Melting pot or salad bowl?

1.Immigration to the USA between 1880-1914:

a) A brief reminder of immigratin wave 1820-1860s
More than 75 percent of all the people in history who have ever left their homelands to live in another country have moved to the United States. Since the founding of Jamestown in 1607 more than 50 million people from other lands have made new homes there. Before 1840 and 1860 more immigrants than ever before arrived => because of poor crops, hunger and political unrest.
Primarily Irish and British immigrated to America during time period between 1820-1860.
-The Irish immigrated to America for several reasons, one of which was the potato famine that killed over a million. Along with this, they resented the British rule of their country, and the British landlords. This included the British Protestantism and British taxes.The Irish depended for food upon their crops of potatoes. For five years after 1845 these became diseased and rotted in the fields => great starvation. In 1847 alone more than 118 000 of them immigrated there. By 1860 one in every 4 of the people living in the city of New York had been born in Ireland. British: The reasons the British came to America are not nearly as detailed as the reasons for the Irish coming here. The British came to simply look for better opportunities of work. In general this immigrant wave brought people from Northern and Western Europe. German: During the Civil War in 1860s the federal government encouraged more emigration from Europe. It did this by offering land to immigrants who would serve as soldiers in the Union armies. Many had come from Germany. Today about 1 in 3 of all Americans have German ancestors. b) immigration in 1880-1914
Until about 1880 most immigrants to the US came from Northern and Western region of Europe. Then a big change took place. More immigrants from lands in the south and east of Europe began to arrive - Italians, Poles, Greeks, Russians, Hungarians, Czechs. By 1896 more than half of the immigrations entering US were from eastern or southern Europe. Northern and western Europeans continued to arrive, but the new wave brought more people from eastern and southern Europe, plus smaller contingents from Canada, Mexico and Japan. -Two-thirds of the newcomers who arrived in the 1880s were from Germany, England,
Ireland and Scandinavia;
-Between 1900 and 1909, two-thirds were from Italy, Austria-Hungary and Russia.

-By 1910 arrivals from Mexico were beginning to outnumber arrivals from Ireland and large numbers of Japanese had moved to the West Coast and Hawaii. Approximately 2/3 of the newcomers were males, especially after 1900 and about 2/3 were between the ages of 15 and 39. Not all groups were equally educated, but almost 3/4 of the immigrants could read and write at lest in their native languages. -The reason for immigration in this period is quite clear. Land remained plentiful, and fairly cheap. Jobs were abundant, and labor was scarce and relatively dear. A decline in the birthrate as well as an increase in industry and urbanization reinforced this situation. • Jews came for religious freedom
• Italians and Asians came for Work
• Russians came to escape persecution
• America had jobs
• America had religious freedom
• America was hyped up in many countries as "Land of Opportunity"

Jews: Many Jewish people came to the US at this time. In the 1880s Jews were being killed all over eastern Europe in bloody masacres called „pogroms“. Tsar Nicholas I created the Pale of Jewish Settlement in April 1835 -a limited geographical area where Jews were mandated to live. The Pale included Lithuania, Poland, the south-western provinces, and White Russia. Within the Pale, Jews were banned from most rural areas and some cities; they were prohibited from building synagogues near churches and using Hebrew in official documents; barred from agriculture, they earned a living as petty traders, middlemen, shopkeepers, peddlers, and artisans. The official view was that Jews were a parasitic element in the Russian Empire who lived off the hard earned wages of the narod [people].
Jews in Europe were seen by many as alien to the nation or the. The peasants in Russia viewed Jews as aliens; their religion, language, food, clothing, and manners were all different, strange, and mysterious—even the government discriminated against them. Russian bureaucrats believed that the teachings of Judaism itself lead Jews into unproductive, parasitical, and exploitative commercial activities. During the decade before the pogroms of 1881, a growing atmosphere of crisis surrounded the Jewish Question in Russia. Prompted by an increasingly militant Judeophobe press, Russian statesmen held their old prejudiced view of the Jews as a serious economic and social problem.
The assassination of Tsar Alexander II in 1881 threw the Russian government into chaos and directly preceded the first major outbreak of pogroms. A wave of pogroms spread throughout the southwestern regions, totaling 200 in 1881.

Approximately 40 Jews were killed, many times that number wounded, and hundreds of women raped. Regular pogrom outbreaks lasted until June 7, 1884, when the last pogrom of the series occurred in Nizhnii Novgorod; this pogrom was an exceptionally vicious one with its victims killed with axes and thrown from rooftops.
However, the worst anti-Jewish violence broke out in 1905, after Tsar Nicholas II was forced to sign the October Manifesto, creating a constitutional monarchy. More than 80 percent of the pogroms of 1905-1906 occurred in the 60 days following the release of the Manifesto.
-Between 1880 and 1925 about 2 million Jews entered the US. In the state of New York, for example, one person in ten is Jewish. Ellis Island: So many immigrants wanted to enter the US in the late 1800s that the government found it difficult to keep check on them. To control the situation it opened a special place of entry in New York Harbor. This place was called Ellis Island. All intending immigrants were examined there before they were allowed to enter the US. Ellis Island was opened in 1892. During its busiest times it dealt with almost 2000 immigrants a day. Between its opening and 1954, when it closed doors, more than 20 million people waited anxiously in halls and corridors. Since 1965, it has been part of the Statue of Liberty National Monument.(The Statue of Liberty was presented to the US in 1886. It was given by the people of France to mark the 100th anniversary of the War of Independence.)
Doctors examined them for disease. A letter chalked on their clothing - H for heart disease or E for eye disease- could end their hopes of new life in America. If diseased they were quarantined. Almost half of all present-day Americans have ancestors who entered the US by way of Ellis Island. - The way of live of immigrants: The new life of immigrants was a hard one. Often they couldn’t even speak the English language. Only a hardest and lowest paid jobs were open to them. They bulit railroads, worked on Rockefeller’s oil fields, or in factories. They lived in „slums“-very poor parts of cities. Estimation says that 300 000 people inhabited a single square mile on New York’s Lower East Side. Overcrowding, poor sanitation and lack of health services caused frequent epidemics. One of the most persistent shortcomings of American cities was thein failure to provide adequate housing for all who need it, population growth outsider housing supplies.

This situation struck most heavily working-class families who, had to rent thein Libiny quarters. It became common in many big cities for a „one family“ apartment to be occupied by two or three families. Inside many buildings, living condotions were harsh. Interior rooms often lacked windows. After discovering precious metals in the West, many people moved there. But also life in the West wasn’t easy. Women commonly did the same agricultural work as men. Lacking cookstoves, they had to prepare food over open fireplaces, using all kinds of substitutes for ingredients easily available back East. Before they could wash clothes, women had to make soap out of lye and carefully saved household ashes. Frontierswomen also had to defend their homes against prairie fires and Indian attacks. Women often gave birth without medical help or even the support of other women. c) The attitude of Americans and influence on religion:
This flood of immigration worried many Americans. They accused immigrants of taking jobs away from American-born workers, of lowering standards of health and education and of threatening the country’s tradition and way of life by bringing in „un-American “ political ideas like anarchism and communism. Workers feared that immigrant labor would drive salaries lower. Increasingly violent agitation against Orientals led to race riots in California and finally culminated in the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, Which denied Chinese laborers entrance to the country. Later the Japanes were also completely excluded. Religion: The influx of so many immigrants between 1870 and 1920 transformed the Us from a basically Protestant nation into one composed of Protestants, Catholics and Jews. Newcomers from Italy, Hungary, Poland and the present-day Czech Republic and Slovakia joined Irish and German to boost the proportion of Catholics in a number of cities. German and Russian immigrants gave New York one of the largest Jewish populations in the world. Many Catholics adn Jews tried to accommodate their faiths to the new environment. Some catholic and Jewish leaders from older, more established immigrant groups supported liberalizing trends- the use of English in sermons, the phasing-out of Old World rituals such as saints’feasts and a preference for public over religious schools. Eastern European Jews, convinced that Reform Judaism sacrificed too much to American ways, established the Conservative branch, which retained traditional ritual, though it abolished the segregation of women in synagogues and allowed English prayers. 2.

Is the USA a melting pot of nations or salad bowl?
In 1908 Israel Zangwill wrote a play, The Melting Pot. The hero, a refugee from persecution in Czarist Russia, escapes to the US. In the final scene he speaks with enthusiasm about the mixture of peoples in his new homeland. Zangwill’s play was a great success. It was comforting for Americans to be told that their country could turn the newcomers into Americans like themselves. In fact this never really happened. The Us turned out to be more a salad bowl than a melting pot. Groups from similar national and ethnic backgrounds often stayed together, keeping alive their old customs. ->Chinatowns, Little Italys (even toady).