The influx of immigrants in the late nineteen hundreds was the factor most directly responsible for the Industrial Revolution in the United States at the turn of the century. As the poor immigrants of Europe flooded America, they quickly needed jobs and transportation. To supply these to needy immigrants, more and more factories were needed, leading to the rise of industrialism in America.
Following the Civil War, the United States saw rapid growth in industrial manufacturing. With the readily available presence of Southern cotton, Northern textile mills became widely occurrent, however, these mills required a workforce mainly found not in American citizens but recent immigrants (The Rise…). …show more content…
These Irish immigrants came to America following the Irish Potato Famine, hoping for a better life than theirs back in Ireland. However, since most Irish immigrants were poor, the area that they entered upon entering the United States was typically where they ended up living; this was the Northern East Coast (Bryant). As more and more poor immigrants migrated to America, Northern cities began to become hubs of culture with many factions, also requiring industrial enhancement to provide for this accelerated growth in city population (City…). Even though these neighborhoods gave new immigrants a chance to feel at home, they still needed to find jobs.
Due to the readily available workforce of immigrants in cities and the demand for laborers in factories, many immigrants began to work in nearby urban mills and factories. However, the German immigrants at the time tended to be wealthier than the Irish and many moved inland to states such as Pennsylvania in hopes of finding farmland (Bryant). Nonetheless, transportation to the inland parts of the country was still difficult to find