Industrial Worker Fry

After the Civil War, during the late 1800s, the rise of the Industrial Revolution and the Gilded Age provided the means and demands for more work and more workers. Due to government actions, immigrations, labor unions and technological changes, the industry expanded in growth. The abundance of natural resources, an increase in labor supply and the role of government led to the high demands for more work and workers. However, as immigration helped by having a cheap, abundant labor source for businesses to use, and as the creation of labor unions sought to increase benefits and improve working conditions many began to see the shortcomings of all that was occurring. Labor Unions and Immigration both had momentous effects upon the industry worker. These two factors affected the daily lives of these industrial workers socially, economically as well as politically. The great migration of southern, central and eastern Europeans greatly impacted American industrial workers socially. The United States attracted these immigrants by promoting their need for laborers, people to settle to the West and by portraying the United States as a land of opportunity and freedom for all. Although there were an abundant number of immigrants flowing into the United States, these groups tended to be less educated, lived heavily in cities and populated the slums. They took any available jobs, which angered many American workers who were in need of money. This sparked a philosophy of nativism, which created this fear of the mass immigration integrating with the population and taking jobs away. Nativists feared that they would become outnumbered and feared the ideas of communism and anarchism that the immigrants brought with them thus blaming the new immigrants for the ills of the society. Native-born Americans began to stigmatize immigrants as racially different and inferior even when they were of the same race. In hopes for opportunity and freedom, immigration transpired, but due to