The Internet is a wondrous place which, if you’re ready,willing, and able to waste a ton o’ time, will wondrously accommodate you. And there’s the equally wondrous Google, ready, willing, and able to serve as your tour guide, or random walk guide, or whatever.
I can’t quite remember what I was googling for when I came across the U.S. Government’s “Special Report on Immigration”, which was published by the Government Printing Office in 1871. Did I want to know what the cost of a velocipede was in 1869? Was I watching a re-run of The Rifleman and felt the need to know what a sod-buster made? Did I wakeup with a hankering to learn how many folks from Norway immigrated in 1820? Or was I just trying to get the earworm “My Sharona” out of my brain. (Thanks, Kath. Hope I paid you back with “Sharif Don’t Like It/Rock the Casbah”.)
Whatever the purpose and urgency driving my googling, there I was with this wondrous book, information at my fingertips that I hadn’t realized I needed to have anywhere, let alone at my fingertips. And what wondrous information it was:
Information for Immigrants relative to the prices and rentals of land, the staple products, the facility of access to market, the cost of livestock, kind of labor in demand in the western and southern states, etc. etc. [sic]
To which are appended tables showing the average weekly wages paid in several states for factory, mechanical, and farm labor; the cost of provisions, groceries, dry goods and house rent in the various manufacturing districts of the country in the year 1869-1870.
All compiled by one Edward Young, PhD, Chief of the Bureau of Statistics.
The first thing that came to my mind was the question: just how many PhDs were there in 1871? But rather than get distracted into seeing if I could find out, I just forged on.
This was 1871. With the opening up of the west, the abolition of slavery, the growing number of factories – it was pretty much welcome immigrants to our shores.
During the first seven decades of the 19th century, the United Kingdom (which included Ireland at the point) made up half of all immigrants. They “speak our language..and are soon assimilated into and absorbed into our body-politic.” All well and good. No mention of the scourge the shanty Irish were.
The next major immigrant group was Germans, who “are intelligent and industrious”, followed by Scandinavians, who are “industrious, economical, and temperate.”
As for real foreigners, “Asiatic” immigration “has not yet reached such proportions that it would excite alarm in the most apprehensive.” And
“The Latin nations contribute little to our population, and the Sclavics (sic) still less, while today, as from time immemorial, the different branches of the great Teutonic trunk are swarming forth from the most populous regions, to aid in the progress of civilization.”
I’m pretty sure that the great Teutonic trunk is not the grey, home-made wooden trunk my German family came through Ellis Island with in the early 1920’s. I’m guessing it’s the Northern European ethnics (Germans, Scandinavians, British Isles) who were the kind of immigrants we welcomed when we were in a welcoming mood.
The narrative sections of the book are a tremendously entertaining read. In them, we find that Edward Young has found that it’s better for unskilled laborers to go west and chop down trees and “engage in subduing the forests” than to fester in the cities. And that the demand for Velocipedes is down.
Then there’s Edward Young’s variation on the camel entering the eye of the needle:
“The son of a rich man, whose raring and education cost $20,000, if not trained to usefulness, is worth far less to the community than the son of a mechanic whose whole cost has not exceeded $2,000, if the latter is a well-instructed and skilled artisan.”
Young was working on it, but couldn’t yet put a price on an immigrant – i.e., the net value to the United States of having them here - but he was definitely in favor of keeping ‘em coming.
And come they did, even in those decades before the really crazy immigration happened (1880-1920, when 20 million immigrants rolled in. How much is much? In 1880, the U.S. population stood at 40 million. Immigrants and their offspring pushed that number up to 106 million by 1920.)
From 1820-1870, the period covered in Edward Young’s wondrous book, 2.7m immigrants came from Ireland. From Germany, the number over that period was 2.268 m.
I think that 1870 was right around the time my Irish great-grandparents were heading over. The Germans were laggards. They waited until after a hellacious world war and found their way to the US in the 1920s.
Being part of these two great-in-number immigrant strains makes me feel, well, so very American.
By 1870, the Italians, Russians, and Poles hadn’t shown up in any great numbers yet. And over that period, only 198 Greeks came to America. 98 from Hayti and 57 from Porto Rico.
In FY 1870, there were a ton of farmers (36k) and laborers (85k) in the immigrant bunches, but there were also 4 actors, 3 dentists, and 10 priests. Not to mention 727 butchers (ach, those Germans), and 990 bakers. No word on candlestick makers, but there was 1 lone hoe-maker.
Hard to imagine that, in a still largely agricultural nation, we only managed to import one hoe-maker that year. Especially given that FY 1870 brought us 23 jugglers. (What was the demand for jugglers?)
That year, our population also increased by 36 nuns, 362 brewers (no doubt those Germans again), and 14k servants. (Was my great grandmother Margaret Joyce among them?)
There was a lot of information provided to immigrants, including where they could buy land – and for how much – and where the jobs were and what they paid.
Some of the jobs are really hard to imagine. Working in the scraping room or a starch factory? And what, pray tell, do mule spinners and mule backside piecers do? I didn’t realize that the backside of a mule had to be pieced.
Easier to think about how god-awful it must have been to work on a sugar plantation in Louisiana, where men made $5.50/week, women made $3.60, and boys $2.50.
Lots of excellent info on M vs. F jobs and wages, and B vs. G.
A type founding company in NY was one of the few places where the girls (rubbing type: $6.50 a week) could make more than the boys (breaking type: $5.50/week).
Oh, the places those immigrants could go and the jobs they could find there. Rhode Island needed spoon and fork makers. Massachusetts could use calendar men ($9.14/week) and calendar boys (4.60/week) at an India rubber goods factory.
Head west to Missouri, young man, to work as a forger, twister, or screw cutter in a lightning rod factory.
Go work as a felt-hat stiffeners, a steel worker in an artificial limb factory, a hair-cloth weaver, a hoop-skirt maker. Soapstone cutting paid exceptionally well: $23.50 a week.
So did work in a wall-paper factory in New Jersey. Flockers made $25, water color painters made $20, and bungers – whatever they did – could haul in a cool $24 per week.
Did immigrants use information like this? I don’t think my immigrant antecedents necessarily did. The Irish branch came to Massachusetts because there were already a ton of Irish here, including friends and family from their home towns. And my more recent German immigrant relatives (my grandparents and toddler mother) went to Chicago for precisely the same reason. Landsmen galore!
But my friend Joyce’s grandparents came over from Lithuania in the early part of the 20th century. They rolled into Ellis Island with little money and less English. There,her grandfather was told that they could use a cobbler in Burrillville, RI, a town of then about 6,000 or 7,000 in population, in the middle of nowhere. Off they went to find work cobbling shoes, and raising a good-sized family that I believe made up the entire Jewish population of Burrillville.
Anyway, I’m guessing that cobbling in Burrillville was better than being a hair-cloth weaver or felt-hat stiffener. Maybe even better than being a bunger in a wallpaper factory.
Ah, history. Ah, data.
Who knows where my next useless Internet stroll will take me…
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