American History - Part 130 - Immigration in the 1880s

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Cloth factories in Fall River, Massachusetts, were filled with young men from Lancashire, England. Most of the workers in the shipyards of San Francisco were from Scotland. Many of the coal miners in America were men from the British mines in Wales. Many were farmers who came to America because they could get land for nothing. They could build new farms for themselves in the rich land of the American west. One of the best-liked songs in Britain then was a song about the better life in America. Its name: "To The West." Its words helped many men decide to make the move to America. "To the West, to the West, to the land of the free Where mighty Missouri rolls down to the sea; Where a man is a man if he's willing to toil. And the poorest may harvest the fruits of the soil. Where the young may exult and the aged may rest, Away, far away, to the land of the west." To another group of immigrants, America was the last hope. Ireland in the eighteen forties suffered one crop failure after another. Hungry men had to leave. In eighteen fifty alone, more than one hundred seventeen thousand people came to the United States from Ireland. Most had no money and little education. To those men and women, America was a magic name. As the years passed, fewer people were moving to America for a better job. Most were coming now for any job at all. Work was hard to find in any of the cities in Europe. In the next ten years, millions of people made the move from Britain, Germany, and the Scandinavian countries. But then, as industry in those countries grew larger, and more jobs opened, the flood of immigration began to slow. The immigrants now were coming from southern and eastern Europe. Anti-Jewish feeling swept Russia and Poland. Violence against Jews caused many of them to move to America. In the late eighteen eighties, cholera spread through much of southern Italy. Fear of the disease led many families to leave for the United States. Others left when their governments began building up strong armies. Young men who did not want to be soldiers often escaped by moving to America. Big armies were costly, and many people left because they did not want to pay the high taxes. Whatever the reason, people continued to emigrate to the United States. These new immigrants were not like those who came earlier. These new immigrants had no skills. Most were unable to read or write. Factory owners found that these eastern and southern Europeans were hard workers. They did not protest because the work was hard and the pay was low. They did not demand better working conditions. They did not join unions or strike. Factory owners began to replace higher-paid American and British workers with the new immigrants. Business leaders wanted more of the new workers. They urged the immigrants to write letters to their friends and relatives in the old country. "Tell them to come to America, that there are plenty of jobs." Letters from America brought many more immigrants. The big steamship companies also helped industry to get more of the new workers. They paid thousands of agents throughout Europe to sell tickets for the trip to America. Their efforts meant that steamships bringing grain to Europe could return to America filled with immigrants. They came by the hundreds of thousands. People of all religions, from all across Europe. Many remained in New York and other eastern cities. But many others moved westward. They took jobs in the steel factories of Pennsylvania and the coal mines of West Virginia. They worked in the lumber camps of Michigan and in the stockyards and meat-packing plants of Chicago. Within a few years, foreign-born workers held most of the unskilled jobs in many American industries. American workers began to protest. They demanded an end to the flood of immigration. That will be our story in the next program of THE MAKING OF A NATION