Day of Empire_ How Hyperpowers Rise to Global Dominance--And Why They Fall - Amy Chua [131]
Germans settled mainly in the North and West, but also in Texas, Louisiana, and Virginia. In the Civil War, more than 175,000 German immigrants fought for the Union, often under German officers and cheered on by their own German marching bands. Before and after the battle of Fort Sumter, German troops played a crucial role in keeping Missouri in Union hands. Without German and other immigrants, the United States could never have fielded the armies that seized California, Texas, and the American Southwest from Mexico, staved off France's advances in Central America, and defeated Spain in Cuba and the Philippines, allowing America to become the preeminent power of the Western Hemisphere by the end of the nineteenth century.
Neither could America have become one of the world's leading agricultural and industrial producers in the nineteenth century without a steady influx of immigrant labor. As nonimmigrant Americans pushed westward, poorer newcomers from Europe populated urban centers and filled the ranks of unskilled labor. Irishmen made up half of the country's miners in the 1860s and 1870s. Buffalo's steel mills were worked largely by Poles, Rochester's textile mills by Italians, and the meatpacking houses of Cedar Rapids and Omaha overwhelmingly by Czechs. By 1910, when the United States led the world in heavy-industry manufacturing output, the majority of America's mass production workers were immigrants. In the country's twenty largest manufacturing and mining sectors, two-thirds of the men and about half the women were recent arrivals.
As late as 1920, immigration from Europe continued almost unrestricted. The total numbers were breathtaking. In 1900 alone some two million people crossed the Atlantic to find a new home in the United States. Between 1820 and 1914, more than thirty million people poured into the United States—the largest human migration in the history of the world.14
Americans did not always embrace the newcomers. On the contrary, the nineteenth century was punctuated by bursts of venomous popular xenophobia and “nativism.” Anti-Catholic riots were especially intense in the 1830s and 1840s. In 1856, the so-called Know-Nothings formed a political party and ran a candidate for president on an anti-Catholic platform, specifically targeting German and Irish immigrants. Although their bid for the presidency failed, the Know-Nothings won dozens of victories in local elections, particularly in New England and the South.
But within a generation or two, the vast majority of European immigrants were brought into the fold of American society. They were allowed not only to worship according to their own religions but also to make their fortunes and rise to political power. By the 1860s, Roman Catholics represented the largest single religious grouping in the country and Know-Nothingism was defunct. The patriotism shown by hundreds of thousands of immigrants who fought for the Union in the Civil War—many of them just learning English—went a long way toward dampening antiforeign sentiment. Indeed, during the Civil War Congress actively encouraged immigration. The Homestead Law it enacted in 1862 granted “one hundred sixty acres of government land to any settler, native or foreign, who, declaring his intention of becoming a citizen, undertook to live on the land for five years and to make the necessary improvements. “15
Democracy and demographics worked in favor of immigrants too. By the mid-nineteenth century, the “ethnic” vote had become a force to be reckoned with, at least in cities with high immigrant concentrations. Thus, despite some employers’ “No Irish Need Apply” signs, through sheer voting power the Irish were able to gain access to the highest levels of urban political machinery,