t is difficult to exaggerate the dread
and sense of crisis that the urban
poor inspired in most citizens of
the United States a century ago.
The phenomenally rapid industri-

alization that had been underway since the Civil War was attracting millions of eastern and southern Europeans to America's sweatshops, steel mills, and railyards. The influx of these "more foreign foreigners," more alien in language, cus- toms, and religion than the Irish and Ger- man immigrants who preceded th...