Immigration and Urbanization in Late 19th Century America

Historians and contemporaries alike distinguished between two broad phases of European immigration to the United States, typically labeled the old immigration and the new immigration, separated by the watershed decade of the 1880s. This distinction, though somewhat simplified, captures a genuine and significant shift in the character, composition, and scale of the immigrant stream that transformed America during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

The old immigration, which dominated the flow of newcomers from the colonial era through roughly 1880, drew predominantly from the nations of Northern and Western Europe: Great Britain, Ireland, Germany, Scandinavia, and the Netherlands. These immigrants shared, in the broad view, certain cultural and religious characteristics. Many were Protestant Christians, though the Irish were a major Catholic exception. Many came from societies with some familiarity with democratic political traditions, and some had prior experience with emerging industrial economies. While they faced discrimination, hardship, and nativist hostility upon arrival, many of these groups possessed cultural tools, including literacy in European languages, familiarity with wage labor, and networks of earlier immigrants, that facilitated their relatively rapid integration into American economic and social life over the course of a generation or two.

The Irish represented the largest and most significant group within the old immigration wave during the mid-nineteenth century. Fleeing the catastrophic potato famine of 1845 to 1852, which killed approximately one million people and drove another million to emigrate in its first years alone, Irish immigrants poured into American port cities, particularly Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Baltimore, in enormous numbers. By 1860, the Irish-born constituted the largest foreign-born group in the United States, and Irish Americans dominated the urban working class of the Northeast. They dug canals, laid railroad tracks, worked in textile mills, and increasingly filled the ranks of police forces, fire departments, and political organizations. Their Catholic faith set them apart in an overwhelmingly Protestant nation and made them targets of bitter nativist hostility throughout the mid-nineteenth century, but their English language skills and their eventual ability to leverage urban political machines gave them a path toward a measure of political and economic power unavailable to later, more linguistically isolated immigrant groups.

German immigrants, who arrived in particularly large numbers between 1840 and 1880, settling in the hundreds of thousands, followed a somewhat different trajectory. They tended to be somewhat more economically stable than the famine Irish, including a significant proportion of skilled craftsmen, small farmers, and middle-class professionals, particularly among those who fled the failed revolutions of 1848 and who are accordingly known to history as the Forty-Eighters. Germans settled more broadly across the country than the Irish, concentrating in cities like Cincinnati, St. Louis, Milwaukee, and Chicago as well as in rural areas of the Midwest, particularly Missouri, Wisconsin, Illinois, Indiana, and the plains states, where they established farming communities that preserved German language and customs for generations. They founded German-language newspapers, churches, singing societies, gymnastic clubs known as Turnvereine, and mutual aid organizations that allowed them to maintain a vibrant ethnic subculture while gradually integrating into American society. By the 1870s, Germans had become so numerous and so culturally visible that some nativists complained of the Germanization of whole sections of the American heartland.

Scandinavian immigrants, comprising Norwegians, Swedes, Danes, and Finns, arrived in substantial numbers beginning in the 1850s and continuing through the end of the century. They gravitated toward the upper Midwest, particularly Minnesota, Wisconsin, and the Dakotas, drawn by landscapes that resembled their homelands and by abundant agricultural land made available through the Homestead Act of 1862. Norwegian and Swedish settlements dotted the prairies of Minnesota and the Dakotas, and these communities maintained their languages and Lutheran faith across several generations while simultaneously embracing the opportunities of American democratic life. British immigrants, who arrived in smaller but continuous numbers throughout the nineteenth century, typically possessed technical skills in mining, weaving, and metalworking that made them valuable in manufacturing centers and required less cultural adaptation given their language advantage.

The new immigration, which began to dominate the flow of newcomers in the 1880s and reached its peak in the years between 1900 and 1914, differed from the old in several critical respects. These immigrants came predominantly from Southern and Eastern Europe: from Italy (particularly the impoverished Mezzogiorno region of the south), from the Austro-Hungarian Empire (including Poles, Czechs, Slovaks, Slovenes, Croats, and Hungarians), from the Russian Empire (including millions of Poles and Jews fleeing the Pale of Settlement), from Greece, Romania, and the Balkan states. They also included substantial numbers of Syrians, Armenians, and other peoples from the Ottoman Empire. In a single peak year, 1907, nearly 1.3 million immigrants arrived in the United States, the vast majority of them from these new source regions.

These new immigrants differed from their predecessors in ways that American nativists were quick to catalog and condemn, but that also genuinely reflected different circumstances and cultural starting points. Many came from predominantly agricultural, non-industrial societies and arrived with limited formal education and no literacy in English, and sometimes no literacy even in their own languages. They practiced religions that seemed strange and threatening to Protestant Americans, including Roman Catholicism in its Italian and Eastern European forms, Eastern Orthodox Christianity, and Judaism. They tended to cluster in tight urban ethnic enclaves rather than dispersing into the American mainstream, a pattern that reflected both discrimination and rational economic strategy. And they arrived in an industrial economy that needed their unskilled labor for exactly the hardest, dirtiest, and most dangerous work, placing them at the very bottom of the occupational hierarchy while subjecting them to the harshest conditions of industrial-era urban life.