696 ★ CHAPTER 18 The Progressive Eracorruption in Chicago’s harsh urban
environment. Perhaps the era’s most
influential novel was Upton Sinclair’s
The Jungle (1906), whose description
of unsanitary slaughterhouses and the
sale of rotten meat stirred public out-
rage and led directly to the passage of
the Pure Food and Drug Act and the
Meat Inspection Act of 1906.Immigration as a Global
Process
If one thing characterized early-
twentieth- century cities, it was their
immigrant character. The “new immi-
gration” from southern and eastern
Europe (discussed in Chapter 17) had
begun around 1890 but reached its peak
during the Progressive era. Between
1901 and the outbreak of World War I
in Europe in 1914, some 13 million
immigrants came to the United States,
the majority from Italy, Russia, and the
Austro- Hungarian empire. In fact, Progressive- era immigration formed part of
a larger process of worldwide migration set in motion by industrial expansion
and the decline of traditional agriculture. Poles emigrated not only to Pitts-
burgh and Chicago but to work in German factories and Scottish mines. Ital-
ians sought jobs in Belgium, France, and Argentina as well as the United States.
As many as 750,000 Chinese migrated to other countries each year.
During the years from 1840 to 1914 (when immigration to the United States
would be virtually cut off, first by the outbreak of World War I and then by
legislation), perhaps 40 million persons emigrated to the United States and
another 20 million to other parts of the Western Hemisphere, including Can-
ada, Argentina, Brazil, and the Caribbean. This population flow formed one
part of a massive shifting of peoples throughout the world.
Numerous causes inspired this uprooting of population. Rural southern
and eastern Europe and large parts of Asia were regions marked by widespread
poverty and illiteracy, burdensome taxation, and declining economies. Politi-
cal turmoil at home, like the revolution that engulfed Mexico after 1911, also
inspired emigration. Not all of these immigrants could be classified as “freeA photograph by Lewis Hine, who used his cam-
era to chronicle the plight of child laborers shown
here: a young spinner in a Vermont cotton factory.