by H. W. Brands
The efforts by business to secure a labor supply continued, though. American manufacturers appreciated that inexpensive steam travel was creating an increasingly global market in labor; workers would go where their skills were best remunerated. Some American manufacturers looked to the tariff to maintain high prices and thereby allow the high wages that would ensure a steady supply of workers. “Let us keep up the walls about our continent,” the chief lobbyist for the National Association of Wool Manufacturers declared, “so that there may be a sure refuge for the industries, or in other words, the capital and skill and labor which we will attract from Europe.” In still other words, let American consumers pay to import the workers American industry required.13
When active recruiting was required, many companies preferred to do it themselves. They sought workers with specific skills the general stream of immigration failed to furnish in adequate amounts. At first their agents offered contracts in Europe to the targeted workers, but the companies discovered that such contracts were nearly impossible to enforce once the immigrants reached America. Workers simply walked away—to take employment elsewhere, often with rivals of the sponsoring firm, which was out the price of passage and suffered the additional blow of having strengthened the competition.
Despite the difficulties, the manufacturers kept trying. Before Andrew Carnegie and others shifted to the Bessemer process, steelmaking was as much an art as an industry, and experienced heaters and puddlers were worth the risk and expense of recruiting. American steel companies monitored the industrial workplace in Britain, and when labor disputes or other troubles angered skilled workers there, they swooped in to take advantage. Often utilizing American consuls, whose job description included promoting American business, they offered free passage to America and well-paying jobs on arrival. “Sober, industrious men can hardly fail of good employment, if well skilled in their work,” one American publication promised.
The strategy triggered retaliation. British and German employers kept an eye on conditions in the United States; when unsuccessful strikes or business depressions put skilled American workers in a bad mood, their agents pounced. After the Panic of 1873 British cotton companies sent agents to New England with orders to find a thousand workers. How many they enticed east is unknown, but the return traffic to Britain rose sharply during this period. (Not all the British were unhelpful to American capitalists. British trade unionists occasionally collaborated with American labor recruiters, pointing out likely emigrants and otherwise doing what they could to fill the boats west—and thereby shrink the labor pool in Britain.)14
While the manufacturers focused their recruiting efforts on skilled workers, other American firms looked for other sorts of immigrants. Railroad companies, flush with land and chronically short of cash, sought farmers to purchase and populate their western domains. The purchasing would help the bottom line at once; the populating would produce traffic that would benefit the roads over time. The Northern Pacific, besides flogging its bonds in Europe, established an emigration office to entice Europeans to Jay Cooke’s “Banana Belt.” The company purchased newspapers in Germany and funded an elaborate exhibit at the Vienna Exposition of 1873. It went so far as to name what would become the capital of North Dakota for the famous chancellor of Germany. The town that arose near the place where the Northern Pacific crossed the Missouri River was originally called Edwinton, for one of the railroad’s engineers. But someone in marketing got the idea of renaming it Bismarck in order to attract attention at the Vienna trade fair and throughout the German-speaking world. An invitation went out to Bismarck himself to visit the budding metropolis, but he declined. Other Germans responded more favorably, streaming to America’s northern Plains, purchasing Northern Pacific land, and becoming the largest ethnic group in North Dakota after that half of the territory achieved independent statehood.15
The Southern Pacific, the holding company that subsumed Leland Stanford’s Central Pacific after the latter ran into cash-flow problems, prospected for immigrants in much the way Stanford’s California neighbors had prospected for gold. Some of its agents worked the home front, diverting already-arrived immigrants from the territories of the Northern Pacific and other railroads by meeting ships from Europe and passing out pamphlets and cut-rate tickets to the West Coast. Other Southern Pacific agents scoured Britain and the European continent for land buyers. The company established an emigration office in London, sponsored lecture tours by speakers touting California, and arranged transport to America for the most promising prospects. Its activities earned the applause of many Californians. “The complete and systematic plan of the Southern Pacific will doubtless bring thousands of the best kind of immigrants to this state each year, to the great benefit of the community at large, as well as to the immigrants themselves,” the San Francisco Call asserted. The railroad’s enemies—it was already being labeled the “Octopus” in California—cast a more jaundiced eye on its immigration schemes. “They lie and cheat,” Ambrose Bierce said of the company and its agents. “Their dealings with settlers have been characterized by a multitude of rapacities. They skin their clients and sell them back the skins at an advance. They will settle the immigrants upon their lines and take the entire profit of their industry for carrying their crops to market.… In three years the people that they have tumbled from the frying pan into the fire will be fighting them on a crust of bread and a cold potato.”16
The states got into the immigration business, too. Western states sought settlers: people to purchase state land, increase everyone’s property values, and generally strengthen the state economies. Midwestern states sought settlers, as well, but also laborers. Michigan wanted miners; Minnesota and Wisconsin lumbermen; Illinois, Iowa, and several other states railroad workers. Southern states tried to counter their historic reputation for contempt of manual labor by advertising for plantation hands and domestic servants. The states seeking workers often collaborated with employers in the production and distribution of pamphlets and posters; Michigan mining companies paid to send state-printed flyers to Europe, while the Wisconsin State Immigration Commission shared agents with the Wisconsin Central Railroad.17
The effect of all the recruiting was hard to gauge. Some state officials seem to have entered the immigration contest less from confidence that their efforts would succeed than from fear that voters would blame them for not trying. The beggar-thy-neighbor efforts of the railroads to divert immigrants to their own domains did nothing directly to increase immigration but, by bidding up the overall rewards to immigrants, made America that much more appealing. The targeted campaigns by manufacturers to lure skilled workers to America doubtless enticed some who wouldn’t have come on their own; how many is impossible to know.
BY EVERYONE’S ACCOUNT (including that of the recruiting agents), the most effective form of marketing was the testimony of immigrants themselves. Often this came in letters from America to friends and kin in the old country. Jacob Riis had read such letters in Denmark; Mary Antin’s father sent them from Boston to Russia. Gustaf Jarlson, a Swedish immigrant to Minnesota, wrote home every month to his brother Axel. “This is a good country,” he explained.
It is like Sweden in some ways. The winter is long, and there are some cold days, but everything grows that we can grow in our country, and there is plenty. All about me are Swedes, who have taken farms and are getting rich. They eat white bread and plenty of meat. The people here do not work such long hours as in Sweden, but they work much harder, and they have a great deal of machinery, so that the crop one farmer gathers will fill two big barns. One farmer, a Swede, made more than 25,000 kroner on his crop last year.18
Even more compelling than letters were the actions of emigrants who returned home. Lee Chew grew up on a farm near Canton during the 1860s. Some of the neighbors had left for California, but Lee Chew’s father wished to keep him home and so told him stories of what “foreign devils” the Americans were. They were powerful, with great fire-belching ship
s and a kind of sorcery that allowed them to light the darkest night and communicate over long distances, but they lacked anything that passed for civilization. Their language was barbaric, they practiced all manner of violence, and they disrespected their ancestors. No correct-thinking Chinese should wish to go to America. Lee Chew had little reason to doubt his father, and he resigned himself to life as a Chinese farmer—until new evidence surfaced.
I was about sixteen years of age when a man of our tribe came back from America and took ground as large as four city blocks and made a paradise of it. He put a large stone wall around and led some streams through and built a palace and summer house and about twenty other structures, with beautiful bridges over the streams and walks and roads. Trees and flowers, singing birds, water fowl and curious animals were within the walls.… When his palace and grounds were completed he gave a dinner to all the people, who assembled to be his guests. One hundred pigs roasted whole were served on the tables, with chickens, ducks, geese and such an abundance of dainties that our villagers even now lick their fingers when they think of it. He had the best actors from Hong Kong performing, and every musician for miles around was playing and singing. At night the blaze of lanterns could be seen for miles.
The lesson was lost on no one there, least of all Lee Chew.
The man had gone away from our village a poor boy. Now he returned with unlimited wealth, which he had obtained in the country of the American wizards.… The wealth of this man filled my mind with the idea that I, too, would like to go to the country of the wizards and gain some of their wealth.19
EVERY IMMIGRANT HAD a story, and each was unique. But the cumulative effect of the stories—the sum of the individual experiences—was perhaps best conveyed by statistics that submerged the differences into impersonal numbers. During the five years after Appomattox, 1.5 million immigrants entered the United States. During the 1870s, 2.8 million more arrived. During the 1880s, another 5.3 million landed, and during the 1890s, 3.7 million. The busiest single year for immigration was 1882, when nearly 789,000 immigrants arrived; the preceding and succeeding years ranked second and third, with 669,000 and 603,000, respectively.
The immigration boom of the 1880s, compared with the 1870s and 1890s, attested to the material motives of most of the immigrants. As the American economy expanded during the 1880s, jobs became plentiful and, to many potential immigrants, irresistible. The depressions of the 1870s and 1890s made the United States comparatively less attractive, and immigration declined. (During those decades, men and women who might have come to the United States either stayed home or went elsewhere. Brazil, for example, experienced a surge of immigration during the 1890s, just as immigration to the United States fell off.)
Measured against the existing resident population as well, the immigration of the 1880s was the era’s largest. The 5.3 million persons who entered the country during that decade amounted to some 10.5 percent of the 50 million persons who lived in the United States in 1880. At the end of the 1880s, nearly 21 million residents were either immigrants or the children of immigrants; this total constituted nearly one-third of the American population in 1890. (The immigration increment of the 1880s was exceeded, as a percentage of the population, by only two decades in American history: the 1850s, when immigration equaled 12.1 percent of the 1850 population, and the 1900s, when immigration came to 10.8 of the 1900 population.)
The statistics also revealed the beginning of a trend that would become especially distinctive after the turn of the century. Till 1890 the great majority—substantially more than 80 percent—of immigrants hailed from northern and western Europe. Between 1820 (the year the federal government started collecting immigration statistics) and 1890, of a total of some 15 million immigrants to America, the German states sent nearly 4.5 million, Ireland 3.5 million, Britain 2.7 million, Scandinavia 1 million, and other western European countries 600,000. But starting in the 1890s (and accelerating in the following decade), the origins of immigration shifted east and south. By 1900 the shift was unmistakable. Russia sent four times as many immigrants to America that year as Germany did; Italy sent three times as many as Ireland. Immigration from eastern and southern Europe in 1900 nearly doubled that from northern and western Europe.
This shift said more about conditions in Europe than in the United States. (Other countries of the Americas experienced a similar shift.) Pogroms like those that drove the Antin family from Russia intensified. The continuing drop in the price of steamship tickets, which held out the possibility of regular returns home, made emigration more attractive to family- and village-oriented Italians and Greeks. Railroads reached farther into eastern and southern Europe, making the first stage of the journey to America more convenient. Meanwhile, the economic and social disruptions that had sent so many to America from Germany, Ireland, and Scandinavia diminished. The leading edge of the storm had moved on.20
The “new immigration,” as it was called, evoked soul-searching among the native born. The newcomers from Russia and Poland were frequently Jews; how would they get along with the overwhelming Christian majority in America? The immigrants from Italy and Greece often had olive complexions; where would they fit among America’s whites and blacks? Almost none of the new immigrants had experienced democracy in their homelands; would they adapt to it in America or undermine it?21
These and related questions would loom larger in the new century. For the time being they reinforced the ambivalence Americans had always felt toward immigration. Few disputed the beneficence of immigration in theory; many objected to certain aspects of immigration in practice.
A GENERATION HENCE, the objections would inspire the first broad-gauged restrictions on immigration, but in the late nineteenth century restrictions applied peculiarly to the Chinese. In 1882, after decades of agitation by native-born workers in California, who complained that Chinese immigrants drove pay rates down, Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act. The measure permitted businessmen, students, temporary visitors, and their spouses to continue to enter the country, but ordinary laborers were barred. More than a quarter million Chinese had emigrated since midcentury; they had dug the nation’s gold and built the Pacific railroad. Suddenly, in 1882, nearly all immigration from Chinese stopped.22
Legal immigration, that is. The exclusion act created, at the stroke of Chester Arthur’s pen, a phenomenon that was previously unknown in America but that would grow in size and complexity ever afterward: illegal immigration. Congress could modify the law of supply and demand, as it applied to labor, by raising the risks of entry to America for particular workers, but it couldn’t repeal the law entirely. As long as those workers found it in their interest to hazard entry, they would do so. Employers, many of whom had opposed the ban, discovered merit—that is, profit—in the existence of a class of workers beyond the protection of the American legal system, who could be mistreated at will. The customers of those employers, sharing the wage savings, had little incentive to complain. Chinese continued to enter the United States, albeit in numbers impossible to measure accurately. Some came with forged documents declaring them to be merchants or students or tourists (or the wives of such authorized entrants). Some came with no documents, relying on stealth and bribery to get past immigration officials. They melted into the existing Chinese community and took jobs where they found them.
One part of the illegal immigration was more vulnerable and exploited than the rest. Chun Ho had been in America for five years when she came to the attention of the federal Immigration Commission. Her story was by no means unique, but it was particularly poignant. As the chairman of the commission questioned her, her answers were punctuated by sobs.
“How old are you?”
“Twenty-four.”
“Where were you born?”
“At Ng Jow, in the province of Kwang Si.”
“How did you happen to come to the United States?”
“When I was nineteen years old, the mistress Number Three of a noted procurer b
y the name of Gwan Lung, who lives in San Francisco, went back to Canton, where my mother happened to be living with me at that time, and gave me glowing accounts of life in California. She painted that life so beautifully that I was seized with an inclination to go there and try my fortune.”
The woman paid Chun Ho’s mother two hundred Mexican dollars and took the daughter away. With six other girls similarly acquired, Chun Ho boarded a steamer and arrived in San Francisco after a two-week voyage. “We all came on fraudulent certificates; the color of those certificates was reddish.”
The girls were conducted to the house of a woman named May Sheen. “They always do that first,” Chun Ho told the commission. “From time to time parties came to May Sheen’s house to see me and to bargain with May Sheen as to what price I should be sold at.” How much Chun Ho—or her mother—had known of the services she was expected to provide is unclear; the nature of these services grew obvious during her time with May Sheen. “Two months after my arrival, a Chinaman by the name of Kwan Kay, a highbinder”—a member of a criminal gang, or “tong”—“and one who owned some of these houses”—of prostitution—“came with his woman, Shin Yee, and bought me for $1,950 gold. They gave me a written promise that in four years I should be free.”23
Prostitution was a principal business of the tongs. It flourished on account of the enormous imbalance of the sexes among the Chinese in America, where men outnumbered women by as much as fifteen to one in the 1870s and 1880s. It battened as well on the poverty of Chinese in China and the practice of poor families there of selling daughters to be wives, concubines, and servants. Arbitragers unburdened by scruples could purchase a girl for as little as five dollars in China and sell her for a thousand dollars in the United States. American lawmakers tried to stop the traffic. The 1875 Page Act, named for California congressman Horace Page, banned the immigration of Chinese prostitutes (along with any other Chinese traveling involuntarily). But like most such prohibitions, the law simply raised the price of that which it forbade.24
