Urbanization and Immigration in the 19th and 20th Centuries
Copyright © 2005-6, Henry J. Sage

Ellis Island, New York City Harbor

The Growth of the Cities

Urbanization is the process of population concentrating in cities. As technology—machinery, irrigation, fertilization—made farming more efficient it became increasingly difficult for farmers to make a living. The new technology required less labor and increased farm output, but the increased supply drove down farm prices. At the same time, in the last half of the 19th-century industrialization saw a huge growth in factories that produced household goods, tools, appliances, machines, and many other commodities that a growing middle class were prepared to buy. Factories tended to congregate in urban areas, near transportation facilities and financial centers, where ready labor was available. Thus a push-pull phenomenon led to ever larger city populations, as people left farms to seek employment in urban areas. Further, ethnic enclaves were constantly fed by the influx of immigrants, creating huge populations of Italians, Greeks, Russians, Poles, Lithuanians, Turks, Jews, Irish and other ethnic groups, where the newly arrived sought people of common background.

American cities in the last half of the last century could be seen in a sense as all things to all people: Farmers and residents of rural areas saw them as pits of degradation and corruption. Immigrants saw them as perhaps crowded and dirty but filled with opportunities for work, education and cultural stimulation. The working poor saw them as prisons, perhaps, or merely places where they could eke out an existence, living from day to day. Middle class people increasingly found them places from which to escape to the suburbs.

The cities were marked by splendid museums, theaters, skyscrapers, parks and mansions, but they just as frequently had appalling slums, crime, prostitution, disease and, especially in those pre-air conditioning times, horribly malodorous air from poor plumbing, inadequate waste removal and the droppings of thousands of horses. Cities were simply unable to keep up with the influx of immigrants and refugees from the farms. They lacked the wealth and resources to handle the multiplying problems, and their political systems were often tainted by corruption. Yet they were vibrant, lively places, and despite the odds, people were able to survive and even prosper.

When contagious diseases invaded the cities, the fevers spread rapidly, and medical practice was not yet advanced enough to cope with large numbers of sick people. The challenge of providing clean water and some kind of sewage facilities also stretched urban planners and managers to and beyond their limits. The result was that around the turn of the century in 1900, the slums in American cities were among the worst in the history of the world. Families with five or six children and more were crammed into tiny two-room spaces, often with only a blanket over a cord providing any degree of privacy for the adults. In the absence of adequate heating and air-conditioning cramped quarters became insufferable in the summer, where insects and vermin thrived, and during the winters people huddled under blankets to keep warm as heating was often erratic. Plumbing was often primitive, and the resultant contamination of living areas exacerbated already difficult conditions. Churches, once the refuge of the poor, simply became incapable of meeting the demand, especially as wealthier congregants fled to greener pastures.

In places like New York, more foreign tongues were spoken than English, and many ethnics did not “melt,” but they got along, and for many, even the worst conditions were far less hopeless than those they had left behind. Between 1870 and 1900, the city became a symbol of a new America. In the late nineteenth century, people flocked to the city, drawn by economic opportunity and the promise of a more exciting life. Cities grew on the basis of a new technology of metal-frame skyscrapers, electric elevators, streetcar systems, and green suburbs, producing an increasingly stratified and fragmented society. The use of steel beams allowed architects to raise buildings to previously impossible heights and the streetcar allowed those with sufficient wealth to move from the crowded city centers. Skyscrapers and suburbs became the defining characteristics of the American city.

Settlement Houses. Coping with the problems of the cities, especially in poorer areas, was beyond the ability of city governments and of churches. Into the vacuum stepped a new breed of professional social workers, often women, who created what were called settlement houses to alleviate the appalling conditions that existed in the industrialized cities. They offered education and training, including English language, they dealt with city hall and did their best to cut red tape. They also worked in the political arena to try to reform things such as public health matters and child labor. The most famous of these workers Jane Addams, whose Hull House in Chicago offered both classical academic and practical education to anyone who lived in the slums.

For college educated women around the turn of the century there were few opportunities for them to put their education experience to practical use. Business management was virtually closed to them, as were the professions of law, medicine, the military, the ministry, and higher education, as well as others. In general women were confined to clerical work below the executive level, grueling factory labor, domestic employment, missionary work, nursing, and primary and secondary education. The settlement house movement was, therefore, to some extent a product of women's frustration. Social work as it evolved in the 20th century was not yet a full-blown profession, so women who saw the terrible needs of poor women in the cities, many of them immigrants, created the profession on their own, frequently with financial assistance and moral support from fathers, husbands, or businessmen who shared their views.

Perhaps the most famous woman who ever worked in the settlement house movement was Eleanor Roosevelt. Early during her marriage to Franklin Roosevelt she worked with settlement houses in New York City. On one occasion she had to escort a young woman back to her residence in one of the city's worst slums. Being somewhat uncertain about what she might find there, she asked Franklin to accompany her, and he did. (He was not yet involved in politics but was a practicing attorney in New York City.) When they had delivered the woman to her squalid quarters, he said to Eleanor as they emerged, “My God, I didn't know people lived like that.” FDR's biographers mark this as a consciousness-raising event in his political evolution; but the remark also demonstrates how oblivious many prosperous people were to the horrifying conditions in which millions of people lived.

Immigration and the Cities

The United States is a nation of immigrants, perhaps more so than any other major nation on the planet. Even our Native American ancestors migrated from Asia tens of thousands of years ago and are actually native to North Asia. Between the end of the Civil war and 1910, 25 million people entered the U.S. They joined rural Americans in the cities looking for jobs and other opportunities. These “new” immigrants came from different parts of Europe from those that had provided new citizens before the Civil War: Italy, Greece, Poland, Hungary, Russia, Turkey, Lithuania, Romania. They practiced different religions, including different forms of Christianity, and brought new and strange cultural ideas with them. They frequently ghettoized themselves, settling in ethnically solid neighborhoods that persist to the present day.

The wave of immigrants started schools and churches and generally adapted themselves to American culture while retaining their own individuality, both enriching and being enriched by the interaction. They found much to admire in American democracy and took enthusiastically to politics and education, areas from which they had generally been excluded in their native lands. Immigrants who passed through Ellis Island, some of whom are still alive, often recall with wonder the feelings they had upon entering New York Harbor and seeing the statue with those words inscribed. One man said, “My God, I thought the ship was going to tip over as everybody rushed to the side to stare at the Statue of Liberty!”

For much of our history most Americans have been proud of our openness to peoples from other lands. Consider the words of Emma Lazarus's famous poem, “The New Colossus”:

Emma Lazarus' precocity as a poet brought her works public attention when she was a girl of eighteen, but her interest in her Jewish heritage was slower to develop, and lay dormant until she learned of the 1879-1881 Russian pogroms against the Jews.   When Jewish refugees began arriving in the United States in 1881, Miss Lazarus organized relief programs and published a bitter attack on the pogroms in Century Magazine. The last five lines of her sonnet, "The New Colossus," were selected for inscription on the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty, dedicated October 28, 1886.Source Poems, Boston, 1989, Vol. II.

THE NEW COLOSSUS Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame, With conquering limbs astride from land to land; Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name Mother of Exiles.   From her beacon-hand Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame. “Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she With silent lips.   “Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me: I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

Yet even from the beginning, new arrivals were not welcome in all quarters. There was even squabbling among early English settlers—Puritans, Anglicans, Quakers, Catholics—as people exhibited the very human tendency to want to be among others who look and think and act just as they themselves do. An early colonist in New Jersey spoke with wonder of what was for him a troubling diversity he experienced at a wedding, where the bride's mother and father were of different backgrounds, perhaps German and Scottish, and the groom's parents were a French Huguenot and a Swede.

The first group who found themselves most unwelcome were the Irish Catholics who began to come to the United States in large numbers in the early 19th century as economic conditions, the most terrible of which was the potato famine, plagued the Irish people. They came in what were often called “coffin ships” because of the numbers who died on board. interestingly, about a third of those Irish immigrants did not speak English but Irish, a language that has rarely traveled far outside of Ireland itself. Further, the Irish are ethnically different from the other groups in the British Isles, and those differences were often exaggerated. As Irish began to fill up some of the poorer districts of Boston, New York, and Philadelphia, they found their children abused, their churches attacked, and they were greeted with signs such as “Dogs and Irish keep out!” The election of John F. Kennedy, an Irish Catholic, to the presidency of the United States in 1960 was a milestone in the acceptance of Irish people among Americans.

Following the Civil War, the floodgates opened once more, and between 1865 and 1910 about 25 million immigrants entered the United States. Those immigrants also changed the ethnic character of the United States, even more profoundly than had the Irish. For large numbers of the immigrants in the late 19th century and early 20th century came from areas which had seen few immigrants to the United States before. They came from Poland, Russia, Romania, Italy, Czechoslovakia, Greece, Turkey and many other southern and eastern European nations. Like the Irish, they tended to ghettoize themselves into communities, many of which remain to this day. There are still parts of the United States where one can hear Swedish, Italian, Polish, Yiddish and many other languages spoken in the streets. The new immigrants filled up the cities faster than they could be accommodated with comfort and found themselves jammed into tenements, crowded apartments and shoddy houses with few sanitary facilities at all. In 1880 in New York City a majority of the population did not speak English. The worst slums in the world were supposed to have existed in Chicago. And yet they continued to come in pursuit of what has been called the American dream.

America has always needed cheap labor, and that provided much of the impetus for immigration, as it still does. In the last decades on the 19 century the building of the transcontinental railroads demanded huge numbers of laborers, and it was Irish and Italians and Chinese who did much of that work. By 1910 United States had over 200,000 miles of railroads, about as much as the rest of the world combined, and when that great building boom subsided, the immigrants remained.

Since most of the Chinese who came to the country to work had been males, and few came with families, when the railroads were finished, they found themselves living in ghettos in the western cities with little female companionship. The social problems which arose from that were predictable, and the American response was to pass laws to restrict and discriminate against those of Asian ethnicity.

Since much of the wealth in the nation was consolidated in the hands of predominantly white Anglo-Saxon Protestants, the social tensions that resulted from immigration and the great disparity in wealth that grew larger in the age of industrialization were multiplied. In the 1920s the doors began to close for a time. Severe restrictions were placed upon immigration, and a quota system was established whereby those who were admitted to the United States were most likely to gain entry if they were of the ethnic groups already well-established here. When an annual quota of 150,000 for immigration was established (as opposed to years when almost a million had entered) approximately 60% of those allowed to enter the country had to come from Germany and the British Isles. The rest of the world had to divvy up to 40% left over. As World War II approached an international troubles multiplied, immigration slowed once more, only to begin again after the war when millions of displaced persons, wartime refugees far from their homes, sought new beginnings her and elsewhere.

In recent years the tide of immigration has continued and has been expanded by large numbers of illegal immigrants who have come mostly across the Mexican-American border, though others have been smuggled in on ships, through Canada and via various other devious routes. The United States is still wrestling with the issue of immigration, especially in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001.

The fact remains that there are few places in the world that accept large numbers of immigrants. The United States, Canada and Australia are the most open and probably account for the great bulk of international migration. How the United States will continue to deal with immigration issues remains to be seen. Our political leaders recognize the challenges, but no clear-cut solution is in sight. Attitudes are far ranging, starting from those of people such as former Mayor Rudy Giuliani of New York City, whose openness and praise of our immigrant population is rare in some political circles. On the other end of the spectrum are descendents of what were known once as Nativists, people who feel that only those who were born in this country have a legitimate claim to all its opportunities. Opinions range widely in between, and only a full understanding of the history of our immigrant population can lead us to satisfactory solutions.

Urbanization: The Cities

Chinese Immigration
Emigration from China to the United States was driven by many of the same motives that brought Europeans to this country. The Chinese, however, faced problems that were far more pronounced than those that affected Europeans, even those from Southern and Eastern Europe whose ethnicity differed sharply from the majority population already in this country. Chinese immigrants were subject to an obvious racist bias directed towards all peoples of Oriental background.

As the American West was being settled in the middle of the 19th century, Chinese were attracted to this nation primarily for economic reasons. Having heard of the California gold rush they hoped to be able to accumulate wealth and return to China. Few of the Chinese became rich from gold, but they soon discovered that their labor was a source of steady income if not instant riches. Centered in California, the Chinese immigrant population constituted approximately one quarter of the California workforce by the year 1880.

The most notable contribution of the Chinese immigrants was their work on the first transcontinental railroad. The Central Pacific, which started from Sacramento, California and headed east to meet with the Union Pacific Railroad, hired approximately 15,000 Chinese laborers. During the tedious tunneling through the Sierras  the Chinese became very adept in the use of Amherst chisels and black powder as they burrowed through the mountains at an agonizingly slow rate. During the winter months Chinese workers dug tunnels through the snow from their cabins to the tunnel worksites and might go for weeks without ever seeing sunshine. Yet they labored diligently and contributed significantly to the progress of the great iron railway across America.

Since the great majority of the Chinese immigrants were young single males, once the railroad work was finished, they had difficulty assimilating into American society. They settled into all-male communities in cities such as San Francisco and created businesses operating restaurants and laundries.  The Chinese communities lacked a family-oriented environment, however, and those conditions tended to foster prostitution, gambling and other socially undesirable practices. The depression years of the 1870s contributed to the anti-Chinese feelings, with the result that Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. The act effectively ended Chinese immigration, as only those with family members already in the United States were allowed to enter the country. The preamble to the Act stated: “ [I]n the opinion of the Government of the United States the coming of Chinese laborers to this country endangers the good order of certain localities within the territory thereof.”

The full story of the Chinese in America has recently been told beautifully by a skilled young historian, Iris Chang, author of a best-selling book, The Rape of Nanking, about the Japanese occupation of that city during World War II. Her most recent work, The Chinese in America, covers 150 years of Chinese immigration to the United States, including anecdotes of Chinese immigrants and their families as they adapted themselves to the changing American culture. She traces the story of the Chinese from the building of the transcontinental railroads to modern times, highlighting the many accomplishments of the Chinese in such areas as science and technology.

Iris Chang is a second-generation American, born in Princeton New Jersey, with a graduate degree in writing from the Johns Hopkins University. Her fascinating book should be read by anyone interested in the Chinese experience in America.

History 122 Part 1 | Updated January 18, 2007