The Great Migration

By John Elson

The most salient fact about American history is this: the ancestors of everyone who lives in the U.S. originally came from somewhere else. That includes even the Inuits and other Native Americans, whose forebears first crossed from Siberia to Alaska on a land bridge that now lies beneath the icy Bering Sea. From its colonial beginnings, the history of America has largely been the story of how immigrants from the Old World conquered the New. As the historian Carl Wittke noted, eight nationalities were represented on Columbus' first voyage to a continent that eventually received its name from a German mapmaker (Martin Walseemuller) working in a French college, who honored an Italian explorer (Amerigo Vespucci) sailing under the flag of Portugal.

The tide of humanity that has washed over the American continent during the last three or four decades of the 20th century has had profound consequences, to be sure. But in relative terms, it is no match for the waves that came ashore during the 19th. Between Napoleon's defeat at Waterloo in 1815 and the assassination of Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand at Sarajevo in 1914, more than 30 million Europeans left their homelands -- some involuntarily -- to settle in the U.S. It was by far the greatest mass movement in human history. The influx continues, in ever greater variety. For people in search of better lives, America remains the ultimate lure.

America's immigration story actually starts in the darkness of prehistory. Archaeologists estimate that Paleo-Indians began their great trek from Asia around 30,000 B.C., in pursuit of shaggy, straight-horned bison (now extinct) and other edible fauna. They gradually moved south and east from Alaska as the glaciers of the Ice Age melted. By 19,000 B.C., the Indians -- a short, hardy people who suffered from arthritis and poor teeth, among other infirmities -- had built primitive homes in cliffs along Cross Creek, a few miles from present-day Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. One tribal nation, the Cahokia federation, had the sophisticated skills to build a thriving trade center of 40,000 people, across the river from what is now St. Louis, Missouri, between A.D. 1000 and 1250. But by 1300, this metropolis -- the largest on the continent north of Mexico -- had been abandoned, a victim of overdevelopment. The Cahokians had run out of food.

When the first Europeans arrived, the Indian population of North America north of Mexico was about 1 million. According to Ronald Takaki's A Different Mirror: A History of Multicultural America, some Indian sages had forecast the coming of white-skinned aliens. On his deathbed, a chief of New England's Wampanoag tribe said that strange white people would come to crowd out the Indians. As a sign, a great white whale would rise out of the witch pond. The night he died, the whale rose, just as he had predicted. Similar prophecies about predatory whites can be found in the lore of Virginia's Powhatans and the Ojibwa of Minnesota.

Until recently, American history texts were resolutely Anglocentric, beginning the immigration story with the first successful English settlements -- at Jamestown, Virginia, in 1607 and Plymouth Rock, Massachusetts, in 1620. The British, in fact, were latecomers. In 1565 a convicted Spanish smuggler named Pedro Menendez de Aviles, leading a ragtag army of perhaps 1,500 that included blacksmiths and brewers as well as foot soldiers, built the first permanent European settlement on American soil at St. Augustine, Florida. (The ruins of Menendez's first fort were discovered only last summer.) Thirty-three years later, Juan de Onate established a colonial capital at San Gabriel in what is now New Mexico.

The Spanish, typically more interested in the pursuit of gold than in settlement, easily subjugated the Indians, enslaving those who did not die of imported diseases like smallpox. The 500,000 or so Indian inhabitants of Eastern North America at the time of the first English settlements were not so easily conquered. These resilient and warlike nations -- principally the Algonquin and Iroquois in the north, the Muskoghean and Choctaw in the south -- were happy to trade with the white man and adopt his weapons, but not his Christian faith or his mores. And they would fight to the death to defend their lands from encroachment.

Many of the first immigrants from the British Isles were unwilling voyagers. Long before Australia became the fatal shore for millions of convicts, North America was London's principal penal colony. Others came to the New World as indentured servants, bound into service to pay the cost of their passage for specified terms -- usually three to seven years -- before being set free. During the 17th century, for example, 75% of Virginia's colonists arrived as servants, some of whom had been kidnapped by unscrupulous "recruiters."

And then there were the slaves. In 1619 the Virginia settler John Rolfe made a diary note of a dark moment in American history. "About the last of August," he wrote, "came in a dutch man of warre that sold us twenty Negars." In Virginia alone, the slave population grew from about 2,000 in 1670 to 150,000 on the eve of the American Revolution. Most of the slaves sailed from West Africa, chained together in dank, fetid holds for transatlantic journeys that often lasted three months or more. The conditions were unspeakable, the mortality rate horrifying: on some ships more than half the slaves died during the passage.

Initially, blacks worked alongside whites in the tobacco fields of Virginia and the Carolinas, but by 1650 field hands were invariably men and women of color. One reason: because of what science now knows is the sickle-cell trait, blacks were often less susceptible than whites to the depredations of malaria. More important, a terrible distinction had been made, first informally but then in legislation: white servants were considered persons despite their temporary state of servitude; blacks were mere property that could be bought and sold.

In sharp contrast to Mother England, the 13 American colonies were heterogeneous in character. By the mid-18th century, Welsh and Germans had settled in Pennsylvania and the Carolinas, which also had a substantial population of Scotch-Irish. South Carolina and the major towns of New England were home to thousands of French Huguenots. There were Swedes and Finns in Delaware, Sephardic Jews from Holland and Portugal in Rhode Island and Dutch in New York. Visiting New Amsterdam in 1643, the French Jesuit missionary Isaac Jogues was amazed to discover that in this town of 8,000 people, 18 languages were spoken. In his famous Letters from an American Farmer, J. Hector St. John Crevecoeur wrote in 1782, "Here individuals of all nations are melted into a new race of men, whose labors and posterity will one day cause great changes in the world."

But did these myriad groups really melt? A unique characteristic of the U.S. immigration experience, historian Daniel Boorstin has noted, is the way in which so many ethnic communities were able to preserve their separate identities. Instead of "E pluribus unum" (From many, one), Boorstin suggests, the American motto should have been "E pluribus plura." New York offers an early case history. The Dutch lost political control of the Hudson River within 40 years of New Amsterdam's founding in 1624, but their cultural influence proved longer lasting. As late as 1890, some inhabitants of villages near Albany still spoke a form of Dutch at home.

Early immigrants found their way to the New World for a variety of reasons. The Huguenots and German Mennonites were escaping religious persecution. The Irish had been deprived of their farmlands. As Crevecoeur observed, the primary motive for most newcomers was economic: "Ubi panis ibi patria ((Where there is bread there is country)) is a motto of all emigrants." A primitive form of advertising helped the cause. William Penn wrote pamphlets extolling the attractions of what was called "Quackerthal" in German, which were circulated widely in the Netherlands and the Rhineland. "Newlanders appeared in Old World villages as living specimens of New World prosperity, dressed in flashy clothes, wearing heavy watches, their pockets jingling with coins."

Brochures promoting the New World's glories understandably did not emphasize the difficulty of getting there. An 18th century journey from, say, Amsterdam to Philadelphia or Boston could last anywhere from five weeks to six months. The tiny ships, whose height between decks seldom exceeded 5 ft., braved pirates as well as North Atlantic storms. Conditions below decks were hardly better than on slave ships. As one passenger wrote, "Betwixt decks, there can hardlie a man fetch his breath by reason there ariseth such a funke in the night that it causeth putrifaction of the blood and breedeth disease much like the plague." Fatal outbreaks of scurvy, dysentery and smallpox were common. And yet the tide of emigration could not be halted. Between 1700 and 1776, . 450,000 Europeans crossed the ocean to find a new life.

Most 18th century immigrants were peasant farmers -- the poor, huddled masses of Emma Lazarus' famous poem. Some, though, elevated the quality of life in the colonies. The Huguenots and their descendants -- Paul Revere among them -- maintained a tradition of craftsmanship and provided the colonies with many of their physicians. Major Pierre Charles L'Enfant designed not only the new capital of Washington but also the badge for the Society of the Cincinnati -- which was one of the earliest uses of the eagle as the symbol of America. Royalist political refugees from the French Revolution turned up as dancing masters in the salons of Philadelphia.

In the early years of the new American republic, however, immigration was modest. Apart from slaves, only about 4,000 foreigners entered the U.S. annually between 1800 and 1810. One reason for the laggard pace was Britain's Passenger Act of 1803, which raised the cost of transatlantic tickets and served to discourage a brain drain of talented workers who might carry with them England's industrial secrets.

The U.S. government did not begin to record immigration data until 1820. A decade later, the nation's population was around 13 million, of whom only 500,000 were foreign-born. But by then the century's great tide of immigration had truly begun, primarily from Ireland, Germany and Scandinavia. Profoundly influencing this exodus were the so-called America letters -- glowing accounts of life in the New World by recent voyagers that became as popular in Europe as best-selling novels. In Ole Rynning's America Book (1838), the U.S. is described as a classless society with high wages, low prices, good land and a nonrepressive government.

Ads by shipping firms and land-speculation companies also beckoned peasants from the Old World to the New. Midwestern states, beginning with Michigan in 1848, set up their own immigration agencies and offered special inducements to newcomers, like voting rights after only six months' residency. In the Dakotas a poetasting huckster promised women that the territories were prime land for husband hunting: "There is no goose so gray, but, soon or late,/ Will find some honest gander for a mate."

In one key respect, emigrating to America was different from moving from one country to another in Europe. The newcomers would face hostility and prejudice from native-born Americans. But in the eyes of the law, once they became ! citizens they were fully equal to those whose ancestors had sailed aboard the Mayflower. In the words of Marcus Hansen, the pioneering historian of U.S. immigration, "The immigrant was to enjoy no special privileges to encourage his coming; he was also to suffer no special restrictions." With that goal in mind, Congress in 1818 rejected requests from Irish societies in Eastern cities to set aside certain frontier lands for colonies of indigent Hibernians. America was not to become "a patchwork nation of foreign settlements."

Relatively few emigrants found the paradise promised by the ads and the letters home. The early arrivals were, by and large, poor, ill-schooled and young (two-thirds were between 15 and 39 years old). In Europe's principal ports of exodus -- Liverpool and Cork, Bremen and Rotterdam -- they were beset by thieves and hucksters, cheated by ship's captains (there was no set fee for tickets to America) and, until the age of steam, often even ignorant of where they would eventually land. If they survived the journey -- and as many as one-third died aboard ship or within a year of landing in the New World -- fresh hazards awaited them in America. Among them were streetwise recent immigrants who would rob them of their few remaining shillings or kronen.

No European nation lost proportionately more of its sons and daughters to the U.S. than Ireland: in all, some 4,250,000 from 1820 to 1920. Native-born Americans sniffed at these Gaels -- made desperate by the potato famine that devastated their homeland in the 1840s -- as filthy, bad-tempered and given to drink. The haunting, taunting employment sign NO IRISH NEED APPLY became a bitter American cliche. And yet Irish lasses made the clothmaking factories of New England hum. Irish lads built the Erie Canal, paved the highways and laid tracks for the railroads. In the South the Irish were sometimes considered more expendable than slaves and were hired, at pitifully low wages, for the dirtiest and most dangerous jobs, like clearing snake-infested swamps.

But the Irish had a gift for mutual self-help and taking care of their own. Out of this instinct, manifest in America's dozens of "little Dublins," emerged institutions, like New York City's notorious Tammany Hall, that would transform the quality and character of urban politics in America. As early as 1852, the immigrant vote (principally Irish) was so important that Winfield Scott, the staunchly Protestant Whig candidate for President, ecumenically attended Sunday Mass on campaign visits to New York. Some 210,000 Irish fought during the Civil War, 170,000 of them on the Union side.

As Irish migration began to recede, a second great wave -- of Germans (or perhaps more properly, German speakers) -- began. As Oscar Handlin pointed out in his classic study The Uprooted, most 19th century European immigrants thought of themselves not as ex-citizens of a national state (which, in the case of Poland, for instance, did not even exist) but as speakers of a common tongue, or residents of a particular village or province. The Germans were lured by the vision of unlimited economic opportunity and greater freedom than Central Europe offered in the post-Napoleonic era.

If the Irish brought a new spirit to American politics, the Germans brought culture in varied forms, from singing groups to vineyards to poetry societies. Some German railway workers could recite Homer in Greek. More pioneering than the Irish, they helped develop America's hinterland, from Ohio to Texas. (In 1900, 1 out of 3 Texans was German in origin.) The town of Hermann, Missouri, still known for its wines, was typical: when laid out in 1837, streets were named for Schiller, Gutenberg, Goethe and Mozart.

"The Scandinavian immigrant to the United States," wrote historian Wittke, "has been the Viking of the Western prairie country." In the mid-19th century, American newspapers carried accounts of immigrant Swedes disembarking en masse from cargo ships and marching -- often with their country's flag carried aloft -- to railway depots where trains would take them upriver to Buffalo, along the Erie Canal and thence to the prairie country of the upper Mississippi valley. "What a glorious new Scandinavia might not Minnesota become!" wrote Frederika Bremer in 1853, and she was right. Today about 400 place names in Minnesota are of Scandinavian origin.

After 1880, immigration changed once again. Most of the newcomers were from Eastern and Southern Europe: Russian Jews, Poles, Italians and Greeks. They too left the Old World to escape poverty and, in the case of the Jews, persecution. Like their predecessors, they were mostly peasants, but they faced a different and unhappy prospect. The great era of frontier settlement was coming to an end. After being processed at Ellis Island in Upper New York Bay and other immigration centers, millions of these rural folk found themselves confined to the mean streets of urban ghettos like Manhattan's , festering Lower East Side, working at menial jobs and crammed into narrow railroad flats that lacked both heat and privacy.

The nativist sentiment that foreigners are somehow inferior to the American- born may be the nation's oldest and most persistent bias. (Curiously, it was not until 1850 that the U.S. Census took note of where Americans were born.) Apart from slaves, Asians (principally the Chinese) suffered most from this prejudice. Seeking fortune and escape from the turmoil of the Opium Wars, Chinese first began arriving in California during the 1840s. Initially, they were welcomed. During the 1860s, 24,000 Chinese were working in the state's gold fields, many of them as prospectors. As the ore gave out, former miners were hired to build the Central Pacific Railroad; others dug the irrigation canals that poured fertility -- and prosperity -- into the Salinas and San Joaquin valleys.

The Chinese were rewarded for their labor with low wages, typically a third less than what white workers could earn. Even so, hostility forced them from many jobs as times got tough. Excluded from the mines and farms, many set up shop as laundrymen, a trade that did not exist in their homeland. They were ineligible for citizenship under a 1790 federal law that limited that privilege to whites. In 1882 Chinese workers were barred from entering the U.S. by an act of Congress that was extended indefinitely in 1902 and was not rescinded until 1943.

After the Chinese were excluded, Japanese became the principal concern of nativists who feared America's contamination by a "Yellow Peril." The shameful nadir of this bias followed the attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941. Under pressure from security-conscious Army officials, the Federal Government exiled more than 100,000 Japanese and Japanese Americans from their homes on the West Coast to internment camps in Arizona, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Idaho, Utah and Wyoming. Despite this humiliation, 30,000 Japanese Americans served in uniform, and the all-Nisei 442nd Regimental Combat Team and the 100th Battalion became the most decorated units in U.S. military history.

American immigration is like a book with no ending. Despite a resurgence of nativism, newcomers continue to seek entry, with the same sense of hope and yearning that fired their 19th century predecessors. Illegal Irish seek jobs, escaping an 18% unemployment rate in their homeland. Jews from the former Soviet Union want relief from an ugly surge of anti-Semitism at home. Perhaps & 80% of the newcomers in recent years have come from Asia and Latin America, adding to the country's unparalleled cultural and racial diversity. (New York City alone has more than 170 distinct ethnic communities.) "Of every hue and caste am I," wrote Walt Whitman in Song of Myself. True enough when he composed that line in 1881. Truer still today.