1. Ellis Island & Samuel Gompers
Unit 12
Ellis Island & Samuel Gompers

2. Ellis Island
"Give me your tired, your poor / Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free / The wretched refuse of your teeming shore / Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me / I lift my lamp beside the golden door!” “The New Colossus”
Emma Lazarus

3. Ellis Island

4. Ellis Island

5. Ellis Island
Opened in 1892
By 1954, the station had processed 12 million immigrants
40% of all Americans today can trace their port of entry back to Ellis Island.
At the time there were 21 immigrant processing centers in the country.
The two most famous ones was Ellis Island and Angel Island in California

6. Angel Island

7. Ellis Island Arrivals were asked 29 questions including: Name
Occupation
Amount of money they were carrying
The inspection process lasted from 3-7 hours
More rigorous provisions for entry were required as laws became more restrictive during the 1890s.

8. Ellis Island
About 2% of immigrants seeking entry were denied admission to the U.S. and sent back to their countries of origin for reasons which included:
Chronic and contagious diseases
Criminal background
Insanity
Around 3,000 immigrants died on the island waiting to be processed.

10. [They] are hirsute, low-browed, big-faced persons of obviously low mentality... They simply look out of place in black clothes and stiff collar, since clearly they belong in skins, in wattled huts at the close of the Great Ice Age. These ox-like men are descendants of those who always stayed behind.”
Sociologist E. A. Ross (1914)

11. Little Italy

12. Chinatown (San Francisco)

13. Chinatown

14. Impact of New Immigration on Urban America
Over-crowding in the cities led to increased problems with crime and disease
Increased demand for agricultural and industrial goods spurred additional economic growth
Low-wage labor was available to work in the growing American industrial economy
New cultural items such as Italian opera, Polish polkas, Russian literature, kindergarten, and new foods such as spaghetti, frankfurters and hamburgers, became part of the American diet.

15. Jacob Riis Photography
How the Other Half Lives: Studies among the Tenements of New York

19. Ellis Island closed in 1954
In 1976 it reopened its doors to the public

20. American Federation of Labor
Unskilled laborers were subject to low wages, long workdays, no vacations, and unsafe workplaces.
Because individual workers had little power to change the way an employer ran a business, workers banded together in labor unions to demand better pay and working conditions.
Originally, labor unions were organized for either skilled or unskilled workers with each group having their own union.

21. The unions relied on collective bargaining to obtain their demands, but, when employers refused to bargain, unions used direct action (i.e. labor strikes) to obtain concessions.
The earliest national labor union was the Knights of Labor founded in 1869
The union lost influence and power after failure to win concessions in the Missouri Pacific Railroad Strike and suffered distrust from the Haymarket Affair in 1886
Skilled workers were reluctant to support lower paid unskilled workers when the latter went out on strike.

22. Knights of Labor

23. The Haymarket Affair
Haymarket Square, Chicago, 1886

24. Samuel Gompers 1850-1924 Born in London Immigrated to the U.S. in 1863
Cigar maker
Founded the American Federation of Labor (AFL)

25. Samuel Gompers
In 1886, he helped created the American Federation of Labor (AFL) and served as its president until his death in 1924
His union accepted only skilled workers.
He organized workers by craft rather than by geography as the Knights had.
Gompers also did not see capitalism as the enemy, as had radical members of the Knights of Labor, and he urged workers to work with owners for better pay and working conditions