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Immigration During The Gilded Age

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The sweltering conflicts facing the immigrants, African-Americans, and farmers during the productive Gilded Age intensely impacted the development and growth for the United States. Though the new creation of a modern industrial age paved an approach for the economy to strive, the presence of harmony was far in the absence for a single race of Americans, as it would take up to a century in order to create unity. Late 19th and early 20th century society ended up with disputes of serious social issues all across the US. After spikes of numerous waves of immigrants from southern and eastern Europe and China making their way into the major cities of the US, tensions grew high and competition of seeking a wage became tougher. This was …show more content…

Throughout the Gilded Age, the US acquired approximately between 10 and 15 million immigrants. (Roediger 10) Known as the “New Immigrants,” majority of the immigrants swarm in from southern and eastern European countries such as Italy, Poland, Greece, Russia, and Croatia, and Czechoslovakia, in desperate needs of a new opportunity. Most of the new immigrants ended up obtaining jobs that involved unskilled labor, like in mills, mines, and factories, generally because they were poor and illiterate peasants. (Roediger 10) Henceforth, causing nativists to claim that the descendants of the new immigrants might prove to be racially unfit to assimilate into American society. The belief of nativism became so strong that unions barred the workforce of the Chinese for their threat of low wages, permitting congress to pass the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882, completely banning Chinese immigration. Also congress passed both the Emergency Quota Act in 1921 and the Immigration Act in 1924 to limit the amount of immigrants allowed in the US due to the increasingly large numbers of new immigrants. Consequently, denying the American Dream to prosperity lurking …show more content…

Pushed away by the revolutionary industrial age, most farmers faced struggles with debt and foreclosure. It was usual for a farmer that relied on soft money to face hardship during the Gilded Age, because of the hard money policy that the government wanted to pursue in order to achieve industrialization. They limited the nation’s coinage to gold rather than other types of currency, such as silver and greenbacks. Thus, promoting the birth of the agrarian Populist Party and the uprising of William Jennings Bryan. While he ran in the election of 1896, Bryan specifically stressed the policy free sliver over the nation’s monetary standard of strictly gold. He strongly emphasized in his Cross of Gold Speech that the gold standard should not be over the favor of bimetallism, especially with concluding “you shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold.” In support of the farmers, Bryan solely ran his campaign for their concern on the monetary policy, which limited his campaign pitches and allowing him to suffer from defeat by Glover Cleveland. Therefore, without the notion of shrinking the gold standard implemented in Cleveland’s campaign, farmers constantly founded themselves underneath piles of

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