Italian

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History of America: Chapter 3, 19th Century


The 19th Century was fairly steady state where immigration was concerned in the years from 1800 to 1890. The exception was, first, the potato blight in Ireland, 1845. A flotilla of 5000 boats brought tens of thousands of Irish to America. (When America Despised the Irish: The 19th Century’s Refugee Crisis – HISTORY) Those Irish congregated in two cities, New York and Boston. Boston’s blue bloods took exception to their influx as they brought their Roman Catholic religion with them to a place were Calvanist beliefs prevailed. The Irish in turn set up their own school system which was attached to their churches. A few decades later, the Boston Brahmins started sending their children to these Catholic schools as their proved far superior to the public school system in Boston at that time. Still, it was commonplace to see a sign in a shop window, “Irish Need Not Apply.”

The Chinese immigration to America started in 1848 with the discovery of gold in California. By 1850 25,000 Chinese had emigrated. In 1875, the Page Act excluded the emigration of Chinese nationals as laborers. In 1882, Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act which suspended all Chinese emigration for 10 years. (Chinese Exclusion Act – 1882, Definition & Purpose – HISTORY) Then in 1892, the Geary Act extended Chinese exclusion for another 10 years. Then in 1902, Chinese immigration was permanently banned. These acts were purely racially motivated.

In 1880 there was a second mass exodus from Ireland the result of wide spread famine among the poor farmers. Still, immigration until the 1890s was almost exclusively northern European. The Swedes started settling Wisconsin and Minnesota. The Germans tended towards Pennsylvania but a significant number settled in other Northeastern States. Names of cities and towns reflect this immigration, cities like Steubenville NY among others.

Starting around 1890 there was termoil and famine in Eastern and Southern Europe which brought those taking flight from Russian service impressment of the Polish, Armenians and Syrians fleeing the bloodbath inflicted upon them by the Ottoman Empire, Italians fleeing extreme poverty in the southern portion of Italy. By 1890 approximately 15,000 Greeks had come to America.

The late 19th century arrivals frequently came being lured by posters saying they can get rich in American mills. Federal law prohibited such advertisements from being put up but the industrialists felt, correctly, that the politicians of the cities and states would bow to their wishes. Even a Congressional probe into such acts said such actions were not happening.

When America switched from a mainly agrarian economy in the 1820s to an industrial economy as the result of the cotton gin and the importation of the water powered loom, mills cities throughout the northeast, Pennsyvania and New Jersery lured farm girls to their mills. No where was this more evident than the mills of Lowell MA where relatively good wages and good housing had farmers pushing their daughters from New Hampshire to the Lowell mills. The reason was a simple and pragmatic one: New England farms were always difficult entities from which they made a living. The farmer relied upon male offspring to assist in the farming while the girls were seen as surplus and a drain on the household. By moving the girls to Lowell, the farmers gained twice: first, the household budget no longer included the girls and secondly, the girls sent money back home.

The Lowell and Lawrence MA mills were textile for the most part. In the early 19th century the farm girls were plentiful enough to satisfy mill needs. But as the looms got larger and faster, and the entire process of textile fabrication grew more sophisticated, the mills expanded quickly and surpassed the labor available to them from the local economy. This started about 1885. That there was abundant work available in America sounded like a really good deal to the poverty stricken Europeans of all nationalities. The Germans supplied what was referred to as “skilled labor.” They took the positions of mechanics in these mills. The job of tending to looms, cleaning wool and cotton fell to the “unskilled labor” market. And it is that market which drew droves of Europeans who were battling poverty, religious oppression, and ethnic hostilities. By 1900, immigrants were counted in the millions per year. These immigrants filled mill positions from Maryland northward and from Massachusetts westward to Chicago.

There were also the coal miners of Pennsyvania, West Virginia and Colorado who came from this immigrant stock. They became some of the first to attempt to unionize and strike. There were many scenes of violence which played out around these mines when the miners struck. The miners’ strife continued through most of the 20th century.

America’s immigrants soon lived in America’s slums as was particularly visible in Massachusetts cities, New York’s lower east side, and Chicago. In her book, Twenty Years at Hull House, Jane Addams describes her outreach work in the Chicago slums to assist single mothers who had to work in the stockyards and mills of Chicago together with the task of parenthood. American novelists such as Sinclair Lewis, Theodore Dreiser, and Upton Sinclair. These authors took on the industrialists and their poor treatment of their workers. Theodore Dreiser wrote the fictional novel Sister Carrie which cronicled the life of a middle class young woman who becomes a nurse and finds herself starting a “settlement house” in New York’s lower east side. This was, of course, a thinly veiled look at the life of Margaret Sanger.

America seems to always have had problems with immigrants. Each ethnic group found itself being preyed upon by the older immigrants.

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A History of Immigration in the U.S.: Preface


This is the first in a series of posts to tell of the history of immigration to America starting with its earliest instances and continuing to today. I am prompted to do this because of the latest round of xenophobia stoked by the Trump presidency. But Trump is only the latest in a long history of such response.

The United States undoubtedly has citizens who trace their ancestry back to every country in the world today, and, to countries which either no longer exist or have changed their identity.

We are a nation of immigrants with only a very small portion of indigenous peoples, who, according to anthropologists are actually immigrants themselves. The difference is that those immigrants came approximately 10,000 years ago over the frozen bridge between present day Russia and Alaska. But that sort of migration was a ancient form of world population which first began in Eastern Africa a million years ago, possibly longer.

The immigration policies of today in the United States have only existed since 1924 in full force as part of a quota system established by the Johnson-Reed Act of 1924. That act had its beginnings in 1917 when the United States tried to stem certain populations from entering the United States. But even 1917 is not the beginning. In 1882, Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act, a purely racist act by the westesrn states over fear of white supremicy and racial purity. Those Chinese immigrants first started entering the U.S. in 1848.

The American idea of who was an American came out of the large emigration of people from England in the early years of our country. As other nationalities started to enter the United States, there was a push back against them over fears of these immigrant taking jobs from established residents.

But the American view of who was actually an American was narrowly defined excluding black Americans who first arrived in 1619 in the Virginia Colony but quickly spread to all 13 of the original colonies. Later, when there were threee waves of Irish immigration, more and more the actual signage on stores of “Irish Need Not Apply” were common. What brought this sort of xenophobia was the fact that almost all Irish brought with them Roman Catholocism with them, a challenge to the anti-Papal religions of Protestantism.

But anti-Irish sentiment quickly passed into the background when beginning in the 1890s a wave of southern and eastern Europeans arrived on our shores. These non-English speaking peoples who not only brought more Catholicism with them, also brought Judeism with them. Additonally the southern Europeans brought a darker skinned people who stood out. Nowhere in the United States was this assimilation shown more prominently than in the lower east side of New York City when these peoples settled. Suddenly the English speaking majority’s ears heard Italian, Polish and Yiddish languages which these immigrants clung to. But this shows the short memories of those Americans who had forgotten the German speaking immigrants of the 1880s.

In the following chapters, I will outline how and who grew our population over the decades. But also, with the great immigration of 1890 to 1920 was the beginnings of many reform movements and unionization. Each of these was an anathema to the English speaking conservative Americans. Immigants poured through the ports of New York, Boston and Baltimore unabated until 1924. American industrialists fought that immigration and were behind the 1924 act.

This is an overview of what I will present in the following chapters. American thought today has the unfortunate lack of understanding that we are still a country heavily reliant upon new immigrants, a fact that will undoubtedly continue in the coming decades. Hopefully you will gain an appreciation of “how we got here” when I finish.

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Sophia’s Sunday — Part 2


The Andreotti’s had moved in next door to them early at the beginning of the previous summer.  Sophia’s father was suspicious of them.  He said he did not trust Italians but when pressed on the issue he could offer no cogent argument, only that it was “well-known” that Italians were not to be trusted.  When Sophia asked why, if that was the case, that it was all right for them to attend the Italian Catholic church down the street, her father had dismissed the question in a huff saying children should not question their parents.  He did that a lot when she brought up any subject which might be thought of as being uncomfortable.  While her mother was more pliable, she seldom went against what her husband proclaimed to be the truth.  And if you asked the question a second time, no matter how well you reworded it, he raised his voice a little higher until she recognized the fruitless nature of her inquiry.

Sophia reflected on her neighborhood that cold January morning.  That was unusual because she seldom had time for her own thoughts once she awoke to the new day.  This day, however, was not a usual day in any respect.  It was not just that it was a Sunday and no one worked on Sundays.  But that there was no prospect of work for anyone in the family for the foreseeable future, and that had trouble all of them.  They had suffered through times of low employment when one or two of the family was out of work.  But this time was different.  This time they were all out of work, food was low, money was lower, and the winter was just reaching its chilling heights.

Sophia reflected back to her life in Poland, just six short years ago.  They had been extremely poor then too, but they always had friends and family to help them through even the most difficult of times.  Now, most of her family surrounded her in this small apartment.  They had no actual relatives in the city, as they had claimed.  Her “uncle” had actually been an acquaintance of her father’s from Poland who had written to his brother.  That brother had talked rather glowingly of America and its promise.  Her father, a headstrong man, had always believed he deserved more than he had gotten, and this word of a better life in America had been virtually all he needed to hear.  Then, about a year before they left Poland, her father had seen a representative, from one of the American mills, talking to some men in Krakow, where he had gone to find some replacement tools for the farm.  The man had said how America longed for the Polish immigrant to work there, and that they were paid handsomely for their toil.  When her father had asked how much, the representative had instantly responded that they lived like kings.  The reference to royalty was met with amazement and disbelief, but it was a tale oft retold in many eastern and southern European towns.  He had heard such “gossip” before and dismissed it as idle talk, but here, right before him, was an American recruiting for those very mills and saying exactly what had before only been rumor.  It was all he needed.

But Sophia was comparing her small village in Poland with the city in which she now lived.  In Poland you knew everyone, and had an opinion about everyone.  Each person knew his place, and that place had a certain respect within the community.  Her father had been very well-respected for his extremely hard work at maintaining a good farm and for generously helping others in their time of need.  Now was their time of need, but here, in America, you knowledge of your neighbors was limited by where you went to church, where you worked, and most importantly, your ethnicity.  When they arrived it was thought they would be living in a Polish neighborhood in their new city.  But that had not been the case.  On her street alone along with the Polish were Italians, Russians, Scots, a few French Canadians, and Armenians.  Their backgrounds were about as diverse as one could imagine.  And their lack of a common native tongue further inhibited them.

When they first arrived they were introduced to their Polish neighbors, who numbered few, and were shown where they could buy their kielbasa, when they could afford it, turnips, cabbage, and get it on credit if need be.  They were also made aware of whom to avoid.  The Poles were always suspect of Russians even though they were of the same background.  You did not go to Warchovsky’s grocery because not only was he a Russian but a Jew, and who could trust them.  That’s what they were told at least.  Sophia had learned much of her English for a Polish Jew who told her that they were not so different from the Russian Jews, so how could that be bad.  Sophia had found work quickly in the closest mill as a mender, one of the better paying jobs, and a job generally assigned to just women.  The women at her mill, mostly Polish but some Italians, were given to gossiping about everything but as she listened Sophia learned that the old world mistrusts did not translate well in this new world, and most importantly, that they were “all in it together,” whatever that meant.  It did not take her long to find out that it meant it was them against the floor bosses who assigned work.  If you did not please such a boss, you might find yourself being laid off and another taking you place in just a day.

At that moment Sophia noticed the emptiness of her stomach.  It ached.  She knew breakfast would be some bread covered with molasses.  It was not very filling but it took the edge off her hunger.  When they had first arrived Sophia and her family looked like well-fed country stock.  She had been a bit of a big girl back then but the constant battle against hunger had depleted her body that it seemed to her she was forever taking in her dresses just so they would fit better.  Sophia had been a seamstress in Poland when they left, and her clothing had been relatively new and always in good condition.  That had all changed, and many was the day that she was simply choosing between the least threadbare garments she owned.  And winter only made things worst. Her one overcoat, though made of wool, failed to keep out the cold for any length of time.  They few times she had had to work across the river at a more distant mill in the winter, she had wished she had the five cent trolley fare.  By the time she made it to work, even when she rushed as best she could, she was always shivering.

As she thought of breakfast she longed for the days when her mother’s fesh-baked bapke and fruit pierogi started her day.  They had enjoyed none of that since they arrived in America.  And their was no Polish baker to provide their favorites.  Mostly the grocers and bakers were Italian and Syian.  But her father had assured her that their present condition, six years previous, was merely temporary, and that soon her mother would be making “babci’s” (grandmother) favorites.  She longed for her babci but knew she would probably never see her again.

At home, here in America, everyone still spoke only Polish.  Her brothers had all learned pretty good English, but her mother and father spoke very stilted, and heavily accented, English.  Her father, it seems to Sophia, was worst of all.  He had a stubborn streak a mile wide.  As much as he need to learn English, he resisted it so much that she frequently had to go with him when he needed to buy something in particular from someone who did not speak Polish.  Her father’s English was so bad that certain of the neighborhood men spoke poorly of him in his own presence without fear of his knowing what they were saying.  It was only Sohpia’s scornful looks that stopped such talk.  When her father noticed this he’d ask what had transpired, and to protect her father, Sophia had become very adept at making up a story to fit the situation so as not to upset her father.  She adored and idolized her father, though he made her crazy many times with his stubbornness and pronouncements.  When such things were talked about among other Polish people, they would universally agree that it was in their nature to be that way.  They were a proud people, and they let their pride show whenever the chance afforded them.  They all belongs to the Polish-American club down the street where these claims were justified on a regular basis.