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Part Three

GOTHAM AND GOMORRAH

Chapter 9

THE TEEMING SHORE

The capitalist revolution affected other countries besides America. Britain felt its influence first, as befitted the homeland of Adam Smith. The revolution then swept across the German states, causing Karl Marx to predict capitalism’s ultimate self-destruction. It touched France and a dozen other countries of Europe. Most of Asia and Africa remained beyond its immediate reach, yet, like a tropical storm system roiling across one of the world’s oceans, it sent ripples and eddies into regions far removed from its center. It created zones of high pressure and low pressure, so to speak, causing resources to flow from the former to the latter, often accompanied by the disruption turbulent weather entails. During the middle and late nineteenth century, for example, the American economy was a low-pressure zone for capital, sucking investment from Britain, a comparatively high-pressure zone.

The weather analogy applied equally, and more conspicuously, to human resources. The capitalist revolution in America created persistent low pressure that pulled immigrants out of Europe and Asia into North America. Not all parts of those people-exporting continents responded equally to the pull. Microclimates within countries and regions caused Ireland to lose more sons and daughters to America than Scotland did, and Germany more than France. The microclimates shifted as the nineteenth century matured, with the center of European high pressure moving east and south. And the strength of the storm in America itself varied, over both space, as cities developed and the frontier shifted, and time, as the American economy surged and stalled.

The United States wasn’t the only low-pressure zone. Empty land pulled immigrant farmers to the plains of Canada and Argentina, and expanding factories drew workers to the cities of England and Germany. But during the second half of the nineteenth century no country experienced such sustained and powerful low pressure as America. And the whirlwind that resulted transformed the face of American society.

    THE IRISH RODE the leading edge of the storm. The capitalist revolution in England—in particular the introduction of steam-driven textile machinery—heightened demand for wool and prompted landlords in Ireland to convert their crop farms to sheep pastures. The enclosing of the fields crowded Irish peasants onto ever-smaller plots, where they became dependent on potatoes for their sustenance. A few Irish, those with the foresight to see where things were going and the means to act on their prescience, emigrated to America during the 1820s and 1830s, but most stayed home, praying the potatoes would hold out. The density of population increased and the potato monoculture deepened until in the 1840s the system became unsustainable. A fungus attacked the potato crop, and with entire districts devoted to the single species it ate through field after field, leaving nothing but blighted leaves and shriveled tubers.

As bad luck would have it, the onset of the potato blight in Ireland coincided with the triumph of free trade in Britain, Ireland’s colonial master. London’s free-traders, having devoted decades to making the principles of Adam Smith the law of the British empire, refused to jeopardize their capitalist experiment in order to save the Irish. Even as hundreds of thousands of peasants died of malnutrition, Irish landlords exported agricultural commodities by the boatload.1

Of those Irish who didn’t die, some million and a half made their way to America. The newcomers weren’t the poorest of the Irish poor, who, lacking the means or vision to emigrate, simply starved in place; but neither were they the entrepreneurs who had characterized the earlier emigration. They came with scant skills and scanter capital; though nearly all had been farmers, most stuck in the cities. Even after the Homestead Act made land available, few emigrated to the frontier, partly because they lacked the cash for travel, tools, and filing fees but also because American farm culture, with its solitary farm houses planted in the middle of large fields, sometimes miles from the nearest neighbors, contradicted the communal style and values of Ireland’s peasant villages. Irish laborers built the Union Pacific and other railroads; Irish mine workers dug coal from the hills of Pennsylvania. But for most of the rest, the cities of the eastern seaboard became their home.

They took employment where they found it. They dug basements and ditches, drove piles and wagons, loaded railcars and barges. On the eve of the Civil War more than 80 percent of New York City’s unskilled labor was Irish. Their employers appreciated their willingness to work for low wages—even as many of those employers despised the Irish as barely human. George Templeton Strong was building a house in New York and needed help. “Hibernia came to the rescue yesterday morning,” he noted in his diary. “Twenty ‘sons of toil’ with prehensile paws supplied them by nature with evident preference to the handling of the spade and the wielding of the pickaxe and congenital hollows on the shoulder wonderfully adapted to make the carrying of the hod a luxury instead of a labor commenced the task yesterday morning.” The Irish were loved even less by the workers they displaced, in particular African Americans. “Along the wharves where the colored man once done the whole business of shipping and unshipping, in stores where his services were once rendered, and in families where the chief places were filled by him, in all these situations there are substituted foreigners,” a black newspaper complained. Frederick Douglass observed, “Every hour sees us elbowed out of some employment to make room for some newly arrived emigrant from the emerald isle, whose hunger and color entitle him to special favor.” Yet Douglass himself realized that such preference as the Irish obtained didn’t amount to much. “In assuming our avocation,” he remarked, the Irish “also assumed our degradation.”2

The competition at the bottom of the social and economic ladder burst shockingly into the open in the summer of 1863. Even as the Union army held fast at Gettysburg, the war came home to Manhattan. The new conscription law compelled young men to register for the draft; those who lacked the three hundred dollars for a replacement were subject to a lottery that determined which ones would actually serve. Many Irish asked why they should fight to free the slaves, whom they would then have to fight for jobs. They observed acidly that three hundred dollars would buy an Irishman’s life while a typical slave cost a thousand dollars. They wondered why blacks long resident in America should be exempt from the draft when the Irish were snatched straight off the boat. Many Irish took to the streets in protest of the draft, of the rich man’s exemption, and of assorted other insults that grew more onerous in the stifling heat of the urban July. Protesters hurled rocks at targets identified with the Republican party, starting with shops and houses and escalating to persons, in particular African Americans. One band of rioters attacked the Colored Orphan Asylum, shouting “Burn the niggers’ nest!” Patrick Merry, an Irish laborer, led another band down Broadway to a neighborhood inhabited by blacks, where the rioters spread out and began chasing those they found on the street. Blacks were dragged from streetcars and beaten. One black man was lynched and his body burned.

For three days the rioting raged. Blacks weren’t merely victims of the violence; as they organized to defend themselves and their property they inflicted casualties on their attackers. The opposing sides armed and fired, till the riot looked alarmingly like urban warfare. Only the arrival of federal troops, drawn in haste from the Pennsylvania front, restored order. By then more than a hundred persons had died, leaving blacks bitter, Irish aggrieved, and everyone wondering what would happen next.

The draft riots revealed a rift not simply between Irish and blacks but among the Irish themselves. Pre-famine immigrants had begun to assimilate into the larger community; these “lace curtain Irish” took pride in pointing to the hundred thousand sons of Erin who fought on the side of the Union. But the arrival of the famine refugees—poorer, more ignorant, less accustomed to city life—threatened much of what their predecessors had attained. These “shanty Irish” rekindled the anti-Catholicism that forever lay close to the surface of American life, contributing, in the 1850s, to the surprising success of the nativist Know Nothing party. By then several good potato crops had reduced the pressure to leave Ireland, after which the Civil War—and the prospect of being drafted—diminished the attractive power of the United States. But as the war ended the immigration resumed. The structural changes in the Irish economy continued, and if Irish peasants weren’t dying as fast as before, neither were they thriving. Modern Irish agriculture—like modern agriculture everywhere—required fewer and fewer farmers, and with little industry in Ireland, the displaced farmers had nowhere to go but abroad.

The same was true of their daughters, who formed a growing part of the Irish emigrant stream. In the post-famine years, in fact, women and girls outnumbered men and boys among those crossing the ocean to America. The female majority—quite unusual among immigrants—reflected at once the dismal prospects for women in Ireland and the comparatively bright outlook in America. Irish marriages traditionally required a dowry; with dowries harder to accumulate, marriages came later and later. For an increasing number of Irish women, marriage didn’t come at all. By the latter part of the nineteenth century, a quarter of Irish women never married. In Irish society there were worse fates for a woman, but not many.

Those Irish women who went to America fared better. Traveling alone, they took jobs in the growing number of American households that could afford maids, in the hope of bringing brothers and mothers and fathers over after them. An Irishman—a priest, as it happened—who visited America after the Civil War described the arrangement:

To better the circumstances of her family, the young Irish girl leaves her home for America. There she goes into service or engages in some kind of feminine employment. The object she has in view—the same for which she left her home and ventured to a strange country—protects her from all danger, especially to her character: that object, her dream by day and night, is the welfare of her family, whom she is determined, if possible, to again have with her as of old. From the first moment, she saves every cent she earns—that is, every cent she can spare from what is absolutely necessary to her decent appearance.… To keep her place or retain her employment, what will she not endure?—sneers at her nationality, mockery of her peculiarities, even ridicule of her faith, though the hot blood flushes her cheek with fierce indignation. At every hazard the place must be kept, the money earned, the deposit in savings-bank increased; and though many a night is passed in tears and prayers, her face is calm, and her eye bright, and her voice cheerful. One by one, the brave girl brings the members of her family about her.3

“Bridget”—as the Irish maids were stereotypically called—had to be brave. Her employers knew how much her wages mattered to her and her family, and they knew how a hint of dissatisfaction from one employer might make her unemployable forever. Under the best of circumstances it left her in no position to complain of long hours—from before dawn till long after dusk, in most cases—and meager pay. Under worse conditions it left her vulnerable to sexual predation, better off than female slaves in the antebellum South but not always by much. (The bitter antidraft observation about an Irish life being worth less than that of a slave was rooted in economic reality. Before the war a Southern planter told a visitor he had hired some Irishmen to drain a swamp for him. “It’s dangerous work, and a negro’s life is too valuable to be risked at it. If a negro dies, it’s a considerable loss, you know.”)

Some Irish women preferred work in factories to domestic service. “It’s the freedom that we want when the day’s work is done,” said a woman who worked in a paper-box plant. “I know some nice girls … that make more money and dress better and everything for being in service.… But they’re never sure of one minute that’s their own when they’re in the house. Our day is ten hours long, but when it’s done it’s done, and we can do what we like with the evenings. That’s what I’ve heard from every nice girl that ever tried service. You’re never sure that your soul’s your own except when you are out of the house.… I couldn’t stand that a day.”4

Where to work was an important question, often the most pressing for immigrants. But another, deeper question for the Irish was how Irish to be. Because they arrived speaking English and sharing skin color with the dominant segments of American society, even first-generation Irish immigrants could consider assimilating. This course had obvious appeal: escape from the specific insults and undifferentiated prejudice visited upon the unassimilated, opportunity to climb the social and economic ladder.

Yet as the number of Irish continued to grow, an alternative strategy, of embracing Irishness, became increasingly viable. By 1870 the Irish composed more than a fifth of the populations of New York and Boston. In both cities they were the single largest identifiable group. If the Irish stuck together they could wield considerable power. If Irish employers hired Irish workers, and Irish customers patronized Irish merchants, the community would benefit economically; if Irish politicians catered to Irish voters, who returned the favor at the polls, the community would advance politically.5

In practice the Irish did a bit of both. Some of the better educated blended into the American mainstream; many of the poorer paraded their Irishness. The former were more successful as individuals; the latter exerted greater influence as a group. By the 1880s the Irish vote, to cite the most obvious manifestation of collective heft, could swing elections in New York City and State, in Boston and Massachusetts, and, in tight races, in the nation as a whole.

    SINCE THE EIGHTEENTH century, Germans had composed the second-largest stream of immigration to America, after the English. They were eclipsed by the Irish during the potato famine and briefly after, but by the 1860s they again predominated—although until 1871 it could be hard to tell who was German and who wasn’t. To the haphazard extent immigrants were enumerated, they were tallied by country of origin, and before Bismarck brought most of the German-speaking peoples into a single empire, the Saxons and Bavarians and Hessians and Prussians sometimes confused the tallymen.

No such collective trauma as the Irish famine drove Germans west. The failed revolution of 1848 sent a wavelet of liberals into exile, but their numbers never approached their symbolic value to Americans who flattered themselves as providing a haven for freedom fighters. Crop failures contributed to decisions by German farmers to leave, but because Germany never fell into such dependence on a single crop as Ireland did, the Germans were less susceptible to blight or rust or wilt.

German immigrants fought in the Civil War, in greater numbers and with greater enthusiasm than the Irish. Forty-eighter Carl Schurz, who rose to the rank of general in the Union army, was the most conspicuous of the 175,000 Germans who battled the secessionists. Some observers gave Missouri’s Germans credit for saving that border state for the Union. Robert E. Lee himself had great respect for the Germans; the Confederate general was said to have declared, “Take the Dutch out of the Union army and we could whip the Yankees easily.” The Germans weren’t necessarily more devoted to abstract liberty than the Irish draft rioters; Henry Frank, a German living in Wisconsin, complained of the “miserable war” and declared, “I am no longer a friend of soldiers, and least of all do I wish to be shot to death for Lincoln and his Negroes.” Many of those who fought did so because they were drafted and couldn’t find substitutes; others simply backed a winner. (So did German investors who bought Jay Cooke’s war bonds. As Carl Schurz sardonically remarked of his capitalist former countrymen, “During the Civil War, America was a friend in need whom her friends across the Atlantic did not abandon—and Germany was rewarded in gold for its idealism and trust in America to the tune of seven percent interest.”)

In the immediate aftermath of the war, German farmers responded to the Homestead Act by emigrating in larger numbers than ever. Inheritance laws in the German states divided farms until they became uneconomic to operate, especially in the face of the increasing integration of world commodity markets. The existence of thriving German agricultural colonies in the American Midwest and in Texas drew new German immigrants to those districts, where they could expect to speak German, read German newspapers, attend German churches, and rear their children in German ways.

After about 1870 the German emigrant stream contained a growing number of displaced townsfolk. Industrialization destroyed the livelihoods of craftsmen, as did competition from immigrants to Germany from other countries. The consolidation of Bismarck’s empire induced East Europeans to migrate to Germany, where they undercut the wages of native Germans, causing many of them to leave. Bismarck, for one, saw this free market in labor as a good thing. “The volume of emigration is a most exact index of our growing well-being,” he declared. “The better it goes for us, the higher the volume of emigration.… There are two kinds of emigrants, … those who emigrate because they still have money enough … and those who emigrate because they now have money enough.”6

    JACOB RIIS KNEW Bismarck from a distance and hated him, as did every Dane of Riis’s generation. The Iron Chancellor made Denmark a pawn in his imperial schemes, bullying the Danes and stealing their soil. Had Riis been a year or two older, he would have joined the army to fight the Germans. Instead he went to America.

His reasons for going were at once complicated and simple. His birthplace stuck in his memory as stubbornly as it stuck in the past.

To say that Ribe was an old town hardly describes it to readers at this day. A town might be old and yet have kept step with time. In my day Ribe had not. It had never changed its step or its ways since whale-oil lanterns first hung in iron chains across its cobblestone-paved streets to light them at night. There they hung yet, every rusty link squeaking dolefully in the wind that never ceased blowing from the sea. Coal-oil, just come from America, was regarded as a dangerous innovation. I remember buying a bottle of “Pennsylvania oil” at the grocer’s for eight skilling, as a doubtful domestic experiment. Steel pens had not crowded out the old-fashioned goose-quill, and pen-knives meant just what their name implies. Matches were yet of the future. We carried tinderboxes to strike fire with. People shook their heads at the telegraph. The day of the stage-coach was not yet past. Steamboat and railroad had not come within forty miles of the town.

Ribe’s one factory was a cotton mill employing half the town’s workforce. Its owner had seen the American Civil War coming, stockpiled cotton, and grown rich after Sumter. He and the town took fright in 1863 when the German army approached, and though the city was spared, the specter of Prussian militarism never receded much below popular consciousness.

Jacob Riis was the next to youngest of the fourteen children of a schoolteacher in Ribe, who employed Latin ordinals to keep them straight. The sixth son was christened Sextus, the ninth Nonus, and so on. “How I escaped Tertius I don’t know,” Riis remarked. His father wished all the children to pursue professional careers but lacked the means to get them started. (The one who made it on his own, becoming a doctor, died just out of medical school.)

Young Jacob showed literary skills, which his father urged him to cultivate. But he also possessed a stubborn streak, and when school didn’t suit him he announced he would become a carpenter. His father resignedly apprenticed him out. Jacob’s master won a contract for work at the cotton mill, and the fifteen-year-old boy spent many days there.

On one of those days, crossing a bridge below the mill, he encountered the twelve-year-old daughter of the mill owner. He had known Elizabeth before, as a child in the town. But he saw her now with new eyes and was transfixed. “I fell head over heels in love,” he wrote. The love was impossible, he being a mere apprentice, she the daughter of the richest man in town. At the very least it must wait years. Yet he approached her, awkwardly. She rebuffed him with the cruel laugh of the favored child.

Heartbroken, he pondered running off to join the army, which was again fighting the Germans. But he was underage, and so contented himself with flight to Copenhagen, where he lost himself in the larger city. For four years he worked, mastering the carpenter trade. Finally he came of age as a craftsman, winning admission to the Copenhagen carpenters’ guild.

His new standing bolstered his confidence, and he returned to Ribe. Word quickly spread that he was back and intended to propose to Elizabeth—“which was annoying but true,” Riis wrote. At her father’s insistence she turned him down. Yet she did so in a way that made him love her the more. “She was not yet seventeen, and was easily persuaded that it was all wrong; she wept, and in the goodness of her gentle heart was truly sorry; and I kissed her hands and went out, my eyes brimming over with tears, feeling that there was nothing in all the wide world for me any more, and that the farther I went from her the better.”

Copenhagen wasn’t far enough; nowhere in Denmark put sufficient distance between the spurned lover and the object of his affection. For millennia Scandinavians had been wanderers, ranging the oceans from the Levant to North America. Recently many had gone to the United States, driven by the age-old difficulty of scratching a living from the lakes and fiords of their chilly homeland, drawn by the novel promise of free land and democracy.

Land meant nothing to Riis, a townsman born and bred. Democracy meant hardly more, as he was too young to have participated in politics of any kind. But others to whom land and democracy mattered had gone to America and written home. They said it was a place where a man might make a new start. Riis couldn’t ask for more. “So it was settled that I should go to America.”7

    IF UNREQUITED LOVE drove Jacob Riis from Denmark, unrelieved hate sent Mary Antin from Russia. “Trouble begets trouble,” she heard as a child in the Jewish Pale of settlement in the western part of the czar’s domain, and the experience of her family appeared to confirm the dismal proverb. Her father fell ill and was sent by doctors from the family’s home in Polotzk to another town for specialized treatment, leaving Mary’s mother in charge of the family business. But the mother took sick and the father had to come home. He wasn’t yet cured, and the strain of running the business and tending to his wife wore him down. The family had prospered well enough to afford servants, but as expenses rose and the business suffered they had to be dismissed. The burden of housework fell on Mary’s sister, who herself became sick and was forced to bed. The baby grew colicky. “And by way of a climax,” Mary remembered, “the old cow took it into her head to kick my grandmother, who was laid up for a week with a bruised leg.”

To pay the bills Mary’s father pawned the silver candlesticks, then some spare featherbeds. “There came a day when grandma, with eyes blinded by tears, groped in the big wardrobe for my mother’s satin dress and velvet mantle; and after that it did not matter any more what was taken out of the house.” Mary’s mother lingered near death. “Her cheeks were red, red, but her hands were so white as they had never been before.” Once energetic and hopeful, she now seemed to have lost the will to live. Mary’s father, fretting over finances, grew old before her eyes.

A ten-year-old can’t sustain sorrow forever, and after a time it seemed to Mary that things turned for the better. Her father found a job at a gristmill outside Polotzk. He would be superintendent, with use of a cottage. The house was small and bare, but Mary liked the way the sun shone in the windows, and she became friends with the freckle-faced children of the miller. They played together, exploring the country, hiding in the nooks of the mill, gathering wildflowers for bouquets. And Mary’s mother improved in the fresh air and sunshine.

But the luck didn’t last. The mill was sold and the new owner installed his own superintendent. Mary’s family moved back to Polotzk. Her father searched for work; her mother’s health declined again. Bills came due and couldn’t be paid. Her father grew more and more worried. “Polotzk seemed to reject him, and no other place invited him.”

Just when it appeared things couldn’t get worse, they did. The Russian authorities recurrently bent the laws restricting Jews to the Pale; they did so because the Jews had skills the Russian economy required but also because Jews beyond the Pale were easy marks for extortion and ready scapegoats when things went wrong. Mary learned of the latest pogrom secondhand.

It was a little before Passover that the cry of the hunted thrilled the Jewish world with the familiar fear. The wholesale expulsion of Jews from Moscow and its surrounding district at cruelly short notice was the name of this latest disaster. Where would the doom strike next? The Jews who lived illegally without the Pale turned their possessions into cash and slept in their clothes, ready for immediate flight. Those who lived in the comparative security of the Pale trembled for their brothers and sisters without, and opened wide their doors to afford the fugitives refuge. And hundreds of fugitives, preceded by a wail of distress, flocked into the open district, bringing their trouble where trouble was never absent, mingling their tears with the tears that never dried.

The open cities becoming thus suddenly crowded, every man’s chance of making a living was diminished in proportion to the number of additional competitors. Hardship, acute distress, ruin for many: thus spread the disaster, ring beyond ring, from the stone thrown by a despotic official into the ever-full river of Jewish persecution.

Passover was celebrated in tears that year. In the story of the Exodus we would have read a chapter of current history, only for us there was no deliverer and no promised land.

But what said some of us at the end of the long service? Not “May we be next year in Jerusalem,” but “Next year—in America!”8

Had Mary’s father not needed work so badly, he and they might have kept their heads down and ridden out this latest wave of persecution. Had there been no persecution, he and they might have waited and hoped for his job prospects to improve. But the combination of poverty and persecution made emigration irresistible.

He went first. He borrowed money from friends for a train ticket to Hamburg, where an emigrant aid society underwrote his passage to Boston.

In the short term his departure made the condition of the rest of the family worse. For months they heard nothing from him and received no money. Mary’s mother tried to work, but her health wouldn’t allow it. Mary’s uncles had businesses and jobs and wanted to help, but they had large families and responsibilities of their own.

Mary and her mother and siblings waited anxiously for word from America. Finally it came. Her father said marvelous things about his new home.

In America, he wrote, it was no disgrace to work at a trade. Workmen and capitalists were equal. The employer addressed the employee as you, not, familiarly, as thou. The cobbler and the teacher had the same title, “Mister.” And all the children, boys and girls, Jews and Gentiles, went to school! Education would be ours for the asking, and economic independence also, as soon as we were prepared.

Months more passed before he saved the money to send for them. But finally their summons came. Mary never forgot the feeling she had when her mother opened the letter that contained the steamship tickets. “At last I was going to America! Really, really going, at last! The boundaries burst. The arch of heaven soared. A million suns shone out of every star. The winds rushed in from outer space, roaring in my ears, ‘America! America!’ ”

The news that the family was leaving spread rapidly through Polotzk.

Friends and foes, distant relatives and new acquaintances, young and old, wise and foolish, debtors and creditors, and mere neighbors—from every quarter of the city, from both sides of the Dvina, from over the Polota, from nowhere—a steady stream of them poured into our street, both day and night, till the hour of our departure. And my mother gave audience. Her faded kerchief halfway off her head, her black ringlets straying, her apron often at her eyes, she received her guests in a rainbow of smiles and tears. She was the heroine of Polotzk, and she conducted herself appropriately.

The guests gave warning for dealing with ticket agents and border guards; those with relatives in America pressed letters to their loved ones into her hand.

The day of departure dawned gray and wet. The train to the border was crowded, and the German guards at the frontier eyed the emigrants suspiciously. Mary’s family held passports that were supposed to ensure easy transit, but a cholera outbreak in Russia had put the border patrol on notice to scrutinize travelers, especially the poorer sort. Yet one German officer took pity on the Antins. Herr Schidorsky was a Jew, and while he arranged with his brother, the chairman of a local emigrant-aid association, to secure their passage across Germany, he let Mary and the others stay in his home.

After several days the papers came through, and they crossed into Germany. Berlin was a daunting blur.

Strange sights, splendid buildings, shops, people, and animals, all mingled in one great, confused mass of a disposition to continually move in a great hurry, wildly, with no other aim but to make one’s head go round and round, in following its dreadful motions. Round and round went my head. It was nothing but trains, depots, crowds—crowds, depots, trains—again and again, with no beginning, no end, only a mad dance! Faster and faster we go, faster still, and the noise increases with the speed. Bells, whistles, hammers, locomotives shrieking madly, men’s voices, peddlers’ cries, horses’ hoofs, dogs’ barkings—all united in doing their best to drown every other sound but their own, and made such a deafening uproar in the attempt that nothing could keep it out.

Hamburg was more orderly—indeed, more orderly than anyone but the German authorities could have wanted. On arrival the emigrants were placed in quarantine, in carefully numbered rooms where they slept in neat rows, with roll call twice a day, morning and night. The quarantine was to protect the German populace from disease but also to safeguard the profits of German steamship lines. The borders of the United States were open to nearly everyone, but American authorities didn’t hesitate to send disease-ridden ships back to Europe, leaving the companies to suffer the immediate loss and the longer-run damage to their reputations.

Finally the Antins’ fortnight passed and their ship arrived. They filed aboard, grateful to have gotten this far but anxious as to what the ocean would bring. Seasickness came first: the North Sea pitched the vessel to and fro. The emigrants’ distress was only amplified by the seasoned unconcern of the professionals aboard. “The captain and his officers ate their dinners, smoked their pipes and slept soundly in their turns, while we frightened emigrants turned our faces to the wall and awaited our watery graves.”

By the time they reached the Atlantic, Mary had her sea legs. She explored the ship, befriended the crew, and stared in wonder at the vastness of the ocean—“the immeasurable distance from horizon to horizon; the huge billows forever changing their shapes, … the gray sky, with its mountains of gloomy clouds, flying, moving with the waves, … the deep, solemn groans of the sea, sounding as if all the voices of the world had been turned into sighs and then gathered into that one mournful sound.” She scanned the western horizon constantly for her first glimpse of America. “We crept nearer and nearer to the coveted shore, until, on a glorious May morning, six weeks after our departure from Polotzk, our eyes beheld the Promised Land, and my father received us in his arms.”9

    THE ANTINS’ JOURNEY to America was fairly typical for European emigrants after the Civil War, and it represented a decided improvement over what earlier generations had experienced. Some still walked from their home villages to the seaports that specialized in the emigrant trade—Liverpool, Le Havre, Hamburg, Bremen, Bergen, Naples, Trieste, and others—but more rode trains, like the Antins. Those who had to cross borders to reach their embarkation ports, again like the Antins, encountered increasing bureaucracy as the apparatus of empire and nation firmed up, but they were less likely to be victimized by highwaymen, confidence men, and related predators upon the transient. The emigrant trade grew more efficient; the bottlenecks at seaports diminished and, with them, the cost of waiting for a ship. Industrialization didn’t always improve health conditions in those seaports—few other countries enforced public health laws with the German rigor the Antins experienced—but the shorter waiting times reduced the emigrants’ exposure to disease.

The ships themselves were a distinct improvement over what had gone before. Steamships displaced sailing ships at the premium level first, conveying wealthy travelers west years before poorer emigrants saw their interiors. But the steamships bumped the better sailing ships down to the emigrant trade, then gradually joined them, until by the 1870s most emigrants traveled aboard the steam-driven craft.

The evolution of the emigrant fleet reflected technological innovation but also imperial competition. Industrialization compelled the European powers to seek both sources of raw materials and markets for exports; the seeking sometimes occurred peacefully but often by force or threat. Steel-hulled, steam-powered warships constituted the state of the art of power projection in the late nineteenth century, and a naval arms race began. The competing governments subsidized their shipbuilders, who honed their skills and kept their construction crews busy between naval orders by building merchant craft. During the 1880s a glut of ships caused ticket prices to fall till an emigrant could cross the Atlantic for the equivalent of ten or twelve American dollars.10

The crossing itself was likewise much improved from decades past. Passengers in steerage (the lowest class) were crowded together, with little privacy and few material comforts beyond those they brought along. In bad weather, with the hatches closed, the best ship could be a dark, lurching container that felt like the oversized coffin the worst of the afflicted almost wished it would be. But the size of the steamships—ten to twenty thousand tons—rendered them far more stable than their wind-powered forebears, and as uncomfortable as the crossing in them might be, it was mercifully brief—eight to twelve days, depending on the port of embarkation, compared with a month or two by sail.

Emigrant transport had always been a business, but in the late nineteenth century it became an industry. Steamship lines competed to carry the emigrants, advertising low fares, convenient schedules, good food, and healthy accommodations. Some lines boasted of labor agents in New York and other American cities who helped passengers from their ships find jobs on arrival. Needless to say, the service delivered didn’t always match the service promised; caveat emptor remained the counsel of prudence. Yet the word got out as to which lines were honest and reliable and which not.

Something else—something almost unheard of in the pre-industrial age—enforced good performance as well. For the first time the ship companies could hope to attract substantial repeat patronage. More and more migrants weren’t emigrants at all but “birds of passage” who spent a season or two in America before returning to their homes, and then did it again, and perhaps again and again. Among some nationalities the intent to return to the country of birth was almost universal. An Italian journalist in Chicago observed, “Italians do not come to America to find a home … but to repair the exhausted financial conditions in which they were living in Italy.… They leave the mother country with the firm intention of going back to it as soon as their scarsellas shall sound with plenty of quibus.” In the event, about half the emigrants from Italy eventually returned. Emigrants from Greece returned in comparable proportions, as did certain Central Europeans. Germans were more likely to remain in America, but not as likely as Russian and Polish Jews, many of whom, having fled religious persecution, had no desire to return to the ghettos and pogroms. The rates of return tended to rise with passing time, as the crossing continued to grow easier and cheaper. During particular periods of depression in America—in the 1870s and again in the 1890s—the returns to some European countries and districts outnumbered the emigrants.11

The return traffic, whether greater or less, helped the bottom line of the steamship companies and encouraged them to dedicate their vessels to the passenger trade rather than convert them to cargo on the eastbound voyage as they had formerly done. On cargo ships the emigrants felt like cargo, on passenger ships more like people. At the same time, the increasing return flow contributed to general knowledge of the transatlantic journey. For most emigrants the unknown was the hardest part of the decision to leave; whatever pierced the darkness made the decision easier.

    THE STEAMSHIP COMPANIES weren’t the only ones drumming for emigrants. In 1864 Congress, responding to pleas from industry that the Union army had stolen its best workers, approved the Act to Encourage Immigration. The measure enlisted federal officials and federal money in the search for industrial workers, created an Immigration Bureau within the State Department, and opened the federal courts to employers attempting to enforce labor contracts concluded on foreign soil. This was less than some supporters of industry wanted. Secretary of State William Seward had advocated using federal money to pay the passage of selected workers to America. But the endorsement the law gave to contract labor seemed a boon to business at a moment when the fighting had pinched the normal supply of workers.

Labor recruiters responded to the new law at once. The American Emigrant Company, proclaiming itself the “handmaid of the new Immigration Bureau,” solicited orders for labor from American manufacturers and advertised for workers abroad. The company accepted compensation in two forms: fees paid directly by the manufacturers and commissions on rail and steamship tickets purchased by the emigrants.

The company’s activities provoked immediate opposition. Organized labor in America, weak as it was during the 1860s, complained that the federal money and authority were being used to undermine native-born and previously landed workers. Foreign governments warned prospective emigrants that the American labor law was a ruse to fill the ranks of the Union army—that the workers would be drafted as soon as they reached American soil, just as Irish and other immigrants had already been drafted.

How the company’s business model would have weathered the political attacks is hard to say; as things happened, the war ended before it had a fair test. The labor pinch eased as soldiers returned to the civilian workforce and prospective immigrants stopped worrying about the draft. Manufacturers refused to pay the company for what they could get free, and the company’s revenues dwindled. Congress in 1868 put it out of its misery by acceding to the workers’ complaints and repealing the immigration-encouragement act.12

The efforts by business to secure a labor supply continued, though. American manufacturers appreciated that inexpensive steam travel was creating an increasingly global market in labor; workers would go where their skills were best remunerated. Some American manufacturers looked to the tariff to maintain high prices and thereby allow the high wages that would ensure a steady supply of workers. “Let us keep up the walls about our continent,” the chief lobbyist for the National Association of Wool Manufacturers declared, “so that there may be a sure refuge for the industries, or in other words, the capital and skill and labor which we will attract from Europe.” In still other words, let American consumers pay to import the workers American industry required.13

When active recruiting was required, many companies preferred to do it themselves. They sought workers with specific skills the general stream of immigration failed to furnish in adequate amounts. At first their agents offered contracts in Europe to the targeted workers, but the companies discovered that such contracts were nearly impossible to enforce once the immigrants reached America. Workers simply walked away—to take employment elsewhere, often with rivals of the sponsoring firm, which was out the price of passage and suffered the additional blow of having strengthened the competition.

Despite the difficulties, the manufacturers kept trying. Before Andrew Carnegie and others shifted to the Bessemer process, steelmaking was as much an art as an industry, and experienced heaters and puddlers were worth the risk and expense of recruiting. American steel companies monitored the industrial workplace in Britain, and when labor disputes or other troubles angered skilled workers there, they swooped in to take advantage. Often utilizing American consuls, whose job description included promoting American business, they offered free passage to America and well-paying jobs on arrival. “Sober, industrious men can hardly fail of good employment, if well skilled in their work,” one American publication promised.

The strategy triggered retaliation. British and German employers kept an eye on conditions in the United States; when unsuccessful strikes or business depressions put skilled American workers in a bad mood, their agents pounced. After the Panic of 1873 British cotton companies sent agents to New England with orders to find a thousand workers. How many they enticed east is unknown, but the return traffic to Britain rose sharply during this period. (Not all the British were unhelpful to American capitalists. British trade unionists occasionally collaborated with American labor recruiters, pointing out likely emigrants and otherwise doing what they could to fill the boats west—and thereby shrink the labor pool in Britain.)14

While the manufacturers focused their recruiting efforts on skilled workers, other American firms looked for other sorts of immigrants. Railroad companies, flush with land and chronically short of cash, sought farmers to purchase and populate their western domains. The purchasing would help the bottom line at once; the populating would produce traffic that would benefit the roads over time. The Northern Pacific, besides flogging its bonds in Europe, established an emigration office to entice Europeans to Jay Cooke’s “Banana Belt.” The company purchased newspapers in Germany and funded an elaborate exhibit at the Vienna Exposition of 1873. It went so far as to name what would become the capital of North Dakota for the famous chancellor of Germany. The town that arose near the place where the Northern Pacific crossed the Missouri River was originally called Edwinton, for one of the railroad’s engineers. But someone in marketing got the idea of renaming it Bismarck in order to attract attention at the Vienna trade fair and throughout the German-speaking world. An invitation went out to Bismarck himself to visit the budding metropolis, but he declined. Other Germans responded more favorably, streaming to America’s northern Plains, purchasing Northern Pacific land, and becoming the largest ethnic group in North Dakota after that half of the territory achieved independent statehood.15

The Southern Pacific, the holding company that subsumed Leland Stanford’s Central Pacific after the latter ran into cash-flow problems, prospected for immigrants in much the way Stanford’s California neighbors had prospected for gold. Some of its agents worked the home front, diverting already-arrived immigrants from the territories of the Northern Pacific and other railroads by meeting ships from Europe and passing out pamphlets and cut-rate tickets to the West Coast. Other Southern Pacific agents scoured Britain and the European continent for land buyers. The company established an emigration office in London, sponsored lecture tours by speakers touting California, and arranged transport to America for the most promising prospects. Its activities earned the applause of many Californians. “The complete and systematic plan of the Southern Pacific will doubtless bring thousands of the best kind of immigrants to this state each year, to the great benefit of the community at large, as well as to the immigrants themselves,” the San Francisco Call asserted. The railroad’s enemies—it was already being labeled the “Octopus” in California—cast a more jaundiced eye on its immigration schemes. “They lie and cheat,” Ambrose Bierce said of the company and its agents. “Their dealings with settlers have been characterized by a multitude of rapacities. They skin their clients and sell them back the skins at an advance. They will settle the immigrants upon their lines and take the entire profit of their industry for carrying their crops to market.… In three years the people that they have tumbled from the frying pan into the fire will be fighting them on a crust of bread and a cold potato.”16

The states got into the immigration business, too. Western states sought settlers: people to purchase state land, increase everyone’s property values, and generally strengthen the state economies. Midwestern states sought settlers, as well, but also laborers. Michigan wanted miners; Minnesota and Wisconsin lumbermen; Illinois, Iowa, and several other states railroad workers. Southern states tried to counter their historic reputation for contempt of manual labor by advertising for plantation hands and domestic servants. The states seeking workers often collaborated with employers in the production and distribution of pamphlets and posters; Michigan mining companies paid to send state-printed flyers to Europe, while the Wisconsin State Immigration Commission shared agents with the Wisconsin Central Railroad.17

The effect of all the recruiting was hard to gauge. Some state officials seem to have entered the immigration contest less from confidence that their efforts would succeed than from fear that voters would blame them for not trying. The beggar-thy-neighbor efforts of the railroads to divert immigrants to their own domains did nothing directly to increase immigration but, by bidding up the overall rewards to immigrants, made America that much more appealing. The targeted campaigns by manufacturers to lure skilled workers to America doubtless enticed some who wouldn’t have come on their own; how many is impossible to know.

    BY EVERYONE’S ACCOUNT (including that of the recruiting agents), the most effective form of marketing was the testimony of immigrants themselves. Often this came in letters from America to friends and kin in the old country. Jacob Riis had read such letters in Denmark; Mary Antin’s father sent them from Boston to Russia. Gustaf Jarlson, a Swedish immigrant to Minnesota, wrote home every month to his brother Axel. “This is a good country,” he explained.

It is like Sweden in some ways. The winter is long, and there are some cold days, but everything grows that we can grow in our country, and there is plenty. All about me are Swedes, who have taken farms and are getting rich. They eat white bread and plenty of meat. The people here do not work such long hours as in Sweden, but they work much harder, and they have a great deal of machinery, so that the crop one farmer gathers will fill two big barns. One farmer, a Swede, made more than 25,000 kroner on his crop last year.18

Even more compelling than letters were the actions of emigrants who returned home. Lee Chew grew up on a farm near Canton during the 1860s. Some of the neighbors had left for California, but Lee Chew’s father wished to keep him home and so told him stories of what “foreign devils” the Americans were. They were powerful, with great fire-belching ships and a kind of sorcery that allowed them to light the darkest night and communicate over long distances, but they lacked anything that passed for civilization. Their language was barbaric, they practiced all manner of violence, and they disrespected their ancestors. No correct-thinking Chinese should wish to go to America. Lee Chew had little reason to doubt his father, and he resigned himself to life as a Chinese farmer—until new evidence surfaced.

I was about sixteen years of age when a man of our tribe came back from America and took ground as large as four city blocks and made a paradise of it. He put a large stone wall around and led some streams through and built a palace and summer house and about twenty other structures, with beautiful bridges over the streams and walks and roads. Trees and flowers, singing birds, water fowl and curious animals were within the walls.… When his palace and grounds were completed he gave a dinner to all the people, who assembled to be his guests. One hundred pigs roasted whole were served on the tables, with chickens, ducks, geese and such an abundance of dainties that our villagers even now lick their fingers when they think of it. He had the best actors from Hong Kong performing, and every musician for miles around was playing and singing. At night the blaze of lanterns could be seen for miles.

The lesson was lost on no one there, least of all Lee Chew.

The man had gone away from our village a poor boy. Now he returned with unlimited wealth, which he had obtained in the country of the American wizards.… The wealth of this man filled my mind with the idea that I, too, would like to go to the country of the wizards and gain some of their wealth.19

    EVERY IMMIGRANT HAD a story, and each was unique. But the cumulative effect of the stories—the sum of the individual experiences—was perhaps best conveyed by statistics that submerged the differences into impersonal numbers. During the five years after Appomattox, 1.5 million immigrants entered the United States. During the 1870s, 2.8 million more arrived. During the 1880s, another 5.3 million landed, and during the 1890s, 3.7 million. The busiest single year for immigration was 1882, when nearly 789,000 immigrants arrived; the preceding and succeeding years ranked second and third, with 669,000 and 603,000, respectively.

The immigration boom of the 1880s, compared with the 1870s and 1890s, attested to the material motives of most of the immigrants. As the American economy expanded during the 1880s, jobs became plentiful and, to many potential immigrants, irresistible. The depressions of the 1870s and 1890s made the United States comparatively less attractive, and immigration declined. (During those decades, men and women who might have come to the United States either stayed home or went elsewhere. Brazil, for example, experienced a surge of immigration during the 1890s, just as immigration to the United States fell off.)

Measured against the existing resident population as well, the immigration of the 1880s was the era’s largest. The 5.3 million persons who entered the country during that decade amounted to some 10.5 percent of the 50 million persons who lived in the United States in 1880. At the end of the 1880s, nearly 21 million residents were either immigrants or the children of immigrants; this total constituted nearly one-third of the American population in 1890. (The immigration increment of the 1880s was exceeded, as a percentage of the population, by only two decades in American history: the 1850s, when immigration equaled 12.1 percent of the 1850 population, and the 1900s, when immigration came to 10.8 of the 1900 population.)

The statistics also revealed the beginning of a trend that would become especially distinctive after the turn of the century. Till 1890 the great majority—substantially more than 80 percent—of immigrants hailed from northern and western Europe. Between 1820 (the year the federal government started collecting immigration statistics) and 1890, of a total of some 15 million immigrants to America, the German states sent nearly 4.5 million, Ireland 3.5 million, Britain 2.7 million, Scandinavia 1 million, and other western European countries 600,000. But starting in the 1890s (and accelerating in the following decade), the origins of immigration shifted east and south. By 1900 the shift was unmistakable. Russia sent four times as many immigrants to America that year as Germany did; Italy sent three times as many as Ireland. Immigration from eastern and southern Europe in 1900 nearly doubled that from northern and western Europe.

This shift said more about conditions in Europe than in the United States. (Other countries of the Americas experienced a similar shift.) Pogroms like those that drove the Antin family from Russia intensified. The continuing drop in the price of steamship tickets, which held out the possibility of regular returns home, made emigration more attractive to family- and village-oriented Italians and Greeks. Railroads reached farther into eastern and southern Europe, making the first stage of the journey to America more convenient. Meanwhile, the economic and social disruptions that had sent so many to America from Germany, Ireland, and Scandinavia diminished. The leading edge of the storm had moved on.20

The “new immigration,” as it was called, evoked soul-searching among the native born. The newcomers from Russia and Poland were frequently Jews; how would they get along with the overwhelming Christian majority in America? The immigrants from Italy and Greece often had olive complexions; where would they fit among America’s whites and blacks? Almost none of the new immigrants had experienced democracy in their homelands; would they adapt to it in America or undermine it?21

These and related questions would loom larger in the new century. For the time being they reinforced the ambivalence Americans had always felt toward immigration. Few disputed the beneficence of immigration in theory; many objected to certain aspects of immigration in practice.

    A GENERATION HENCE, the objections would inspire the first broad-gauged restrictions on immigration, but in the late nineteenth century restrictions applied peculiarly to the Chinese. In 1882, after decades of agitation by native-born workers in California, who complained that Chinese immigrants drove pay rates down, Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act. The measure permitted businessmen, students, temporary visitors, and their spouses to continue to enter the country, but ordinary laborers were barred. More than a quarter million Chinese had emigrated since midcentury; they had dug the nation’s gold and built the Pacific railroad. Suddenly, in 1882, nearly all immigration from Chinese stopped.22

Legal immigration, that is. The exclusion act created, at the stroke of Chester Arthur’s pen, a phenomenon that was previously unknown in America but that would grow in size and complexity ever afterward: illegal immigration. Congress could modify the law of supply and demand, as it applied to labor, by raising the risks of entry to America for particular workers, but it couldn’t repeal the law entirely. As long as those workers found it in their interest to hazard entry, they would do so. Employers, many of whom had opposed the ban, discovered merit—that is, profit—in the existence of a class of workers beyond the protection of the American legal system, who could be mistreated at will. The customers of those employers, sharing the wage savings, had little incentive to complain. Chinese continued to enter the United States, albeit in numbers impossible to measure accurately. Some came with forged documents declaring them to be merchants or students or tourists (or the wives of such authorized entrants). Some came with no documents, relying on stealth and bribery to get past immigration officials. They melted into the existing Chinese community and took jobs where they found them.

One part of the illegal immigration was more vulnerable and exploited than the rest. Chun Ho had been in America for five years when she came to the attention of the federal Immigration Commission. Her story was by no means unique, but it was particularly poignant. As the chairman of the commission questioned her, her answers were punctuated by sobs.

“How old are you?”

“Twenty-four.”

“Where were you born?”

“At Ng Jow, in the province of Kwang Si.”

“How did you happen to come to the United States?”

“When I was nineteen years old, the mistress Number Three of a noted procurer by the name of Gwan Lung, who lives in San Francisco, went back to Canton, where my mother happened to be living with me at that time, and gave me glowing accounts of life in California. She painted that life so beautifully that I was seized with an inclination to go there and try my fortune.”

The woman paid Chun Ho’s mother two hundred Mexican dollars and took the daughter away. With six other girls similarly acquired, Chun Ho boarded a steamer and arrived in San Francisco after a two-week voyage. “We all came on fraudulent certificates; the color of those certificates was reddish.”

The girls were conducted to the house of a woman named May Sheen. “They always do that first,” Chun Ho told the commission. “From time to time parties came to May Sheen’s house to see me and to bargain with May Sheen as to what price I should be sold at.” How much Chun Ho—or her mother—had known of the services she was expected to provide is unclear; the nature of these services grew obvious during her time with May Sheen. “Two months after my arrival, a Chinaman by the name of Kwan Kay, a highbinder”—a member of a criminal gang, or “tong”—“and one who owned some of these houses”—of prostitution—“came with his woman, Shin Yee, and bought me for $1,950 gold. They gave me a written promise that in four years I should be free.”23

Prostitution was a principal business of the tongs. It flourished on account of the enormous imbalance of the sexes among the Chinese in America, where men outnumbered women by as much as fifteen to one in the 1870s and 1880s. It battened as well on the poverty of Chinese in China and the practice of poor families there of selling daughters to be wives, concubines, and servants. Arbitragers unburdened by scruples could purchase a girl for as little as five dollars in China and sell her for a thousand dollars in the United States. American lawmakers tried to stop the traffic. The 1875 Page Act, named for California congressman Horace Page, banned the immigration of Chinese prostitutes (along with any other Chinese traveling involuntarily). But like most such prohibitions, the law simply raised the price of that which it forbade.24

Technically, the girls brought to America were contract workers, bound for a term of service in exchange for their passage east. The contracts could be quite explicit. “An agreement to assist a young girl named Loi Yau” declared:

Because she became indebted to her mistress for passage, food, &c., and has nothing to pay, she makes her body over to the woman Sep Sam to serve as a prostitute to make out the sum of $503. The money shall draw no interest, and Loi Yau shall receive no wages. Loi Yau shall serve four and a half years.… When the time is out, Loi Yau may be her own master, and no man shall trouble her.

The contracts were rather less than they seemed, starting from the fact that the girls who were made to sign them typically couldn’t read. Moreover, the pimps and mistresses devised various means to extend the contracts. The girls were docked for sickness; in Loi Yau’s case, she had to repay one month for every fifteen days she was sick. Given their line of work, sickness was common, with the result that the girls found themselves falling farther and farther behind. (Some pimps and madams defined menstruation as a sickness, in that it kept the girls from working; these unfortunate souls were guaranteed an extended sentence.)25

Chun Ho learned the business the hard way. She received customers nearly every day, earning her masters almost three hundred dollars a month. She hoped that some of this might be credited to her account, but after two years they told her she was deeper in debt than when she started. For her—or anyone else—to purchase her freedom would now cost $2,100. Needless to say, she didn’t have any money, and so she was sold to another tong man, who kept her working as hard as ever.

During this period she heard about groups devoted to rescuing sex slaves like herself, but her new owner warned her that if she tried to escape he’d kill her. The rescue societies staked out the brothels, to gather evidence against them and to encourage girls like Chun Ho to break for freedom, but the pimps took the girls to other houses, outside the city, to administer exemplary beatings where no one could hear their screams. “The instruments used were wooden clubs and sometimes anything they could lay their hands on,” Chun Ho said. “One time I was threatened with a pistol held at me.”

She survived and, by a stroke of fortune, eventually escaped, but she knew of many other girls who weren’t so lucky. One was murdered by her pimp for not turning over money he said she owed him. “I saw her after she had been shot,” Chun Ho said. At least three others Chun Ho knew met a similar fate. “Two of these were shot and one stabbed to death.” The murderers were never brought to justice. “No one would dare to testify.”26

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