Growth, Cities, and Immigration: Crash Course US History #25 episode transcript - U.S. History by Crash Course

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Growth, Cities, and Immigration: Crash Course US History #25

From: U.S. History by Crash Course

In which John Green teaches you about the massive immigration to the United States during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Immigrants flocked to the US from all over the world in this time period. Millions of Europeans moved to the US where they drove the growth of cities and manned the rapid industrialization that was taking place. In the western US many, many Chinese immigrants arrived to work on the railroad and in mines. As is often the case in the United States, the people who already lived in the US reacted kind of badly to this flood of immigrants. Some legislators tried to stem the flow of new arrivals, with mixed success. Grover Cleveland vetoed a general ban on immigration, but the leadership at the time did manage to get together to pass an anti-Chinese immigration law. Immigrants did win some important Supreme Court decisions upholding their rights, but in many ways, immigrants were treated as second-class citizens. At the same time, the country was rapidly urbanizing. Cities were growing rapidly and industrial technology was developing new wonders all the time. John will cover all this upheaval and change, and hearken back to a time when racial profiling did in fact boil down to analyzing the side of someone's face.

Full Transcript

Growth, Cities, and Immigration Crash Course US History 25

speaker01 00:00:00

Hi I'm John Green, this is Crash Course us history and today we're going to continue our extensive look at American capitalism. Mr Green Mr Green I'm sorry, are you saying that I grow up to be a tool of the bourgeoisie? Oh, not just a tool of the bourgeoisie, me from the past, but a card carrying member it. I mean, you have employees whose labor you can exploit because you own the means of production, which in your case includes a chalkboard, a video camera, a desk, and a xenophobic globe. Meanwhile, Stan, Danica, Raul, and Meredith toil and crushing poverty. Did you write this part? These are all lies, cue the intro.

speaker01 00:39:00

So last week, we saw how commercial farming transformed the American West and gave us mythical cowboys, and unfortunately, not so mythical Indian reservations. Today we leave the sticks and head for the cities, as so many Americans and immigrants have done throughout the nation's history. I mean, we may like to imagine that the history of America is all go west, young man. But in fact, from Mark Twain to pretty much every hipster in Brooklyn, it's the opposite. The population was growing everywhere in America after 1850, following a major economic downturn in the 1890s, farm prices made a comeback, and that drew more and more people out west to take part in what would eventually be called agriculture's gold age. Although to be fair, agriculture's real golden age was in like 3000 BCE when Mesopotamians were like, dude, if we planted these in rows, we could have more of it than we could eat. It was really more of a second golden age, but anyway, more than a million land claim were filed under the Homestead Act in the 1890s.

speaker01 01:30:00

In between 1919 10, the populations of Texas and Oklahoma together increased by almost 2 million people, and another 800000 people moved into Kansas, the Dakotas and Nebraska. That's people moved two Nebraska, Sorry, I just hadn't yet offended Nebraskans. I'm looking to get through the list before the end of the year, but one of the central reasons that so many people moved out west was that the demand for agricultural products was increasing due to the growth of cities. 1920 of the American population lived in cities, and there were 12 with a population over 100000 people. This rose to 18 cities in 1900, with the percentage of urban dwellers rising to 38%, and by 1920, 68% of Americans lived in cities and 26 cities had a population over. So in the 40 years, around the turn of the 20th th century, America became the world's largest industrial power and went from being predominantly rural to largely urban. This is, to use a technical historian term, a really big deal because it didn't just make cities possible, but also their products.

speaker01 02:29:00

It's no coincidence that while all this was happening, we were getting cool stuff like electric lights and moving picture cameras, neither of which were invented by Thomas Edison. I don't know if you've noticed, but suddenly there are a lot more photographs in Crash Course us history B eroll. So the city leading the way in this urban growth was New York, especially after Manhattan was consolidated with Brooklyn and the Bronx Queens and Staten Island in 1000 and 890 two-eight at the turn of the population of the 20 thre square miles of Manhattan Island was over 2 million, and the combined five Boros had a population over 4 million. But in New York and most of the attention in this time period and all time period since, it wasn't alone in experiencing massive growth like my old hometown of Chicago, after basically burning to the ground in 1871, became the second largest city in America by the 18 and 90 S, the freaking Chicago River, probably the second most impressive feat in Chicago at the time. The first being that the Cubs won two World Series, even though I'm so attempted to chalk up the growth of these metropolises to a combination of better nutrition and rise in scootie pooping going to have to bound to stupid historical accuracy and tell you that much of the growth had to do with the phenomenon that this period is most known for.

speaker01 03:35:00

Immigration, Of course, by the end of the 19th century, immigration was not a new phenomenon in the United States after the first wave of by English people and Spanish people and other Europeans, there was a new wave of Scandinavians French people and especially the Irish most of you probably know about the potato famine of the 1840s that led a million Irish men and women to flee. If you don't know about it, it was awful, and the second largest wave of immigrants was of of German speakers, including a number of liberals who left after the abortive revolutions of 1000 and 840 five-eight.

speaker01 04:05:00

Alright, let's go to the thought bubble, the Irish had primarily been farmers in the motherland, but in America they tended to stay in cities like New York and Boston. Most of the men began their working lives as low wage, unskilled laborers, but over time they came to have much more buried job opportunities. Irish immigrant women worked to some in factories or as domestic servants in the homes of the growing upper class women. She preferred the freedom that factory labor provided, and one Irish factory woman compared her life to that of a servant by saying our day is 10 hours long. But when it's done, it's done and we can do what we like with the evenings. That's what I've heard from every nice girl that's tried service. You're never sure that your soul is your own, except when you're out of the house.

speaker01 04:46:00

Most German speakers have been farmers in their home countries and would remain farmers in the U, but a number of skilled artisans also came. They tended to stay in cities and make a go of entrepreneurship.

speaker01 04:55:00

Bismarck himself saw immigrations from Germany as a good thing, saying the better it goes, the higher the volume of immigration, And that's why we named a city in North Dakota after him. Although enough German immigrants came to New York that the Lower East Side of Manhattan came to be known for a time as Klein Deutschland Little Germany, many moved to the growing cities of the Midwest, like Cincinnati in St Louis, some of the most famous German immigrants became brewers, and America is much richer for the arrival of men like Frederick Pt, Joseph Schwinn, adolfus Bush, and I mean drunk hey for not ending on a downer thought bubble I, you count alcoholism, but by the 18890 S over half of the 3.5 million immigrants who came to our shores came from Southern and Eastern Europe in particular Italy and the Russian and austro-hungarian and empires they were more likely than previous immigrants to be Jewish or Catholic, and while almost all of them were looking for work, many were also escaping political or religious persecution, and by the 1000 and 890 S they had to face new scientific theories, which I'm putting in Air quotes to be clear because there was nothing scientific about them which consigned them to different races whose low level of civilization was fit only for certain kinds of work and predisposed them to criminality.

speaker01 06:04:00

The immigration restriction league was founded in Boston in 18 and 94 and lobbied for national legislation that would limit the number of immigrants and one such law even passed Congress in 1897, only to be vetoed by President Grover Cleveland.

speaker01 06:18:00

Good work Grover. You know, his first name was Stephen, but he called himself Grover. I would have made a different choice, but before you get too excited about Grover Cleveland, president were able to agree on one group of immigrants to discriminate against the Chinese, Chinese immigrants overwhelmingly male had been coming to the United States, mostly to the West, since the 1850s to work in mines and on the railroads. They were viewed with suspicion because they looked different, spoke a different language, and they had strange habits like regular bathing by the time the Chinese Exclusion Act went into effect in 1882, there were 105000 people of Chinese descent living in the United States. Cities on the West Coast. San Francisco refused to educate Asians until the state Supreme Court ordered them to do so, and even then the city responded by setting up segregated schools. The immigrants fought back through the courts in 1886 in the case of yick Wo versus Hopkins, the United States Supreme Court ordered San Francisco to grant Chinese operated Lary licenses to operate. Then in 1898 in United States versus Wong Kim Arc, the court ruled that American born children of Chinese immigrants were entitled to citizenship under the 14th Amendment, which should have been a dub but wasn't.

speaker01 07:24:00

We've been hard on the Supreme Court here at Crash Course, but those were two good decisions. You go Supreme Court, but despite these victories Asian immigrants continued to face discrimination in the form of vigilante led riots like the one in Rock Springs, Wyoming that killed 20 five-six people and congressionally approved restrictions, many of which the Supreme did uphold.

speaker01 07:42:00

So also it's important to remember that this large scale of immigration and the fear of it was part of a global phenomenon at its peak between 19 9 0 1 and the outbreak of World War 1 and 19 9, 14 13 million immigrants came to the United States in the entire period, touched off by the industrialization from 1840 until 1009 14, a total of 40 million people came to the us, but at least 20 million people emigrated to other parts of the Western hemisphere, including Brazil, the Caribbean Canada, yes Canada and Argentina, as much as we have Italian immigrants to thank for like pizza and we do, thank you, Argentina can be just as grateful for the immigrant ancestors of Leo Messi also the Pope, although he has never once won La Liga, and there was also extensive immigration from India to other parts of the British Empire like South Africa, Chinese Im to South America and the Caribbean mean the list goes on and on in short, America is not as special as it fancies itself.

speaker01 08:35:00

Oh, it's time for the mystery document. The rules here are simple, I guess. The author of the mystery document, I get it wrong, and then I get shocked with the shock pen. Sorry, I don't mean to sound defeatist, but I don't have a good feeling about this. All right, to figure the challenge, attention to the group was the tall, straight father with his earnest face and fine forehead, nervous hands eloquent in gesture, and a voice full of feeling. This foreigner who brought his children to school as if it were act of consecration, who regarded the teacher of the primer class with reverence, who spoke of visions like a man inspired in a common classroom. I think Miss Nixon guessed what my father's best English could not convey. I think she divined that by the simple act of delivering our school certificates to her, he took possession of America.

speaker01 09:20:00

I don't know, at first I thought it might be someone who works with immigrants like Jane Adams, but then at the end, suddenly it's her own father out of his father was on Mary Anton. Did she even have a Wikipedia page? She does Did you write it?

speaker01 09:33:00

Sta Stan wrote her Wikipedia page. So this document, while it was written by someone who should not have a Wikipedia page, points out that most immigrants to America, we're coming for the most obvious reason, opportunity industrialization, both in manufacturing and agriculture, meant that there were jobs in America, there was so much work, in fact, that companies used labor recruiters who went to Europe to advertise opportunities. The passage was relatively cheap, provided you were only going to make it once in your life, and it was fast taking only 8 to 12 days on the new steam powered ship the lower East side of Manhattan became the magnet for waves of immigrants first Germans, then Eastern European Jews and Italians who tended to recreate towns and neighborhoods within blocks and sometimes single buildings, tenements.

speaker01 10:13:00

These 4, 5, six story buildings that were designed to be apartments sprang up in the second half of the 19th century, and the earliest ones were so unsanitary and crowded that the city passed laws requiring a minimum of light and ventilation and often these tenement apartments doubled as workspaces because many immigrant women and children took in peace work, especially in the garment industry, despite local laws mandating the occasional window and outlawing the presence of cows on public streets, conditions in these cities were pretty bad things got a little bit better with the construction of L railroads and later subways that helped relieve traffic congestion.

speaker01 10:45:00

But they created a new problem. Pickpockets, pickpockets take advantage of the confusion to ply their vocation. The foul, close heated air is poisonous, a healthy person can ride a dozen blocks without a headache, so that's changed this new transportation technology also enabled a greater degree of residential segregation in cities.

speaker01 11:04:00

Manhattan's downtown area had at one time housed the very rich as well as the very poor, but improved transportation meant that people no longer had to live and work in the same place. The wealthiest, like Cornelius Vanderbilt and JP Morgan, constructed lavish palaces for themselves, and uptown townhouses were common. But until then, one of the most notable features of Gilded Age cities like New York was that the rich and the poor lived in such close proximity to each other. And this meant that with America's growing urbanization, the growing distance between rich and poor was visible to both rich and poor. And much as we see in today's megacity, this inability to look away from poverty and economic inequality became a source of concern. Now, one way to alleviate such concern is to create suburbs so you don't have to look at poor people.

speaker01 11:48:00

But another response to urban problems was politics, which in cities like New York became something of a contact sport. Another response was the sole carelle progressive movement. And in all these responses and in the issues that prompted them, urbanization, mechanization, capitalism, the distribution of resources throughout the social order, we can see modern industrial America taking shape. And that is the America we live in today. Thank you for watching I'll see you next week.

speaker01 12:12:00

Crash Course is produced and directed by Stan Muller, the script supervisor is Meredith Danko, the show is written by my high school history teacher, Raoul Meyer, rosiana Rojas, and myself, our associate producer is Danica Johnson, and our graphics team is Thought Cafe. Every week there's a new captain for the Liberties, if you'd like to suggest when you can do so in comments where you can also ask questions about today's video that will be answered by our team of historians. Thank you for watching Crash Course and as we say in my hometown, don't forget to be awesome.