Early European Immigrants Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free. The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the tempest-tossed to me. I lift my lamp beside the golden door. -- Emma Lazarus, 1888. (Courtesy: Library of Congress) The American nation was awash in a tidal wave of immigration when Lazarus's words were fixed to the Statue of Liberty in the first years of the Twentieth Century. More than one million people a year were leaving their homelands to start anew in the United States. Anti-immigration leagues started to form throughout the nation. Initiatives started to make their way through Congress to block the huddled masses from passing through the Golden Door. A yawning cultural and economic chasm had opened in America. An estimate of the day said that five percent of the population controlled ninety percent of the nation's wealth. As the class of dispossessed immigrants grew larger---the chasm widened---resulting in deeper suspicions and sharper opinions. "They may adopt the language of the True American. They may wear his clothes, they may steal his name...And they are beginning to steal his women. But they seldom adopt his religion, or understand his ideals," said Madison Grant, Trustee of the Museum of Natural History, New York. Without job skills for the burgeoning industrial economy...without the benefit of language to bridge a yawning cultural chasm, many immigrants felt they had fallen into a sub-class that lived beneath the streets paved with gold. Continue                 About the Program || Joe Hill Home || PBS Home