14

Liberty

THE STATUE OF LIBERTY is America’s, and the world’s, quintessential symbol of immigrant hope. But it did not start out that way.

The statue and its illuminated torch were initially conceived not as a welcoming beacon to Europe’s emigrants but as a memorial to the emancipation of American slaves during the Civil War. The idea for the bronze colossus originated in the 1860s with Édouard René de Laboulaye, a prominent French legal scholar. Laboulaye, like most French intellectuals of his day, adored the United States (how things change!). It was not American culture that he admired but rather the American Constitution, with its republican form of government and freedoms guaranteed in a written Bill of Rights. Laboulaye and his circle were thrilled when the destruction of slavery became part of the North’s wartime agenda, as they had always believed that slavery was inconsistent with the United States’ republican ideals.

When Robert E. Lee surrendered at Appomattox Courthouse and the slaves’ freedom became irreversible, Laboulaye established the French Emancipation Committee, which raised funds to assist the freedmen with their transition out of bondage. Living in Paris, a city full of grandiose monuments to heroic military accomplishments, Laboulaye hoped that Americans would erect a colossal memorial to their historic act of liberation. If it should ever be built, Laboulaye and his friends decided, it ought to be a joint Franco-American effort, because the French too prized liberty above all else.¹

For a decade, Laboulaye’s idea languished. No one in the United States seemed interested, while Laboulaye and his associates (among them the statue’s eventual designer, sculptor Frédéric Bartholdi) were distracted and disheartened by the suppression of their political views under Napoleon III. But they revived their plan in the mid-1870s once their autocratic ruler had been deposed, promising to design, construct, and pay for the colossal statue, and asking only that Americans provide a suitable pedestal and location. As the sculptor entered New York Harbor on a visit to the United States to promote his idea, the ship passed tiny Bedloe’s Island, recently ceded by New York to the federal government for military purposes. The Frenchman eventually decided that the statue should be placed there, so that every ship passenger arriving at the United States’ busiest port would see it. In 1877 both President Ulysses S. Grant and his successor, Rutherford B. Hayes, authorized the erection of the monument on the island.²

Yet the United States was a profoundly different place in 1877 than in 1865. Tired of sectional strife and still staggering from the worst depression in the nation’s history (one that saw the unemployment rate surpass 25 percent in cities of the Northeast and Midwest), white Americans did not want to be reminded of issues that had so recently divided them. Other states could not be motivated to contribute to a project that would grace the harbor of a rival, while New Yorkers believed that in tough economic times, they could not spare the funds necessary to build the one-hundred-foot-tall pedestal that the colossus required. Believing that the statue would cost ten times what the French had budgeted and would therefore never be built, the Times scoffed at the idea of the state or federal government allocating $100,000 for the enormous granite base. “It would unquestionably be impolitic to look a gift-statue in the mouth,” pronounced the Times glibly, but given how unlikely it was that the French would ever complete the project, the paper advised against “any such expenditure for bronze females in the present state of our finances . . . Unless the Frenchmen change their minds and pay for the statue themselves, we shall have to do without it.”³

By this point, few Americans were aware of the original relationship between the proposed statue and the Civil War. American boosters now promoted the monument as a commemoration of the one hundredth anniversary of American independence and the “ancient alliance of the French and American people” that had helped the thirteen colonies liberate themselves from Great Britain. But vestiges of the project’s anti-slavery origins were still evident. The leaders of the pedestal fund-raising committee, established in 1877—William Evarts, Edwin D. Morgan, William Cullen Bryant, Parke Godwin, and nineteen-year-old Theodore Roosevelt—were all Republicans. Democrats, never enthusiastic supporters of emancipation or civil rights for the freedmen, tended to oppose the project but justified their opposition on economic grounds.⁴

The pedestal committee members tried every imaginable strategy. They published memorials in the New York press. They arranged benefit performances of popular plays. They persuaded wealthy New Yorkers to exhibit their art collections and charged the public for admission. They arranged for Bartholdi to send the statue’s torch to the United States to be displayed as a means of conveying to Americans the magnitude of the project. They even held an auction in December 1883 for which they solicited artwork and literary manuscripts. These would be assembled in a leather-bound, velvet-lined portfolio that would include twenty-five watercolors and sketches, letters from President Chester A. Arthur, Mark Twain, Henry James, and Bret Harte, and two original poems.⁵

 

The hand and torch of the yet-to-be-completed Statue of Liberty on display in Philadelphia in 1876.

 

One of the writers asked to submit a poem was thirty-four-year-old Emma Lazarus. She was born into what the Times characterized as “one of the best-known and oldest Hebrew families” in the city. Her father, Moses Lazarus, amassed a fortune as a sugar refiner by taking on a Louisiana sugar planter as his partner and thereby significantly reducing the cost of his raw materials. Moses spent most of his time in New York but summered in a Newport mansion by the sea. Emma could count among her good friends not only other wealthy Jews but also members of the well-connected Gilder and Schuyler families. Her parents socialized with Astors, Belmonts, and Vanderbilts. Emma’s modest literary renown at this point resulted from the poetry and magazine articles (primarily on Jewish topics) that she occasionally published in Lippincott’s, The Century, Scribner’s, and The American Hebrew. Prominent writers also respected Lazarus and her work; Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry James corresponded with her regularly.⁶

Despite her wealthy upbringing, Emma had a strong social conscience. If they had been asked to choose one word to describe her, “serious” is what most of her friends and literary acquaintances would have chosen. “One never failed to bring away from a talk with her an impulse to higher things, more serious endeavor, less of satisfaction with the mere touch-and-go relations with the world of every day,” recalled one, the writer Constance Cary Harrison. The problems of the world, Harrison noted, seemed to “weigh strangely heavy upon the mind of a woman so young.”⁷

The anti-Semitic pogroms that broke out in Russia after the assassination of Tsar Alexander II in March 1881 profoundly disturbed Lazarus. With eastern European Jews suddenly arriving in New York in large numbers, she volunteered to assist the refugees, working at the employment bureau of the Hebrew Emigrant Aid Society, helping to establish the Hebrew Technical Institute to provide vocational training for the newcomers, and demanding improvements in living conditions at the Jewish paupers’ “refuge” on Wards Island in the East River. A Times article describing a visit to the island, probably written by Lazarus herself, notes how excited the immigrants were “to breathe in America the air of freedom . . . Every American must feel a thrill of pride and gratitude in the thought that his country is the refuge of the oppressed, . . . and however wretched be the material offered to him from the refuse of other nations, he accepts it with generous hospitality.”⁸

With anti-Semitism still rife in the United States, Lazarus believed that the best hope for Europe’s Jews lay in Palestine. She was the first American Jew of note to call for the creation of a Jewish state there. More than a dozen years before Theodor Herzl is credited with “founding” the Zionist movement, Lazarus visited England early in 1883 to enlist the support of Britain’s most wealthy and influential Jews, who might bankroll the project and push for the British government to support it. She was able to make little headway there, however. For the time being, the United States would be the best destination for eastern Europe’s Jewish refugees.⁹

Soon after returning home, Lazarus was contacted by Harrison, another of the city’s well-known female writers. A native of Mississippi, Harrison was the Confederacy’s Betsy Ross, having sewn (along with her sisters) the first Confederate battle flag, the famous “Stars and Bars,” while her husband, Burton, served as Jefferson Davis’s private secretary in Richmond. Relocating to New York after the war, she became a successful novelist, contributing many pieces to Scribner’s and The Century, and thereby becoming acquainted with Lazarus.¹⁰

Harrison was one of the literary socialites responsible for assembling the portfolio to be auctioned off at the December 1883 pedestal fund benefit. (One wonders what Laboulaye would have thought of this unrepentant Confederate soliciting contributions for his project, but the Frenchman had died a few months earlier.) When Harrison approached Lazarus about contributing a poem, the southerner recalled four years later, Lazarus “was at first inclined to rebel against writing anything ‘to order,’” condemning the whole enterprise with “the summer-lightning of her sarcasm.” Besides, Lazarus said, any poem she might attempt on such short notice, without proper inspiration, would “assuredly be flat.”

But Harrison refused to take no for an answer. She suggested that for motivation, Lazarus “think of that Goddess standing on her pedestal down yonder in the bay, and holding her torch out to those Russian refugees of yours you are so fond of visiting at Ward’s Island.” Harrison saw instantly that her remark had struck a nerve. The poet’s “dark eyes deepened—her cheek flushed—the time for merriment was passed—she said not a word more, then.” A few days later, Lazarus delivered a handwritten sonnet titled “The New Colossus.”¹¹

That fourteen-line poem gave a new meaning and purpose to the figure of Liberty, which had remained abstract and remote in Americans’ minds, especially since Laboulaye’s abolitionist message had long since been forgotten. While Bartholdi’s personification of Liberty might appear on the surface to be quiet and dignified, her “silent lips,” according to Lazarus, were actually crying out to Europe’s tyrants:

 

Give me your tired, your poor,

Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,

The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.

Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,

I lift my lamp beside the golden door!

 

Like every other moneymaking scheme the pedestal fund-raising committee dreamed up, the portfolio auction was a disappointment. It brought in $1,500 (about $30,000 in today’s dollars), only half the amount the committee had expected. The portfolio quickly disappeared inside a New York mansion, and Lazarus’s sonnet, which organizers had read at the auction, was immediately forgotten.¹²

The project’s supporters, doubting that they could ever pay for the monumental pedestal with private donations, turned their hopes once more to the government. But they again encountered partisan obstacles. When the Republican-controlled New York legislature in 1884 allocated $50,000 for the pedestal, Democratic governor Grover Cleveland vetoed the bill. A year later, congressional Republicans proposed an expenditure of $100,000 for the base, but Democrats in the Senate blocked the measure. With the pedestal committee’s treasury depleted, construction of the base was now suspended. Bartholdi’s colossal work of art, which he called Liberty Enlightening the World, gathered dust in more than two hundred crates in a European warehouse. The French people who had paid to have it cast became increasingly bitter, while civic leaders in Boston and Philadelphia promised to build a splendid pedestal immediately if the statue was sent to them.¹³

 

Poet Emma Lazarus was the first person to link the Statue of Liberty to the American immigration experience. It might never have been placed in New York Harbor but for the fund-raising efforts of Joseph Pulitzer.

 

Just when it seemed certain that New York would lose the statue, Joseph Pulitzer initiated a one-man crusade to fund the completion of the project. Pulitzer had come to America in 1864 at age seventeen to enlist in the Union army. After the war, still just eighteen years old, Pulitzer moved to St. Louis. He worked a series of odd jobs while simultaneously ingratiating himself with the city’s German intellectuals, reading and playing chess with them at the St. Louis Mercantile Library. One of these acquaintances eventually hired Pulitzer as a cub reporter for one of the city’s German-language newspapers. Brimming with ambition, he also studied law and won election to the Missouri legislature in 1869 at age twenty-two. Pulitzer was eventually able to buy two struggling St. Louis newspapers, the Post and the Dispatch. He combined them and made them hugely profitable. Most immigrants would have been content to rule over a lucrative Midwest publishing empire and enjoy local political power and prestige. But Pulitzer’s outsized ambition was not sated. In 1883 he moved to New York and bought one of the city’s struggling dailies, the New York World.¹⁴

Pulitzer attracted readers by launching crusades—against monopolies, corruption, and the greed and misdeeds of the wealthy. In March 1885 he decided to make Bartholdi’s statue one of the World’s crusades. Correctly foreseeing that the statue would become a beloved landmark that would evoke “more sentiment than we can now dream of,” Pulitzer argued that it would be “an irrevocable disgrace to New York City and the American Republic to have France send us this splendid gift without having provided even so much as a landing-place for it . . . Let us not wait for the millionaires to give this money,” Pulitzer insisted. “It is not a gift from the millionaires of France to the millionaires of America, but a gift of the whole people of France to the whole people of America.” Pulitzer announced that what the high-society fund-raisers had not been able to accomplish in a decade, he and the readers of the World would accomplish in a matter of months. “The World is the people’s paper,” he intoned, “and it now appeals to the people to come forward and raise this money.”¹⁵

Pulitzer’s journalistic instincts proved impeccable once again. Donations poured in. The notes humble New Yorkers sent with their pennies, dimes, and quarters were gems of popular patriotism, just what readers of the jingoistic World adored. Circulation soared. Organizers ordered work on the pedestal to resume. It was nearly complete when the statue—still in pieces—arrived in New York Harbor, amid much pomp and excitement, in June 1885. On Tuesday morning August 11, Pulitzer announced that the one-hundred-thousandth dollar had arrived at the offices of the World on the previous day.¹⁶

Lazarus was not in New York during the climax of Pulitzer’s pedestal campaign. Just months after she wrote “The New Colossus” late in 1883, she began to feel occasionally weak and debilitated. Soon the symptoms became chronic. When she sailed for Europe in 1885, two years after her previous visit, she said that she felt twenty years older.

Lazarus was no hypochondriac. She had cancer, lymphoma, which was gradually sapping her immune system. Over the next two years she slowly withered; eventually she was bedridden. While still in Europe the following summer, sensing that she would never recover, Lazarus decided that she could at least try to shape her literary legacy. Into a notebook she copied by hand all of her favorite compositions, putting them in the order in which she wanted them to be published upon her death. On the very first page, in the place of honor, she put “The New Colossus.” In November 1887, just after returning to New York from Europe, Lazarus succumbed to the cancer. She was only thirty-eight.¹⁷

None of her obituaries mentioned “The New Colossus.” When Emma’s sisters, who controlled her literary estate, brought out a two-volume set of her collected works in 1888, they defied her instructions concerning her proudest achievement. They buried “The New Colossus” on page 202.¹⁸

Meanwhile, the Statue of Liberty had been assembled. It was dedicated amidst extraordinary pomp and ceremony on October 28, 1886. None of the speeches by President Grover Cleveland or any of the other dignitaries in attendance mentioned immigrants or immigration. Native-born Americans could barely perceive how the sight of the statue would unleash a torrent of pent-up emotions in immigrants—most of whom had been praying that they might live to one day see its welcoming outstretched arms.¹⁹

 

Immigrants admiring the Statue of Liberty as their steamship arrives in New York Harbor. Just eight months after its unveiling, newcomers viewed the colossal statue as a symbol of the very reasons why they had immigrated, even if native-born Americans did not yet associate the monument with immigration.

 

It was completely appropriate that a Jewish New Yorker, inspired by the plight of indigent Russian Jewish immigrants, had written the words that would come to define the Statue of Liberty. In 1865, the year Laboulaye conceived the statue, Irish immigrants arriving in the United States outnumbered Russians by 162 to 1, but by 1883, when Lazarus wrote “The New Colossus,” Russian immigration (consisting almost entirely of Jews) had increased fifty-fold. When Bartholdi’s monument was unveiled in 1887, the immigrant ships steaming past her uplifted torch carried three Russian Jews for every five Irish immigrants. In 1892, the year Ellis Island opened, Russian immigrants outnumbered the Irish for the first time.

East European Jews were not the only immigrant group drawn to New York by what one immigrant called “the far-flung clarion call of American liberty and her promise of equal opportunity.” Scandinavian immigration grew tremendously in the 1880s, as did the influx from Austria-Hungary, then encompassing a large swath of central Europe stretching from Lake Constance, near Zurich, all the way to what is now eastern Romania and western Ukraine. Several thousand Chinese immigrants also moved to New York in these years, creating the city’s first Chinatown.²⁰

But the largest group of new immigrants, larger even than the Russian Jews, came from Italy. In 1895 Italians outnumbered all other groups arriving in the United States, surpassing even the Germans, who had held the top spot on the annual arrivals list for forty consecutive years. Italians outnumbered all other immigrants for seventeen of the twenty years leading up to World War I. (Russian immigrants ranked first in the remaining three years.) By 1900, Italian and Russian immigrants disembarking at the port of New York outnumbered Irish and German immigrants four to one. That margin grew to nearly seven to one in 1910, and nine to one in 1914. New York’s immigrant population, which had been dominated by Irish and German newcomers for generations, became predominantly Italian and Jewish by the start of the war. Yet more of the arriving eastern European Jewish immigrants stayed in New York than did their Italian counterparts, so New York City ended up with more Jews than Italians. At the end of World War I, New York’s population of 5.6 million included 2 million immigrants. Of that total, about 200,000 were Irish, 200,000 were Germans, 400,000 were Italians, and 600,000 were east European Jews. One-quarter of the nation’s Italian immigrants and about one-third of its east European Jewish immigrants lived in New York City in 1920. By that point it was said that 50 percent of all Jews living in the United States, and 10 percent of all Jews in the world, called New York City their home.²¹

 

Like New York’s Irish immigrants, eastern European Jews came to America fleeing both economic hardship and oppression. This discrimination related mainly to where Russian Jews could live and what occupations they could follow. Muscovites in the late eighteenth century had begun complaining that too many Jews were living and working in their midst. The tsars and their ministers promulgated a series of laws from the 1790s to the 1830s that banned Jews from residing in the interior regions of Russia, stipulating that they must instead settle in the Russian Empire’s western borderlands—the area that roughly comprises modern-day Lithuania, Belarus, Moldova, and Ukraine. This confinement zone was not a cramped space. Its nearly 5 million Jewish inhabitants lived alongside 37 million non-Jews in an area twice the size of contemporary France that stretched from the Baltic to the Black Sea. But within that area, Jews could not farm or even live in rural villages, a prohibition that effectively banned them from inhabiting most of the area in which they were confined. The Russian term for the territory where they were forced to live literally translates as the “boundary of settlement,” but in English it became known as the Pale of Settlement.²²

 

A Jewish neighborhood in a Polish shtetl, the small to medium-sized towns in which most east European Jews lived in the late nineteenth century.

 

Within the Pale, most Jews lived in shtetls. Notwithstanding the modern popular imagination, a shtetl was not a village but a small or medium-sized town of five thousand to fifty thousand inhabitants. In some shtetls Jews made up as much as 80 percent of the population, but more often they accounted for only about 40 to 50 percent. The typical shtetl was big enough to have its own synagogue, Jewish cemetery, Jewish schools, and Jewish community associations, but small enough to allow most Jews to know one another, either personally or by reputation. In a shtetl, Jews usually lived in Jewish neighborhoods and earned their livelihoods in the Jewish segment of the town’s overall economy. As a result, they followed almost every occupation at every income level, ranging from prosperous merchants to day laborers barely making ends meet.²³

What made life in the Pale and its shtetls so demoralizing were the constant indignities and ever-increasing list of constraints placed on Jews, especially after the promulgation in 1882 of the “May Laws.” These placed quotas on the number of Jewish doctors who could serve in the military and on the number of Jewish students who could enroll in high schools and universities. Jews’ ability to obtain mortgages was restricted. Jews were later banned from holding political office, voting, or working for railroads and steamship companies. The authorities even forbade Jews to change or conceal their names so that non-Jews would not mistakenly patronize their businesses. Soon they were also banned from selling liquor, an ironic and especially damaging restriction because several generations earlier, Jewish families had been allowed to migrate to eastern Europe on the condition that they agree to sell liquor (and pass on a portion of the income to the state). The government insisted that these restrictions were necessary to protect Russians from Jewish exploitation.²⁴

Life for Jews in the Pale became especially intolerable in the early 1880s when they became the targets of widespread organized violence known as pogroms. While rioting in nineteenth-century New York was especially common in the sweltering summer months, Russian pogroms most often began around the simultaneous springtime celebrations of Easter and Passover. The Christian holiday gave clerics the opportunity to recount the role of Jews in the death of Jesus, while the concurrent Jewish celebration of Passover offered Russian anti-Semites the chance to once again propagate the “blood libel,” the legend that Jews use the blood of secretly murdered Christian children as an ingredient in their Passover matzos.

On April 27, 1881,^* just a few days after Russians had finished celebrating Easter, the first systematic assaults on Jews and Jewish property began. Over the course of the next several months, Russians attacked Jews in at least 250 different communities, almost all of them in modern-day Ukraine. One of the first, on April 29, occurred in the shtetl of Golta (now known as Pervomais’k), located midway between Kiev and Odessa and just twenty miles east-southeast of the shtetl of Holoskov (now usually transliterated as Holoskove), the home of my great-grandfather Froim Leib Anbinder, then seven years old. The attackers in these pogroms generally targeted Jewish property rather than the Jews themselves. Nonetheless, rioters killed many men, raped dozens of women, and ruthlessly beat thousands. Tens of thousands more were terrorized, as their homes and businesses were looted and their meager possessions stolen or destroyed. Even in places where no pogroms took place, Jews feared for their lives. “It is as if we were besieged,” a Jew in Odessa wrote in his diary. “The courtyard is bolted shut . . . We sleep in our clothes . . . for fear that robbers will fall upon us and so that we can then quickly take the little children . . . and flee wherever the wind will carry us.”²⁵

In April 1882 the pogroms resumed. One of the most notorious took place in Balta, a shtetl of about twenty thousand inhabitants (half of them Jewish) located forty miles west-southwest of Holoskov. “What I saw defies description,” wrote a Russian journalist who toured Balta’s scenes of destruction after the mobs had dispersed. On one of the town’s main streets, nothing remained of one grand building but

 

heaps of debris of furniture, household utensils, and merchandise. I move on to a second building, then a third—the picture is the same everywhere! I go to other streets and find the same picture of devastation. It took me seven hours by the clock, walking and riding in my carriage, to traverse the most important parts of a town—in which, in one word, everything that had belonged to Jews had been demolished, destroyed, sacked . . . Nothing remained standing other than the carcasses [of buildings], the walls and the roofs . . . The entire Jewish population of Balta at this moment lacks clothing, furniture, beds, household utensils, crockery. The sacked homes are without windows, doors, and often without stoves.

 

Victims at the time and historians ever since have assumed that the Russian government orchestrated the attacks, but Russian archival records indicate that Tsar Alexander III and his ministers objected to any inflaming of popular passions, even when those passions were directed at Jews. Local officials, however, seem to have put little effort into suppressing most of the attacks. “I am very anxious to leave Russia,” wrote one Jew in his diary in the wake of the rampages of 1882. “Do I not rise daily with the fear lest the hungry mob attack me and rob me of my possessions and destroy everything that I have acquired with the sweat of my brow? Do I not pray that my sisters may escape the clutches of drunkards lest they be raped? Do I not pray that my parents be not killed trying to defend their children and that my brothers and sisters do not die of hunger and thirst?”²⁶

The tsar’s leftist opponents could be just as anti-Semitic as the government reactionaries who tacitly condoned the anti-Jewish violence. “Who takes the land, the woods, the taverns from out of your hands? The Jews,” read one socialist broadside. “Wherever you look, wherever you go—the Jews are everywhere. The Jew curses you, cheats you, drinks your blood.” It was not always like this, insisted the author, but by creating the Pale, the tsars had caused Ukraine to become overrun with Jews. “You have begun to rebel against the Jews,” the author wrote, referring to the pogroms of 1881. “You have done well. Soon the revolt will be taken up across all of Russia against the tsar, the [landlords], the Jews.”²⁷

Russian immigration to the United States tripled in 1882 in the wake of the pogroms, and it was the influx of refugees that attracted the attention of Emma Lazarus and many other New Yorkers. Nonetheless, for every 2 Russian Jews who decided to emigrate in 1881–82, another 998 remained in Russia. Many of the Jews who stayed came to the conclusion that they were no longer safe in their shtetls, so after 1882 there was a massive movement of Jews into the region’s major cities. Odessa, which had only 200 Jews in 1800, had 139,000 by 1900. The Jewish population of Bialystok in what is now Poland grew more than tenfold over that same time span, and Warsaw’s mushroomed from 9,000 to 219,000. In the early years of the twentieth century, the urban influx accelerated even further. Kiev’s Jewish population expanded from 32,000 in 1897 to 81,000 fifteen years later, while that of Lodz, now the third-largest city in Poland, grew from 99,000 to 167,000 in the same fifteen-year period.²⁸

 

Newly arrived Jewish immigrants from Russia leaving Castle Garden in 1882 during the first big wave of east European Jewish immigration to New York.

 

But Russia’s cities did not welcome the influx of Jews. In 1891, for example, the Russian government expelled all twenty thousand Jewish inhabitants from Moscow. They had previously been exempted from the requirement to live in the Pale because as merchants or artisans whose trades were in high demand, they had been deemed “useful” Jews. Some of the banished Jews clearly chose to emigrate, as did others who thought their turn might come next. A “mighty wave” of emigration swept through Russia and Poland in 1891 and 1892, recalled Mary Antin, who left Poland at that time. Immigration from Russia to the United States increased more than 125 percent from 1890 to 1892, reaching 82,000 in the latter year. One of these immigrants was my mother’s maternal grandfather, Barnet Gutkin, a furrier who emigrated from Odessa to New York late in 1891. For every immigrant who was forced from his home, however, there were many more who were motivated by economic aspirations or long-standing grievances, and merely considered the new round of restrictions the last straw.²⁹

Living conditions for Jews in the fast-growing cities of Poland and the Pale were far worse than they had been in the shtetls. An English member of Parliament visiting Vilna (in modern-day Lithuania) at the beginning of the twentieth century found “the miserable dens and cellars” in which the Jews lived truly shocking. “The walls of the houses were blistered and rotting, as if poisoned by the pestilent atmosphere within . . . During my walks through the ghetto I was surrounded by a crowd of gaunt, curious, anxious faces—sad, careworn, hungry-looking people.” In Lodz the situation was no better. “The Jews are crowded together in the Balout quarter where the atmosphere is almost unbreathable,” reported one eyewitness in 1897. “Their misery is indescribable.” The situation had not improved a few years later when the same English M.P. toured the Jewish ghetto of Lodz. “The people had the appearance of half-starved consumptives,” he reported. “It would need the pen of a Zola to do justice to them . . . I have never seen human beings living under more awful conditions.”³⁰

Meanwhile, the circumstances of the majority of east European Jews who remained in the shtetls were deteriorating as well, as the exodus to the cities siphoned off their customers and earning a living increasingly difficult. Perhaps worst of all, these Jews saw no possibility of future improvement for themselves or their children. “The Russian peasant, poor as he may be, is the proprietor of a small piece of land,” wrote one Lithuanian Jewish émigré of his former neighbors. “And his condition is not hopeless—one feels that sooner or later it will improve. But Jewish poverty is utterly without a cure; the Jew has no available means for improving his condition, which will remain abject as long as he lives among alien peoples.”³¹

Jews were encouraged to emigrate by letters that earlier Russian and Polish Jewish immigrants sent to friends and relatives in the Pale. “It is a beautiful country, the land of freedom,” wrote back one immigrant to the shtetl of Eishyshok in what is now southeast Lithuania. “Wherever [a Jew] wants to move he can go, whatever he wants to accomplish he can attain.” Such letters convinced Jews still in the Pale that the United States was far more “civilized” than eastern Europe, “and offers the most guarantees of individual freedom, freedom of conscience, and security of all property.” Furthermore, they had learned, America “endows every one of her inhabitants with both civil and political rights.” At home, Russian Jews enjoyed neither.³²

By 1890, so many residents of the Pale had received such “America letters,” or had friends or neighbors who had, that east European Jews became obsessed with the prospect of immigrating to the United States. “All my relatives and all our neighbors—in fact, everybody who was anybody—had either gone or was going to New York,” recalled Marcus Eli Ravage of the days before he emigrated from Romania in about 1900. Mary Antin, who came to the United States at age eleven in 1894, three years after her father, likewise remembered that on the eve of her departure, “‘America’ was in everybody’s mouth. Business men talked of it over their accounts; the market women made up their quarrels that they might discuss it from stall to stall; people who had relatives in the famous land went around reading their letters for the enlightenment of less fortunate folks; the one letter-carrier [in her hometown in what is now Belarus] informed the public how many letters arrived from America, and who were the recipients; children played at emigrating.”³³

Like the Irish before them, east European Jews often employed “chain migration,” first sending one family member to New York to establish a foothold and find steady work before mailing steamship tickets back to loved ones so their families could be reunited. This was what my mother’s father’s family had done. Isidor Munstuk, my great-great-grandfather, immigrated to New York at around age twenty-nine from Plotzk, Poland. Upon arrival in about 1871, he found work as a barber on Hester Street in what would later be known as the Lower East Side. Only after about five years did he manage to bring his wife, Bertha, and his children Rachel, Sarah, and Jacob (my great-grandfather) over to join him.³⁴

In 1900, Russian Jewish immigration set a new record, and it continued to climb from there. Jewish immigration spiked still higher in 1903, when Russia was once again wracked by pogroms. This outbreak of anti-Jewish violence was much more deadly than previous waves and lasted four years. “At our door four Jews were hanged, and I saw that with my own eyes,” recalled Marsha Farbman, who fled to America in 1904. “The Gentiles were running and yelling, ‘Beat the Jews, Kill them!’”³⁵

One of the most notorious and deadly of these pogroms began on Easter Sunday, April 19, 1903, in Kishinev, a city of about 150,000 located one hundred miles northwest of Odessa in what is now Moldova but was then the portion of the Pale known as Bessarabia. Wielding crowbars, clubs, axes, and occasionally pistols, thousands of marauding townsmen joined peasants from surrounding villages in a three-day rampage in which they killed about fifty Jews and injured five hundred (out of a Jewish population of about fifty thousand). The rioters destroyed Jewish homes and property throughout the city, leaving ten thousand homeless. The pogrom sparked international outrage, especially when the Russian ambassador to the United States told the press that the Jews themselves were “responsible for the troubles.” Many Jews from Bessarabia had immigrated to New York before the renewal of violence in 1903. One of my paternal great-grandfathers, Mendel Dandishensky, from the shtetl of Briceni in northern Bessarabia, arrived in New York in 1896, and his wife, Liba, joined him a year later. But the Kishinev pogrom and the official response to it persuaded even more east European Jews from Bessarabia and all over the Pale to flee to America in 1903 and 1904.³⁶

 

Child victims of the Ekaterinoslav pogrom of 1905. Such violence prompted many Jews to leave for America.

 

In 1905, socialist revolutionaries gained increasingly large followings across Russia. They organized general strikes in many cities and attempted to seize and collectivize the landholdings of Russia’s aristocracy, with the ultimate goal of driving the tsar from power. This wave of uprisings became known as the Russian Revolution of 1905. Many Russians who supported the tsar blamed Jewish socialists for the revolutionary tumult. As a result, the number of anti-Jewish rampages multiplied, including one that resulted in one hundred deaths in Kiev in July of that year.

Meanwhile, other opponents of the Russian government, best described as “reformers,” pursued a more moderate strategy. They sought to reduce the authority of the Russian aristocracy without overthrowing it, to create a constitutional monarchy that would allow a less powerful tsar to retain his title, and to grant civil and political rights to all Russians. Influenced by both radicals and reformers, Russian workers organized a nationwide general strike in October in which millions participated. Russia’s rulers became increasingly panicked. If the strike lasted very long, it might cripple the Russian economy and create further discontent. At the end of October, the Russian ruler and his ministers acceded to many of the reformers’ demands in the hopes that doing so would undercut the radicals and prevent a true revolution. Among the concessions that the government made in this “October Manifesto” was the granting of political and civil rights to all Russians, including the heretofore disenfranchised Jews.³⁷

Jews could not celebrate for long. The new law prompted a vicious popular backlash against the Jews by anti-Semites who objected to granting them equal rights. In the weeks after the tsar signed the October Manifesto, right-wing mobs shouting “Death to the rebels. Death to the Jews” formed in almost all the major cities of the Pale and Poland and in hundreds of shtetls as well, instigating six hundred pogroms, the deadliest yet. Russians killed approximately 2,500 Jews in November and December 1905 and injured many thousands more. In Odessa, where the deadliest pogrom took place, estimates put the fatalities as high as eight hundred and the number of injured at five thousand. Pogroms also broke out again in the shtetls of Balta and Golta near the home of my Anbinder ancestors in southern Ukraine. These pogroms caused another huge spike in the emigration of east European Jews. The number of Russians arriving annually in the United States rose steadily from 107,000 in 1902, before the violence erupted, to 259,000 in 1907.³⁸

Pogroms alone, however, do not explain why so many Jews immigrated to the United States in these decades. Thousands emigrated from portions of the Pale such as Lithuania that experienced relatively few pogroms. Thousands of Jews also left Romania and Galicia (now the southern part of Poland) in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, where anti-Jewish violence was also relatively rare. In fact, a higher proportion of the Jewish population emigrated from Lithuania and Galicia than from violence-ridden Ukraine. “The small town felt narrow to me, and I wanted to go somewhere else,” recalled Aaron Domnitz, who emigrated from what is now Belarus, in an autobiographical sketch. “The mood in town in general was to emigrate . . . There was no friction with non-Jews.”³⁹

Hunger, political oppression, and a lack of economic opportunity drove most of these immigrants to the United States, just as these same factors had pushed the Irish and the Germans to America before them. One tailor, who left for America at the height of these pogroms, did not even mention anti-Jewish violence when recounting his decision to leave the Pale: “Those days everybody’s dream in the old country was to go to America. We heard people were free and we heard about better living . . . I figured, I have a trade, I have a chance more or less to see the world. I was young.” A Jewish immigrant from Poland also did not mention pogroms when explaining why he decided to emigrate. “I want to go to a country where everyone is equal, where the rich also work, and work is no disgrace,” his daughter recalled hearing him say. “I want to go to America, where a Jew does not have to take off his hat and wait outside to see a Pole . . . I want to go to a country where I can work hard and make a living for my wife and children and be equal to everyone.”⁴⁰

Some Jews emigrated to escape the gender conventions that constrained them in the Old World. Emma Goldman left St. Petersburg for New York in large part because her father, she later recounted, “had tried desperately to marry me off at the age of fifteen. I had protested, begging to be permitted to continue my studies. In his frenzy he threw my French grammar into the fire, shouting: ‘Girls do not have to learn much! All a Jewish daughter needs to know is how to prepare gefüllte fish, cut noodles fine, and give the man plenty of children.’” Young Emma was incensed. “I wanted to study, to know life, to travel. Besides, I never would marry for anything but love, I stoutly maintained. It was really to escape my father’s plans for me that I had insisted on going to America.” At age sixteen, the headstrong Goldman sailed for America accompanied by her older half sister Helena.⁴¹

Yet the sharp rise in emigration corresponding to each new wave of pogroms is unmistakable, and clearly these played some role in the decision of many Jews to immigrate to the United States. Furthermore, one did not have to experience pogroms firsthand to be frightened. A Jew might choose to emigrate out of fear that her shtetl could be next. “The accounts in the newspaper were terrifying,” one east European Jewish memoirist wrote, vividly recalling the day when news of a Bialystok pogrom reached his town. “Yosele translated into Yiddish the report of the atrocities committed against babies, about old men who had been hacked to death with axes, and about pregnant women whose bellies had been slit open. The people in the [synagogue] were left pale and shaken.” Many would have resolved to emigrate before the violence could spread to their shtetl. And for those who did live in the centers of violence, the reason for emigrating was simple: “Pogroms, pogroms without end,” wrote Bertha Fox, who came from Skvira, near Kiev. “That is why I left the old country.”⁴²

 

A photo of my great-grandmother Beyle Anbinder (seated left) and her five children, taken some time before they were able to leave Ukraine and join Froim Leib Anbinder in New York. My grandfather Tulea is in the center, standing.

 

East European Jewish immigration fell off a bit after the four-year wave of pogroms ended in late 1906 (and perhaps in part because of the American Financial Panic of 1907 as well), but then the emigration from Russia rose once more. My great-grandfather Froim Leib Anbinder left Holoskov in this period, arriving in New York on April 2, 1910. Immigration to the United States from Russia hit an all-time high of 291,000 in 1913 as Russian Jews joined hundreds of thousands of other Europeans rushing to emigrate before military tensions in Europe could spiral out of control and make such a move impossible. From that first pogrom in 1881 to the end of 1914, a few months after World War I had begun, about 2.1 million east European Jews (one-third of the total) immigrated to the United States. Of that number, 1.6 million came from Russia (including the portion of Poland that Russia controlled), 400,000 from the Austro-Hungarian Empire (including lands such as Galicia that are now in southern Poland), and 80,000 from Romania. Demographers estimate that approximately three-quarters of those Jews who immigrated to the United States initially made New York City their new home.⁴³

Once the war started in 1914, Froim Leib, who had not yet managed to accumulate enough money to bring his wife, four daughters, and son over to join him, must have been wracked by guilt. With U-boats sinking transatlantic steamers like the Lusitania, now was not the time to cross the ocean, especially once the United States entered the war in 1917. The outbreak of the Russian Revolution that same year made it even more difficult for the remaining Anbinders to emigrate. Every couple of years, Froim Leib’s wife, Beyle, would mail him a photograph of herself and the children so he could see how they had grown (or perhaps to make sure he would not think about abandoning them). There must have been times when Froim Leib wondered if he had done the right thing, and if he would ever see his wife and children again.

 

Italy had no pogroms. But it had crushing poverty, and America beckoned. More than 4 million Italians moved to the United States from 1880 to 1914. But while Jews invariably bade good riddance to Russia, many Italians initially thought of themselves as temporary migrants, not immigrants. Not until the end of World War I would the bulk of the Italians living in New York commit to making the United States their permanent home.

For most Italians who immigrated, it was a feeling of despair on behalf of themselves and their children, and the apparent impossibility of ever owning their own land to farm, that played the key role in their decision. “In Italy it was work and work hard with no hope of any future,” recalled Leonard Covello long after he immigrated. “A few years of schooling and then work for the rest of one’s life—no prospect of ever going beyond the fifth grade or ever becoming other than what one started out to be.” Most Italians in the nineteenth century did agricultural labor, but at the time of Italian unification in 1871, fewer than 10 percent of Italian farmers owned the fields they cultivated. Italy’s landed gentry, the signori, controlled most farmland, especially in southern Italy (the portion of the country known as the mezzogiorno), and as the Italian peninsula’s population skyrocketed over the course of the nineteenth century, the land barons raised rents to unprecedented levels. “Every bit of cultivable soil is owned by those fortunate few who lord over us,” complained Pascal D’Angelo, who lived in the mountains of the Abruzzi region east of Rome and whose family began immigrating to the United States in 1910. Those who did manage to scrape together enough money for a down payment on a small farm often had to sell the property at a loss after the first poor harvest in order to satisfy creditors or tax collectors. The influx of cheap imported grain from the United States and Russia in the 1870s and 1880s and a tariff war with France in the 1890s made it especially hard for Italian farmers—both landowners and renters—to make a profit.⁴⁴

Italian peasant farmers often lived in squalid conditions. “The life of the men, the beasts and the land seemed fixed in an inflexible circle, hemmed in by the position of the mountains and the passage of time, as if condemned by nature to life imprisonment,” wrote the Italian novelist Ignazio Silone, who was also from Abruzzi. The farmers lived in “huts” that were “irregular, unformed, blackened by time and worn down by wind, rain, and fire, with their roofs poorly covered by all sorts of tiles and scrap lumber. Most of these hovels have only one opening, which serves as door, window, and chimney,” and most had dirt floors, too. Inside these dingy one-room cabins, “the men, the women and children, and their goats, chicken, pigs and donkeys live, sleep, eat and reproduce, sometimes all in the same corner.” Nonfiction writers conveyed similar accounts, albeit in less melodramatic prose, of “huts” without windows or chimneys, peasants sleeping with their animals, “sanitary conditions . . . abominable,” and no hope for improvement. In Italy, an American journalist concluded in 1909, “poverty,—or rather misery, abject and hopeless,—is a chronic phenomenon.”⁴⁵

By this point, many Italian men found that thievery was the only way to break out of this cycle of destitution. Thousands of southern Italians became brigands, members of criminal gangs who waylaid well-to-do travelers on remote mountain roads. But for those not suited to a life of crime, another option seemed more attractive. “I can be a thief or I can emigrate,” one Italian confessed to his priest when explaining his decision to leave Italy. A blacksmith came to the same conclusion: “When I found that the only way I could prevent my family from starving was to turn to stealing, I decided it was time to leave.” He emigrated in 1906.⁴⁶

One might imagine that the unification of Italy in 1871 would have ameliorated some of these problems in southern Italy, but in fact the situation got worse rather than better. The sense of paternalism the signori felt for their peasant workers disappeared after unification because the elite now believed that the state was ultimately responsible for the welfare of its poorest residents. The ambitions of the new national government also led to higher taxes; some peasants previously considered too poor to pay government levies were now taxed for the first time. They considered the new system unfair inasmuch as it taxed mules, considered a necessity even for indigent farmers, but not cows, which in the south only wealthy farmers could usually afford. “It is progressive taxation topsy-turvy,” observed Pasquale Villari, a Neapolitan who taught history at the University of Florence. “The less a man has, the more he pays.” Poor Italians in the mezzogiorno found the regressive tax policy especially galling because the new national government, even with all that income, seemed incapable of addressing the problems such as chronic disease that ravaged southern Italy. Thousands there contracted malaria each year, and 55,000 died in the mezzogiorno during a cholera outbreak that lasted from 1884 to 1887.⁴⁷

One of the reasons why poor Italians felt so hopeless about their future was their lack of political power. In the first decade after unification, only 2 percent of Italians were eligible to vote, and from 1882 to 1912, just 7 percent qualified to participate in elections. Only in 1912 did the Italian parliament grant all men age thirty and over the right to vote; men in their twenties could not vote until 1918. Women could not cast ballots until 1945. Excluded from the polity, and feeling that they lacked a real future in Italy, many Italians saw the United States as the next best option. “No, I will not stay vegetating here, I thought. The world is big, there’s America, and New York is a vast metropolis,” Adolfo Rossi remembered thinking when, at age twenty-two, he decided to emigrate in the summer of 1879. A native of the Veneto region of northeast Italy, Rossi first found employment in New York as an apprentice eyeglass maker; a year later he was making gelato at the Metropolitan Concert Hall, a precursor to the Metropolitan Opera House. Rossi eventually landed a position with one of the city’s Italian-language newspapers and later wrote guidebooks for aspiring Italian emigrants.⁴⁸

The United States was not initially the favored destination of Italian migrants. In the late nineteenth century, more chose to move to other parts of Europe than to relocate across the Atlantic. And of those who did decide to cross the sea, more initially settled in Argentina than in the United States. In 1890 Buenos Aires had four times as many Italian-born residents as did New York. The northern Italians who moved to Argentina believed they could more quickly ascend to the middle class in South America than in the United States.⁴⁹

Nineteen hundred was the first year in which Italians immigrating to the United States outnumbered those headed to South America. Northern Italians leaving Europe continued to prefer Argentina or Brazil, while central and southern Italians, who in the twentieth century began to outnumber northerners as emigrants, overwhelmingly chose the United States. “All people talked was, ‘America, America, America,’” an immigrant from Calabria recalled years later in an interview. The southern Italians had trouble imagining that they could reach the middle class anywhere, and the day labor and construction jobs they hoped to land paid better in New York than in Buenos Aires. The letters sent back to Italy by the earliest immigrants also induced many Italians to venture to the United States.⁵⁰

Unlike the east European Jews, who rarely returned to visit Russia or Poland, many Italians went back to Italy in the winter, when American construction work dried up, especially if they were doing well in America. These return migrants were always men; unlike the Irish, Italians never sent a female family member to America first. The stylish clothes and worldly sophistication of the returning “Americani” mesmerized their former neighbors. “But the great change is that he has money—more money than ever before, more money than [any of] his old neighbors have,” remembered one Italian of his first encounter with a returning “Americano.” “He is an advertisement that there is prosperity for the stranger in America.” Shortly thereafter, this awestruck villager boarded a ship for New York.⁵¹

Many of these returning “Americani” stayed permanently in Italy. For some, their whole goal in traveling to New York had been to save enough money to put a down payment on a piece of farmland back in Italy, pay off a family debt, purchase a business, or build better housing for their parents. These Italians became known as “birds of passage” because, like migratory birds, they spent part of the year in one part of the world and the remainder in another. Fare wars among the steamship companies drove ticket prices to unprecedentedly low levels, making it feasible for them to cross the Atlantic twice a year. Tens of thousands of Italians made the migratory voyage to the United States each spring to find construction work, then returned to Italy the following winter. In the heaviest years of return migration (1903 and 1904), two Italians went back to Italy in the winter for every three who had arrived the previous spring, though the more typical ratio was two returnees to every five immigrants.⁵²

Yet many Italians who planned to be birds of passage eventually became immigrants. Pascal D’Angelo and his father, Angelo, for example, left Abruzzi for New York in 1910, intending to stay only long enough to pay off the loan sharks to whom the family was indebted. Yet Pascal never returned home. Some remained in New York because they had not managed to save much money and were ashamed to show their faces back in their hometowns. “It is not as you believe that here in America money is found on the ground,” wrote another native of Abruzzi to his parents in Italy. Others decided to settle permanently in the United States after World War I devastated the Italian economy. Still others found that they liked life in America more than they had expected. And some decided to stay only after the United States began imposing immigration restrictions in 1921. These migrants chose to become permanent American residents so their children would not have to suffer through the same “abysmal misery” in Italy that they had endured.⁵³

 

Italian emigrants near Lake Como in northern Italy heading for an emigration office as they began their journey to America.

 

As time passed, a new reason to remain permanently in the United States developed: there was not much left in the mezzogiorno to go back to. In the early years of the twentieth century, many southern Italian villages became virtual ghost towns as the majority of men moved to America, eventually sending for their families or returning to Italy just long enough to choose brides and bring them back to the United States. When the first Italian prime minister to tour the mezzogiorno arrived in the Basilicata region in 1902, the mayor of Moliterno greeted him by saying, “I salute you in the name of my 8,000 fellow villagers, of whom 3,000 have emigrated to America and 5,000 are preparing to join them.” The town of San Demetrio in Calabria lost so many men to emigration that no one was left to light its streetlamps at night. Visiting another southern Italian town, an American reporter found “nowhere the vibrant toil of young men; nowhere the cheerful sound of intense, hopeful, human activity. The village is dead.” The inhabitants who remained, “aimlessly filling a weird, fatal silence, seem like denizens of an accursed land. Their only thought is America.”⁵⁴

Natural disasters accelerated the immigration from southern Italy still further. A parasite spread throughout southern Italian vineyards in 1890, destroying the grapevines and consequently the livelihoods of many residents. The eruption of Mount Vesuvius and the earthquakes that accompanied it in April 1906 killed approximately two thousand Italians, persuading many from the region surrounding Naples to make the trip to America. An even more important stimulus was the horrific earthquake and tidal wave that struck the Straits of Messina on December 28, 1908. Approximately 150,000 Italians died in that cataclysm of tremors, fires, and flooding. (The earthquake and fire in San Francisco two years earlier, in contrast, had claimed three thousand lives.) Only 2 percent of the buildings in Messina, in northeast Sicily, were left intact after the quake. On the other side of the straits, Reggio Calabria, the capital city of Calabria, was equally devastated. Thousands of charred corpses could be seen floating in the straits in the days after the quake.

These natural disasters prompted even more southern Italians to depart their seemingly accursed homeland for the United States, leaving in their wake, according to an Italian parliamentary inquiry in 1910, “abandoned houses, orchards transformed into thorny thickets,” and villages as empty as if they “had been stricken by the plague.” An Italian member of parliament from Basilicata expressed the prevailing sentiment this way: “Oh God,” he wrote, please “never let the United States choose to close its doors to the surging flood of our wretched countrymen!”⁵⁵

Natural disasters are dramatic, but the recurring subtheme in the Italian emigrants’ tales of woe was hunger. While starvation in Italy might be rare, a British report noted in 1901, “there is a terrible permanent lack of food.” A few years later, an American journalist found that emigration “from the Peninsula is only too plainly an emigration of hunger.” This privation was not soon forgotten. When the mayor of a Sicilian town was asked in the 1970s where an American might find documents describing why the city’s residents had emigrated in the early twentieth century, he replied that a trip to the archives was unnecessary: “You want to know why people left? Hunger, that’s why.”⁵⁶

Huge numbers of Italians emigrated from every region of Italy, but while northerners continued to emigrate primarily within Europe, 90 percent of southern Italian emigrants relocated to the Americas, and 70 percent of them settled in the United States. From 1880 to 1914, 375,000 Italians emigrated from remote and sparsely populated Basilicata to the United States; 420,000 from Calabria, the “toe” of the Italian “boot”; 425,000 from the Campania region surrounding Naples; 530,000 from Abruzzi e Molise; and 960,000 from Sicily.⁵⁷

 

For those who came to the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the journey from their homeland to New York was far different from that of the Irish and Germans a half century earlier. Jews traveled on huge ocean liners that now took a week rather than a month to cross the Atlantic (a bit longer for those sailing direct from Italy). Deaths among the passengers, common in the 1850s, were rare by 1900. But psychologically, the weeklong journey was just as traumatic and indelible in the mind as the much longer, more perilous passage had been for their predecessors in the age of sail. The journey is “a kind of hell,” reported a guidebook for Jewish immigrants published in 1891 by an author who had made the journey himself, one “that cleanses a man of his sins before coming to the land of Columbus.”⁵⁸

The memorable portions of the immigrants’ journeys to America began even before they left their hometown. For many, a hearty, festive farewell meal or going-away party would be held on the night before the date of departure. The following morning, an entourage of dozens or even hundreds of family members, neighbors, acquaintances, or merely curious onlookers would accompany the emigrant to the train station, sometimes a journey of many miles.

Few emigrants forgot the moment when the train began approaching the station, for tears would start to flow in abundance. Since it was the younger generation that typically emigrated, most mothers and grandmothers expected that they would never see their offspring again. “The scene at the station was one of undescribable confusion, lamentation and exclamation,” recounted D’Angelo of his departure from Introdacqua in the Abruzzi region in 1910. “Everything was obscured by a mist of tears.” Marcus Ravage’s Romanian Jewish mother at first “seemed calm and resigned” to his departure, but when his train approached the station, “she lost control of her feelings. As she embraced me for the last time,” he wrote, “her sobs became violent and father had to separate us. There was a despair in her way of clinging to me which I could not then understand. I understand it now. I never saw her again.”

The wailing as the emigrant departed was very much like the heartfelt sobbing one found at a funeral, and with good reason. “A person gone to America,” Ravage recalled, “was exactly like a person dead,” and the procession to the station very much like a funeral, with the train station replacing the cemetery. “The whole community turned out, and marched in slow time to the station, and wept loudly and copiously, and remembered the unfortunates in its prayer on the next Saturday,” or the next Sunday in the case of the Italians, whose memoirs recount similar scenes.⁵⁹

For Italians, the trip to the port of embarkation was relatively simple from this point onward, albeit full of new sights and sounds at every turn. Most had never ridden on a train or visited a big city. Those from the interior had usually never seen the sea or ocean before, even if they lived only ten or twenty miles inland. Italians could at least take comfort in the fact that they traveled with passports—the Italian government demanded it as a condition of emigration—giving them some sense of security as they approached the port where they would board the ship that would take them to the United States.⁶⁰

For Russian Jews, by contrast, it was illegal to emigrate. Many carried no passport, and others bought fakes. In truth, neither the Russian authorities nor the security services of the nations Jews would pass through en route to their ports of embarkation in western Europe had much interest in stopping them. But because one could never be sure, and emigrants were occasionally arrested and jailed, the Jews’ journeys to reach a steamship were fraught and stressful. Russian Jews would take a train as far west as they could and then transfer to a hired horse and cart for the trip to either the Austro-Hungarian border (for those from the southern part of the Pale) or the German border (for those from the Pale’s northern regions). Approaching the border, they would leave the cart and travel by foot, usually at night to avoid detection. Typically they were led by professional immigrant smugglers—sometimes peasants and sometimes other Jews—who (then as still today) charged outrageous sums to help the immigrants avoid the supposedly omnipresent border guards.

The more the emigrants could be made to fear that capture was imminent, the more their guides could extort from them. They were often subject to interminable layovers in rural cabins until the smugglers had extracted every possible bit of cash from them. “We waited a long time in the hut before we realized we were being held for more money,” recalled Abraham Cahan, who later went on to edit New York’s most widely read Yiddish newspaper. “Having paid, we moved on. We made a strange group going across fields and meadows in the night, halted suddenly every few minutes by the tall peasant holding up his finger and pausing to listen for God-knows-what disaster.”⁶¹

Having made it across the border, some Jewish immigrants would regroup and decompress in towns such as Brody in Austria-Hungary (now western Ukraine), where they might receive advice from the Jewish community about the best way to proceed to a port city. Others, like Mary Antin, did not dare tarry and instead pressed immediately onward.

 

In a great lonely field opposite a solitary wooden house within a large yard, our train pulled up at last, and a conductor . . . hurried us into the one large room . . . Here a great many men and women, dressed in white, received us . . . This was another scene of bewildering confusion, parents losing their children, and little ones crying; baggage being thrown together in one corner of the yard, heedless of contents, which suffered in consequence; those white-clad Germans shouting commands always accompanied with “Quick! Quick!”; the confused passengers obeying all orders like meek children, only questioning now and then what was going to be done with them . . . A man came to inspect us, as if to ascertain our full value; strange looking people driving us about like dumb animals, helpless and unresisting; children we could not see, crying in a way that suggested terrible things; ourselves driven into a little room where a great kettle was boiling on a little stove; our clothes taken off, our bodies rubbed with a slippery substance that might be any bad thing; a shower of warm water let down on us without warning; again driven to another little room where we sit, wrapped in woollen blankets till . . . we . . . hear the women’s orders to dress ourselves . . . “Quick, quick, or you’ll miss the train!” Oh, so we really won’t be murdered! . . . Thank God!

 

Some immigrants would have been warned by the America letters from those who had made the journey before them to expect this delousing by the German railway officials. For others it would have been a sudden, bewildering shock.⁶²

At this point, most of these east European Jews boarded trains heading for Vienna, Frankfurt, or Berlin, where they would transfer to yet another train, this time headed for the port of Hamburg or Bremen, though some sailed via Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Antwerp, or even Trieste or Fiume. Those with the least money might take a ship to England so that they could sail from Liverpool, where the transatlantic fare was about 25 percent cheaper. Froim Leib Anbinder was one of the Jews who trekked there to board his vessel and save a few precious dollars. Italians initially would have sailed to America almost exclusively from just two ports, Genoa and Naples. Only in the years immediately before World War I did ships begin to carry immigrants regularly from Palermo to New York as well.⁶³

The array of bewildering and frightening experiences did not end once the immigrants arrived at the port. In the 1880s and early 1890s these would have been experiences very similar to those faced by the Irish immigrants in Liverpool fifty years earlier. In Naples and Bremen alike, “porters” who promised to carry luggage ran off with it instead; agents peddled tickets with fares too low to be true, because they were not real tickets at all, or they were the wrong tickets; quayside boardinghouse keepers tried to fleece the immigrants of what little money they had left.

Beginning in 1892, when Ellis Island opened and the immigrants faced a more rigorous medical inspection upon arrival, a whole new array of traps were set at the European ports of departure. Self-described dentists made the rounds of immigrant boardinghouses, insisting that if an aching tooth was not removed before departure, it would surely cause the immigrant to be rejected at Ellis Island. Others peddled smallpox vaccination certificates to those who could be fooled into believing that such a document would relieve them of the requirement either to show a welt on the arm as proof of vaccination or to be vaccinated on board the ship prior to arrival in New York. A guidebook for Italian emigrants succinctly summed up the situation by giving travelers the following advice: never, ever trust anyone who approached them or showed the least interest in them, no matter what story they might tell, offer they might make, or product they might sell.⁶⁴

The American Immigration Act of 1891, part of the movement for the more thorough examination of arriving immigrants that led to the creation of the Ellis Island immigration station, required steamship companies to pay for the feeding and transportation home of any immigrant turned away by inspectors. The Immigration Act of 1907 went further, and made the shipping companies liable to a stiff fine for each rejected immigrant. As immigration skyrocketed and the potential liability of the steamship companies multiplied, the shipping lines began instituting their own medical inspections to weed out those who might be turned back at Ellis Island. First, the German shippers got German railway companies to inspect and disinfect Jews as they crossed into Germany from Russia, Poland, or Austria-Hungary. (These were the white-robed Germans who deloused Mary Antin immediately before she first boarded a German train.) To further prevent sick passengers from sailing for America, the German steamship companies started requiring that steerage passengers undergo a two-week quarantine to make sure they would not spread or contract any ailments during the sea voyage. Italy, fearing that its own citizens might become stigmatized if they were rejected at Ellis Island more often than others, introduced its own state-run health inspections in 1901. Italian emigration officials asked the emigrants headed for the United States the same questions they would face at Ellis Island and advised them to alter their responses if they gave ones that were likely to cause problems. On top of all this, Congress directed American consuls to initiate their own inspections of emigrants to insure that those likely to be rejected at Ellis Island never made it that far. As a result of such examinations, 4 percent of those attempting to emigrate from the port of Naples to the United States were turned back in 1907, and 5.5 percent were turned away in Bremen that same year.⁶⁵

 

Once the immigrants passed through that gauntlet of examinations and made it on board their ship, all but the most well-to-do were ushered down into the bowels of the vessel to the steerage compartments. In some ways, steerage in the early twentieth century was a far cry from steerage during the age of sail. Floors and bunks were now made of metal instead of hard-to-clean wood. There were toilets and sinks with running water, luxurious conveniences beyond the wildest dreams of the famine Irish. There was even electric lighting, though not much of it.

Yet the essence of steerage—the crowding, the indignities, and above all the pandemonium—had not changed at all. “Steerage was a horror; to this day I can feel the smell, the nausea, the crowding,” recalled one Jewish immigrant. “We were huddled together in the steerage literally like cattle,” recounted another. Congressional investigators agreed that despite decades of reform efforts, steerage was still “disgusting and demoralizing,” its inhabitants overwhelmed by “filth and stench.” In order to learn about conditions firsthand, a congressional commission sent Anna Herkner to cross the Atlantic in disguise. “During these twelve days in the steerage,” she testified, “I lived in a disorder and in surroundings that offended every sense . . . Everything was dirty, sticky, and disagreeable to the touch. Every impression was offensive.” There might be toilets, but they were “filthy” and no one could figure out how to use them, and as a result, human waste was everywhere, though it did not wash around the feet of the passengers in the bunkrooms the way it had in the famine era.⁶⁶

Seasickness was one of the most vivid memories of steerage passengers in the early twentieth century. “Nine days on the boat . . . Nine days I was sick. Nine days I don’t eat nothing,” recounted Rosa Vartone, who moved to New York from Calabria in 1928. “Hundreds of people had vomiting fits, throwing up even their mother’s milk,” a Jewish immigrant likewise recalled. “As all were crossing the ocean for the first time, they thought their end had come. The confusion of cries became unbearable . . . I wanted to escape from that inferno, but no sooner had I thrust my head forward from the lower bunk I lay on than some one above me vomited straight upon my head. I wiped the vomit away, dragged myself onto the deck, leaned against the railing and vomited my share into the sea, then lay down half-dead upon the deck.”⁶⁷

One aspect of steerage that is rarely commented upon in immigrant recollections from this era is how particularly offensive it was for women. From the moment they got up in the morning to the moment they went to bed at night, women were pawed, groped, and propositioned, primarily by the ship’s crew, but also by male passengers. “The atmosphere was one of general lawlessness and total disrespect for women,” reported Herkner. Sailors addressed the female steerage passengers in the most “revolting, . . . vile . . . indecent” language imaginable. “Not one young woman in the steerage escaped attack,” Herkner testified. “The screams of the women defending themselves” below decks rent the air all day and half the night.⁶⁸

For Jews, another part of the steerage experience that was particularly difficult was the lack of food. Unlike in the famine era, when ship passengers had to provide almost all their own sustenance, food was relatively plentiful on the ocean liners of the twentieth century, even in steerage. But women traveling alone often found that other greedy passengers grabbed all the food before they could get any. Also, the food that was offered wasn’t kosher, and for the majority of the Jewish passengers this was a problem. “We could not eat the food of the ship, since it was not kosher,” recalled one immigrant from Minsk who traveled to America with his mother and sister. “We only asked for hot water into which my mother used to put a little brandy and sugar to give it a taste” and supplemented it with bread his mother had brought with her. But their voyage was an unusually long one (two weeks), and when their bread began to run out, they decided they must ask the steward for some of the ship’s bread. “But the kind he gave us was unbearably soggy,” so they went hungry until they reached New York. Many other Jewish immigrants remembered grappling with this same dilemma. Even those who were willing to eat the ship’s food found it “miserable.”⁶⁹

A final aspect of the voyage that most immigrants would recall, even dec­ades later, was “the much-dreaded vaccination muster. Many and loud were the objections raised to the enactment of this law,” wrote one of the numerous journalists who crossed the ocean in steerage in these years in order to provide a firsthand account. When the occupants of “No. 1 steerage lined up with bared arms for the doctor’s inspection, a more sullen lot of men I never saw. Those who had no marks, or whose marks were not sufficiently distinct, were vaccinated again. One man, an Irishman, made a stir by refusing to be operated upon, and insisting that the scar of a knife stab was a vaccination mark. When told that he could not enter America as he was, he submitted to the process.” Authorities eventually required emigrants to receive their vaccinations before boarding their transatlantic vessels.⁷⁰

Steerage conditions gradually improved in the first decades of the twentieth century. The same Italian law of 1901 that mandated the inspection of emigrants also required that more and better food be served aboard ship. Furthermore, many vessels built after 1900 were outfitted with the “new steerage,” a vastly improved arrangement for the shipboard housing of immigrants in which even those paying the lowest fare slept in rooms that held no more than eight berths (accurately depicted in Leonardo DiCaprio’s small steerage room in Titanic) rather than in cavernous spaces accommodating one hundred or more passengers. Those lucky enough to travel in the new steerage rarely had the usual complaints, other than the ever-present seasickness. But for every ship that could boast the new steerage, there were dozens more that continued to ply the Atlantic offering only the older variety. Ships making the voyage from Italy to the United States rarely provided the updated steerage accommodations.⁷¹

The part of the voyage that immigrants seemed to remember most vividly, to judge from how frequently it was referred to in interviews and memoirs, was the sight of the Statue of Liberty as they entered New York Harbor. “The Statue of Liberty rising out of the ocean so free and majestic, thrilled me! An entrance never to be forgotten,” wrote a Danish milliner, Anna Walther, of her arrival in New York. Goldie Stone, a Russian Jew, called her sighting of the Statue of Liberty from the deck of her ship “a thrill, somehow different from any other I have ever known, or hope to know.” Larry Edelman, who arrived from Poland at age ten, agreed: “That was the biggest thrill, to see that statue there.” To him it represented “freedom from want.” Lilly Daché, the French-born hatmaker and designer, remembered that even though the statue was “all shadowy and mysterious in the fog,” she felt sure as she gazed upon its face that it was conveying “a special promise for me.”⁷²

It is hard to know whether these reactions resulted from the symbolic meaning the statue had for the immigrants or merely the fact that seeing it meant that they had safely completed their journey to America. Slovenian immigrant Louis Adamic, for example, recalled the “garlicky crowd on the steerage deck . . . pushing toward the rails, straining and stretching to catch a glimpse of the new country, of the city; lifting their children, even their infants, to give them a view of the Statue of Liberty; women weeping for joy, men falling on their knees in thanksgiving, and children screaming, wailing, dancing.” Given that immigrants arriving in New York before the statue existed recalled similar scenes of shipboard rejoicing as they entered New York Harbor, no doubt much of the outpouring of emotion felt at this moment was not a reaction to the sight of the statue.⁷³

Yet for many immigrants in this era, the Statue of Liberty itself clearly held profound meaning, and symbolized the very reasons why they had chosen to risk so much, leave behind everything they had ever known, and make the perilous journey to America. Almost fifty years later, Emma Goldman could vividly recall the day when she and her half sister, “our eyes filled with tears,” entered New York Harbor. “Everybody was on deck. Helena and I stood pressed to each other, enraptured by the sight of the harbour and the Statue of Liberty suddenly emerging from the mist. Ah, there she was, the symbol of hope, of freedom, of opportunity! She held her torch high to light the way to the free country, the asylum for the oppressed of all lands. We, too, Helena and I, would find a place in the generous heart of America.”⁷⁴

The “generous heart of America” welcomed more than 17 million immigrants to the United States from the day the Statue of Liberty was dedicated in 1886 to the beginning of World War I, twenty-eight years later—a movement of people without precedent in human history. And for nearly all of them, the term “liberty” perfectly encapsulated the reasons they had come to America. Liberty from hunger, liberty from fear, liberty from violence, liberty to pursue any occupation, liberty to live where they chose, and political liberty—these were the motives that had driven this extraordinary mass of humanity to the United States.

While newcomers immediately recognized the relationship between the message conveyed by the Statue of Liberty and their own immigration experiences, it took native-born Americans nearly twenty years to acknowledge the connection. They did so in 1903, when they placed a bronze tablet just inside the entrance to the statue’s pedestal bearing Emma Lazarus’s transcendent sonnet. The poem’s sentiments have spoken to millions of aspiring immigrants ever since.⁷⁵