CHAPTER 3
At the turn of the century the most famous magician in the world was Harry Houdini, an American immigrant who specialized in great escapes. He could free himself from handcuffs, iron collars, and strait-jackets. With consummate ease he emerged from prison cells and padlocked safes, from river beds and buried coffins. He captivated audiences who saw in his escapes a symbolic reenactment of their own emancipation from the Old World and their flight to the New. By his art Houdini could express their fantasies, needs, and fears. His own experiences of displacement and assimilation had equipped him perfectly.
Born Ehrich Weiss in 1874, Houdini took the name of another, the French conjuror Robert-Houdin. His life story, personal and professional, was a series of escapes. His rabbi father fled Budapest to evade arrest. The son ran away from home in Appleton, Wisconsin, when he was twelve to free himself for his chosen career. In 1894 he eloped with a Catholic girl, Beatrice Rahner, whose widowed mother would not accept him; neither, at first, would the world of American show business. It was only after he held London audiences spellbound that he could make the big time in the United States. When he did so, his stunts and illusions were taken as a celebration of immigration—physical, spiritual, and psychological.
The part played by the United States in the mass migrations of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is most distinctive—and not for quantity alone. Americans looked to the future, not the past. Where people had come from was less important than where they were going. The very word “immigrant” was invented by Jedidiah Morse in 1789 to describe foreign settlers in New York. By calling them immigrants, rather than the more traditional “emigrants,” Americans emphasized the fact that newcomers had entered a new land rather than left an old one.
American immigration was continuous throughout the nineteenth century. Nevertheless, there were three distinct waves, each greater than the one before. According to historian Marcus Lee Hansen they were dominated successively by the Celts, Germans, Slavs, and Mediterranean peoples. Of the 5 million people who crossed the Atlantic between 1815 and 1860 and the 10 million who did so between 1860 and 1890 the majority came from Britain and Ireland, Germany and Scandinavia, Switzerland and Holland. However, the 15 million who composed the third wave, from 1890 to 1914, came principally from Italy and Greece, Austria-Hungary and Russia, Rumania and Turkey.
The extent of the change is best illustrated by a comparison of immigration figures at the crest of the second and third waves in, respectively, 1882 and 1907. In 1882, 788,992 immigrants arrived—a record for the nineteenth century. Of these, 250,630 were from Germany (the highest number ever), 179,423 from Britain and Ireland, and 105,326 from Scandinavia. Only 32,159 were from Italy, 29,150 from the Hapsburg Empire, and 16,918 from Russia and the Baltic. Thus, 87 percent were from northern and western Europe and only 13 percent from southern and eastern Europe. In 1907, however, when 1,285,349 immigrants arrived, 19.3 percent were from northern and western Europe, and 80.7 percent from southern and eastern Europe. The “old” immigration was now much smaller than the “new.”
It was political, economic, and religious discontent in Europe that stirred both old and new immigrants to leave. Throughout the nineteenth century industrial and agricultural revolutions transformed European society. The additional pressure of increasing population provided the impetus for emigration. Such changes began in western Europe. As the century progressed they spread to the east. The causes and sources of American immigration moved with them.
A whole series of factors stimulated the exodus from Germany. More German immigrants arrived than any other ethnic group in all but three years from 1854 to 1894. Agricultural depression and industrial recession stirred Britons, Norwegians, and Swedes. In Ireland the root cause of unemployment and poverty was agricultural mismanagement by absentee landlords. After 1890 the birthrate began to fall in northwestern Europe. Moreover, increased industrialization afforded new employment for those displaced from agriculture. The old immigration began to decline.
The huddled masses arrive. This famous photograph by Levick Edwin of immigrants aboard the Atlantic liner SS Patricia about to dock in New York Harbor on December 10, 1906, suggests the mix of expectation and apprehension felt by throngs of new immigrants from central, southern, and eastern Europe who constituted the greater part of people coming to the New World in search of political freedom and economic opportunity at the turn of the century. (SSF Emigration and Immigration; Library of Congress.)
Of all factors stimulating the new immigration the most obvious was an increase in population. At the close of the century the annual rates of increase in eastern Europe were more than 10 in every previous 1,000. Increased population threatened traditional standards of living. There was not enough food to go around. Developments in the three states from which Slavic and Mediterranean emigration flowed (Austria-Hungary, Russia, and Italy) illustrate this. Italian immigration to America rose from 12,000 in 1880 to over 100,000 in 1900; immigration from Austria-Hungary rose from 17,000 in 1880 to 114,000 in 1900. The catchment area of Slavs was especially wide. The term “Slav” covers a western division of Poles, Bohemians (Czechs), and Slovaks, and an eastern division of Russians, Ruthenians (Ukrainians), Bulgarians, Serbs, Croatians, and Slovenians.
The impulse for migration from Russia was as much political and religious as it was economic. The greatest exodus was of Russian Jews, fleeing new persecution. The assassination of Alexander II in 1881 set off anti-Semitic riots in the south and west. Henceforth Jews were confined to the Pale of Settlement, Poland, and the western provinces. Outright persecution followed. The number of Russian immigrants to America rose from 5,000 in 1880 to 90,000 in 1900. Even when Poles made up a quarter of the Russian exodus, and Finns, Germans, and Lithuanians accounted for almost another quarter, Jews constituted the largest single group, 43.8 percent of the whole. Less than 5 percent of immigrants from Russia were Russian in anything but birth. Muslim oppression of Armenians in the notorious massacres of 1894, 1895, and 1896 compelled Armenians to emigrate.
Not all immigrants came across the Atlantic. Between 1860 and 1900 about 300,000 French-Canadians left the Province of Quebec where neither agriculture nor industry could support the population. By the end of the nineteenth century, French-Canadians constituted one of the major minority groups in New England and rather smaller ones in northern New York, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Illinois. Only when the Canadian frontier reached the prairies at the turn of the century did immigration from Canada begin to decline. A small number of Mexicans immigrated—according to official statistics less than 10,000 before 1900. Some historians believe that the actual numbers were twice that figure. Mexican immigrants usually went first to El Paso, Texas, a city with three railroad lines offering transport to jobs on nearby farms, mines, and smelters, and in railway construction.
A comparatively small but significant number of Asians crossed the Pacific. Between 1849, when gold was discovered in California, and 1882, when the Chinese Exclusion Act was passed, 300,000 Chinese settled in California. Like many Europeans, their primary motive was economic. The Taiping Rebellion that began in 1848 devastated southeast China. The lure of high wages on the railroads enticed men from the province of Guangdong. Chinese comprised an overwhelming majority of laborers who laid the track of the Central Pacific through the Sierra Nevada in the 1860s. In 1870 Chinese miners accounted for a fifth of all miners in Montana, a quarter in California and Washington, and more than half in Oregon and Idaho. In 1886 nearly 90 percent of all farm laborers in California were Chinese.
In 1885 a Japanese exodus began after the emperor revoked a ban on emigration. Japan’s population explosion was greater than that of any Western country. However, only from 1891 onward did more than 1,000 Japanese come in any one year. In the 1880s and 1890s most immigrants went to Hawaii to work on American sugar plantations as contract laborers. After the annexation of Hawaii in 1898 they could travel to the United States.
What prospective immigrants learned about the United States was not all hearsay. There were many travelers’ tales. More important, there were advertisements in guidebooks, pamphlets, and newspapers. For example, the guidebook Where to Emigrate and Why was published by “Americus” in 1869. It described journeys by land and sea, calculated the cost, and reported on wages in the United States. It was one of a series of tracts describing the advantages of life in America. The gospel was not only that of wealth and economic opportunity but also of political equality and religious tolerance.
Prospective immigrants were shown why, where, and how to go. Steamships had revolutionized the transatlantic traffic. In 1867, 92.86 percent of passengers arrived in New York by steamship. Of all the benefits the most significant was a shorter journey. The old sailing ships took from one to three months to cross the Atlantic. The crossing by steam lasted, on average, fourteen days in 1867 and only five and a half days forty years later. The journey was much safer, for ships were getting bigger and better. The introduction of steel hulls, improved boilers, and the triple expansion engine made possible ships of 5,000 tons. Each could accommodate about 300 passengers first class and more than 1,000 in the steerage.
During the Civil War, British and German steamship lines seized the bulk of the transatlantic traffic from American companies. Lines such as the Inman and Cunard from Liverpool, the Hamburg-Amerika from Hamburg, and the North German Lloyd from Bremen built new fleets of passenger ships and expanded their trade. They were joined by new lines: by 1882 there were 48 steamship companies competing with one another in the Atlantic.
Steamship companies proudly advertised their facilities. It was said in 1890 that the five largest shipping lines had 3,600 agents in the British Isles alone. The French line, Compagnie Générale Transatlantique, employed 55 agents, each with 200 or 300 subagents working part-time. Moreover, there were also agencies throughout the United States where Americans could buy tickets for their relatives abroad. In 1890 nearly a third of immigrants arrived on prepaid tickets; in 1900, almost two-thirds. Specific funds to assist immigrants were also provided by public organizations and private individuals. Over the years the sums raised and distributed were considerable. Between 1847 and 1887 Irish immigrants received £34 million in advance to pay for their journey. Immigrants from Austria-Hungary received $95 million between 1893 and 1903.
During the 1880s the immigration trade became a matter of fierce competition among British and German steamship companies. One result of these rate wars was a temporary reduction in fares from £3 or £4 ($15 or $20) to £2 ($10). Yet steamship lines also entered “pools” in much the same way American railroads did. Thus, in 1886 British lines agreed with Hamburg-Amerika to divide the traffic and retain their profits. British companies would limit their crossings from Hamburg. In return the German company would give up its service from Gothenburg.
In fact, German lines were better situated to serve immigrants from southern and eastern Europe than were the British. During a cholera epidemic in 1892 the German government set up stations for medical inspections along the frontiers with Austria and Russia. But the authorities went further. They encouraged the Hamburg-Amerika and North German Lloyd companies to screen passengers for commercial reasons. Thus emigrants with tickets for British ships were delayed unless they agreed to travel on German ships instead. British companies retaliated by finding alternative routes to Liverpool for southern and eastern Europeans which avoided Germany. They also introduced direct routes to the United States from Liban (Lepaya) in the Baltic, and from Naples, Genoa, Palermo, and Trieste in the Mediterranean. Thus immigration was now possible from the whole of Europe and not just the northwest. At the turn of the century British and German companies agreed to resolve their differences. They formed the North Atlantic, Continental, and Mediterranean Steamship Conferences to end rate wars and reduce competition.
In this graceful drawing by Kenyon Cox (1856–1919), Liberty, with rapt expression, wearing a laurel wreath and classical clothes but carrying a camera, leads eager immigrants of all ages to the land of freedom, in an idealized scene of pastoral solicitude that was at odds with many immigrants’ firsthand experiences of the raw disorder of city tenements or the loneliness of solitary homesteads. (Library of Congress.)
Whatever their origins, northwest Europe was still the main point of departure for immigrants in 1891. Some 110,000 left from Liverpool; 82,000 from Hamburg; 68,000 from Bremen; 36,000 from Antwerp; 25,000 each from Rotterdam and Le Havre; 23,000 from Glasgow and other smaller ports in northern Europe. Only 50,000 left directly from the Mediterranean. In addition to New York, ships left Liverpool bound for Boston, New Orleans, Philadelphia, and Quebec.
Because the new ships were built especially for passengers, their accommodation was superior to that of sailing ships. Yet for several years the steerage remained dark, dank, and foul. In 1867 the New York State Commissioners of Emigration reported the scandalous treatment of 544 German passengers on the Leibnitz. It took seventy days to reach New York from Hamburg. One hundred and twenty immigrants were confined to the steerage beneath a cargo of wool and hides. They had little light and less ventilation. Passengers received only half a pint of water a day whereas they were entitled to three quarts. The food was partly rotted. The medicine chest was paltry and its supplies were exhausted after two weeks. There was no doctor. There were only six water closets. People simply used the decks: urine and excrement flowed from the upper to the lower. In all 108 died of malnutrition or asphyxiation. Their corpses remained on board for hours, covered in excrement and vermin. Frederick Kassner, who inspected the ship in New York, could not discover a spot on ladders or ropes clean enough to put down his hands and feet.
This was an extreme case, yet passengers still ran a risk of epidemics. Cholera struck down hundreds of German immigrants traveling on three National Line ships from Rotterdam in 1866. Two years later there was an outbreak of smallpox on another National ship carrying Swedes from Liverpool. Another cholera epidemic, this time among Russian Jews on Hamburg-Amerika ships in 1892, led to the United States imposing quarantine restrictions that brought immigration to a temporary halt. During the Gilded Age, however, the average number of deaths at sea was less than one percent.
Improvements in accommodation, maintenance, and welfare were largely the result of government action. According to the American Passenger Act of 1855, still in operation after the Civil War, the United States declared that each deck had to have a height of at least six feet. Each passenger was to have space of sixteen square feet on the top deck and eighteen on the lower deck, and a berth six feet long by two feet wide. The law insisted that ships provided passengers with cooked rather than raw food. Moreover the total number of passengers carried could not be more than half the ship’s tonnage. However, in the first six months of 1880 no fewer than thirty-four ships arrived in New York carrying far more passengers than the law allowed. In 1882 Congress made more stringent provisions. It decided that adults and older children were each to have space of 100 cubic feet, 120 if on the lowest deck. Passengers were to be served three meals a day, a total of 1½ Navy rations. The captain was required to set standards of discipline and hygiene. The company would incur a fine of $10 for every death on board. Most commentators agreed the law could not be enforced.
The mass Irish exodus of the 1840s prompted the British government to pass its own Passenger Acts. They established codes of practice in the matters of provisions, capacity, hygiene, ventilation, and medicine. They also insisted that passengers’ rights were fully advertised. And they appointed emigration officers to see that the law was enforced. Emigrants’ rights were also set out by Germany in 1897 and Italy in 1888 and 1901. The Italian act of 1901 contained one radical requirement, a ship’s doctor responsible for passengers’ health and welfare alike.
By the 1890s accommodation was better for some. William Smith, a Yorkshire traveler to New York in 1891, noted that steerage passengers on the Majestic had a smoking room, family cabins, baths, and an open deck. This was the beginning of a genuine third class on British liners. The old steerage accommodation still served the majority aboard continental vessels.
Some immigrants were only interested in temporary employment at high wages, which they could obtain in American mines and textile factories. The steamship, capable of regular, rapid, and reliable crossings, made it possible for British and German workers to move between eastern and western hemispheres in response to seasonal demand. These “swallows” traveled to America each spring and returned to Europe in the fall. Thus transatlantic traffic now moved in two directions. There were times following the depression of 1873 when eastbound exceeded westbound traffic.
States and railroads were even more responsible than steamship companies for stimulating immigration. Well before the war, Michigan and Wisconsin had made concerted efforts to attract immigrants. After 1865 almost all the northwestern states and territories formed separate agencies. They wanted to dispose of unsold land and they realized that increased population was essential for material growth. In 1870 mid-western governors held a national convention on immigration in Indianapolis. It was attended by delegates from twenty-two states who petitioned Congress to establish a national bureau of immigration in place of the one closed down in 1868. The depression of 1873 put to rest many of the thirty-three state bureaus then in existence.
State bureaus concentrated their efforts on Britain, Germany, and Scandinavia. Their pamphlets and newspaper advertisements emphasized future prospects. In Minnesota, the Empire State of the North-West (1878), Minnesota claimed it could support five million people. This was two years before a census that recorded fewer than 800,000. Before it even became a state Colorado had established a board of immigration that circulated reports on railroads and real estate. According to Colorado, A Statement of Facts (1872), “The poor should come to Colorado, because here they can by industry and frugality better their condition. The rich should come here because they can more advantageously invest their means than in any other region. The young should come here to get an early start on the road to wealth.” The states were in competition with one another and also with the territories. Both Iowa and Minnesota tried to undermine the campaign to settle Dakota in the 1860s. They published articles on the hazards of life there—droughts, blizzards, and hostile Indians.
The South also tried to attract immigrants. It wanted cheap labor to replace the supposedly lazy blacks. South Carolina set up the first immigration agency in any southern state in 1866. A more general agency, the Southern Immigration Association of America, was organized in Louisville, Kentucky, in 1883. But its campaigns were ineffective. The South had almost no unsold land to dispose of. Moreover there was little large-scale industry. Therefore immigrants went elsewhere, belated proof that slavery was not the reason why earlier immigrants had also done so. Thus the South had fewer immigrants than Manhattan or Brooklyn and not many more than Chicago.
Some historians believe that railroads were the most significant promotional agencies at the turn of the century. They were especially important in dispersing immigrants. They had vast tracts of land to dispose of, and they could offer transport to reach it. The Kansas Pacific, Missouri Pacific, Santa Fe, and Wisconsin Central all distributed booklets. The Santa Fe even appointed a European agent, C. B. Schmidt. In 1875 he visited Russia to arrange passages for Mennonites who settled in Kansas. In California railroad magnates helped found the California Immigrant Union in 1869. The railroads’ lavish inducements to immigrants included reduced fares by sea and land, loans at low rates of interest, classes in farming, and the building of churches and schools.
Notwithstanding their self-interest, the railroads’ policies to immigrants were far more benevolent than their practices to their native clientele. It was railroad policy to establish homogeneous communities. Thus the railroads helped determine the ethnic composition of the West and Midwest. Most active was the Burlington. To sell its three million acres of land in Iowa and Nebraska it published a monthly newspaper in 1875 and 1876. Annual editions were translated into German, Czech, Norwegian, and Swedish. Its London agent, Edward Edgington, who also worked for the Iowa Board of Immigration, mounted a massive publicity campaign in Britain between 1870 and 1875. Thus the Burlington installed British, German, and Scandinavian settlements in Iowa and Nebraska.
The keynote of such campaigns was not wealth alone: it was also independence. A Northern Pacific advertisement placed in the Sher-borne, Dorchester and Taunton Journal (a newspaper in the west of England) on June 13, 1872, summed up the railroads’ general appeal: “For the amount of a single year’s rental in Great Britain, a British tenant-farmer can obtain in Minnesota the freehold of a large and productive farm.” Thus the Northern induced British, German, and Scandinavian immigrants to settle in Dakota, Minnesota, and the Pacific Northwest. It was credited with doubling their population between 1880 and 1900. Railroad agents, whose job was to sell land to Europeans, were also able to assure prospective settlers that they could always find work while railroad construction was in progress. In 1868 the Central Pacific advertised that it would “employ all the labor that may be offered” in construction work at $30 a month plus board. Between 1870 and 1873 the Lake Superior and Mississippi Railroad advertised construction work in the Skandinavisk Post.
By the 1890s there was little railroad land available at prices immigrants could afford. Other land was in areas unattractive to them. Thus by the close of the century most railroads had closed their European agencies. The end of their recruitment campaigns coincided with a natural decline in immigration from Britain, Germany, and Scandinavia.
Integration
The first stage in the integration of immigrants into American society was their reception. In 1855 New York State established a reception center in Manhattan at the old fort down at the Battery, Castle Garden. Immigrants arriving at the Port of New York first went through quarantine at Staten Island, next through customs at a dock on the Hudson or East River, and finally to Castle Garden. It was here that they were registered and could make arrangements for their new life. Castle Garden had its own labor bureau, separate from the reception center, where immigrants met employers. However, few employers were aware of its existence, and not until 1880 did requests for skilled workers exceed the supply. British, German, and Irish immigrants were given the pick of available jobs. Others were left to fend for themselves.
In 1892 the federal government opened a new immigration depot. Ellis Island had once been a picnic resort and was later an arsenal. Now ships docked in the harbor, and immigrants were ferried to the island where all stages—quarantine, customs, and registration—were completed. Registration covered, in turn, name, nationality, last residence, destination, occupation, age, sex, marital status, number in family, literacy, amount of money, whether a former prisoner or pauper, health, vessel, and date. The clerks’ methods were rough-and-ready, their knowledge of other languages rudimentary. If immigration statistics are misleading, it is largely due to them. They were quite likely to call Czechs Germans, and Serbs Hungarians. The Jewish Cooperstein became Cooper, the Dutch Kok became Cook, and the Greek Kiriacopoulis became Campbell. One German Jew was so confused by the barrage of questions that he forgot his own name. “Ich vergesse,” he admitted when asked. The clerk accordingly registered him as Ferguson.
During the Gilded Age 80 percent of immigrants settled in a northeastern quadrilateral between Canada, the Atlantic, Washington, D.C., and St. Louis, Missouri. Two-thirds remained in New England and in New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania. In 1890 there were 9 million first-generation immigrants in the United States. Of these 2.75 million were Germans. Half lived in five states: Illinois, Michigan, Missouri, Iowa, and Wisconsin. They constituted the single largest ethnic group in twenty-seven states. The Irish accounted for 2 million, and nearly two-thirds lived in New England and the Middle Atlantic states. Almost 1 million were Canadians. Those from the French provinces settled in New England; those from the British areas, in the states bordering the Great Lakes. There were 1 million English, 250,000 Scots, and 100,000 Welsh—all widely scattered. Of the 900,000 Scandinavians, most lived west of the Great Lakes. One-fifth lived in Minnesota (which acquired over 400 Swedish place names) and one-seventh in Illinois. Finns also settled in Massachusetts and Michigan. The remaining first-generation immigrants included 250,000 people from other parts of northwestern Europe, 750,000 from eastern and central Europe, and 100,000 Chinese. Immigrants from Austria-Hungary and Russia settled chiefly in Massachusetts, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Illinois. The great majority of Italians moved to California and Illinois. The Portuguese settled by the sea, in Massachusetts and Rhode Island on the Atlantic and in California on the Pacific.
It was principally the Industrial Revolution with its splendid promise of opportunity that had attracted immigrants, old and new. Indeed, without massive immigration the United States could not have developed industrially at anything like the rate it did. In 1890, 56 percent of the labor force in manufacturing and mechanical industries was of foreign birth or foreign parentage. Not surprisingly, public opinion held American industry responsible for increased immigration. As Welsh historian Maldwyn Jones explains, it assumed that between 1864, when Congress made contract labor legal in the Act to Encourage Immigration, and 1885, when it forbade it in the Foran Act, American industrialists imported cheap labor for the express purpose of depressing wages and breaking strikes. The steady flow of immigrants, ready to seize any opportunity, may have had that effect. But it was not part of a capitalist plot. For the 1864 act fell far short of the aims of its Republican sponsors. Congress appropriated $25,000 to establish a Commission of Immigration within the State Department and a United States Immigrant Office in the Port of New York. But the United States never provided immigrants with financial assistance, and the bureau was closed down in 1868. Financial support was left to private enterprise, whether business or union.
Contract labor was a new version of the indenture system of colonial times. Workers agreed to a period of service in return for having their fares to America prepaid. But the system was now used to bring over skilled workers for specialized jobs. It was not used to import masses of unskilled laborers. Mining companies in particular welcomed skilled immigrants. They lent miners their fare and a third of the fares of their families in return for two years’ work at half pay—about $10 a month. According to the census of 1870, half of the miners in America were first-generation immigrants from Britain and Ireland.
Beginning in the 1860s, first in New York and Chicago and then elsewhere, private firms began to supply labor on commission. For a brief period in the 1860s the American Emigrant Company tried to run an international labor agency. It sought assistance for passages for prospective immigrants. But its activities in Europe fell foul of manufacturers and governments alike. It could not make ends meet and in 1867 gave up the attempt to procure contract labor.
There was also a Latin variation on the theme of contract labor. Immigration from the south of Italy was promoted by padroni. The padrone system passed through two phases. At first the padrone was an independent boss who collected children from villages. He trained them as street musicians and acrobats and took them to America to earn a living. The practice was made illegal and died out. The Italian vice consul in New York assured the Ford committee investigating immigration in 1888 that there were no longer any padroni in operation. But the system had changed. New padroni now acted in association with Italian travel and labor bureaus. They recruited unskilled laborers in Italy and put them under contract at a fixed wage. They advanced money to cover traveling expenses and boarded them in America. Loans were to be repaid at 6 percent interest. The Ford committee discovered that immigrants sometimes ran up debts of $70 in return for passages originally worth only $20. In 1899 there were eighty Italian banks in New York, most of which ran labor bureaus. About two-thirds of the Italian work force in the city owed them and the padroni their livelihood.
For a long time it was said that immigrants found employment according to their physical and mental abilities. Thus, Poles and Slavs worked in heavy industry because they were supposed to be strong, stupid, and submissive. English workers were noted for their skill and versatility. For example, cutlers from Sheffield, who had had a long and careful training, were in special demand because they could turn their hand to anything in the iron industry. In New York and Chicago, Russian Jews, widely known for their dexterity, made women’s clothes their particular specialty.
However, who worked where and when depended on all sorts of social and economic factors. French-Canadians worked in the textile factories of New England because their immigration coincided with increased demand for labor in the cotton mills of states near Quebec. Moreover, the mills of Maine, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island hired women and children as well as men. Thus, whole families could be employed together. The clothing industry was not attractive to Russian Jews because it offered work to women and children. Their women usually stayed at home after marriage. Their children stayed at school until they were in their teens. The principal attraction of the rag trade was as an avenue to commerce. Pay was by piecework; earnings were related to individual effort. Workers could therefore amass capital and invest in their own businesses.
Inauguration of the Statue of Liberty: a military and naval salute in New York Harbor following the dedication by President Grover Cleveland on October 28, 1886. Given by the Third French Republic to the United States in commemoration of its Centennial in 1876, the immense Statue of Liberty, 151 feet high and weighing 225 tons, was designed by sculptor Frédéric-Auguste Bartholdi and made of copper sheets mounted on four huge steel supports designed by Alexandre Eiffel. The statue was soon identified with the aspirations of immigrants, especially those fleeing oppression—although some continued to fear its monumental brooding presence, wondering if it were the tomb of Christopher Columbus. (Photo by H. O’Neill, taken from a steamer, Patrol; Library of Congress.)
Acculturation
“We call England the mother country,” observed humorist Robert Benchley, “because most of us come from Poland or Italy.” Indeed, it was only the British with conspicuous advantages of language and literacy who remained indifferent to American citizenship. In 1890 more than half of the first-generation immigrants had already been naturalized and many others had filed for citizenship. The immigrant’s key to acculturation in America was his new citizenship. It confirmed a new identity. For a long time, however, immigrants were American only in name. Their language, customs, and religions were quite different from those of many natives. Their lives revolved around their own ethnic group.
Certainly, the culture of ethnic ghettos owed little to English tradition. The facades of city houses and apartment blocks would not have been out of place in continental Europe: New York City’s Orchard Street was reminiscent of old Vienna, Hester Street of Warsaw. Taste and smell were as much affected as sight and sound. The new American cuisine included Irish stew, Hungarian goulash, German liverwurst, Russian borscht, Rumanian pastrami, Italian lasagne, Greek moussaka, and Jewish bagels and lox.
In their new and alien environment immigrants required special services: mutual aid societies; foreign language businesses and newspapers; churches and synagogues for culture, ceremony, and consolation. Organizations like the Illinois Immigrants’ Protective League and the North American Civic League for Immigrants were primarily concerned with integrating their members into American society.
Of all the different ethnic groups the Jews were most prepared to unite for the sake of their people as a whole. Successive Russian pogroms provided a continuous reminder of cultural obligations to others in distress. Moreover, Jewish religious observance preserved cultural identity and solidarity. As early as 1860 there were 27 synagogues in New York City. With the passing years many German Jews became Americanized in their attitudes to teaching and services. Their reform movement was given theological respectability by the arrival of learned rabbis from Europe. The most influential was Isaac Wise, who published the Israelite and made Cincinnati the center of Reform Judaism. By 1890 there were more members of Reform than Orthodox synagogues. Yet without the whip of persecution religion flagged. Many Russian Jews came to prefer socialism to religion.
The influx of Russian and other eastern European Jews prompted the established community to offer help by way of the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, the Educational Alliance, and other organizations. The newcomers disliked taking charity from Americanized Jews and were quite capable of founding their own Hebrew Sheltering Society in 1890. They also established 300 schools to teach Hebrew. These newcomers brought an intense piety, sustained by strict religious observance, and deep commitment to secular causes—socialism, anarchism, and Zionism.
The Roman Catholic Church was the church of immigrants. After the Civil War there were 42 dioceses and 3,000 churches. In 1900 there were 70 dioceses and 10,000 churches. As historian John Higham explains, “Immigration transformed the church into an ethnic fortress.” Yet the Roman Catholic Church became a source of controversy among immigrants rather than a means of assimilation. When the Irish first arrived, it was the only institution ready to accept them. But it was ambiguous about the Irish movement for Home Rule. Churchmen were sympathetic to the idea of Irish independence from Protestant England. But they realized that the removal of Irish members from the British Parliament would weaken the representation of Catholics there. They also resented secret societies such as the Fenians. Furthermore, they distrusted the Irish movement as a nationalist rather than religious cause. However, other ethnic groups thought that the Irish were getting more than their fair share of attention from the church. In 1886 the Reverend Peter M. Abbelen, vicar general of the Diocese of Milwaukee, complained to the Vatican that Irish bishops were hostile to German culture. In 1891 the St. Raphaelsverein, a society for the protection of German immigrants, went further. It submitted the Lucerne Memorial to the Vatican. This was a petition asking that each ethnic group should have its own priests and parishes. Officially the church refused. Tacitly it complied.
The foreign language newspaper was a crucial immigrant institution. It nourished group solidarity. Between 1884 and 1920, 3,500 new foreign language papers appeared. In 1890, 800 of the foreign language papers were German, three-quarters of the total number. A few were city dailies such as the New Yorker Staatszeitung, the Anzeiger des Western of St. Louis, the Cincinnati Volkesblatt, and the Wisconsin Banner. Most of the others were Scandinavian, French, or Spanish. Later on, more groups were represented. The first paper ever published in Lithuanian was in America, not Europe. Only a fraction survived, and the total number of foreign-language papers increased only a little, from 794 to 1,052.
The local political boss gave immigrants employment, protection, and housing. It was he they repaid. As Oscar Handlin puts it, “The machine was the means through which the immigrants sought services no one else performed.” First in the field were Irish machines. The heyday of Irish bosses was from 1870 to 1920. The Irish had arrived earlier and, unlike many who followed, spoke English. They also knew how democratic government was supposed to work. As Leonard Dinnerstein and David Reimers acutely observe, “For two centuries they had been oppressed by the English in Ireland and during that period they had learned how Anglo-Saxon law could be manipulated to satisfy the ends of those who governed and work against those who did not.” From the Catholic church they learned organization and discipline. Thus, among ethnic groups they alone had the understanding and techniques to dominate politics after the Civil War. “Honest John” Kelly, Richard Croker, and Charles F. Murphy in succession ruled Tammany Hall. Mike McDonald, Johnny Rogers, Michael (“Hinky Dink”) Kenna, and “Bathhouse John” Joseph Coughlin dominated Chicago. Colonel Ed Butler was the Democratic boss who ruled the Republican city of St. Louis. Hugh O’Brien became first in a long line of Irish mayors of Boston. These men led the first and most enduring ethnic bloc in American politics. On the whole, the Irish remained loyal to the Democrats and resisted Republican attempts to entice them away.
Although the political contribution of new immigrants was, at first, hesitant, their cultural contribution was distinctive from the outset. Through the simultaneous experiences of displacement and assimilation many second-generation immigrants showed a special feeling for the theater. Playing a part and projecting a personality were second nature.
It was in theater that Jewish artistry in particular first achieved its fullest expression. Three Yiddish theaters on New York’s Bowery specialized in problem plays. The plots were drawn from comic operas and melodramas, the dialogue from vaudeville patter. They were immensely popular among audiences of all classes. It is estimated that 2 million people attended 1,100 performances each year at the turn of the century. The extraordinary popularity of the Yiddish theater was due to its realism. In the plays of Jacob Gordin audiences could recognize and identify with situations from everyday life. The most influential statement about assimilation was The Melting Pot (1908), a play by Israel Zangwill, an English Jew. The subsequent contribution of American Jews to vaudeville, radio, and cinema became a legend of show business. Their contribution to American literature was also outstanding. It began with Yekl: A Tale of the New York Ghetto (1896) by Abraham Cahan, the first novel of American immigrants written by a naturalized citizen in English.
The phenomenon of apparently sudden, spontaneous, and exceptional Jewish creativity in the fields of music, art, and later, science was so astonishing after centuries of silence that it requires some explanation. Emancipation from one world and reception into another provide only part of the answer. English political scientist Bryan Magee has defined and analyzed the phenomenon. He calls his article “Of Jews—Not Least in Music” (1968) because it is in music that he finds the Jewish achievement so striking. His argument, by extension, accounts for newfound creativity among other immigrants. He dismisses an obvious explanation, that the cultural achievement of Jews at the turn of the century arose from their unique religious tradition. Because Judaism is by and large authoritarian it does not allow its basic values to be questioned. Originality is inimical to closed religious and political systems, but it is essential to truly creative art, which expresses the artist’s conscious ideas and needs and his subconscious conflicts and desires. Throughout central and eastern Europe, Jews had been obliged to live in a closed religious culture of their own. They had no opportunity either within or outside their ghettos and shtetls for free expression. But in the course of the nineteenth century these closed communities were broken up and their people scattered in the wake of European nationalism.
The first emancipated Jews spoke the Gentile languages of the new society around them with foreign accents. However talented they were, Jewish artists and philosophers in Europe could, at first, make no more of their art than a self-conscious synthesis of form and idea. But this was not a permanent state of affairs. Two things were happening. As generations passed, Jews became more integrated with the culture around them. In the United States they helped to create it. At the same time, Western culture itself was disintegrating. The skein of nineteenth-century history is woven from national struggles for liberation, imperialist wars, mass migrations, and the dispersal of refugees. They are its very warp and woof. The fragmentation of society and the alienation of the individual from society and himself became major themes of modern culture. Because of their experiences, new immigrants, particularly Jews, were far more involved in, and identified with, each of these things than other immigrants. They could articulate their responses both consciously and subconsciously. Many benefited from the dubious distinction of double alienation. They rejected Orthodox Judaism, yet remained victims of anti-Semitism. The Yiddish theater, with its special themes of expatriation and assimilation, was an ideal forum for the first flowering of Jewish expression and creativity in a Gentile world. It served as a focal point of acculturation and also helped reshape the developing culture of the New World.
More than anything else fluency and facility in English liberated immigrants from the past. Once children had mastered the language they were beyond their parents’ control. It was they who led. They could reject the traditions of the Old World. Perhaps this partly explains the Italian hostility to education. It weakened ethnic ties. When in 1889 and 1890 the states of Illinois and Wisconsin decided that English was to be the medium of instruction in schools, there was a great outcry from Germans and Scandinavians. Catholics and Lutherans alike believed that it would destroy their ethnic culture. Eight midwestern states agreed to retain German as the medium wherever there was a demand. However, it was particularly important to Jews that towns afforded free secular education. Their fascination with the new language in part explains their cultural renaissance.
Nativism
Throughout the 1860s, 1870s, and early 1880s no effort was spared to encourage immigration. Immigrants themselves chose as a symbol of welcome and promise the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor. But this was not an official view. The gigantic statue, unveiled before President Grover Cleveland on October 28, 1886, was a gift from the people of France. Created by sculptor Frédéric-Auguste Bartholdi, it was conceived, not as a symbol of welcome, but rather of republican solidarity. Intended for the Centennial Exhibition of 1876, it was not ready until ten years later. This was just as well. It took nine years for a committee of New York socialites and businessmen to raise the necessary funds to pay for the pedestal on which Liberty would rest. In 1883 they organized an art exhibition. New York poet Emma Lazarus, moved by the plight of bedraggled Jewish refugees fleeing the Russian pogroms of 1881, submitted a sonnet. In The New Colossus the Statue of Liberty was “Mother of Exiles,” her torch a beacon for newcomers:
“He who has never seen a New York street has never seen anything beautiful,” is an opinion Russian immigrant author Sholom Aleichem (1859–1916) gives to one of his characters. Along congested Hester Street on New York’s Lower East Side, principal center for the Jewish immigrant community from Central and Eastern Europe, street and market were one. By 1914 New York had 1.4 million Jews—the largest Jewish community in the world and more than the entire population of the city in 1870. These immigrants, most of whom were packed together in an area little more than a square mile in a seamy environment recorded by Jacob Riis (1849–1914), were to give the city much of its distinctive cultural character. (Photo by Riis; Library of Congress.)
Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!
However, economic fear bred ethnic intolerance. Immigrants came to be regarded, not as a source of strength, but as a drain on American resources. This was especially true of the East, where most immigrants arrived and where the social system was already hard and fast. Even the English did not escape censure. The New York Herald Tribune charged on November 7, 1879, that English workmen “must change their habits if they are to make good in the United States. No longer can they give the worst work for the highest wages.” The complaint was to become traditional. In the 1880s and 1890s magazines such as Harper’s, Atlantic Monthly, Puck, and Life contained an astonishing share of ethnic jokes, all prejudiced against newcomers. Scots retained in the New World the reputation for meanness they had first acquired in the Old. The day a funeral parlor in Camden, South Carolina, advertised “Bargains in Coffins” there were supposed to have been fourteen suicides among Scottish immigrants. A Scottish boy killed his parents rather than pay to go to the annual picnic of a local orphans’ society. His friends commiserated with a Scot scalped by the Sioux because only two days earlier he had paid for a haircut. And so on.
Cartoonist Thomas Nast expressed the attitude of many Americans when he showed the Irish as ugly, brawling drunkards. Norwegians and Swedes brought from Scandinavia their mutual hostility. When a Norwegian immigrant in Minnesota reported a sleighing accident in which he had run down and killed a Swedish farmer, the local Norwegian constable brushed aside his protestations of innocence: “Aw, forget it. But you’ll have to go to the county seat to collect your bounty.” Contrary to statistical evidence, Italian men were not considered regular churchgoers. They attended only their baptism, wedding, and funeral. Each time they had to be carried in.
Far more insidious was the charge that Italians were deeply involved in syndicated crime. The Hennessy case of 1890 led to widespread speculation about the existence of a transplanted Mafia in the United States. The original Sicilian Mafia was a prototype of illegal protective societies based on theft and extortion throughout Italy. A feud between two rival gangs of dock racketeers in New Orleans reached its climax in the trial of Joe and Pete Provanzano for the attempted massacre of the Matranga gang. When David Hennessy, the superintendent of police, disclosed that he had evidence about the Mafia, he was assassinated by five armed men on the streets of New Orleans. In the public outcry following Hennessy’s murder nineteen Sicilians were indicted for conspiracy or murder. Eight escaped and evaded prosecution. When the trial of the others ended inconclusively, a lynch mob of loyal Americans stormed the jail and seized the eleven defendants. They mowed down nine with guns and hanged the other two from lampposts. A grand jury investigating the murder of David Hennessy confirmed “the existence of the secret organization styled Mafia.” The press went further and began using the term as a generic name for any crimes involving Italians.
However, no immigrant group received as much abuse as the Jews. Anti-Semitism was, of course, not new to America. Still, Jews were barred from voting until the mid-nineteenth century, and social ostracism continued. The exclusion of banker Joseph Seligman from the Grand Union Hotel in Saratoga, New York, in 1877 was widely publicized. Hotels, clubs, and colleges then began to turn Jews away. Some even displayed cruel signs such as “No Jews or Dogs Admitted Here.” A Jewish parvenu dressed like a dandy was the object of ridicule and contempt. He was a “Jew de Spree.” The more established Jewish community responded by making scapegoats of the new immigrants from eastern Europe. A German-American Jew, W. M. Rosenblatt, wrote an article for Galaxy in 1872 in which he implored the public not to judge Jews by the “ignorant . . . bigoted, and vicious Poles and Russians arriving on the scene.”
Chinese immigrants to California were also subject to a barrage of abuse. Three-fifths of them had come from one small area, the district of Taishan in the province of Guangdong, a province that had ninety-eight districts. Thus, in the words of ethnic historian Thomas Sowell, they were “highly cohesive in culture, dialect and family network.” This cohesiveness sustained them in American society against seemingly impossible odds. They developed their own welfare institutions. Through the Chinese Benevolent Association, or “Six Companies,” they took care of the poor and imposed order and honor in Chinatown. But the secrecy of the Six Companies was held against them. So was the fact that the Chinese were willing to take menial jobs. They awakened white fears of a new slavery in a nation that had just fought a war to remove the old.
To labor they were “coolies,” a subversive and servile class that threatened the existence of white workers. In 1875 the Union Pacific imported 125 Chinese laborers to Rock Springs, Wyoming, to break a miners’ strike. Labor determined to fight back. In 1877 Dennis Kearney, a naturalized Irish immigrant, used the new Workingmen’s party as a pulpit to denounce them. His oratory resulted in hostile demonstrations in San Francisco, mob violence, and general public demand for an exclusion law. Rather than face industrial and agricultural anarchy from hostile artisans and laborers, conservatives were ready to give in to radical demands. The new state constitution of 1879 was permeated with racial intolerance. Article 19 gave the state legislature power to regulate immigration of paupers, criminals, diseased persons, and aliens. Corporations could not engage Mongolians, nor could they be employed on any public works. Coolie contracts were declared void. A state law of 1849 prohibiting Native Americans and African-Americans from testifying against whites was construed to bar Chinese testimony as well. Occupational licensing law and special taxes were also used against them. Thus, Chinese immigrants could no longer work in the very businesses they had created. Two occupations were left to them, the laundry and the restaurant.
President Rutherford B. Hayes could hardly repudiate the Burlingame Treaty of 1868 that granted the Chinese the right to immigrate. However, party politics compelled him to persuade China to accept a different form of limitation. In 1880 China gave the United States the right “to regulate, limit or suspend,” though not to prohibit, the immigration of laborers. There followed the Chinese Exclusion Act of May 1882, which suspended Chinese immigration for ten years. It also forbade the naturalization of Chinese residents and imposed further restrictions on them. Many returned to China. In 1892 the Chinese Exclusion Act was renewed for another ten years, and in 1902 it was extended indefinitely. The Chinese-American population declined from about 100,000 in 1890 to 60,000 in 1920. Traditional Chinese culture was oriented toward family life. But in America Chinese men outnumbered women by a ratio of 20 to 1. It was no wonder that Chinatowns acquired the problems of prostitution, drug abuse, and high suicide rates.
Chinese exclusion set a precedent. Congress eventually responded to the clamor for reform by passing an act in August 1882 that imposed a head tax of 50 cents on every foreigner arriving by sea and that excluded convicts and lunatics.
Immigration was now beginning to divide American society. A great gulf was opening between a predominantly native plutocracy and a predominantly foreign working class. The United States was becoming two nations separated by language and religion, residence and occupation alike. Not only was the new tide of immigration depressing wages, but also the closing of the frontier and settlement of available land in the West had sealed off the traditional escape route for discontented easterners. Thus, Americans began to lose confidence in the process of assimilation. The outcome was nativism, what John Higham calls “a defensive type of nationalism.” Nativist agitation was the work of three groups: unions that regarded unskilled immigrants as a threat to organized labor, social reformers who believed the influx of immigrants exacerbated the problems of the cities, and Protestant conservatives who dreaded the supposed threat to Nordic supremacy.
Skilled workers had most to fear from the importation of contract labor. After skilled Belgian and British glassworkers were brought under contract to work for lower wages in Baltimore and in Kent, Ohio, the two unions of American glassworkers amalgamated. The new union, Local Assembly 300, was pledged from its inception in February 1882 to oppose contract labor. Union leader James Campbell pressed for federal legislation on this point. Congressman Martin Foran of Ohio, himself a former president of the Coopers’ International Union, had already introduced a bill against contract labor in the House in January 1884. In 1885 the bill was revived by Senator Blair of New Hampshire, and it passed the Senate on February 18 by a vote of 50 to 9. The new ban on contract labor did not extend to skilled workers needed for new industries, nor to actors, singers, lecturers, and domestics.
The acts of 1882 and 1885 thus contradicted one another. The first obliged immigrants to show that they were not likely to become public charges. The second excluded them if they had taken precautions by obtaining work in advance. The craft unions were disappointed. They had wanted a bill to exclude skilled contract labor on economic grounds. Congress had passed an act against unskilled labor on racist grounds. The comparatively new American industries such as tin, silk, hosiery, and lace received skilled immigrants on contract. In a test case, the United States v. Gay (1897), the Supreme Court upheld the principle that skilled labor could be imported on contract.
The most widespread hostility was directed at Roman Catholics or, more precisely, at their church and its increasing strength. In 1890 Catholics claimed that 600,000 children were enrolled in their schools. They renewed demands for a share of public school funds, which enraged staunch Protestants. A bizarre pun managed to attack the Church of Rome and two ethnic groups at once. It was said that Italians had exchanged the old Roman religion of Jupiter for the new Roman Catholicism of Jew-Peter and were no better for the swap. Protestant extremists joined secret societies pledged to defend the school system and to oppose Catholic influence in politics. The most powerful was the American Protective Association, founded in Clinton, Iowa, in 1887 by a lawyer, Henry F. Bowers. Bowers, whose family name had been anglicized from its original Bauer, was a leading Freemason who abhorred Catholicism. The APA spread first through the Upper Mississippi Valley and from there through the entire Midwest. But, although the APA claimed a total of 2.5 million members, it declined after 1894. It was faction-ridden and unequal to the task of persuading government to restrict immigration.
The distinction between old and new immigrants was first put forward by New England academics who resented the intrusion of outsiders in politics. They provided the nativist movement with plenty of social cachet but with very little intellectual respectability. Social scientist Richard Mayo Smith doubted the economic value of immigration. The whole process of assimilation, he believed, was being jeopardized by the sheer size and changing composition of the new immigration. “It is scarcely probable that by taking the dregs of Europe,” he wrote in 1890, “we shall produce a people of high social intelligence and morality.” In 1894 a group of Bostonians, Charles Warren, Robert DeCourcy Ward, and Prescott F. Hall, founded the Immigration Restriction League. Bostonians were notorious for their ethnocentricity and ignorance. When introduced to visitors from Iowa and Idaho, the Beacon Hill set thought these names were simply funny ways of saying Ohio. They did not believe that travel broadened the mind. “Travel?” they asked when the suggestion was put to them. “Why should I? I live here.” A maiden aunt from Boston visiting relatives nearby noted a slab of granite beside the railway track by their home. It read, “I—m [mile] from Boston.” She thought it was a tombstone that declared, “I’m from Boston,” and said to herself, “How very simple and yet how sufficient.” Boston was thus a natural center for a nativist movement.
In 1896, for the first time, the volume of new immigration exceeded that of the old. That year the crucial victory of white over black was won in the notorious decision of Plessy v. Ferguson: “separate but equal.” Racists transferred this educational principle to their fight against new immigrants. Rather than restrict immigration on an openly racist basis, the IRL preferred the more devious device of a literacy test as a means of excluding undesirable southern and eastern Europeans. Senator Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts sponsored a bill that would have excluded any adult immigrant unable to read forty words in any language. Of course, as was pointed out at the time, while a literacy test examined not natural intelligence but social opportunity, it was not a sure means of separating the northwestern sheep from the southeastern goats. For example, Armenian immigrants surpassed all others in this respect. They had a literacy rate of 76 percent. The bill passed Congress, but President Cleveland vetoed it as unworthy of the United States.
It was precisely the fusion of old and new cultures that gave the politics and philosophy, the literature and art of the United States their distinctive character and universal appeal. Some immigrants had known this all along. In the fall of 1892 Czech composer Antonin Dvorak became director of the National Conservatory of Music in New York. He was expected to stimulate the development of an original American music that would express the landscape, folklore, and ideals of the New World. He tried to show Americans the possibilities of their own folk music and told the New York Herald of May 21, 1893, how Indian melodies and African-American spirituals should be the foundation of music in the United States. He integrated them into his new symphony, From the New World, given its premiere at Carnegie Hall on December 15, 1893. Yet Dvorak’s recollections of Bohemia were also an important source of inspiration; his musical personality remained Slavic. For what was new about the New World if not its people and their culture?