Immigration, cities, and the West
Millions of immigrants transformed American cities, while settlers, railways, and the army transformed the West, at a devastating cost to Native nations.
The new immigration
Between 1880 and 1920, more than 20 million immigrants arrived, increasingly from Southern and Eastern Europe (Italy, Poland, Russia, Austria-Hungary), many of them Catholic or Jewish. Most entered through Ellis Island in New York Harbor, opened in 1892. Many worked in factories, mines, and construction.
Nativism and restriction
Many native-born Americans responded with nativism, hostility toward immigrants. The Chinese Exclusion Act (1882) was the first major federal law banning immigration by a specific nationality; it was not repealed until 1943. Later laws in the 1920s set national-origin quotas that sharply limited Southern and Eastern European immigration.
Urbanisation
Cities grew explosively; by 1920, more Americans lived in urban areas than rural ones for the first time. Crowded tenements had poor sanitation and frequent disease. Jacob Riis's photographs in How the Other Half Lives (1890) exposed slum conditions. Settlement houses, such as Jane Addams's Hull House in Chicago (1889), provided services to immigrants.
The Plains Wars
As settlers, miners, and railways moved west, the US Army fought Native nations of the Great Plains and West. In 1876, Lakota and Cheyenne forces defeated George Custer at the Little Bighorn. In 1890, US troops killed between about 150 and 300 Lakota men, women, and children at Wounded Knee, South Dakota, often seen as the end of armed resistance on the Plains.
Destruction of the bison and reservations
Commercial hunting slaughtered the bison, the basis of Plains Native economies, from tens of millions to only a few hundred by the late 1880s. Native nations were confined to reservations, often on poor land, and treaties were repeatedly broken, as when gold was found in the Black Hills, which the Treaty of Fort Laramie (1868) had guaranteed to the Lakota.
Assimilation policy
The Dawes Act (1887) broke up tribal lands into individual plots, with 'surplus' land sold to settlers; Native landholdings fell from about 138 million acres to 48 million by 1934. Boarding schools, such as Carlisle in Pennsylvania, separated children from families and forbade Native languages, aiming to 'kill the Indian, save the man'.
Farmers and the Populists
Western and Southern farmers faced falling crop prices, high railway rates, and debt. They organised the Grange and Farmers' Alliances and in 1892 formed the Populist (People's) Party, demanding railway regulation, a graduated income tax, direct election of senators, and coinage of silver to expand the money supply. Many of their ideas were later adopted.
Worked example
A Polish immigrant family arriving at Ellis Island in 1905 passes medical inspection, settles in a crowded Chicago tenement, and works in the meatpacking plants, perhaps visiting Hull House for English classes. Their story differs sharply from that of a Lakota family of the same era, confined to a reservation, losing land under the Dawes Act, and seeing their children sent to boarding school.
Key takeaways
Over 20 million immigrants arrived from 1880 to 1920, increasingly from Southern and Eastern Europe, mostly through Ellis Island. Nativism produced the Chinese Exclusion Act (1882) and later quotas. Cities grew rapidly, with harsh tenement conditions exposed by Riis and addressed by settlement houses. The Plains Wars, bison slaughter, broken treaties, the Dawes Act, and boarding schools devastated Native nations. Farmers formed the Populist Party.
Flashcard
Southern and Eastern Europeans, 1880-1920
Check your understanding
What was the main effect of the Dawes Act (1887) on Native nations?