Lecture 8 Notes

The Migration

Economic Rationales for Migration

• Cities promised social mobility, higher wages, and greater opportunity.  The image did not always match reality, but it was the image nevertheless.  From 1860-1920, the number of people living in towns of 8000 or more grew from 6 million to 54 million, with immigrants from Europe and rural migrants from the U.S. forming the bulk of newcomers.
• The proliferation of unskilled jobs in America's new, expanding industrial factories--steel mills, auto factories, cigar plants, etc.--was centered in cities.
• Immigrants had additional reasons.  In the U.S. they enjoyed religious and political freedom.
• It was in the industrialists' favor to have large numbers of immigrants -- the more immigrants (European or African American) who came to the city, the lower they were able to keep wages.

Race in the Labor Market

• Labor was divided.  The Knights of Labor, formed in 1869, represented all workers and sought to reform the economy and do away with the wage system.  They sought political power to focus on the local level, with the state as the guardian of equality.  Their social reform vision doomed them, and by 1900 they were gone.
• The Knights were replaced by and large by the American Federation of Labor, which originated in 1881 and represented skilled workers.  The AFL accepted the basic principle of capitalism; their goal was to simply secure for the workers they represented a greater share of capitalism's rewards.  They fought for higher wages, fewer hours, and improved working conditions.  The AFL excluded most women, blacks, and recent immigrants; indeed, their limited vision and commitment to segregation within the labor market limited their opportunities for growth and threatened their vitality.
• The first large migration of blacks to urban sites took place after the Civil War until the mid-1880s, when southern states began to restrict their movement.  This first wave did not find factory jobs, but rather typically worked as domestics, cooks, janitors, and in other service occupations.  Since most of those jobs were considered women's work, black women often outnumbered black men in the cities.
• By 1900, there were substantial black communities (10,000 people or more) in over 30 cities.
• The labor market was heavily segregated by race.  Indeed, labor agents from certain industries targeted certain racial ethnic or racial groups -- Scandinavians to mine iron ore in Minnesota, Latinos to the mining areas of the Southwest.  In industries that recruited from all races, such as the steel industry, races were segregated within the factories and given different types of work, often based on racist assumptions of ability and social hierarchy.
• This racial stratification led to difficulties in organizing.  Even when people from different races or ethnic groups worked at the same plant, they were separated on the job, and residential segregation meant they were separated when they went home as well.

Urban Housing

• Housing is still in extremely short supply in many urban areas.
• 3/4 of all urban residents had to rent their living quarters.  Working-class districts had a 90-95% rental rate, usually in the most crowded district in the city.
• Unprecedented demand for housing drove rents to very high levels, even for dilapidated, dirty, overcrowded apartments.
• People were forced to share apartments because the rents were so high, exacerbating the problem of overcrowding.
• Inequalities in housing, jobs, and politics were all intertwined.
• Residential segregation took place in the South under the ongoing practice of Jim Crow.  In the North, under the aegis of Progressivism, the idea was to separate different classes of people, thus leading to residential segregation which matched or even exceeded that in the South.  This was done to stave off conflict, but it still operated among racial, and not just class lines.
• Inadequate sewage systems in overcrowded urban areas created massive public health problems.
• Overcrowding also led to a tremendous fire problem in turn-of-the-century cities.  By 1900, fire was the leading cause of urban deaths, and the greatest threat to property and human life, even more than disease.

"Great Migration"

• The largest era of migration by southern blacks to northern cities was at the time of World War I (the mid- to late-1910s).
• The war limited foreign migration -- in 1914 there were 1.2 million immigrants, 326,700 in 1915, and only 110,618 in 1918.
• Europe's mobilization for war meant a greater need for a host of manufactured goods.  America's factories were at full production by 1915.  When America entered the war, that only increased the need.
• Full production meant a need for a larger work force.  With European immigration drying up, workers had to come from domestic migration, meaning primarily southern blacks.
• For many blacks, who had never lived out of the South, they recognized that this was a new opportunity for their economic advancement.  Migration was a coldly calculated decision.
• Black migrants looked for which city to move to -- it was not random.  They were often encouraged by labor agents and family and kin networks.
• A major factor in black migration was the black press, papers like the Chicago Defender and Pittsburgh Courier.  The black press was African Americans' only contemporary public advocate, were widely read, and they actively called for migration beginning around 1916.
• In short, blacks were active agents in moving north, not just subjects of external push-pull factors.

Role of Women and Families

• There were more women than men in the migration.
• Women had additional motivation for moving -- in addition to economic motivations, women often moved to escape from sexual exploitation both within and outside their families, as well as escaping domestic violence.
• Men tended to migrate singly, sometimes stopping at a couple of places before moving to a final destination (called secondary migration).  Women, on the other hand, tended to move all at one time, partly because it was safer, and often because they moved to join a family member.
• Both men and women often left children behind with parents or family members while they earned enough to bring the children up to join them.  This was similar to the experience of many European immigrants.  Consequently, there were frequent trips back to the South, at least once a year, and constant news flow back and forth.  Black newspapers reported family news in order to keep family members abreast of the situation up north.
• As long as offspring, relatives, and friends remained in the South, psychological and emotional relocation was much more convoluted, and perhaps more complicated.
• Women in the North had fewer children -- some explanations are that they didn't need children as part of the labor force, or they increasingly used contraceptives, or simply practiced abstinence to a greater degree.

Black Culture

• Much has been written of the transfer of southern culture to the urban North.  Unfortunately, we do not fully understand how that transfer took place.
• We often point to institutions such as churches, mutual aid societies, and YMCA, but who did the actual work of cultural transmission? (institutions don't act on their own)
• The Black Women's Club Movement did at least two things in this regard:  they helped preserve and transfer culture; and they displayed black women as virtuous, middle-class women who espoused Victorian ideals.  The clubs ranged from social, religious, political, and economic.  They were as important in transforming black peasants into the northern proletariat as any single group.  Originally historians thought they were class-based, but recent evidence suggests that they also crossed class lines.
• Newspapers were also important in transmitting culturally important events.

Work

• The nature of work in the North was obviously quite different than African Americans were accustomed to in the South.
• For one, the war had a drastic effect on the economy.
• The percentage of domestics declined between 1910 and 1920 from 78.4% to 63.8% in Chicago, and from 81% to 77% in Cleveland.
• Blacks were usually the last hired for desirable factory jobs.