Immigration and Cultural Conflict

Cultural diversity was the result of a vast wave of immigration. Between 1840 and 1860, about 2 million Irish, 1.5 million Germans, and 750,000 Britons poured into the United States. The British migrants were primarily Protestants and relatively prosperous — trained professionals, propertied farmers, and skilled workers. Many German immigrants also came from propertied farming and artisan families and had sufficient resources to move to the midwestern states of Wisconsin, Iowa, and Missouri. Poorer Germans and most of the Irish settled in the Northeast, where by 1860 they numbered nearly one-third of white adults. Most immigrants avoided the South because they feared competition from enslaved workers.

Irish Poverty The poorest migrants, Irish peasants and laborers, were fleeing a famine caused by severe overpopulation and a devastating blight that destroyed much of the Irish potato crop. They settled mostly in the cities of New England and New York. The men took low-paying jobs as factory hands, construction workers, and canal diggers, while the women became washerwomen and domestic servants. Irish families crowded into cheap tenement buildings with primitive sanitation systems and were the first to die when disease struck a city. In the summer of 1849, cholera epidemics took the lives of thousands of poor immigrants in St. Louis and New York City.

In times of hardship and sorrow, immigrants turned to their churches. Many Germans and virtually all the Irish were Catholics, and they fueled the growth of the American Catholic Church. In 1840, there were 16 Catholic dioceses and 700 churches; by 1860, there were 45 dioceses and 2,500 churches. Guided by their priests and bishops, Catholics built an impressive network of institutions — charitable societies, orphanages, militia companies, parochial schools, and political organizations — that maintained both their religion and their German or Irish identity.

Nativism Confronted by Catholic and German-speaking immigrants, some American-born citizens formed nativist movements that condemned immigration and asserted the superiority of Protestant religious and cultural values. In 1834, artist and inventor Samuel F. B. Morse published Foreign Conspiracy Against the Liberties of the United States, which warned of a Catholic threat to American republican institutions. Morse argued that Catholic immigrants would obey the dictates of Pope Gregory XVI (1831–1846), who urged Catholics to repudiate republicanism and acknowledge the “submission due to princes” and to the papacy. Republican-minded Protestants of many denominations shared Morse’s fears of papal interference in American life and politics, and Foreign Conspiracy became their handbook (American Voices).

The social tensions stemming from industrialization intensified nativist and anti-Catholic attitudes. Unemployed Protestant mechanics and factory workers joined mobs that attacked Catholic immigrants, accusing them of taking jobs and driving down wages. These cultural conflicts undercut trade unionism, because many Protestant wage earners sided more with their Protestant employers than with their Catholic coworkers. Benevolent-minded Protestants supported the anti-Catholic movement for reasons of public policy. As crusaders for public education, they opposed the use of tax resources for Catholic schools; as advocates of temperance and civilized manners, they condemned the rowdyism of drunken Irish men.

Religious and cultural tensions led to violence. In 1834, in Charlestown, Massachusetts, a quarrel between Catholic laborers repairing a convent and Protestant workers in a neighboring brickyard led to a full-scale riot and the convent’s destruction. In 1844, in Philadelphia, riots erupted when the Catholic bishop persuaded public-school officials to use both Catholic and Protestant versions of the Bible. Anti-Irish violence incited by the city’s nativist clubs eventually escalated into open warfare between Protestants and the Pennsylvania militia. Thus even as the American economic revolution attracted millions of European immigrants, it divided society along lines of ethnicity and religion as well as class.

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