Episode 25: Immigrant Cities
Hi, I’m John Green, this is CrashCourse U.S. History and today we’re going to continue
our extensive look at American capitalism. Mr. Green, Mr. Green, I’m sorry are you
saying that I grow up to be a tool of the bourgeoisie…
Oh not just a tool of the bourgeoise, Me from the Past, but a card-carrying member of it.
I mean, you have employees whose labor you can exploit because you own the means of production,
which in your case includes a chalkboard, a video camera, a desk, and a xenophobic globe.
Meanwhile Stan, Danica, Raoul, and Meredith toil in crushing poverty--STAN, DID YOU WRITE
THIS PART? THESE ARE ALL LIES. CUE THE INTRO. intro
So, last week we saw how commercial farming transformed the American west and gave us
mythical cowboys and unfortunately not-so-mythical Indian reservations. Today we leave the sticks
and head for the cities--as so many Americans and immigrants have done throughout this nation’s
history. I mean we may like to imagine that the history
of America is all “Go west young man,” but in fact from Mark Twain to pretty much
every hipster in Brooklyn, it’s the opposite. So, population was growing everywhere in America
after 1850. Following a major economic downturn in the 1890s, farm prices made a comeback,
and that drew more and more people out west to take part in what would eventually be called
agriculture’s golden age. Although to be fair agriculture’s real golden
age was in like 3000 BCE when Mesopotamians were like, “Dude, if we planted these in
rows, we could have MORE OF IT THAN WE CAN EAT.”
So it was really more of a second golden age. But anyway, more than a million land claims
were filed under the Homestead Act in the 1890s. And between 1900 and 1910 the populations
of Texas and Oklahoma together increased by almost 2 million people.
And another 800,000 moved into Kansas, the Dakotas, and Nebraska. That’s right. People
moved to Nebraska. Sorry, I just hadn’t yet offended Nebraskans.
I’m looking to get through the list before the end of the year.
But one of the central reasons that so many people moved out west was that the demand
for agricultural products was increasing due to … the growth of cities.
In 1880, 20% of the American population lived in cities and there were 12 cities with a
population over 100,000 people. This rose to 18 cities in 1900 with the percentage of
urban dwellers rising to 38%. And by 1920, 68% of Americans lived in cities
and 26 cities had a population over 100,000. So in the 40 years around the turn of the
20th century, America became the world’s largest industrial power and went from being
predominantly rural to largely urban. This is, to use a technical historian term, a really
big deal. Because it didn’t just make cities possible,
but also their products. It’s no coincidence that while all this was happening, we were
getting cool stuff like electric lights and moving picture cameras. Neither of which were
invented by Thomas Edison. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but suddenly
there are a lot more photographs in Crash Course U.S. History b-roll.
So the city leading the way in this urban growth was New York, especially after Manhattan
was consolidated with Brooklyn (and the Bronx, Queens and Staten Island) in 1898.
At the turn of the century, the population of the 23 square miles of Manhattan Island
was over 2 million and the combined 5 boroughs had a population over 4 million.
But, while New York gets most of the attention in this time period, and all time periods
since, it wasn’t alone in experiencing massive growth. Like, my old hometown of Chicago,
after basically burning to the ground in 1871, became the second largest city in America
by the 1890s. Also, they reversed the flow of the freaking
Chicago River. Probably the second most impressive feat in Chicago at the time. The first being
that the Cubs won two World Series. Even though I’m sorely tempted to chalk
up the growth of these metropolises to a combination of better nutrition and a rise in skoodilypooping,
I’m going to have to bow to stupid historical accuracy and tell you that much of the growth
had to do with the phenomenon that this period is most known for: immigration.
Of course, by the end of the 19th century, immigration was not a new phenomenon in the
United States. After the first wave of colonization by English people, and Spanish people, and
other Europeans, there was a new wave of Scandinavians, French people, and especially the Irish.
Most of you probably know about the potato famine of the 1840s that led a million Irish
men and women to flee. If you don’t know about it, it was awful.
And the second largest wave of immigrants was made up of German speakers, including
a number of liberals who left after the abortive revolutions of 1848. Alright, let’s go to
the ThoughtBubble. The Irish had primarily been farmers in the
motherland, but in America, they tended to stay in cities, like New York and Boston.
Most of the men began their working lives as low-wage unskilled laborers, but over time
they came to have much more varied job opportunities. Irish immigrant women worked too, some in
factories or as domestic servants in the homes of the growing upper class.
Many women actually preferred the freedom that factory labor provided and one Irish
factory woman compared her life to that of a servant by saying:
“Our day is ten hours long, but when it’s done, it’s done, and we can do what we like
with the evenings. That’s what I’ve heard from every nice girl that’s tried service.
You’re never sure that your soul is your own except when you’re out of the house.”
[1] Most German speakers had been farmers in their
home countries and would remain farmers in the U.S., but a number of skilled artisans
also came. They tended to stay in cities and make a go of entrepreneurship. Bismarck himself
saw emigration from Germany as a good thing saying, “The better it goes for us, the
higher the volume of emigration.”[2] And that’s why we named a city in North
Dakota after him. Although enough German immigrants came to New York that the lower east side
of Manhattan came to be known for a time as Kleindeutschland (little Germany), many moved
to the growing cities of the Midwest like Cincinnati and St. Louis. Some of the most
famous German immigrants became brewers, and America is much richer for the arrival of
men like Frederick Pabst, Joseph Schlitz, and Adolphus Busch. And by richer, I mean
more drunker. Hey. Thanks for not ending on a downer, Thought
Bubble. I mean, unless you count alcoholism. So but by the 1890s, over half of the 3.5
million immigrants who came to our shores came from southern and eastern Europe, in
particular Italy and the Russian and Austro Hungarian empires.
They were more likely than previous immigrants to be Jewish or Catholic, and while almost
all of them were looking for work, many were also escaping political or religious persecution.
And by the 1890s they also had to face new “scientific” theories, which I’m putting
in air quotes to be clear because there was nothing scientific about them, which consigned
them to different “races” whose low level of civilization was fit only for certain kinds
of work and predisposed them to criminality. The Immigration Restriction League was founded
in Boston in 1894 and lobbied for national legislation that would limit the numbers of
immigrants, and one such law even passed Congress in 1897 only to be vetoed by President Grover
Cleveland. Good work, Grover! You know, his first name
was Stephen, but he called himself Grover. I would have made a different choice.
But before you get too excited about Grover Cleveland, Congress and the President were
able to agree on one group of immigrants to discriminate against: the Chinese.
Chinese immigrants, overwhelmingly male, had been coming to the United States, mostly to
the West, since the 1850s to work in mines and on the railroads. They were viewed with
suspicion because they looked different, spoke a different language, and they had “strange”
habits, like regular bathing. By the time the Chinese Exclusion Act went
into effect in 1882 there were 105,000 people of Chinese descent living in the United States,
mainly in cities on the West Coast. San Francisco refused to educate Asians until the state
Supreme Court ordered them to do so and even then the city responded by setting up segregated
schools. The immigrants fought back through the courts.
In 1886, in the case of Yick Wo v. Hopkins the United States Supreme court ordered San
Francisco to grant Chinese-operated laundries licenses to operate.
Then in 1898 in United States v. Wong Kim Ark, the Court ruled that American born children
of Chinese immigrants were entitled to citizenship under the 14th Amendment, which should have
been a duh but wasn’t. We’ve been hard on the Supreme Court here
at Crash Course, but those were two good decisions. You go, Supreme Court!
But despite these victories Asian immigrants continued to face discrimination in the form
of vigilante-led riots like the one in Rock Springs, Wyoming that killed 26 people, and
congressionally approved restrictions, many of which the Supreme Court did uphold, so
meh. Also it’s important to remember that this
large-scale immigration--and the fear of it--was part of a global phenomenon.
At its peak between 1901 and the outbreak of World War 1 in 1914, 13 million immigrants
came to the United States. In the entire period touched off by the industrialization from
1840 until 1914, a total of 40 million people came to the U.S.
But at least 20 million people emigrated to other parts of the Western Hemisphere, including
Brazil, the Caribbean, Canada (yes, Canada) and Argentina.
As much as we have Italian immigrants to thank for things like pizza (and we do thank you),
Argentina can be just as grateful for the immigrant ancestors of Leo Messi.
Also the Pope, although he has never once won La Liga.
And there was also extensive immigration from India to other parts of the British Empire
like South Africa; Chinese immigration to South America and the Caribbean; I mean, the
list goes on and on. In short, America is not as special as it fancies itself.
Oh it’s time for the Mystery Document? The rules are simple.
I guess the author of the Mystery Document. I get it wrong and then I get shocked with
the shock pen. Sorry I don’t mean to sound defeatist, but
I don’t have a good feeling about this. Alright.
“The figure that challenged attention to the group was the tall, straight, father,
with his earnest face and fine forehead, nervous hands eloquent in gesture, and a voice full
of feeling. This foreigner, who brought his children to school as if it were an act of
consecration, who regarded the teacher of the primer class with reverence, who spoke
of visions, like a man inspired, in a common classroom...I think Miss Nixon guessed what
my father’s best English could not convey. I think she divined that by the simple act
of delivering our school certificates to her he took possession of America.”[3]
Uhh, I don’t know. At first I thought it might be someone who worked with immigrants,
like Jane Addams, but then at the end suddenly it’s her own father. Jane Addams’s father
was not an immigrant. Mary Antin? Does she even have a Wikipedia
page?! She does? Did you write it, Stan? Stan wrote her Wikipedia page. AH.
So, this document, while it was written by someone who should not have a Wikipedia page,
points out that most immigrants to America were coming for the most obvious reason: opportunity.
Industrialization, both in manufacturing and agriculture, meant that there were jobs in
America. There was so much work, in fact, that companies used labor recruiters who went
to Europe to advertise opportunities. Plus, the passage was relatively cheap, provided
you were only going to make it once in your life, and it was fast, taking only 8 to 12
days on the new steam powered ships. The Lower East Side of Manhattan became the
magnet for waves of immigrants, first Germans then Eastern European Jews and Italians, who
tended to re-create towns and neighborhoods within blocks and sometimes single buildings.
Tenements, these 4, 5 and 6 story buildings that were designed to be apartments, sprang
up in the second half of the 19th century and the earliest ones were so unsanitary and
crowded that the city passed laws requiring a minimum of light and ventilation.
And often these tenement apartments doubled as workspaces because many immigrant women
and children took in piecework, especially in the garment industry.
Despite laws mandating the occasional window and outlawing the presence of cows on public
streets, conditions in these cities were pretty bad.
Things got better with the construction of elevated railroads and later subways that
helped relieve traffic congestion but they created a new problem: pickpockets.
“Pickpockets take advantage of the confusion to ply their vocation… The foul, close,
heated air is poisonous. A healthy person cannot ride a dozen blocks without a headache.”
So that’s changed!
This new transportation technology also enabled a greater degree of residential segregation
in cities. Manhattan’s downtown area had at one time housed the very rich as well as
the very poor but improved transportation meant that people no longer had to live and
work in the same place.
The wealthiest, like Cornelius Vanderbilt and J.P. Morgan, constructed lavish palaces
for themselves and uptown townhouses were common.[4][5]
But until then, one of the most notable feature of gilded age cities like New York was that
the rich and the poor lived in such close proximity to each other.
And this meant that with America’s growing urbanization, the growing distance between
rich and poor was visible to both rich and poor.
And much as we see in today’s megacity, this inability to look away from poverty and
economic inequality became a source of concern.
Now one way to alleviate concern is to create suburbs so you don’t have to look at poor
people, but another response to urban problems was politics, which in cities like New York,
became something of a contact sport.
Another response was the so-called progressive reform movement. And in all these responses
and in the issues that prompted them – urbanization, mechanization, capitalism, the distribution
of resources throughout the social order -- we can see modern industrial America taking shape.
And that is the America we live in today. Thank you for watching. I’ll see you next
week.
Crash Course is produced and directed by Stan Muller. The script supervisor is Meredith
Danko. The show is written by my history teacher, Raoul Meyer, Rosianna Halse Rojas, and myself.
Our associate producer is Danica Johnson. And our graphics team is Thought Café.
Every week, there’s a new caption for the libertage. If you’d like to suggest one,
you can do so in comments where you can also ask questions about today’s video that will
be answered by our team of historians.
Thanks for watching Crash Course and as we say in my hometown, don’t forget to be awesome.
Immigrant Cities - ________________
[1] Quoted in H.W. Brands, American Colossus: The Triumph of Capitalism 1865-1900. p. 265.
[2] Ibid p. 267 [3] Quoted in Brands, American Colossus, p.
324 [4] Ibid p. 315
[5] quoted in Brands, American Colossus p. 320