Topics 6.8 and 6.9 Immigration, Urbanization, and Responses: the new immigration, the growth of cities, the rise of a middle class, and the nativist reaction between 1865 and 1898.

What this topic is asking

Topics 6.8 and 6.9 ask you to explain immigration and urbanization in the Gilded Age: the "new immigration" from southern and eastern Europe, the explosive growth and problems of cities, the rise of an urban middle class and the political machine, and the nativist reaction to the newcomers. The exam wants who the new immigrants were, how they reshaped the cities, and how native-born Americans responded, including the Chinese Exclusion Act.

The new immigration

The growth and strains of the city

Immigration and industry made the United States an urban nation. Cities grew at an astonishing rate, drawing immigrants from abroad and native-born Americans from the countryside. This growth created tenement slums, overcrowding, poor sanitation, and disease, but also new technologies, electric streetcars, skyscrapers, and mass transit, that made the modern city possible. A reform impulse responded to urban misery: settlement houses such as Jane Addams's Hull House (1889) offered services to the poor, anticipating the Progressive reform of Period 7. Cities also produced a growing middle class of office workers, managers, and professionals whose tastes and consumer culture reshaped American life.

The political machine

The nativist reaction

Mass immigration produced a powerful nativist backlash. Native-born Americans, especially workers fearing competition for jobs and wages, and Protestants alarmed by Catholic and Jewish newcomers, demanded restriction. Organizations such as the American Protective Association spread anti-Catholic fear, and reformers proposed literacy tests to keep immigrants out. The most consequential act was the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which barred Chinese laborers and denied them naturalization, the first major federal law to exclude an entire group by nationality. Nativism would intensify into the immigration restriction of the 1920s.

Worked example: arguing immigration transformed the cities

Try this

Q1. Name the 1882 federal law that barred Chinese laborers from immigrating. [Recall]

• Cue. The Chinese Exclusion Act, the first major federal law to exclude an entire group by nationality.

Q2. Explain how the political machine maintained its power in immigrant cities. [Short explanation]

• Cue. The machine provided immigrants with jobs, housing help, and other services that no other institution offered, and in return it collected their votes; this exchange let bosses such as those of Tammany Hall control city government, even as they enriched themselves through corruption.