The procession formed a gallant and striking spectacle. The Turners, in their uniforms of white jackets and pants, with gay kerchiefs tied around their necks, and neat black Kossuth hats, the many richly embroidered banners, the numerous and well-trained music corps, the companies of happy looking cadets, and then, along the sidewalks, the accompanying throng and interminable train of buxom women, nearly all lugging along huge chubby-cheeked babies or followed by troops of roly-poly children, some of whom were just able to toddle—all these indispensable and inevitable features of the German “Fest-tag” were there in rare profusion, brightening even the August sunshine to a ruddier glow.31
When the paraders arrived at the ferry landing, they were literally shipped off to the picnic ground in Hoboken, New Jersey, or Upper Manhattan, which still offered large tracts of undeveloped land.
At the largest festivals, the number of people might reach twenty or thirty thousand. The amount of food and drink required to satisfy a crowd that size must have been staggering. Equally daunting were the logistics of preparing and transporting it in an era before the mechanized kitchen and takeout containers. It is unclear exactly who supplied the food at the picnics, though some of it came from restaurant kitchens inside the various parks. It was sold from booths or stands that were set up in shady areas, usually under a tree. The kinds of food consumed are already familiar to us. What’s new is the quantity: colossal mounds of herring salad, heaps of sauerkraut the size of small haystacks, and giant sheets of honey cake. But the items that seemed to dominate the picnics were sausages, potatoes, and beer. At a picnic in Brooklyn’s Ridgewood Park,
In all directions were arrayed booths and stalls in which edibles were prepared and offered for sale. Frankfurter sausages were in great demand, while the supply of potato pancakes was something enormous. The consumption of lager beer kept the brewers’ carts busy continually coming and going with kegs of beer.32
The vendors at a picnic in Harlem provided “sausages of different sizes from the small one of a finger’s size to the enormous wurst two yards long and two feet in circumference.”33
American visitors to the German picnics were awed by the sight of so many people, eating, drinking, dancing, shooting their rifles, and generally celebrating. In June of 1855, the Saengverein, one of the German singing societies, hosted a picnic at Elm Park on Staten Island. A New York journalist who was sent to cover the event returned with the following report:
We never saw the like before! Such a pouring down of lager bier, such swarms of Germans, such extravagantly jolly times, we should not have expected to see if we planned a year’s travel and tarry in Germany as we saw yesterday in Elm Park…Before 1 o’clock from twelve to fourteen thousand persons were already busily enjoying themselves, and still for a couple of hours longer they kept streaming in at both entrances.34
Visitors were equally impressed by the spirit of orderliness that prevailed at the picnics, despite the size of the gathering and the amount of drinking that took place. Somewhere in that frolicsome but well-mannered mob were the Glockners, Wilhelmina sitting under a tree on the slightly damp earth. Her infant son nestled beside her, lying on his father’s out-spread handkerchief. The two of them are waiting for the return of Mr. Glockner, who has temporarily disappeared into the crowd in search of grilled bratwurst.
CHAPTER TWO
The Moore Family
Potatoes—! Kindly Root, most Cordial Friend,
That Ever Nature to this Isle did send!
Potatoes; oh hard Fate! all dead and gone?
And with them thousands of our selves anon!
’Twas you, deceas’d dear friends, kept us alive,
Vain, vain are all our Hopes long to survive!
—ANONYMOUS EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY IRISH POET1
It was the size of a boy’s fist, though not so well-formed. Its crackled skin was covered with sunken, purplish-black marks, splattered like paint. Sliced in half, the pale interior was marbled with thick, rust-colored veins. Poke it with your finger, and the spongy flesh oozed a foul-smelling liquid….
This lopsided, rotting form was a blighted Irish potato, victim of the fungus-like parasite Phytophthora infestans. The blight that struck Ireland in the mid-nineteenth century, triggering the deadliest famine in the history of modern Europe, originated in central Mexico sometime around 1840. From there, it migrated to the United States in 1843, first detected by New England farmers who were mystified by its lethal handiwork. The following year, it was carried to Europe with a shipment of seed potatoes, spreading through Belgium, Germany, France, and England, then leaping over the sea to Ireland in 1845. Here, it found ideal growing conditions—cool temperatures and plenty of rain. According to Irish observers, the parasite worked on its host with such efficiency that entire fields, green and healthy one day, were black and withered within the week. The blight returned in 1846, this time causing a total failure of the Irish potato crop, the national staple, leaving most of the country with virtually nothing to eat. Incredibly, it endured for nearly a decade, hibernating over the winter then blooming to life each spring until it was finally killed off by a warmer, drier weather pattern.
In 1840, the population of Ireland was over eight million, and still quickly growing. Within fifteen years, more than a quarter of that number had vanished. One and a half million Irish had died of starvation, or of famine-related diseases, such as typhus or cholera. Approximately two million were lost to emigration, some to England and Scotland but most to America, producing another demographic shift, this one in New York.
When the nineteenth century began, New York was in many ways an English city. Most of its inhabitants were of English descent; they belonged to the Church of England, drank English-style ale, and paid for it with English-named coins. The great influx of Irish immigrants between 1845 and 1860 changed the city’s ethnic composition, so by 1860 it was a quarter Irish, and nearly a third Catholic. Included in that exodus were Bridget Meehan and Joseph Moore (her future husband), the focus of our present story.
Bridget came first, in 1863, and Joseph in 1865, the final year of the American Civil War. As far as we know, both traveled alone, sailing from Liverpool to New York. If they had good weather, the transatlantic voyage took each of them roughly twelve days. Most of that time was spent in the ship’s steerage, a space designed for the transport of cargo, not people. A low-ceilinged deck of six feet or less, steerage was typically divided into three sections: one for single men, another for women, and the third for families. The portholes were the only source of light and fresh air, and during bad weather even they were shut tight. The passengers in steerage, a mix of Irish, English, Scots, and Germans, slept on bare wooden berths six feet long and eighteen inches wide. After 1849, ships sailing from Britain were compelled by law to allot each steerage passenger sixteen square feet of space, a good indication of the crowding that existed before the statute was passed.
Two or more weeks at sea, confined in tight quarters, posed considerable health risks. Steerage passengers regularly came down with typhus, also called “ship’s fever,” and many died en route. An incubator for disease, the steerage compartment was also a tinder box for the emotions of frightened, drunk, frustrated, and bored travelers of diverse backgrounds, suddenly thrown together. The following travel advice came from a newly landed immigrant named Mary McCarthy, writing back to her family in Ireland:
Take courage and be determined and bold as the first two or three days will be the worst to you and mind whatever happens on board keep your own temper, do not speak angry or hasty. The mildest man has the best chance on board.2
Mary also recommends that her family travel with a bottle of whiskey, doling out an occasional glass of it to the ship’s cook and the sailors, as it could do “no harm.” But life in steerage wasn’t all grim. Passengers entertained themselves with card games, singing, music, and dancing. In the evenings, as an accordion player pumped out tunes, Irishwomen danced reels in the aisles. Children clapped to
the music, while men drank toasts to the promise of their new lives in America, filling the compartment with a fog of blue tobacco smoke.
As to the food in steerage, travelers have left us with dramatically conflicting reports. In the first decades of the nineteenth century, passengers were responsible for supplying their own provisions, and for cooking them, too. On the upper deck, in a primitive kitchen known as the steerage galley, they boiled potatoes, oatmeal, salt beef, and water for tea, their cooking pot suspended from a hook over a hot grate. They ate and drank from tin cups and plates, two more items they were required to provide for themselves. (A thin straw mattress, a pot, tin plate, fork, and spoon became known as the “immigrant’s kit.”) Another way for the shipping lines to increase their profit, the bring-your-own system was fraught with problems. The steerage galleys were much too small, and fights erupted as families vied for cooking time. A more serious drawback was that many steerage passengers were simply too poor to provide for themselves and either brought nothing or ran out of food before the ship reached its destination.
To save the immigrant passenger from starvation and other dangers at sea, statutes were passed in both the United States and Britain to improve and regulate steerage conditions. One result of that effort was that, beginning in 1848, ships were required to furnish each passenger with the following: sixty gallons of water, thirty-five pounds of flour, fifteen pounds of ship’s biscuits, and ten pounds each of wheat flour, oatmeal, rice, salt pork, and peas and beans. It was just enough food to last through the transatlantic journey which, at the time, averaged thirty-five to forty days. The steerage galleys were still mobbed, however, and wholly inadequate to meet the demands placed on them. In desperation, passengers ate their food raw, mixing flour and water into a paste and gulping it down as best they could.
By the time of Bridget’s journey, it had become routine for ships to provide their passengers with cooked meals. They were eaten down in steerage on collapsible tables that were no more than crude boards balanced on trestles. On some ships, tables were lowered from the ceiling into the aisles, creating an impromptu dining room that was hoisted back up when the meal was over. Three times a day, stewards descended the narrow staircase with oversize cooking vessels, and dished out the contents. For breakfast, there was porridge with molasses, or salt fish; for lunch, boiled beef and potatoes; and for dinner, bread or biscuits and tea. Even if the meat was rank and the bread moldy, to a half-starved Irish peasant the quantity and variety was extravagant, a good omen for all the good eating that lay ahead.
The biographies of Bridget Meehan and Joseph Moore are representative of the larger Irish migration on several counts. First and most important, both arrived in New York young and unmarried: Bridget was seventeen, and Joseph twenty. Where other national groups—the Germans, Italians, and Russians, for example—settled in the United States as families, the Irish migration was essentially a movement of teenagers. Though many sent money home to bring over brothers or sisters or cousins, parents were generally left behind. The Irish were also the only major immigrant group in which women outnumbered men. Amid the cultural and economic changes in post-famine Ireland, women’s status declined drastically. For many, a relatively inexpensive ticket to America was the only way to improve their lot.
Very little is known about Bridget’s life during her first two years alone in New York. If she were fortunate, the still “green” Miss Meehan had a cousin or some other relative already in America to unravel the mysterious workings of her adopted home. The hard-edged geometry of the American city was utterly alien to the Irish immigrant. The ceaseless motion of both men and machines tested the newcomer’s very sanity. One young Irishman, writing home to his family in 1894, tried to convey the strangeness of his current home. “This country is very different from the old one,” he tells them:
The houses are of brick five to nine stories high with flat roofs on which people walk as in a garden…The streets here are paved with stones, and as they are filled with fast-driven vans at all hours—the streets are as bright by night as day—the din and uproar is something horrid. Add to this the elevated railways running 30 feet above the avenues, as the cross-streets are called, the trains flying after one another like furies, and thousands of factories and steamboats whistling and roaring all the time.3
Letters from home were a salve to the disoriented and uprooted immigrant, but the waiting time between letters brought its own torments. A young Irishwoman living in Brooklyn in the 1880s hints at the terror she experienced waiting for the letter that never seems to arrive:
My dear Mamma,
What on earth is the matter with you all, that none of ye would think of writing to me. The fact is I am heartsick fretting. I cannot sleep the night and if I chance to sleep I wake up with frightful dreams. To think it’s now going and gone into the third month since you wrote to me. I feel as if I’m dead to the world.4
What the lonesome immigrant seemed to crave most was information about relatives and friends in Ireland. Writing to her sister back home, a young New York immigrant named Mary Brown asks for news on aunts, uncles, nephews and nieces, siblings and neighbors, mentioning each by name and wondering who among them is in good health, who is sick, and who has been married. Just before signing off, Mary asks her sister to send her a locket of hair as a tangible keepsake.
Mary Brown worked as a domestic for a family on West 13th Street. Most likely, Bridget Meehan began her life as an American wage-earner in just the same way, as a servant, a maid or pantry girl, working for a New York family that also provided her with room and board. Disparaged by native-born citizens, domestic ser vice was a form of work open to immigrants and people of color, and by the 1850s it was dominated by Irishwomen.
The Irish found domestic jobs through other immigrants, who acted as unofficial employment agents. Working in America as maids or cooks, they spread the word that an honest, industrious relative back in Ireland was looking for a domestic position, so when she arrived, a job was waiting for her. If she had no connections, a newly arrived immigrant could find work through a commercial employment agency, or “intelligence office,” as they were known, many of them located downtown, near the docks. The typical intelligence office demanded money from the immigrants they were supposed to help, charging a fee—between 50 cents and a dollar—just to register, and additional fees after that. Even shadier, some respectable-seeming offices were fronts for less wholesome activities. Young girls who stumbled into them expecting to find work with a local family were sent instead to one of the many hundreds of brothels that once flourished in New York. To protect work-hungry immigrants, in 1850 the New York State Commissioners of Emigration opened the Labor Exchange, an office that served both women and men looking for work in New York, or anywhere else in the United States. The majority of people who registered with the Exchange were unskilled workers in low-paying jobs. The men were laborers, and the women servants, mostly German and Irish. Bridget Meehan may have been among them.
The demand for immigrant servants in nineteenth-century America was insatiable. If a household was well-to-do or even middle-class, its every function was in the hands of domestic workers. Beyond cleaning, servants were responsible for laundering and ironing, for lighting lamps, fireplaces, and furnaces. They took care of the children, nursed the sick, received visitors, and cooked and served the family meals. The housewife’s job was to manage her staff, even though she may have had no hands-on experience of the tasks they performed. If a servant suddenly quit or was hurt or sick, the household was thrown into a tumult until a replacement was found. If the family cook came down with the flu, the housewife was unable to step in and fix dinner, because she had never learned how to cook.
With so much riding on their staff, the job of finding good servants was a much-discussed topic among nineteenth-century housewives. In the second half of the century, running debates on the “servant question” appeared in the women’s advice columns, now and then boiling over onto t
he editorial page. One question of enduring interest was: “Which nationality makes the best servants?”
As a rule, housewives looked on their immigrant servants as partly formed and childlike beings. The word they used for it was “raw.” A German or English or Swiss girl, newly landed, was raw in exactly the right way—untainted and malleable. Raw Irish maids, by contrast, were “Dirty, impudent, careless, wasteful, and for incompetence they take the premium, but what can you expect when most of them are just off the ‘bogs’?”5 The critique comes from a New York homemaker, venting her domestic frustrations in a letter to the editor. Her biting words, one isolated expression of much broader anti-Irish and anti-Catholic feelings that had taken hold of America, placed the Irish servant in a highly peculiar position. The same women who battered their Irish maids with insults also relied on them to keep their families clean and fed. Scorned and ridiculed, the Irish maid was also indispensable, a fact she came to grasp, using it to her advantage in ways small and large. When a servant was applying for a new job, it gave her a clear negotiating advantage over her much wealthier American mistress. It also made her exceedingly hard to get rid of. Despite all their moaning, American housewives, in the interest of domestic stability, were reluctant to fire their Irish maids, among the lowest paid of any nationality. Besides, the job of finding a new one was so onerous, it was ultimately less trouble to put up with the servants they already had, despite their glaring imperfections.
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