Penguin History of the United States of America

by Hugh Brogan

  American history has been largely the story of migrations. That of the hundred years or so between the Battle of Waterloo and the outbreak of the First World War must certainly be reckoned the largest peaceful migration in recorded history; probably the largest of any kind, ever. It is reckoned that some thirty-five million persons entered the United States during that period, not to mention the large numbers who were also moving to such places as Argentina and Australia. Historians may come to discern that in the twentieth and later centuries this movement was dwarfed when Africa, Asia and South America began to send out their peoples; but if so they will be observing a pattern, of a whole continent in motion, that was first laid down in nineteenth-century Europe. Only the French seemed to be substantially immune to the virus. Otherwise, all caught it, and all travelled. English, Irish, Welsh, Scots, Germans, Scandinavians, Spaniards, Italians, Poles, Greeks, Jews, Portuguese, Dutch, Hungarians, Czechs, Croats, Slovenes, Serbs, Slovaks, Ukrainians, Lithuanians, Russians, Basques. There were general and particular causes.

  As regards the general causes, the rise in population meant that more and more people were trying to earn their living on the same amount of land; inevitably some were squeezed off it. The increasing cost of the huge armies and navies, with their need for up-to-date equipment, that every great European power maintained, implied heavier and heavier taxes which many found difficult or impossible to pay, and mass conscription, which quite as many naturally wanted to avoid. The opening up of new, superbly productive lands in the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the Ukraine, coupled with the availability of steamers and steam trains to distribute their produce, meant that European peasants could not compete effectively in the world market: they would always be undersold, especially as the victory of free trade was casting down the old mercantilist barriers everywhere. Steam was important in other ways too. It became a comparatively quick and easy matter to cross land and sea, and to get news from distant parts. The invention of the electric telegraph also speeded up the diffusion of news, especially after a cable was successfully laid across the Atlantic in 1866. New printing and paper-making machines and a rapidly spreading literacy made large-circulation newspapers possible for the first time. In short, horizons widened, even for the stay-at-home. Most important of all, the dislocations in society brought about by the French Revolution, the Industrial Revolution and the various wars and tumults of nineteenth-century Europe shattered the old ways. New states came into being, old ones disappeared, frontiers were recast, the laws of land-tenure were radically altered, internal customs barriers and feudal dues both disappeared, payment in money replaced payment in kind, new industries stimulated new wants and destroyed the self-sufficiency of peasant households and the saleability of peasant products. The basic structure of rural Europe was transformed. Bad times pushed, good times pulled (American factories were usually clamouring for workers): small wonder that the peoples moved. It was a necessary phase in their development, which roughly followed a standard pattern everywhere. The Industrial Revolution would first make itself felt as a disturbing force, driving people off their farms and into emigration, or factories, or both. Then it slowed down the increase in the birth-rate, it raised the standard of living, it created new employment on a large scale. Consequently emigration fell off. By the end of the century the British and the Germans were no longer the leading nations among the migrants: their industrialization had reached maturity. Their place was taken by the comparatively backward Poles and Italians.

  Particular reasons were just as important as these general ones. For example: between 1845 and 1848 Ireland suffered the terrible potato famine. A million people died of starvation or disease, a million more emigrated (1846-51). Matters were little better when the Great Famine was over: it was followed by lesser ones, and the basic weaknesses of the Irish economy made the outlook hopeless anyway. Mass emigration was a natural resort, at first to America, then, in the twentieth century, increasingly, to England and Scotland (a fact regularly and unfortunately overlooked by most Irish-Americans today, who seem to think that they are Ireland’s only overseas representatives). Emigration was encouraged, in the Irish case as in many others, by letters sent home and by remittances of money. The first adventurers thus helped to pay the expenses of their successors.

  Political reasons could sometimes drive Europeans across the Atlantic. In 1848 some thousands of Germans fled the failure of the liberal revolution of that year (but many thousands more emigrated for purely economic reasons). Pogroms in Tsarist Russia later brought large numbers of Jews to America. The collapse of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies in i860 destroyed the economy of southern Italy by exposing it to competition from the north: hence, in due course, the arrival of the Sicilians and Neapolitans. Swedes and Norwegians abandoned the struggle of farming in their cold and narrow fields, and once more set out for Vinland the Good. European and American commerce began to stir up the ancient societies of the East: so Japanese and Chinese began to settle in California and Hawaii.9

  If such external stimuli faltered, American enterprise was more than willing to fill the gap. The high cost of labour had been a constant in American history since the first settlements; now, as the Industrial Revolution made itself felt, the need for workers was greater than ever. The supply of native white Americans was too small to meet the demand: while times were good on the family farm, as they were on the whole until the 1880s, or while there was new land to be taken up in the West, the drift out of agriculture (which was becoming a permanent feature of American, as of all industrialized, society) would not be large enough to fill the factories. Theoretically the shortfall might have been made up by emigration, both black and white, from the South; but the sharecropping system and the dreadful interlockings of a society based on racial rivalry tied Southerners of both colours to their blighted homeland, and anyway Northern workers would soon have made trouble if large numbers of blacks had been brought among them. So employers looked for the hands they needed in Europe, whether skilled, like Cornish miners, or unskilled, like Irish navvies. Then, the transcontinental railroads badly needed settlers on their Western land grants, as well as labourers: they could not make regular profits until the lands their tracks crossed were regularly producing crops that needed carrying to market. Soon every port in Europe knew the activities of American shipping lines and their agents, competing with each other to offer advantageous terms to possible emigrants. They stuck up posters, they advertised in the press, they patiently answered inquiries, and they shepherded their clients from their native villages, by train, to the dockside, and then made sure that they were safely stowed in the steerage.

  Steerage was never a particularly pleasant experience. In the days of sail it was appalling. Apart from the frequent scandals, of captains who went to sea with inadequate supplies or who sought to make dishonest profits either by overcharging their passengers for what they fed them or by simply not feeding them enough (sometimes people actually starved to death), or of brutal crews, or of owners who sent out unseaworthy vessels (the Irish had particularly horrible experiences in these ‘coffin-ships’ at the time of the famine, when they could not afford to be choosy), or of shipping brokers, who chartered whatever vessels they could find, however rotten, and then touted for emigrants until they could crowd in no more (these were known as ‘paper ships’), there were the inevitable uncertainties of the weather – the crossing was supposed to last no more than six weeks, but it might take more than three months – and the appalling living conditions, scarcely changed from the days of the Mayflower. There was very little room, so there was no privacy; hygiene was minimal; all the passengers were seasick over each other; there was no ventilation. According to Herman Melville, the author of Moby Dick, steerage smelt exactly like and as strong as a cesspool. Because of the danger of fire in wooden ships, cooking was difficult or impossible; such food as there was was hard to store or preserve, hence the custom of taking along live animals, which added to the
general dirt, stink and unhealthiness; everything got damp and nothing could be got really dry. It is not surprising that the mortality figures at times recalled those of the old slave ships. On one voyage 108 German passengers died out of a total of 544. In 1853 the Washington, a New York vessel specially built for the migrant traffic, lost ninety-four passengers from cholera on one voyage.

  The coming of iron and steam made a vast difference. To be sure, steerage was still invariably uncomfortable and, for many, actively unpleasant. Seasickness was still nearly universal, and since many people were still crammed into open bunks it was still impossible to get away from the sight, sound and stench of each other’s distress. Many other evils were as little amended. But at least the voyage would now last only a short and certain period (failing really violent storms); the journey from north-western Europe now seldom lasted more than twelve days. The passengers contrived to enjoy themselves, singing folk-songs and dancing on deck. Mortality dropped: in 1880, for example, when 457,257 immigrants landed in America, only 269 died at sea. As time went on other conditions began to improve. The great steam lines – Cunard, White Star, Hamburg-Amerika and so on – competed with each other for the traffic. Industrial employers subsidized them, as an inducement to carry plenty of steerage passengers; in rivalry for the money, they began to pamper the migrants (as no doubt their directors put it to themselves). By the eve of the First World War, when the traffic was at its height, conditions on the bottom deck were quite tolerable. Even tablecloths made an appearance. This was just as well, for it eased the transition from the migrant business to tourism which followed the war, as America closed her doors to poor Europeans and Europe opened hers to prosperous Americans.

  Famous photographs still show us the bewilderment of the arrivals at New York: peasant women grasping small children with their right hands, huge bundles with their left; men in black hats and vast moustaches looking wary; immigration officials looking weary. Various fates awaited the travellers. Proportionately few of them went to settle the public lands in the West, for they mostly lacked the skills needed to hack homesteads out of the wilderness. Instead, when they could, the farmers among them bought already cleared land from restless Americans who, having used up the soil and caring nothing for husbandry, were all too ready to move on. The only exception to this came about in Wisconsin and Minnesota. These states were largely settled after the Homestead Act came into operation, and not even prudent Scandinavians could resist the lure of free land. So they made their way to that region and took it over: Vinland at last.

  The boldest immigrants might take one of the special trains to California. These were subsidized, like the liners, the object being to get able-bodied young men to the mines and wharves of the West as quickly as possible. Conditions compared favourably with those in steerage, but otherwise there was not much to be said for them. Families, even those which took the trains, seldom got much further than Chicago or Milwaukee, which became the great German stronghold of the prairie states, as Cincinnati was of the Middle West. And although the immigrants were conspicuous in the great surge of the internal American movement which was carrying the centre of population ever further westward10 their chief cities remained Boston and New York, where they first landed. Of the two New York grew the faster. It had so much to offer, employment above all, for its great age had dawned, the era when it was the real capital of the United States. Its harbour attracted the ships, its excellent canal and rail connections with the interior made it the inevitable middle man for all who wanted to import or export. Even before the Civil War the South had sent much of its cotton to New York for re-export to Old or New England; after the war every region did the same with its own produce, whether foodstuffs, other raw materials or manufactured goods. From New York they flowed out to the Atlantic and, more and more, across the continent. Orders for articles of every kind flowed in upon the city and were filled by its innumerable manufacturing establishments. For New York was the country’s greatest industrial city as well as its greatest port and financial centre. Factories were uncommon: instead, a myriad of little workshops supplied the consumers’ needs, for example, in the matter of shirts and dresses. Much of the work could be and was done at home, in the slums. These now developed with extraordinary speed on both the east and west sides of Manhattan Island, as the city built up as far as Central Park (prudently reserved and planned by Frederick Law Olmsted, an abolitionist turned landscape architect: without him the site would have been built over like everywhere else on that expensive lump of rock) and then passed it into the fields of Harlem. Every empty tenement room was a vessel waiting to be filled with cheap labour; none had to wait long. Housing conditions in New York soon became a scandal; so were working conditions, and they were often identical. In boom times an immigrant family, or at least its female and youthful members, would sit round the table throughout the day and much of the night, cutting out, stitching, lace-making, fine-sewing, in bad light and worse air. In slump times they might not be so fortunate, and a stream of returning migrants would fill the steerage from West to East. But the westward stream was always the larger.

  Beginning life in the New World was appallingly difficult. Immigrants arriving at New York had first to run the gauntlet of the officials at the great reception centres of Castle Garden and, later, Ellis Island, where they would be medically examined, have their nationality and names recorded (often with hilarious inaccuracy) and have to prove that they were neither going to take jobs which American workers might fill nor become charges on the public from lack of funds. Since these last two requirements were contradictory, it is perhaps surprising that in a normal year 80 per cent of the immigrants got through without much difficulty. Then they would have to shake off the horde of dockside sharks waiting to take advantage of their inexperience by seizing their baggage and exacting a fee, and taking them to filthy lodging-houses, for a further fee, where they would be grossly over-charged until their money ran out, when they would be thrown into the street, perhaps ending up in the pauper refuge maintained for their reception. Those were luckiest who were met at the docks by friends and relations who could shepherd them through the difficulties of learning English and finding a job and a home. After non-English-speaking nationalities had established themselves in large numbers they set up efficient reception networks. A young Jew arriving from a Russian stetl, or ghetto, might thus be accommodated in a boarding-house run by a Jewish matriarch who, if she did not consider him good enough to marry one of her daughters, could at least pass him on to a town or neighbourhood where he could get employment. But if these resources failed and the travellers were nevertheless to escape the clutches of the many scoundrels who wanted to exploit them, their likeliest resort would be to the local politicians. These too were exploiters; but they were not so much interested in an immigrant’s money as in the vote which they would shortly enable him to cast. In return for that valuable possession there was little that they would not and nothing that they could not do.

  This was not only the age of the rising cities; it was the great age of the city machines, as they were called. Some, like the Democratic organization in New York, Tammany Hall, founded in 1789, had fairly respectable origins; others grew up in response to conditions, or in emulation of St Tammany.11 By the 1870s all, without exception, were the scandal and the glory of their time. The immigrants played an essential part in their development. To understand how and why requires a glance at the forces which brought about the development of the machines.

  It was a new stage in the politics of patronage. No longer was the politician’s job simply that of manipulating the spoils system to reward party workers and of working the state and national governments to further or defend the interests of a particular place, state, region or big economic interest. Now the great railroad companies needed land grants. Other industrial concerns needed charters of incorporation (which would give them the privileges belonging, in English law, to limited liability companies) and, sometimes, the
assistance of the state militia in suppressing violent strikes. The new cities needed all sorts of facilities: street lighting, sewers, police, roads, bridges, harbour works, prisons, schools, housing, parks, hospitals. It was inevitable that these interests should look to politics for their appeasement; and inevitable that the politicians, ever anxious to make themselves useful, for a price, should do what they could to oblige. The late nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries together amounted to a period in which various experiments were tried to see what was the best way of satisfying the demands of the American people on their political system. Bossism was the first of these experiments.

  The machine was firmly based on the city district known as the ward – was, in fact, little more than an alliance of wards. A ward boss maintained his ascendancy in his neighbourhood by methods that would have been recognized by Sam Adams of the North End of Boston. George Washington Plunkitt, a luminary of Tammany Hall, explained it all at the beginning of the twentieth century:

  I know every man, woman, and child in the Fifteenth District, except them that’s been born this summer – and I know some of them too. I know what they like and what they don’t like, what they are strong at and what they are weak in, and I reach them by approachin’ at the right side.

  For instance, here’s how I gather in the young men. I hear of a young feller that’s proud of his voice, thinks that he can sing fine. I ask him to come around to Washington Hall and join our Glee Club. He comes and sings, and he’s a follower of Plunkitt for life. Another young feller gains a reputation as a base-ball player in a vacant lot. I bring him into our base-ball club. That fixes him. You’ll find him workin’ for my ticket at the polls next election day… I rope them all in by givin’ them opportunities to show themselves off. I don’t trouble them with political arguments. I just study human nature and act accordin’.