2.12 Immigration and Urbanisation 1890-1917

Question 1

How many European immigrants came to the US between 1890 and WW1?

Answer 1

More than 18 million

Question 2

What was the relationship between immigration and economic growth?

Answer 2

It was a symptom and a cause

Question 3

What examples are there of cities being shaped by the cultural identities of migrants?

Answer 3

‘Little Italy’ in New York and the ‘Polish Triangle’ in Chicago

Question 4

What divisions did immigration exacerbate?

Answer 4

• Tensions between new and old immigrants
• Regional divisions between the North and South
• Wets and Drys

Question 5

What nationalities made up the wave of immigrants in this time?

Answer 5

• Continuation from Germany, Scandinavia, and Britain
• New wave mostly from Austria-Hungary, southern Italy, and the Russian Empire
• One third of all Jews in Russia and Eastern Europe emigrated to the US

Question 6

What push factors were there?

Answer 6

• Poverty and hunger drove people to leave southern Italy
• ‘Russification’ in Tsarist Russia
• Surplus population in Europe

Question 7

What pull factors were there?

Answer 7

• Idealised belief in America as a land of riches and freedom
• Joining previously established communities
• Demand for migrant workers

Question 8

How did improvements in transportation and communications boost migration?

Answer 8

• Ships were bigger and faster
• Departure ports (eg. Liverpool) developed sophisticated systems for handing the flow of people across the Atlantic
• A huge new immigration centre opened on Ellis Island in 1892

Question 9

What proportion of immigration returned home?

Answer 9

1 in 3

Question 10

How did the rate of return vary between communities?

Answer 10

• 20% of Scandinavians
• 60% Italians
• 3% Russian Jews

Question 11

Why did so many Italians return home?

Answer 11

80% of Italian immigrants were male and many came to work and send money home to their impoverished families, not necessarily to settle

Question 12

How were the rural and urban populations balanced until 1920?

Answer 12

More Americans still lived and worked on the land than in urban areas

Question 13

What did the construction boom create?

Answer 13

New commercial and civic buildings, vast quantities of housing, tramways, and elevated railways

Question 14

How did urbanisation influence the entertainment industry?

Answer 14

• Accelerated the spread of advertising
• Spread mass entertainment
• Theatres and music halls for the masses and the elite
• Film industry started to emerge from small beginnings in small cinemas known as nickelodeons

Question 15

Where was most industrialisation, urbanisation, and immigration?

Answer 15

In the North and East

Question 16

How did urbanisation transform small towns?

Answer 16

• Brought street lighting, trams, civic buildings, and public utilities to towns of 5000-30,000 populations
• eg. Belleville in southern Illinois

Question 17

How did the population change between 1900 and 1920?

Answer 17

76 million to 100 million

Question 18

What were the birth and death rates like in America?

Answer 18

• Birth rate declining
• Death rate at 16.5 per thousand was the lowest in the world

Question 19

What relationship did new immigrant communities have with municipal politics?

Answer 19

• Felt they didn’t protection from discrimination and were reception to help from local politicians
• Politicians offered protection and patronage to secure votes in elections
• Offered help with jobs, welfare handouts in emergencies

Question 20

What was an example of a political machine that exploited new immigrants?

Answer 20

Tammany Hall in New York City

Question 21

Why did Populism grow so strongly in the South and West in the late 1890s?

Answer 21

A backlash against the urban, mostly catholic, political phenomenon of political machines

Question 22

What relationship did immigrants have with the trade unions?

Answer 22

• Many joined as they were recruited by leaders like Gompers of the American Federation of Labour
• Wanted to strengthen the unions against the employers
• Also seen as a threat because they were cheap, unskilled workers who could be used to under cut wages or to break strikes

Question 23

How were immigrants treated during strikes?

Answer 23

The wave of violence in the great strikes in the 1890s, such as the Homestead Strike 1892 and the Pullman Strike 1894 were blamed on ‘foreign agitators’

Question 24

What were the key characteristics of the Northeast?

Answer 24

• Modernisation and social change was the greatest here
• More European
• Social trends were not really nationwide but it seemed so because of the Northeastern dominance

Question 25

What were the key characteristics of the South?

Answer 25

• Different view of American history, especially the legacy of the Civil War
• Dominated by the Democratic Party
• ‘King Cotton’
• White supremacy
• Little European immigration

Question 26

What were the key characteristics of the West?

Answer 26

• Social and economic development unfinished after 1890
• Some territories did not achieve full statehood until as late as 1912
• ‘Rugged individualism’