2.12 Immigration and Urbanisation 1890-1917 Flashcards
How many European immigrants came to the US between 1890 and WW1?
More than 18 million
What was the relationship between immigration and economic growth?
It was a symptom and a cause
What examples are there of cities being shaped by the cultural identities of migrants?
‘Little Italy’ in New York and the ‘Polish Triangle’ in Chicago
What divisions did immigration exacerbate?
- Tensions between new and old immigrants
- Regional divisions between the North and South
- Wets and Drys
What nationalities made up the wave of immigrants in this time?
- 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
What push factors were there?
- Poverty and hunger drove people to leave southern Italy
- ‘Russification’ in Tsarist Russia
- Surplus population in Europe
What pull factors were there?
- Idealised belief in America as a land of riches and freedom
- Joining previously established communities
- Demand for migrant workers
How did improvements in transportation and communications boost migration?
- 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
What proportion of immigration returned home?
1 in 3
How did the rate of return vary between communities?
- 20% of Scandinavians
- 60% Italians
- 3% Russian Jews
Why did so many Italians return home?
80% of Italian immigrants were male and many came to work and send money home to their impoverished families, not necessarily to settle
How were the rural and urban populations balanced until 1920?
More Americans still lived and worked on the land than in urban areas
What did the construction boom create?
New commercial and civic buildings, vast quantities of housing, tramways, and elevated railways
How did urbanisation influence the entertainment industry?
- 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
Where was most industrialisation, urbanisation, and immigration?
In the North and East
How did urbanisation transform small towns?
- Brought street lighting, trams, civic buildings, and public utilities to towns of 5000-30,000 populations
- eg. Belleville in southern Illinois
How did the population change between 1900 and 1920?
76 million to 100 million
What were the birth and death rates like in America?
- Birth rate declining
- Death rate at 16.5 per thousand was the lowest in the world
What relationship did new immigrant communities have with municipal politics?
- 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
What was an example of a political machine that exploited new immigrants?
Tammany Hall in New York City
Why did Populism grow so strongly in the South and West in the late 1890s?
A backlash against the urban, mostly catholic, political phenomenon of political machines
What relationship did immigrants have with the trade unions?
- 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
How were immigrants treated during strikes?
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’
What were the key characteristics of the Northeast?
- 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
What were the key characteristics of the South?
- Different view of American history, especially the legacy of the Civil War
- Dominated by the Democratic Party
- ‘King Cotton’
- White supremacy
- Little European immigration
What were the key characteristics of the West?
- Social and economic development unfinished after 1890
- Some territories did not achieve full statehood until as late as 1912
- ‘Rugged individualism’
