Life in America. Enclaves, Tenements, and Assimilation

Transcription

1 Life in America Enclaves, Tenements, and Assimilation

2 If you moved to a new country as an immigrant, what would you look for as a source of comfort?

3 Ethnic Neighborhoods Ethnic neighborhoods helped immigrants adjust to life in America Many came from peasant backgrounds to northeastern cities (big change from rural villages) Ethnic communities provided help everyone spoke the same language and had the same cultural traditions (newspapers, foods, businesses) Help Americanize people older immigrants served as mentors to help new immigrants find jobs and homes, and learn the language Ethnic institutions like churches, businesses, entertainment, newspapers, etc. all helped immigrants feel at home in their new country.

4 Like Boston s historically Italian North End and Chinatown, most cities had similar ethnic neighborhoods, where groups of immigrants from one nation clustered together.

5 Tenement Living The plaster was always falling down, the stairs were broken and dirty. Five times that winter the water pipes froze, and floods spurted from the plumbing, and dripped from the ceilings. There was no drinking water in the tenement for days. The women had to put on their shawls and hunt in the street for water. Up and down the stairs they groaned, lugging pails of water.

6

7 Some tenants set out hunting for other flats, but could find none. The cheap ones were always occupied, the better flats were too dear. Besides, it wasn t easy to move; it cost money, and it meant leaving one s old neighbors. The tenements are the same everywhere, the landlords, the same, said a woman.

8 Jacob Riis, How the Other Half Lives (1890) As a police reporter for the New York Tribune, Jacob Riis wrote about social and economic conditions in New York City's Lower East Side. Riis set up an office in Mulberry Bend, a tenement neighborhood across from police headquarters. Each day he traveled through the neighborhood, witnessing firsthand the cramped, dirty quarters and inadequate sanitation. The stories Riis wrote emphasized the humanity of the tenement population. While his commentary was often harsh, his ultimate goal was to depict the poor as a group capable of responding favorably to reform efforts. An emerging theme of his writings was that the poor were not immoral by nature, but, rather, were products of the environment in which they lived.

9 Riis goal: to improve NYC s tenements by the creation of new laws, by remodeling and making the most out of the old houses, by building new, model tenements.

10

11 Bohemian Cigar Makers in Tenement Italian Ragpicker and her Baby Bandit s Roost Necktie Workshop in a Division Street Tenement

12 Here, too, shunning the light, skulks the unclean beast of dishonest idleness. "The Bend" is the home of the tramp as well as the rag-picker. Baxter Street in Mulberry Bend

13 The truth is that pauperism grows in the tenements as naturally as weeds in a garden lot. - Church Street Tenement Children s Playground

14 Basement Pub Five Cents Lodging Blind Beggar A Peddler

15 Men s Lodging House A Plank for a Bed Street Arabs Women s Lodging House

16 Waiting for Lodging With the first hot nights in June police dispatches, that record the killing of men and women by rolling off roofs and window-sills while asleep, announce that the time of greatest suffering among the poor is at hand. It is in hot weather, when life indoors is wellnigh unbearable with cooking, sleeping, and working, all crowded into the small rooms together, that the tenement expands, reckless of all restraint.

17 Americanization Americanization: to make or become American in character; assimilate to the customs and institutions of the U.S., to bring under American influence or control. (The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, 4 th Edition, Houghton Mifflin Company, 2006)

18 Most Americans at the turn of the new century believed that the nation's public schools could play a decisive role in helping to assimilate the new immigrants into America's social and political mainstream. This confidence was expressed by a New York City high-school principal, who proclaimed in 1902 that "Education will solve every problem of our national life, even that of assimilating our foreign element. Americanization programs were supported by both employers and the government and run by local boards of education. They emphasized one s role as a responsible citizen and a loyal, efficient worker.

19

20 Classes included instruction on English, American history & civics, homemaking, personal hygiene, and vocational training. Goal: to convey an understanding of the English language & a set of appropriately American values. Classes were operated in night schools, factories, community centers, mother s programs. Settlement houses, YMCAs, churches, and patriotic & fraternal groups also sponsored their own programs.

21 Pressure on immigrants to assimilate was tremendous and extended to all areas of life including the workplace. (Some immigrants were required to take English classes as part of their job placement.) Women were seen as the ones who would pass on American culture to their families, so organizations established classes to teach women American homemaking skills. Cooking classes taught immigrant women how to cook American style and promoted certain vegetables as American while others were labeled foreign. Programs for children included opportunities to play that taught them how to go grocery shopping, American games and music, and took them on outings.

22 Some cities sponsored patriotic pageants where thousands of immigrants publicly swore their allegiance (part of a push for 100% Americanism. )

23 Into the Melting Pot The melting pot: a metaphor for American society s ability to assimilate a wildly heterogeneous population into a single, unified American people. As immigration rates surged in the late 19 th - early 20 th centuries, many native-born Americans began to worry that the "new immigrants" (from SE & E Europe) might be unable to assimilate. The melting pot was vital to those who wanted to maintain American culture against the foreign threat.

24 Henry Ford, whose auto plants employed immigrant workers from every corner of Europe, was such a firm believer in the melting pot that he literally built one. Ford, who once declared that "these men of many nations must be taught American ways, the English language, and the right way to live," forced his immigrant workers to attend lengthy "Americanization" courses, in which they were schooled in the English language and Ford's own conservative ideology. Ford's giant melting pot a twenty-foot tall crucible fashioned of wood, canvas, and papier-mâché served as the centerpiece for his Americanization School's graduation ceremony. In this ornate pageant, workers clad in outlandish versions of their home countries' native costumes descended into the giant pot, only to climb out the other side wearing modern business suits and waving tiny American flags while singing "The Star-Spangled Banner." Ford hoped that his literal demonstration of the melting pot's power would "impress upon these men that they are, or should be, Americans, and that former racial, national, and linguistic differences are to be forgotten."

25 While Henry Ford's melting-pot pageantry might have seemed utterly benign, his company's Americanization program had a harder edge. The company's Sociological Department paid investigators to monitor the home lives of workers; any Ford employee who failed to maintain a middle-class American lifestyle that met Ford's standards could lose his job.

26 Despite attempts to Americanize immigrants, many immigrants were not reached by these schools for Americanization. In Chicago, for example, even at the movement s height in 1922, no more than 25,000 of the city s 300,000 immigrants participated in formal Americanization programs. Many immigrants became acculturated through informal contact at work, in the saloon, through movies or radio, or, in the case of children, in the city s streets, alleys, and playgrounds and parks. How were these programs received? Some immigrants were indifferent to the efforts to assimilate them. Others, like Italians, were distrustful of programs that promised handouts and instead relied on their families, relatives, and mutual aid societies to help the needy. For the most part, immigrants wanted to learn English which resulted in a shortage of English night classes. Immigrants also responded creatively to the challenges that they faced in America. They adopted certain American traditions, dropped some of their own, and combined others.

27 Charity Organization Societies: wanted to reform charity by ensuring that paid agents investigated the worthiness of the poor before distributing aid. Believed un unregulated and unsupervised relief caused rather than cured poverty Sent a volunteer friendly visitor to homes to offer advice and oversee the family s progress. These volunteers kept files on families and during their visits, advised families on how to live, how to raise their kids, and what to eat. Interfered with immigrants lives & imposed their middle-class standards/values on the poor

28 Settlement Houses A less coercive manifestation of the melting pot could be found in Chicago, where a Progressive reformer named Jane Addams transformed Hull House an abandoned old mansion in a working-class immigrant neighborhood into the nation's preeminent settlement house. Addams declared the settlement's primary mission to be to "help the foreign-born conserve whatever of value their past life contained and to bring them into contact with a better class of Americans."

29 Hull House The immigrants who lived in the surrounding neighborhoods especially the women embraced Hull House. It eventually occupied 13 buildings covering a full city block, housed 70 live-in settlement workers, and even included an on-site art gallery, gymnasium, theatre, and coffeehouse. Jane Addams believed that assimilation to American cultural norms was more likely to be achieved through outreach and uplift than through coercion and enforcement. Hull House became one of the nation's largest social service providers. It benefited the thousands of mostly immigrant women who utilized their services, making the transition to America that much easier.

30

31 Hull House There are now 47 evening classes meeting at the House weekly, twenty-five evening clubs for adults, seventeen afternoon clubs for children, the Hull-House Music School, a choral society for adults, a children's chorus, a children's sewing school, a training school for kindergartners, a trades union for young women. In daily use are the nursery, the kindergarten, the playground, the penny provident bank, an employment bureau, a sub-station of the Chicago post office. A trained nurse reports to the house every morning and noon, to take charge of the sick-calls for the neighborhood; a kindergartner visits daily sick and crippled children. The coffeehouse serves an average of 250 meals daily, and furnishes noonday lunches to a number of women's clubs; soups and broths and wholesome food are bought by neighbors from its kitchen, and bread from its bakery, adorned with the label of the bakers' unions, goes out to the Lewis Institute, to grocery stores, to neighbors' tables. Life in a Social Settlement Hull House, Chicago Article by Alzina Parsons Stephens, March