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IMMIGRATION

A Land of Immigrants

In 1885 the Protestant writer and orator Josiah Strong noted in his popular tract Our Country that "America, as the land of promise to all the world, is the destination of the most remarkable migration of which we have any record. During the last four years we have suffered a peaceful invasion by an army more than twice as vast as the estimated number of Goths and Vandals that swept over Southern Europe and overwhelmed Rome.… A study of the causes of this great world movement," he continued, "indicates that as yet we have seen only beginnings." Whatever one might think of Strong's equation of immigrants with an invading army, he was perceptive in recognizing that a migration of unprecedented scope was under way, a migration that would continue until the eve of World War I. Immigration not only transformed American society in the 1900s, but became a focal point for widespread anxiety about the nation's future, about the growth of cities and slums, and about what exactly it meant to be an American. Immigration was not, of course, a new phenomenon in the American experience. From the early seventeenth century to the Civil War, American culture, religion, and society had been shaped by successive waves of immigration from Europe, Africa, Asia, and Mexico. But the immigration of the 1900s was different in several significant ways.

Scale

Never before had the United States absorbed so many newcomers in such a short period of time. Between 1865 and 1915 some twenty-five million immigrants arrived in America, more than four times the number that arrived in the fifty years before the Civil War. In the decade before 1914 immigrants were arriving at the rate approaching one million per year. In the 1900s more than eight million newcomers flocked to the United States. Most were processed at Ellis Island, New York, where an impressive new complex of buildings was completed in 1901. Immigrants were registered in the Great Hall, a room two hundred feet long and one hundred feet wide. Other facilities included a shower facility that could handle eight thousand bathers a day, restaurants, railroad-ticket offices, a laundry, and a hospital. During the peak years of immigration, approximately 80 percent of arrivals were processed without difficulty.

Origins

These decades also witnessed an important shift in the origins of the nation's immigrants. Throughout most of the nineteenth century the vast majority of immigrants came from northern and western Europe: the British Isles, Scandinavia, and Germany. But beginning in the 1880s and 1890s the contribution of these regions, in both absolute and relative terms, began to decline, and the flow of newcomers from southern and eastern Europe—Russia, Poland, Italy, Greece, and the Austro-Hungarian Empire—increased dramatically. From 1900 to 1909 there were more than 2 million Austro-Hungarian immigrants (which at the time included much of central and eastern Europe), nearly 2 million from Italy, and 1.5 million from Russia. By comparison, there were 1.7 million immigrants during the decade from Great Britain, Ireland, Scandinavia, Germany, and France combined. Immigration from China, which had supplied many of the laborers for the construction of railroads in the western United States, was reduced to a trickle after the Chinese Act of 1882.

Destination

Earlier waves of immigrants had, for the most part, settled in rural America and the nation's interior, with the major exception being the Irish who came in the 1840s and 1850s. Germans had settled on farms in the Midwest or in cities such as Milwaukee, Saint Louis, and Cincinnati. Almost all Scandinavians had settled farms in Midwest and the Plains states. The new immigrants, most of them unskilled and from rural backgrounds, lacked the capital to settle on farms of their own. They were drawn by economic necessity, and by the growth of ethnic enclaves, to the cities. This concentration made them a more visible presence in American life and would eventually contribute to a rising tide of nativism and xenophobia.

The Image of America

Immigrants came to the United States in the 1900s for a variety of reasons. The United States enjoyed a reputation as a country relatively free from religious persecution and political oppression. There was no officially established church, no national police, no compulsory military service, and no overt restriction on land ownership or university enrollment. The constitution guaranteed individual liberties. While there were many exceptions to this benign image, particularly for blacks and Asian Americans, this reputation for tolerance and freedom drew many who were plagued by ethnic or religious persecution in their homelands. The United States also had a reputation as place where economic opportunities were more numerous. Despite the harsh conditions of labor in the nation's mines, factories, slaughterhouses, and railroads, there were jobs and at least some opportunities for advancement. The reputation of the United States for tolerance and economic opportunity was spread by many means in communities across Europe, Asia, and elsewhere. Steamship companies, who were engaged in fierce competition for immigrant business, promoted the bounty of America and the opportunities awaiting anyone willing to work. They used guidebooks, posters, poems, and paid agents to sing the praises of the United States. Equally important were the communications among friends and within families and communities. Often this took the form of someone who had gone to the United States to work for a period of time and returned to his or her community. But letters were especially important in shaping the expectations and decisions of immigrants. Of those arriving at the port of New York in 1908-1910, 92 percent said they were joining relatives or friends who had sent for them. Mary Antin, a Russian Jewish immigrant who came to the United States with her family while still a child, recalled in her memoir that in Russia "America was in everybody's mouth. Businessmen talked of it over their accounts; the market women made up their quarrels that they might discuss it from stall to stall; people who had relatives in the famous land went around reading their letters for the enlightenment of less fortunate folk.… all talked of it, but scarcely anyone knew one true fact about this magic land."

"Birds of Passage."

Those who did know something about it were the young male immigrants whom American officials referred to as "birds of passage." These immigrants left families behind to come to the United States in search of work, usually during the summer months. In the period from 1908 to 1914, officials recorded 6.7 million arrivals and a little more than 2 million departures. They found jobs as outdoor laborers on farms, in mining camps, and on construction sites. When work was scarce, as it was following the Panic of 1907, they were sometimes stuck without enough money to pay their fare home. Eventually many of these young migrant workers settled in the United States, becoming citizens, and bringing over their families. Their migration and settlement were particularly sensitive to changing economic conditions and opportunities.

Immigrant Communities

Even though immigrants were by definition uprooted, many quickly established new ties in their new surroundings. Shaped in large measure by the need for cheap housing, ethnic neighborhoods also reflected the desire of many first-generation immigrants to maintain connections to their country of origin. They were knit together by bonds of language, religion, and ethnic identity that was often also regional. Though it was rare for an ethnic group to monopolize an entire neighborhood, each group occupied particular blocks or streets. There immigrants could buy familiar food, speak their native language, and find that customs and traditions still had relevance. Mutual-aid societies such as the Sons of Italy provided basic services such as life insurance. Churches were crucial anchors in ethnic neighborhoods, with the parish priest functioning as spiritual leader, social worker, and mediator between old customs and the demands of what was for many newcomers a bewildering urban world. Most ethnic groups had their own newspapers that preserved their language and published news from the old country. Saloon keepers and ethnic politicians helped immigrant workers find jobs and resolve disputes. And those immigrants who came with some money in their pockets, or with valuable skills, opened small grocery stores, butcher shops, boarding-houses, and other institutions that knit ethnic communities together.

Nativism

Those who hired immigrant men, women, and children to work in the mills and mines, in sweat-shops, and on the docks welcomed the steady supply of cheap labor. But increasing numbers of Americans in the 1900s resented their new neighbors. Native-born workers were threatened by intense competition for jobs that drove down wages and made successful strikes difficult. Others felt that the ethnic diversity of the new immigrants was diluting the power and cultural influence of those whose ancestry was northern or western European. Municipal reformers decried the ease with which blocs of immigrant voters were manipulated by corrupt bosses who traded services for votes. From all of these groups the call for restriction of immigration would swell to a chorus by the 1910s, and their goal would be achieved with the passage of the Immigration Restriction Acts of 1921 and 1924. But by then the immigration of the 1900s had already indelibly transformed American society.