3.1 Immigration, Urban Growth, and Tenement Life

Why immigration and the industrial city show up on this exam

CLEP History of the United States II spends a large share of its 1865–1914 questions on how the United States became an urban, multiethnic industrial society. That is not a side story to railroads and trusts. The same decades that built Carnegie mills and Rockefeller refineries packed New York, Chicago, Boston, and other ports with newcomers, rebuilt housing as stacked tenements, and taught urban political machines to convert groceries and jobs into votes. OpenExamPrep publishes independent study material for exam ID clep-history-us-2; it is not a College Board publication. Treat 1870–1900 as a closed window: the Great Migration of African Americans from the South to Northern industrial cities is a World War I–era development, often dated from about 1916. Do not drag it backward into Gilded Age city items.

Old immigration and new immigration

Textbook language still splits European inflows into two streams, and exam items love the contrast.

Old immigration, dominant before the 1880s, came mainly from northern and western Europe: Britain, Ireland, Germany, and Scandinavia. Many arrivals were Protestant; Irish Catholics were the large exception that already filled Eastern seaboard wards. A substantial share spoke English or entered skilled trades and Midwest farming. Irish famine migrants of the 1840s–1850s had urbanized port cities a generation earlier; Germans often moved inland to farms and crafts.

New immigration, surging after about 1880 and continuing past 1900, came from southern and eastern Europe—Italians, Poles, Russians, Hungarians, Greeks, and Slavic peoples—plus a growing Jewish exodus from the Russian Empire after the 1881 pogroms that followed the assassination of Tsar Alexander II. On the Pacific Coast, Chinese laborers (and, later in smaller numbers, Japanese migrants) formed a separate new stream that nativists racialized even more harshly than they did Italian or Jewish neighbors. New immigrants were more often Catholic, Jewish, or Orthodox; they clustered in industrial cities rather than on homestead farms; and they faced literacy, language, and religious suspicion that old-stock Americans packaged as patriotism.

Push factors included peasant land hunger, military conscription, religious persecution, and cheap steerage fares on steamships. Pull factors included factory wages, letters from earlier migrants (chain migration), and the reputation of the United States as a wage magnet even when the reality was a twelve-hour day in a mill or a garment loft.

By the 1890s the new stream was the majority of European arrivals in peak years, even though the depression after 1893 temporarily slowed the Atlantic crossing. Ethnic neighborhoods—Little Italy, Jewish Lower East Side blocks, Chinatowns, Polish parishes—were not accidents. They were labor markets, boarding networks, and language shelters. They also became the raw material for cartoon nativism and for machine politics that could deliver a ward on election day.

Those rounded Census figures are a teaching sketch, not a claim that the country was already majority-urban. The 1920 census is the usual marker for an urban majority. What 1870–1900 shows is acceleration: streetcar lines, elevated trains, the Brooklyn Bridge (1883), and steel-frame buildings stretched cities outward and upward while the poorest renters stayed in the dark core.

Ellis Island, Angel Island, and the federal gate

Until the 1890s, New York processed most Europeans at Castle Garden (the state's station, 1855–1890) and then a temporary barge office. Ellis Island opened in New York Harbor in 1892 as the federal government's showpiece inspection depot. Most steerage passengers received a medical glance and a legal interview measured in hours, not months. Cabin passengers in first and second class often cleared inspection aboard ship. Exam distractors that say Ellis Island imprisoned all immigrants for weeks are describing the exception, not the rule. A fire in 1897 destroyed the first wooden plant; the station reopened in 1900. Those logistics sit at the edge of this chapter, but they do not change the 1892 opening date.

Angel Island in San Francisco Bay is the comparison item writers use for Asian inflows. The island's dedicated immigration station opened in 1910—just after this chapter's 1900 end date—but it crystallized a West Coast system already running under Chinese exclusion: longer detentions, aggressive interrogation, and a presumption that Chinese applicants were trying to evade the 1882 ban. For 1870–1900, remember the policy core. Europeans generally met a processing queue at New York. Chinese migrants met a racial bar, enforced at Pacific ports well before Angel Island's barracks became famous.

Nativism and the Chinese Exclusion Act

Nativism is hostility to immigrants as a threat to jobs, wages, religion, or "racial" stock. In the 1880s–1890s it had two faces that exam stems sometimes mash together. Keep them distinct.

Against European Catholics and Jews, groups such as the American Protective Association (founded 1887) recycled older anti-Catholic politics. The Immigration Restriction League (1894), a Boston elite project, pushed a literacy test to slow southern and eastern European entry. Congress passed a literacy-test bill that President Grover Cleveland vetoed in 1897. A literacy test would not become law until 1917, outside this chapter. Do not date the national-origins quota system (1921/1924) to the Gilded Age.

Against Chinese workers, nativism became federal statute. California's Workingmen's Party, associated with Denis Kearney, blamed Chinese labor for wage cuts after the transcontinental railroad's completion. The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 barred Chinese laborers for ten years—the first major U.S. law to exclude a group by nationality. The Geary Act (1892) extended the ban and required Chinese residents to carry certificates of residence. Exclusion was later made "permanent" (1902) and not repealed until 1943. The Page Act (1875) had already restricted Chinese women under a moral-and-labor pretext. When an item asks for the first nationality-based exclusion of laborers, the 1882 act is the answer. When it asks which party machine welcomed European immigrants, do not confuse that urban story with West Coast exclusion.

The Foran Act (1885) banned imported contract labor, a different nativist-labor demand aimed at employers who prepaid European workers. It did not close the Atlantic. It did show how unions and nativists could share an enemy—the padrone or the agent—without sharing a program on Chinese exclusion or on Jewish refugees.

Tenement housing and How the Other Half Lives

Industrial cities grew faster than sewers, building codes, or daylight. Landlords subdivided 25-foot lots. New York's Tenement House Act of 1879 required air shafts, producing the dumbbell tenement: a building pinched in the middle so that a narrow shaft ran between neighboring walls. In theory the shaft brought air and light. In practice it collected garbage, carried fire and noise, and left interior rooms dark. Four families on a floor was common. Hall or yard toilets served dozens. Tuberculosis, diphtheria, and summer infant deaths tracked overcrowding. That is urbanization as lived experience, not as a skyline postcard.

Jacob Riis's How the Other Half Lives (1890) used flash photography and police-reporter prose to show Mulberry Bend and other Lower East Side blocks to a middle-class audience. This chapter previews Riis as evidence of tenement conditions. The political career of muckraking—magazine exposés, Progressive municipal reform, later tenement statutes—belongs to the next chapter. Do not turn every 1890 photograph into a 1906 Progressive coalition, and do not credit Riis with inventing a federal welfare state.

Machines as social services—and who was not yet in these cities

City governments in this era did not run modern welfare departments. Tammany Hall in New York and similar machines in Chicago, Boston, and elsewhere offered what the ward needed: a job on the docks or in street cleaning, a turkey at Christmas, help with a landlord or a naturalization paper. The price was the vote, often delivered as a bloc. Reformers called this corruption. Many immigrant families called it the only office that answered the door. Both descriptions can appear in a single exam stem. The historical point is the function, not a moral cartoon. Section 3.4 returns to Boss Tweed's graft; here the point is that machines were an immigrant social service in cities that lacked one.

Stay inside 1870–1900 for African American demography. The large majority of Black Americans still lived in the South as sharecroppers, wage hands, or residents of Southern towns under tightening Jim Crow. Northern cities had older free Black neighborhoods, and a trickle of migrants moved after Reconstruction collapsed, but the labeled Great Migration is not a Gilded Age event. Items that place a million Southern Black workers in Chicago steel mills in the 1880s are using the wrong war. Mexican American communities in the Southwest predated this chapter (the U.S.-Mexico War generation) and grew with railroads; they are part of the racial-and-ethnic map, not a substitute for the later Great Migration story.

Exam traps for this section

• Treating Irish famine migrants of the 1840s as new immigration. They are the old stream.
• Dating Angel Island's station to 1892 because Ellis Island opened that year. Ellis Island 1892; Angel Island station 1910.
• Crediting Chinese Exclusion to the 1924 National Origins Act.
• Calling Riis's 1890 book the start of the federal welfare state or of full Progressive muckraker politics.
• Importing the Great Migration into 1890 Chicago or Detroit.