Throughout the latter half of the nineteenth century, a rapidly industrializing America seemed to many European workers to offer an attractive promise – of jobs, land, and opportunity for all.  And millions did flock towards this promise.  Before the Civil War, large waves of predominantly Irish, German, and other northwestern European immigrants arrived and settled in America, meeting religious persecution (if they happened to be Catholic) and many of the difficulties and opportunities of life in a new country.  Despite obstacles, they persevered.  Most Irish immigrant families settled into crowded quarters near the booming factory districts in the largest cities of the northeastern states, while nearly half of the German immigrants gradually left the port cities to which they arrived and began establishing farms throughout northeastern and middle-western America (Ward 64).  What difficulty the new German-Americans of the mid-century might have encountered, because of the language barrier, beyond that of their Irish contemporaries, they made up in the advantage they gained in the eyes of established Anglo-American society by settling in farms and “assimilating” relatively smoothly.  Meanwhile, Chinese immigrants to America suffered far greater suspicion and resistance than did their European contemporaries in the middle decades of the 1800s; while European immigration continued through the turn of the century, the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 all but stopped the flow of immigration from China (Shenton).

After the Civil War, immigrants continued flow into the United States in great numbers, but now they began to arrive from a different set of more apparently “foreign” nations of origin, speaking languages that differed more radically from English. The change began during the 1880s, when

German, British, Canadian, and Scandinavian immigrants to the U.S. were [yet] the most numerous[;] but, during the same decade, almost 750,000 people came from Italy and the Russian and Austro-Hungarian empires.  Then, during the 1890’s, when the total volume of immigration had declined, the number of arrivals from southern and eastern Europe more than doubled.  From 1900 to 1909 more than 6 million immigrants from Italy and the two eastern European empires arrived in the U.S., resulting in an unprecedented total immigration for those years:  more than eight million people.  (Ward 71)

This second wave came to be referred to as the “new” immigration, and racial bigotry mushroomed as Anglo-America confronted the influx of unfamiliar ethnicities.  Many of them coming from peasant backgrounds, the “new” immigrants settled principally in the largest cities, fulfilling the industrial economy’s need for cheap, unskilled labour.  For the sake of living in affordable housing within walking distance of their job sites (Ward 106-7), for the sake of finding comfort and familiar society among people of their own language and original culture, and for the sake of remaining close to the entrepreneurial businesses which began providing “for the distinctive material or dietary needs of the immigrant community” (Ward 107), late nineteenth-century immigrants established tightly-packed neighbourhoods.  Historian David Ward reports that ethnic groups tended as well to specialize in different jobs:

new arrivals from Italy [for example] in part replaced the Irish as general labourers and were attracted to distributing fresh food from the central wholesale markets.  Jewish immigrants […] quickly developed many branches of merchandising […and] rapidly took over the ready-made clothing industry.  (107)

However productive the exchange of cultures and influx of new labour would eventually become for a developing America, dominant Anglo-American society felt threatened by the “new” immigration.  The poverty of slum neighbourhoods seemed to worried contemporaries to be a deadly social disease, spread not by poor infrastructure for sanitation but by deficiencies in the living habits of the residents themselves.  Meanwhile, large new populations of able-bodied workers seemed, for the first time, to pose a threat to the job prospects of home-grown Americans:  “a feeling was prevalent that a man’s chances to get ahead had dwindled with the coming of the giant metropolis and the factory” […] As unions became fearful for the jobs of their members, the men lost confidence in the future for themselves and their children” (Warner 171).  And “the tendency of immigrants of similar nationalities and religions to congregate in ghettos was often regarded as a threat to the ‘Americanization’ or assimilation of the newcomer” (Ward 106).  During what turned into a “period of intense national chauvinism and racial bigotry in America,” a reactionary culture of patriotic caricature developed, rife with fear, ignorance and stereotyping images of Spanish Toreadors, Irish paddys or leprechauns, Italian organ grinders or mafiosos, Mexican banditos, Jewish pawnbrokers, the Russian bear, and Chinese laundry workers (Hays). (SB)

Works Cited

Hays, David M.  “Drawn from the Same Inkwells:  Cartoons, Ethnic Stereotypes, and Uncle Sam.”  American Studies Interlink.  Dec 2002. 10.  Feb 18 2006.  (No longer online.)

Ward, David.  Cities and Immigrants:  a Geography of Change in Nineteenth-Century America.  Toronto:  Oxford UP, 1971.

Warner, Sam Bass Jr.  The Urban Wilderness:  A History of the American City.  New York:  Harper and Row, 1972.
Work Consulted

Shenton, James P.  “Ethnicity.”  The Reader’s Companion to American History.  Houghton Mifflin, college division.  Feb 18 2006.