To: Bread Upon The Water who wrote (246725 ) 3/10/2014 3:32:02 PM From: John Vosilla Read Replies (2) | Respond to Most today would be shocked if they really knew how 'whiteness' was classified in the united states a century ago.. Just a small taste here: Also starting around 1850 and continuing through the early twentieth century, both the size of the American population and immigration dramatically increased. From 1880 to 1930, between four and eight million new residents arrived in the United States per decade, during an era in which the total American population rose from 50 to 123 million. So the country more than doubled in size—and still immigration reached about 15 percent of the American population for many years in those decades. From 1900 through 1920, almost 40 percent of residents of New York City were foreign-born, and about the same proportion of whites (who comprised virtually all of the population) were children of immigrants. Nor was New York City unique; about three-quarters of the residents of other large cities such as Boston, Chicago, Cleveland, Providence, and Detroit were born outside the United States or were children of foreign-born parents. [152] The census’s increased attention to country of birth, mixed parentage, native tongue, and other features of immigration provided one resource for making sense of this reconfiguration of the nation. Not only were newcomers pouring into the nation, but also, as we have seen, they were coming from places perceived to be dangerously foreign. Chinese immigrants comprised 10% of the non-Indian population of California in 1870, and they were followed by workers and migrants from other Asian nations and from ambiguously classified countries such as Afghanistan or Iran. Mexicans increasingly migrated across the southwestern border to work in agriculture, railroad construction, and nascent industries. The apparent threat from Chinese, and later Japanese and other Asians, was ruthlessly dealt with. But the “beaten men from beaten races” of southern and eastern Europe were a larger national issue. In 1850, most immigrants came from Great Britain, Ireland, and Germany; by 1910, a majority of the rapidly increasing population of immigrants were arriving from the Austro-Hungarian empire, Italy, and Russia. They were white, at least in the sense that they were not black or “Asiatic”—but only marginally and questionably so. Their capacity to work and bear children was undoubted; their ability to become good democratic citizens remained in severe doubt in the eyes of many native-born Americans. As Figure 1 shows, the Census Bureau was keeping very careful track of who was migrating to the United States from where in Europe, and at what pace; it developed new forms of statistical analysis and graphical display in order to show this information most clearly. scholar.harvard.edu
