Social Fears and Immigration: Housing, Ethnicity, Crime

1. What is this cartoon implying? What is it useful in showing?

2. Social fears: • Housing • Growth of ethnically exclusive areas • Crime • Note taking – key knowledge is in red

3. Today we will: Understand the importance of Social fears in changing attitudes towards immigration

4. Recap So far we have looked at: • Isolationism • Political fears • World War I Which do you think is most important in changing people attitudes to immigration.

5. Social fear - Housing • Immigrants tended to settle in the rapidly growing cities at which they arrived, usually New York. • One social fear that existed was that immigrants posed a threat to housing supply in the large cities. • Immigrants often had little or no money to buy/rent a home, but the soaring demand for cheap housing meant landlords could increase their rents without improving their property. It caused competition for housing. • The areas immigrants lived in became overcrowded, and run down as immigrants were poorly paid. • Housing was poor quality, and this was blamed on the immigrants. Due to the housing problems which were blamed on immigrants, there were calls to limit immigration. K A

6. Slum Housing We read and discussed briefly where immigrants settled and their living conditions when we looked at their first arrival. What do you remember?

7. Immigrants tended to settle in “teeming cities.” They went to places populated with their own kind – immigrant enclaves – e.g. Little Italy. In these areas, immigrants could practice their religions and native customs, talk in their own languages and not be lonely. As these cities grew, living conditions deteriorated. ‘Old’ immigrants moved out as ‘new’ immigrants moved in. Add these to your notes.

8. Immigrants tended to live in tenements, called ‘dumbbells’. • Overcrowded – some blocks housed 4000 people. • Little ventilation, which proved to a fire hazard, fuelling and conveying flames from building to building. • Were poorly heated – immigrants froze in winter. • Had outside toilets and little sanitation.

9. Social fear – There was a growth of ethnically exclusive areas Definition of ethnicity: “A social group that has a common national or cultural tradition.”

10. Social fear – There was a growth of ethnically exclusive areas • E.g. • Little Italy • Little Poland. • Here, people of the same nationality crowded together, continued to speak their own languages and follow their traditional culture and customs. This picture is of Mulberry Street in Little Italy in the early 1900s. K

11. There was a growth of ethnically exclusive areas The growth of ethnically exclusive areas of cities increased suspicion of those who were differentand maintained their difference once they arrived in the USA = calls to limit immigration. A Mulberry Street

12. Crime As the population of the cities grew, crime rates in cities increased. Taverns, gambling houses and brothels existed in immigrant enclaves. K

13. Crime • There was a growth of organised crime, e.g. the Italian Mafia (originated in Sicily), and the Five Points Gang. • Famous gangsters such as Al Capone were in the public eye. K

14. “Scarface” Al Capone Born in Brooklyn to Italian parents. Expelled from school at 14 and became involved in gang activity. 1920 he moved to Chicago where he became the leader of the Five Points Gang and became the cities leading bootlegger and gambling and vice lord. K

15. 1919 – Eighteenth Amendment to the Constitution banned the manufacture, sale or transport of intoxicating liquors (drinks containing more than 0.5% alcohol). • This law did not convince people to stop drinking, instead they found new and illegal ways to get alcohol, and organised crime gangs such as the Mafia, and bootleggers like Capone were involved in supplying illegal alcohol during the Prohibition Era. K

16. Selling illegal alcohol Al Capone • 1927 – hisbootlegging, prostitution and gamblingempiremade him $60 million. • He always maintained he was merely providing the public with goods and services it demanded, saying: • “They say that I violate the prohibition law. Who doesn’t?” (Capone) • He was arrested and tried in 1931 for tax evasion, was sentenced to eleven years in prison, and served 8. After his release his health deteriorated and he died at his home in Miami in 1947. K

17. Roger Daniels “Most immigrants entered American society at its bottom layers and lived in decaying, crime – ridden neighbourhoods.” “Some Americans perceived the immigrants as contributing disproportionately to crime.”

18. Prohibition As you watch the clip, think of arguments and facts you would use to explain: K

19. Those who called for Prohibition cited violence by drunk husbands towards their wives and children A lot of beer was imported from Germany. In the aftermath of World War One, anti-German feeling was running high Prohibition Why Prohibition was introduced, and then later repealed? How successful Prohibition was? WASPs sometimes associated alcohol consumption with immigrant communities, and anti-alcohol campaigners played on the prejudice towards immigrants America was a very Christian country. ManyChristians linked alcohol consumption to sin, including gambling and prostitution

20. The trial of Sacco and Vanzetti Anarchists “Belief in the abolition of all government and the organization of society on a voluntary, cooperative basis without force or compulsion.” What does this mean? There were anarchist fears in the USA in the early twentieth century, and this is highlighted by the case of Sacco and Vanzetti. K

22. I am not only innocent...but...in all my life I have never stole, never killed, never spilled blood, but I have struggled all my life, since I began to reason, to eliminate crime from the earth.... I am suffering because I am a radical and indeed I am a radical; I have suffered because I was an Italian, and indeed I am an Italian...but I am so convinced to be right that if you could execute me two times, and if I could be reborn two other times, I would live again to do what I have done already. Bartolomeo Vanzetti, 1927

23. Task 1 Read the sheet and complete the questions on `The trial of Sacco and Vanzetti.` Finished? Try and come up with argument to support the idea of Social fears limiting immigration. Do you think they committed the crimes they were accused of?

24. Crime and changing attitudes to immigration in the 1920s • It could be argued that American attitudes to immigration changed due to fear of crime, as immigrants were blamed for soaring crime rates in neighbourhoods with concentrations of immigrants. • The Mafia, gangsters such as Capone and the arrest and trial of Sacco and Vanzetti linked crime with immigrants in the publics mind. • Journalists, politicians and many people began to favour restricting immigration due to the bad influence and criminal activity of immigrants on their environment. A