October 8, 2025 • 20 mins
On this episode of Our American Stories, in the 35th episode of our Story of America series, Hillsdale College professor and Land of Hope author Bill McClay tells the story of how America shifted from the rhythms of the countryside to the pace of the city. Factories, streetcars, and crowded neighborhoods brought both opportunity and hardship, reshaping daily life for millions. As McClay explains, immigration and industry created a faster, less familiar America—one that still shapes the way we live today.
Support the show (https://www.ouramericanstories.com/donate)
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:10):
This is Lee Habib and this is our American stories.
Up next to the Story of Us, the Story of
America series with Hillsdale College professor and author of Land
of Hope Bill McLay. After the Civil War, America was
a nation.
Speaker 2 (00:27):
On the move and growing rapidly. Let's get into the story.
Here's Bill.
Speaker 3 (00:45):
The Industrial Revolution is something unrivaled, unprecedented in the ways
it transformed American life. The fact is, for most of
our history of the American people have been a rural
people with a particular.
Speaker 2 (00:59):
And found distrust of cities.
Speaker 3 (01:03):
There were at the dawn of the nineteenth century only
six cities in the entire country with a population of
over eight thousand people. These numbers barely qualify for city
status by almost any measure.
Speaker 2 (01:17):
And that was in a nation of nearly five million people.
It was agriculture.
Speaker 3 (01:23):
Agriculture that dominated the lives of Americans. Agricultural life was
seen as a morally superior way of life.
Speaker 2 (01:32):
This wasn't of you, taken only by farmers.
Speaker 3 (01:35):
It was taken by men like Thomas Jefferson, who praised
those who labor in the earth. The mobs of great
cities had just so much as a support of pure government,
as sores do to the strength of the human body.
A harsh assessment from the men who drafted our nation's
declaration of independence. And it might be added a man
(01:57):
who loved the city of Paris. His fellow Virginian, a
man who would come to be known as the indispensable American,
had similar thoughts. Here's just one short statement by George
Washington on urban life. The tumultuous populace of large cities
are ever to be dreaded. These opinions are not only
(02:20):
held by Virginians. John Adams, a Bostonian, Here's what he said,
in the present state of society and manners in America,
with the people living chiefly by agriculture, in small numbers
sprinkled over large packs of land, they are not subject
to those panics and transports, those.
Speaker 2 (02:39):
Contagions of madness and folly.
Speaker 3 (02:42):
Which are seen in the countries where large numbers live
in small places. The fact is, the urban way of
life did not come naturally or easily to America, but
when it came, it came quickly with remarkable speed. By
eighteen ninety, the nation's urban popular would explode from a
mere three percent to thirty three percent. The nation's total
(03:05):
population grew by twelve times, and the cities had grown
even faster. By the year nineteen hundred, there were six
cities with a population of more.
Speaker 2 (03:14):
Than five hundred thousand. Now you're talking about a city.
Speaker 3 (03:18):
An unimaginable number and unimaginable size and scale.
Speaker 2 (03:22):
Just ninety years after the.
Speaker 3 (03:25):
City of Chicago experienced unfathomable growth. In eighteen fifty, the
city had a population of thirty thousand. By eighteen seventy,
that number had skyrocketed to three hundred thousand, and despite
a devastating fire that wiped out a third of the
city in eighteen seventy one, the Windy City's population would
catapult to one point one million.
Speaker 2 (03:48):
In eighteen ninety. Wow.
Speaker 3 (03:51):
This is amazing, astonishing growth by any measure of the imagination.
But American cities didn't just get bigger. There is cential
character and nature changed too. Prior to the eighteen seventies,
most American cities were what we would call walking cities.
Speaker 2 (04:08):
Homes and churches and businesses.
Speaker 3 (04:10):
Were all packed together close together, an especially important feature
for business and work, but also for life outside of work.
After eighteen seventy, city life change in profound ways. As
the cities grew larger geographically, populations were separated by class,
with the poorest neighborhoods in the innercore surrounded by wealthy
(04:33):
areas developed in the outer regions of the city. For
many people, this transformation had negative side effects for city living.
The wealthy could retreat to the outskirts. The poor were
crowded into tenement buildings designed to maximize inhabitant space, but
(04:57):
was drove unhealthy living condition, fire hazards. Indeed, infectious diseases
such as tuberculosis and the measles ravaged the urban cores,
and criminal gangs can equally ugly effects. And that's not
counting atrocious public sanitation, with many public spaces relying on
(05:18):
cesspools rather than sewage systems, all of which wregged havoc
on local water supplies. The withy journalist hl Men could
once described summer in Baltimore as smelling like a billion
pole cats, and he wasn't much exaggerating. This is why
anyone who could afford to get out of the urban
core did just that.
Speaker 2 (05:43):
There were other problems.
Speaker 3 (05:44):
Lurking in the urban core, most noticeably in the stark
decline of workplace standards, The sixty hour workweek had become routine,
and dangerous conditions prevailed at many factories and workplaces in
our urban centers. How bad were things In nineteen thirteen alone,
there was an unimaginable twenty five thousand workplace fatalities in
(06:07):
America best and then there was a disgraceful use of
children in the workplace. In eighteen eighty, nearly one and
six children in the country were working full time jobs.
Speaker 2 (06:18):
That's nearly twenty percent.
Speaker 3 (06:20):
Even under the very best management and optimal conditions, a
modern factory was a terribly inhuman and unsafe place to work.
The pressure of working under the clock continually, with some
called the tyranny of the clock, and the never ending
monotony of performing highly repetitive tests had little in common
with the type of work and workmanship found in smaller,
(06:43):
less scaled workplaces, and even less in common with the
work and working conditions of country life.
Speaker 2 (06:50):
Of rural life. Steel mills, for instance, never shut down.
Speaker 3 (06:56):
They had to be operated twenty four hours a day
to recoup their investment for shareholders and produce a profit.
The fact is the extreme scale of new industries and
the concentration of power that went with them came at
a real human cost, a profound cost. The best tool
(07:19):
available for workers to improve their working life was unionization.
A union allowed workers to get together and organize and
negotiate as a group rather than as random and siloed individuals,
and their biggest weapon was the withholding of their labor
a strike. Americans until this time were generally hesitant to
(07:44):
join the unions for many reasons. Individualists ran through the
character of the American nation, practically embedded in our DNA.
Workers also tended to see their working class status as temporary,
always hoping through their own effort and merit, to rise
above their station, to rise into the middle class.
Speaker 2 (08:07):
And even beyond.
Speaker 3 (08:09):
There were also ethnic and racial tensions on the workfront,
especially as more and more immigrants poured into the cities
and into city factories. It made organizing as a single
cohesive unit that much more difficult. There were some early
union successes, and those successes were of skilled workers union
(08:30):
craft unions. These skilled workers were easier to organize, and
under the charismatic leadership of Samuel Gompers, the American Federation
of Labor the aff L was able to help those
skilled workers with issues that range from growing wages to
shortening work weeks, and to improve safety conditions.
Speaker 2 (08:50):
On the job. But for the large and growing pool
of unskilled workers, there was no group like the AFA L,
no group that had managed to successfully.
Speaker 3 (09:04):
Organize them, no Samuel Gompers to represent them.
Speaker 1 (09:17):
The Story of America series continues the story of Us,
(09:39):
and we returned to our American stories and our Story
of America series with Professor Bill McLay of Hillsdale College.
When we last left off, Bill was telling us about
the pitfalls of the Industrial Revolution and how Americans struggled
to make sense with a massive changes going on around them.
Speaker 2 (09:59):
Let's return the story.
Speaker 3 (10:01):
The massive influx of immigrants into American cities was a
very big part of the industrialization story, just as immigration
itself was a part of America's story. The idea that
our shores, our nation, would be a refuge of sorts, political, economic,
and religious states back to the Puritans, after all. But
(10:23):
this new wave of immigration was different than the.
Speaker 2 (10:28):
Fact is.
Speaker 3 (10:28):
Most American immigrants prior to the Industrial Revolution came from
Northern and Western Europe, with a majority having British heritage,
but post Civil War huge new waves of immigrants would
forever change American.
Speaker 2 (10:41):
And these waves were just that waves.
Speaker 3 (10:45):
Here are the numbers between eighteen eighty and nineteen twenty
and estimated twenty million new immigrants landed on our shores,
and many experts believe that number is actually quite a
bit higher. And this new wave of immigrants increasingly came
from Slavic, Latin, and Jewish backgrounds. Their religions were different,
(11:06):
as were their languages, customs, and political.
Speaker 2 (11:09):
Habits and understandings.
Speaker 3 (11:11):
Those differences would change the country in ways no one could.
Speaker 2 (11:15):
Possibly have predicted. One thing we do know are.
Speaker 3 (11:21):
The reason that these new waves of immigrants came to
escape poverty, to run from famine, to escape religious persecution.
Especially Jewish immigrants would experience violent programs, and they came
to escape political corruption or the collapse of governments too.
But millions also came for the sheer promise of our country.
(11:46):
Their relatives may have come before them, and they heard
firsthand not just about the promise of America, but real
life success stories. Soon, entire extended families would find their
way to the American Add to all of that, the
growing demand for fresh unskilled laborers from our growing industries
(12:08):
and in part growing to produce the goods and products
to feed and housing clothes. Not just America's growing population,
but the world.
Speaker 2 (12:16):
The promise of.
Speaker 3 (12:17):
Steady employment and the ability to move up, the ability
to raise your status in class and lifestyle, was a.
Speaker 2 (12:23):
Powerful lure, and millions came to do just that.
Speaker 3 (12:29):
They were, in a very profound and meaningful way, leaving
the old world for a new one, and that shock,
that radical adjustment was no easy thing. These immigrants were
not just moving from one country to another, They were
moving from.
Speaker 2 (12:44):
One era to another.
Speaker 3 (12:46):
They were, in a profound sense, time travelers, moving from
feudalism to modernity. They left behind all they knew and understood,
and behind a life that for centuries had essentially been
the same eking out a living as their parents and
(13:08):
grandparents and great grandparents had done. The drama of it all,
the sheer shock of it all, is hard to imagine.
The sheer courage it took to uproot yourself and your
family and everything you knew to improve your family's prospects
is perhaps the most impressive.
Speaker 2 (13:26):
Feature of these new waves of immigrants.
Speaker 3 (13:30):
They risked it all to make a better life for
the kids and grandkids at great sacrifice, enormous sacrifice, And
yet so did the Puritans, so did many previous immigrants.
In American history always has been an ACKed of boldness
and faith to immigrate. They persisted even through the very
(13:53):
worst of modern life and the problems of tenement life,
the disorder and decay of urban American life, disorder as
it all, must have been making epic long voyages to
our shore in the wholes of large.
Speaker 2 (14:07):
And small ships of mine.
Speaker 3 (14:11):
Once they made their way through their protocols of Ellis Island,
these legal immigrants would usually connect with their family or
friends those who'd come before them, gathering in ethnic neighborhoods,
famous neighborhoods like those in New York City. In Lower
Manhattan there was Little Italy and Chinatown. The parts of
(14:32):
Queens Still to this day you'll find high concentrations.
Speaker 2 (14:35):
Of Greek families.
Speaker 3 (14:37):
Brooklyn Spriton Beach is still predominantly Russian and has the
nickname Little Odessa. These neighborhoods would act as a kind
of staging space from which to launch lives, a bridge
between the old country and the new which helped to
blunt the cultural shock and ease the transition.
Speaker 2 (14:57):
From the old world.
Speaker 3 (14:59):
In short, these ethnic enclaves served a profound purpose, helping
these new immigrants grow accustomed, little by little to a
radically different way of life, cities filled with gigantic buildings
and loud street carts, and the blazing lights day and night,
the sights and sounds and smells of modern urban life.
(15:21):
But this ethnic separation also came with a cost, because
the very idea of America, the ideal of America was
out of a melting pod, and these new waves of
immigrants didn't melt quickly into the larger society. That separateness
was one of the reasons many of the new ethnic
groups were treated with suspicion, but their sheer numbers made
(15:44):
it all but impossible to ignore them.
Speaker 2 (15:47):
In eighteen ninety four out of five New Yorkers were
four and born four out of five.
Speaker 3 (15:56):
There were more Irish in America than in the largest
Irish city. Chicago had the largest Czechs population in the
world and had the second largest Polish population in the world,
second only to Poland's largest city, Warsaw. How would such
(16:18):
a wildly diverse population filled with such different cultures, in
languages and faiths become a cohesive whole.
Speaker 2 (16:26):
And a functioning America.
Speaker 3 (16:29):
It was a question many native born Americans asked themselves,
and some began to act on their questions and concerns,
calling to restrict immigration.
Speaker 2 (16:38):
And their motives were mixed.
Speaker 3 (16:42):
Many Americans felt their own jobs were being threatened by
the influx of cheaper immigrant labor. Others felt these new
waves of immigration were a threat to American culture, particularly
the ideal of American self reliance, and many distrusted the
largely Catholic.
Speaker 2 (16:58):
Population of the immigrants.
Speaker 3 (17:01):
Fearing that Catholic obedience to the Pope would make Catholics
unreliable citizens of the United States. Others believed in the
cultural inferiority of the Latin and Slavic immigrants as well.
Which is not to say that the entire American population
opposed immigration, far from it, but it is true to
(17:24):
say that there was a mounting desire in the land
to begin restricting immigration. What's clear looking back at this
moment in history is this the massive wave of immigration
that America experienced during that time cannot be properly understood
without understanding the massive changes that America was experiencing at
(17:46):
that time, and which propelled the waves of immigration in
the first place. These combined forces were bigger than any
one person or organization.
Speaker 2 (17:55):
Could possibly fathom, let alone control.
Speaker 3 (18:00):
There was something at once great and even magnificent, but
also terrifying about the speed of this economic and cultural transformation.
America was experiencing a force that uprooted the lives of
so many people but improved the lives of so many
Why else would so many more immigrants choose to come
(18:22):
with all the attendant risks if that were not the case.
This great unsettlement happened in a nation that was accustomed
to great unsettlements.
Speaker 2 (18:33):
Our nation was born as a result of many great.
Speaker 3 (18:36):
Unsettlements, including those that sailed from the Mayflower to the
Revolutionary War and the Civil War, and once landing on
our shores, is Topeville noted, Americans were constantly uprooted, moving
from one.
Speaker 2 (18:49):
Place to the next. The settlement of the West itself
was a great.
Speaker 3 (18:54):
Unsettlement of sorts, but we should never forget the real
human drama of it, all the losses that were born
for every gain. Even assimilation itself, when it worked and
when it was successful, came with a price.
Speaker 2 (19:10):
It came with a cost.
Speaker 3 (19:12):
A bitter sweet, if not bitter sigh. It's hard to
think of grandparents who took that great leap and that
great voyage only to watch their children and grandchildren grow
up and move away from them and be absorbed into
a culture they neither understood nor could fully enter into
(19:33):
without giving up a part of their essential identity. This
is where the term brutal bargain sprang from the price
that first generation of immigrants paid for their family's futures.
It is all inspiring as it is terrified, and.
Speaker 1 (19:52):
A terrific job on the production, editing and storytelling by
our own Monty Montgomery, and a special thanks to Professor
Bill McLay who teaches it hill Dale College and his
book Planned of Hope is just a terrific read. Go
to Amazon or the usual suspects and pick it up.
Another installment of the Story of Us the Story of
America series here on our American Stories
This is Lee Habib and this is our American stories.
Up next to the Story of Us, the Story of
America series with Hillsdale College professor and author of Land
of Hope Bill McLay. After the Civil War, America was
a nation.
Speaker 2 (00:27):
On the move and growing rapidly. Let's get into the story.
Here's Bill.
Speaker 3 (00:45):
The Industrial Revolution is something unrivaled, unprecedented in the ways
it transformed American life. The fact is, for most of
our history of the American people have been a rural
people with a particular.
Speaker 2 (00:59):
And found distrust of cities.
Speaker 3 (01:03):
There were at the dawn of the nineteenth century only
six cities in the entire country with a population of
over eight thousand people. These numbers barely qualify for city
status by almost any measure.
Speaker 2 (01:17):
And that was in a nation of nearly five million people.
It was agriculture.
Speaker 3 (01:23):
Agriculture that dominated the lives of Americans. Agricultural life was
seen as a morally superior way of life.
Speaker 2 (01:32):
This wasn't of you, taken only by farmers.
Speaker 3 (01:35):
It was taken by men like Thomas Jefferson, who praised
those who labor in the earth. The mobs of great
cities had just so much as a support of pure government,
as sores do to the strength of the human body.
A harsh assessment from the men who drafted our nation's
declaration of independence. And it might be added a man
(01:57):
who loved the city of Paris. His fellow Virginian, a
man who would come to be known as the indispensable American,
had similar thoughts. Here's just one short statement by George
Washington on urban life. The tumultuous populace of large cities
are ever to be dreaded. These opinions are not only
(02:20):
held by Virginians. John Adams, a Bostonian, Here's what he said,
in the present state of society and manners in America,
with the people living chiefly by agriculture, in small numbers
sprinkled over large packs of land, they are not subject
to those panics and transports, those.
Speaker 2 (02:39):
Contagions of madness and folly.
Speaker 3 (02:42):
Which are seen in the countries where large numbers live
in small places. The fact is, the urban way of
life did not come naturally or easily to America, but
when it came, it came quickly with remarkable speed. By
eighteen ninety, the nation's urban popular would explode from a
mere three percent to thirty three percent. The nation's total
(03:05):
population grew by twelve times, and the cities had grown
even faster. By the year nineteen hundred, there were six
cities with a population of more.
Speaker 2 (03:14):
Than five hundred thousand. Now you're talking about a city.
Speaker 3 (03:18):
An unimaginable number and unimaginable size and scale.
Speaker 2 (03:22):
Just ninety years after the.
Speaker 3 (03:25):
City of Chicago experienced unfathomable growth. In eighteen fifty, the
city had a population of thirty thousand. By eighteen seventy,
that number had skyrocketed to three hundred thousand, and despite
a devastating fire that wiped out a third of the
city in eighteen seventy one, the Windy City's population would
catapult to one point one million.
Speaker 2 (03:48):
In eighteen ninety. Wow.
Speaker 3 (03:51):
This is amazing, astonishing growth by any measure of the imagination.
But American cities didn't just get bigger. There is cential
character and nature changed too. Prior to the eighteen seventies,
most American cities were what we would call walking cities.
Speaker 2 (04:08):
Homes and churches and businesses.
Speaker 3 (04:10):
Were all packed together close together, an especially important feature
for business and work, but also for life outside of work.
After eighteen seventy, city life change in profound ways. As
the cities grew larger geographically, populations were separated by class,
with the poorest neighborhoods in the innercore surrounded by wealthy
(04:33):
areas developed in the outer regions of the city. For
many people, this transformation had negative side effects for city living.
The wealthy could retreat to the outskirts. The poor were
crowded into tenement buildings designed to maximize inhabitant space, but
(04:57):
was drove unhealthy living condition, fire hazards. Indeed, infectious diseases
such as tuberculosis and the measles ravaged the urban cores,
and criminal gangs can equally ugly effects. And that's not
counting atrocious public sanitation, with many public spaces relying on
(05:18):
cesspools rather than sewage systems, all of which wregged havoc
on local water supplies. The withy journalist hl Men could
once described summer in Baltimore as smelling like a billion
pole cats, and he wasn't much exaggerating. This is why
anyone who could afford to get out of the urban
core did just that.
Speaker 2 (05:43):
There were other problems.
Speaker 3 (05:44):
Lurking in the urban core, most noticeably in the stark
decline of workplace standards, The sixty hour workweek had become routine,
and dangerous conditions prevailed at many factories and workplaces in
our urban centers. How bad were things In nineteen thirteen alone,
there was an unimaginable twenty five thousand workplace fatalities in
(06:07):
America best and then there was a disgraceful use of
children in the workplace. In eighteen eighty, nearly one and
six children in the country were working full time jobs.
Speaker 2 (06:18):
That's nearly twenty percent.
Speaker 3 (06:20):
Even under the very best management and optimal conditions, a
modern factory was a terribly inhuman and unsafe place to work.
The pressure of working under the clock continually, with some
called the tyranny of the clock, and the never ending
monotony of performing highly repetitive tests had little in common
with the type of work and workmanship found in smaller,
(06:43):
less scaled workplaces, and even less in common with the
work and working conditions of country life.
Speaker 2 (06:50):
Of rural life. Steel mills, for instance, never shut down.
Speaker 3 (06:56):
They had to be operated twenty four hours a day
to recoup their investment for shareholders and produce a profit.
The fact is the extreme scale of new industries and
the concentration of power that went with them came at
a real human cost, a profound cost. The best tool
(07:19):
available for workers to improve their working life was unionization.
A union allowed workers to get together and organize and
negotiate as a group rather than as random and siloed individuals,
and their biggest weapon was the withholding of their labor
a strike. Americans until this time were generally hesitant to
(07:44):
join the unions for many reasons. Individualists ran through the
character of the American nation, practically embedded in our DNA.
Workers also tended to see their working class status as temporary,
always hoping through their own effort and merit, to rise
above their station, to rise into the middle class.
Speaker 2 (08:07):
And even beyond.
Speaker 3 (08:09):
There were also ethnic and racial tensions on the workfront,
especially as more and more immigrants poured into the cities
and into city factories. It made organizing as a single
cohesive unit that much more difficult. There were some early
union successes, and those successes were of skilled workers union
(08:30):
craft unions. These skilled workers were easier to organize, and
under the charismatic leadership of Samuel Gompers, the American Federation
of Labor the aff L was able to help those
skilled workers with issues that range from growing wages to
shortening work weeks, and to improve safety conditions.
Speaker 2 (08:50):
On the job. But for the large and growing pool
of unskilled workers, there was no group like the AFA L,
no group that had managed to successfully.
Speaker 3 (09:04):
Organize them, no Samuel Gompers to represent them.
Speaker 1 (09:17):
The Story of America series continues the story of Us,
(09:39):
and we returned to our American stories and our Story
of America series with Professor Bill McLay of Hillsdale College.
When we last left off, Bill was telling us about
the pitfalls of the Industrial Revolution and how Americans struggled
to make sense with a massive changes going on around them.
Speaker 2 (09:59):
Let's return the story.
Speaker 3 (10:01):
The massive influx of immigrants into American cities was a
very big part of the industrialization story, just as immigration
itself was a part of America's story. The idea that
our shores, our nation, would be a refuge of sorts, political, economic,
and religious states back to the Puritans, after all. But
(10:23):
this new wave of immigration was different than the.
Speaker 2 (10:28):
Fact is.
Speaker 3 (10:28):
Most American immigrants prior to the Industrial Revolution came from
Northern and Western Europe, with a majority having British heritage,
but post Civil War huge new waves of immigrants would
forever change American.
Speaker 2 (10:41):
And these waves were just that waves.
Speaker 3 (10:45):
Here are the numbers between eighteen eighty and nineteen twenty
and estimated twenty million new immigrants landed on our shores,
and many experts believe that number is actually quite a
bit higher. And this new wave of immigrants increasingly came
from Slavic, Latin, and Jewish backgrounds. Their religions were different,
(11:06):
as were their languages, customs, and political.
Speaker 2 (11:09):
Habits and understandings.
Speaker 3 (11:11):
Those differences would change the country in ways no one could.
Speaker 2 (11:15):
Possibly have predicted. One thing we do know are.
Speaker 3 (11:21):
The reason that these new waves of immigrants came to
escape poverty, to run from famine, to escape religious persecution.
Especially Jewish immigrants would experience violent programs, and they came
to escape political corruption or the collapse of governments too.
But millions also came for the sheer promise of our country.
(11:46):
Their relatives may have come before them, and they heard
firsthand not just about the promise of America, but real
life success stories. Soon, entire extended families would find their
way to the American Add to all of that, the
growing demand for fresh unskilled laborers from our growing industries
(12:08):
and in part growing to produce the goods and products
to feed and housing clothes. Not just America's growing population,
but the world.
Speaker 2 (12:16):
The promise of.
Speaker 3 (12:17):
Steady employment and the ability to move up, the ability
to raise your status in class and lifestyle, was a.
Speaker 2 (12:23):
Powerful lure, and millions came to do just that.
Speaker 3 (12:29):
They were, in a very profound and meaningful way, leaving
the old world for a new one, and that shock,
that radical adjustment was no easy thing. These immigrants were
not just moving from one country to another, They were
moving from.
Speaker 2 (12:44):
One era to another.
Speaker 3 (12:46):
They were, in a profound sense, time travelers, moving from
feudalism to modernity. They left behind all they knew and understood,
and behind a life that for centuries had essentially been
the same eking out a living as their parents and
(13:08):
grandparents and great grandparents had done. The drama of it all,
the sheer shock of it all, is hard to imagine.
The sheer courage it took to uproot yourself and your
family and everything you knew to improve your family's prospects
is perhaps the most impressive.
Speaker 2 (13:26):
Feature of these new waves of immigrants.
Speaker 3 (13:30):
They risked it all to make a better life for
the kids and grandkids at great sacrifice, enormous sacrifice, And
yet so did the Puritans, so did many previous immigrants.
In American history always has been an ACKed of boldness
and faith to immigrate. They persisted even through the very
(13:53):
worst of modern life and the problems of tenement life,
the disorder and decay of urban American life, disorder as
it all, must have been making epic long voyages to
our shore in the wholes of large.
Speaker 2 (14:07):
And small ships of mine.
Speaker 3 (14:11):
Once they made their way through their protocols of Ellis Island,
these legal immigrants would usually connect with their family or
friends those who'd come before them, gathering in ethnic neighborhoods,
famous neighborhoods like those in New York City. In Lower
Manhattan there was Little Italy and Chinatown. The parts of
(14:32):
Queens Still to this day you'll find high concentrations.
Speaker 2 (14:35):
Of Greek families.
Speaker 3 (14:37):
Brooklyn Spriton Beach is still predominantly Russian and has the
nickname Little Odessa. These neighborhoods would act as a kind
of staging space from which to launch lives, a bridge
between the old country and the new which helped to
blunt the cultural shock and ease the transition.
Speaker 2 (14:57):
From the old world.
Speaker 3 (14:59):
In short, these ethnic enclaves served a profound purpose, helping
these new immigrants grow accustomed, little by little to a
radically different way of life, cities filled with gigantic buildings
and loud street carts, and the blazing lights day and night,
the sights and sounds and smells of modern urban life.
(15:21):
But this ethnic separation also came with a cost, because
the very idea of America, the ideal of America was
out of a melting pod, and these new waves of
immigrants didn't melt quickly into the larger society. That separateness
was one of the reasons many of the new ethnic
groups were treated with suspicion, but their sheer numbers made
(15:44):
it all but impossible to ignore them.
Speaker 2 (15:47):
In eighteen ninety four out of five New Yorkers were
four and born four out of five.
Speaker 3 (15:56):
There were more Irish in America than in the largest
Irish city. Chicago had the largest Czechs population in the
world and had the second largest Polish population in the world,
second only to Poland's largest city, Warsaw. How would such
(16:18):
a wildly diverse population filled with such different cultures, in
languages and faiths become a cohesive whole.
Speaker 2 (16:26):
And a functioning America.
Speaker 3 (16:29):
It was a question many native born Americans asked themselves,
and some began to act on their questions and concerns,
calling to restrict immigration.
Speaker 2 (16:38):
And their motives were mixed.
Speaker 3 (16:42):
Many Americans felt their own jobs were being threatened by
the influx of cheaper immigrant labor. Others felt these new
waves of immigration were a threat to American culture, particularly
the ideal of American self reliance, and many distrusted the
largely Catholic.
Speaker 2 (16:58):
Population of the immigrants.
Speaker 3 (17:01):
Fearing that Catholic obedience to the Pope would make Catholics
unreliable citizens of the United States. Others believed in the
cultural inferiority of the Latin and Slavic immigrants as well.
Which is not to say that the entire American population
opposed immigration, far from it, but it is true to
(17:24):
say that there was a mounting desire in the land
to begin restricting immigration. What's clear looking back at this
moment in history is this the massive wave of immigration
that America experienced during that time cannot be properly understood
without understanding the massive changes that America was experiencing at
(17:46):
that time, and which propelled the waves of immigration in
the first place. These combined forces were bigger than any
one person or organization.
Speaker 2 (17:55):
Could possibly fathom, let alone control.
Speaker 3 (18:00):
There was something at once great and even magnificent, but
also terrifying about the speed of this economic and cultural transformation.
America was experiencing a force that uprooted the lives of
so many people but improved the lives of so many
Why else would so many more immigrants choose to come
(18:22):
with all the attendant risks if that were not the case.
This great unsettlement happened in a nation that was accustomed
to great unsettlements.
Speaker 2 (18:33):
Our nation was born as a result of many great.
Speaker 3 (18:36):
Unsettlements, including those that sailed from the Mayflower to the
Revolutionary War and the Civil War, and once landing on
our shores, is Topeville noted, Americans were constantly uprooted, moving
from one.
Speaker 2 (18:49):
Place to the next. The settlement of the West itself
was a great.
Speaker 3 (18:54):
Unsettlement of sorts, but we should never forget the real
human drama of it, all the losses that were born
for every gain. Even assimilation itself, when it worked and
when it was successful, came with a price.
Speaker 2 (19:10):
It came with a cost.
Speaker 3 (19:12):
A bitter sweet, if not bitter sigh. It's hard to
think of grandparents who took that great leap and that
great voyage only to watch their children and grandchildren grow
up and move away from them and be absorbed into
a culture they neither understood nor could fully enter into
(19:33):
without giving up a part of their essential identity. This
is where the term brutal bargain sprang from the price
that first generation of immigrants paid for their family's futures.
It is all inspiring as it is terrified, and.
Speaker 1 (19:52):
A terrific job on the production, editing and storytelling by
our own Monty Montgomery, and a special thanks to Professor
Bill McLay who teaches it hill Dale College and his
book Planned of Hope is just a terrific read. Go
to Amazon or the usual suspects and pick it up.
Another installment of the Story of Us the Story of
America series here on our American Stories
Host
Lee Habeeb
Popular Podcasts
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com
The Joe Rogan Experience
The official podcast of comedian Joe Rogan.