this act was aimed at preventing the new immigrants from being allowed into the country. The National Origins Act also prevented the undesired immigration from Asia. Finally, the Americans had been given an act of Congress that would successfully halt the amount of immigration of unfit citizens. The golden gates were now well guarded; the wide open door just barely cracked. The National Origins Act had the desired affect, in the years ensuing it’s passage immigration dramatically dropped off to it’s normal rates before 1875 (Doc A).
The tired, poor, huddled masses yearning to breathe free had only desired to come to America to make a better life for themselves and their families. America offered the promise of hope, symbolized by the magnificent Statue of Liberty raising her lamp over the tumultuous waters of the Atlantic Ocean. They faced hardship from the day they decided to come to the land of freedom and once they had arrived, their journey was hardly over. Struggling to make enough money to survive, being forced to live in horrible conditions, and comforting themselves with the cultures of their homelands, the immigrants simply wanted the chance to become free from their chains. As the old chains were shed, new ones were shackled on. Americans blamed the immigrants for all of the nations problems, and continuously took away their rights. If that wasn’t enough, Americans then took away their hope. They formed societies to oppress the immigrants and enacted laws to prevent further immigration. Americans all but slammed the door shut in the face of the immigrants. But those who stayed did not give up. They worked hard and made their way up the ladder of life. Some became prosperous and brilliant Americans who’s names are forever remembered. Others just made it to the comfortable state of life that they had intended to gain when they decided to cross the ocean and enter into the unknown. No matter the end product, the millions of immigrants who came to the United States between the busy years of 1875 and 1925 significantly shaped the nation into the culturally rich society that it is today. Their courage, persistency, and spirit will always be admired.
1. Martin, Roberts, Mintz, McMurry, and Jones America and it’s Peoples: A Mosaic in the Making Third edition (New York: Longman Inc. 1997) p. 609.
©2000 Marci
