Responses to Newcomers
A public debate, and a negotiation
- Increasing public debates over assimilation and Americanisation accompanied the growth of international migration.
- Many immigrants negotiated compromises between the cultures they brought and the culture they found in the United States.
- Negotiated compromises gives immigrants agency: they were parties to the outcome, not material being processed.
'Negotiated compromises' gives immigrants...
Not material being processed.
Social Darwinism justified the outcome
- Social commentators advocated theories later described as Social Darwinism to justify the success of those at the top of the socioeconomic structure as both appropriate and inevitable.
- Later described as — the CED notes the label is retrospective, which is a precise historical point.
- Both appropriate and inevitable are two separate claims: one moral, one causal, and the pairing is what makes the doctrine powerful.
Select both claims Social Darwinism made about success at the top.
One moral claim and one causal claim.
Settlement houses
- Many women, like Jane Addams, worked in settlement houses to help immigrants adapt to U.S. language and customs.
- The CED names a person and a method, and it places this among the responses to immigration, not among reform movements generally.
- So settlement work is one answer to the assimilation debate — practical help rather than argument or restriction.
Public debate, intellectual justification, or practical work?
Sort each response to immigration.
The CED says these theories were ____ described as Social Darwinism.
A precise historical note: the label is retrospective.
"Later described as" is a precise historical note. The CED says commentators advocated theories later described as Social Darwinism — the label is retrospective, and the doctrine's power came from claiming success was both appropriate and inevitable: one moral claim and one causal claim together.
Settlement houses answered the assimilation debate with...
Rather than argument or restriction.
Three responses, three registers
- Debate is public argument; Social Darwinism is intellectual justification; settlement houses are practical work.
- 5.5's nativism supplies a fourth register — political restriction — and it is the same argument continuing.
- So a strong answer names responses at more than one level, because the CED deliberately supplies more than one.
Select all the registers of response named across 5.5 and 6.9.
The CED deliberately supplies more than one.
Various responses over time
- The objective is the various responses to immigration in the period over time.
- Various again invites more than one, and over time invites a sequence: welcome as labour, debate as numbers grow, restriction as politics organises.
- Name a response, its register, and who made it — three details per response is enough.
A doctrine that says the winners deserve to win answers a moral objection. A doctrine that says they were always going to win answers a practical one. Saying both at once leaves the critic with nowhere to stand.
Increasing public debates over assimilation and Americanisation accompanied the growth of international migration, and many immigrants negotiated compromises between the cultures they brought and the culture they found. Social commentators advocated theories later described as Social Darwinism to justify the success of those at the top of the socioeconomic structure as both appropriate and inevitable, while many women, like Jane Addams, worked in settlement houses to help immigrants adapt to U.S. language and customs.