5-3.3

It is essential for students to know:

• Immigrants came to the United States for a variety of reasons. Some were “pushed” out of their home country; others were “pulled” to the United States.
• Many fled their home country in order to escape religious persecution, war or poverty. Almost all immigrants were attracted by the economic opportunities that the growing American economy offered to them.
• They also came for political freedom and social equality. For whatever reason they came, immigrants had a profound impact on the United States.
• Most immigrants who came in the later half of the 19th century were too poor to take advantage of the offers of free land in the West made by the United States government. Even free land required the resources to travel there and start-up money for establishing a farm. Therefore, many immigrants settled in the cities on the east coast in which they landed.
• Many immigrants came through the major processing centers at Ellis Island in New York City and Angel Island in San Francisco but every port city was an entry point for immigrants.
• Some immigrants continued their journey to the cities of the Midwest to work in meat packing plants or grain mills. The increasing numbers of immigrants added to a growing urbanization. Immigrants also impacted the character of cities. Many settled with people of their own ethnic backgrounds creating city neighborhoods known as Little Italy, Germantown, Chinatown or Little Poland.
• Some immigrants, such as Andrew Carnegie and Alexander Graham Bell, contributed their entrepreneurial skills to the growth of industry. However, most immigrants provided the labor, or workforce, needed for expanding industry.
• Although they played a vital role in the economy, they were often not appreciated for their contributions to economic growth.
• By their sheer numbers, immigrants drove down wages (supply and demand).
• Immigrants also took whatever jobs they could find and were willing to work for whatever wage they could get. Because of this, immigrants were resented by ‘native’ Americans. In addition, many immigrants who came in the late 19th century were from eastern and southern Europe whereas immigrants who had arrived in the first half of the 19th century had been of Anglo-Saxon heritage, including the Germans and the Irish.
• Although German and Irish immigrants had been resented when they first arrived in the 1840s and 1850s, the Irish spoke English and the Germans were known as hard workers.
• New prejudices against the ‘new’ immigrants of the late 19th century were based on their ethnic and religious backgrounds. Many were Jewish or Catholic and were discriminated against in Protestant America. When industrial workers attempted to organize into unions, the prejudice that native born Americans felt for immigrants undermined the union’s solidarity.
• Factory owners were able to exploit suspicions about foreigners as dangerous radicals who did not understand or appreciate the democratic system to drive a wedge between workers and to make the cause of labor unions unpopular among the middle class.
• The growth of Big Business was both a cause and an effect of increased immigration. Big Business encouraged the United States government to continue an open immigration policy so that their workforce would be plentiful and cheap. Immigrants were attracted to jobs created by Big Business and enabled the businesses to grow bigger because they worked for low wages and therefore helped the businesses to make a greater profit.
• However, Big Business was also caused by the availability of natural resources (land), new inventions and technologies (5-3.1), capitol for investment and the role of entrepreneurs. Men like Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller developed business practices that allowed them to create monopolies.
• Carnegie controlled the steel industry and Rockefeller controlled the oil industry.
• These monopolies kept wages low and kept labor unions from being effective.
• As industries grew, the United States shifted from an agrarian economy based on agriculture to an industrial economy based on manufacturing. Farmers were able to produce more crops because of mechanization. As a result, the prices that they could get for their crops fell (supply and demand).
• Unable to pay their mortgages on land and equipment because of low profits, many farmers lost their farms to foreclosure and moved to the cities in search of jobs in industry.
• In the late 1800s, many African American sharecroppers and tenant farmers left the South for cities of the Midwest and the Northeast in search of jobs in factories and to escape Jim Crow.
• By 1920, the majority of people in the United States lived in cities. [This is also a good time to address indicator 5-6.2 “Explain how humans change the physical environment of regions and the consequences of such changes, including use of natural resources and the expansion of transportation systems (P, G, E).”
• The growth of industry and cities significantly impacted the environment.]

It is not essential for students to know:

• Students do not need to know all of the port cities through which immigrants entered the United States such as Baltimore, Philadelphia, Boston or Charleston.
• They do not need to be able to list the countries of origin of all immigrants or know the approximate ratio of immigrants who came from each area.
• They do not need to understand the methods that entrepreneurs such as Carnegie and Rockefeller used to create their monopolies such as creating vertical and horizontal integration, demanding rebates from railroads, or driving their competitors out of business.
• Students do not need to know about other big businesses such as the Sugar Trust, or the Meat Packing Trust.
• Students do not need to be able to name the 10 largest cities in the United States in the late 19th century.