19th Century Immigration

In the early days of the American union, Thomas Jefferson envisioned a nation peopled mostly by yeoman farmers, each owning his own land and enjoying a relatively equal status as a citizen. While the United States never really approached this ideal, the nation was mostly rural throughout the 19th century. Between 1870 and 1900, however, this began to change. America’s overall population doubled in those decades while the urban population tripled. The biggest transformation in U.S. cities of the era was that of shear size. Several cities such as New York, Chicago, and Philadelphia had more the one million residents. However, new waves of immigrants composed an ever-larger percentage of the people building the way of life in these and

Before the 1880s, most non-English immigrants had been of northern European stock such as German and Scandinavian. Now more and more immigrants were from southern and eastern Europe. There were many Italians, Slovaks, Greeks, Poles, and Russians. These groups tended to be poorer and less educated than earlier groups of immigrants. Also, they often had religions such as Orthodox or Jewish, unlike the Protestant Christianity that had been considered the norm in earlier America. Although many who arrived in this “new immigration” had been farm workers in their home countries, they rarely had the means to leave the cities to take up farming in the U.S. They naturally gravitated toward neighborhoods where they understood the language and customs. So cities developed many crowded enclaves populated by single ethnic groups – Little Italy, Little Poland, and the like. Each new group of arrivals seemed to settle in some of the worst housing in a particular city. Those displaced by newcomers headed toward slightly better neighborhoods. The descendants of the original White Anglo-Saxon Protestant settlers moved to more attractive park-like districts or to less crowded communities away from the congestion. In the end, the urban geography of late 19th century America displayed considerable

The national government of the era had an aversion to meddling in social issues. Rural interests, by and large, dominated state governments. This left it up to city governments and private agencies to deal with the immigrants. The urban political machines were often criticized for corruption. However, they did provide a network of ward bosses who could link immigrants with needed jobs and services in return for votes. The Social Gospel movement, led by Walter Rauschenbusch and Washington Gladden, brought the needs of the immigrants to the attention of many Christian churches. One outgrowth of this was the opening of settlement houses, such as Jane Addams’ Hull House in Chicago, to provide social services and cultural education to newcomers. The profession of social work was born in this era, and often appealed to reform-minded middle-class women. Also the rapid expansion of public school system in the cities meant that many of the younger immigrants learned the English language and American customs that were the gateway to upward social