by Bill Bryson
Never before had there been such a global exodus – and not just to America, but to Australia, Argentina, New Zealand, anywhere that showed promise, though America had by far the largest share. Between 1815 and 1915 it took in 35 million people, equivalent to the modern populations of Norway, Sweden, Austria, Ireland, Denmark and Switzerland. Seven million came from Germany, roughly 5 million each from Italy and Ireland (1.5 million more than live in Ireland today), 3.3 million from Russia, 2.5 million from Scandinavia, and in the hundreds of thousands from almost everywhere else – from Greece, Portugal, Turkey, the Netherlands, Mexico, the Caribbean, China, Japan. Even Canada provided a quarter of a million immigrants between 1815 and 1860, and nearly a million more in the 1920s.2 For smaller countries like Sweden, Norway and Ireland, and for regions within countries, like Sicily and the Mezzogiomo in Italy, the numbers represented a significant drain on human resources. This was especially true of Ireland. In 1807 it was the most densely populated country in Europe; by the 1860s it was one of the least.3
Once across the ocean the immigrants tended naturally to congregate in enclaves. Almost all the migrants from Norway between 1815 and 1860 settled in just four states, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Iowa and Illinois. In much the same way, two-thirds of the Dutch were to be found in Michigan, New York, Wisconsin and Iowa. Sometimes they were given active encouragement to congregate. In the first half of the nineteenth century several German societies were formed with the express intention of so concentrating immigration in a particular area that they could in effect take it over. One German spoke for many when he dreamed of Pennsylvania becoming ‘an entirely German state where ... the beautiful German language would be used in the legislative halls and the courts of justice’. Not just in Pennsylvania, but in Texas, Missouri and Wisconsin, there were earnest hopes of colonizing all or at least a significant part of those states.4
In factory towns, too, immigrant groups were often concentrated to an extraordinary degree. In 1910 Hungry Hollow, Illinois, a steel town, was home to 15,000 Bulgarians. At the same time, of the 14,300 people employed in Carnegie steel mills, almost 12,000 were from eastern Europe.5
Those who had neither the inclination to work in heavy industry nor the wherewithal to take up farming generally clustered in cities – even if, as was almost always the case, their backgrounds were agricultural. So effortlessly did Irish, Poles and Italians settle into urban life that we easily forget that most came from rural stock and had perhaps never seen a five-storey building or a crowd of a thousand people before leaving home. Often they arrived in such numbers as to overturn the prevailing demographics. In a single year, 1851, a quarter of a million Irish came to America, and almost all of them settled in New York or Boston. By 1855 one-third of New York’s population was Irish born.6 As immigration from northern Europe eased in the third quarter of the century, the slack was taken up by eastern European Jews. Between 1880 and 1900 an estimated one-third of the Jewish population of Europe came to America, and again settled almost exclusively in New York.7
By the turn of the century, New York had become easily the most cosmopolitan city the world had ever seen. Eighty per cent of its five million inhabitants were either foreign born or the children of immigrants.8 It had more Italians than the combined populations of Florence, Genoa and Venice, more Irish than anywhere but Dublin, more Russians than Kiev. As Herman Melville put it: ‘We are not so much a nation as a world.’ In 1908 a British Zionist named Israel Zangwill wrote a play about the immigration experience that gave Americans a term for the phenomenon. He called it The Melting-Pot.
The popular image, recreated in countless movies and books from The Godfather to Kane and Abel, is of an immigrant arriving wide-eyed and bewildered at Ellis Island, being herded into a gloomy hall, subjected to an intimidating battery of medical tests and interviews, being issued a mysterious new name by a gruff and distracted immigration official, and finally stepping into the sunshine to realize that he has made it to the New World. Except possibly for the last part, it wasn’t quite like that.
For one thing, until 1897 immigrants didn’t pass through Ellis Island, but through Castle Garden, a former opera house on the Battery. Even after immigration facilities were transferred to Ellis Island only steerage passengers were taken there. First- and second-class passengers were dealt with aboard their ships. Nor was Ellis Island (named, incidentally, for an eighteenth-century owner, Samuel Ellis) the drab, cheerless institution we might imagine. It was a beautiful, richly decorated complex with first-class health facilities, a roof garden with inspiring views of lower Manhattan and the Statue of Liberty, and good food for the relative few who were subjected to detention. Its Registration Hall, with its brass chandeliers and vaulted ceiling containing 29,000 tiles, each one set by hand by Italian craftsmen, was possibly ‘the grandest single space in New York’, according to one account.9 Although the immigration officials were unquestionably hard-worked – they processed up to 5,000 arrivals a day and just over 1 million, four times Ellis Island’s supposed capacity, in a single peak year, 190710 – they performed their duties with efficiency, dispatch and not a little compassion. (Many were themselves immigrants.)
Though the list of those who could be denied admission was formidable – it included prostitutes, lunatics, polygamists, anarchists, those with ‘loathsome or contagious diseases’, those deemed likely to become public charges, and some ninety other categories of undesirables – only about 2 per cent of applicants were denied entrance, and so few were given names they didn’t willingly accede to as to make the notion effectively mythical. Far from being a cold and insensitive introduction to the New World, it was a dazzling display of America’s wealth, efficiency and respect for the common person – and one that made many truly believe that they had passed into an earthly paradise.
Once landed on Manhattan the new immigrants would immediately find further manifestations of the wondrousness of America. At the landing point they would often be approached by fellow countrymen who spoke their language, but who were friendlier, easier in their manner and far more nattily dressed than any they had seen at home. With astounding magnanimity, these instant friends would offer to help the newly arrived immigrant find a job or lodgings, and even insist on carrying the grip into which he had packed his few valuables – one couldn’t be too careful in New York, the immigrant would be solemnly cautioned. And then at some point the immigrant would turn to discover that his new friend had vanished with his belongings, and that he had just learned his first important lesson about life in a new land. Few newly arrived immigrants were not fleeced in some way within their first days.
Most of the millions of lower-class immigrants settled in the four square miles that were the Lower East Side, often in conditions of appalling squalor, with as many as twenty-five people sharing a single windowless room. As early as the 1860s, three-quarters of New York City’s population – more than 1.2 million people – were packed into just 37,000 tenements. By the end of the century the population density of the Lower East Side was greater than in the slums of Bombay.11 In an effort to improve conditions, a law was passed in 1869 requiring that every bedroom have a window. The result was the air-shaft. Though a commendable notion in principle, air-shafts turned out to be a natural receptacle for garbage and household slop, and thus became conduits of even greater filth and pestilence.
Crime, prostitution, begging, disease and almost every other indicator of social deprivation existed at levels that are all but inconceivable now. (Murder, however, was the exception to this rule; the rate is ten times higher today.) A study of Irish immigrants to Boston around mid-century found that on average they survived for just fourteen years in America. In 1888 the infant death rate in the Italian quarter was 325 per 1,000. That is, one-third of all babies did not survive their first year.12
Gangs with names like the Plug Uglies, Dead Rabbits and Bowery B’hoys roamed the streets, robbing and mugging (an Americanism dating from 1863; also sometimes called yoking) wit
h something approaching impunity. Although New York had had a police force since 1845, by the second half of the nineteenth century it was thoroughly corrupt and ineffectual. Typical of the breed was Chief Inspector Alexander ‘Clubber’ Williams, who was brought up on charges no fewer than 358 times, but was never dismissed or even apparently disciplined. Such was his gift for corruption that by the time of his retirement he had accumulated a yacht, a house in Connecticut and savings of $300,000.13
Against such a background, it is hardly surprising that many immigrants fled back to Europe. At one point, for every 100 Italians who arrived in New York each year, 73 left. Perhaps as many as one third of all immigrants eventually returned to their native soil.14
None the less, the trend was relentlessly upward. The pattern was for one immigrant group to settle in an enclave and then disperse after a generation or so, with a new concentration of immigrants taking its place. Thus when the Irish abandoned their traditional stronghold of the Five Points area, their place was taken immediately by Italians. The old German neighbourhoods were taken over by Russian and Polish Jews. But there were finer gradations than this, particularly among the Italians. Natives of Genoa tended to accumulate along Baxter Street, while Elizabeth Street housed a large community of Sicilians. Calabrians congregated in the neighbourhood known as Mulberry Bend. Alpine Italians – those from areas like Ticino in Switzerland and the Tyrol near Austria – were almost invariably to be found on Sixty-ninth Street.
Immigrant groups had their own theatres, newspapers, libraries, schools, clubs, stores, taverns and places of worship. Germans alone could choose between 133 German-language newspapers by 1850, some of them, like the New York Staats-Zeitung and the Cincinnati Volksblatt, nearly as large and influential as their English-language counterparts.15 Yiddish-speaking New Yorkers could in 1935 choose from a dozen daily newspapers, one of which, the Jewish Daily Forward, had a circulation of 125,000. Even Norwegians had forty papers in their own tongue to choose from across the nation as a whole. It was possible – indeed, in some cases normal – to live an entire life in the United States and never speak English.
Dutch, for instance, remained widely spoken in rural New York well into the nineteenth century, some two hundred years after the Netherlands had retreated from the continent. The celebrated feminist and public speaker Sojurner Truth, for instance, was raised in a Dutch household in Albany and spoke only Dutch until she reached adulthood.16 According to Raven I. McDavid, jun., ‘a few native speakers [of Dutch] survived in the remoter parts of the Hudson Valley as late as 1941’.17
Though the Dutch were only a passing political presence in America, their linguistic legacy is immense. From their earliest days of contact, Americans freely appropriated Dutch terms – blunderbuss (literally ‘thunder gun’) as early as 1654, scow in 1660, sleigh in 1703. By the mid-eighteenth century Dutch words flooded into American English: stoop, span, coleslaw, boss, pit in the sense of the stone of a fruit, bedpan, bedspread (previously known as a counterpane), cookie, waffle, nitwit (from the colloquial Dutch ‘Ik niet weet’, meaning ‘I don’t know’), the distinctive American interrogative how come? (a literal translation of the Dutch hoekom), poppycock (from pappekak, ’soft dung’), dunderhead, and probably the caboodle in kit and caboodle. (Boedel in Dutch is a word for household effects, though Dillard, it is worth noting, mentions its resemblance to the Krio kabudu of West Africa.)18
Two particularly durable Americanisms that emanate from Dutch are Santa Claus (out of Sinter Klaas, a familiar form of St Nicholas), first recorded in American English in 1773, and Yankee (probably from either Janke, a diminutive equivalent to the English Johnny, or Jan Kaas, ’John Cheese’, intended originally as a mild insult). Often Dutch words were given entirely new senses. Snoepen, meaning to slip candy into one’s mouth when no one is watching, was transformed into the English snoop, meaning to spy or otherwise manifest nosiness.19 Docke, ’doll’, became doxy, a woman of easy virtue. Hokester, an innocuous tradesman, became huckster, someone not to be entirely trusted. Doop to the Dutch signified a type of sauce. In America, transliterated as dope, it began with that sense in 1807, but gradually took on many others, from a person of limited mental acuity (1851), to a kind of lubricant (1870s), to a form of opium (1889), to any kind of narcotic drug (1890s), to a preparation designed to affect a horse’s performance (1900), to inside information (1910). Along the way it spawned several compounds, notably dope fiend (1896) and dope addict (1933).
Still other Dutch terms came to English by way of nautical contacts, reflecting the Netherlands’ days of eminence on the seas, among them hoist, bumpkin (originally a short projecting spar; how it became transferred to a rustic character is unclear), bulwark, caboose (originally a ship’s galley), freebooter, hold, boom and sloop.
As Dutch demonstrates, a group’s linguistic influence bears scant relation to the numbers of people who spoke it. The Irish came in their millions, but supplied only a handful of words, notably smithereens, lallapalooza, speakeasy, hooligan (from Gaelic uallachán, a braggart20) and slew (Gaelic sluagh), plus one or two semantic nuances, notably a more casual approach to the distinctions between shall and will, and the habit of attaching definite articles to conditions that previously lacked them, so that whereas a Briton might go into hospital with flu or measles, Americans go to the hospital and suffer from the flu and the measles.
The Scandinavians imparted even less. With the exception of a very few food words like gravlaks and smorgasbord, and a few regional terms like lutfisk (a fish dish) and lefse (a pancake) that are generally unknown outside the upper Midwest and the books of Garrison Keillor, their linguistic presence in America left no trace.
Italian was slightly more productive, though again only with food words – spaghetti, pasta, macaroni, ravioli, pizza and the like. The few non-food Italian terms that have found a home in English, like ciao and paparazzo, came much later and not through the medium of immigration.
German by contrast prospered on American soil. Germans had been present in America from early colonial times – by 1683 they had formed their own community, Germantown, near Philadelphia – but the bulk of their immigration came in two relatively short, subsequent bursts. The first, numbering some 90,000, happened mostly in the five years from 1749 to 1754 and was largely completed by the time of the American Revolution.21 From 1830-50 there was a second, larger influx focused mostly on urban areas like St Louis, Cincinnati, Chicago, Milwaukee, Cleveland, Buffalo and New York, in several of which the German cultural impact was not just enormous but domineering. As an editorial writer for the Houston Post noted at the outbreak of World War I, ‘Germany seems to have lost all of her foreign possessions with the exception of Milwaukee, St Louis and Cincinnati.‘22
Only a few German words naturalized into English date from the earlier period of immigration, notably sauerkraut (1776), pretzel (1824) and dumb in the sense of stupid (1825). Most Americanized German terms arose during or soon after the second wave: to loaf and loafer (1835), ouch, bub and pumpernickel (1839), fresh (in the sense of being forward; 1848), kindergarten (1852), nix (1855), shyster (probably from Scheisse, ’shit’; 1856), check (in the sense of a restaurant bill; 1868), and possibly hoodlum (from the Bavarian dialect word hodalump; 1872). Rather slower to assimilate were delicatessen (1889), kaput (1895), fink (from Shmierfink, a base character, literally ‘a greasy bird’; 1892), kaffeeklatsch and hockshop (1903), and scram (1920). From German speakers too came the American custom of saying gesundheit (’health!’) after a sneeze, so long upon departing, and how as an intensifier, and the practice of putting fest on the ends of many words – for example, songfest, foodfest, slugfest and talkfest.
Many German terms underwent some generally minor modifications of spelling to make them accord with English practice, so that autsch became ouch, frech became fresh (in the sense of impertinent), krank (unwell) became cranky, zweiback became zwieback, Schmierkiise became smearcase, and Leberwurst became liverwurst.
; Equally productive, if rather less diffused through society, was Yiddish (from Middle High German jüdisch diutsch, ’Jewish German’), brought to America by eastern European Jews beginning in about 1880. Though based on German, Yiddish is written from right to left like Hebrew, and uses Hebrew characters. It originated in the early twelfth century in the Jewish ghettoes of central Europe. As the Jews dispersed through Europe they took Yiddish with them, enlivening it along the way with borrowings from Aramaic, Hebrew, various Slavic and Romance languages, and finally English. By the late nineteenth century it was the mother tongue of some eleven million people, a quarter of whom ended up in the United States.
As with the Germans, Jews came to America in well-defined but far more culturally distinct waves – first a small block of Sephardic Jews from Spain and Portugal (Sephardic means Spaniard in Hebrew) in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; then, from the 1820s to the 1880s, a much larger group of Ashkenazi Jews (named for the scriptural figure Ashchenaz) from elsewhere in western Europe, particularly Germany; and finally, from about 1880 to 1924, a tidal wave of eastern European Jews, especially from Poland and Russia.
Members of the first two groups were mostly educated and comfortably off, and they slipped relatively smoothly into American life. Many of the great names of American business and philanthropy – Guggenheim, Kuhn, Loeb, Seligman, Schiff, Lewisohn, Morgenthau, Speyer – trace their origins to the first and more particularly second waves. Those in the final diaspora were by contrast almost universally ragged and poor. At least one-fourth could not read or write. To the ‘uptown Jews’, these new arrivals were something of an embarrassment. They referred to them as ‘barbarians’ or ‘Asiatics’, and regarded speaking Yiddish as a mark of poverty and ignorance.23