20

Refuge

THE IMPACT OF IMMIGRATION RESTRICTION on New York City was profound. “The one great element that has changed the east side has been the stoppage of immigration,” wrote William Feigenbaum, a socialist who had once represented the Lower East Side in the state legislature, in the Times in 1927. “Ceaseless immigration,” he said, was what gave the district “its character.” But East Broadway, which once had “swarmed with large families,” was now “a wilderness of warehouses, fur shops and stores . . . Teeming streets are being depopulated, life is leaving the once vivid neighborhood, and old men and women very often have all the room for themselves that not so long ago the elders had to share with countless children.” A few years later, the city’s leading Italian-language daily, Il Progresso Italo-Americano, came to a similar conclusion concerning Manhattan’s Italian immigrant neighborhoods. “Many apartment houses are vacant,” the paper reported, “while in 1920 one could not find a room here for an arm and a leg.”

Most of the depopulation of these enclaves resulted from immigrants moving to other boroughs rather than from a decrease in the city’s overall immigrant population. Many Jews, now able to afford better Brooklyn neighborhoods than Brownsville and East New York, were moving to Bensonhurst, Coney Island, and Flatbush, noted Feigenbaum, “or even to Queens.” By 1932, Jews (not all of them immigrants) constituted a majority of the inhabitants in Brownsville, Coney Island, East Flatbush, Far Rockaway, Kensington, Midwood, and Sea Gate in Brooklyn; Hunts Point, Morrisania, Highbridge, and Fordham Heights in the Bronx; and the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Italian Americans (again, not all immigrants) not only dominated East Harlem and the area now known as SoHo but also made up the majority of the population in parts of the Bath Beach, Bedford-Stuyvesant, Bensonhurst, Borough Park, Bushwick, Dyker Heights, Fort Greene, Gravesend, and Red Hook neighborhoods of Brooklyn, and the Baychester, Belmont, Gun Hill Road, and Williamsbridge sections of the Bronx. Previously, immigrants moving out of Manhattan for the backyard gardens and roomier apartments of the outer boroughs had been replaced by thousands of new arrivals fresh from Ellis Island. Now, the incoming greenhorns numbered only in the hundreds, and Manhattan’s Jewish and Italian districts were becoming far less crowded.¹

There were still some Italian and eastern European immigrants settling in the once congested neighborhoods. Several thousand newcomers could enter the country legally each year, and many of them moved in with friends, relatives, or landsmen in New York City. But far outnumbering these legal newcomers were the tens of thousands who immigrated illegally after the discriminatory quotas first took effect in 1921. “Big Ring Smuggles Aliens and Liquor,” shouted a page-one headline in the Times in 1922, noting that smugglers who had begun sneaking alcohol into the United States after the beginning of Prohibition in 1919 used the same land, sea, and even air routes to bring in illegal immigrants once the quota law took effect.

Experts disagreed about the scope of illegal immigration. Already by 1922, the commissioner general of immigration conceded that it had reached “alarming proportions.” The Department of Labor, under whose aegis immigration fell, estimated that in 1927 there were 1 million illegal immigrants living in the United States, but the Times put the true figure at 2 million. Between 100,000 and 300,000 new undocumented aliens were said to be arriving annually. “The bootlegging of aliens,” noted Commissioner General of Immigration Harry Hull in 1927, “has grown to be an industry second in importance only to the bootlegging of liquor.”²

Then as now, the cheapest and easiest way to move illegally to the United States was to obtain a legitimate tourist or student visa and remain in the country when it expired. Many illegal immigrants from northern and western Europe employed this tactic, but few ragged refugees from eastern Europe or impoverished Italians from Calabria or Sicily could succeed at this ruse. Nonetheless, tens of thousands of undocumented aliens entered the United States in this manner in the 1920s. New York State alone was said to be home to eighty thousand of these visa overstayers.

The most expensive way to enter the United States illegally, in contrast, was with a forged visa. While officials at each American consulate knew how many visas they could issue each year, inspectors at Ellis Island had no master list. As a result, a lucrative market developed for fake visas. They could be bought in Poland during the 1920s for $500. One could also buy a real visa. The American vice consul in Warsaw sold a stack of blank visas to a gang of immigrant smugglers for $1,200, which the crooks quickly resold at a hefty profit. When the American official refused to supply the gang with more, they blackmailed him by threatening to expose the initial sale.

Smugglers developed another means of getting legitimate visas. They solicited residents of countries with large quotas such as Germany to obtain real visas, which the gangs then purchased and resold. Germans with Jewish-sounding names were especially sought after for this scam. The authorities eventually caught on and began to question immigrants more carefully at Ellis Island to be sure they were actually the people named on their visas. Despite coaching from the visa sellers, many of these fraudulent immigrants were detected and sent back to Europe.

Most immigrants could not afford forged entry documents. They preferred to legally enter a country bordering on the United States and then somehow complete the journey illicitly. The majority of British and eastern European Jews who sought to enter the United States in this manner did so through Canada. For anywhere from $25 to $100, aspiring immigrants could find a boatman willing to transport them from Windsor, Ontario, across the Detroit River to Michigan in a skiff. Taxi drivers from Montreal all the way to Vancouver also did a thriving side business smuggling immigrants across the border. They openly solicited customers at the docks where immigrants landed. Taxicab drivers in Winnipeg did the same at the city’s main train station.³

One fairly typical eastern European Jew who illicitly crossed the Canadian border on her way to New York was Minnie Yezernitzsky. Born in 1912 in the small town of Ruzhany in modern-day Belarus, Minnie later recalled that every young Jew in town sought to emigrate upon finishing high school. Her older sisters had gone directly to New York, but with the restrictions put in place in 1921 and 1924, Minnie and her high school classmates could not legally join them. Some Ruzhany emigrants decided to try Palestine; one was future Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Shamir, three years Minnie’s junior. Others went to Argentina, and still others to Cuba. But hoping to be as close to her sisters as possible, Minnie decided to go to Canada, and eventually moved in with a cousin in Montreal. “I was eighteen,” she later recalled, “and full of life.”

Minnie’s cousin took her to a dress factory where the boss asked ominously if she would “do anything to earn a few dollars.” Minnie was horrified to have to work on the Sabbath, but she adjusted and eventually became an expert sewing machine operator. Paid by the piece, she was soon earning $15 to $17 a week. Minnie “dressed quite well,” she recalled, had a boyfriend, went dancing on Saturday nights, and had lots of friends who came from Ruzhany or its environs. “Still,” she said, “I was drawn to be with my sisters.” Learning this, one of her brothers-in-law in New York insisted that Minnie “sneak across the border to America.” Her New York relatives would pay whatever it cost.

For $200 (the equivalent of about $3,000 today), a man agreed to smuggle Minnie into the country and arrange her transportation to New York. Minnie could not bring anything with her, as it might arouse suspicion should they be stopped, but her cousin agreed to ship her clothes and other possessions to her. One morning, she recounted, “the man led me to the border, and there, next to a forest, stood a car with New York license plates and two Christian men.” After waiting in the woods for what seemed like an eternity, they set off for New York. Two policemen stopped them along the way, but after checking the driver’s license and questioning them briefly, they allowed Minnie and her escorts to proceed. Finally, at 6:00 a.m., they reached Brooklyn. When her sister opened her apartment door, Minnie “burst out crying hysterically,” she said, “seeing my eldest sister whom I did not remember at all except from pictures.”⁴

The cheapest way to cross the border from Canada illicitly was by ferry. With fifteen thousand men and women taking ferries daily from Windsor to their workplaces in Detroit’s factories, immigration inspectors could not possibly stop and interrogate each passenger. Border patrolmen scanned the crowds rushing down the gangplanks, looking for men and women who seemed out of place. But as the Times noted in 1927, “an American suit of clothes and hair-cut to match” made it virtually impossible to detect the illegal immigrants among the throng of morning commuters.⁵

Unlike those from northern and eastern Europe, citizens of Mediterranean countries who wanted to enter the United States illegally did so primarily via Cuba. These were typically Italians, but large numbers from Greece and Syria (which then comprised modern-day Lebanon as well as Syria) also attempted to enter the United States illicitly. As was the case in Canada, smugglers in Havana brazenly advertised their services and fees. These immigrants might pay $100 to be transported to the vicinity of the Florida Keys, the Times reported, “and there may be another $50 for the sponge fisherman who relays the cargo to shore.”

If smugglers landed too many immigrants in Florida at once, they might arouse suspicion. When several dozen disoriented Italians, Greeks, and Syrians suddenly began wandering around sleepy Fort Myers in the summer of 1927, for example, locals notified the police, who quickly arrested the gate-crashers. Other smugglers took their human cargo to Bimini, a Bahamian island fifty miles east of Miami, where the immigrants secured passage to Florida’s Atlantic coastline. According to the Times, it was not uncommon for smugglers to abandon their passengers on a deserted island or even throw them overboard to avoid being caught red-handed if they feared the authorities were about to intercept them.

Another popular method for sneaking immigrants into the United States from Cuba was to bribe sailors to transport them on commercial passenger ships. Smugglers might take the would-be immigrants to Nassau, where the criminals would use a combination of cash and liquor (which the crewmen could sell for a hefty profit at an American port) to entice the seamen to take charge of some illegal immigrants. One smuggler told an undercover American investigator that when these ships docked in Miami or New York, “many times the stowaways are marched off right under [the immigration officer’s] very nose by being dressed like dock workers, stewards, baggage handlers, engine-room crew, sailors,” and so forth.⁶

With the press harping incessantly on the problem of illegal immigration after the National Origins Act went into effect in 1924, the federal government tried to step up both prevention and prosecution. The task was truly daunting. When the National Origins Act became law, the United States Border Patrol had only 472 agents to guard more than 7,500 miles of border with Canada and Mexico and 5,000 miles of coastline. (Today there are more than twenty thousand Border Patrol officers.) By 1926, the Border Patrol had increased its force to 632, still wholly inadequate, the commissioner general of immigration admitted, but the parsimonious Republican congresses of the twenties refused to appropriate enough money to vastly increase the Border Patrol’s size. In 1932 there were still fewer than one thousand officers guarding the borders. Nonetheless, the apprehension of illegal immigrants in the United States rose from just a few thousand in the fiscal year ending June 30, 1925, to twelve thousand two years later and eighteen thousand the year after that. Arrests soon leveled off at about twenty thousand per year.⁷

While these figures may seem impressive, authorities lacked both the manpower and the will to organize and carry out the kinds of proactive raids on the residences and workplaces of suspected illegal immigrants that we associate with immigration enforcement today. Apart from ferry terminal and border station arrests, most immigrants who were caught after successfully crossing the border or coming ashore were apprehended as a result of sheer luck rather than an effective enforcement strategy.

Take, for example, the case that received the most publicity in the early years of restriction. On Sunday July 13, 1924, Anthony Camardo of Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn, steered his forty-two-foot sloop, the Bessie B., toward the docks at Rockaway Point, the western tip of a peninsula that juts into lower New York Bay about a half mile southeast of Brooklyn’s south shore. The officers on a nearby police launch, tasked with intercepting rumrunners landing cargoes of illicit booze, found it strange that Camardo had the Bessie B.’s hatches shut tight despite the hot summer weather. They decided to take a closer look. As the policemen boarded the sloop, the half-dozen taxis inexplicably waiting by the piers suddenly sped away. The officers descended into the hold and pulled back a tarp, expecting to uncover cases of liquor. Instead, they found thirty-one frightened and bewildered Italian illegal immigrants.

It turned out that while Camardo was fishing that afternoon, smugglers in a rowboat had approached the Bessie B. and offered the Brooklynite $75 if he would motor over to a three-masted schooner farther out in the bay, hide its thirty-one passengers in his sloop, and land them at Rockaway Point, where they would be picked up by a fleet of taxis. The schooner had carried the immigrants all the way from Palermo in a voyage that had taken nearly four weeks.

At the court hearing, the port’s commissioner of immigration, Henry Curran, urged the judge to sentence the immigrants to twenty years’ hard labor before they were deported, to deter others from sneaking into the country. But the magistrate ruled that he had no power to assess any punishment other than deportation. No wonder so many people, from all over the world, were willing to pay smugglers for the chance to start a new life in New York.⁸

Most cases of illegal immigration came to the attention of the authorities in New York only because other New Yorkers informed on them. More often than not, these tips arrived at Curran’s office on Ellis Island as anonymous letters. “There is an alien who ran off with my wife last week,” began one missive reprinted in the Times. “They are living at _______. I don’t want my wife back but the alien is here without any right.” Another letter writer felt compelled to report an illegal immigrant because the foreigner had a job while the informant was unemployed, and “I need the job.” In one unusual case, a mother in Italy informed on her own child. “My son is in New York—he sneaked in. Please send him back because I need him to support me.”⁹

Minnie Yezernitzsky was one of the illegal immigrants caught as a result of an informant’s tip. Upon her arrival in New York from Montreal, she found work in a Manhattan dress factory along Sixth Avenue in the Garment District, where clothing manufacturers had begun moving their operations in Manhattan during the 1920s. She became an activist within the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union, something her boss had to tolerate both because it was a union shop and because she was one of his best dressmakers. Though Minnie was voluble and outgoing, in the spring of 1936 she fell in love with Chaim Kusnetz, a quiet, devout metalworker who wooed her by writing Yiddish poems about his devotion to her. A year later, by which point Minnie had been living in New York for four or five years, her boss asked her and all his other employees for their full names and addresses as part of the registration process for the new Social Security system. When Minnie asked her boss not to submit her name, he realized she was in the country illegally; he then gleefully reported her to the authorities. A few days later, a detective appeared at Minnie’s workplace, arrested her, and took her to Ellis Island, where illegal immigrants were detained pending deportation. “They asked me questions, took fingerprints and photographs—just as they would of a real criminal,” she recalled. “I had no food at all and didn’t sleep all night. I could not stop crying.”

The next day Minnie was released on $500 bond put up by her brother-in-law. He hired a lawyer, who told Minnie that the only way she could avoid deportation was to marry Chaim, who had become an American citizen. She did so a few days later, just before her hearing at Ellis Island. There, she had to use her correspondence with Chaim—even the poems—to prove that her marriage was not a sham. When questioned about how she had entered the United States, she followed the instructions of her attorney and testified untruthfully that she did not know until she was arrested at her workplace that she had entered the United States illegally. Three months later, Minnie had to return to Canada, pick up a visa, and answer hours of questions about her marriage, just as if she had never been in the United States. But by virtue of her marriage and authorized reentry into the country, she became a legal immigrant.¹⁰

Most “smuggled aliens” (the term then used for illegal immigrants) could not count on having a citizen ready to marry them. As a result, a market developed in New York for forged documents that might convince the authorities that an illegal immigrant had actually entered the country lawfully. One criminal ring peddling such papers extended its reach into federal offices in Washington and at Ellis Island. Its members bribed employees at the New York facility to go into the island’s old ledger books and add the names of illegal immigrants to archived ship manifests so that the immigrants, if detained, could refer the authorities to the doctored manifests to “prove” that they had entered the country legally. Bozo Galantich, for example, who had crossed over from Canada by shinnying across the girders of the Niagara Falls Bridge in 1927, paid to have an Ellis Island employee add his name to the manifest of a ship that arrived in New York in 1931. A former Brooklyn congressman, Michael J. Hogan, was convicted in 1935 of soliciting $300 bribes from three different Italian illegal immigrants. In return for the payments, he promised to use his connections in Washington to obtain documents indicating that they had entered the United States lawfully. Prosecutors alleged in 1935 that a single New York ring specializing in forging evidence of lawful admission for illegal immigrants had taken in more than $1 million in its ten years of operation.¹¹

Those who objected to the presence of so many smuggled aliens demanded that Congress require all non-citizens to register with the government. Immigrants would have to come forward, prove their legal status, and receive an identification card with their photo and fingerprints, which they would be required to present whenever their right to be in the country was questioned. As early as 1924, the Herald Tribune had argued that this was the only way to ferret out the thousands of illegal immigrants pouring into the United States each year. New York congressmen such as Fiorello La Guardia, Emanuel Celler, and Samuel Dickstein, who represented heavily immigrant constituencies, objected to the registry idea and other immigrant identification proposals. Fingerprinting would subject immigrants to unnecessary humiliation, they claimed, because criminals were the only other Americans who were routinely fingerprinted. Furthermore, such programs would inevitably lead to discrimination, the congressmen argued, since law enforcement officials in New York would be much more likely to ask Jews and Italians for proof of legal status than other city residents.¹²

 

Americans put so much effort into ferreting out Jewish and Italian illegal immigrants in large part because they did not consider them capable of being “true Americans.” Some Jewish and Italian Americans thought they could prove that they were true Americans by embracing the most American of all pastimes: baseball. Aficionados of the game prided themselves on the idea that baseball was a genuine meritocracy. “The Mick, the Sheeny, the Wop, the Dutch, and the Chink, the Cuban, the Indian, the Jap or the so-called Anglo-Saxon—his nationality is never a matter of moment if he can pitch, or hit, or field,” the Sporting News declared in 1923.¹³

Even before the arrival of many Italian and Jewish immigrants to New York, baseball managers there considered the ethnicity of their players in formulating game plans. “You want two or three quick-thinking sons of Celt to keep the Germans and others moving,” said New York Giants manager Bill Joyce in 1896. “Now you take a German, you can tell him what to do and he will do it. Take an Irishman and tell him what to do, and he is liable to give you an argument. He has his own ideas. So I have figured it out this way. Get an Irishman to do the scheming. Let him tell the Germans what to do and then you will have a great combination.”¹⁴

In the 1920s, as Americans became determined to stanch the flow of Jews and Italians into the country, baseball team owners became equally determined to increase attendance by adding Jews and Italians to their rosters. The Brooklyn Robins—later renamed the Dodgers—were the first team to sign a gifted Jewish player when they added Moe Berg to their lineup in 1923. The New York–born son of Jewish immigrants from Ukraine, Berg spent only one season in Brooklyn, but he had a fifteen-year major league career before becoming a spy for the Office of Strategic Services during World War II. A student at Princeton prior to signing with Brooklyn, the multilingual Berg once skipped spring training and the first month of the regular season to finish the courses he had begun that winter at the Sorbonne. Another year, he refused to report to his team until he completed his final exams at Columbia Law School. Among his other idiosyncrasies was his obsessive refusal to let anyone so much as touch one of the ten newspapers he bought each day until he had read every word. Casey Stengel, who saw quite a few ballplayers in his five decades in the game, called Berg “the strangest man ever to play baseball.”¹⁵

The Dodgers’ Manhattan rivals, the Giants, became better known for their Jewish players. “The stories of [Giants manager] John McGraw’s efforts to develop a Jewish star are legion,” wrote the editors of The American Hebrew in 1937. In 1923, the same year Berg made his debut in Brooklyn, McGraw signed Mose Solomon. At the press conference announcing Solomon’s acquisition, McGraw made no effort to conceal the reason for elevating him directly from a Class C minor league team in Hutchinson, Kansas, to the major leagues. “We appreciate that many of the fans in New York are Jews,” he told the reporters, “and we have been trying to land a prospect of Jewish blood.” Solomon ultimately played in just two games during his season as a Giant.¹⁶

A few years later, on opening day 1928, McGraw sent a relative unknown named Andy Cohen onto the field to play second base. Cohen delivered a three-hit, two-run, two-RBI performance which so impressed fans that they stormed the field to carry him on their shoulders after the final out was recorded. It was, McGraw said, “the greatest ovation . . . given any player in all my life.” A Times profile called Cohen “The Baseball Star Whose Name Is an Asset.” During the offseason, Cohen parlayed his fame into a vaudeville act, performing Jewish and Irish ethnic humor with Giants teammate Shanty Hogan.¹⁷

The Yankees became known for their Italian ballplayers. The Bronx Bombers were also the only New York team whose “ethnic” players were true baseball stars. In 1925 the team paid $50,000 for the rights to a young San Franciscan named Tony Lazzeri, son of Italian immigrants, who had attracted national attention by hitting sixty home runs for the Salt Lake City Bees. Even the signing of unknown sandlot players with virtually no chance of ever making the majors made headlines in the 1920s if they were Italian Americans. The number of Italian Americans in baseball soon grew rapidly. “The Irish are good ball players with their alertness and avidity of mind, but they are being challenged right under their noses,” observed the Sporting News in 1931. “The Italians have found baseball and they like it.”¹⁸

Of course, it was another child of Italian immigrants, Joe DiMaggio, who became the Yankees’ most famous Italian American ballplayer. Yet when DiMaggio made his Yankees debut in 1936, his Italian heritage was rarely mentioned in the press, an indication of how far New York’s major immigrant groups had come in gaining acceptance (in baseball, at least) over the dozen years since the passage of the National Origins Act in 1924.¹⁹

 

The restrictions imposed on some groups by the 1924 statute gave other New Yorkers new opportunities. The city’s African American population, for example, grew dramatically during and after World War I as hundreds of thousands of southern blacks moved to New York, Chicago, and other northern cities, both to escape violence and discrimination in the South and to fill a labor shortage caused by the war. As a result of this “Great Migration,” the city’s African American population increased 60 percent from 1910 to 1920 and 100 percent from 1920 to 1930, to a total of 328,000.

Many of these migrants were attracted to New York by the prospect of landing jobs that would have gone to immigrants before restriction. “Most Negroes who have got work in this city have been taken on largely because the white employer could not [g]et anybody else,” reported the Newark correspondent of the African American Chicago Defender in November 1924 of a phenomenon that was also taking place just across the Hudson in New York. “Forced to admit Negroes because of a Republican administration which closed the flood gates of European immigration, employers have now become accustomed to the former cotton picker and he is making his way in grand style.” African Americans were being offered “skilled work” and “other fairly responsible positions” they could not attain before, the Defender reported. Why? “Blood calls to blood. In most cases the white worker is the one chosen. The Democratic policy is to put foreigners on American jobs by permitting them to enter into the country in great numbers and gobble up the work. The Republican policy is to protect the American laborer, white and black.”²⁰

African Americans saw immigration restriction as a golden opportunity. “Our people are vitally interested in who gets the work in this country,” recognized the Defender, and “it has been their salvation in this city to find a federal government which held the foreigners off and gave him a chance. That was his only opportunity to make good.” The Great Migration might have been far smaller, and the racial composition of New York and other northern cities might today be far different, had it not been for the immigration restrictions of the 1920s.²¹

Harlem filled during the 1920s not only with native-born African Americans but with foreign-born people of color as well. By 1930, 55,000 Caribbean immigrants had settled in New York City (a figure that does not include Puerto Ricans, who by this point were American citizens). Barbados was the source of many of these newcomers, though others came from Jamaica, Trinidad and To bago, and other British possessions. They primarily entered the United States under the generous British immigration quota. Most of these foreign-born African Americans in this period lived in Harlem; they composed about 25 percent of that area’s black population in 1925 (and one in six black residents citywide). The Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood in Brooklyn contained the second-largest concentration of Caribbean immigrants in the city. As an African American scholar aptly put it in 1939, New York had become the “new world mecca of the negro peoples.”²²

Like their native-born Harlem neighbors, most Caribbean immigrants worked as laborers, janitors, busboys, elevator operators, cooks, and dishwashers. Caribbean women toiled primarily as domestic servants. These immigrant workers, however, became especially well known for refusing to display the subservience usually demanded of African Americans by white New Yorkers. West Indians were “notably lacking in the Southern Negro’s diplomacy” and made “lots of noise about their rights,” complained the Saturday Evening Post in 1925. The Pullman Railcar Company, a major employer of African Americans, had a policy of not hiring black immigrants precisely because of their refusal to meekly accept insults from passengers. “The outstanding contribution of West Indians to American Negro life,” wrote one of the newcomers in 1925, “is the insistent assertion of their manhood in an environment that demands too much servility and unprotesting acquiescence from men of African blood.”²³

The personification of this “New Negro” mindset was a New Yorker named Marcus Garvey. Garvey was a journalist from Jamaica who believed that Africans and their descendants in the Americas had become too dependent on whites as a result of the European colonization of the African continent. Through an organization he created in Jamaica, the United Negro Improvement Association, Garvey sought to rally blacks to return to Africa and retake their homeland from European colonizers so they could shape their own destinies, free from racism and white domination. To those who called this a pipe dream, Garvey replied that no army on earth could stop Africans and their descendants in other parts of the world—400 million people all told—if they devoted themselves to African liberation and self-determination. They should establish themselves “as a mighty race and nation, nevermore to be disrespected by men.” By the early 1920s, the UNIA had about seventy thousand dues-paying members (including thousands in New York), and there were hundreds of thousands more who sympathized with its goals. These fellow travelers might not want to return to Africa themselves, but they found Garvey’s notions of self-reliance and autonomy thrilling.

Many Americans saw Garvey’s movement as alarming, all the more so since it was led by an immigrant agitator. Federal authorities hoped to find some means of undermining his popularity, and in 1922 they indicted him for mail fraud for supposedly misrepresenting the prospects of the black-owned steamship company that he helped start. Found guilty, he began a five-year prison term in 1925 but was released and deported to Jamaica in 1927. Although the UNIA never recovered, Garvey profoundly influenced such future black nationalist leaders as Malcolm X and Louis Farrakhan.²⁴

There were many Italian immigrants in Harlem who wished that the Back to Africa movement would succeed because they often had to compete with African Americans for the same jobs, and central Harlem’s growing black population threatened to spill over into Italian-dominated East Harlem. Violent conflict between the groups actually predated the Great Migration. In 1903, striking Italian construction workers became enraged when employers recruited African Americans to replace them. “The niggers won’t stay here—we’ll scare them off,” declared one Italian American, and sure enough, a mob of men and women managed to drive the African Americans away.²⁵

African Americans were appalled that New Yorkers referred to them using the same hated slurs employed by white southerners. Even more galling was the fact that immigrants who spoke little English nonetheless knew and used the n-word. “One of the first epithets that many European immigrants learned when they got off the boat was the term ‘nigger,’” Ralph Ellison observed years later. “It made them feel instantly American.” Italian radicals who hoped to organize the entire American “proletariat,” regardless of race, into one big union lamented that to so many white Americans, including Italian immigrants, “race hatred is a national duty.”²⁶

These animosities bubbled to the surface more frequently during and after World War I, as the African American population of Harlem skyrocketed. A fight between African American and Italian American boys over a ball game escalated into an adult riot near the corner of Second Avenue and 126th Street in October 1916. Initially, the two sides threw bricks at each other, but they eventually began firing at each other with pistols, and two Italian Americans were wounded. The Times reported that “there had long been ill-feeling” between the two groups.²⁷

Even more tension developed between Italians and their other new East Harlem neighbors—recent arrivals from Puerto Rico. Puerto Ricans were not technically immigrants after 1898, when the United States annexed the island after taking it from Spain during the Spanish-American War. And very few Puerto Ricans initially took advantage of their new status as Americans to migrate to the United States. Only 1,500 lived in the continental United States in 1910, 554 of them in New York City. But the Puerto Rican–born population of the city multiplied over the next several decades—to 7,000 in 1920, 45,000 in 1930, and 61,000 in 1940. More than 80 percent of Puerto Ricans living in the continental United States that year resided in New York City.²⁸

Puerto Ricans came to New York for the same reasons that others immigrated to the city. Like the Irish in the nineteenth century, most Puerto Ricans were terribly poor, and because they were subjects of a foreign colonial power, the island’s residents believed that prospects for improving their economic status were dismal. Like Italian immigrants, Puerto Ricans often ventured to New York not expecting to stay there permanently. Bernardo Vega recalled in his memoirs that on the ship bringing him to New York, he and his fellow Puerto Rican passengers agreed that after a few years they would “return home with pots of money. Everyone’s mind was on that farm they’d be buying or the business they’d set up in town.” And like both the Irish and the Italians, many Puerto Ricans migrated to New York because they had heard that no one went hungry there. “I came to New York because the food situation was very bad in Puerto Rico and there was no work,” one migrant told a New York newspaper in 1947. “I don’t like it here but I hate it there. Here at least I can live.”²⁹

Others left Puerto Rico to avoid having to follow the dictates of overbearing parents. Homero Rosado of Ponce wanted a university education, but his father declared that only Rosado’s sisters could go to college; Homero must work to support the family. Determined to get a university degree, Rosado defied his father and in 1930, at age seventeen, he slipped away to San Juan, borrowed $25, and used the money to buy a one-way ticket on the weekly steamer to New York. Ten years later he had not yet made it to college and was working as a handyman. Elisa Baeza, as the eldest daughter among nine children, likewise chafed at her parents’ demand that she care for her younger siblings. At age seventeen, she accepted a cousin’s invitation to come live with her in New York.³⁰

Antonio Rivera Hernández also rebelled against parental dictates. When he was a boy, he later recalled, “we had no money,” and there were many mouths to feed. Rivera Hernández dreamed of being a lawyer, but his parents decided that he should become a teacher in rural Puerto Rico instead and sent him to get a degree in education. After a year he dropped out, and “to keep me from a life of decadence,” he explained, “my father gave me the passage to New York City.” There, Rivera Hernández got a job as a dental technician, later worked for the post office, and eventually became one of the first Puerto Rican insurance agents employed by the John Hancock Life Insurance Company.³¹

Such white-collar work was the exception rather than the rule for Puerto Rican New Yorkers, especially in the period before World War II. The typical Puerto Rican migrant worked as a day laborer on a construction site. Puerto Ricans also washed and pressed clothes in the city’s laundries; worked as porters at New York’s train stations, docks, bus terminals, and hotels; served as janitors in office buildings, as apartment building handymen (“supers” in New York parlance), and as short-order cooks and dishwashers. Puerto Rican women primarily found employment in the garment industry, working in sweatshops if they were single and as finishers or seamstresses at home if they were married. Other Puerto Rican women toiled as hotel maids, housekeepers, waitresses, salesclerks, and factory operatives. Studies of the city economy indicated that much of New York’s light industry would have left New York in the 1940s and 1950s had it not been for the influx of Puerto Ricans who took jobs being vacated by Jewish and Italian immigrants as they became more prosperous and moved to Brooklyn or the Bronx.³²

Violence often flared between the Puerto Ricans and their Harlem neighbors. “Relations among the different nationalities were fraught with tension,” recalled Vega years later. “Women would often clash while shopping, and at times the fights in the neighborhood bars would become serious.” Sometimes the quarrels involved rival neighborhood businesses. Jewish storekeepers in Harlem, for example, resented competition from the Puerto Ricans’ small corner groceries known as bodegas. “The newcomers have opened their own stores and patronize no others,” reported the Times. On July 28, 1926, Vega recounted, word spread to the Puerto Ricans trying to escape the summer heat in Central Park that “mobs armed with clubs had begun to attack Puerto Ricans with a fury.” Vega rushed back to El Barrio to find that “several stores owned by Puerto Ricans had been attacked. The sidewalks in front of the bodegas were covered with shattered glass, rice, beans, plantains, and tropical vegetables . . . Terror gripped El Barrio.” The attack “had left more than fifty people wounded, some critically.”³³

Puerto Ricans quickly demonstrated to their neighbors that they would not tolerate such treatment. A few days after the attack, hearing rumors that the perpetrators were thugs hired by Harlem’s Jewish shopkeepers, the leaders of the Puerto Rican community in Harlem called Carlos Tapia, who ran a Puerto Rican longshoreman’s boardinghouse in Red Hook, Brooklyn. Tapia brought thirty-five Puerto Rican stevedores—and probably some of the enforcers from his illegal “numbers” (private lottery) operation as well—to Harlem and, as he put it, “disrupted” business at the candy stores, tailor shops, delis, and other businesses run by those who supposedly had orchestrated the original violence. “We made sure the victims knew the reason for our attack.” No mass assault on the neighborhood’s bodegas ever took place again.³⁴

Eventually their neighbors acquiesced to Puerto Rican dominance of the territory bounded by Fifth Avenue on the west, Park Avenue (and later Third Avenue) on the east, 116th Street to the north, and 103rd Street to the south. “Our countrymen made it clear that we were in charge in that part of town,” noted Vega. Poet Jack Agüeros agreed that 103rd Street was where El Barrio ended and “America began.” An American-born child of Puerto Rican immigrants growing up in East Harlem in the late forties, Agüeros knew that crossing any of these boundaries was perilous. If “we decided to go swimming to Jefferson Park pool” on First Avenue, he wrote in 1971 for a collection called The Immigrant Experience: The Anguish of Becoming American, “we knew we risked a fight and a beating from the Italians. And when we went to La Milagrosa Church” on Seventh Avenue at 114th Street, which the Catholic archdiocese of New York designated in 1926 as the parish for the city’s Hispanic population, “we knew we risked a fight and a beating from the blacks.” If they ventured south of 103rd Street, they “risked dirty looks, disapproving looks, and questions from the police, like, ‘What are you doing in this neighborhood?’ and ‘Why don’t you kids go back where you belong?’”³⁵

Sometimes parents, ignorant of the dangers involved for teenagers in crossing these boundaries, inadvertently sent their sons into harm’s way. In his autobiography Down These Mean Streets, Piri Thomas (the New York–born son of a Puerto Rican mother and a Cuban-born father) recounted how, after his baby brother died, his parents moved the family “to Italian turf” on 114th Street east of Third Avenue. There he became the target of the neighborhood’s Italian bully Rocky, who called him a “dirty fuckin’ spic” and humiliated Piri at every turn. One day, Piri’s mother sent him “to the Italian market on 115th Street and First Avenue, deep in Italian country. Man, that was stompin’ territory. But I went.” Piri decided that if he encountered Rocky and his gang, he was going to fight back. Sure enough, as he was hurrying around the corner at First Avenue and 114th Street on his way home from the market, he and Rocky crossed paths. The ensuing fight landed Piri in the hospital for several days, but he won the respect of both Rocky and his own father, who told him he was now “un hombre.” Despite his injuries, Piri “felt proud as hell.” But the family moved back to El Barrio.³⁶

This drawing of ethnic boundary lines was not a specifically anti–Puerto Rican sentiment. Irish Americans had resented the influx of Italians into “their” neighborhoods in the late nineteenth century just as much as Italian Americans disdained the flow of Puerto Ricans into theirs. Puerto Ricans “are not like us,” one Italian East Harlemite explained to educator Leonard Covello in 1938. “We’re American. We eat meat at least three times a week. What do they eat? Beans! So they work for beans. That’s why we have trouble here.” Worse yet, “the Porto Ricans are all Negroes, lazy and never working,” one Italian immigrant complained to a sociologist. “The men spend all their time drinking and smoking and gambling.” Italian immigrants found Puerto Rican women just as objectionable. They “are awful dirty people, the women are all bad.” The Irish had said the exact same things about the Italians only a few years earlier.³⁷

Native-born Americans did not view the Puerto Ricans any more favorably than did the Italians. “Puerto Ricans were not born to be New Yorkers,” insisted the authors of a guidebook to the city. “They are mostly crude farmers, subject to congenital tropical diseases, physically unfitted for the northern climate, unskilled, uneducated, non-English-speaking, and almost impossible to assimilate and condition for healthful and useful existence in an active city of stone and steel.” Others saw little difference between the Puerto Ricans and the southern and eastern European immigrants. The “verminous, crime-ridden slum called East Harlem,” Time reported menacingly in 1946, overflows with “hordes of Italians, Puerto Ricans, Jews and Negroes.” The promiscuous mixing of races and ethnic groups in East Harlem particularly alarmed outside observers. “Negroes, whites and every intermediate shade of human being were living not only under the same roof but by the dozen in the same rooms,” exclaimed Scribner’s Commentator in 1940.³⁸

Other reporting on El Barrio echoed that on nineteenth-century Five Points. “Few have running water,” Scribner’s reporter Charles Hewitt observed of the neighborhood’s residents, “but most are not even conscious of that lack; for it is unknown in Porto Rico.” Sanitary conditions could also be alarming. “In an average home on 112th street,” Hewitt wrote, “I found nearly 80 persons using a single outdoor privy.” The tenements in Spanish Harlem became just as torridly hot in the summer as those in other parts of town. Like tenement dwellers in other sections of Manhattan a generation earlier, Puerto Ricans resorted to sleeping on fire escapes and rooftops or even in Central Park to escape the oppressive heat. Spanish Harlem was also said to contribute a disproportionate amount of disease, crime, and pauperism to the city. These “crowded and filthy conditions,” Hewitt insisted, “do not belong to this century.”³⁹

Such reports were more than nativist hyperbole. Vega agreed that over the course of the 1920s and 1930s, living conditions in Spanish Harlem “grew worse and worse. Once a building was occupied by our countrymen, no more maintenance was done on it. Garbage collection also became inadequate, and the whole neighborhood gave the impression of being totally neglected.” All the habitable spaces in the area’s tenements, including the “cellars and basements, were packed with people. Men, women, and children shared what little room they had with rats, cockroaches, and garbage.”⁴⁰

 

These problems—for Puerto Ricans and all of New York’s immigrants—grew far worse with the onset of the Great Depression that began after the stock market crash of October 1929. The severity of the Depression is incomprehensible today. The unemployment rate reached 16 percent in 1931, peaked at 25 percent in 1933, and was still at 20 percent in 1935. New York, with a relatively diversified economy and lacking much heavy industry, was not as hard-hit as cities like Pittsburgh, Detroit, and Cleveland. But the garment industry was devastated as Americans stopped buying new clothes, and another of New York’s biggest employment sectors, construction, also saw massive layoffs. Even in 1940, when the unemployment rate for New York’s garment workers had fallen to “only” 14 percent, 31 percent of New York’s construction workers still lacked jobs.⁴¹

The Great Depression also had a major impact on immigration. The number of immigrants entering the United States decreased dramatically, from about 150,000 (the quota limit) in 1929 to 62,000 in 1931 and only 12,000 in 1933. Immigration would not reach pre-Depression levels again until 1950. Furthermore, many immigrants left the United States to return to their native lands. While immigrants generally believed that the United States was the best place to strike it rich, many decided that it was far easier to be poor in their homeland, where housing and food were far less expensive than in New York. The Great Depression thus became the only period in American history when more immigrants left the country than entered it. From 1930 to 1934, about 20 percent of New York City’s Puerto Rican–born residents returned to the Caribbean. Even the “old” immigrants joined the exodus. Angela and Malachy McCourt were among the many Irish who decided to depart New York for their native land, in their case bringing their four American-born sons with them. The miserable poverty they suffered in Limerick was probably far worse than anything they would have experienced in New York, but the ordeal did at least inspire their eldest son, Frank, to write one of the most moving memoirs ever published by a New Yorker, or any American, Angela’s Ashes.⁴²

Immigration to the United States has always declined during economic downturns. It still does today. But the low level of immigration to the United States in the thirties—a rate not seen since the 1820s—was not merely the result of slackening demand. Hundreds of thousands of would-be immigrants applied for visas, only to have American consular officials turn down almost all of them on the grounds that immigrants without substantial savings were likely to become public charges because there were no jobs to be had. Even a letter from a relative in New York stating that the applicant would be welcome to work in the family business would not satisfy America’s gatekeepers. To be sure, immigration during the Depression would have fallen even without such onerous restrictions. But it was policy, not a lack of interest in coming to America, that drove immigration to such unprecedentedly low levels.⁴³

For immigrants already in New York when the stock market crashed, the Great Depression was devastating. Hundreds of thousands lost their jobs. Even worse, hundreds of thousands lost their savings, and not just because they drained their bank accounts while seeking new jobs. The savings institution most popular with the city’s Jewish immigrants, the Bank of the United States, with sixty branches and 400,000 customers, went out of business in December 1930. In an era before federal deposit insurance, these immigrants lost almost everything they had. Even decades later, Irving Howe remembered the “terrible day in the early thirties we heard that the Bank of the United States—Jewish-owned!—had failed, and I sat in our apartment listening to my aunt and grandmother wailing over the loss of the few hundred dollars they had scraped together.” While the closing of the Bank of the United States affected more New York immigrants than any other single failure, a number of the small banks that catered to New York’s Italian immigrants went bankrupt as well, wiping out the emergency funds many families had set aside for just such a crisis.⁴⁴

The government stepped in to ease the suffering where it could. In New York, neighborhood “relief” stations initially doled out this aid, which typically took the form of “tickets” New Yorkers could exchange at local businesses for food, fuel, or clothing. Immigrants—both citizens and aliens—qualified for this assistance, and it helped hundreds of thousands avoid hunger. But immigrants believed that they were not all being treated equally in the distribution of this aid. “We receive persistent and detailed complaints from destitute hispanos,” noted the city’s Spanish-language daily La Prensa, “who, after speaking to relief station officials, either don’t receive any aid at all or are given some indefinite date—which never actually arrives.” Relief options multiplied when Franklin Roosevelt became president in 1933 and instituted his New Deal. He pumped far more federal dollars into local home relief programs. But other immigrants of color who lived among the city’s native-born African Americans in Harlem just west of the Puerto Rican enclave also complained bitterly of being discriminated against in the dispersal of relief, resentment that helped fuel the Harlem riots of March 1935.⁴⁵

Many Americans today mistakenly believe that immigrants did not become eligible for welfare until the Great Society programs of the 1960s. In fact, New York’s immigrants qualified for and took government benefits many decades earlier. And even before these programs were initiated, “Boss” Tweed and his successors had assisted indigent immigrants with government jobs as well as food and fuel bought with taxpayer dollars diverted to Tammany Hall. Even the Wall Street Journal, never a fan of government handouts to the poor, has recognized that modern Asian and Latino immigrants do not get significantly more government assistance than did European immigrants seventy-five or one hundred years ago. “Folklore Says Great-Grandpa Didn’t Take Handouts,” read its descriptive subheading over a 1995 story acknowledging this fact. “Actually, He Took Plenty.” The newspapers of the period document European immigrant community leaders demanding their fair share of relief benefits and even the occasional Republican complaint that immigrants who had not become citizens were getting too much assistance.⁴⁶

The most important additional relief measure initiated by Roosevelt that helped immigrants was his massive public works program. In recent years, Americans have been told by their leaders that government must economize during economic downturns. Roosevelt, in contrast, took advantage of record low interest rates to carry out hundreds of big-ticket projects that Americans knew they needed but had not been able to muster the collective will to undertake. The infrastructure projects built in New York City with New Deal financing created the modern city we know today. They include the Triborough (now RFK) Bridge connecting the Bronx, Queens, and Manhattan (1933–1936); Manhattan’s Henry Hudson Parkway (1934–1937); the Lincoln Tunnel, connecting Manhattan to New Jersey (1934–1937); Manhattan’s Sixth Avenue subway line (1934–1940); the East River (now FDR) Drive (1935–1937); the Queens-Midtown Tunnel (1936–1940); La Guardia Airport (1937–1939); the Belt Parkway, the Cross Island Parkway, and Southern State Parkway on Long Island (1938–1940); as well as the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel (1940–1950). These projects employed tens of thousands of New Yorkers who would otherwise have remained unemployed. Another seventy thousand New Yorkers were put to work building or improving city parks. By the winter of 1936, the New Deal’s Works Progress Administration had hired 248,474 New Yorkers, ranging from skilled Irish sandhogs and welders to Italian stonemasons and laborers. Their work left New Yorkers with the modern transportation infrastructure that it still relies on now more than ever, given how difficult it is to get such massive projects built (or even adequately maintained) today. These positions paid far less than the same jobs in the private sector, in order to give workers an incentive to find non-government employment as the Depression eased. “Their standard of living is considerably lowered,” noted a government report, referring specifically to New York’s immigrants. Yet thanks to public works projects and other types of relief, “they are not subjected to hunger.”⁴⁷

Despite the terrible stresses of the Great Depression, Americans in some ways became more forgiving of the undocumented aliens already in their midst. In 1929 Congress in essence granted amnesty to immigrants who had arrived illegally before July 1, 1921, or who had arrived legally but then overstayed their visas. By 1934, the government had extended partial amnesty to the huge numbers of undocumented aliens who had arrived in the United States from July 1921 through June 1924. They could not become citizens, reported the Times, but would now be free from the threat of deportation. In 1935 the Department of Labor (led by New Yorker Frances Perkins) began allowing illegal immigrants whose deportations would break up families to go to Canada and reenter the United States legally as permanent residents. This was the provision that had enabled Minnie Kusnetz to escape deportation. Finally, in 1940, Congress authorized the suspension of orders of deportation when removal from the country would cause “serious economic detriment” to an immigrant’s immediate family.⁴⁸

 

“Sandhogs” working seventy feet below the riverbed of the East River on the Queens-Midtown Tunnel in 1939. Jobs on infrastructure projects like this one helped many New York immigrants survive the Great Depression.

 

There were limits to this forgiveness. The government allowed only undocumented Europeans to adjust their status by reentering the United States from Canada. The many undocumented Asians were still subject to deportation. So too were Mexicans, even those who had entered the country legally (and in some cases become American citizens). Thousands of non-citizens were deported without cause, and thousands of citizens of Mexican descent were coerced to accept “voluntary repatriation.” In many of these cases, Mexican Americans were so severely discriminated against in the distribution of Depression-era unemployment benefits that they elected to board free buses and trains provided by state and local governments to take them back to Mexico rather than face the humiliation of being denied jobs and government relief because, they were told, there was only enough for “real” Americans.⁴⁹

Some in Congress wanted to go even further. In 1935, Representative Martin Dies of Texas proposed a bill that would mandate the deportation of all the nation’s illegal immigrants, whose numbers, Dies estimated, had grown to 3.5 million. The Dies proposal would also have given 4 million legally admitted aliens who had not yet undergone naturalization twelve months to, in Dies’s words, “become citizens or go home,” even though an immigrant who had not already been in the United States for four years could not become a citizen in a year’s time.

The Dies bill and others like it never became law. Deportations actually declined sharply once Franklin Roosevelt became president, so much so that the government stopped publishing the numbers. The Great Depression certainly was a terrible time to be a Mexican immigrant in the United States, but the Mexican population of New York City at this point was negligible. With a mayor (La Guardia) very sympathetic to immigrants in City Hall, another New Yorker famous for defending immigrants’ rights (Dickstein) chairing the House Immigration Committee, and still another New Yorker sympathetic to immigrants’ needs (Perkins) heading the Department of Labor, New York’s undocumented aliens must have felt a little less vulnerable than they had previously.⁵⁰

Another reason why New York’s immigrants could feel more secure was that their increasing political clout made it harder for officeholders to ignore or neglect them. The city’s two biggest immigrant groups, Jews and Italians, took enormous pride in La Guardia’s election as mayor in 1933. But more important to solving the problems in the immigrants’ day-to-day lives were their local representatives. Gone were the days when Tammany could safely nominate Irish Americans for high office and expect the new immigrants to vote the straight party ticket. In the year when New Yorkers first elected Roosevelt president, they sent to Congress such American-born sons of Jewish immigrants as Sol Bloom, Emanuel Celler, Samuel Dickstein, and William Sirovich. Italian immigrants, typically perceived as less politically active than Jewish newcomers, managed to control only East Harlem’s congressional seat. It was filled from 1923 to 1951 by La Guardia, James Lanzetta, and Vito Marcantonio. All three were popular with their Puerto Rican as well as Italian constituents. Marcantonio also won the admiration of African American voters, proposing civil rights bills in Congress that would have outlawed poll taxes and made lynching a crime punishable in federal courts. Puerto Ricans demonstrated nascent political clout in the New Deal era too, electing Oscar García Rivera to the state legislature several times beginning in 1937. García Rivera, who had arrived in New York in 1925, put himself through law school at St. John’s University with income from a post office job and used his legal practice as a springboard into politics.⁵¹

Not everything these politicians did was popular with their immigrant constituents. In 1934 La Guardia declared war on the city’s pushcarts, condemning them as unsightly, unsanitary, and a major cause of traffic congestion. La Guardia also viewed pushcart-lined streets as an embarrassment in much the same way that other children of immigrants found their parents’ Old World customs mortifying. The mayor proposed that the city move the pushcart peddlers into city-financed indoor markets.

La Guardia was roundly booed by the peddlers when he appeared at the opening of the city’s first such market, in East Harlem, running from 111th to 116th Street underneath the gloomy stone viaduct that carried the New York Central (now Metro North) Railroad tracks above Park Avenue. But La Guardia was unapologetic. “Today you have graduated from pushcart peddlers into merchants,” he boasted. And apart from the peddlers themselves, many immigrants applauded the demise of the pushcarts, especially those that sold food. Pushcarts are “very unsanitary,” complained a group of East Harlem mothers. “The streets are full of flies and at night when they leave, there are about thirty ashcans on the sidewalks full of garbage.” Believing that the local high school principal, Leonard Covello, had political influence, they asked him “to try to do something to have these pushcarts taken away from our streets and make it a better and safer place to live in.” La Guardia banned carts from selling all food, even New Yorkers’ beloved hot dogs. While a Times editorial admitted that the removal of the pushcarts was beneficial overall, the editors nonetheless acknowledged some sadness in having to bid “farewell to another bit of old New York.”⁵²

A more consequential change for immigrants advanced by La Guardia and other New Dealers was public housing. Twenty years earlier, immigrant socialists had proposed to alleviate the high rents New Yorkers had to pay, even for decrepit tenement apartments, by demanding that the government build housing and rent it at cost. Most Americans considered such ideas radical insanity in the 1910s, but twenty years and hundreds of rent strikes later, New Yorkers were willing to give public housing a try.

The first project involved a renovation, not new construction. The New York City Housing Authority used a federal loan to buy the fifteen dilapidated, Astor-owned five-story tenements on the south side of East 3rd Street between Avenue A and First Avenue and on the west side of Avenue A between 2nd and 3rd streets on the Lower East Side. Using federally financed public works employees, the city tore down every third building to reduce congestion and to enable additional windows to be cut on the sides of the buildings. The interiors got new oak floors and brass light fixtures. Rent ranged from $15 to $19 per month, depending on the occupants’ income. The manager of “First Houses,” as the complex was christened, received 3,800 applications for the 122 apartments. She screened out New Yorkers who earned too much to qualify and those who earned too little, choosing in particular those who were steadily employed but living in tenements with insufficient ventilation and sanitation. One First Houses resident had lived so long in a tenement with windowless interior rooms that until she moved into her new apartment, she told the manager, “I never knew what color my furniture was.” It was the first municipally built, owned, and managed housing project in the United States.⁵³

Critics were skeptical that the success of First Houses could be replicated on a large enough scale to improve the lives of the hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers who still lived in dark, dirty, outmoded tenements, but La Guardia and his housing commissioner, Langdon Post, were determined to try. Post told the press in 1935 that he hoped to create new housing for 500,000 families over the next ten years. That was a pipe dream—it would have cost billions. But with the financial backing of the new Federal Housing Authority, La Guardia and Post did manage to construct fifteen thousand apartments by 1945. Some replaced the worst barracks-style tenements in East Harlem and the Lower East Side. Others were built in the Bronx, Brooklyn, and Queens.

Today we tend to think of big-city public housing as crime-and-drug-ridden towers of failure. But those problems would only develop a generation later, as the economically stable initial tenants were replaced with the urban poor. Following the lead of social critic Jane Jacobs, many assume that the scale of the public housing complexes doomed them to failure, but the fact that middle-class New Yorkers lived (and continue to live) in buildings of similar scale suggests that poverty, rather than architecture, lies at the root of public housing’s woes in cities like New York. During the 1930s and 1940s, when thousands of immigrants and their American-born children moved into New York’s first public housing projects, they were grateful for the vastly improved living conditions and reasonable rents such housing offered.⁵⁴

 

One defining feature of New York during the Great Depression was huge public works projects in housing and transportation. Another was ethnic conflict. Animosity between the city’s religious, ethnic, and racial groups was as old, of course, as the city itself. But the economic hardships of the Great Depression made New Yorkers especially anxious and likely to blame others for their problems. Jews blamed anti-Semitism for their inability to find jobs during the Depression. Many Christians blamed the entire economic catastrophe on supposed Jewish control of Wall Street and the slowness of the recovery on Jews who administered the New Deal. Puerto Rican and African American New Yorkers blamed white racism for their persistent poverty.

Those anxieties were heightened still further by the chaotic international situation of the 1930s. Japan aggressively colonized Korea and parts of China. The Spanish Civil War provoked passionate debate among the various large immigrant communities in New York, as most Catholics supported the insurgents under General Francisco Franco while the left advocated the Republican cause. The rise to power of Hitler in Germany and Mussolini in Italy also divided immigrant New Yorkers. German and Italian Americans tended to take pride in the prosperity and respect their homelands enjoyed under these authoritarian leaders, while those on the left were aghast at the suppression their ideological brethren suffered under these fascist regimes. The governments of Franco, Mussolini, and Hitler were all unabashedly anti-Semitic, something that made New York’s Jews especially uneasy because so many of them still had relatives in Europe.

While the situation overseas made New York’s Jews nervous, the appalling increase in American anti-Semitism during these same years worried them even more. Some of the nation’s most outspoken anti-Semites, like Henry Ford and Charles Lindbergh, were midwesterners whose influence in New York seemed minimal. New York’s Jews felt much more threatened by two groups that did flourish in the city: the German American Bund and the Christian Front.

The Bund, established in 1936, was essentially the American affiliate of Hitler’s Nazi Party, complete with swastikas, Hitler salutes, and storm troopers. Most of its members were German immigrants or their children. (Only those who could prove German heritage were permitted to join.) Its leader was Fritz Kuhn, a chemist who had fought in the German army in World War I and who immigrated to the United States in 1928 and had become a citizen in 1934. Kuhn ran the Bund from its national headquarters at 178 East 85th Street in Yorkville, a predominantly German neighborhood on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. In fact, the Bund had far more members in New York City than in any other place in America. The height of the Bund’s notoriety came with its rally for “true Americanism” staged at Madison Square Garden on February 20, 1939. Nearly twenty thousand attendees cheered as Kuhn, standing beneath a giant portrait of George Washington (whom American Nazis called “the first fascist”), denounced “Frank D. Rosenfeld” and his “Jew Deal.”⁵⁵

Some Jews called for La Guardia to ban Bund rallies, arguing that its calls to “kill the Jews” were incitements to violence. Others, recalling the suppression of Jewish socialists during the Palmer Raids, felt that much as they despised the American Nazis, the First Amendment protected their hate speech. Judge Nathan Perlman, a Polish Jewish immigrant and former congressman, found what he considered a middle ground. Using his contacts in law enforcement, he arranged a meeting with the notorious Jewish gangster Meyer Lansky, also a Polish Jewish immigrant. Perlman offered to pay Lansky if the gangster would use his thugs to “disrupt” local Bund meetings, using as much violence as they found appropriate, as long as no one was killed.

Lansky agreed but refused to take any money. “I was a Jew and felt for those Jews in Europe who were suffering,” he explained years later to an Israeli interviewer. “They were my brothers.” Lansky fondly recounted one of his raids on a Bund rally in Yorkville. “The stage was decorated with a swastika and a picture of Hitler.” Several hundred Bund followers were in attendance when the meeting began and “the speakers started ranting. There were only fifteen of us, but we went into action . . . Most of the Nazis panicked and ran out. We chased them and beat them up . . . We wanted to show them that Jews would not always sit back and accept insults.”⁵⁶

Menacing as the American Nazis of the 1930s may seem today, New York Jews saw the Christian Front, an organization inspired by the weekly radio broadcasts of Father Charles Coughlin, a Catholic priest from Michigan, as even more of an immediate threat. Unlike the Bund, which had a relatively limited following, Coughlin’s syndicated radio show was wildly popular and drew an especially large audience of Irish Catholics. At the start of the New Deal, Coughlin supported Roosevelt and his relief programs. By 1936, however, he had become disillusioned with FDR, convinced that because of the influence of Jewish bankers, Jewish labor leaders, and Jewish communists, the president was not doing enough to aid those in need. When Coughlin spoke at a rally in a Philadelphia stadium in 1936, the Times noted ominously, “the men and women in the stands . . . thrust their hands upward and forward in what closely resembled the Nazi salute.” In 1938 Coughlin called for his followers to form a “Christian front” against a predicted communist takeover of America, and soon Christian Front clubs began appearing wherever in the Northeast and Midwest there were large Irish Catholic populations. Coughlin’s anti-Semitism became so virulent (and his defense of Hitler’s policies toward Germany’s Jews so strident) that several radio stations, including his New York outlet, refused to continue airing his broadcasts. This censorship, however, served only to convince his devoted followers that Jews now controlled the media.⁵⁷

Members of the Christian Front began to appear all over New York selling Coughlin’s magazine, Social Justice, and loudly condemning the influence of Jews in America. New York’s Jews were appalled. It was one thing to rant from the traditional soapbox forums in Times Square or on Park Row across from City Hall, but Christian Front street speakers were spewing their hate in Jewish neighborhoods like the Upper West Side of Manhattan and Flatbush in Brooklyn. Worse still, their harangues seemed to lead directly to anti-Semitic vandalism and violence. In Washington Heights, the south Bronx, and Brooklyn, Jews were assaulted on the streets by teenagers shouting anti-Semitic slurs. Synagogues and Jewish businesses all over the city were vandalized. “This is not the usual ‘polite anti-Semitism’ to which we have become more or less accustomed in the United States,” observed a prominent New York Methodist. “It is a militant, hate-breeding” organization. And because “its membership is about 90 per cent Catholic, the Christian Front well merits the title of ‘Catholic Klan.’”⁵⁸

What New York’s Jews found most appalling about the Christian Front was that the New York police seemed unwilling to stop the anti-Semitic crime that grew along with it. “We are tired of approaching a police captain, hat in hand, saying ‘Please Captain McCarthy (or O’Brien) . . . My boy was hit because he is a Jew. Will you send a cop?’ And we are damned sick and tired of . . . hearing the usual answer: ‘Ah, the boys are just playing.’” In several well-publicized cases, the police did nothing when Christian Front speakers shouted insults at Jews, but when Jews responded with their own invective, they were hauled off to jail on charges of disturbing the peace. La Guardia staunchly defended the police in public, but privately asked his subordinates to determine how many New York policemen belonged to the Christian Front. In an anonymous survey conducted as part of the investigation, four hundred officers admitted that they were or had been members, and many others probably hid their affiliation. The head of the Front in Brooklyn testified in court that five hundred police officers had applied to join the organization in that borough alone. FBI director J. Edgar Hoover claimed to have a list of 1,500 policemen citywide who had applied for Christian Front membership.⁵⁹

Perhaps because of lobbying by Jews and other New Yorkers, or perhaps because Europe appeared to be descending imminently into war, the police finally began to arrest some members of the Christian Front and its offshoots like the Christian Mobilizers, whose hatemongering seemed to invite violence. In September 1939, Ralph Ninfo, the twenty-nine-year-old son of Councilman Salvatore Ninfo, was sentenced to seventy-five days’ hard labor at the city’s Rikers Island jail for disorderly conduct after telling a crowd at the corner of Broadway and 72nd Street that he would “like to see every Jew in the United States hanged.” Ninfo’s soapbox partner, found guilty of the same charge, had told the gathered crowd that he “wished to see Jewish blood flow all over America.”⁶⁰

Many New York Christians, including many Catholics, came to the defense of the city’s Jewish population. Residents in several boroughs formed interfaith groups to protect Jews from those who, as one put it, “had been terrorizing the Bronx by nightly street meetings, petitions and literature.” Some Irish Catholics themselves recognized the irony involved in this Irish-led religious harassment. In passing judgment on Florence Nash, a child of Irish immigrants arrested for haranguing Jews as they passed her on the street while she sold Social Justice, magistrate Michael Ford reminded her that her parents “undoubtedly came to this country, as my parents did, to escape the persecution of the English government . . . The persecution you have perpetrated could be perpetrated also against your own race.”⁶¹

The Christian Front’s public activities subsided somewhat in January 1940, when J. Edgar Hoover announced the arrest and indictment of eighteen members, including Brooklyn leader John F. Cassidy, on charges of conspiring to overthrow the government. Hoover alleged that the group intended to seize “the reins of government in this country as Hitler did in Germany” and bring about the complete “eradication of the Jews in the United States” as well. At the time of their arrest, these Christian Front members were found to possess a large collection of weapons, five thousand rounds of ammunition, and more than a dozen half-completed bombs. The conspirators, Hoover alleged, planned to use the bombs to blow up the offices of the communist Daily Worker, the Yiddish-language socialist daily Forward, and various Jewish congressmen. Some of the arrested were Irish and German immigrants, the remainder mostly American-born men of Irish and German ancestry. As soon as the arrests were announced, Coughlin disavowed the Christian Front and its followers. At their trial a few months later, the defendants’ attorney managed to impugn the reliability of the FBI’s paid informants. Cassidy testified convincingly that they had not intended to overthrow the government but were arming themselves to resist the communists’ inevitable attempt to seize the reins of power. One of the defendants committed suicide during the trial, but the jury found Cassidy and eight others not guilty.^* It deadlocked eleven to one in favor of acquittal for the remaining five, and the government never retried them.⁶²

By this point Jewish immigration was growing once again, despite the restrictions, driven primarily by refugees from Hitler’s Germany. When Hitler first came to power, most fleeing Jews chose to settle in other parts of Europe. With Hitler menacing the entire continent by the end of 1938, however, the mass of refugees now sought admission to the United States. Yet despite calls from American Jews and humanitarian groups, the Roosevelt administration accepted hardly any more German refugees than could be allowed into the country under Germany’s normal immigration quota. By June 1939, 309,000 Jews in areas under German control had applied for one of that year’s thirty thousand or so quota slots.^* Some suggested “mortgaging” Germany’s future quota slots so that more refugees could be admitted immediately, but that would have required an act of Congress that never materialized. A bill proposed by one of New York’s U.S. senators, Robert Wagner (himself an immigrant from Germany), to allow twenty thousand German Jewish children under the age of fourteen to enter the country as refugees over two years above and beyond the German quota, also failed to muster support. The wife of Roosevelt’s commissioner of immigration, James Houghteling, explained that her husband opposed Wagner’s plan because “20,000 children would all too soon grow up to be 20,000 ugly adults.” Roosevelt could have used his substantial political capital to try to push for these bills or some other kind of legislation that would have allowed more refugees to enter the United States, but he demurred. Instead FDR tried to persuade Latin American nations to admit the refugees. They were no more willing to take the Jews than the rest of the world.⁶³

The climax of the refugee crisis came with the ill-fated voyage of the St. Louis, a ship that left Hamburg in May 1939 carrying more than 937 Jewish refugees who had permission to settle in Cuba or at least stay there temporarily. As the ship crossed the Atlantic, however, the Cuban government bowed to internal anti-Semitism and announced that it would admit no more Jewish refugees, not even those who had valid American visas that would allow them to enter the United States later that year. Threatened by the Cuban navy, the ship sailed to the southeast coast of Florida, its German captain hoping that some nation would agree to accept his passengers. “The refugees could even see the shimmering towers of Miami rising from the sea,” reported the Times, “but for them they were only the battlements of another forbidden city.” Finally, with no North or South American country willing to take the St. Louis’s passengers, the ship returned to Europe. Belgium, France, Great Britain, and the Netherlands had agreed to divide the refugees among them. But they were not safe from Hitler on the Continent. Of the 620 St. Louis passengers forced to resettle there, 254 were killed during the war, primarily in the Nazi death camps at Auschwitz and Sobibor. “The cruise of the St. Louis,” the Times ruefully concluded, “cries to high heaven of man’s inhumanity to man.”⁶⁴

While it is easy to condemn Roosevelt or Congress for not taking in more refugees from Hitler’s Europe, the United States did admit far more of these refugees than any other nation. Of the 523,000 Jews who lived in Germany when Hitler came to power, about 282,000 had managed to flee by the time World War II began in September 1939, and about 95,000 of those refugees were admitted into the United States. In fact, about half the passengers on the St. Louis eventually did succeed in immigrating to the United States, either during or after the war. In addition to the Germans, thousands of refugees relocated to New York from Russia, France, and other war-torn nations. In all, the United States took in somewhere between 200,000 and 250,000 refugees, of whom perhaps two-thirds were Jews.⁶⁵

 

Jewish refugees on the St. Louis , 1939. No country would take them in, and the ship was eventually forced to return with them to Europe. Although the United States took in more refugees during World War II than any other nation, New York’s Jews were shocked that the Roosevelt administration would not provide a safe haven for more Jews fleeing Nazi Germany.

 

Louis and Paula Kissinger and their two teenage sons were typical of Jewish refugees who settled in New York. Louis had been a schoolteacher in Fürth, a small town in northern Bavaria just outside Nuremberg. Though the Kissin­gers were Orthodox Jews, they considered themselves thoroughly and devoutly German. They were dismayed, therefore, when just weeks after Hitler’s rise to power in 1933, all the Jewish doctors in town were fired from their posts at the local hospital and all the Jewish civil servants, including Louis Kissinger, lost their jobs too. Later that spring, the town’s largest Jewish-owned store was ordered closed, while the Nazis organized a boycott of all the town’s other Jewish businesses. Jews were also banned from the town beach. Then in 1934, a cap was placed on the number of Jews who could attend the public schools, and in 1936, Jews were banned from attending them altogether. Kissinger supported his family by starting a private Jewish school that same year. His sons, one of them recalled years later, were “often . . . chased through the streets, and beaten up” for no other reason than that they were Jewish.

Despite all this, Louis Kissinger thought the family should stay in Germany. Surely Germans would come to their senses and the madness would pass. But Paula Kissinger had seen enough. Her brother-in-law had already been sent to Dachau. She refused to watch her teenage sons suffer the same fate. Paula contacted a first cousin who had been born in Brooklyn and now lived in Larchmont, in affluent Westchester County, just north of New York City. Paula’s cousin provided the affidavit of support that enabled the Kissingers to snare four of the prized German quota slots. In August 1938 they crossed the English Channel and on the thirtieth boarded the Île de France for New York. And not a moment too soon. Kristallnacht came in November; the Nazis seized Jewish businesses and property a few weeks after that. Before long, the concentration camps turned into death camps. Three of Louis’s sisters and their husbands, along with most of their children, were among the several dozen family members killed by the Nazis by the time the war was over.⁶⁶

Those tragic events, however, lay in the future. When the Kissingers arrived in New York in September 1938, the city was well prepared to meet, greet, and integrate them and their fellow refugees. Officials knew which refugees would be arriving on each ship and worked in conjunction with dozens of volunteer groups to help settle them. Because the majority of the refugees were Jewish, the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society was by far the busiest of the relief organizations. It lodged the newcomers who did not go immediately to live with friends or relatives, offered a three-day crash course in English and American civics, and provided a free job placement service.

The biggest and most important institution helping the city’s refugees adjust to their new lives in America was the New York City public school system. Back before immigration restriction, the city’s schools had offered English and civics courses to the newcomers. When immigration was reduced to a trickle, the city largely eliminated these classes. Now, the school system shifted its night school program into high gear again. “As never before in its history,” reported the Times in January 1939, “the evening division of the New York City school system is crowded to capacity with serious-minded students—persecuted refugees from central Europe—eager to absorb the language, traditions and literature of their newly adopted land.” Five thousand refugees had already enrolled in such classes, according to the Times, and many more were on waiting lists for their chance to take them.

The refugees’ teachers faced a far different task than they had before World War I. Back then, many of the immigrants in night school had received very little formal education before coming to America. In 1939, though, the students were “in large measure . . . professional men.” Twenty-five percent of the night students already had college degrees. Female refugees were less likely than men to enroll in these classes, unless they came to America without male family members. The Times told of one class composed of twenty Czech women, “some with husbands or fathers left behind in concentration camps.” These refugees often attended class with their children, who “help their parents decipher the English words.”⁶⁷

Unlike the Italian farm laborer and Jewish peddler, who had known what kind of work awaited them in the United States, the new refugees had no idea what jobs they would find. “The change these people had to undergo can hardly be overestimated,” wrote a social scientist who interviewed several hundred refugees just after World War II ended. Putting food on the table was their immediate priority, and the language barrier and American skepticism toward their qualifications made it extremely difficult for them to resume their former occupations. The refugees simply had to take whatever work they could get. “Here was the former factory owner who now peddled cakes and candies, or the manager of a department store who worked as a laborer in a cemetery.” A former steel exporter peddled pencils. A professor of classics worked as a dishwasher. In some cases, housewives who had until recently employed domestic servants now found themselves scrubbing the floors and toilets of others.⁶⁸

Not every refugee had to change careers. German doctors could continue to practice their profession. So could most scientists. Enrico Fermi, who left Italy for the United States in 1938 a few months after winning the Nobel Prize in physics because he feared for the safety of his Jewish wife, Laura, had no shortage of job offers before he accepted a position at Columbia. Fordham University snagged its own Nobel physicist, Victor Francis Hess, who left Austria in 1938 because he too had a Jewish wife. New York University also got a Nobel laureate, German pharmacologist Otto Loewi. A fourth Nobel refugee, Norwegian novelist Sigrid Undset, settled in Brooklyn Heights.⁶⁹

The New York arts world also benefited tremendously from the influx of refugees. In the sphere of music, those who relocated to New York included composers Kurt Weill and Béla Bartók, pianist Vladimir Horowitz, and conductor Arturo Toscanini. Artists were particularly drawn to New York City. Salvador Dalí, Marcel Duchamp, and Piet Mondrian, among many others, made New York their new home. They helped New York become the capital of the international art world in the postwar years. The American government purposefully adopted a visa policy that favored them. After Germany invaded France in 1940, FDR directed his Advisory Committee on Refugees to draw up a list of Europeans “of superior intellectual attainment” who might be in danger of persecution and offer them visas without their even having to ask. Approximately 3,400 visas were issued under this initiative—about a third of which were used.⁷⁰

Even many unknown refugees managed to thrive in New York. Those with an entrepreneurial bent seemed especially able to replicate their commercial success in America. Heinrich Spitzer, who owned his own “knit goods” business in Germany, took a job as a stock clerk upon arrival in New York to “learn American methods.” Once he had collected enough intelligence, he went into business for himself. By the end of 1939, he had a dozen employees. A German manufacturer who had operated a multimillion-dollar dress business in Europe lost almost everything to the Nazis but managed to smuggle out some of his wife’s jewelry. He pawned it and used the proceeds to start manufacturing dresses in Brooklyn. Soon he had thirty-five workers on his payroll. But such stories were the exception rather than the rule. Only 39 percent of refugees who had been business owners and managers in Europe were able to resume such work within five years of their arrival in the United States. Those most likely to recommence their former occupations were professionals (doctors, scientists, and so on) and skilled craftsmen. Two-thirds of them found similar work within five years of settling in the United States.⁷¹

One of the refugees who could not manage to find steady employment was Louis Kissinger. Upon their arrival in New York, he and his family had found an apartment in Washington Heights, in northwest Manhattan, just a few blocks north of where the George Washington Bridge disgorged its traffic from New Jersey. Washington Heights was a favorite destination of German Jewish refugees, so much so that they sometimes referred to it as the “Fourth Reich of Germany.” Perhaps because Louis was surrounded by so many German-speakers, he found it very difficult to learn English, even though the family decided to speak only English at home to help him master the language. Feelings of inadequacy sent Louis spiraling into depression, so that even when a friend offered to take him on as a bookkeeper, he was not able to work regularly. Paula became the family’s primary breadwinner, first as a servant and then as a caterer.⁷²

At the beginning of 1940, the family decided that while Paula was getting her business off the ground, their eldest son, Heinz, would work full-time to supplement the family’s meager income. He had been attending George Washington High School along with his brother since their arrival in New York, and it was in order to fit in at school that Heinz decided to Americanize his name to Henry. He now switched to the night session to accommodate his work schedule. Henry took a menial job at a shaving brush factory on West 15th Street owned by the husband of Paula Kissinger’s cousin, the one who had sponsored the Kissingers’ immigration to America. Henry’s assignment at the factory was to dip badger bristles into acid to bleach them and then squeeze as much acid as possible out of the bristles before others attached them to the shaving brush handles. Almost sixteen when he began the job, Henry worked from 8:00 to 5:00 and was paid $11 a week. After work, he would take the subway home, eat a quick dinner, and then rush off to three hours of night school so he could get his diploma. Despite the exhausting hours, Heinz earned excellent grades in everything but math, aided by the fact that he had studied English in Germany. A year after his arrival, he was essentially fluent, though unlike most immigrants his age (and even his own brother), he never learned to speak without an accent. Henry continued to work at the brush factory—albeit with a promotion to a much higher-paid position in the shipping department—even after he graduated from George Washington in 1941 and enrolled at City College to study accounting. He lived at home and registered for classes that met at night so he could continue to help support his family.⁷³

By this point, the war in Europe was monopolizing the attention of New Yorkers and virtually all Americans. Many, like La Guardia and Roosevelt, believed that American entry into the war on the side of Great Britain and France was inevitable. Others, in particular German and Irish Americans, thought the United States should stay out of the conflict. They argued that the nation’s ethnic mix made it impossible to enter a war that pitted the homelands of half the nation’s immigrants against the other half. Pointing to the fighting between Catholics and Jews and the boycotts of Jewish businesses that were being led by an offshoot of the Front, the Christian Mobilizers, municipal judge Herbert O’Brien told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in February 1941 that a virtual state of “civil war” already existed in the city. “New York City is a veritable powder keg,” testified Queens Democratic leader William Goodwin, a Coughlin follower, before the same committee, “and our entry into this war might touch it off.”⁷⁴

The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941 and the decisions of both Hitler and Mussolini to declare war on the United States four days later rendered such arguments moot, as Roosevelt had no choice but to enter the conflict both in Europe and in the Pacific. That all three nations had chosen preemptive war against the United States disarmed Roosevelt’s isolationist foes and also helped unite Americans, even the nation’s immigrants, in support of the war effort. “Now we know where we stand,” declared Italian American grocer Al Cazazza after the Axis powers suddenly forced the United States into the conflict. “We are all together, this unites us all.”⁷⁵

Not quite all. One of the first things Americans did after their entry into the war was to take steps to remove from their midst immigrants who they believed were likely to sympathize with, or even aid, the nations against which the United States was fighting. “For the time being New York has a concentration camp of its own,” reported the Times as Ellis Island was converted into a detention facility for those deemed a threat to national security. On the very day the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, the FBI began rounding up many of the 2,500 or so Japanese-born New Yorkers to bring them to Ellis Island for internment. By December 11, 413 German-born Americans had been taken there as well. Italians who authorities believed might aid America’s wartime enemies were interned there too. Most internees were aliens, but some, like Fritz Kuhn, leader of the Bund, were naturalized American citizens. Each detainee received a hearing at which he or she could present witnesses and be represented by a lawyer. Many of the detainees were able to convince the authorities that they posed no threat. One was Metropolitan Opera star Ezio Pinza, who was held at Ellis Island for three months. Those detainees the tribunal judged to be a danger to national security, however, were shipped to detention camps such as the Crystal City Internment Camp near San Antonio or Fort Lincoln Internment Camp on the outskirts of Bismarck, North Dakota. Kuhn and William Bishop, an illegal immigrant from Austria who was one of the defendants in the Christian Front sedition case, were among the New Yorkers sent to these camps.⁷⁶

Despite the hysteria that resulted in the detention of many immigrants on dubious grounds, New York was crawling with immigrant spies. Machinist Rene Froehlich, who had immigrated from Germany as an eleven-year-old in 1923, was drafted into the army in 1941 and conveyed information to the Germans on American troop and ship movements that came across his desk in his capacity as an army typist on Governors Island in New York Harbor. A German immigrant from Queens, Herman Lang, attempted to transmit to the German government top-secret aerial bomb site information stolen from his workplace in Manhattan. Kurt Ludwig, born in Ohio but raised in Germany, recruited German Americans in Queens to help him with his espionage. In 1941 he hired Lucy Boehlmer, an eighteen-year-old blonde who had immigrated to New York from her native Stuttgart in 1929, to coax sensitive information from soldiers on Long Island. The press referred to Boehlmer as the “Maspeth Mata Hari.” For every spy the FBI caught, many more were undoubtedly never detected.⁷⁷

Also undetected was the U-boat that ventured into New York Harbor in January 1942. From where it surfaced off Rockaway Beach, the sailors on board could clearly see the Parachute Jump and the Wonder Wheel at the Coney Island amusement park. Had the German spies in New York been able to coordinate their efforts with the German U-boats, which returned nine months later and laid mines in the harbor, they could have wreaked real havoc throughout the city.⁷⁸

While the FBI rounded up suspected spies, the military recruited soldiers. Immigrants had constituted a substantial portion of the army and navy in World War I and the Civil War, but the foreign-born played a relatively minor role in fighting World War II. Because of immigration restrictions, New York’s foreign-born population had grown fairly old: the average age of a New York immigrant in 1940 was forty-eight, compared to just thirty-one for natives. The foreign-born still made up 29 percent of the city’s population, but they constituted only 5 percent of men aged eighteen to thirty-five. By the end of the war in 1945, 891,000 of New York’s 7.5 million inhabitants had either enlisted or been drafted into the military, but only a small number of them were immigrants. The press and Hollywood might boast that the American army was a true “melting pot,” but the Irish, Italians, Jews, and Poles who fought side by side were almost always the children or grandchildren of immigrants rather than adopted Americans themselves.⁷⁹

Of the New York immigrants who did fight in the war, many had only recently left Europe as refugees. Perhaps the most famous New York refugee turned soldier was Hitler’s own nephew, English-born William Patrick Hitler. The younger Hitler was something of a louse himself. After growing up in England, he went to Germany in the mid-1930s hoping to cash in on his name. He apparently even attempted to blackmail his uncle when he did not succeed. He fled Germany in 1938 and moved to Queens, where he tried to support himself by giving anti-Nazi lectures organized by publisher William Randolph Hearst. Despite the navy’s misgivings about his loyalty to the United States, the American Hitler was allowed to enlist in 1944 because the propaganda value of his service was too good to pass up.⁸⁰

While most everything William Patrick Hitler did seemed to be driven by mercenary motivations, New York’s Jewish refugees had far loftier reasons to fight. “I, who have been robbed of all I possessed and driven out of my homeland,” wrote one Jewish refugee soldier, “have so much more reason for wanting to get a whack at Hitler than has the average American citizen who has not yet suffered from him.” Despite such inducements to fight, most immigrant soldiers (and most native-born, too) were draftees rather than volunteers. One was my grandfather Tulea Anbinder. He was sent not to the front lines but to Fort Wayne, where he treated the dental woes of the army’s recruits, many of whom had had little or no dental care before entering the service.⁸¹

Henry Kissinger was also drafted. In early 1943, the nineteen-year-old was sent to basic training in Spartanburg, South Carolina. When he completed his three-month boot camp, the army made him an American citizen as well. Soon Kissinger’s younger brother Walter was drafted too. Henry’s letter of advice to him conveys a sense of what Henry’s first six months in the army had been like. Keep “your eyes and ears open and your mouth closed,” he wrote to Walter. “Always stand in the middle because details are always picked from the end. Always remain inconspicuous because as long as they don’t know you, they can’t pick on you . . . Don’t become too friendly with the scum you invariably meet there. Don’t gamble! There are always a few professional crooks in the crowd and they skin you alive . . . Don’t go to a whore-house. I like a woman, as you do. But I wouldn’t think of touching those filthy, syphilis-infected camp followers.”⁸²

The war was a huge boon to the New York economy. The garment industry, which had languished for years, was now awash in orders for military uniforms. Other kinds of manufacturing benefited as well. New York was a major transshipment point for men and matériel, and by the end of the war, the city could boast the world’s largest warehouse, which sat among hundreds of other supply sheds and administrative buildings at the Brooklyn Army Base in Sunset Park. Hundreds of thousands of soldiers and sailors also shipped out from the city’s piers, using its hotels and restaurants before doing so.

Another large employer in the city during the war was the navy. Today, Americans do not associate New York with the navy, but back then New York was a true navy town in large part because of the vast Brooklyn Navy Yard. The war made the Navy Yard an even more massive presence in the city’s economy. By 1944, seventy thousand New Yorkers worked in what was probably the world’s biggest shipyard. By the end of the war, the Navy Yard had built five aircraft carriers and three battleships, including the Missouri, the ship on whose decks the Japanese government signed the instrument of surrender that for all intents and purposes ended the war. Because of security concerns, relatively few immigrants were permitted to work at the Navy Yard or the Brooklyn Army Base during the war, but they employed thousands of immigrants’ children. With so many men off fighting, wages in New York rose sharply in the early 1940s as companies became desperate to attract workers, and as a result, these defense jobs often paid far more than any of these “second-generation” Americans had earned before. They brought this pay home to their families, and in that manner the war helped boost the standard of living of immigrant New Yorkers as well.⁸³

A New York military operation that did employ immigrants at its highest levels was the Manhattan Project, the program to design and construct the first atomic bomb. It was called the Manhattan Project because it originated in the Manhattan physics laboratories of Columbia University. It was there in Pupin Hall on West 120th Street just east of Broadway that physicists produced the manmade uranium fission chain reactions that led to the making of the first atomic bomb. Among the immigrant physicists who worked on the project in its New York phase were Fermi, Isidor Rabi (born in the part of Austria-Hungary that is now Poland), Leo Szilard (Hungary), and Walter Zinn (Canada). Lacking the necessary space to advance the project toward the construction of a nuclear weapon, the Manhattan Project was moved to the University of Chicago (where the scientists worked under the football field) as well as to laboratories in Tennessee, New Mexico, and Washington State.⁸⁴

As the Manhattan Project was entering its final phases, the Kissinger brothers were sent to the front lines, Walter in the Pacific and Henry with the Eighty-fourth Infantry Division in Europe. Henry hoped he would be part of the assault on Germany so he could have the satisfaction of helping to defeat the Nazis, who had treated him so mercilessly and forced him to flee his homeland. In November 1944 he got his wish. “I am back where I wanted to be,” he wrote to his parents at the end of the month. “I think of the cruelty and barbarism those people out there in the ruins showed when they were on top. And then I feel proud and happy to be able to enter here as a free American soldier.”⁸⁵

Given his fluency in German, Kissinger was at this point reassigned to counterintelligence. His job was to interview German civilians in towns his unit occupied, determine which if any of them might pose a threat to American troops, and oversee the evacuation of those considered “unreliable.” That winter, Kissinger and his unit faced grave danger during the German counteroffensive known as the Battle of the Bulge. But once it was repulsed, he resumed his counterintelligence efforts, earning a Bronze Star in April 1945 for his work in discovering and breaking up a Gestapo sleeper cell left behind by the fleeing Germans in Hanover.

Later that month Kissinger had the grim task of helping to liberate the Nazi concentration camp at Ahlem just outside of Hanover. “As our jeep travelled down the street,” Kissinger wrote soon afterward, “skeletons in striped suits lined the road . . . Cloth seemed to fall from the bodies” of the survivors, and each head “was held up by a stick that once might have been a throat. Poles hang from the sides where arms should be, poles are the legs.” Kissinger criss-crossed the camp, telling each prisoner, “You are free.” But he took no pleasure in the job. “What kind of freedom can I offer? I see my friend enter one of the huts and come out with tears in his eyes: ‘Don’t go in there. We had to kick them to tell the dead from the living.’” Kissinger wished the sights he had seen at Ahlem could be preserved in concrete “for future generation[s] to look upon and take stock.”⁸⁶

Kissinger spent two more years in Germany as part of the American occupation. At first he continued his intelligence-gathering work, but later he was assigned to teach incoming officers intelligence techniques and German history as the army attempted to prevent both a resurgence of pro-Nazi sentiment and a rise in pro-communist feelings that might aid the United States’ new rival, the Soviet Union. Finally, in the late spring of 1947, four years after he first entered the army, Kissinger returned home to Washington Heights.

For the 98 percent of New York soldiers who managed to make it home, the war often profoundly changed their lives. The experience the immigrants’ American-born sons gained in the army and navy, and the G.I. Bill benefits they would receive, filled the city’s Italian and Jewish newcomers with pride. They believed that their children would now be much more likely to achieve the American dream. For the city’s many Puerto Rican soldiers, who had been given more responsibility and treated with more dignity in the army than they had been accustomed to in New York, the war inspired in them a determination to demand more rights and respect once they returned to the city.

The war also altered Henry Kissinger’s life. Had it not been for the war, he would likely have finished his degree in accounting at City College and been satisfied to keep the books of Washington Heights’ German American merchants and manufacturers. But his success in the army, the mentoring and encouragement he received from his commanders, and in particular his stint teaching intelligence officers prompted him to aspire to loftier goals. “I shall write, I may lecture later on . . . I have extreme confidence.” That confidence, shared by millions of New Yorkers, would shape the city, its immigrants, and the entire era that followed the war.⁸⁷

 

TOP TEN SOURCES OF NEW YORK’S IMMIGRANTS, 1960

 

Italy	280,786
USSR	204,578
Poland	168,824
Germany	152,192
Ireland	114,008
Austria	84,301
Great Britain	61,018
Hungary	45,567
Greece	28,845
Canada	28,150
Total foreign-born	1,463,821
Total population	3,622,929

 

Note: The Census Bureau specified the birthplace of only “white” immigrants in 1960. Immigrants born in Northern Ireland are listed under Ireland.

 

Source: Ira Rosenwaike, Population History of New York City (Syracuse, 1972), 205.