6.9 Responses to Immigration in the Gilded Age

Gilded Age Immigration Quick Writes

Directions: Complete the prompts below each source. As you read, make sure that you are considering the question below. At the end of this activity, you will be asked to draw on evidence from the documents to support a claim.

Why did tensions exist between immigrants and nativists from 1880 to 1925?

Document A: Puck Magazine, April 1880

Document B: James Bryce, The American Commonwealth, 1888

For the United States the practice has the double advantage of supplying a volume of cheap unskilled labor when employment is brisk and of removing it when employment becomes slack, so that the number of the unemployed, often very large when a financial crisis has brought bad times, is rapidly reduced, and there is more work for the permanently settled part of the laboring class. It is easier to go backwards and forwards, because two thirds among all the races except the Jews, are men, either unmarried youths or persons who have left their wives behind.

The purpose of this document was… ________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Document C: National People’s Party platform, 1892, Expression of Sentiments

We condemn the fallacy of protecting American labor under the present system, which opens our ports to the pauper and criminal classes of the world and crowds out our wage-earners; and we denounce the present ineffective laws against contract labor, and demand the further restriction of undesirable emigration.

I think the National People’s Party was feeling _________________ because…

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Document D: Report of the Commissioner General of Immigration, 1908

In order that the best results might follow from an enforcement of the regulations, an understanding was reached with Japan that the existing policy of discouraging emigration of its subjects of the laboring classes to continental United States should continue, and should, by co-operation with the governments, be made as effective as possible.

What outside information do I remember about Japanese immigration?

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How might this outside information be connected to this document?

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Document E: Madison Grant, The Passing of the Great Race, 1918

Whatever may be its intellectual, its literary, its artistic or its musical aptitudes as compared with other races, the Anglo-Saxon branch of the Nordic race is again showing itself to be that upon which the nation must chiefly depend for leadership, for courage, for loyalty, for unity and harmony of action, for self-sacrifice and devotion to an ideal. Not that members of other races are doing their part, many of them are, but in no other human stock which has come to this country is there dispatched the unanimity of heart, mind, and action which is now being displayed by the descendants of the blue-eyed, fair-haired peoples of the north of Europe.

• Social Darwinism Applying the concept of "survival of the fittest" to human society to justify racism and inequality.

• Eugenics The attempt to "improve" the human race by controlling who is allowed to have children.

• White Man’s Burden The colonial belief that white people had a moral duty to rule over and "civilize" non-white nations.

  
  

This document best represents a variety of ideologies. (Social darwinism, eugenics, white man’s burden). Underline or circle any textual evidence that demonstrates these ideologies.

Document F: Democracy Doesn’t Breed that Kind, Des Moines Register, June 1919

Documents _____ and ______ were similar because….

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Document ______ helps describe the historical context of the time period because…

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Tensions existed between immigrants and nativists.  This is evident in documents ______ and ______ because….

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