Penguin History of the United States of America (75 page)

This system was wonderfully adapted to the needs, and even more to the experience, of the immigrants. They came from a world where the state was little more than a distant instrument of oppression which taxed them heavily, punished them brutally, took away their sons for years at a time as conscripts and gave them little or nothing in return. In such a world the only reliance was on family and neighbours. They came to America, and, lo!, things operated in much the same way as at home. Family, neighbours and, in times of unusual difficulty, a local chieftain to rely on and obey. No wonder that they settled in rapidly. The Irish did it best. They brought with them a literate knowledge of English, substantial experience of electoral politics (largely learned in Daniel O’Connell’s great campaigns of the 1820s and 1830s), a spontaneous clannishness and a useful strain of Catholicism. They had long looked up to their priests as leaders; the habit continued in America, the more so as the priests still had political objectives, especially the fostering of a system of parish schools where good Irish children could study, untainted by the godlessness and Protestantism of the free public schools which were almost universally available in late-nineteenth-century America. Since there were always more children than Catholic schools for them it was frequently necessary to do battle with public authorities to try to modify the public schools’ curricula. So priests and bosses were both anxious to organize and sustain a solid Catholic-Irish voting bloc, and worked together. It is no wonder that the Irish very soon came to dominate the city organizations. ‘The Irish was born to rule,’ said Plunkitt vaingloriously, and compared their performance in New York favourably (and justly) with that of the native Americans in Philadelphia, where wholesale plunder of the public treasury (‘boodling’) was the order of the day. The only drawback was that as they prospered the Irish tended to move out of the city centre to the more salubrious suburbs that were springing up everywhere. This dispersion of the faithful was a sore point to the bosses. They began to make it a condition of holding a job under the machine (policeman, fireman, street-sweeper, clerk) that the holder should stay in his first place of residence and continue to vote there.

But this was a puny check on a great movement. The vast wandering of the peoples, the insatiable quest for betterment, which brought Jews from the Pripet Marshes to New York and Chicago, and took American farmers from New York to the Pacific Coast, where they met Chinese from Fukien and Kwantung come to work as navvies on the railroads, was not to be balked. The cities now developed what one wise commentator has called the Tenement Trial:
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it was shorter in miles than the Oregon Trail or the Long Drive, but it took years or decades to get from its beginning to its end. A family which started in a squalid one-room apartment on the Lower East Side would gradually promote itself to better accommodation as its savings and income mounted, until eventually it could cross the rivers into the boroughs of the Bronx, Queens and Brooklyn. The places it left behind were never empty: other families, intent on making as good, followed closely behind. The process goes on today, which explains why the poorer parts of New York, once solidly Irish, Jewish or Italian, are now just as solidly black or Puerto Rican. The big city still holds out its promise of improvement, though unfortunately, nowadays, the promise seems to be more than a little delusive.

But in the nineteenth century the promise was kept, and not only in New York. Most of the immigrants had left home in hopes of bettering themselves, and their letters home were full of proud claims that they had done so: ‘We have now a comfortable dwelling and two acres of ground planted with potatoes, Indian corn, melons, etc. I have two hogs, one ewe and a lamb; cows in the spring were as high as 33 dollars, but no doubt I shall have one in the fall’ (an Englishman writing from New Hampshire, 1821); ‘We can eat our beefsteaks or ham every morning with our breakfast’ (a Welshman, 1846); ‘A breakfast here consists of chicken, mutton, beef, or pork, warm or cold wheat bread, butter, white cheese, eggs, or small pancakes, the best coffee, tea, cream and sugar’ (a Norwegian woman, writing from Wisconsin, 1847); ‘I am exceedingly well pleased at coming to this land of plenty. On arrival I purchased 120 acres of land at $5 [£1] an acre… You must bear in mind that I have purchased the land out, and it is to me and mine an “estate for ever”, without a landlord, an agent or tax-gatherer to trouble me. I would advise all my friends to quit Ireland – the country most dear to me; as long as they remain in it they will be in bondage and misery’ (an Irishman, Wisconsin, 1849);
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‘I had planned last Christmas that I would spend this Christmas in Sweden – but when I gave more thought to the matter, what can one do in Sweden but work for sour bread and salt herring?’ (a Swede, 1896).

Of course, not all were pleased. ‘O, that I had never seen this land, but had remained in Germany, apprenticed to a humble country craftsman!’ lamented a Jewish pedlar in 1842. ‘From what I understand,’ wrote an Ulsterman to his sister in 1787, ‘David will be for coming here and I will say nothing in such a case between you but that I am confident you will have time enough to repent it if you come.’ Another such, a century later, a clerk reduced to casual manual labour, was entirely disillusioned: ‘Any person who can live at home at all had better stay there, for in this country I can neither see comfort nor pleasure… of course people writing home won’t tell the truth but will give glowing accounts of everything; don’t believe a word of it.’ Some were homesick, more failed to prosper; perhaps a third of the entire number went back to Europe. Towards the end of the period 1815–1914, ‘birds of passage’ appeared – individual workers, especially Italians, who went to America each spring when jobs were easiest to come by and returned home for the winter. But two-thirds of the total number of entrants stayed in the United States for good.

They were not entirely welcome, and got less so as time went on. The immigration came in three great tides, each stronger than the last. The first rose in the 1830s and 1840s to a high-water mark in 1854, when 427,833 new arrivals were recorded; the second, starting in the seventies, rose to a height of 788,992 in 1882;
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the third brought in an average of one million immigrants a year in the decade before First World War. These tides were roughly connected with the push-and-pull of the American and European economies, as well as with purely political factors, such as the policy of the Russian Tsars towards the Jews. There was a long American tradition of welcome to these incomers: the fact that every white American was the descendant of migrants does not seem to have mattered very much; the belief that the United States was a haven of liberty to the persecuted did. At other times businessmen loved to calculate how much a skilled immigrant was worth to the American economy (and indeed the amount was substantial: during the later nineteenth century it was reckoned that one factory worker in three was an immigrant). Finally, in times of prosperity and self-confidence, such as those which immediately followed the Civil War or immediately preceded the First World War, it was hard to think that the immigrants, the numerical proportion of whom in the population remained constant, were a very dangerous threat, if they were a threat at all: ‘let ’em all come’ was the attitude. But against these views were others, equally indigenous; and they too, like the immigration, had their three tides of potency: in the early 1850s, in the eighties and early nineties, and in the First World War and its aftermath.

The first significant eruption of nativism, as hostility to immigrants is called, occurred in the early 1850s, as has already been described.
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It was expressed largely in terms of the no-Popery tradition, which was enjoying its last significant triumph in England at the same period.
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Know-Nothingism subsided as the Irish immigration, against which it was chiefly directed, fell away, and as the all-absorbing problem of slavery came to dominate politics again. The next upsurge of nativism came during the slackest years of the late-nineteenth-century depression. Protestantism was no longer such a dominant force in American society, nor were the Irish regarded with quite so much enmity; so it is not surprising that hostility was now largely expressed in economic and political terms. A series of violent clashes between largely immigrant workers and the capitalist class – a railroad strike and riots of 1877, the Haymarket affair in Chicago in 1886,
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the Homestead strike of 1892, when an immigrant socialist nearly succeeded in murdering Henry Frick, another railroad strike in 1894 – made it seem that all too many immigrants were now violent revolutionaries, intent on stirring up class conflict and destroying the American political and social system. Native Americans might have been less alarmed by all this had they not begun to be aware of the emergence of grave social problems connected with industrialism and urbanization, and of the glaring disparity between the enormous wealth of the Astors, Vanderbilts, Morgans, Carnegies, Fricks and Rockefellers and the miserable living conditions of so many workers. With the return of good times after 1896 this movement also passed.

In due time, however, it was succeeded by another, the most formidable, and eventually the most effective, of them all. The roots of this movement were as usual to be found in social anxiety, and the policy which its supporters wanted Congress to adopt was one of immigration restriction; but the nature of the anxiety was now more various than ever before, and the justification of the policy was for the first time racialist. The labour unions, now organized in the American Federation of Labor, feared the immigrants as competitors for their jobs and as tending, by their willingness to work for low wages, to keep the income of the industrial workers low. The conservative patricians of New England, prosperous persons of English descent, resented their loss of political power to the Irish and Italians, and were prepared to exploit any form of social discontent to regain power in the cities, or at least to lose no more of it. In the South it was feared that immigrants did not have the correct racial attitudes: five Italians were lynched, in Tallulah, Louisiana, for associating on equal terms with blacks; in Georgia, in 1914, Leo Frank, a Jewish factory owner who had been convicted, on the flimsiest evidence, of murdering one of his woman employees, was taken from jail and hanged by a hysterical mob. Old-style anti-Catholicism supported a journal called
The Menace
, which concentrated on the popish plot. Growing international anxiety, which fed on the half-conscious perception that in the world of modern technology America was no longer invulnerable to foreign aggression, coupled with a long tradition of hostility to Asians, led in California to outbreaks of severe hostility to Japanese immigrants, just as the earlier movement had produced the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 and its successors, which forbade all Chinese immigration. This ominous conjunction of forces generated an equally ominous ideology. A library of books like Madison Grant’s
The Passing of the Great Race
(1916) warned the Americans that they could not safely continue to admit members of inferior races to their country, and asserted that all races were inferior to the glorious Nordic race, whether they were Alpine, Mediterranean, Jewish, black or Oriental. Congress responded to political pressure by setting up an Immigration Commission, chaired by one William P. Dillingham, to investigate the immigrants and make recommendations. The resultant Dillingham Report was published in 1911; it consisted of forty-two volumes of tendentiously organized data tending to draw a distinction between the ‘old’ immigrants from the West and North of Europe and the ‘new’ immigration from the South: naturally it found that the new immigrants were deeply unsuited to life in the free, Protestant, Nordic American republic. In this way official support was given to the ever-more-popular farrago of racist nonsense that was then masquerading as anthropology.

It is rather too easy to condemn the nativists for their panic and their prejudices, which were in the end to work so much mischief, playing a part in bringing about the war with Japan and in excluding European political refugees during the 1930s when they had never needed help more. It should be borne in mind that the great nineteenth-century migration was, in modern terms, a very odd affair. No country today can or will permit the perpetual, unregulated incursion of foreign millions; yet such permissiveness was normal then, as the empty places of earth had to be filled. Timid, absurd and nasty though the nativists were, their attitudes foreshadowed those which, one way or another, necessarily shape governmental policies today, when the world is no longer empty. Mass migration nevertheless continues: politics, war, economics, technology make it inevitable – as inevitable as resistance to it. Today’s struggle, in every nation, is to try to find a just balance between these forces. Nowhere is the achievement of such a balance more likely and unlikely than in the United States, with its traditions of rejection and welcome, its poverty and its wealth, its space and its crowd. Today its people grapple with the problems of new Mexican, Puerto Rican, Cuban and South-East Asian immigration, not to mention the migration of blacks from the South to the Northern cities. It is not for a historian to predict the outcome, but the spectacle of present difficulties makes it easier to have sympathy and respect for the achievements, whatever their limitations, of earlier generations of Americans.

The thirty-five millions were, after all, absorbed. It is now fashionable to denigrate the image of the melting-pot, made popular by a play of that name (written by an English Jew, Israel Zangwill) that had a long run in New York in 1909; for although the descendants of the immigrants have been thoroughly Americanized in many ways, not least in language, politics and manners, they have not lost, nor, by their fellow-citizens, been allowed to lose, their sense of apartness: ethnic groups are perhaps more fundamental to the structure of American society than economic ones, and show every sign of equal permanence. In short, not everything was melted in the pot. But a lot was, and the process happened remarkably swiftly. Already by the
beginning of the twentieth century (with some assistance from the great capitalists, still concerned about their labour supply) the immigrants had become sufficiently integrated into American society to form a powerful voting block. Presidential candidates courted them at election time; Presidents vetoed bills which sought to apply a literacy test to new arrivals. The old tradition of more or less free entry (except for the Chinese) was successfully defended until the First World War. The effectiveness of the defence shows how thoroughly and intelligently the immigrants had learned the trick of American politics; the fact that it was possible at all is surely notable evidence of the essential liberalism of American political institutions.