🇺🇸AP US History
1. Evaluate the extent to which economic opportunities for workers in the United States between 1845 and 1952 were shaped by factors of race, gender, and immigration status.
Respond to the prompt with a historically defensible thesis or claim that establishes a line of reasoning.
Describe a broader historical context relevant to the prompt.
Support an argument using at least four of the provided documents.
Use at least one additional piece of specific historical evidence beyond the documents.
For at least two documents, explain how or why the document's point of view, purpose, historical situation, or audience is relevant.
Demonstrate a complex understanding through sophisticated argumentation and/or effective use of evidence.
Document 1
Source: Howard Chandler Christy, Americans All! Victory Liberty Loan, 1919.
Document 2
Source: Madison Grant, article in The Forum magazine, 1924
[Recently,] the chief cause of migration to this country has been the desire of the submerged and poverty-ridden elements in Europe to secure a share in our wealth and prosperity. They moved in vast numbers, especially from countries . . . where low standards of living prevail, into North America where wages are large, food and work abundant, and where the standard of living is very high—for the masses probably the highest in the history of the world. If unchecked, this threatened influx of foreigners will submerge the native population and ultimately reduce the standing of living of the average man to low levels. . . . The restriction of immigration is primarily necessary to prevent our present population, native and foreign alike, from being overwhelmed by numbers. This means that we must have a numerically restricted immigration.
Document 3
Source: Betty Friedan, UE (United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America) Fights for Women Workers, 1952.
In advertisements across the land, industry glorifies the American woman—in her gleaming GE kitchen, at her Westinghouse laundromat, before her Sylvania television set. Nothing is too good for her—unless she works for GE, or Westinghouse, or Sylvania or thousands of other corporations throughout the U.S.A. As an employee, regardless of her skill, she is rated lower than common labor (male). She is assigned to jobs which, according to government studies, involve greater physical strain and skill than many jobs done by men—but she is paid less than the underpaid sweeper, the least skilled men in the plant. She is speeded up until she may faint at her machine, to barely earn her daily bread. Wage discrimination against women workers exists in every industry where women are employed. It exists because it pays off in billions of dollars in extra profits for the companies. According to the 1950 census, the average wage of women in factories was $1,285 a year less than men. . . . In just one year, U.S. corporations made five billion four hundred million dollars in extra profits from their exploitation of women.
Document 4
Source: Lizabeth Cohen, historian, Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919–1939, published in 1991
“Working-class Chicagoans—male and female, black and white, ... immigrants from eastern and southern Europe or their children—were ... asserting themselves in new ways in the larger political arena. During the 1930s, Chicago workers, along with men and women elsewhere in the nation, had begun to vote Democratic more consistently and in greater numbers than ever before, joining President Franklin Roosevelt’s ‘New Democratic Coalition.’ ... Supporting the Democrats ... , they felt, would ensure a more activist federal government committed to providing the benefits that over time have become associated with ‘the welfare state.’”
Document 5
Source: Josephine L. Baker, factory worker, "A Second Peep at Factory Life," Lowell Offering, 1845
You ask, if there are so many things objectionable, why we work in the mill. Well, simply for this reason—every situation in life, has its trials which must be borne, and factory life has no more than any other. There are many things we do not like. . . .
[But] there is a brighter side to this picture. . . . The time we do have is our own. The money we earn comes promptly; more so than in any other situation; and our work, though laborious is the same from day to day; we know what it is, and when finished we feel perfectly free, till it is time to commence it again.
Besides this, there are many pleasant associations connected with factory life, that are not to be found elsewhere.
There are lectures, evening schools, and libraries, to which all may have access. The one thing needful here, is the time to improve them as we ought.
Document 6
Source: Editorial Letter, The Messenger , African American magazine, March 1920
Fellow Negroes of the South, leave there. Go North, East, and West—anywhere—to get out of that hell hole. There are better schools here for your children, higher wages for yourselves, votes if you are twenty-one, better housing and more liberty. All is not rosy here, by any means, but it is Paradise compared with Georgia, Arkansas, Texas, Mississippi and Alabama. Besides, you make it better for those you leave behind. Labor becomes scarce, so that the Bourbons 1 of Dixie are compelled to pay your brothers back home more wages. They will give them more schools and privileges, too, to try to get them to come back, and, secondly, to try to keep you from leaving.
Document 7
Source: Lewis Hine, Child Labor in Cotton Mills, 1908.
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