THE HISTORY OF THE UNITED
STATES 1877-1945
SEMINAR 5
THE GOLDEN DOOR-THE NEW
IMMIGRATION
REVIEW QUESTIONS
• What factors made the American Industrial
Revolution possible?
• What was the symbol of the era and why?
• Name leading business figures or industrialists
• In what way can trusts develop?
• What were the foundations of the early
information systems?
MIX AND MATCH
• Which historical periods, or events can you
associate the following terms with?
• Sutter, Glidden, Muir, Custer,
• Wounded Knee, Sand Creek Massacre,
• railroads, Model T
• Ghost Dance Movement, mass production,
conservation movement, Little Big Horn,
American Industrial Revolution, Gold Rush,
barbed wire, Indian wars and treaties,
THE GOLDEN DOOR
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1886: Statue of Liberty
Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breath free
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore
Send these, the homeless tempest-tossed to
me
• I lift my lamp beside the golden door (Emma
Lazarus, The New Colossus)
SOURCE ANALYSIS
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Why is the poem titled The New Colossus?
Explain: huddled, tempest-tossed,
Wretched refuse, teeming shore,
What does the golden door symbolize?
What is the message of the poem?
EXPLAIN
• They said in America the streets are paved
with gold, but when we arrived there were no
streets, we had to build them, we had to mine
the gold, and we had to do the paving….
• How is the myth and reality of immigration
conflicted in the quote?
• Myth: Statue of Liberty, reality: Ellis Island, the
hard conditions of immigrants, nativism
WAVES OF IMMIGRATION
• 1607-1787 Colonial period: WASP groups,
African slaves
• 1820-1860: Old Immigration: WASP, Mexicans,
Chinese
• 1880-1924: New Immigration, non-WASP,
Central, Eastern, Southern Europe
• 1945- : Latin America, Southeast Asia
JEWISH IMMIGRATION
• Colonial America: involved in trade and
commerce
• European roots
• Ashkenazi community: Holland, England
• Sephardic community: Spain, Portugal
• 1780-1850 Population growth
• Jews settle in Boston, Buffalo, Baltimore,
Cleveland, Chicago
IMMIGRATION AND INTEGRATION
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1881: Start of pogroms in Russia
(discrimination, anti-Jewish hysteria,)
In America: face anti-Semitism
1890s: 600,000 arrive Immigrants found a
haven instead of a home, their children turned
a haven into a home
• 1880-1925: 2 million Jews immigrate
• Reason: religious and political tolerance
MAIN FEATURES OF JEWISH
IMMIGRATION
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Successful immigrants—integration
Iconic figure: Jewish peddler
Strength of the family
Respect for tradition
Importance of education
Observation of religion
Value of hard work
ELLIS ISLAND
• From Liberty Island to Ellis Island
• Official entry point
• Reasons for refusal of entry: membership in
radical organizations, fear of prostitution
• Medical tests, fear of disease is also a cause
for exclusion
METAPHORS FOR AMERICAN CULTURE
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Melting pot
Salad bowl
Symphony
Rainbow
Kaleidoscope
MELTING POT
• Israel Zangwill: The Melting Pot (1908)
• America is God’s crucible
• The Great Melting Pot: where all the races of
Europe are melting and reforming. God is
making the American-fusion of all races, the
coming Superman
• National, cultural heritages are melted into a
new ”American identity”
• Madison Grant: The Passing of the Great Race
MELTING POT
• The dominant paradigm until the 1960s
• St. Jean de Crévecoeur: promiscuous breed: ”a mixture of English,
Scotch, Irish, French, Dutch, Germans, and Swedes” (1782)
• ”What then is the American, this new man? He is neither an
European, nor a descendant of an European; hence that strange
mixture of blood which you will find in no other country […] He is
an American, who, leaving behind him all his ancient prejudices and
manners, receives new ones from the new mode of life he has
embraced, the new government, he obeys, and the new rank he
holds. He becomes an American by being received in the broad lap
of our great Alma Mater. Here individuals of all nations are melted
into a new race of men, whose labours and posterity will one day
cause great changes in the world”
BEYOND THE MELTING POT
• ”The alien, who comes here from Europe is not
the raw material Americans suppose him to be.
He is not a blank sheet to be written on as you
see fit, he brings with him a deep-rooted
tradition, a system of culture, taste, and habits
that comes into conflict with America as soon as
he landed.” (Marcus Ravage Eli)
• Salad bowl, mosaic: groups with similar national
and ethnic backgrounds living side by side
preserving old identities, cultures, customs
(Chinatown, Little Italy)
BEYOND THE MELTING POT
• Other explanations: static, constant change is not
indicated
• Lawrence Fuchs: Kaleidoscope theory, reflecting
the dynamics of ethnicity: ”American ethnicity is
kaleidoscopic: complex and varied, changing
form, pattern, color… continually shifting from
one set of relations to another, rapidly changing”
• Virágos: a dynamic system entailing the
interaction of a primary core and several
secondary cores, parallel cultures
NATIVISM
• John Higham: opposition to aliens, their
institutions, ideas, a rejection of an internal
minority based on its foreign connections
• Three main currents:
• -anti-Catholicism 1830-1850s
• -fear of foreign radicals (post World War One
Red Scare)
• -racial nativism (based on Anglo-Saxon
superiority)
NATIVIST VOICES
• ”men of the sturdy stocks of the north of Europe
made up the main force of immigrants, but now
‘multitudes of men of the lowest class from the
south of Italy and men of the meaner sort out of
Hungary and Poland who had neither skill nor
energy nor an initiative of quick intelligence were
coming.” (Woodrow Wilson 1901)
• ”wide open and unguarded stand our gates, and
through them presses a wild, a motley throng,
who bring with them unknown gods and rites.”
(Thomas Bailey Aldrich 1892)
EXAMPLES OF NATIVISM
• Indian resistance to settlers
• William Bradford-mixed multitude
• Benjamin Franklin
-”Why should the Palatine Boors be suffered to
swarm into our Settlements?”
-”we have so fair and opportunity of increasing the
lovely white” (Observations Concerning the
Increase of Mankind)
• Know-Nothings (American Party)
IMMIGRATION RESTRICTION
• 1795: Citizenship restricted to whites
• 1798: Alien and Sedition Acts allow the
president to deport dangerous aliens
• 1808: Prohibition on slave trade
• 1850s : Know Nothing Party seeks restriction
on immigration
• 1882: Chinese Exclusion Act
IMMIGRATION RESTRICTION
• 1907: Gentlemen’s Agreement
• 1921: Emergency Quota Act Immigrant
admission is restricted to 3% of the total
representation of the given nationality
recorded by the 1910 census
• 1924: Johnson Reed Act limits annual
European immigration to 2 % of the total
representation of the given nationality
recorded by the 1890 census
MULTICULTURALISM TODAY
• David Hollinger: ethnic identities form into
Euro-America-Post-Ethnic America
• Erasure of diversity
• Declining significance of race, racial
oppression superseded by class oppression
(William J. Wilson)
MULTICULTURALISM TODAY
• Multiculturalism undermines the American
Creed
• Post 1960s, non-English speaking mass
immigration, dual identities
• ”If someone calls America a nation of
immigrants he forms lies from half truths.”
(Who are we?: Challenges to the American
Identity, Samuel P. Huntington 2005)