by H. W. Brands
His new standing bolstered his confidence, and he returned to Ribe. Word quickly spread that he was back and intended to propose to Elizabeth—“which was annoying but true,” Riis wrote. At her father’s insistence she turned him down. Yet she did so in a way that made him love her the more. “She was not yet seventeen, and was easily persuaded that it was all wrong; she wept, and in the goodness of her gentle heart was truly sorry; and I kissed her hands and went out, my eyes brimming over with tears, feeling that there was nothing in all the wide world for me any more, and that the farther I went from her the better.”
Copenhagen wasn’t far enough; nowhere in Denmark put sufficient distance between the spurned lover and the object of his affection. For millennia Scandinavians had been wanderers, ranging the oceans from the Levant to North America. Recently many had gone to the United States, driven by the age-old difficulty of scratching a living from the lakes and fiords of their chilly homeland, drawn by the novel promise of free land and democracy.
Land meant nothing to Riis, a townsman born and bred. Democracy meant hardly more, as he was too young to have participated in politics of any kind. But others to whom land and democracy mattered had gone to America and written home. They said it was a place where a man might make a new start. Riis couldn’t ask for more. “So it was settled that I should go to America.”7
IF UNREQUITED LOVE drove Jacob Riis from Denmark, unrelieved hate sent Mary Antin from Russia. “Trouble begets trouble,” she heard as a child in the Jewish Pale of settlement in the western part of the czar’s domain, and the experience of her family appeared to confirm the dismal proverb. Her father fell ill and was sent by doctors from the family’s home in Polotzk to another town for specialized treatment, leaving Mary’s mother in charge of the family business. But the mother took sick and the father had to come home. He wasn’t yet cured, and the strain of running the business and tending to his wife wore him down. The family had prospered well enough to afford servants, but as expenses rose and the business suffered they had to be dismissed. The burden of housework fell on Mary’s sister, who herself became sick and was forced to bed. The baby grew colicky. “And by way of a climax,” Mary remembered, “the old cow took it into her head to kick my grandmother, who was laid up for a week with a bruised leg.”
To pay the bills Mary’s father pawned the silver candlesticks, then some spare featherbeds. “There came a day when grandma, with eyes blinded by tears, groped in the big wardrobe for my mother’s satin dress and velvet mantle; and after that it did not matter any more what was taken out of the house.” Mary’s mother lingered near death. “Her cheeks were red, red, but her hands were so white as they had never been before.” Once energetic and hopeful, she now seemed to have lost the will to live. Mary’s father, fretting over finances, grew old before her eyes.
A ten-year-old can’t sustain sorrow forever, and after a time it seemed to Mary that things turned for the better. Her father found a job at a gristmill outside Polotzk. He would be superintendent, with use of a cottage. The house was small and bare, but Mary liked the way the sun shone in the windows, and she became friends with the freckle-faced children of the miller. They played together, exploring the country, hiding in the nooks of the mill, gathering wildflowers for bouquets. And Mary’s mother improved in the fresh air and sunshine.
But the luck didn’t last. The mill was sold and the new owner installed his own superintendent. Mary’s family moved back to Polotzk. Her father searched for work; her mother’s health declined again. Bills came due and couldn’t be paid. Her father grew more and more worried. “Polotzk seemed to reject him, and no other place invited him.”
Just when it appeared things couldn’t get worse, they did. The Russian authorities recurrently bent the laws restricting Jews to the Pale; they did so because the Jews had skills the Russian economy required but also because Jews beyond the Pale were easy marks for extortion and ready scapegoats when things went wrong. Mary learned of the latest pogrom secondhand.
It was a little before Passover that the cry of the hunted thrilled the Jewish world with the familiar fear. The wholesale expulsion of Jews from Moscow and its surrounding district at cruelly short notice was the name of this latest disaster. Where would the doom strike next? The Jews who lived illegally without the Pale turned their possessions into cash and slept in their clothes, ready for immediate flight. Those who lived in the comparative security of the Pale trembled for their brothers and sisters without, and opened wide their doors to afford the fugitives refuge. And hundreds of fugitives, preceded by a wail of distress, flocked into the open district, bringing their trouble where trouble was never absent, mingling their tears with the tears that never dried.
The open cities becoming thus suddenly crowded, every man’s chance of making a living was diminished in proportion to the number of additional competitors. Hardship, acute distress, ruin for many: thus spread the disaster, ring beyond ring, from the stone thrown by a despotic official into the ever-full river of Jewish persecution.
Passover was celebrated in tears that year. In the story of the Exodus we would have read a chapter of current history, only for us there was no deliverer and no promised land.
But what said some of us at the end of the long service? Not “May we be next year in Jerusalem,” but “Next year—in America!”8
Had Mary’s father not needed work so badly, he and they might have kept their heads down and ridden out this latest wave of persecution. Had there been no persecution, he and they might have waited and hoped for his job prospects to improve. But the combination of poverty and persecution made emigration irresistible.
He went first. He borrowed money from friends for a train ticket to Hamburg, where an emigrant aid society underwrote his passage to Boston.
In the short term his departure made the condition of the rest of the family worse. For months they heard nothing from him and received no money. Mary’s mother tried to work, but her health wouldn’t allow it. Mary’s uncles had businesses and jobs and wanted to help, but they had large families and responsibilities of their own.
Mary and her mother and siblings waited anxiously for word from America. Finally it came. Her father said marvelous things about his new home.
In America, he wrote, it was no disgrace to work at a trade. Workmen and capitalists were equal. The employer addressed the employee as you, not, familiarly, as thou. The cobbler and the teacher had the same title, “Mister.” And all the children, boys and girls, Jews and Gentiles, went to school! Education would be ours for the asking, and economic independence also, as soon as we were prepared.
Months more passed before he saved the money to send for them. But finally their summons came. Mary never forgot the feeling she had when her mother opened the letter that contained the steamship tickets. “At last I was going to America! Really, really going, at last! The boundaries burst. The arch of heaven soared. A million suns shone out of every star. The winds rushed in from outer space, roaring in my ears, ‘America! America!’ ”
The news that the family was leaving spread rapidly through Polotzk.
Friends and foes, distant relatives and new acquaintances, young and old, wise and foolish, debtors and creditors, and mere neighbors—from every quarter of the city, from both sides of the Dvina, from over the Polota, from nowhere—a steady stream of them poured into our street, both day and night, till the hour of our departure. And my mother gave audience. Her faded kerchief halfway off her head, her black ringlets straying, her apron often at her eyes, she received her guests in a rainbow of smiles and tears. She was the heroine of Polotzk, and she conducted herself appropriately.
The guests gave warning for dealing with ticket agents and border guards; those with relatives in America pressed letters to their loved ones into her hand.
The day of departure dawned gray and wet. The train to the border was crowded, and the German guards at the frontier eyed the emigrants suspiciously. Mary’s family held passports that were s
upposed to ensure easy transit, but a cholera outbreak in Russia had put the border patrol on notice to scrutinize travelers, especially the poorer sort. Yet one German officer took pity on the Antins. Herr Schidorsky was a Jew, and while he arranged with his brother, the chairman of a local emigrant-aid association, to secure their passage across Germany, he let Mary and the others stay in his home.
After several days the papers came through, and they crossed into Germany. Berlin was a daunting blur.
Strange sights, splendid buildings, shops, people, and animals, all mingled in one great, confused mass of a disposition to continually move in a great hurry, wildly, with no other aim but to make one’s head go round and round, in following its dreadful motions. Round and round went my head. It was nothing but trains, depots, crowds—crowds, depots, trains—again and again, with no beginning, no end, only a mad dance! Faster and faster we go, faster still, and the noise increases with the speed. Bells, whistles, hammers, locomotives shrieking madly, men’s voices, peddlers’ cries, horses’ hoofs, dogs’ barkings—all united in doing their best to drown every other sound but their own, and made such a deafening uproar in the attempt that nothing could keep it out.
Hamburg was more orderly—indeed, more orderly than anyone but the German authorities could have wanted. On arrival the emigrants were placed in quarantine, in carefully numbered rooms where they slept in neat rows, with roll call twice a day, morning and night. The quarantine was to protect the German populace from disease but also to safeguard the profits of German steamship lines. The borders of the United States were open to nearly everyone, but American authorities didn’t hesitate to send disease-ridden ships back to Europe, leaving the companies to suffer the immediate loss and the longer-run damage to their reputations.
Finally the Antins’ fortnight passed and their ship arrived. They filed aboard, grateful to have gotten this far but anxious as to what the ocean would bring. Seasickness came first: the North Sea pitched the vessel to and fro. The emigrants’ distress was only amplified by the seasoned unconcern of the professionals aboard. “The captain and his officers ate their dinners, smoked their pipes and slept soundly in their turns, while we frightened emigrants turned our faces to the wall and awaited our watery graves.”
By the time they reached the Atlantic, Mary had her sea legs. She explored the ship, befriended the crew, and stared in wonder at the vastness of the ocean—“the immeasurable distance from horizon to horizon; the huge billows forever changing their shapes, … the gray sky, with its mountains of gloomy clouds, flying, moving with the waves, … the deep, solemn groans of the sea, sounding as if all the voices of the world had been turned into sighs and then gathered into that one mournful sound.” She scanned the western horizon constantly for her first glimpse of America. “We crept nearer and nearer to the coveted shore, until, on a glorious May morning, six weeks after our departure from Polotzk, our eyes beheld the Promised Land, and my father received us in his arms.”9
THE ANTINS’ JOURNEY to America was fairly typical for European emigrants after the Civil War, and it represented a decided improvement over what earlier generations had experienced. Some still walked from their home villages to the seaports that specialized in the emigrant trade—Liverpool, Le Havre, Hamburg, Bremen, Bergen, Naples, Trieste, and others—but more rode trains, like the Antins. Those who had to cross borders to reach their embarkation ports, again like the Antins, encountered increasing bureaucracy as the apparatus of empire and nation firmed up, but they were less likely to be victimized by highwaymen, confidence men, and related predators upon the transient. The emigrant trade grew more efficient; the bottlenecks at seaports diminished and, with them, the cost of waiting for a ship. Industrialization didn’t always improve health conditions in those seaports—few other countries enforced public health laws with the German rigor the Antins experienced—but the shorter waiting times reduced the emigrants’ exposure to disease.
The ships themselves were a distinct improvement over what had gone before. Steamships displaced sailing ships at the premium level first, conveying wealthy travelers west years before poorer emigrants saw their interiors. But the steamships bumped the better sailing ships down to the emigrant trade, then gradually joined them, until by the 1870s most emigrants traveled aboard the steam-driven craft.
The evolution of the emigrant fleet reflected technological innovation but also imperial competition. Industrialization compelled the European powers to seek both sources of raw materials and markets for exports; the seeking sometimes occurred peacefully but often by force or threat. Steel-hulled, steam-powered warships constituted the state of the art of power projection in the late nineteenth century, and a naval arms race began. The competing governments subsidized their shipbuilders, who honed their skills and kept their construction crews busy between naval orders by building merchant craft. During the 1880s a glut of ships caused ticket prices to fall till an emigrant could cross the Atlantic for the equivalent of ten or twelve American dollars.10
The crossing itself was likewise much improved from decades past. Passengers in steerage (the lowest class) were crowded together, with little privacy and few material comforts beyond those they brought along. In bad weather, with the hatches closed, the best ship could be a dark, lurching container that felt like the oversized coffin the worst of the afflicted almost wished it would be. But the size of the steamships—ten to twenty thousand tons—rendered them far more stable than their wind-powered forebears, and as uncomfortable as the crossing in them might be, it was mercifully brief—eight to twelve days, depending on the port of embarkation, compared with a month or two by sail.
Emigrant transport had always been a business, but in the late nineteenth century it became an industry. Steamship lines competed to carry the emigrants, advertising low fares, convenient schedules, good food, and healthy accommodations. Some lines boasted of labor agents in New York and other American cities who helped passengers from their ships find jobs on arrival. Needless to say, the service delivered didn’t always match the service promised; caveat emptor remained the counsel of prudence. Yet the word got out as to which lines were honest and reliable and which not.
Something else—something almost unheard of in the pre-industrial age—enforced good performance as well. For the first time the ship companies could hope to attract substantial repeat patronage. More and more migrants weren’t emigrants at all but “birds of passage” who spent a season or two in America before returning to their homes, and then did it again, and perhaps again and again. Among some nationalities the intent to return to the country of birth was almost universal. An Italian journalist in Chicago observed, “Italians do not come to America to find a home … but to repair the exhausted financial conditions in which they were living in Italy.… They leave the mother country with the firm intention of going back to it as soon as their scarsellas shall sound with plenty of quibus.” In the event, about half the emigrants from Italy eventually returned. Emigrants from Greece returned in comparable proportions, as did certain Central Europeans. Germans were more likely to remain in America, but not as likely as Russian and Polish Jews, many of whom, having fled religious persecution, had no desire to return to the ghettos and pogroms. The rates of return tended to rise with passing time, as the crossing continued to grow easier and cheaper. During particular periods of depression in America—in the 1870s and again in the 1890s—the returns to some European countries and districts outnumbered the emigrants.11
The return traffic, whether greater or less, helped the bottom line of the steamship companies and encouraged them to dedicate their vessels to the passenger trade rather than convert them to cargo on the eastbound voyage as they had formerly done. On cargo ships the emigrants felt like cargo, on passenger ships more like people. At the same time, the increasing return flow contributed to general knowledge of the transatlantic journey. For most emigrants the unknown was the hardest part of the decision to leave; whatever pierced the darkness made the de
cision easier.
THE STEAMSHIP COMPANIES weren’t the only ones drumming for emigrants. In 1864 Congress, responding to pleas from industry that the Union army had stolen its best workers, approved the Act to Encourage Immigration. The measure enlisted federal officials and federal money in the search for industrial workers, created an Immigration Bureau within the State Department, and opened the federal courts to employers attempting to enforce labor contracts concluded on foreign soil. This was less than some supporters of industry wanted. Secretary of State William Seward had advocated using federal money to pay the passage of selected workers to America. But the endorsement the law gave to contract labor seemed a boon to business at a moment when the fighting had pinched the normal supply of workers.
Labor recruiters responded to the new law at once. The American Emigrant Company, proclaiming itself the “handmaid of the new Immigration Bureau,” solicited orders for labor from American manufacturers and advertised for workers abroad. The company accepted compensation in two forms: fees paid directly by the manufacturers and commissions on rail and steamship tickets purchased by the emigrants.
The company’s activities provoked immediate opposition. Organized labor in America, weak as it was during the 1860s, complained that the federal money and authority were being used to undermine native-born and previously landed workers. Foreign governments warned prospective emigrants that the American labor law was a ruse to fill the ranks of the Union army—that the workers would be drafted as soon as they reached American soil, just as Irish and other immigrants had already been drafted.
How the company’s business model would have weathered the political attacks is hard to say; as things happened, the war ended before it had a fair test. The labor pinch eased as soldiers returned to the civilian workforce and prospective immigrants stopped worrying about the draft. Manufacturers refused to pay the company for what they could get free, and the company’s revenues dwindled. Congress in 1868 put it out of its misery by acceding to the workers’ complaints and repealing the immigration-encouragement act.12
