APUSH Unit 9, 10 and 11Mr. Evans
I. Immigration:
A. The Immigrant:
- Immigrants trek began with walking. 1880 few immigrant peasants were from rural villages not close to a seaport or
a railroad.
- Walking put strict limits on the amount of baggage they could carry – far less than the steamships allowed per passenger.
- Immigrants came from Italy, Poland, Greece, Russia, Lithuania, etc…
- by 1890 half of all immigrants came form Eastern of Southern Europe.
- Steamship competition had driven prices low to $10 to $20 in steerage (the lowest class).
- On departure day you would be subjected to a rude bath and fumigation for lice on the docks and more than casual
examination by company doctors for contagious diseases (especially tuberculosis), insanity, feeblemindedness, and trachoma
(inflammation of eye that leads to blindness – common in Italy and Greece.)
- U.S. immigration would refuse entry to anyone who suffered from these diseases and the company that had brought them
over was required to take them back.
- Immigrant ships held as many as a 1000 people in steerage.
- No Cabins only large compartments formed by bulkheads in the hull.
- Travel took from 8 days to 2 weeks to arrive in New York.
- Harbor wait to be seen by U.S. Immigration could take up to 2 weeks.
B. Ellis Island:
- 1892 U.S. Immigration Service opened a facility designed specifically for the “processing” of newcomers on Ellis Island,
(a land fill site) in New YorkHarbor that had served as a arsenal.
- The facility was designed to control the stream of immigrants into controlled lines through corridors and
examination rooms to be inspected by physicians, nurses, and officials.
- Ellis Island could handle 8 to 15 thousand immigrants a day while thousands waited.
- Doctors: Chalked F placed on clothing meant facial rash – separated to be examined more closely.
Chalked H place on clothing meant suspected of Heart Disease.
Chalked L placed on clothing meant Limp and examination for rickets – Children were made to do a little dance to
avoid this disease.
Chalked Circle around a Cross meant feeblemindedness and immediate return to the ship.
- Thousands of families were faced with the awful decision, which had to be made within moments to return to Europe with
a denied entry relative or push on.
- Trick Question: “Do you have a job waiting for you?”
- The Contract Labor Law of 1885 forbade the making of pre-arrival agreements to work.
- 80 percent of those who entered Ellis Island were given passes and ferried the Battery or Manhattan.
- Every large ethnic group in America eventually founded Aid societies to provide new comers service to prevent them from
being swindled within hours of their arrival in the land of opportunity.
C. Statue of Liberty:
- Proper name is Liberty Enlightening the World.
- 1884 France gave the copper monument to the United States as a symbol of friendship and of the liberty that citizens enjoy
under a free form of government.
- Right Arm holds torch extended into the air.
- Left Arm holds a tablet bearing the date of the Declaration of Independence.
- At the feet is a broken shackle, symbolizing the overthrow of tyranny.
- “Give me our tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breath free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”
D. New World Ghettos:
1. Jacob Riis – Danish immigrant Reporter and Photographer reported a map of New York “colored to designate
nationalities, would show more stripes than the skin of a zebra and more colors than the rainbow.”
- Riis published How the Other Half Livesdescribing the ghastly details of miseries of New York and other American cities:
over crowding, filth, disease, crime, immorality, and death against which the urban poor fought every day.
- Noted that immigrants lived neighborhoods separated into ethnic groups within a city.
- “Little Italy” / Italians – “Lower East Side” / “Jewville” / Jews – “PolackTown / Polish
- immigrants found solace in familiar language, customs, and foods.
- Ghetto served as a buffer from the hostilities of old stock Americans and frequently, the hostility of other ethnic groups with
whom it inhabitants competed for the lowest level jobs.
- Greenwich Village NY – Italian community people from Calabria controlled housing on some streets where immigrants from
Sicily on others.
- Jewish Neighborhoods – Galicia Jews (Polish) look and separated for Jews from Russia.
APUSH Unit 9, 10 and 11Page 2
- Rumanian Jews set up their own communities.
- Germans divided on the basis of Religion – Lutheran or Catholic.
- The ethnic ghetto served as an impediment to assimilation by permitting immigrants to cling to old ways and not come to
terms with the culture and customs of their adopted country.
2. Settlement House Movement:
- Began in England and came to America in 1886 with the opening of University Settlement House in New York City.
- Americans quickly abandoned the strong religious overtones of the English realizing it would be counterproductive and
divisive and counterproductive to promote Protestantism to their largely Catholic and Jewish Neighborhoods.
- Women would play a substantial role – particularly college educated women.
- 6 settlement Houses in 1891 to 400 by 1911.
- Jane Adams – Established the first American Settlement Houses, Hull House – in Chicago’s West Side.
- searched for solutions to the social problems fostered by urban industrialization.
- First Social Workers.
- 1907 Hull House had expanded into 13 buildings hosting a variety of activities.
- public baths, coffee shop, restaurant sold take out food to working women to tired to cook, a nursery and kindergarten
provided care for neighborhood children.
- classes, lectures, exhibits, musical instruction, and college extension courses.
- gymnasium, theater, manual training workshop, labor museum, first public playground in Chicago.
- Hull House attracted reformers from around the country.
- first to investigate the problems of the city with scientific precision.
- launched campaigns to improve housing, end child labor, fund playgrounds, mediate between labor and management, and
lobby for protective legislation.
- Political Activism – impossible to deal with urban problems without becoming involved politically.
- Part of the Progressive movement.
E. Asian Immigration:
1. China:
-China with a population of 430 million was suffering from severe unemployment, poverty, and famine.
- 1849 Gold rush drew some to California. By the time they arrived the gold was exhausted.
- worked in the jobs whites distained: cooks, laundryman, farm worker, domestic servant.
- 1860 35 thousand Chinese young men hoping to return to China after they had made their fortunes.
- 1860 only 1800 Chinese females many working as prostitutes.
- thriving Chinatowns in every west coast city – San Francisco, Sacramento, and most mining camps.
- Race and Culture kept Chinese separate.
“We are accustomed to an orderly society, but it seems as if the Americans are not bound by rules ofconduct. It is best, if
possible to avoid any contact with them.” Chinese Immigration Leader
- Taiping Rebellion cost 20 million lives and thousands fled to Western America.
- 1860s The Central Pacific transcontinental railroad recruited Chinese laborers.
- 1864 3,000 to 6,000 a year Railroad Construction by 1868 12,000 to 20,000 a year.
- 1877 Chinese made up 18 percent of California’s population.
2. AngelIsland: 1910 California opened AngelIsland to deal with Asian migration.
3. Nativism:
- As long as there was plenty of work hostility toward Chinese was restrained.
- 1873 the country lapsed into a depression.
- Denis Kearney a San Francisco teamster began speaking to white working people at open air rallies in thesandlot (empty
lots), blaming their joblessness on the willingness of the Chinese to work of less than an Americans living wage.
- the Anti-Chinese movement inspired politicians to choke off Asian immigration.
- 1882 Congress enacted the Chinese Exclusionary Act – which forbade Chinese immigration.
- Many WASP (White Anglo Saxon Protestant) Americans looked at the miniature Poland, China, and Greece, etc.. as
subversive to American culture.
II. Urbanization:
A. Population:
1. Cities 1880 1900
New York1,773,0003,437,000
Philadelphia 847,0001,294,000
Chicago 503,0001,699,000
2. US Population186018801900
Population in Millions 32 50 76
Urban population 20 28 40
APUSH Unit 9, 10 and 11Page 3
B. Urban Environment:
1. Immigrants:
- The United States in 1840 had only 131 cities by 1900 over 1700
- Most immigrants had little money upon arrival or the education to obtain higher paying jobs so they remained in the growing
cities working long hours for little pay in rapidly expanding factories.
- Most immigrants found the move to have improved their standard of living.
- Rural American also began moving because cities offered better paying jobs besides the bright lights, running water, modern
plumbing, museums, libraries, and theaters.
2. Technology - Skyscraper Cities Develop:
“A town that crawled now stands erect, And we whose backs were bent above the (open) hearths know how it got its
spine.” Unknown Ironworker
- skyscraper, mighty bridges, paved streets, parks, public libraries, subways and sewers made for a rush to embrace new
technology making American cities the most modern in the world.
a. The BrooklynBridge May 1883:
- Proclaimed “one of the wonders of the world”
- Worlds longest suspension bridge soared over the east river in a single mile long span connecting Brooklyn andManhattan.
b. The Elevator:
- Leonardo da Vinci had plans for a elevator in his drawings.
- elevators were in use in factories, mines and warehouses.
- 1860 Grave Otis patented the “Safety Hoister” and the elevator become safe enough for humans.
- ingenious mechanism consisting of two metal pieces fastened to the elevator platform. If the rope orcable supporting the
elevator was to break, the metal pieces would spring out and stop the downward motion.
- The elevator was a major factor in the urban real estate making it possible to build into the air.
c. Skyscrapers:
- with the invention of the elevator in the 1850s cast-iron allowed for the creation of 10 story buildings with the Pulitzer
Building climbing to 349 feet being the tallest in the world.
- with the advent of structural steel any thing was possible.
- Chicago gave rise to the skyscraper – rising out of the Great Fire of 1871 offered a generation of architects and engineers
the chance to experiment with new technologies.
- Architects “carried out of modern business life, simplicity, breadth, dignity.” “form follows function”.
- A fitting symbol of modern America, the skyscraper expressed and exalted the domination of corporate power.
d. Public Parks:
- Credit for America’s public park goes to one man landscape architect Frederick Law Olmstead.
- designed parks in cities from Atlanta, Brooklyn, and Harford to Detroit, Chicago, and Louisville.
- laid out the grounds for the U.S Capital and planned the entire city of Riverside, Illinois.
- BostonPark system a seven mile ring Olmsted called the city’s emerald necklace.
- New York’s Central Park: directed the planting of more than five million trees, shrubs, and vines to trans form the eight
hundred acres between 59th and 110th streets into an oasis for urban dwellers.
“We want a ground to which people may easily go after their day’s work is done … where they may stroll for an hour,
seeing, hearing, and feeling nothing of the bustle ad jar of the streets.”
e. Mass Transit:
- 1890 Horse Car: railway car pulled by a horse – move 70 percent of urban traffic.
- 1873 Cable Cars – 20 cities including San Francisco - cars pulled along tracks by underground cables.
- 1887 Frank J. Sprague developed the Electric Trolley Car. RichmondVa. First electric trolley line.
- Chicago responded to traffic on the streets by building the first elevated railroad – L line still today.
-Boston and New York built the first subway systems.
Urban Development
1867 New York built the first elevated railroad.
1870 New York and Boston incorporated museums of fine art.
1873 San Francisco built first cable car.
1878 New Haven, Connecticut, opened the first telephone exchange – by 1900 85 cities had exchanges.
1879 Cleveland and San Francisco were the first cities to install electric street lights.
1881 Andrew Carnegie donated a library to Pittsburgh, the first of many Carnegie Libraries.
1883 The Brooklyn Bridge was completed.
1884 Chicago built a ten story building, the first skyscraper.
1887 Richmond, Virginia, built the first electric trolley car line. By 1894, 850 lines were in operation.
1892 Telephone connection was completed between New York and Chicago.
1897 Boston opened the first subway.
APUSH Unit 9, 10 and 11Page 4
C. Evils of City Life:
a. Death rate:
- National death rate was 20 per 1,000 annually.
- New York City it was 25- In the Slums it was 38.
- Children under the age of 5 136 per 1,000.
- Chicago had the highest mortality rate -1900 it was 200 – 1 in 5 children would die within a year of birth.
- Today in comparison infant mortality is less than 20 and total mortality rate is less than 9 per 1,000.
b. Crowded Living Conditions:
- Philadelphia and Baltimore – the poor crowded into two and three story brick “row houses” that ran for twohundred yards
before cross street broke the block.
- Boston and Chicago – housing was old wooden structures that had been comfortable home for one family; knowcrowded by
several families plus boarders.
- New York the worst due to the narrow confines of ManhattanIsland former single family residence were carvedinto
tenements that housed a hundred or more people.
- 1866 NY Board of Health found four hundred thousand people living in overcrowded tenements with nowindows, and
twenty thousand living in cellars below the water table. At high tide their homes filled with water.
- Jacob Riis estimated that 330,000 people lived in a square mile of slum; 986.4 people per acre.
- Architect James E. Ware made the situation worse by designing a new kind of building to house New Yorkpoor. The
“dumbbell” tenement named for its shape provided 24 to 32 apartments, all with ventilation on a standard NY building lot.
- When two dumbbells were built side by side the windows of two thirds of the living units opened on an airshaft, sometimes
only two feet wide, that was soon filled with garbage creating a health threat worse than airlessness.
- 1894 there were thirty nine thousand dumbbells in New York City.
c. Sanitation:
- Crowding led to outbreaks of smallpox, cholera, measles, typhus, scarlet fever, and diphtheria.
- Quarantining patients was out of the question in slums.
- Less dangerous diseases like chicken pox, mumps, whooping cough, croup, and various influenzas were killers.
- The common cold was the first step to pneumonia.
- free roaming scavengers, chicken, dogs, hogs, and wild birds quite handily cleaned up garbage in small town, and back yard
latrines were adequate to disposing of human waste, neither worked when more than a hundredpeople lived in a building
and shared a single privy.
- sanitation departments just couldn’t keep up.
- Horses deposited tons of manure in the city streets daily.
- On especially hot day horses keeled over dead – sometimes total topped 1,000. – owner dumped caucus in river.
d. Water:
- In the poorest tenements piped water was available only in shared sinks in the hallway, which were filthy.
- Safe water had been so heavily dosed with chemicals that it was barely palatable.
- The wealthy bought bottled “spring water” that had been trucked into the cities.
- Tenement apartments did not have bathrooms – children washed by romping in the water of open fire hydrants or by taking
a swim in polluted waterways.
- Adults went to public bath houses where there was hot, clean water at a reasonable price.
e. Vice and Crime:
- Slums were breeding grounds for vice and crime.
- 1890 New York had fourteen thousand homeless people most of them children “street Arabs”.
- thievery, pocket picking, purse snatching, and for the bolder violent robbery to much to resist.
- As of 1850 strong arm gangs named after their neighborhoods were bribing police – Five points gang, Mulberrybend, Hell’s
Kitchen, Poverty Gap, the Whyo Gang.
- Gangs mostly preyed on those who lived in the slums.
- Homicide rates declined in British and German cities as they grew in America it increased during the 1880s.
- Prison population rose by 50 percent, the streets grew ever more dangerous.
- More sophisticated gang come 1900 moved into vice running illegal gambling operations, opium dens, andbrothels.
- Prostitution flourished at every level in society where sex was repressed and their was a plentiful supply ofimpoverished
women and girls who had not other way to survive.
D. Class Separations 1800s:
a. High Society: Established fashionable districts within the hearts of cities.
- Construction of feudal Castles, French Chateau, Tuscan Villas, or a Persian Pavilion.
b. Middle Class: Doctors, Lawyers, engineers, managers, social workers, architects and teachers.
- moved away from central city to “streetcar suburbs”.
- Salaries were twice that of the average factory worker - $1,100 a year.
APUSH Unit 9, 10 and 11Page 5
c. The Working Class:
- Tenements: Dark and crowded multi family apartments – 3 out of 4 New Yorkers live hear.
- Industrial workers annual income of $445.
- Families earned additional by sending their children off to work or rented space in their room.
E. Big City Government:
a. The Boss:
- the physical growth of cities public services and the creation of entirely new facilities: streets, subways, elevated trains,
bridges, docks, parks, sewers, and public utilities – meant their was work to be done and money to be had.
- The professional politician -- the colorful big city boss – became a phenomenon of 19th and 20th century cities.
- The boss often corrupt and often criminal over saw the city and provided needed social services of the residents.
b. Tammany Hall:
- The most infamous of all city bosses was William Marcy Tweed of New York.