Synthesis

Major Trends

The broad late 19th century trends of industrialization, consolidation of industry and capital, business growth, and urbanization produced a number of effects that were almost universally described as negative. Namely, inequality, extreme poverty, wage slavery, child labor, and political corruption (domination of politics by business).

Progressivism was the name of a non-radical reform movement that directed its energies toward social problems. Some Progressives focused on women, who could not yet vote; others on child labor; others on extreme poverty; others on wage slavery, industrial work conditions, or worker impoverishment.

The Progressives proposed several categories of solutions. Some Progressives had a very top-down approach: government should create policies to help people out, keep them from extreme situations. Others were more bottom-up: people should be educated and allowed to organize so that they have more power and influence to get what they need. None of the Progressives were radicals: none suggested that the structure of the state itself, or private ownership of industry and production should be fundamentally changed (as did the radical socialists, who sought worker-ownership of industry and democratic control of the workplace).

Immigration

Huge waves of immigration to the US occurred from 1890 to 1920. Immigrants were sometimes pushed out of their old countries by ethnic persecution (e.g., pogroms), famine, war, and extreme poverty; or they were “pulled” to the new country by the perception of wealth and opportunity there. (Some immigrants had heard that the shores of California had lumps of gold for the picking; others had heard that with a little effort, you could own your own house and even get rich.)

As industrial mechanization increased, the need for unskilled labor (someone to pull a lever or push a button) grew immensely. For poor peasants and the urban poor in China, Italy, Russia, Germany, Ireland, Lithuania, Poland, or the Balkans, the promise of a job and potential economic mobility (you could work your way up) was an enormous allure. A new land, a land of plenty, a place of hope and opportunity, where all of your dreams could be realized, where you could escape persecution, poverty, class degradation (serfdom and peasantry), where life would be good.

Between 1901 and 1914, there were 13 million immigrants who came to the US. To consider the larger trend of a massive wave of shifting people in the world, from 1840 to 1914 (when immigration was cut off), perhaps 40 million people emigrated to the US (another 20 million to elsewhere in the Western Hemisphere).

Immigrants tended to come to a place that offered two things: 1) a job; 2) connections to your countrymen. So if you were a Pole, you perhaps came to industrial Chicago, where you might have had a relative or two, and where there were restaurants with Polish food, churches worshiping in the Polish fashion, and plenty of factory work, such as in the stockyards. Hence, we see trends of a specific ethnicity doing what his or her countrymen were already doing, a consolidation of both the neighborhood and the profession according along ethnic lines.

Ellis Island in NYC became the entryway for immigrants from the East, while Angel Island in SF was the gateway from the West. At both entryways, many immigrants came through, but those perceived as unwanted, such as prostitutes, political subversives, or the elderly were sent back home.

First generation immigrants typically planned to return back home once they had earned enough money in the US.

Between 1900 and 1930, about one million Mexican immigrants came to the US, with many settling in CA to work as cheap labor in the citrus orchards.

By 1910, 1/7th of the American population was born outside of US, and over 40% of NYC residents were. In 1900, there were 1,000 foreign-language newspapers published in US.

Immigrants sought numerous freedoms in the US, including religious freedom, but mostly they sought economic freedom–a chance to live a decent live, instead of dire, hopeless poverty. America was an expanding place of growth and industry, a place where jobs were to be had and a better future to be hoped for. Because immigrants were often coming from desperate circumstances, they were willing to endure low wages, long hours, and dangerous work conditions. One Slavic priest said: “My people are not in America, they are under it.”

Ironically, once an immigrant generation had turned over, they often became nativist, perceiving new arrivals with suspicion. “We” were the Americans, even if our fathers had been born in a foreign land; “they” are foreigners trying to take our jobs, and they’re probably all criminals with nothing to offer our country.