During the Gilded Age the population of immigrants grew in absolute numbers, proportional numbers, and diversity. As we will see, in certain American cities the number of persons born abroad reached and may have exceeded 50 per cent. This was, of course, no accident. Agents of immigration agencies “sold” the United States to Europeans–but not only to Europeans: to Asians, and South Americans as well. The Handook, of which I’ve reproduced the first section, will give you a sense of how the promise of the new world was extended, and what elements served to attract the new wave of Americans.
Immigrants didn’t spread themselves equally across the United States. We’re going to play with two tools to give us a little flavor of who came, from where, and to where. One of these tools is the Panoramic Maps collection which is part of the Library of Congress’s American Memory website. I’ve introduced these in other classes, a bit. If you’ve not played with them before, you have a treat coming. The cities we’ll be investigating with them include
Boston
Homestead, Pennsylvania
Philadelphia
Pittsburgh
Cleveland
Atlanta
St. Louis
New Orleans
San Francisco
Chicago
Milwaukee and
Omaha
I’ve chosen these particular cities not only because they have number of panoramic maps, but because they were magnets for immigrants, as well.
The second tool is a little more tricky. We won’t really talk about it on Monday, but I want you to do some fiddling with it between now and Tuesday just to see if you can get it working for you. I’m referring to the Historic Census Map Server, provided to us courtesy of the University of Virginia. Through it, you’ll be able to trace the growth of immigrant populations from 1870 to 1900 or 1910...both generally (in terms of persons “foreign born” and specifically (“persons born in Bohemia, for example) and you’ll be able to plot them in both numbers and as percentages of the total population.
I’d like to have each of you choose one of the cities above (I may add a couple of others). Homestead is actually there because of the famous (or infamous) Homestead Strike. The combined research of everyone will give us a mosaic of the development of cities and immigrant communities in the United States
These excerpts will give you a picture of what immigration was really like, and if you have relatives who made this kind of journey, I think your appreciation for their courage and fortitude will rise accordingly. If you choose to make your persona an immigrant, the documents this week will give your historic imagination plenty of fodder to chew upon. The immigrant in the picture is Polish, but the story behind the picture is of a Norwegian immigrant gunsmith in the wild and wooly west. Check it out.
I’ll also see how you’re doing playing with the historic census tools. We’ll continue working with these until we get good at them. Don’t let yourself get too discouraged too early.
As I suggested last week, we’d flip the transportation revolution from short distance streetcars to long distance immigration. The gilded age marks the transition from voyaging by sail to voyaging by steam. So once again technological innovations are in the forefront. This week we’ll also be experimenting with some useful tools, as well
Pauper labor steals the bread out of the mouths of an honest American working family, in this anti-immigrant cartoon from Judge.
Anti-immigrant propaganda focussed on "The New Emmigration" from Southern and Eastern Europe, especially Italians and Jews. Click on the image to the right to read more about the 19th century Jewish experience.
The complaint about immigrant labor depressing wages is still heard from time to time.
Chinese immigrants arrived largely through the ports of California, first recruited to work on the building of the transcontinental railroad and later to work in agriculture. The Chinese were subjected to intense interest on the one hand and intense prejudice upon the other. They seemed very exotic, even alien, to those whose families had migrated from Europe. The picture at the top lleft links to information about ongoing efforts to exclude chinese altogether.
The image above is curious for its demonstration of American interest in technology, as well as the intense anti-Chinese feeling it displays. The washing machine will chase the Chinese from San Francisco to back to China. The picture links to a photo book interspersed with short vignettes about life in "Chinatown" It isn't long and is worth a read, so read it. The "Great Disaster" of which the book speaks is shown in the last photograph. For the curious, and I hope that includes many of you, it will be an interesting exercise to look the the streets mentioned on one of the panoramic maps, or on one of the tools we have available to ourselves today: Google Earth or Google Maps.
Finally, humor can be a wicked and vicious weapon as some of us have discovered from time to time. "Polite Society" in the gilded age was not very politically correct, as is witnessed by attempts from time to time to either edit books like Huckleberry Finn or exclude them from libraries altogether.
Stage Humor thrived on making fun of African Americans and immigrants. Choice Dialect is a book chock full of examples. IReach it by clicking on the image. to the right.
ASSIGNMENT: I want each of you to read or tell an ethnic story or joke from the book. I'll circulate a table of contents in class Wednesday and ask people to initial two or three which seem of special interest to them. Read them, and let me know which is your final choice. Extra credit for trying a "Choice Dialect"
For Friday, February 7
Many of you have been aware of the controversies surrounding immigration policy and "controlling our borders" which have flooded the news in the last several years. Nativism of one kind or another has been part of the American political and social scene for well over 160 years. It tends to be particularly vigorous during times of economic uncertainthy.
All our resources for this class are on the Internet, and the variety is immense. By exploring this page you should find five links, four behind pictures and one in the text. Two of them are short summaries -- read all of each.
One is a book of gilded age pictures. Read as much as you can of the interspersed vignettes, but do look at all the pictures. If they don't move you check your pulse. Read all of the document linked by text, and as far as the jokes go, the instructions should be self-explanatory. I'll do show and tell to help explain all of this.
