1900's Media | The Heyday of the Foreign Language Press

A Nation of Immigrants.

In 1900, 46 percent of the nation's population was composed of first- or second-generation immigrants. Beginning in 1896 immigrants from southeastern European countries outnumbered those from northwestern European countries, bringing with them a diversity of languages and cultures that America had never before experienced. Many of these new Americans could not read at all, and most of them could not read English but were eager to learn. In the last decades of the nineteenth century, most foreign-language papers were run by intellectuals or clergy on the European model of dedication to one religion or ideology. In the first decade of the twentieth century all this changed. More than one thousand foreign-language papers operated, the number peaking at thirteen hundred in 1914. More than 140 of these were dailies, and 40 percent were in German. German-, Polish-, and Yiddish-language papers claimed circulations...