Explain how immigration, internal migration and urbanization transformed American life, 1870-1920

Learning goal: Explain how immigration, internal migration and urbanization transformed American life between about 1870 and 1920. Define each process, give dated evidence for it, and explain at least three ways daily life, politics and society changed as a result.

Three processes, not one. Immigration is movement into the country from abroad. Internal migration is movement within the country, such as from farms to cities or from the South to the North. Urbanization is the growth in the share of people living in cities. The first two are movements of people; the third is a result that both helped produce. Keeping them separate lets you ask which process explains a given change.

Immigration. More than 20 million immigrants arrived in the United States between 1880 and 1920. Before about 1880, most European immigrants had come from northern and western Europe, especially Britain, Ireland, Germany and Scandinavia. After 1880 a growing share came from southern and eastern Europe: Italy, Austria-Hungary, the Russian Empire (including many Jewish families escaping persecution), Greece and Poland. Historians often call them the "new immigrants." People came to escape poverty, land shortages, military conscription and religious persecution, and were drawn by industrial jobs and letters from relatives already here (push and pull factors). Most landed at East Coast ports; the federal immigration station on Ellis Island in New York harbor opened in 1892. On the West Coast, immigrants from China and later Japan arrived through San Francisco, where Angel Island station opened in 1910.

Immigration also met resistance. Nativism is hostility to immigrants in favor of people born in the country. The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 barred Chinese laborers from entering the United States, the first major federal law to exclude immigrants of one nationality. Under the "Gentlemen's Agreement" of 1907–1908, Japan agreed to limit emigration of laborers to the United States. Restrictions on southern and eastern Europeans came in the 1920s and are studied in the next unit.

Internal migration. Americans moved as well. Mechanized farming and falling crop prices pushed rural families toward city wages (see the previous lesson). Beginning around 1915–1916, African Americans from the South began moving in large numbers to northern industrial cities such as Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland and New York, a movement historians call the Great Migration. They left behind Jim Crow laws, disenfranchisement, the threat of lynching and the poverty of sharecropping, and were drawn by wartime factory jobs when World War I cut off European immigration. They also met discrimination in housing and hiring in the North.

Urbanization. Cities grew rapidly as immigrants and migrants arrived. Chicago grew from a mid-sized city to one of the largest in the world within a few decades. New technology made larger cities possible: steel-frame skyscrapers (Chicago's Home Insurance Building of 1885 is often named as the first), electric streetcars from the late 1880s that let workers live farther from their jobs, elevators, and bridges such as the Brooklyn Bridge of 1883. Rapid growth also produced problems: crowded tenements with little light or air, poor sanitation, disease, fire danger and crime. Jacob Riis's photographs and his book How the Other Half Lives (1890) documented tenement life in New York.

How American life was transformed. First, who Americans were: the population became more religiously and ethnically diverse, with large Catholic, Jewish and Orthodox communities alongside Protestant majorities, and ethnic neighborhoods with their own newspapers, churches, synagogues and mutual-aid societies. Second, how cities were governed: political machines, such as New York's Tammany Hall and the organization of George B. Cox in Cincinnati, traded jobs, help and favors for votes; they provided services to newcomers and were often corrupt. Third, how people responded to urban problems: settlement houses, such as Jane Addams's Hull House in Chicago (1889) and Hiram House in Cleveland (1896), offered classes, child care and health services to immigrant neighborhoods. Fourth, everyday life: wage work on fixed hours, public schools that taught English to immigrant children, department stores, amusement parks and a growing mass culture.

A worked model: one hypothetical family. In 1905 a young man leaves a village in southern Italy (push: poverty and lack of land) and arrives at Ellis Island. His cousin in Cleveland has written that a steel mill is hiring (pull). He lives in a crowded rooming house in an Italian neighborhood, sends money home and, five years later, pays for his wife's passage. His children attend public school and speak English; a ward leader helps him find a better job and asks for his vote. This family is hypothetical, but each step reflects a documented pattern: chain migration, ethnic neighborhoods, industrial work, public schooling and machine politics.

The misconception to avoid. Students sometimes treat all immigrants as poor and unskilled, or all migrants as moving only once. Immigrants included skilled craftworkers and merchants, and many, especially young men, returned home after earning money; historians call this return migration. The pattern of American life changed because of many individual decisions made under specific pressures, not a single wave.

Worked push-pull analysis: Case: a Jewish family leaving the Russian Empire around 1905. Push factors: religious persecution, including violent attacks called pogroms, and legal restrictions on where Jews could live and work. Pull factors: religious freedom, industrial jobs in the garment trade, relatives already in New York. Evidence types a historian would use: immigration records, letters, community newspapers. The step students skip is linking each factor to a type of evidence. A second skipped step: checking whether the family intended to stay. Some immigrants, especially young men from Italy and Greece, planned to earn money and return home, so a historian should not assume every arrival was permanent without evidence such as naturalization papers.

Worked distinction of processes: Change: Cleveland's African American population grew during World War I. Which process? Internal migration, the Great Migration, not immigration, because the migrants came from the American South. What caused it? Pushes from Jim Crow, disenfranchisement and sharecropping poverty; pulls from factory jobs opened when the war cut European immigration. Result: urbanization of a population that had been largely rural.

Worked evaluation of machines: Claim: "Political machines only harmed cities." Evidence for harm: bribery, rigged contracts and fraud. Evidence against the absolute claim: machines found jobs, food and help for newcomers when government provided little. Balanced thesis: machines met real needs of immigrant voters while corrupting city government, which is why reformers had to offer replacements, not only criticism.

Three-process chart: Make a chart with columns for immigration, internal migration and urbanization. In each, record: definition; who moved or grew; when; push factors and pull factors (or causes of growth); one dated piece of evidence; one way it changed American life. Add a row connecting the three with arrows labeled with the mechanism.

Independent performance: Write a 400-word explanation answering, "How did immigration, internal migration and urbanization transform American life between 1870 and 1920?" Success criteria: defines all three processes; gives at least five accurate dates or facts (for example Ellis Island 1892, Chinese Exclusion Act 1882, Hull House 1889, the Great Migration from about 1915–1916, the 1920 census); explains at least three transformations (diversity, city politics, reform, everyday life); includes one Ohio example; and labels any interpretation as interpretation.

Evidence sort: Sort these into immigration, internal migration or urbanization, and give each a date: Ellis Island opens; Chinese Exclusion Act; Great Migration to Cleveland; Brooklyn Bridge; electric streetcars; Hull House; Gentlemen's Agreement; Riis's photographs of tenements. For two items that could belong to more than one process, explain your choice in one sentence each.