Immigration: Face of America HTY-110

In the large cities the Germans are being driven out of the barbers’ shops by Italians and the Irish out of rude laboring employments. Germans take to shopkeeping, beer selling, and other better-paying occupations. Irish- men turn to salaried places as janitors or through their singularly keen political sense obtain offices under municipal government in the great cities. The South Russian immigrants go largely to the West as farmers, and the Turkish subjects become peddlers of fruit and cheap Oriental goods, which are being made here in great quantities. Englishmen take to factory work and shopkeeping. The Italian immigrants are doing so well that they now import their families and settle down, generally in the large cities, instead of returning to Italy as they were formerly wont to do. The Slavs of Austria find employment in the mines.

So far it cannot be said that the immigration offers any very serious drawbacks, although many bad elements enter with the good. Our population is now so large that it may be depended upon to neutralize even so tremen- dous a foreign element, broken as it is into so many unconnected parts, separated yet further by diversity of language. Whether in the coming years we shall be forced to render immigration more difficult in order to winnow more thoroughly the desirable from the

DIDYOUKNOW?

Muckrakers

The terrible working conditions of the millions of immi-

grants who came to America’s shores gave rise to critiques

of American capitalism in the late nineteenth and early

twentieth centuries. Prominent writers, such as Upton Sin-

clair and Jack London, wrote about difficult conditions for

immigrants and about the travails of the lower classes. Sin-

clair’s The Jungle was published in 1906 and exposed the

horrid conditions for workers at U.S. meatpacking plants

in Chicago through the story of an immigrant laborer,

Jurgis Rudkus. Similarly, journalistic pieces by Ida Tarbell,

who exposed Standard Oil Company, and Lincoln Steffen,

who wrote about corruption in big cities, and others,

earned these journalists the title ‘‘muckrakers’’ for raking

up muck on American capitalism (Howard Zinn, A Peo-

ple’s History of the United States, 1492–Present [New

York: Harper Collins, 1999], 322–323).

Italian immigrants sell bread from a cart on Mulberry Street in New York City, circa 1900, in this

image recorded by an unidentified photographer for the Byron Company, a commercial studio that

flourished in the city from 1892 to 1942. ‘‘Mulberry Bend,’’ at Mulberry Street’s southern end, was

New York City’s most densely populated Italian slum. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs

Division, LC-D401-13585.

Immigration

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EBSCO Publishing : eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 5/17/2015 2:47 AM via SAINT LEO UNIV AN: 280845 ; Kalaitzidis, Akis, Felsen, David, Cieslik, Thomas.; Immigration : A Documentary and Reference Guide Account: stleocol