“America’s industrial might was built principally on immigrant labour”. Discuss with reference to the period from the 1880s to through World War I.

The backbone of America’s Might

A variety of factors contributed to the preeminence of American industrial power in the late 19th and early twentieth century. Whereas the United States enjoyed an abundance of domestic raw materials, technological advancements by scientific entrepreneurs, and a battery of talented business entrepreneurs assisted by a compliant federal government, the most convenient and probably most critical progressive factor was the influx of a cheap, non-American immigrant labour force.
Brinkley in his work “The Unfinished Nation: A Concise History of the American People” is careful to point out that America rise in industrialization occurred in half the period of time that England took to achieve the same. Though some scholars argue that the U.S. was already steering toward industrial prominence since the early 1800s, the majority agree that last three decades prior to the 1920s witnessed an incredible surge in economic growth that heralded America’s supremacy thereafter. By 1900, over $3.4 billion in foreign wealth fueled the economy of the US.Of course, a comparison of England’s and America’s progress in industrialization is wanted, and would yield points that support the main thesis.
One way to understand the rapid growth of American industries as opposed to English industries is to view the industrial revolution as a seamless international phenomenon. In this view, England’s early advancements in industrial technology paved the way for other nations to bypass serendipitous error and speculative trial. Innovators such as Lewis Paul in the textile industry, Abraham Darby in the metal industry, James Watt in the energy (steam power) industry highlight this point. These Englishmen no doubt paved the way for the rapid American refinement of manufacturing processes and product quality – both critical factors in economic expansion.
Apart from this pretext, a significant number of immigrants can be counted along with the cadre of old-stock American scientist and entrepreneurs who shaped the industrial future of the late 1800s. For instance, Serbian Michael Pupin, who came to the US in 1874 made indispensible contributions to the development of the telecommunications industry (Hillstrom 161). Another significant contribution was made by German immigrant Ottmar Mergenthaler. A refugee of the Franco Persian war, Mergenthaler arrived in Maryland in 1872 and fourteen years later he invented the linotype machine. This device was an early precursor to the type writer and helped revolutionize the American printing process (159). Still, another major contributor to the industrial drive in the late 19th century was Serbian immigrant Nikola Tesla. As a physicist and mathematician Tesla first worked with Thomas Edison in his “Electric Illuminating Company” after arriving in America in 1884. Three years later he expanded the energy sector when he started his own company called the “Tesla Electric Company”, and by 1893, went on to make major advances in wireless transmissions (164).
Of course both England and the US enjoyed the convenience of having easy access to raw materials. Throughout the British Empire, cotton, iron ore, and labour were certainly accessible –likewise within America; however the major difference was that American businessmen faced less transportation challenges than English businessmen. According to Conlin, by the 1865, the United States was already the world’s premier railway country with about 35, 00 miles of track. Whereas Americans transported the majority of its goods via a burgeoning railroad industry in the 1860s, the geo-political distribution of the British Empire meant that greater transportation cost were incurred to make England the European hub of Industrial activity.
Certainly, cheap industrial labour accounts for the tremendous strides gained in the American economy. In the decades merging the 19th and 20th century, America witnessed a population explosion due to immigration. In the first wave of immigration from the 1860s to the 1890s population growth was unprecedented. 1860 census data showed that the US population was about 31.5 million people. By 1900, the data indicated that the population was about 76 million. This categorical influx of immigrants into America was essentially a male-concentration hailing from North Western Europe (Germany, the British Isles, the Netherlands, Belgium) and Scandavia (Denmark, Finland, Norway, Sweden). These settled mainly in the American mid-west. By the 1880s into the 1890s, approximately 100,000 immigrants entered the United States annually.
The second phase of immigration (called New Immigration) started just before the turn of the century and was halted by the Great War in 1914. This period witnessed a tremendous population increase with approximately 500,000 immigrants entering the US annually. Among them were Italians, Latvians and Lithuanians, Greeks, Turks, and peoples of the Balkans (Romania, Bulgaria). Before 1880, about 200,000 people of southern and eastern European origin lived in the United States. However by 1910 about 8.4 million arrived (Conlin 511).
In this second phase of immigration, the largest group of people to come to the United States was the Italian population totaling to approximately 3.6 million. It is also worth noting that between 1881 and 1914 one-third of the Jewish population of Russia fled persecution, with the majority heading for the United States. It was one of the greatest relocations of a people in such a short period in the history of the world.
To a large extent, immigration was stimulated by American industrialists during the 19th century. Companies often paid immigrants’ travelling fares once they signed contracts agreeing to work for them upon their arrival in American cities. In the age of high capitalism American employers preferred the cheaper immigrant labour. According to Conlin, since many immigrants intended to work in America for only a few years before returning to their homeland, employers reasoned that they were likely to accept low wages, refrain from labour unions, and live off of menial jobs with very modest wages (512). From a macro-perspective, it was a very profitable arrangement; immigrant workers were steady producers and consumed little because of their humble origins.
Apart from their manual labour, immigrant workers also brought with them skills and experience that contributed greatly to rapid industrial stability. Finns for example were particularly important in logging and iron mining while German Jews were noted for being small-scale tradesmen. Scots and Irishmen, because of the ethnic affinity with old stock Americans often took up leadership roles in public service administration and the middle-management positions in medium-scale enterprises.
The close proximity of the labour class to centres of industry was a natural phenonema due to the limitation of transportation in the late 1800s, early 1900s. Of course this played off well for industrial capitalists who popularized the 12 hour work day for their employees who lived within a walking distance reasonable enough to encourage productivity. More convenient to industrialists was the fact the immigrants hailing from poor backgrounds were desperate to find their niche in American society and support their families – desperate enough to endure the risks of overcrowded cities. Eighty percent of the New Immigrants settled in the metropolises of the North-east and Midwest. They clustered themselves together in ethnic groups living in ghettos and slums. By 1890 a typical factory-centre was surrounded by residential areas and shantytowns habouring over 8,000 people. Cities saw expanding business-centres push back tightly stacked residential tenements (apartment buildings). Initially designed by James E. Ware for New York’s poor these dumbbell tenements (so called because of their shape) provided 24 to 32 apartments. By 1900, such developments allowed some 26 cities to habour more than 100,000 persons. Among these cities, six topped with an average of 500,000 persons.
According to Jacob Riis, as cited by Conlin, an average 330,000 people lived in a square mile of city a slum (531). This translated to about 986 people per acre. As an expection, Riis notes that in a particular Jewish tenement block in New York, spanning just over an acre lived a mind-boggling 2,800 tenants. He further expounds with a personal experience of seeing a family of fourteen crammed into a tenenment apartment consisting of two tiny rooms. The growth of cities also saw the establishment of settlement Houses styled after the famous Toynbee Hall in a London slum. Such living conditions spelt disaster for many women and children. Because of unsanitary conditions caused by poor waste disposal and ventilation, measles wreaked havoc in the overcrowded tenements and settlement Houses.
Big-city sweat shops saw workers exploited by garment-makers sometimes in a micro economy of vicious subcontracting. The key to the system was that everyone involved was paid by the piece the made so that it was in the interest of all to pay those below them as little for their work as possible. These arrangement has damaging consequences for the economy of families when newer and cheaper sources of labour were source by the man on top (Conlin 532).
By 1880, more than 200,000 Chinese had settled in the United States. As a labour group they made a notable impact on the building of the transcontinental railroad. According to Brinkley, by 1865, about 12,000 Chinese formed 90 percent of the railroad construction labour force in the Central pacific. Being hard working and demanding little, Chinese labourers were preferred over their white counterparts and were largely responsible for the completion of the railway. This of course came at a great expense to the Chinese community who lost many men in the harsh working conditions along the railroad project.
During the 1870s, thousands of Chinese laborers played an indispensable role in the construction of a vast network of earthen levees in the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta in California. These levees opened up thousands of acres of highly fertile marshlands for agricultural production. Chinese workers were used to construct hundreds of miles of levees throughout the delta's waterways in an effort to reclaim and preserve farmland and control flooding. These levees therefore confined waterflow to the riverbeds. Many of the workers stayed in the area and made a living as farm workers or sharecroppers, until they were driven out during an outbreak of anti-Chinese violence in the mid-1890s.
In summary, immigrant labour proved indispensible to American industrialists in the 19th and early 20th century. Their contributions were not only seen in unskilled labour but also within academia, industrial middle management, and technical innovations. For the most part the profitability of industrial ventured stemmed from the fact that immigrant labour was conveniently cheap. This was so because many of the immigrants were unskilled workers who were happy to escape persecution or war in their land of birth, and would settle for menial wages to survive in a new land. As a result, America witnessed a rapid growth-rate of industry that surpassed Europe’s.
The significantly large influx of European immigrants into America between the period 1880 to 1914 when the Great War began meant that the demand for work was incredibly high and thus the cost of labour was low. Despite the obvious advantage of these circumstances for capitalists, it also meant uncertain futures for the cities' poor.

References
Brinkley, Alan. The Unfinished Nation: A Concise History of the American People (6th Ed). McGraw-Hill, 2009.
Conlin, Joseph R. The American Past: A Survey of American History. San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1987.
Hillstrom Kevin, Hillstrom Laurie C. Industrial revolution in America. Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, 2007.
Mintz, Steven. "Was slavery the engine of economic growth?” Digital History. 2 March, 2011. 15 February, 2011
“Chinese Workers and the Building of the California Levees, 1860-1880”. The Heritage We Renouce Sacramento Delta Blues. 16 February, 1997. 3 March 2011 < http://rwor.org/a/firstvol/890-899/894/chines.htm>