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APUSH ASSIGNMENTSWeek of October 16, 2017AP Lesson 30READINGS-Urbanization and ImmigrationREADINGS- Urbanization and ImmigrationAMSCO- ch 18 The Rise of Industrial America, Growth of Cities, and American Culture, 1865-1900A NATION OF IMMIGRANTSIn the last half of the 19th century, the US population increased more than threefold, from about 23.2 million in 1850 to 76.2 million in 1900. A significant portion of the growth was fueled by the arrival in these years of some 16.2 million immigrants. An additional 8.8 million more arrived during the peak years of immigration, 1901-1910.Growth of Immigration:In every era, the motives for emigrating from one country to another are a combination of “pushes” (negative factors from which people are fleeing) and “pulls” (positive attractions of the adopted country). The negative forces driving Europeans to emigrate in the late 19th century included:The poverty of displaced farmworkers driven from the land by the mechanization of farm-workOvercrowding and joblessness in European cities as a result of a population boomReligious persecution of Jews in RussiaPositive reasons for choosing to emigrate to the US included this country’s reputation for political and religious freedom and the economic opportunities afforded by the settling of the Great Plains and the abundance of industrial jobs in US cities. Furthermore, the introduction of large steamships and the relatively inexpensive one way passage in the ships “steerage” made it possible for millions of poor Europeans to emigrate. “Old” Immigrants and “New” Immigrants:Through the 1880s, the overwhelming majority of immigrants came from northern and western Europe: the British Isles, Germany, and Scandinavia. Most of these “old” immigrants were Protestants, although a sizable minority were Irish and German Catholics. Their language (mostly English-speaking) and high level of literacy and occupational skills made it relatively easy for these immigrants to blend into a mostly rural American society in the early decades of the 19th century.NEW IMMIGRANTS: Beginning in the 1890s and continuing to the outbreak of WWI in 1914, there was a notable change in the national origins of most immigrants. The “new” immigrants came from southern and eastern Europe. They were Italians, Greeks, Croats, Slovaks, Poles, and Russians. Many were poor and illiterate peasants, who had left autocratic countries and therefore were unaccustomed to democratic traditions. Unlike the earlier groups of Protestant immigrants, the newcomers were largely Roman Catholic, Greek Orthodox, Russian Orthodox, and Jewish. On arrival, most new immigrants crowded into poor ethnic neighborhoods in NY, Chicago, and other major US cities. An estimated 25% of them were “birds of passage,” young men contracted for unskilled factory, mining, and construction jobs, who would return to their native lands once they had saved a fair sum of money to bring back to their families. Restricting Immigration:In the 1870s, when the French sculptor Frederic- Auguste Bartholdi began work on the Statue of Liberty, there were few legal restrictions on immigration to the US. By 1886, however- the year that the great welcoming statue was placed on its pedestal in NY harbor- Congress had passed a number of new laws restricting immigration. First came the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, placing a ban on all new immigrants from China. Then came restrictions on the immigration of “undesirable” persons (those convicted of criminal acts or diagnosed as mentally incompetent). Another law in 1885 prohibited contract labor in order to protect American workers. Soon after the opening of Ellis Island as an immigration center in 1892, the new arrivals had to pass more rigorous medical and document examinations and pay an entry tax before being allowed into the US.These efforts to restrict immigration were supported by diverse groups such as:Labor unions, which feared that employers would use immigrants to depress wages and break strikesA nativist society called the American Protective Association, which was openly prejudiced against Roman Catholics Social Darwinists, who viewed the new immigrants as biologically inferior to English and Germanic stocks.During a severe depression in the 1890s, foreigners became a convenient scapegoat for jobless workers as well as for employers who blamed strikes and the labor movement on foreign agitators. By no means, however, did the anti-immigrant feelings and early restrictions stop the flow of newcomers. At the turn of the century, almost 15% of the US population were immigrants. The Statue of Liberty remained a beacon of hope for the poor and the oppressed of southern and eastern Europe until the 1920s, when the Quota Acts almost closed Liberty’s golden door. URBANIZATIONUrbanization and industrialization developed simultaneously as 2 sides of the same coin. Cities provided both a central supply of labor for factories and also a principal market for factory-made good. The shift in population from rural to urban became more obvious with each passing decade. By 1900 almost 40% of Americans lived in towns or cities, and by 1920, for the first time, more Americans lived in urban communities than in rural areas. Those moving into the cities were both immigrants and native-born Americans. In the late 20th century, millions of young Americans from rural areas decided to seek new economic opportunities in the cities. They left the farms for industrial and commercial jobs, and few of them returned. Among those who joined the inexorable movement from farms to cities were African Americans from the South. Between 1897 and 1930, nearly 1 million southern African Americans settled in northern and western cities.Changes in the Nature of Cities:Cities of the late 19th century underwent significant changes not only in their size but also in their internal structure and design. STREETCAR CITIES: A number of improvements in urban transportation made the growth of cities possible. In the walking cities of the pre-Civil War era, people had little choice but to live within walking distance of their shops or jobs. Such cities gave way to streetcar cities, in which people lived in residencies many miles from the jobs and commuted to work on horse-drawn streetcars. By the 1890s, both horse-drawn cars and cable cars were being replaced by electric trolleys, elevated railroads, and subways, which could transport people to urban residences even further from the city’s commercial center. The building of massive steel suspension bridges such as the Brooklyn Bridge (completed in 1883) also made possible longer commutes between residential neighborhoods and the center city. Mass transportation had the effect of segregating urban workers by income. The upper and middle classes moved to streetcar suburbs to escape the pollution, poverty, and crime of the city. The exodus of higher-income residents left older sections of the city to the working poor, many of whom were immigrants. SKYSCRAPERS: As cities expanded outward, they also soared upward, since increasing land values in the central business district dictated the construction of taller and taller buildings. In 1885, William Le Baron Jenny built the 10-story Home Insurance Building in Chicago- the first true skyscraper with a steel skeleton. Structures of this size were made possible by such innovations as the Otis elevator and the central steam-heating system with radiators in every room. By 1900 steel-framed skyscrapers for offices of industry and commerce had replaced church spires as the dominant feature of American urban skylines. ETHNIC NEIGHBORHOODS: As the more affluent citizens deserted residences near the business district, the poor moved into them. To increase their profits, landlords divided up inner-city housing into small, windowless rooms. The resulting slums and tenement apartments could cram over 4,000 people into one city block. In an attempt to correct unlivable conditions, NYC passed a law in 1879 that required each bedroom to have a window. The cheapest way for landlords to respond to the law was to build the so-called dumbbell tenements, with ventilation shafts in the center of the building to provide windows for each room. However, overcrowding and filth in new tenements continued to promote the spread of deadly diseases, such as cholera, typhoid, and tuberculosis. In their crowded tenement quarters, different immigrant groups created distinct ethnic neighborhoods where each group could maintain its own language, culture, church or temple, and social club. Many groups even supported their own newspapers and schools. While often crowded, unhealthy, and crime-ridden, these neighborhoods often served as springboards for ambitious and hardworking immigrants and their children to achieve their version of the American dream.RESIDENTIAL SUBURBS: In contrast to social and residential patterns in the US, in Europe the wealthiest people today live, as in the past, near the business districts of modern cities, while lower-income people live in the outlying areas. There is a historical explanation for US divergence from this pattern. During the 19th century, upper and middle class Americans decided that the best way to escape the problems of the city was to move out to the suburbs. The factors that promoted suburban growth included: (1) abundant land available for low cost, (2) inexpensive transportation by rail, (3) low-cost construction methods such as the wooden, balloon-framed house, (4) ethnic and racial prejudice, and (5) an American fondness for grass, privacy, and detached individual homes. In the late 1860s, the landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted designed a suburban community with graceful curved roads and open spaces- “a village in the park.” By 1900, suburbs had grown up around every major US city, and a single-family dwelling surrounded by an ornamental lawn soon became the American ideal of comfortable living. Thus began the world’s first suburban nations.PRIVATE CITY VS. PUBLIC CITY: At first, city residents tried to carry on life in large cities much as they had in small villages. They did not expect a lot of public services from municipal governments, and as a result, American cities could not deal effectively with the build-up of waste, pollution, disease, crime, and other hazards. Only slowly did advocates for healthier and more beautiful cities convince citizens and city governments of the need for water purification, sewerage systems, waste disposal, street lighting, police departments, and zoning laws to regulate urban development.Boss and Machine Politics:The consolidation of power in business had its parallel in urban politics. Political parties in major cities came under the control of tightly organized groups of politicians, known as political machines. Each machine had its boss, the top politician who gave orders to the rank and file and doled out government jobs to loyal supporters. Several political machines, such as Tammany Hall in NYC, started as social clubs and later developed into power centers to coordinate the needs of businesses, immigrants, and the underprivileged. In return for performing these functions, they asked for people’s votes on Election Day. Successful party bosses knew how to manage the competing social, ethnic, and economic groups in the city. In many cases, the political machines that they ran brought modern services to the city, including a crude form of welfare for urban newcomers. The political organization would find jobs and apartments for recently arrived immigrants and show up at a poor family’s door with baskets of food during hard times. But the political machine could be greedy as well as generous and often stole millions from the taxpayers in the form of graft and fraud. In NYC in the 1860s, for example, an estimated 65% of public building funds ended up in the pockets of Boss Tweed and his cronies. AWAKENING OF REFORMUrban problems, including the desperate poverty of working-class families, inspired a new social consciousness among members of the middle class. Reform movements begun in earlier decades gathered renewed strength in the 1880s and 1890s.Books and Social Criticism:A San Francisco journalist, Henry George, published a provocative book in 1879 that became an instant bestseller and jolted readers to look more critically at the effects of laissez-faire economics. George’s book, Progress and Poverty, proposed placing a single tax on land as the solution to poverty. More important, George succeeded in calling attention to the alarming inequalities in wealth caused by industrialization. Another popular book of social criticism, Looking Backward, 2000-1887, was written by Edward Bellamy in 1888. It envisioned a future era in which a cooperative society had eliminated poverty, greed, and crime. So enthusiastic were many of the readers of George’s and Bellamy’s books that they joined various reform movements and organizations to try to implement the authors’ ideas. Both books encouraged to try to implement the authors’ ideas. Both books encouraged a shift in American public opinion away from pure laissez-faire and toward greater government regulation.Settlement Houses:Concerned about the lives of the poor, a number of young, idealistic, and well-educated women and men of the middle class settled into immigrant neighborhoods to learn about the problems of immigrant families first hand. Living and working in places called settlement houses, the young reformers hoped to relieve the effects of poverty by providing social services for people in the neighborhood. The most famous such experiment was Hull House in Chicago, which was started by Jane Addams and a college classmate in 1889. Settlement houses taught English to immigrants, pioneered early childhood education, taught industrial arts, and established neighborhood theaters and music schools. By 1910 there were over 400 settlement houses in America’s largest cities. Settlement workers were civic-minded volunteers whose work provided the foundation in a later era for the professional social worker. They were also political activists who crusaded for child-labor laws, housing reform, and women’s rights. Two settlement workers, Frances Perkins and Harry Hopkins, went on to leadership roles in President Franklin Roosevelt’s reform program, the New Deal, in the 1930s.Social Gospel: In the 1880s and 1890s, a number of Protestant clergymen espoused the cause of social justice for the poor- especially the urban poor. They preached what they called the Social Gospel, or the importance of applying Christian principles to social problems. Leading the Social Gospel movement in the late 19th and early 20th centuries was a NY minister, Walter Rauschenbusch, who worked in NYC’s Hell’s Kitchen and wrote several books urging organized religions to take up the cause of social justice. His Social Gospel preaching linked Christianity with the Progressive reform movement and encouraged many middle-class Protestants to attack urban problems.Religion and Society:All religions found the need to adapt to the stresses and challenges of modern urban living. Roman Catholics gained enormous numbers from the influx of new immigrants. Catholic leaders such as Cardinal James Gibbons of Baltimore inspired the devoted support of old and new immigrants alike by defending the Knights of Labor and the cause of organized labor. Among Protestants, Dwight Moody and his Moody Bible Institute (founded in Chicago in 1889) would help generations of urban evangelists to adapt traditional Christianity to city life. The Salvation Army, imported from England in 1879, provided the basic necessities of life for the homeless and the poor, while also preaching the Christian gospel. Members of the urban middle class were attracted to the religious message of Mary Baker Eddy, who taught that good health was the result of correct thinking about “Father Mother God” By the time of her death in 1910, hundreds of thousands had joined the church she had founded, the Church of Christ, Scientist- popularly known as Christian Science. Families and Women in Urban Society:Urban life placed severe strains on parents and their children by isolating them from the extended family (relatives beyond the family nucleus of parents and children) and village support. Divorce rates increased to 1 in 12 marriages by 1900, partly because a number of state legislatures had expanded the grounds for divorce to include cruelty and desertion. Another consequence of the shift from rural to urban living was a reduction in family size. Children were an economic asset on the farm, where their labor was needed at an early age. In the city, however, they were more of an economic liability. Therefore, in the last decades of the 19th century, the national average for birthrates and family size continued to drop. The cause of woman’s suffrage, launched at Seneca Falls in 1848, was vigorously carried forward by a number of middle-class women. In 1890, 2 of the pioneer feminists of the 1840s, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony of NY, helped found the National American Women’s Suffrage Association to secure the vote for women. A western state, Wyoming was the first to grant full suffrage to women in 1869. By 1900, some states allowed women to vote in local elections, and most allowed women to own and control property after marriage.Temperance and Morality:Another cause that attracted the attention of urban reformers was the temperance movement. Women especially were convinced that excessive drinking of alcohol by male factory workers was a principal cause of immigrant and working-class families. The Women’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) was formed in 1874. Advocating total abstinence from alcohol, the WCTU under the leadership of Frances E. Willard of Illinois had 500,000 members by 1898. The Anti-saloon League, founded in 1893, became a powerful political force and by 1916 had persuaded 21 states to close down all saloons and bars. Unwilling to wait for the laws to change, Carry A. Nation of Kansas created a sensation by raiding saloons and smashing barrels of bear with a hatchet. Moralists thought of cities as a breeding ground for vice, obscenity, and prostitution. Anthony Comstock of NY formed the Society for the Suppression of Vice to be the watchdog of American morals. He and his followers persuaded Congress in 1873 to pass the “Comstock Law,” which prohibited the mailing or transportation of obscene and lewd material and photographs. INTELLECTUAL AND CULTURAL MOVEMENTSThe change from an agricultural to an industrial economy and from rural to urban living profoundly affected all areas of American life and culture: education, the arts, and even sports.Changes in Education:The growing complexity of modern life, along with the intellectual influence of Darwin’s theory of evolution, raised challenging questions about what the schools and universities should teach.PUBLIC SCHOOLS: Elementary schools after 1865 continued to teach the 3 R’s (reading, writing, arithmetic) and the traditional values promoted in the standard texts, McGuffrey’s readers. New compulsory laws, however, dramatically increased the number of children enrolled in public schools. As a result, the literacy rate rose to 90% of the population by 1900. The practice of sending children to kindergarten (a concept borrowed from Germany) became popular and reflected the growing interest in early childhood education in the US. Perhaps even more significant was the growing support for tax-supported public high schools. At first these schools followed the college preparatory curriculum of private academies, but soon the public high schools became more comprehensive and began to emphasize vocational and citizenship education for a changing urban society.HIGHER EDUCATION: The number of US colleges increased in the late 1800s largely as a result of (1) land grant colleges established under the Morrill Act of 1862, (2) universities founded by wealthy philanthropists- the University of Chicago by John D. Rockefeller, for example, and (3) the founding of new colleges for women, such as Smith, Bryn Mawr, and Mount Holyoke. By 1900, over 100 educational colleges had been founded in addition to the women’s colleges. There were also significant changes in the college curriculum. Soon after becoming president of Harvard in 1869, Charles W. Eliot reduced the number of required courses and introduced electives (courses chosen by students) to accommodate the teaching of modern languages and the sciences: physics, chemistry, biology, and geology. Johns Hopkins University was founded in Baltimore in 1876 as the first American institution to specialize in advanced graduate studies. Following the model of German universities, Johns Hopkins emphasized research and free inquiry. As a result of such innovations in curriculum, the US produced its first generation of scholars who could compete with the intellectual achievements of Europeans. At the same time, however, there was a trend in another direction as life at many colleges became dominated by social activities, fraternities, and intercollegiate sports.SOCIAL SCIENCES AND THE PROFESSIONS: The application of the scientific method and the theory of evolution to human affairs revolutionized the social science in the late 19th century. The new social sciences included behavioral psychology, sociology, anthropology, and political science. Richard T. Ely of Johns Hopkins attacked laissez-faire economic thought as dogmatic and outdated and used economics to study labor unions, trusts, and other existing economic institutions not only to understand them but to suggest remedies for economic problems of the day. Evolutionary theory influenced leading sociologists (Lester F. Ward), political scientists (Woodrow Wilson), and historians (Frederick Jackson Turner) to study the dynamic process of actual human behavior instead of logical abstractions. In the legal profession, Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., taught that the law should evolve with the times in response to changing needs and not remain restricted by legal precedents and judicial decisions of the past. Clarence Darrow, a famous lawyer, argued that criminal behavior could be caused by a person’s environment of poverty, neglect, and abuse. Other professions- doctors, educators, and social workers- also began applying scientific theory and methodology to their work. The leading African American intellectual of his day, WEB Du Bois, was the first African American to receive a doctorate from Harvard. Du Bois used the new statistical methods of sociology to study crime in an urban neighborhood. As an activist, he advocated full equal rights for blacks, integrated schools, and equal access to higher education for the “talented tenth” of African American youth. Although fewer than 5% of Americans attended college before 1900, the new trends in education and the professions would have a significant impact on progressive legislation and liberal reforms in the next century.Literature and the Arts:American writers and artists responded in diverse ways to industrialization and urban problems. In general, the work of the best –known innovators of the era reflected a new realism and an attempt to express an authentic American style.REALISM AND NATURALISM: Many of the popular works of literature of the post-Civil War years were romantic novels that depicted ideal heroes and heroines. The first break with this genteel literary tradition came with regionalist writers like Bret Harte, who depicted life in the rough mining camps of the West. Mark Twain (the penname for Samuel L. Clemens) became the first great realist author. His classic work The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884) revealed the greed, violence, and racism in American society. Another leading realist, William Dean Howells, seriously considered the problems of industrialization and unequal wealth in the novels The Rise of Silas Lapham (1885) and A Hazard of New Fortunes (1890). A younger generation of authors who emerged in the 1890s became known for their naturalism, which described how emotions and experience shaped human experience. In his naturalist novel Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (1893), Stephen Crane told how a brutal urban environment could destroy the lives of young people. Crane also wrote the popular Red Badge of Courage about fear and human nature on the Civil War battlefield before dying himself of tuberculosis at only 29. Jack London, a young California writer and adventurer, portrayed the conflict between nature and civilization in novels like The Call of the Wild (1903). A naturalistic book that caused a sensation and shocked the moral sensibilities of the time was Theodore Dreiser’s novel about a poor working girl in Chicago, Sister Carrie (1900).PAINTING: Several American painters responded to the new emphasis on realism, while others continued to cater to the popular taste for romantic subjects. Winslow Homer, the foremost American painter of seascapes and watercolors, often rendered scenes of nature in a matter-of-fact way. Thomas Eakins specialized in painting the everyday lives of working class men and women and used the new technology of serial-action photographs to study human anatomy and paint it more realistically. Born in Massachusetts, James McNeill Whistler became an American expatriate when he sailed to Europe at the age of 21 and spent most of his life in Paris and London. His most famous painting, Arrangement in Grey and Black (popularly known as “Whistler’s Mother”), hangs in the Louvre. This study of color, rather than subject matter, influenced the development of modern art. A distinguished portrait painter, Mary Cassatt, also spent much of her life in France where she learned the techniques of impressionism, especially in her use of pastel colors. As the 19th century drew to a close, a group of social realists known as the “Ashcan School” painted scenes of everyday life in poor urban neighborhoods. Upsetting to realists and romanticists alike were the abstract, nonrepresentational paintings exhibited in the Armory Show in NYC in 1913. Art of this kind would be rejected by most Americans until the 1950s when it finally achieved recognition and respect among collectors of fine art.ARCHITECTURE: In the 1870s, American architecture underwent a fundamental change in direction as a result of the work of Henry Hobson Richardson. Richardson’s urban architecture, based on the Romanesque style of round arches, gave a gravity and stateliness to functional commercial buildings. Influenced by Richardson, Louis Sullivan of Chicago went a step further by rejecting historic styles in his quest for a suitable style for the tall steel-framed office buildings of the 1880s and 1890s. Sullivan’s buildings achieved a most admired aesthetic unity in which the form of the building flowed from its function- a hallmark of the Chicago School of architecture. Daniel Burnham, another leading Chicago architect, designed numerous skyscrapers that influenced modern architecture (even though, at the time, he was better known for reviving classic architecture in his design of the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893). One of the most influential urbanists, Frederick Law Olmsted specialized in the planning of city parks and scenic boulevards, including Central Park in NYC and the grounds of the US Capitol in Washington. As the originator of landscape architecture, Olmsted not only designed parks, parkways, campuses, and suburbs but also established the basis for all later efforts at urban landscaping. MUSIC: With the growth of cities came increasing demand for musical performances and entertainment appealing to a variety of tastes. By 1900, most large cities had either a symphony orchestra, an opera house, or both. In smaller towns, outdoor bandstands were the setting for the playing of popular marches by John Philip Sousa. Probably the greatest innovators of the era were African American musicians in New Orleans. Jelly Roll Morton and Buddy Bolden introduced the general American public to jazz, a form of music that combined African rhythms with western-style instruments and mixed improvisation with a structured band format. The remarkable black composer and performer Scott Joplin sold nearly a million copies of sheet music of his “Maple Leaf Rag” (1899). Also from the South came blues music that expressed the pain of the black experience. Jazz, ragtime, and blues music gained popularity during the 20th century as New Orleans performers headed north into the urban centers of Memphis, St. Louis, Kansas City, and Chicago.Popular Culture:Entertaining the urban masses became a major business in the late 19th century. Even newspapers became less a medium of objective information and more of a mass medium for amusing millions of readers.POPULAR PRESS: Mass circulation newspapers had been around since the 1830s, but the first newspaper to exceed a million in circulation was Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World. Pulitzer achieved this success by filling his daily paper with both sensational stories of crimes and disasters and crusading feature stories about political and economic corruption. Another NY publisher, William Randolph Hearst, pushed scandal and sensationalism to new heights (or lows).AMUSEMENTS: In addition to urbanization, other factors also promoted the growth of leisure-time activities: (1) a gradual reduction in hours people worked, (2) improved transportation. (3) promotional billboards and advertising and 94) the decline of restrictive Puritan and Victorian values that discouraged “wasting” time on play. Based on numbers alone, the most popular forms of recreation in the late 19th century (despite the temperance movement), was drinking and talking at the corner saloon. Legitimate theaters for the performance of comedies and dramas flourished in most large cities, but vaudeville with its variety of acts had more appeal for the urban masses. The circus became the “Greatest Show on Earth” in the 1880s through the showmanship of Phineas T. Barnum and James A. Bailey. Also immensely popular was the Wild West Show brought to urban audiences by William F. Cody (“Buffalo Bill”) and headlining such personalities as Sitting Bull and the markswoman Annie Oakley. Commuter streetcar and railroad companies also promoted weekend recreation in order to keep their cars running on Sundays and holidays. They created parks in the countryside near the end of the line so that urban families could enjoy picnics and outdoor recreation.SPECTATOR SPORTS: Enthusiasm for professionally organized spectator sports (baseball, football, basketball, and boxing) had its origins in the late 19th century. The most famous athlete of the era was the heavyweight boxer John L. Sullivan. Professional boxing bouts drew mostly male spectators from both the upper and lower classes to cheer and wager on their favorite pugilist. Baseball, while it recalled a rural past of green fields and fences, was very much an urban game that demanded the teamwork needed for an industrial age. Owners organized teams into leagues, much as trusts of the day were organized. In 1909, when President William Howard Taft started the tradition of throwing out the first ball of the season, the national pastime was already a well established part of American popular culture. Basketball was invented in 1891 at Springfield College, in Massachusetts. In only a few years, high schools and colleges across the nation had teams. The first professional basketball league was organized in 1898. The first intercollegiate football game was played by two NJ colleges, Rutgers and Princeton, in 1869. Football remained a college sport for decades and did not become a commercial enterprise of professional league teams until the 1920s. American spectator sports were played and attended by men. They were part of what historians have called the “bachelor subculture” for single men in the 20s and 30s, whose lives centered around saloons, horse races, and pool halls. It took years for some spectator sports, such as boxing and football, to gain middle-class respectability.AMATEUR SPORTS: The value of playing sports as healthy exercise for the body gained acceptance by the middle and upper classes in the late 19th century. Women were considered unfit for most competitive sports, but they too engaged in such recreational activities as croquet and bicycling. Participation in golf and tennis grew, but was often limited to members of athletic clubs, which kept out most of the working class. The very rich could separate themselves from lower-income people by pursuing the expensive sport of polo and yachting. While Jews and Catholics were kept out of some private clubs, the most severely discriminated against were African Americans, who were prevented by Jim Crow laws from joining whites-only clubs and playing on all white big-league baseball teams until the late 1940s. Urbanization and ImmigrationAmerican life in the 20th century has been profoundly affected by two social movements- urbanization and immigration- which progressed at an ever-increasing pace during the years between 1870 and 1920. Between the Civil War and WWI, American cities grew at an unprecedented rate. The population of NYC rose from 1.2 million in 1860 to 4.75 million in 1910. Chicago, from a population of a little over 100,000 in 1860, boomed to over 2 million in 1910. And these cities were not isolated phenomena; in 1860 there were only two cities in the US with populations over 200,000 but in 1910, there were 24.The effect of this tremendous and fast-paced urban growth on American life was paradoxical. On the one hand, cities signified crime, corruption, and poverty. On the other hand, cities signified progress, glitter, and opportunity. On the one hand, public education and public libraries flourished in the new urban setting, as did newspapers and magazines, spectator sports, the theater, and the symphony. On the other hand, cities sprawled slums and tenement districts, disease, crime, and juvenile delinquency. On the one hand, urban growth led to progress and growth of municipal services such as street paving, electric lighting, public waterworks and sewage disposal, fire and police departments, and public transportation such as electric trolleys and subways. On the other hand, this same growth of municipal government led to widespread municipal corruption, political machines, and “boss’ rule,” It was not by chance that the progressive movement began its crusade on the municipal levels in the interest of clean government and social reform.Immigration contributed to the urban progress and the urban problems. Between 1860 and 1890, 13.5 million immigrants came to the US, and from 1900 to 1930, the number swelled to 19 million. Most of the immigrants in the first wave, known as the “old” immigration, came from northern and western Europe, while the majority in the “new” immigration came from southern and Eastern Europe. While it was obvious to all that this tremendous influx of peoples had an effect on American social, economic, and political conditions, it was not obvious exactly what this effect was. Some people blamed immigrants for creating slums, increasing crime, and maintaining foreign ways. Others maintained that slums and crime were caused by other factors, and pointed to the immigrants’ enrichment of American life. Some people claimed that immigrant labor caused unemployment and hurt the labor movement’s fight for higher wages and better working conditions. Others maintained that immigrant labor did not cause unemployment and lower wages, and, in fact, served to stimulate the economy. Some people charged that immigrants were a danger to democracy and were manipulated by political machines. Others claimed that immigrants voted independently, unhampered by old party ties. As the controversy deepened, so did the demand for immigration restriction, and from the 1880s to the 1920s laws were passed which limited mainly the “new” immigration. Urbanization and Its Effect on American Life- M.M. Yeakle on Urban Growth in St. LouisUrban growth and urban progress in St. Louis were typical of that experienced by many American cities during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The excerpt below is from the book The City of St. Louis of Today, by M.M. Yeakle, which was published in 1899.No enumeration of the population of the city of St. Louis has been made since the national census of June 1880, when the population was 350,561 souls. Its growth in the present decade exceeds the previous experience, but an estimate of the present population… at the close of the year 1888…. [points] to the conclusion that it is a half million souls. The grounds for this estimate are... as follows: during the last decade, this city has witnessed extraordinary development of its rare resources of site and surroundings… its industries have been enlarged through the constant increment of capital and commerce. Its wholesale and jobbing trades have realized greater expansion in solid growth. The suburban development has been very large, both in population and real estate improvements, while the urban has been most extensive and varied in buildings of every description. {Other grounds include} residences, large and small, stores and warehouses, colleges and churches, halls, machine shops and factories, the extension of the old, and opening of new streets, the construction of more and lengthened sewers, the largely increased consumption of water and gas, the building of new schoolhouses… and lastly, but not least, the increased throngs of men, women and children observed at every turn on the sidewalks, and crowding the street railways, to which many miles of new track have been added, while demands are constantly made for increase in the facilities of rapid transit. The new manufacturing plants, and the extension of the old ones- a process constantly going on- add yearly a large population to St. Louis from abroad, through the demand for skilled workmen, and in providing employment for an army of the youth of both sexes. A mild climate, exemption from epidemic diseases, cheap living, great advantages of primary, academic and collegiate education, the numerous schools in science, art, technical instruction, complete curriculum of education in all professions and pursuits, the public libraries, and numerous other attractions, are constantly filling this city with a population of the refined and cultured… The volume of the present population of St. Louis has reached that point of fullness, when, as has been observed in the growth of other cities, (remarkably for which were the cities of London, NY, and Brooklyn), it will begin to take increase in a ratio disproportioned to its previous experience; and, it is apparent, that such an era of quickened growth has reached this city, whose increase in population in succeeding decades will be in accordance with the experience of those other very large communities…Few large cities of our country have as many solid attractions for the residence of a family, composed of parents and children, as this city. To state the facts briefly, a house may be purchased, or rented, at a reasonable- even low- price. Schools, churches and modern improvements are found in every quarter. Sores and markets are convenient. An abundant supply of good water, gas, and thorough sewerage is found in every developed district. Rapid transit on upwards of 160 miles of street, railways, is available, every five minutes and under, at a 5 cent fare for any distance. Institutions and societies for intellectual and physical improvement, and for rational delight are numerous. Libraries are open to the public at a merely nominal cost. The necessaries and luxuries of life are abundant and cheap. Saloons are closed 24 hours on Sundays. Gambling is forbidden by State and Municipal laws, which are rigidly enforced. And the policing of the city being rigid and active, there are few temptations or allurements which youth may not avoid, provided, the training be proper at home, and that made attractive as it can be. Finally, the climate is mild, and in healthfulness St. Louis is equal to the most favored cities of the USA. And, in many other respects, this city is a delightful place of residence.Charles Zueblin on Civil ProgressCharles Zueblin, a professor of sociology at the University of Chicago, chronicled the progress in municipal reform and “city making” in his book A Decade of Civil Development, published in 1905. An excerpt from that book follows.In the last decade of the century there came a new conception of public responsibility and activity. The characteristic note of the new era is social. The public-school system began to accommodate itself to the conditions of industry and life, abandoning the all-sufficient pedagogy [teaching] of the “three Rs” and teaching the power of observation, accomplishment, and self-reliance. The administrative reform of cities was promoted with a success which would have seemed incredible in the ninth decade of the century. Village and towns undertook the organization of improvement associations. The last decade of the century also witnessed an astounding development of free libraries, health regulations, factory legislation, interstate commerce provisions and the extension of municipal functions such as street paving and cleaning and lighting, water supply and sewage disposal, parks and boulevards, all expressing a changed conception of public life…The increasing prosperity which gave the leisure and the culture for social reform facilitated municipal reform. The external improvement of the cities became imperative, and the growth of public activities made municipal reform not only indispensable but impossible… in 1893 the first good government conference was held, leading to the organization of the National Municipal League. In 1894 civil service reform was introduced into NYC, an example followed by Chicago in 1895. Thus recent are the beginnings of a movement which it would take volumes to chronicle. The merit system now prevails in all the large cities of NY State and in many other states, from Massachusetts to California… The conception of city making is a newer one than that of municipal reform. While the city cannot be properly made without a clean and efficient government, the process of making it continues in spite of political imperfection…No department of city making has witnessed such marked progress during the decade as the functions connected with the streets. Ten years ago few American streets were well paved, and fewer were clean. The typical street of the progressive city today is broad, well-paved, frequently cleaned, free from poles, well lighted, tree-lined in the residential districts, and provided with underground systems of conduits, water and sewage pipes. The newer streets of the older cities are commonly as broad as all the streets of the newer cities. Thus provision is made for abundant light, and, if need be, shade trees and lawns. Several cities, such as Columbus, Ohio, Denver, and Indianapolis, in paving these wide streets, have reduced the area devoted to traffic and increased that reserved for planting, so that a considerable amount of parking is found on either side of the street…… The underground trolley is in successful operation in NY and Washington. Water and gas pipes and sewers are found under most of the streets in the well-constructed cities, and occasionally subways suggest the correlation of such functions in galleries, the logical method of the future. With the multiplication of these subterranean structures the regulations regarding the breaking of pavements become more stringent, and some cities are moving toward the construction of passenger subways like those of NY or Boston, or freight tunnels, 20 miles of which are to be found in Chicago…No phase of city making speaks more eloquently of the change in American ideals than the growth of parks, playgrounds and boulevards. For many years such cities as Brooklyn and Philadelphia have boasted of the possession of a great and beautiful park, and Chicago has been noted for its public driveways, but within the decade the idea has developed that not acreage or mileage, but distribution is the standard to guide park commissions. The park, the playground and the boulevard are now seen to be organic parts of the city- the respiratory system, perhaps we may say. The finest appreciation of this fact is found in Boston, NY, and Washington…The making of the new city will mean the making of a new citizen, and the process is in no sense visionary. Almost every American city is already infested with the new ideals, while some of the leading cities are far advanced in their realization. The crude conceptions of an earlier generation, which planned city streets with the rough precision of the ploughman’s furrows, have been transformed by the experience of the decade. Jacob Riis On Slum Life in New YorkOne of the paradoxes of urban growth- the growth of slums- is revealed in the following excerpt from Jacob Riis’ How the Other Half Lives, which was published in 1890. Riis was an immigrant from Denmark and a journalist-turned-reformer who spent his life trying to clean up the slums and tenement districts where the “other half” lived in New York.Long ago it was said that “one half of the world does not know how the other half lives.” That was true then, it did not know because it did not care. The half that was on top cared little for the struggles, and less for the fate of those who were underneath, so long as it was able to hold them there and keep its own seat. There came a time when the discomfort and crowding below were so great, and the consequent upheavals so violent, that it was no longer an easy thing to do, and then the upper half fell into inquiring what was the matter…In NY, the youngest of the world’s great cities, that time came later than elsewhere, because the crowding had not been so great… Today three-fourths of its people live in the tenements, and the 19th century drift of the population to the cities is sending ever-increasing multitudes to crowd them. The 15,000 tenement houses that were the despair of the sanitarian in the past generation have swelled into 37,000, and more than twelve hundred thousand persons call them home……If it shall appear that the sufferings and the sins of the “other half,” and the evil they breed, are but as a just punishment upon the community that gave it no other choice, it will be because that is the truth… [in] the tenements all the influences make for evil; because they are the hotbeds of the epidemics that carry death to rich and poor alike; the nurseries of pauperism and crime that fill our jails and police courts; that throw off a scum of 40,000 human wrecks to the island asylums and workhouses year by year; that turned out in the last 8 years around half million beggars to prey upon our charities; that maintain a standing army of 10,000 tramps with all that that implies; because, above all, they touch the family life with deadly moral contagion…Today, what is a tenement?... The typical tenement is thus described when last arraigned before the bar of public justice: “It is generally a brick building from 4 to 6 stories high on the street, frequently with a store on the first floor which, when used for the sale of liquor, has a side opening for the benefit of the inmates and to evade the Sunday law; 4 families occupy each floor, and a set of rooms consists of one or two dark closets, used as bedrooms, with a living room twelve feet by ten. The staircase is too often a dark well in the center of the house, and no direct through ventilation is possible, each family being separated from the others by partitions. Frequently the rear of the lot is occupied by another building of three stories high with 2 families on a floor”…Where are the tenements of today? Say rather: where are they not?... The tenements of today are NY, harboring ? of its population… Suppose we look into one?... Be a little careful, please! The hall is dark and you might stumble over the children pitching pennies back there. Not that it would hurt them; kicks and cuffs are their daily diet. They have little else. Here where the hall turns and dives into utter darkness is a step, and another, another. A flight of stairs. You can feel your way, if you cannot see it. Close? Yes! What would you have? All the fresh air that ever enters these stairs comes from the hall door that is forever slamming, and from the windows of dark bedrooms… That was a woman filling her pail by the hydrant you just bumped against. The sinks are in the hallway, that all the tenants may have access… hear the pump squeak! It is the lullaby of tenement-house babies. In summer, when a thousand thirsty throats pant for a cooling drink in this block, it is worked in vain. But the saloon, whose open door you passed in the hall, is always there. The smell of it has followed you up. Here is a door. Listen! That short hacking cough, that tiny, helpless wail- what do they mean? They mean that the soiled bow of white you saw on the door downstairs will have another story to tell- Oh! A sadly familiar story- before the day is at an end. The child is dying with the measles. With half a chance it might have lived; but it had none. That dark bedroom killed it…… Come over here. Step carefully over this baby- it is a baby, spite of its rags and dirt- under these iron bridges called fire escapes, loaded down, despite the incessant watchfulness of the firemen, with broken household goods, with washtubs and barrels, over which no man could climb from a fire. This gap between dingy brick walls is the yard. That strip of smoke-colored sky up there is the heaven of these people. Do you wonder the name does not attract them to the churches? That baby’ parents live in the rear tenement here. She is at least as clean as the steps we are now climbing. There are plenty of houses with half a hundred such in. The tenement is much like the one in front we just left, only fouler, closer, darker- we will not say more cheerless. The word is a mockery…What sort of an answer, think you, would come from these tenements to the question “Is life worth living?” were they heard at all in the discussion? It may be that this, cut from the last report but one of the Associations for the Improvement of the Condition of the Poor, a long name for a weary task, has a suggestion of it: “In the depth of winter the attention of the Association was called to a Protestant family living in a garret in a miserable tenement in Cherry Street. The family’s condition was most deplorable. The man, his wife, and three small children shivering in one room through the roof of the pitiless winds of winter whistled. The room was almost barren of furniture; the parents slept on the floor, the elder children in boxes, and the baby was swung in an old shawl attached to the rafters by chords by way of a hammock. The father, a seaman, had been obliged to give up that calling because he was in consumption [ill with tuberculosis], and was unable to provide either bread or fire for his little ones”Perhaps this may be put down as an exceptional case, but one that came to my notice some months ago in a Seventh Ward tenement was typical enough to escape that reproach. There were 9 in the family: husband, wife, an aged grandmother, and 6 children; honest, hardworking Germans, scrupulously neat, but poor. All 9 lived in 2 rooms, one about ten feet square that served as parlor, bedroom, and eating-room, the other a small hallroom made into a kitchen. The rent was seven dollars and a half a month, more than a week’s wages for the husband and father, who was the only breadwinner in the family. That day the mother had thrown herself out of the window, and was carried up from the street dead. She was “discouraged,” said some of the other women from the tenement, who had come in to look after the children while a messenger carried the news to the father at the shop. They went stolidly about their task, although they were evidently not without feeling for the dead woman. No doubt she was wrong in not taking life philosophically, as did the 4 families a city missionary found housekeeping in the 4 corners of one room. They got along well enough together until one of the families took a boarder and made trouble. Philosophy, according to my optimistic friend, naturally inhabits the tenements. The people who live there come to look upon death in a different way from the rest of us- do not take it as hard. He has never found time to explain how the fact fits into his general theory that life is not unbearable in the tenements. Unhappily for the philosophy of the slums, it is too apt to be of the kind that readily recognizes the saloon, always handy, as the refuge from every trouble, and shapes its practice according to the discovery. Immigration and Its Effects on American LifeImmigration’s Effect on the American EconomyReaction to the “old” immigration, from northern and western Europe was generally more favorable than reaction to the “new” immigration from southern and eastern Europe. The following editorial which appeared in the Commercial and Financial Chronicle on August 19, 1882, was a reaction to the “old” immigration, but it represented the line of argument used by those groups who favored all immigration, both old and new, for economic reasons.An important factor in the present and prospective development of the US is the immigration movement… in the very act of coming and traveling to reach his destination, he [the immigrant] adds… to the immediate prosperity and success of certain lines of business. Not only do the ocean steamers engaged in the work get very large returns in carrying passengers of this description, but in forwarding them to the places chosen by the immigrants as their future homes the railroad companies also derive great benefit and their passenger traffic is greatly swelled…But it is in its bearing upon the future that the movement derives its chief and greatest significance. The class of immigrants now reaching our shores is composed largely of thrifty, industrious, and able-bodied persons… now, with such an inpouring of labor as the last 2 years have witnessed, it cannot but be that we are greatly enlarging the basis of our industrial fabric and widening and extending very materially the limits of all departments of business. Yet the full effects of this beneficent stream of immigrants upon our internal commerce are not felt or seen at once. It takes time. The immigrant, for instance, who takes to farming, probably does not make any very great progress on his farm during the first year of his arrival… In the second year he will do better than in the first, but it is not until the third or fourth year, doubtless, that he attains full results. It follows, therefore, that in the present immigration movement we are laying the foundations for great activity in the immediate future, and probably paving the way for business expansion on a great scale than ever before.These immigrants not only produce largely, and thus add to our exportable surplus, but, having wants which they cannot supply themselves, create a demand for outside supplies, which acts and reacts upon all industries, and is felt in every department of business. Thus it is that the Eastern manufacturer finds the call upon him for his wares and goods growing more urgent all the time, thus the consumption of coal keeps on expanding notwithstanding the check to new railroad enterprises, and thus there is a more active and larger interchange of all commodities. And it is in this connection that the figures of immigration for the late fiscal year, issued by the Bureau of Statistics, impress one as being of more than ordinary significance. From these it appears that during the 24 months ended July 1, 1882, no less than 1, 458,343 immigrants came to this country. In view of what has been said above, it will not be difficult to appreciate the importance of this infusion of new life into our industrial system; but it should be borne in mind that this vast body of immigrants has scarcely as yet had time to get fairly started at work. The full measure of their power and influence upon our industries still remains to be revealed.Emanuel Goldenweiser on Immigration’s Effects on American CitiesIn 1907 Congress established a 9-man Immigration Commission, consisting of 6 members of Congress and 3 other citizens, to study the immigration problem and the effects of the rising tide of immigration on American life. One of the studies conducted by the Immigration Commission was an inquiry into the effects of immigration on 7 representative cities throughout the USA. Emanuel Goldenweiser, an economist for the US government and an immigrant himself, headed this inquiry and reported its conclusions to the public in an article in the January 1, 1911 issue of The Survey. An excerpt from this article follows.Seven cities were included by the Federal Immigration Commission in its study of conditions: New York… Chicago… Philadelphia… Boston… Cleveland… Buffalo… and Milwaukee.It was felt that an inquiry covering representative districts in these 7 cities could safely be accepted as indicative of what may be found elsewhere in the US in the poorest environment and most congested quarters… for many reasons the problem of the immigrant in large cities has for almost a generation attracted a great deal of attention… The phenomenal growth of cities and the difficulties accompanying their growth have been intensified by the influx of millions of aliens, who for the most part are unacquainted with urban conditions in their own countries, and are dazed by the complexity of existence in the great American cities. And it must be remembered that writers, like immigrants, congregate in large cities, and their proximity to the foreign colonies has had its natural result. The social reformer who wishes to remedy preventable evils, as well as the journalist who is anxious to present readable material, has consistently dwelt on the crowding and filth, the poverty and destitution, of which there are such extreme instances in the poorer quarters of every city. Public opinion has been aroused, and legislation enacted which has tended to minimize the evils of overcrowding in many of the older cities, and to inform the younger cities of the dangers of unregulated growth. But the result also has been to create in the popular imagination an impression that the extreme instances cited are the whole story, and that the congested quarters of large cities, full of filth, squalor, and depraved humanity, are a menace to the nation’s health and morals. Moreover, the responsibility for these conditions is almost universally placed by old residents on the immigrant, and primarily on the recent immigrant, from the South and East of Europe…The inquiry covered over 10,200 households and over 51,000 individuals. The largest number of households, 2,667, was studied in NY, and the smallest, 687, in Buffalo… What then are some of the vital facts disclosed by the investigators? First of all, it reaffirms that crowded districts are largely populated by immigrants, and more particularly by recent immigrants. In the eastern cities, NY, Philadelphia, and Boston, the Russian Hebrews and the south Italians are the largest elements in congested foreign colonies. In the cities on the Great Lakes, Buffalo, Cleveland, Chicago, and Milwaukee, the various Slavic races, the Poles, Slovaks and Slovenians, are found in large numbers. About 2/3 of the foreign-born in the selected districts have been in this country less than 10 years, and 1/5 has immigrated within the past 5 years.In connection with the prevailing opinion about the filth, which is supposed to be the natural element of an immigrant, it is an interesting fact that, while perhaps 5/6 of the blocks studied justified this belief, so far as the appearance of the street went, 5/6 of the interiors of the homes were found to be fairly clean, and 2 out of every 5 were immaculate. When this is considered in connection with the frequently inadequate water supply, the dark halls, and the large numbers of families living in close proximity, the responsibility for uncleanliness and unsanitary conditions is largely shifted from the immigrants to the landlords, and to the municipal authorities who spare no expense in sprinkling oil to save the wealthy automobilists from the dust, but are very economical when it comes to keeping the poorer streets in a habitable condition. The water supply, the drainage, and the condition of the pavement are also outside the jurisdiction of the tenants; and yet their neglect results in bad conditions for which the resident of the crowded districts is blamed.Congestion itself is a relative term, and hard to measure statistically without going into more details than any extensive investigation can afford to do. And yet it does seem like something of an anticlimax to the cry about terrible congestion, when the fact is stated that the average number of persons per room in the 10,000 households studied by the commission is 1.34… These figures are significant, because they indicate that the pictures of 6 or more persons per room, which are frequently given to the public, do not represent general conditions, but are exceptional. It is also interesting that NY shows lower averages than Boston and Philadelphia. This suggests that after all, when a certain density of population is reached, the building of tenement houses tends to increased the amount of floor area per acre and reduce the number of persons per square yard of floor space, and presumably per room…In studying foreign colonies in cities, one is constantly reminded of the forces which create them and keep them together. Most immigrants come to join friends or relatives and thus form the nucleus of a colony; the first few families attract more, and in a short time a racial island is created in the city. Once the colony is established there are many reasons for its continued existence and growth. It is expensive to move; it is sometimes hard to find a position in a new environment or to pay carfare, or even to be deprived of the possibility of coming home for lunch. Furthermore, friendly relations, kinship, language, religious affiliations, dietary laws and preferences, and the greater ease of securing boarders in districts where immigrants of the same race are centered, tend to keep the families where they have once settled.But when the immigrant becomes accustomed to American conditions, when he has gained a firm economic footing, when his children have gone to American schools, the desire for better surroundings overcomes the economic and racial reasons for remaining in congested districts. The stream of emigration from the foreign colonies in large cities is continuous;…In conclusion, I wish to say that this study… [shows] that the immigrants in cities in a large majority of cases live a clean and decent life, in spite of all the difficulties that are thrown in their way by economic struggle and municipal neglect. The study strongly indicates that racial characteristics are entirely subordinate to environment and opportunity in determining that part of the immigrant’s mode of life which is legitimately a matter of public concern; and finally, it shows that foreign colonies in large cities are not stagnant, but are constantly changing their composition, the more successful members leaving for better surroundings, until finally the entire colony is absorbed in the melting pot of the American city.Jeremiah Jenks and W. Lett Lauch on the Social and Economic Effects of ImmigrationLater in 1911 the Immigration Commission completed its study and published its findings in a 41-voljume report. In 1912, Jeremiah Jenks, a political economist on the Immigration Commission, and W. Lett Lauck, the economist in charge of the Immigration Commission’s industrial investigations, published a book called The Immigration Problem, which condensed the commission’s 41-volumes of findings into readable form. The excerpt from this book which follows cover’s the commission’s conclusions as to the social and economic effects of immigration on American life. The commission’s conclusions were to a great extent responsible for the passage, or attempted passage, of immigration restriction bills by Congress in later years.In most of the discussions on immigration that have appeared during the last few years, whether the immigrant came from Europe or from Asia, great importance has been attached to the social effects of immigration arising from the personal qualities of the immigrants. Many have feared that the physical standards of the population of the USA would be lowered by the incoming of diseased persons, that the arrival of immigrants and paupers would prove not merely a financial burden but also a menace to the morals of the community, while the late discussions over the white slave traffic and other forms of vie have served still more strongly to accentuate this belief in the social evils arising from immigration.The late investigations of the Immigration Commission show that undue significance has been attached to these social effects during the past few years. While there are still many improvements to be made in our immigration laws and in their administration, nevertheless at the present time there is no serious danger to be apprehended in this direction… The chief danger of immigration lies, not in this direction, but in the field of industry. When immigrants who are unskilled laborers arrive in so large numbers that the tendency is for them to lower the average rate of wages and the standard of living among the poor people, the danger is one much more far-reaching, and one to which our statesmen should give earnest attention… … Immigrants from the south and east of Europe have usually had but a few dollars in their possession when their final destination in this country has been reached… consequently, finding it absolutely imperative to engage in work at once, they have not been in a position to take exception to wages or working conditions, but must obtain employment on the terms offered or suffer from actual want…As regards the effects of the employment of recent immigrants upon wages and hours of work, there is no evidence to show that the employment of southern and eastern European wage earners has caused a direct lowering of wages or an extension in the house of work in mines and industrial establishments. It is undoubtedly true that the availability of the large supply of recent immigrant labor prevented the increase in wages which otherwise would have resulted during recent years from the increased demand for labor. The low standards of the southern and eastern European, his ready acceptance of a low wage and existing working conditions, his lack of permanent interest in the occupation and community in which he has been employed, his attitude toward labor organizations, his slow progress toward assimilation, and his willingness seemingly to accept indefinitely without protest certain wages and conditions of employment, have rendered it extremely difficult for the older classes of employees to secure improvements in conditions or advancement in wages since the arrival in considerable numbers of southern and eastern European wage earners. As a general proposition, it may be said that all improvements in conditions and increases in rates of pay have been secured in spite of their presence. Isaac Hourwich on Immigration’s Effect on American LaborIsaac Hourwich, an immigrant and an economist for various US government bureaus and commissions, disagreed violently with the Immigration Commission’s conclusions and arguments for restricting immigration. In the controversial book Immigration and Labor, which he published in 1912, Hourwich used the commission’ data to prove the opposite conclusions that immigration had not caused unemployment or reduced workers’ wages. Below is an excerpt from the book.… The advocates of restriction believe that every immigrant admitted to this country takes the place of some American workingman… the labor market being normally overstocked, it sounds plausible that the immigrant, who is accustomed to a lower standard of living at home than the American workman, will be able to underbid and displace his American competitor. If this view were correct, we should find, in the first place, a higher percentage of unemployment among the native than among the foreign-born breadwinners. Statistics, however, show that the proportion of unemployment is the same for native and foreign-born wage-earners. The immigrant has no advantage over the native American in securing or retaining employment. In the next place, we should find more unemployment in those sections of the US where the immigrants are most numerous. In fact, however, the ration of unemployment in manufactures is the same in the North Atlantic states with a large immigrant population as in the South Atlantic states where the percentage of foreign-born is negligible. Coal miners are thought to have suffered most from immigration. Yet it appears that Pennsylvania, which is among the states with the highest percentages of foreign-born miners, has the second lowest percentage of unemployment…Furthermore, if there existed a causal connection between immigration and unemployment, there should have been more unemployment in those years when immigration was greater, and vice versa. The figures show, on the contrary, that there was less unemployment during the first 7 years of the present century with immigration at a high tide than during the preceding decade when immigration was at a low ebb…The relation between immigration and unemployment may thus be summed up in the following propositions: Unemployment and immigration are the effects of economic forces working in opposite directions; those which produce business expansion reduce unemployment and attract immigration; those which produce business depression increase unemployment and reduce immigration.The objective to the unskilled immigrant is based upon the belief that because of his lower standard of living he is satisfied with lower wages than the American or the older immigrant. It is therefore taken for granted that the effect of the great tide of immigration in recent years has been to reduce the rate of wages or to prevent it from advancing. The fallacy of this reasoning is due to the attempt to compare the wages and standard of living of the unskilled laborer with those of the skilled mechanic…The primary cause which has determined the movement of wages in the US during the past 30 years has been the introduction of labor-saving machinery. The effect of the substitution of mechanical devices for human skill is the displacement of the skilled mechanic by the unskilled laborer. This tendency has been counteracted in the US by the expansion of industry… while, in the long run, there has been no displacement of skilled mechanics by unskilled laborers in the industrial field as a whole, yet at certain times and places individual skilled mechanics were doubtless dispensed with and had to seek new employment. The unskilled laborers who replaced them were naturally engaged at lower wages. The fact that most of these unskilled laborers were immigrants disguised the substance of the change- the substitution of unskilled for skilled labor- and made it appear as the displacement of highly paid native by cheap immigrant labor…As a general rule, the employment of large numbers of recent immigrants has gone together with substantial advances in wages. This correlation between the movements of wages and immigration is… the plain working of the law of supply and demand. The employment of a high percentage of immigrants in any section, industry, or occupation, is an indication of an active demand for labor in excess of the native supply. Absence of immigrants is a sign of a dull labor market… There is consequently no specific “immigration problem.” There is a general labor problem, which comprises many special problems, such as organization of labor, reduction of hours of labor, child labor, unemployment, prevention of work-accidents, etc. None of these problems being affected by immigration, their solution cannot be advanced by restricting or even by complete prohibition of immigration. A Little Milk, A Little Honey: Jewish Immigrants in America ?by David BoroffThe Gilded Age witnessed an enormous surge of immigration from Europe, as the romantic lure of America seemed to draw more people than ever. For Europeans, as one historian has noted, “America was rich, America was good, America was hope, America was the future.” They came over by the millions, crowding into American cities and swelling the bottom ranks of American labor. Between 1850 and 1910, some 22,800,000 immigrants arrived in the United States, more than three-fourths of them after 1881. There was also a significant shift in the source of immigration. The “old” immigrants were from western and northern Europe- Britain, Ireland, Germany, and the Scandinavian countries. But in the 1890s, most immigrants were from eastern and southern Europe- Russia, Serbia, Austria-Hungary, and Italy- and most were Jewish or Catholic. When these people arrived in America’s northeastern cities, they invariably antagonized native-born Protestants, who unfairly blamed them for America’s growing urban problems. The major gateway of the new immigration was New York City, where the population swelled from 1.5 million in 1870 to a spectacular 5 million by 1915. The constant stream of new arrivals made New York the largest and most ethnically diverse city in America. In fact, by 1900, more than three-fourths of New York’s citizenry was foreign born. Among them were several hundred thousand eastern European Jews, most of whom settled in the crowded and tumultuous Lower East Side, where they lived in conditions that contrasted sharply with the dream of America that had brought them here. David Boroff provides a vivid picture of the Jewish immigrants, who first began arriving in New Amsterdam (later New York) in 1654. His focus, however, is on the period after 1880, when Jewish immigration was, as he puts it, “in flood tide.” Boroff’s lively narrative not only captures the immigrant experience but points out the influence of the Jewish immigrants on the United States and America’s influence on them. In significant ways, the Jewish immigrant experience mirrored that of other ethnic groups newly arrived in America. Italians, Poles, Slovaks, Greeks, and Irish also congregated in “immigrant ghettos” in which they tended to recreate the features of the Old World societies they had left behind. While the ghetto had its beak side, it nevertheless afforded ethnic groups “a sense of belonging,” or “cultural cohesiveness,” that assuaged the pain of leaving their homelands and starting over in a strange, often overwhelming, new land. Glossary:Auswandererhallen:Emigrant building.?Castle Garden:Huge building, situated at the foot of Manhattan, where immigrants were cleaned and interrogated after their arrival.?Cheders:Hebrew schools.?Coffee House:The most popular cultural institution in the Jewish ghetto.?Gehenna:Hell?Gentile:People who are not Jewish.?Greenhorn/Greener:Slang term for newly arrived immigrants.?Jewish Daily Forward:Socialistic Yiddish newspaper, edited by Abraham Cahan.?Max Hochstim Association:Energetically recruited girls to work as prostitutes.New York IndependentBenevolent Association:An organization of pimps.Orthodox Jew:One who adheres faithfully to traditional Judaism, who is devoted to the study of the Torah, attends synagogue daily, and takes care to observe the Sabbath, Jewish holy days, dietary laws, and religious festivals.?“Pig Market”:Function as the labor exchange on the Lower East Side.?Pogram:Organized massacre of Jews.?Shtetl:Typical small Jewish towns in Europe.?White Plague:Immigrants’ term for tuberculosis.?Yiddish:The Hebrew-German dialect; main vehicle for a Jewish cultural renaissance (1890-WWI) ?Zhid:Yiddish word for leave. It started with a trickle and ended in a flood. The first to come were twenty-three Jews from Brazil who landed in New Amsterdam in 1654, in flight from a country no longer hospitable to them. They were, in origin, Spanish and Portuguese Jews (many with grandiloquent Iberian names) whose families had been wandering for a century and a half. New Amsterdam provided a chilly reception. Governor Peter Stuyvesant at first asked them to leave, but kinder hearts in the Dutch West India Company granted them the right to stay, “provided the poor among them… be supported by their own nation.” By the end of the century, there were perhaps one hundred Jews; by the middle of the 18th century, there were about three hundred in New York, and smaller communities in Newport, Philadelphia, and Charleston.Because of their literacy, zeal, and overseas connections, colonial Jews prospered as merchants, though there were artisans and laborers among them. The Jewish community was tightly knit, but there was a serious shortage of trained religious functionaries. There wasn’t a single American rabbi, for example, until the 19th century. Jews were well regarded, particularly in New England. Puritan culture leaned heavily on the Old Testament, and Harvard students learned Hebrew; indeed, during the American Revolution, the suggestion was advanced that Hebrew replace English as the official language of the new country. The absence of an established national religion made it possible for Judaism to be regarded as merely another religion in a pluralistic society. The early days of the new republic were thus a happy time for Jews. Prosperous and productive, they were admitted to American communal life with few restrictions. It is little wonder that a Jewish spokesman asked rhetorically in 1820: “On what spot in this habitable Globe does an Israelite enjoy more blessings, more privileges?” The second wave of immigration during the 19th century is often described as German, but that is misleading. Actually, there were many East European Jews among the immigrants who came in the half century before 1870. However, the German influence was strong, and there was a powerful undercurrent of Western enlightenment at work. These Jews came because economic depression and the Industrial Revolution had made their lot as artisans and small merchants intolerable. For some there was also the threatening backlash of the failure of the Revolution of 1848. Moreover, in Germany at this time Jews were largely disfranchised and discriminated against. During this period, between 200,000 and 400,000 Jews emigrated to this country, and the Jewish population had risen to about half a million by 1870.This was the colorful era of the peddler and his pack. Peddling was an easy way to get started- it required little capital- and it often rewarded enterprise and daring. Jewish peddlers fanned out through the young country into farmland and mining camp, frontier and Indian territory. The more successful peddlers ultimately settled in one place as storekeepers (some proud businesses… made their start this way). Feeling somewhat alienated from the older, settled Jews, who had a reputation for declining piety, the new immigrants organized their own synagogues and community facilities, such as cemeteries and hospitals. In general, these immigrants were amiably received by Native Americans, who, unsophisticated about difference that were crucial to the immigrants themselves, regarded all Central Europeans as “Germans.”Essentially, the emigration route was the same between 1820 and 1870 as it would be in the post-1880 exodus. The travelers stayed in emigration inns while awaiting their ship, and since they had all their resources with them, they were in danger of being robbed. The journey itself was hazardous and, in the days of the sailing vessels when a good wind was indispensable, almost interminable. Nor were the appointments very comfortable even for the relatively well to do. A German Jew who made the journey in 1856 reported that his cabin, little more than six feet by six feet, housed six passengers’ triple-decker bunks. When a storm raged, the passengers had to retire to their cabins lest they be washed off the deck by waves. “Deprived of air,” he wrote, “it soon became unbearable in the cabins in which six sea-sick persons breathed.” On this particular journey, sea water began to trickle into the cabins, and the planks had to be re-tarred.Still, the emigration experience was a good deal easier than it would be later. For one thing, the immigrants were better educated and better acquainted with modern political and social attitudes than the oppressed and bewildered East European multitudes who came after 1880. Fewer in number, they were treated courteously by ships’ captains (on a journey in 1839, described by David Mayer, the ship’s captain turned over his own cabin to the Jewish passengers for their prayers and regularly visited those Jews who were ill). Moreover, there was still the bloom of adventure about the overseas voyage. Ships left Europe amid the booming of cannon, while on shore ladies enthusiastically waved their handkerchiefs. On the way over, there was a holiday atmosphere despite the hazards, and there was great jubilation when land was sighted.There was, however, rude shocks when the voyagers arrived in this country. The anguish of Castle Garden and Ellis Island was well in the future when immigration first began to swell. But New York seemed inhospitable, its pace frantic, the outlook not entirely hopeful. Isaac M. Wise, a distinguished rabbi who made the journey in 1846, was appalled. “The whole city appeared to me like a large shop,” he wrote, “where everyone buys or sells, cheats or is cheated. I have never before seen a city so bare of all art and of every trace of good taste; likewise I had never witnessed anywhere such rushing, hurrying, chasing, running… Everything seemed so pitifully small and paltry; and I had had so exalted an idea of the land of freedom.” Moreover, he no sooner landed in New York than he was abused by a German drayman whose services he declined. “Aha! Thought I,” he later wrote, “you have left home and kindred in order to get away from the disgusting Judaeo-phobia and here the first German greeting that sounds in your ears is hep! Hep!” (the expletive was a Central European racial slur for Jews). Another German Jew who worked as a clothing salesman was affronted by the way customers were to be “lured” into buying (“I did not think this occupation corresponded in any way to my views of a merchant’s dignity”).After 1880, Jewish immigration into the United States was in flood tide. And the source was principally East Europe, where by 1880 three-quarters of the world’s 7.7 million Jews were living. In all, over two million Jews came to these shores in little more than three decades- about one-third of Europe’s Jewry. Some of them came, as their predecessors had come, because of shrinking economic opportunities. In Russia and in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the growth of large-scale agriculture squeezed out Jewish middlemen as it destroyed the independent peasantry, while in the cities the development of manufacturing reduced the need for Jewish artisans. Vast numbers of Jews became petty tradesmen or even luftmenschen (men without visible means of support who drifted from one thing to another). In Galicia, around 1900, there was a Jewish trader for every ten peasants, and the average value of his stock came to only twenty dollars.Savage discrimination and pogroms also incited Jews to emigrate. The Barefoot Brigades- bands of marauding Russian peasants- brought devastation and bloodshed to Jewish towns and cities. On a higher social level, there was the “cold pogrom,” a government policy calculated to destroy Jewish life. The official hope was that one third of Russia’s Jews would die out, one third would emigrate, and one third would be converted to the Orthodox Church. Crushing restrictions were imposed. Jews were required to live within the Pale of Settlement in western Russia, they could not Russify their names, and they were subjected to rigorous quotas for schooling and professional training. Nor could general studies be included in the curriculum of Jewish religious schools. It was a life of poverty and fear. Nevertheless, the shtetl, the typical small Jewish town, was a triumph of endurance and spiritual integrity. It was a place where degradation and squalor could not wipe out dignity, where learning flourished in the face of hopelessness, and where a tough, sardonic humor provided catharsis for the tribulations of an existence that was barely endurable. The abrasions and humiliations of everyday life were healed by a rich heritage of custom and ceremony. And there was always Sabbath- “The Bride of the Sabbath,” as the Jews called the day of rest- to bring repose and exaltation to a life always sorely tried. To be sure, even this world showed signs of disintegration. Secular learning, long resisted by East European Jews and officially denied to them, began to make inroads. Piety gave way to revolutionary fervor, and Jews began to play a heroic role in Czarist Russia’s bloody history of insurrection and suppression. This was the bleak, airless milieu from which the emigrants came. A typical expression of the Jewish attitude towards emigration from Russia- both its hopefulness and the absence of remorse- was provided by Dr. George Price, who had come to this country in one of the waves of East European emigration:Should this Jewish emigrant regret his leave-taking of his native land which fails to appreciate him? No! A thousand times no! He must not regret fleeing the clutches of the blood-thirsty crocodile. Sympathy for this country? How ironical it sounds! Am I not despised? Am I not urged to leave? Do I not hear the word Zhid constantly?... Be thou cursed forever my wicked homeland, because you remind me of the Inquisition… May you rue the day you when you exiled the people for your welfare.After 1880, going to America- no other country really lured- became the great drama of redemption for the masses of East European Jews (for some, of course, Palestine had that role even in the late 19th century, but these were an undaunted Zionist cadre prepared to endure the severest hardships). The assassination of Czar Alexander II in 1881, and the subsequent pogrom, marked the beginning of the new influx. By the end of the century, 700,000 Jews had arrived, about one quarter of them totally illiterate, almost all of them impoverished. Throughout East Europe, Jews talked longingly about America as the “golden medinah” (the golden province), and biblical imagery- “the land of milk and honey”- came easily to their lips. Those who could write were kept busy composing letters to distant kin- or even to husbands- in America (much of the time, the husband went first, and by abstemious living saved enough to fetch wife and children from the old country). Children played at “emigrating games,” and for the entire shtetl it was an exciting moment when the mail-carrier announced how many letters had arrived from America.German steamship companies assiduously advertised the glories of the new land and provided a one-price rate from shtetl to New York. Emigration inns were established in Brody (in the Ukraine) and in the port cities of Bremen and Hamburg, where emigrants would gather for the trip. There were rumors that groups of prosperous German Jews would underwrite their migration to America; and in fact such people often did help their co-religionists when they were stranded without funds in the port cities of Germany. Within Russia itself, the government after 1880 more or less acquiesced in the emigration of Jews, and connived in the vast business of “stealing the border” (smuggling emigrants across). After 1892, emigration was legal- except for those of draft age- but large numbers left with forged papers, because that proved to be far easier than getting tangled in the red tape of the Czarist bureaucracy. Forged documents, to be sure, were expensive- they cost twenty-five rubles, for many Jews the equivalent of five weeks’ wages. Nor was the departure from home entirely a happy event. There were uncertainties of the new life, the fear that in America “one became a gentile.” Give the Jewish aptitude for lugubriousness, a family’s departure was often like a funeral, lachrymose and anguished, with the neighbors carting off the furniture that would no longer be needed.For people who had rarely ventured beyond the boundaries of their own village, going to America was an epic adventure. They travelled with pitifully little money; the average immigrant arrived in New York with only about twenty dollars. With their domestic impedimenta- bedding, brass candlesticks- they would proceed to the port cities by rail, cart, and even on foot. At the emigration inns, they had to wait their turn. Thousands milled around, entreating officials for departure cards. There were scenes of near chaos- mothers shrieking, children crying; battered wicker trunks, bedding, utensils in wild disarray. At Hamburg, arriving emigrants were put in the “unclean” section of the Auswandererhallen until examined by physicians who decided whether their clothing and baggage had to be disinfected. After examination, Jews could not leave the center; other emigrants could.The ocean voyage provided little respite (some elected to sail by way of Liverpool at a reduction of nine dollars from the usual rate of thirty-four dollars). Immigrants long remembered the “smell of ship,” a distillation of many putrescences. Those who went in steerage slept on mattresses filled with straw and kept their clothes on to keep warm. The berth itself was generally six feet long, two feet wide, and two and a half feet high, and it had to accommodate the passenger’s luggage. Food was another problem. Many Orthodox Jews subsisted on herring, black bread, and tea which they brought because they did not trust the dietary purity of the ship’s food. Some ships actually maintained a separate galley for kosher food, which was coveted by non-Jewish passengers because it was allegedly better. Unsophisticated about travel and faced by genuine dangers, Jewish emigrants found the overseas trip a long and terrifying experience. But when land was finally sighted, the passengers often began to cheer and shout. “I looked up to the sky,” an immigrant wrote years later. “It seemed much bluer and the sun much brighter than in the old country. It reminded me of the Garden of Eden.”Unhappily, the friendly reception that most immigrants envisioned in the new land rarely materialized. Castle Garden in the Battery, at the foot of Manhattan- and later Ellis Island in New York Harbor- proved to be almost as traumatic as the journey itself. “Castle Garden,” an immigrant wrote, “is a large building, a Gehenna, through which all Jewish arrivals must pass to be cleansed before they are considered worthy of breathing freely the air of the land of the almighty dollar… If in Brody, thousands crowded about, here tens of thousands thronged about; if there they were starving, here they were dying; if there they were crushed, here they were simply beaten.”One must make allowances for the impassioned hyperbole of the suffering immigrant, but there is little doubt that the immigration officials were harassed, overworked, and often unsympathetic. Authorized to pass on the admissibility of the newcomers, immigration officers struck terror into their hearts by asking questions designed to reveal their literacy and social attitudes. “How much is six times six?” an inspector asked a woman in the grip of nervousness, then casually asked the next man, “Have you ever been jailed?”There were, of course, representatives of Jewish defense groups present, especially from the Hebrew Immigration Aid Society. But by this time, the immigrants, out of patience and exhausted, tended to view them somewhat balefully. The Jewish officials tended to be highhanded, and the temporary barracks which they administered on Ward’s Island for those not yet settled became notorious. Discontent culminated in a riot over food; one day the director, called The Father, had to swim ashore for his life, and the police were hastily summoned.Most immigrants went directly from Castle Garden or Ellis Island to the teeming streets of Manhattan, where they sought relatives or landsleit (fellow townsmen) who had gone before them. Easy marks for hucksters and swindlers, they were overcharged by draymen for carrying their paltry possessions, engaged as strikebreakers, or hired at shamelessly low wages.“Greenhorn” or “greener” was their common name. A term of vilification, the source of a thousand cruel jokes, it was their shame and their destiny. On top of everything else, the immigrants had to abide the contempt of their co-religionists who had preceded them to America by forty or fifty years. By the time the heavy East European immigration set in, German Jews had achieved high mercantile status and an uneasy integration into American society. They did not want to be reminded of their kinship with these uncouth and impoverished Jews who were regarded vaguely as a kind of Oriental influx. There was a good deal of sentiment against “aiding such paupers to emigrate to these shores.” One charitable organization declared: “Organized immigration from Russia, Romania, and other semi-barbarous countries is a mistake and has proved to be a failure. It is no relief to the Jews of Russia, Poland, etc., and it jeopardizes the well-being of the American Jews.”A genuine uptown-downtown split soon developed, with condescension on one side and resentment on the other. The German Jews objected as bitterly to the rigid, old-world Orthodoxy of the immigrants as they did to their new involvement in trade unions. They were fearful, too, of the competition they would offer in the needle trades (indeed, the East Europeans ultimately forced the uptown Jews out of the industry). On the other side of the barricades, Russian Jews complained that at the hands of their uptown brethren, “every man is questioned like a criminal, is looked down upon… just as if he were standing before a Russian official.” Nevertheless, many German Jews responded to the call of conscience by providing funds for needy immigrants and setting up preparatory schools for immigrant children for whom no room was yet available in the hopelessly overcrowded public schools.Many comfortably settled German Jews saw dispersion as the answer to the problem. Efforts were made to divert immigrants to small towns in other parts of the country, but these were largely ineffective. There were also some gallant adventures with farming in such remote places as South Dakota, Oregon, and Louisiana. Though the Jewish pioneers were brave and idealistic, drought, disease, and ineptitude conspired against them (in Oregon, for example, they tried to raise corn in cattle country, while in Louisiana they found themselves in malarial terrain). Only chicken farming in New Jersey proved to be successful to any great degree. Farm jobs for Jews were available, but as one immigrant said: “I have no desire to be a farm hand to an ignorant Yankee at the end of the world. I would rather work here at half the price in a factory; for then I would at least be able to spend my free evenings with my friends.”It was in New York, then, that the bulk of the immigrants settled- in the swarming, tumultuous Lower East Side- with smaller concentrations in Boston, Philadelphia, and Chicago. Far less adaptable than the German Jews who were now lording it over them, disoriented and frightened, the East European immigrants constituted a vast and exploited proletariat. According to a survey in 1890, 60% of all immigrant Jews worked in the needle trades. This industry had gone through a process of decentralization in which contractors carried out the bulk of production, receiving merely the cut goods from the manufacturer. Contracting establishments were everywhere in the Lower East Side, including the contractors’ homes, were pressers warmed their irons on the very stove on which the boss’s wife was preparing supper. The contractors also gave out “section” work to families and landsleit who would struggle to meet the quotas at home. The bondage of the sewing machine was therefore extended into the tenements, with entire families enslaved by the machine’s voracious demands. The Hester Street “pig market,” where one could buy anything, became the labor exchange; there tailors, operators, finishers, basters, and pressers would congregate on Saturday in the hope of being hired by contractors.Life in the sweatshops of the Lower East Side was hard, but it made immigrants employable from the start, and a weekly wage of five dollars- the equivalent of ten rubles- looked good in immigrant eyes. Moreover they were among their own kin and kind, and the sweatshops, noisome as they were, were still the scene of lively political and even literary discussions (in some cigar-making shops, in fact, the bosses hired “readers” to keep the minds of the workers occupied with classic and Yiddish literature as they performed their repetitive chores). East European Jews, near the end of the century, made up a large part of the skilled labor force in New York, ranking first in twenty-six our of forty-seven trades, and serving, for example, as bakers, building-trade workers, painters, furriers, jewelers, and tinsmiths.Almost one quarter of all the immigrants tried their hands as tradesmen- largely as peddlers or as push-card vendors in the madhouse bazaar of the Lower East Side. For some it was an apprenticeship in low-toned commerce that would lead to more elegant careers. For others it was merely a martyrdom that enabled them to subsist. It was a modest enough investment- five dollars for a license, one dollar for a basket, and four dollars for wares. They stocked up on pins and needles, shoe laces, polish, and handkerchiefs, learned some basic expressions (“you wanna buy somethin’?”), and were on their hapless ways. It was the professions, of course, that exerted the keenest attraction to Jews, with their reverence for learning. ?For most of them it was too late; they had to reconcile themselves to more humble callings. But it was not too late for their children, and between 1897 and 1907, the number of Jewish physicians in Manhattan rose from 450 to 1,000. Of all the professions it was medicine the excited the greatest veneration (some of this veneration spilled over into pharmacy, and “druggists,” were highly respected figures who were called upon to prescribe for minor- and even major- ills, and to serve as scribes for the letters that the immigrants were unable to read and write themselves). There were Jewish lawyers on the Lower East Side and by 1901 over 140 Jewish policemen, recruited by Theodore Roosevelt, who, as police commissioner, had issued a call for “the Maccabee or fighting Jewish type.”The Lower East Side was the American counterpart of the ghetto for Jewish immigrants, as well as their glittering capital. At its peak, around 1910, it packed over 350,000 people into a comparatively small area- roughly from Canal Street to Fourteenth Street- with as many as 523 people per acre, so that Arnold Bennett was moved to remark that “the architecture seemed to sweat humanity at every window and door.” The most densely populated part of the city, it held one sixth of Manhattan’s population and most of New York’s office buildings and factories. “Uptowners” used to delight in visiting it (as a later generation would visit Harlem) to taste its exotic flavor. But the great mass of Jews lived there because the living was cheap, and there was a vital Jewish community that gave solace to the lonely and comfort to the pious.A single man could find lodgings of a sort, including coffee morning and night, for three dollars a month. For a family, milk was four cents a quart, kosher meat twelve cents a pound, herring a penny or two. A kitchen table could be bought for a dollar, chairs at thirty-five cents each. One managed, but the life was oppressive. Most families lived in the notorious “dumbbell” flats of old-law tenements (built prior to 1901). Congested, often dirty and unsanitary, these tenements were six or seven stories high and had four apartments on each floor. Only one room in each three or four apartment received direct air and sunlight, and the families on each floor shared a toilet in the hall.Many families not only used their flats as workshops but also took in borders to make ends meet. [Journalist and reformer] Jacob Riis tells of a two-room apartment on Allen Street which housed parents, six children, and six borders. “Two daughters sewed clothes at home. The elevated railway passed by the window. The cantor rehearses, a train passes, the shoemaker bangs, ten brats run around like goats, the wife putters… At night we all try to get some sleep in the stifling, roach-infested two rooms.” In the summer, the tenants spilled out into fire escapes and rooftops, which were converted into bedrooms.Nevertheless, life on the Lower East Side had surprising vitality. Despite the highest population density in the city, the 10th Ward had one of the lowest death rates. In part, this was because of the strenuous personal cleanliness of Jews, dictated by their religion. Though only 8% of the East European Jews had baths, bathhouses and steam rooms on the Lower East Side did a booming business. There was, of course, a heavy incidence of tuberculosis- “the white plague.” Those who were afflicted could be heard crying out, “Luft! Gib mir luft!” (Air! Give me air!) It was, in fact, this terror of “consumption” that impelled some East Side Jews to become farmers in the Catskills at the turn of the century, thus forerunning the gaudy career of the Catskill Borscht Belt hotels. The same fear impelled Jews on the Lower East Side to move to Washington Heights and the Bronx, where the altitude was higher, the air presumably purer. Alcoholism, a prime affliction of most immigrant groups, was almost unknown among Jews. They drank ritualistically on holidays but almost never to excess. They were, instead, addicted to seltzer or soda water… which they viewed as “the worker’s champagne.” The suicide rate was relatively low, though higher than in the shtetl, and there was always a shudder of sympathy when the Yiddish press announced that some had genumen di ges (taken gas).The Lower East Side was from the start the scene of considerable crime. But its inhabitants became concerned when the crime rate among the young people seemed to rise steeply around 1910. There was a good deal of prostitution. The dancing academies, which achieved popularity early in the 20th century, became recruiting centers for prostitution. In 1908-09, of 581 foreign women arrested for prostitution, 225 were Jewish. There was the notorious Max Hochstim Association, which actively recruited girls, while the New York Independent Benevolent Association- an organization of pimps- provided sick benefits, burial privileges, bail, and protection money for prostitutes. The membership was even summoned to funerals with a two-dollar fine imposed on those who did not attend. Prostitution was so taken for granted that Canal Street had stores on one side featuring sacerdotal articles, while brothels were housed on the other.Family life on the Lower East Side was cohesive and warm, though there was an edge of shrillness and hysteria to it. Marriages were not always happy, but if wives were viewed as an affliction, children were regarded as a blessing. The kitchen was the center of the household, and food was almost always being served to either family or visitors. No matter how poor they were, Jewish families at well- even to excess- and mothers considered their children woefully underweight unless they were cushioned with fat.It was a life with few conventional graces. Handkerchiefs were barely known, and the Yiddish newspapers had to propagandize their use. Old men smelled of snuff, and in spite of bathing, children often had lice in their hair and were sent home from school by the visiting nurse for a kerosene bath. Bedbugs were considered an inevitability, and pajamas were viewed as an upper-class affectation. Parents quarreled bitterly- with passionate and resourceful invective- in the presence of their children. Telephones were virtually unknown and a telegram surely meant disaster from afar.The zeal of the immigrants on behalf of their children was no less than awe-inspiring. Parents yearned for lofty careers for their offspring, with medicine at the pinnacle. In better-off homes, there was always a piano (“solid mahogany”), and parents often spent their precious reserves to arrange a “concert” for their precocious youngsters, often followed by a ball in one of the Lower East Side’s many halls.To be sure, the children inspired a full measure of anxiety in their parents. “Amerikane kinder” was the rueful plaint of the elders, who could not fathom the baffling new ways of the young. Parents were nervous about their daughters’ chastity, and younger brothers- often six or seven years old- would be dispatched as chaperones when the girls met their boy friends. There was uneasiness about Jewish street gangs and the growing problem of delinquency. The old folks were vexed by the new tides of secularism and political radicalism that were weaning their children from traditional pieties. But most of all, they worried that their sons would not achieve the success that would redeem their own efforts, humiliations, and failures in the harsh new land. Pressures on their children were relentless. But on the whole the children did well, astonishingly well. “The ease and rapidity with which they learn,” Jacob Riis wrote, “is equaled only by their good behavior and close attention while in school. There is no whispering and no rioting at these desks.” Samuel Chotzinoff, the music critic, tells a story which reveals the attitude of the Jewish schoolboy. When an altercation threatened between Chotzinoff and a classmate, his antagonist’s reaction was to challenge him to spell “combustible.” The Lower East Side was a striking demonstration that financial want does not necessarily mean cultural poverty. The immigrant Jews were nearly always poor and often illiterate, but they were not culturally deprived. In fact, between 1890 and World War I, the Jewish community provides a remarkable chapter in American cultural history. Liberated from the constrictions of European captivity, immigrant Jews experienced a great surge of intellectual vitality. Yiddish, the Hebrew-German dialect which some people had casually dismissed as a barbarous “jargon,” became the vehicle of this cultural renascence. Between 1885 and 1914, over 150 publications of all kinds made their appearance. But the new Yiddish journalism reached is apogee with the Jewish Daily Forward under the long editorial reign of Abraham Cahan. The Forward was humanitarian, pro-labor, and socialistic. But it was also an instrument for acclimatizing immigrants in the new environment. It provided practical hints on how to deal with the new world, letters from the troubled (Bintel Brief), and even, at one time, a primer on baseball (“explained to non-sports”). The Forward also published and fostered an enormous amount of literature in Yiddish- both original works by writers of considerable talent, and translations of classic writers.In this cultural ferment, immigrants studied English in dozens of night schools and ransacked the resources of the Aguilar Free Library on East Broadway. “When I had [a] book in my hand,” an immigrant wrote, “I pressed it to my heart and wanted to kiss it.” The Educational Alliance, also on East Broadway, had a rich program designed to make immigrant Jews more American and their sons more Jewish. And there were scores of settlement houses, debating clubs, ethical societies, and literary circles which attracted the young. In fact, courtships were carried on in a rarefied atmosphere full of lofty talk about art, politics, and philosophy. And though there was much venturesome palaver about sexual freedom, actual behavior tended to be quite strait-laced.But the most popular cultural institution was the café or coffee house, which served as the Jewish saloon. There were about 250 of them, each with its own following. Here the litterateurs sat for hours over steaming glasses of tea; revolutionaries and Bohemians gathered to make their pronouncements or raise money for causes; actors and playwrights came to hold court. For immigrant Jews, talk was the breath of life itself. The passion for music and theater knew no bounds. When Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony was performed one summer night in 1915, mounted police had to be summoned to keep order outside Lewisohn Stadium, so heavy was the press of crowds eager for the twenty-five-cent stone seats. Theater (in Yiddish) was to the Jewish immigrants what Shakespeare and Marlowe had been to the groundlings in Elizabethan England. Tickets were cheap- twenty-five cents to one dollar- and theatergoing was universal. It was a raucous, robust, and communal experience. Mothers brought their babies (except in some of the “swellest” theaters, which forbade it), and peddlers hawked their wares between the acts. There were theater parties for trade unions and landsmanschaften (societies or fellow townsmen), and the audience milled around and renewed old friendships or argued the merits of the play. The stage curtain had bold advertisements of stores or blown-up portraits of stars. There was an intense cult of personality in the Yiddish theater and a system of claques not unlike that which exists in grand opera today. The undisputed monarch was Boris Thomaskefsky… Many of the plays were sentimental trash- heroic “operas” on historical themes, “greenhorn” melodramas full of cruel abandonments and tearful reunions, romantic musicals, and even topical dramas dealing with such immediate events as the Homestead Strike, the Johnstown Flood, and the Kishinev Pogrom of 1903. Adaptability and a talent for facile plagiarism were the essence of the playwright’s art in those days, and “Professor” Moses Horwitz wrote 167 plays, most of them adaptations of old operas and melodramas. The plays were so predictable than an actor once admitted that he didn’t even have to learn his lines; he merely had to have a sense of the general situation and then adapt lines from other plays.There was, of course, a serious Yiddish drama, introduced principally by Jacob Gordin, who adapted classical and modernist drama to the Yiddish stage. Jewish intellectuals were jubilant at this development. But the process of acculturation had its amusing and grotesque aspects. Shakespeare was a great favorite but “verbessert and vergrossert” (improved and enlarged). There was the Jewish King Lear in which Cordelia becomes Goldele (the theme of filial ingratitude was a “natural” on the Lower East Side, where parents constantly made heroic sacrifices). Hamlet was also given a Jewish coloration, the prince becoming a rabbinical student who returns from the seminary to discover treachery at home. And A Doll’s House by Ibsen was transformed into Minna, in which a sensitive and intelligence young woman, married to an ignorant laborer, falls in love with her boarder and ultimately commits suicide.Related to the Jewish love of theater was the immigrant’s adoration of the cantor, a profession which evoked as much flamboyance and egotistical preening as acting did (in fact, actors would sometimes grow beards before the high holydays and find jobs as cantors). Synagogues vied with each other for celebrated cantors, sometimes as a way of getting out of debt, since tickets were sold for the high-holyday services.The Lower East Side was a vibrant community, full of color and gusto, in which the Jewish immigrant felt marvelously at home, safe from the terrors of the alien city. But it was a setting too for fierce conflict and enervating strain. There were three major influences at work, each pulling in a separate direction: Jewish orthodoxy, assimilationism, and the new socialist gospel. The immigrants were Orthodox, but their children tended to break away. Cheders (Hebrew schools) were everywhere, in basements and stores and tenements, and the old custom of giving a child a taste of honey when he was beginning to learn to read- as symbolic of the sweetness of study- persisted. But the young, eager to be accepted into American society, despised the old ways and their “greenhorn” teachers. Fathers began to view their sons as “free-thinkers,” a term that was anathema to them. Observance of the Law declined, and the Saturday Sabbath was ignored by many Jews. A virulent anti-religious tendency developed among many “enlightened” Jews, who would hold profane balls on the most sacred evening of the year- Yom Kippur- at which they would dance and eat non-Kosher food (Yom Kippur is a fast day). And the trade-union movement also generated uneasiness among the pious elders of the Lower East Side. “Do you want us to bow down to your archaic God?” a radical newspaper asked. “Each era has its new Torah. Ours is one of freedom and justice.”But for many immigrants the basic discontent was with their American experience itself. The golden province turned out to be a place of tenements and sweatshops. A familiar cry was “a klug of Columbus!” (a curse of Columbus) or, “Who ever asked him, Columbus, to discover America?” Ellis Island was called Trernindzl (Island of Tears), and Abraham Cahan, in his initial reaction to the horrors of immigration, thundered: “Be cursed, immigration! Cursed by those conditions which have brought you into being. How many souls have you broken, how many courageous and mighty souls have you shattered.” The fact remains that most Jewish immigrants, in the long run, made a happy adjustment to their new land.After 1910, the Lower East Side went into a decline. Its strange glory was over. New areas of Jewish settlement opened up in Brooklyn, the Bronx, and in upper Manhattan. By the mid-20s, less than 10% of New York’s Jews lived on the Lower East Side, although it still remained the heartland to which one returned to shop, to see Yiddish theater, and to renew old ties. By 1924 Jewish immigration into the United States was severely reduced by new immigration laws, and the saga of mass immigration was done. But the intensities of the Jewish immigrant experience had already made an indelible mark on American culture and history that would endure for many years. UNIT 1 (1865-1898)LESSON 30- Labor Unions: The Failure to Gain Public AcceptanceDOCUMENT A: Massachusetts Bureau of the Statistics of Labor, Thirteenth Annual Report (1883)“I regard my people as I regard my machinery. So long as they do my work for what I choose to pay them, I keep them, getting out of them all I can. What they do or hoe they fare outside my walls I don’t know, nor do I consider it my business to know. They must look out for themselves as I do for myself”DOCUMENT B: Selig Perlman and Philip Taft, History of Labor in the United States, 1896-1932 (NY: Macmillan, 1935), 4.To the American worker, who hankered to be rid of the capitalist “boss,” a cooperative “self-bossing” had seemed almost as desirable as the self-employment of an independent individual- until he learned by experience how hateful cooperators may be to one another.DOCUMENT C: Nelson Manfred Blake, A History of American Life and Thought (NY: McGraw-Hill, 1963), 445.One of the most profitable opportunities open to authors was to write for the great juvenile public. The most spectacular exploit was that of Horatio Alger, Jr., who between 1867 and 1899 wrote 135 books for boys. His favorite formula of the poor but honest lad who raises by pluck and industry from rags to riches had universal appeal. According to one estimate the total sale of Alger books was about 17 million, but this can be little better than a guess. Even harder to estimate would be Alger’s influence on sharpening the acquisitive instincts of several generations of American boys.DOCUMENT D: This cartoon depicted the national view toward organized labor ? Culver Pictures, NY, NY.DOCUMENT E: ? Culver Pictures, NY, NYIn 1877, a year of violence in which a general strike threatened to halt national production, federal troops engaged railroad strikers in Baltimore. Score of people were killed and millions of dollars in property damaged.DOCUMENT F: Philip S. Foner, History of the Labor Movement in the United States (NY: International Publishers, 1947), 496.Social-Revolutionary clubs made their appearance in New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Milwaukee, and Chicago, composed of foreign-born workers who had belonged to the Socialist Labor Party or who had recently arrived from Germany. Eventually the new organizations were to federate and form the Revolutionary Socialist Party. This party’s platform, adopted at a convention in 1881, urged the organization of trade unions on “communistic” principles and asserted that aid should be given only to those unions which were “progressive” in character. The platform also denounced the ballot as “an invention of the bourgeoisie to fool the workers” and recommended independent political action only in order to prove to workers “the iniquity of our political institutions and the futility of seeking to reconstruct society through the ballot.” The chief weapons to be used in combating the capitalist system were “the armed organizations of workingmen who stand ready with the gun to resist encroachment upon their rights…” ?Very few workers in American were full-fledged anarchists. In the main those who were influenced by the anarchist philosophy, were class-conscious, militant trade unionists, who had lost faith in the efficacy of the ballot as a result of the increasing use of troops and local police to crush strikes, the widespread corruption in politics, and the inability even to seat labor candidates when they were elected to office.DOCUMENT G: Samuel Gompers“I want to tell you Socialists, that I have studied your philosophy, read your works upon economics, and not the meanest of them; studied your standard works, both in English and in German- have not only read but studied them. I have heard your orators and watched the work of your movement the world over. I have kept close watch upon your doctrines for thirty years; have been closely associated with many of you, and know what you think and what you propose. I know, too, what you have up your sleeve. And I want to say that I am entirely at variance with your philosophy. I declare to you, I am not only in variance with your doctrines, but with your philosophy. Economically, you are unsound; socially, you are wrong; and industrially you are an impossibility.” DOCUMENT H: Judge Jenkins, Farmer’s Loan and Trust vs. Northern Pacific, 1894It is idle to talk of a peaceable strike. None such has ever occurred. All combinations to interfere with perfect freedom in the proper management and control of one’s lawful business, to dictate the terms upon which such business shall be conducted by means of threats, are within the condemnation of the law.DOCUMENT I: Leonard Dinnerstein, Roger L. Nichols, and David M. Reimers, Natives and Strangers (NY: Oxford Press, 1979), 220-21“Old-stock Americans often thought that others were strange, inferior, and potentially disloyal… Rapid social and economic changes in American society after the Civil War reinforced intolerance. In the 1890s American nativists began noting with alarm the shifting patterns of immigration that brought so many Jews and Catholics from southern and eastern Europe. Labor violence, such as that occurring during the railroad disturbances of 1877 and at the Haymarket in Chicago in 1886, crowded slums in the nation’s fast-growing cities, and industrial strikes also created uneasiness about the stability of American society. Nativists were quick to blame foreign radicals and agitators for the unrest… ?Many others, reformers and non-reformers alike, feared the economic impact of immigration. When depression drove wages down and threw people out of work, they blamed the immigrants for lowering the American standard of living. Many of the newcomers, themselves prisoners of peasant ignorance and superstition, came with traditional hatreds and suspicions of one another, and they did not lose these feelings quickly in the United States. All of these conditions contributed to the widespread intolerance and bigotry that flourished in the United States during the late 19th and well into the 20th centuries.” ................
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