US History CH 15 Notes
New Immigrants
The Main Idea
A new wave of immigrants came to the United States in the late 1800s, settling in cities and troubling some native-born Americans.
Reading Focus
How did patterns of immigration change at the turn of the century?
Why did immigrants come to America in the late 1800s, and where did they settle?
How did nativists respond to the new wave of immigration?
Changing Patterns of Immigration
The old immigrants
10 million immigrants came between 1800 and 1900. Known as the old immigrants, they came from Northern and Western Europe.
Most were Protestant Christians, and their cultures were similar to the original settlers.
Chinese immigrants had been lured by the gold rush and jobs building railroads.
The new immigrants
From 1880 to 1910, a new wave brought 18 million people to America.
Unlike the immigrants in earlier times, most of the immigrants coming to the US between 1880-1910 came from Southern and Eastern Europe.
They were Roman Catholics, Orthodox Christians and Jews. Arabs, Armenians, and French Canadians came as well.
A typical immigrant to the US between 1880-1910 would be a Russian Jew seeking freedom from religious persecution
Coming to America
Desire for a better life
Most immigrants were seeking a new life, but they left their homelands for many reasons, including religious persecution, poverty, and little economic opportunity. If you were willing to work hard in America, prosperity was possible.
The journey to America
Most traveled cheaply, in steerage, and they still had to make it through the immigration station.
Steerage was cramped, unsanitary, and completely disgusting.
Ellis Island
Opening in 1892 as an immigration station, 112 million immigrants passed through Ellis Island. One hurdle faced by immigrants at Ellis Island was a medical examination.
Coming to America
Angel Island
West Coast immigrants were processed in San Francisco at Angel Island. Many Chinese immigrants were detained in prison-like conditions while awaiting a ruling.
Building urban communities
Many new immigrants lived in poor housing in slums near the factories where they found work. In the Northeast and Midwest, immigrants settled near others from their homeland. Cities became a patchwork of ethnic clusters. They formed benevolent societies, aid organizations to help new immigrants obtain jobs, health care, and education.
Nativists Respond
Threat to society
Some native-born Americans saw immigrants as threats to society. Nativists felt that immigrants were taking jobs away from Americans and should be sent home.
Limiting Chinese immigration
The Chinese Exclusion Act was passed in 1882, banning Chinese immigration for 10 years. None of the Chinese in the U.S. would be allowed citizenship. The law was renewed in 1892, and Chinese immigration was banned indefinitely in 1902.
Immigrants from China declined shapely after congress banned it with this act
Limits to Immigration
Japanese
Nativists also resented the Japanese. Japanese students in San Francisco were segregated from other children.
President Theodore Roosevelt negotiated a Gentlemen’s Agreement to stop the practice of segregating immigrant school children from Japan in 1907
In return Japan sent no more unskilled workers to America
Other immigrants
Nativists opposed immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe.
They claimed these folks were poor, illiterate, and non-Protestant and could not blend into American society.
Americanization occurred in many places. Newcomers were taught American ways to help them assimilate. They learned English literacy skills and American history and government.
Urban Life
The Main Idea
In cities in the late 1800s, people in the upper, middle, and lower classes lived different kinds of lives because of their different economic situations.
Reading Focus
How did American cities change in the late 1800s?
How did class differences affect the way urban dwellers lived?
How did the settlement house movement work to improve living conditions for immigrants and poor Americans?
American Cities Change
Compact cities
Before industrialization, cities had no tall buildings and most people lived within walking distance of their work, schools, shops, and churches. In the late 1880s, they ran out of room and started to build up.
Tall buildings and transportation
Steel frames and Elisha Otis’s safety elevator made construction of skyscrapers practical
With mass transit, people lived farther away from the city centers.
Green spaces
Urban planning was used to map out the best use of space in cities. Frederick Law Olmsted designed city parks to provide residents with countryside. New York’s Central Park is his most famous endeavor.
Class Differences
The wealthy in America inherited fortunes, but they made them from industry and business as well.
The newly rich made a point of conspicuously displaying their wealth. Grand city houses and magnificent country estates were commonplace.
High-society women read instructional literature detailing proper behavior. The ideal woman was a homemaker who organized and decorated her home; entertained visitors and supervised her staff; and offered moral and social guidance to her family.
Some women lent their time and money to social reform efforts.
Class Differences
The middle class
Educated workers like teachers, engineers, lawyers, and doctors were needed.
The rise of the modern corporation contributed to jobs in accounting, clerical and managerial work and professionals which increased the urban middle class
Married women managed a home. With time for other activities, some participated in reform work or other activities, expanding their influence to the outside world.
The working class
Many lived in poverty, with a growing population keeping wages low.
Housing shortages led to crowded and unsanitary tenement conditions.
Housekeeping was difficult; with no indoor plumbing, water had to be hauled inside from a pump.
Many women also worked low-paying jobs outside the home.
The Settlement House Movement
London reformers
Founded the first settlement house in 1884. Volunteers provided a variety of services to people in need.
They taught skills people could use to lift themselves from poverty.
Hull House
Jane Addams founded Hull House, one of the first settlement houses in the U.S., and the movement spread quickly. The movement gave women the opportunity to lead, organize, and work for others.
Religious views
The Social Gospel was the idea that religious faith should be expressed through good works and that churches had a moral duty to help solve society’s problems.
Social Darwinists disagreed; they felt people were poor because of their own deficiencies.
Politics in the Gilded Age
The Main Idea
Political corruption was common in the late 1800s, but reformers began fighting for changes to make government more honest.
Reading Focus
How did political machines control politics in major cities?
What efforts were made to reduce political corruption?
How did the Populist movement give farmers political power?
Political Machines
Political Machine—was an group of politicians controlling the local government who often resorted to corrupt methods for dealing with urban problems. Political machines gave economic favors in exchange for votes.
Immigrants—were a loyal support base for the political machines. In Boston, the Irish rose in the ranks to control the political machine in that city.
The Tweed Ring—was a notorious political machine headed by William Marcy Tweed.
Thomas Nast—a political cartoonist who attacked the corruption in Harper’s Weekly.
Federal Corruption
Scandals
Crédit Mobilier cost the taxpayers $23 million and demonstrated that political corruption had reached the highest levels of government including the Vice Presidency. Although Grant was not personally involved, his term in office was marred by several scandals involving the Credit Mobilier Company
Hayes and reform
Reformers wanted to end the spoils system, and the next president agreed. Hayes issued an executive order that prohibited government employees from managing political parties or campaigns. The Stalwarts wanted to continue the spoils system.
Civil service reform
James A. Garfield became president but as assassinated after four months. His death indirectly helped to bring about civil service reform as His successor, Chester A. Arthur, turned against the spoils system and passed the Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act.
The Populist Movement
Farmers’ hardships
Crop prices were falling, and farmers had to repay loans.
Railroads were charging high fees for transport
Merchants made money from farm equipment.
Everyone made money but the farmer doing the work
Outraged farmers organized to help themselves.
The National Grange
First major farmers’ organization
As membership grew, pushed for political reform and targeted railroad rates
One of the most far reaching goals of the National Grange was accomplished with the passage of the Interstate Commerce Act
The Alliance Movement and money supply
The Farmers’ Alliance helped with practical needs such as buying equipment or marketing farm products. They also lobbied for banking reform and railroad rate regulation.
In the South, the Colored Farmers’ Alliance formed. With more than 1 million members, the Alliance advocated hard work and sacrifice as keys to gaining equality in society.
The Alliances felt that an expanded money supply would help farmers by inflating prices, with inflation easing farmers’ debt burden. Money was tied to the gold standard, and farmers wanted it to be backed by silver as well. Now politically active, candidates supported by the Alliance won more than 40 seats in Congress and four governorships.
The Populist Party
Encouraged by their clout in national elections, the Alliance decided to form a national political party. The Peoples’ Party was born in Nebraska in July 1892. This coalition of farmers, labor leaders, and reformers became known as the Populist Party.
Party Platform—Platform calling for an income tax, bank regulation, government ownership of railroad and unlimited coinage of silver.
1892 election—Speaking for the common people against the ruling elite, the Populists took several state offices and won seats in Congress.
Economic Depression and a New Election
The Panic of 1893
The nation plunged into another depression, investors pulled out of the stock market, and businesses collapsed.
Cleveland focused on silver as a cause of the national depression. When silver decreased in value, people rushed to exchange paper money for gold.
Cleveland called for Congress to repeal the Sherman Silver Purchase Act. The country stayed on the gold standard.
The election of 1896
William McKinley, a believer in the gold standard, was the Republican nominee, and the Democratic candidate was William Jennings Bryan.
Bryan hailed the free coinage of silver as the key to prosperity.
The Populists threw their support to Bryan.
McKinley won the election, and the Populist Party soon faded away. But the groundwork for reform was laid
Segregation and Discrimination
The Main Idea
The United States in the 1800s was a place of great change—and a place in need of even greater change.
Reading Focus
What kinds of legalized discrimination did African Americans endure after Reconstruction?
What informal discrimination did African Americans face?
Who were the most prominent black leaders of the period, and how did their views differ?
In what ways did others suffer discrimination in the late 1800s?
Legalized Discrimination
Restricting the vote
Once white Democrats had regained control over their state legislatures, they passed poll tax and literacy requirements to prevent African Americans from voting.
Most African Americans were too poor to afford the poll tax, and many had been denied the education needed to pass the literacy test.
Some poor or illiterate white men could not meet the requirements, but they were given a grandfather clause allowing them to vote if he, his father or his grandfather had been able to vote before 1867
Legalized segregation
Designed to create and enforce segregation, Jim Crow laws were passed in the South.
An example of a Jim Crow law would be requiring separate railroad cars for whites and blacks
African Americans filed lawsuits, wanting equal treatment under the Civil Rights Act of 1875.
Congress had no power over private individuals or businesses.
Plessy v. Ferguson
Thirteen years later, another key case came before the Supreme Court. The matter involved a Louisiana state law requiring railroads to provide “equal but separate accommodations for the white and colored races.”
Homer Plessy sat in a whites-only train compartment to test the law and was arrested. He appealed based on the 14th Amendment.
In Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) the court upheld the practice of segregation, with only Justice John Marshall Harlan dissenting.
The Court ruled that “separate but equal” facilities did not violate the Fourteenth Amendment. The Plessy decision allowed legalized segregation for nearly sixty years.
Informal Discrimination
Racial etiquette
Strict rules of behavior, called racial etiquette, governed social and business interactions. African Americans were supposed to “know their place” and defer to whites in every encounter.
Lynching
If an African American failed to speak respectfully or acted with too much pride or defiance, the consequences could be serious.
The worst consequence was lynching, the murder of an individual usually by hanging, without a legal trial.
Between 1882 and 1892, nearly 900 lost their lives to lynch mobs. Lynchings declined after 1892, but continued into the early 1900s.
Prominent Black Leaders
With the turn of the century, two different approaches emerged for improving the lives of African Americans.
Born into slavery, Booker T. Washington believed that African Americans should accept segregation for the moment. Farming and vocational skills were the key to prosperity, and he founded the Tuskegee Institute to teach practical skills for self-sufficiency.
W.E.B. Du Bois, a Harvard-trained professor, believed in speaking out against prejudice and striving for full rights immediately. African Americans should be uplifted through the “talented tenth,” their best educated leaders. Du Bois launched the Niagara Movement to protest discrimination in 1905. Later, he helped found the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).
Others Suffer Discrimination
Mexican Americans
They encountered hostility from white Americans, often not speaking English well and taking the most menial jobs for little pay. Debt peonage tied many of them to their jobs until they could pay off debts they owed their employer.
Asian Americans
Chinese and Japanese Americans had to live in segregated neighborhoods and attend separate schools. Housing was difficult, because most house owners did not want Chinese tenants. Several states also forbade marriage with whites.
Native Americans
Native Americans faced continuous government efforts to stamp out their traditional ways of life. Children were sent away from their parents to be “Americanized.” Reservation life held little opportunity for economic advancement.
CH 15 Vocabulary
Section 1
Ellis Island immigration station in New York Harbor
Angel Island immigration station in San Francisco Bay
benevolent society group that helps immigrants
Denis Kearney Irish immigrant who led the Workingman’s Party, which was against Chinese immigration
Chinese Exclusion Act 1882 law that did not allow Chinese immigration for 10 years
Gentlemen’s Agreement 1907 agreement between President Theodore Roosevelt and Japan to prevent unskilled Japanese workers from coming to the United States
literacy test an exam to determine whether immigrants could read English
Section 2
Elisha Otis inventor of the safety elevator
Frederick Law Olmsted landscape architect who designed many city parks
settlement house place where volunteers provided services to people in need
Jane Addams co-founder of Chicago’s Hull House, one of the first settlement houses in the United States
Lillian Wald founder of the Henry Street Settlement in New York City
Social Gospel idea that religious faith should be shown through good works
Section 3
William Marcy Tweed corrupt political boss of Tammany Hall in New York
Thomas Nast political cartoonist who attacked corruption