Immigrants In The 19th Century

An outburst in growth of America's big city population, places of 100,000 people or more jumped from about 6 million to 14 million between 1880 and 1900, cities had become a world of newcomers (551). America evolved into a land of factories, corporate enterprise, and industrial worker and, the surge in immigration supplied their workers. In the latter half of the 19th century, continued industrialization and urbanization sparked an increasing demand for a larger and cheaper labor force. The country's transformation from a rural agricultural society into an urban industrial nation attracted immigrants worldwide. As free land and free labor disappeared and as capitalists dominated the economy, dramatic social, political, and economic tensions were created. Religion, labor, and race relations were questioned; populist and progressive thoughts were developed; social Darwinism and nativism movements were launched.
The influx of immigrants created availability for cheap labor, which in turn led to corrupt business practices, urban political machines, and "white slavery". To curtail these "evils" present in society, progressivism was developed. The goals of progressivism were simple: to decrease poverty levels, to establish local charities, to fight for social justice, and to bring back good government practices. Between 1870
Nativist had plagued up the supposed association of the immigrants with radicalism and labor unrest, charging the southern and eastern European Catholics and Jews as incapable of becoming true Americans. Acts were crated privileging older immigrant groups whose "national origins" were northern and western European at the expense of more recent southern and eastern Europeans (709). As extreme forms of nativism expanded, in the 1920 there was a revival of the Ku Klux Klan, an organization of racist group of southerners; "Native, white Protestant supremacy," they protested