The transformation of American society, 1865-1900 The population of the continental United States in 1880 was slightly above 50,000,000. In 1900 it was just under 76,000,000, a gain of more than 50 percent, but still the smallest rate of population increase for any 20-year period of the 19th century. The rate of growth was unevenly distributed, ranging from less than 10 percent in northern New England to more than 125 percent in the 11 states and territories of the Far West. Most of the states east of the Mississippi reported gains slightly below the national average. ImmigrationMuch of the population increase was due to the more than 9,000,000 immigrants who entered the United States in the last 20 years of the century, the largest number to arrive in any comparable period up to that time. From the earliest days of the republic until 1895, the majority of immigrants had always come from northern or western Europe. Beginning in 1896, however, the great majority of the immigrants were from southern or eastern Europe. Nervous Americans, already convinced that immigrants wielded too much political power or were responsible for violence and industrial strife, found new cause for alarm, fearing that the new immigrants could not easily be assimilated into American society. Those fears gave added stimulus to agitation for legislation to limit the number of immigrants eligible for admission to the United States and led, in the early 20th century, to quota laws favouring immigrants from northern and western Europe. Until that time, the only major restriction against immigration was the Chinese Exclusion Act, passed by Congress in 1882, prohibiting for a period of 10 years the immigration of Chinese labourers into the United States. This act was both the culmination of more than a decade of agitation on the West Coast for the exclusion of the Chinese and an early sign of the coming change in the traditional U.S. philosophy of welcoming virtuall...
