Name: Growth, Cities, and Immigration: Crash Course US History #25
Uploaded: 2016-09-18T04:24:18.000Z
Duration: 12 min 45 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Hi, I’m John Green, this is CrashCourse U.S. History and today we’re going to continue

our extensive look at American capitalism. Mr. Green, Mr. Green, I’m sorry are you

saying that I grow up to be a tool of the bourgeoisie…

Oh not just a tool of the bourgeoise, Me from the Past, but a card-carrying member of it.

I mean, you have employees whose labor you can exploit because you own the means of production,

which in your case includes a chalkboard, a video camera, a desk, and a xenophobic globe.

Meanwhile Stan, Danica, Raoul, and Meredith toil in crushing poverty--STAN, DID YOU WRITE

THIS PART? THESE ARE ALL LIES. CUE THE INTRO. intro

So, last week we saw how commercial farming transformed the American west and gave us

mythical cowboys and unfortunately not-so-mythical Indian reservations. Today we leave the sticks

and head for the cities--as so many Americans and immigrants have done throughout this nation’s

history. I mean we may like to imagine that the history

of America is all “Go west young man,” but in fact from Mark Twain to pretty much

every hipster in Brooklyn, it’s the opposite. So, population was growing everywhere in America

after 1850. Following a major economic downturn in the 1890s, farm prices made a comeback,

and that drew more and more people out west to take part in what would eventually be called

agriculture’s golden age. Although to be fair agriculture’s real golden

age was in like 3000 BCE when Mesopotamians were like, “Dude, if we planted these in

rows, we could have MORE OF IT THAN WE CAN EAT.”

So it was really more of a second golden age. But anyway, more than a million land claims

were filed under the Homestead Act in the 1890s. And between 1900 and 1910 the populations

of Texas and Oklahoma together increased by almost 2 million people.

And another 800,000 moved into Kansas, the Dakotas, and Nebraska. That’s right. People

moved to Nebraska. Sorry, I just hadn’t yet offended Nebraskans.

I’m looking to get through the list before the end of the year.

But one of the central reasons that so many people moved out west was that the demand

for agricultural products was increasing due to … the growth of cities.

In 1880, 20% of the American population lived in cities and there were 12 cities with a

population over 100,000 people. This rose to 18 cities in 1900 with the percentage of

urban dwellers rising to 38%. And by 1920, 68% of Americans lived in cities

and 26 cities had a population over 100,000. So in the 40 years around the turn of the

20th century, America became the world’s largest industrial power and went from being

predominantly rural to largely urban. This is, to use a technical historian term, a really

big deal. Because it didn’t just make cities possible,

but also their products. It’s no coincidence that while all this was happening, we were

getting cool stuff like electric lights and moving picture cameras. Neither of which were

invented by Thomas Edison. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but suddenly

there are a lot more photographs in Crash Course U.S. History b-roll.

So the city leading the way in this urban growth was New York, especially after Manhattan

was consolidated with Brooklyn (and the Bronx, Queens and Staten Island) in 1898.

At the turn of the century, the population of the 23 square miles of Manhattan Island

was over 2 million and the combined 5 boroughs had a population over 4 million.

But, while New York gets most of the attention in this time period, and all time periods

since, it wasn’t alone in experiencing massive growth. Like, my old hometown of Chicago,

after basically burning to the ground in 1871, became the second largest city in America

by the 1890s. Also, they reversed the flow of the freaking

Chicago River. Probably the second most impressive feat in Chicago at the time. The first being

that the Cubs won two World Series. Even though I’m sorely tempted to chalk

up the growth of these metropolises to a combination of better nutrition and a rise in skoodilypooping,

I’m going to have to bow to stupid historical accuracy and tell you that much of the growth

had to do with the phenomenon that this period is most known for: immigration.

Of course, by the end of the 19th century, immigration was not a new phenomenon in the

United States. After the first wave of colonization by English people, and Spanish people, and

other Europeans, there was a new wave of Scandinavians, French people, and especially the Irish.

Most of you probably know about the potato famine of the 1840s that led a million Irish

men and women to flee. If you don’t know about it, it was awful.

And the second largest wave of immigrants was made up of German speakers, including

a number of liberals who left after the abortive revolutions of 1848. Alright, let’s go to

the ThoughtBubble. The Irish had primarily been farmers in the

motherland, but in America, they tended to stay in cities, like New York and Boston.

Most of the men began their working lives as low-wage unskilled laborers, but over time

they came to have much more varied job opportunities. Irish immigrant women worked too, some in

factories or as domestic servants in the homes of the growing upper class.

Many women actually preferred the freedom that factory labor provided and one Irish

factory woman compared her life to that of a servant by saying:

“Our day is ten hours long, but when it’s done, it’s done, and we can do what we like

with the evenings. That’s what I’ve heard from every nice girl that’s tried service.

You’re never sure that your soul is your own except when you’re out of the house.”

[1] Most German speakers had been farmers in their

home countries and would remain farmers in the U.S., but a number of skilled artisans

also came. They tended to stay in cities and make a go of entrepreneurship. Bismarck himself

saw emigration from Germany as a good thing saying, “The better it goes for us, the

higher the volume of emigration.”[2] And that’s why we named a city in North

Dakota after him. Although enough German immigrants came to New York that the lower east side

of Manhattan came to be known for a time as Kleindeutschland (little Germany), many moved

to the growing cities of the Midwest like Cincinnati and St. Louis. Some of the most

famous German immigrants became brewers, and America is much richer for the arrival of

men like Frederick Pabst, Joseph Schlitz, and Adolphus Busch. And by richer, I mean

more drunker. Hey. Thanks for not ending on a downer, Thought

Bubble. I mean, unless you count alcoholism. So but by the 1890s, over half of the 3.5

million immigrants who came to our shores came from southern and eastern Europe, in

particular Italy and the Russian and Austro Hungarian empires.

They were more likely than previous immigrants to be Jewish or Catholic, and while almost

all of them were looking for work, many were also escaping political or religious persecution.

And by the 1890s they also had to face new “scientific” theories, which I’m putting

in air quotes to be clear because there was nothing scientific about them, which consigned

them to different “races” whose low level of civilization was fit only for certain kinds

of work and predisposed them to criminality. The Immigration Restriction League was founded

in Boston in 1894 and lobbied for national legislation that would limit the numbers of

immigrants, and one such law even passed Congress in 1897 only to be vetoed by President Grover

Cleveland. Good work, Grover! You know, his first name

was Stephen, but he called himself Grover. I would have made a different choice.

But before you get too excited about Grover Cleveland, Congress and the President were

able to agree on one group of immigrants to discriminate against: the Chinese.

Chinese immigrants, overwhelmingly male, had been coming to the United States, mostly to

the West, since the 1850s to work in mines and on the railroads. They were viewed with

suspicion because they looked different, spoke a different language, and they had “strange”

habits, like regular bathing. By the time the Chinese Exclusion Act went

into effect in 1882 there were 105,000 people of Chinese descent living in the United States,

mainly in cities on the West Coast. San Francisco refused to educate Asians until the state