You are here:
The High Tide of Immigration
Date: 1903
Caption: A political cartoon depicts anti-immigrant attitudes.
Immigrants helped New York City grow and prosper in the late 1800s and early 1900s, yet they faced many anti-immigrant attitudes in their new home city. Negative attitudes towards immigrants increased as more people from southern and eastern European countries (like Italy and Russia), rather than from Northern and Western countries (like Ireland and Germany), began to arrive. Many New Yorkers perceived these new immigrants to be very culturally, religiously, and at times racially different than themselves. Notice the choices that cartoonist Louis Dalrymple made in this cartoon. What people or groups does he include, and how does he show them visually? What text does he include, and what message does this send? What does the caption say?
Some New Yorkers welcomed new immigrants, but others - including some who had power to shape the city’s school system - worried that immigrants were a threat to US society. Immigrants would become citizens, and then exercise their rights to vote and participate in US democracy. Immigrants would vote for the local school board, or even run for elected office themselves. Reformers argued that the city should move power away from local elected boards and to experts and others appointed by the mayor. In doing so, they took power away from local voters, including many immigrants, to influence the schools that their children attended and that were in their own communities.1
-
David B. Tyack, The One Best System: A History of American Urban Education (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1974). ↩︎
Categories: national
Tags: photography, imagery, and visual representation, immigrants and migrants, democracy, newspapers and the media
This item is part of "From the “Masses” to “Experts”" in "Who Governs Schools?"
Item Details
Date: 1903
Creator: Louis Dalrymple
Source: Judge Magazine
Copyright: Public domain
How to cite: “The High Tide of Immigration,” Louis Dalrymple, in New York City Civil Rights History Project, Accessed: [Month Day, Year], https://nyccivilrightshistory.org/gallery/high-tide-of-immigration.
Questions to Consider
- What do you think the message of this political cartoon is? Who do you think it was trying to speak to?
- What idea of the United States did this political cartoon communicate? What relationship did it suggest between US patriotism (represented by Uncle Sam) and immigration? What does the caption say about how immigration at the time of the cartoon was different from immigration in previous periods?
- How could the anti-immigrant or xenophobic sentiment depicted in this cartoon have mattered for school governance in New York City? How could it have affected how people thought about who should be in charge of a system with a large majority of immigrant students and a predominantly white and Protestant Christian political elite?
References
How to Print this Page
- Press Ctrl + P or Cmd + P to open the print dialogue window.
- Under settings, choose "display headers and footers" if you want to print page numbers and the web address.
- Embedded PDF files will not print as part of the page. For best printing results, download the PDF and print from Adobe Reader or Preview.