The migration of people from one place to another, whether internally or internationally, was a significant force in the United States during the early 20th century. In the years prior to World War I, immigration to the United States reached its peak, with 6 million immigrants arriving between 1900 and 1910 and nearly a million annually between 1900 and 1920. The ' “new immigration,” as it was called, came primarily from southern and eastern Europe and brought new customs and religious practices to the United States. Moreover, the new immigrants significantly increased the labor force, filling jobs in mass production and extractive industries. Their large numbers also contributed to the intensity and visibility of anti-immigrant sentiment among native-born Americans and gave rise to demands for the restriction of immigration.
The industrial development that attracted waves of men and women from Europe prompted others to migrate within the United States. Many men and women left the countryside and moved to cities, seeking better economic and cultural opportunities. Rural-to-urban migration was not new in American history, but the process accelerated during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. While only 28.6 percent of Americans lived in an urban area in 1880, 40 percent did in 1900. The 1920 census reported that the United States had become an urban nation as more than half of its citizens (51.4 percent) lived in areas with a population of 2,500 or more.
Rural-to-urban migration was particularly common among young farm men and women. During the 1920s, a decade in which nearly 6.25 million people moved from the country to cities, one out of every four rural individuals in their early twenties left the countryside. A number of factors prompted their migration, including declining farm prices as the economy normalized after World War I, increasing employment opportunities in the cities, and the desire to seek independence and excitement away from home. Young women were even more likely to migrate to an urban area than young men, since there were fewer job opportunities for them in rural areas. This migration of the young had lasting effects on the rural population. The age of the average farm operator increased, with 52.6 percent being over the age of 45 in 1930, while only 48.1 percent had been in 1920. The aging rural population also meant that there were fewer young people to attend churches and schools or shop and work in small towns.
People in the United States also migrated from one region of the country to another at this time. The largest such shift was the migration of people, both black and white, out of the primarily agricultural South to areas in the northern or western states. Starting in the years before World War I, African Americans left the South in the Great Migration, hoping to find better economic opportunities as well as freedom from the restrictive Jim Crow laws of the South. Many of these individuals found work in factories or domestic service, jobs to which they were largely confined by racial prejudices. The migration of African Americans out of the South steadily increased during the early 20th century, with approximately 200,000 leaving the region in the first decade. Approximately 437,000 African Americans left the South during the 1910s and more than 800,000 during the 1920s. These migrants not only changed the racial composition of northern cities but also created institutions that would later provide some of the framework and leadership for the northern segment of the Civil Rights movement.
White southerners left the South to avoid the same agricultural economic hardships that many African Americans also faced. White southerners, however, did not encounter racial discrimination in the North. Their race made it easier for them to obtain higher paying, higher status work. More than 700,000 white southerners migrated north and west during the first decade of the century, 893,000 during the 1910s, and almost 1.5 million during the 1920s. Both white and black migration influenced American culture, spread Baptist and Pentecostal religion out of the South, and contributed to the development of blues, jazz, and country music across the country.
The outbreak of World War I accelerated both rural to urban migration and South-to-North migration, as more workers were needed in northern industries to produce the supplies needed for war. The turmoil of World War I cut the United States from its source of immigrant labor in Europe, meaning that few new workers arrived in the United States. This shortage of immigrants proved beneficial to internal migrants, particularly African Americans, as many of them were able to obtain higher paying industrial jobs for the first time during the war.
Immigration never attained its former levels due to legislation passed in the 1920s, which made immigration from Asia, Africa, and southeastern Europe difficult or impossible, due to restrictive quotas. As a result, the number of immigrants arriving each year fell off sharply. The primary source of immigrants became Canada and Mexico, since Western Hemisphere nations were not included in the restrictive quotas. Migration within the United States continued unabated during the 1920s, although the economic collapse during the Great Depression caused a temporary decline in labor migration.
See also cities and urban life; population
Trends; rural LIFE.
Further reading: Roger Daniels, Coming to America: A History of Immigration and Ethnicity in American Life (New York, Harper & Row 1991); James N. Gregory, The Southern Diaspora: How the Great Migrations of Black and White Southerners Transformed America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005); Conrad Taeu-ber and Irene B. Taeuber, The Changing Population of the United States (New York: Wiley, 1958).
—Kristen Anderson
World History
