Eastern Europeans: Poles, Jews, and Hungarians
According to the HEAEG, members of at least twenty-six European ethnic groups emigrated to the United States from the area north of Greece and east of Germany.* Most of these groups cannot be treated in a work of this kind, just as certain Western European groups were not treated and as many Asian and Latin American groups will not be treated. (From a demographic point of view it can be argued that the most serious omission has been the failure to talk to any length about those whom Charlotte Erickson has called “invisible immigrants,” non-Irish emigrants from the British Isles, persons who could all but disappear into the mass of the American people almost as soon as they arrived.)1 More than three million such immigrants arrived during our century of immigration from the end of the War of 1812 to 1924. The failure to talk about an ethnic group here should not be regarded as dismissive of its importance. For example, five times as many Slovaks came to the United States as did Armenians, yet the former will not be discussed in detail here. Those interested in Slovaks, and in other groups about whom modern histories have been written, can discover appropriate titles in the bibliography or in the HEAEG essays. Omission is not a slight. This book, as previously noted, is intended to be illustrative, not encyclopedic. Some groups, like Poles and Eastern European Jews, were simply too large to be ignored. Among the others, choice was arbitrary and was, in part, dictated by the quality of available secondary works.
Most members of these groups who came to the United States began to arrive in the last years of the nineteenth century and the initial ones of the twentieth. They settled predominantly in the cities of the northeastern and north-central states, cities known today as the “rust belt” for the demolished or obsolete and rusting factories that once made the region the greatest manufacturing center in the world. It was these and other immigrants who, in the main, made these factories go and provided the human raw material that transformed the United States into a great industrial power. The distinguished American historian, Carl Wittke, when he wrote a general book about European immigration, called it We Who Built America. If we use the verb built literally instead of figuratively, as Wittke did, it would apply to no groups more appropriately than to the European ethnics of this period. To be sure, so-called Anglo-Americans tended to own and operate the factories, and members of better-established or more easily assimilated ethnic groups, tended to be the managers, superintendents, and even foremen. But the brawn that fed the blast furnaces, laid rails, and actually built things was predominantly that of the later arrivals. They came to a country whose frontier, in a traditional sense, was closing. In a report accompanying the census of 1890, the superintendent of the census demonstrated that the frontier, defined as a large contiguous region with fewer than one person per square mile, had ceased to exist in the United States. (Alaskans today amend this to say “in the lower forty-eight.”) And it was in 1893 that a young historian named Frederick Jackson Turner first propounded what has become known as the Turner thesis, one of the two or three most influential notions ever put forth about American history.
Up to our own day American history has been in a large degree the history of the Great West. The existence of an area of free land, its continuous recession, and the advance of American settlement westward explain American development.2
Turner, and the generation or two of historians who followed him, all but ignored the role of the cities and the immigrants who were filling them even as he spoke. And Turner spoke, ironically, in the city of Chicago, where the American Historical Association happened to be meeting, a city that was becoming home to hundreds of thousands of immigrants and their children.
Although they came to American cities, these immigrants did not, generally, come from European cities. They were, overwhelmingly, peasants from the less-developed regions of Europe, who lived mainly in villages and small towns. Had there been land available, and had they been able to buy it, many of them would surely have become farmers in America. Indeed, for many, the reason for coming to American was to earn enough money to buy land back home, and many sojourners in America were able to save enough from their meager earnings to achieve that goal. And, as Eva Morwaska has pointed out, for many Eastern Europeans in American industry, gardening was a source both of dietary and income supplementation.3
The two most important historical surveys of immigration to focus on these immigrants each used a titular organic metaphor to describe them: Oscar Handlin’s book, perhaps the most influential and widely read historical work on immigration, was called The Uprooted; John Bodnar’s was titled, somewhat mimetically, The Transplanted.4 Each metaphor, whether or not its author realized it, tends to reduce the immigrants to objects rather than subjects of history, makes them seem persons to whom things happened rather than persons who caused things to happen. While no person can control completely her or his destiny, and since poor people—and most immigrants were poor—generally have fewer options than do better-off individuals, immigrants were often buffeted by forces beyond their control. But immigrants, or more properly the decision makers in immigrant families, all made at least one crucial decision: They chose to come to America. They were thus, in this sense, movers rather than the moved. Metaphors, however striking or dramatic, that suggest otherwise are misleading and contribute to the stereotype of the “dumb” immigrant. To English-speaking Americans, of course, these immigrants did indeed seem literally “dumb”: They could not talk in a language appropriate to “God’s country.” From this it was easy to assume that immigrants were “dumb” in another sense, that is, not smart. And the statistical evidence shows clearly that most immigrants of this period had very little formal education and were thus ignorant of many things. Many, perhaps most, came with gross misconceptions about what kind of place an industrializing America was. But that is not to say that immigrants were stupid, or at least not more stupid than the general run of humanity. And in general, it seems to me, many of them came to understand the real nature of America much better than did most of those who despised them.
Poles
As indicated earlier, it is difficult if not impossible to tease out of the American immigration statistics accurate data about the immigration of Poles. Between the third partition of Poland in 1795 and the creation of a new Poland by the Treaty of Versailles in 1919, no Polish state existed. Interwar Poland lasted just twenty years; a new one was created by the victorious allies after World War II. During the century of immigration the Poles who came to America lived mainly in one of the three great European empires—the German, the Austro-Hungarian, and the Russian. Other Poles, to be sure, came from elsewhere, including France, to which large numbers of Polish workers traditionally migrated. Poland was also the home of large numbers of non-Polish peoples, including Germans, Jews, and Lithuanians. Almost all the ethnic Poles who came to America shared two common characteristics: They came speaking Polish as a mother tongue, and they were Roman Catholics.5
And it is from mother tongue that we obtain our best clues from American statistics as to the number of Poles who immigrated here. In the 1910 census, for example, persons were asked about their mother tongue. Of the more than thirteen million foreign-born white persons counted that year, more than nine hundred thousand (7 percent) told the census taker that Polish was their native tongue; and of 32 million persons of what the Bureau of the Census called foreign white stock—that is, second-generation Americans, the children of immigrants—some 1.7 million (5 percent) were the children of persons whose mother tongue was Polish. Table 8.1 summarizes the census findings for Poles.
As the table shows, almost 45 percent of the Polish immigrants came from Russia, 35 percent from Austria-Hungary, and 20 percent from Germany. The greater apparent rate of increase of second-generation German Poles—2.7 times foreign born vis-à-vis second-generation Russian and Austrian Poles—1.5 times foreign born—represents, not higher fertility on the part of German Poles but the fact that they came earlier and thus (1) more had completed their child production; and (2) more of the Germans would have died by then. What this and similar tables cannot show is immigrants who had come and returned before the census was taken. Archdeacon’s return rate for Poles is a fairly high 33 percent, so the probable discrepancy is quite high. Other mother tongues from Eastern Europe that show significant percentages (10 percent or more) coming from different states are Romanians, more than 50 percent from Romania, more than 33.3 percent from Hungary, and 9 percent from Austria (in this table, Austria means the Austro-Hungarian Empire minus Hungary); Slovaks, almost 66.6 percent from Hungary, the rest from Austria; Russian, almost 70 percent, not surprisingly, from Russia, but most of the rest from Austria; Serbo-Croat speakers, 75 percent from Austria, more than 12 percent from Hungary, and 10 percent from various Balkan states; and Bulgarian, almost 60 percent from Bulgaria, 30 percent from Turkey, and nearly 9 percent from Hungary. The distribution of Yiddish and Hebrew speakers will be discussed later.
Table 8.1
Country of Origin, Polish Mother Tongue, 1910 Census
COUNTRY OF ORIGIN |
FOREIGN BORN |
FOREIGN STOCK (2ND GENERATION) |
Russia |
418,370 |
655,733 |
Austria |
329,418 |
494,629 |
Germany |
190,096 |
513,466 |
Hungary |
2,637 |
4,005 |
England |
1,484 |
1,848 |
Canada |
471 |
636 |
France |
143 |
188 |
Romania |
137 |
188 |
At sea |
124 |
162 |
South America |
101 |
112 |
Other categoriesa |
800 |
1,327 |
Mixed foreignb |
— |
35,366 |
Total |
943,781 |
1,707,640 |
aThere are twenty-nine of these, ranging from “Country not specified,” 234 and 441, and “Europe not specified,” 78 and 179, to “Montenegro,” 2 and 2, and “Atlantic Islands,” 1 and 2.
bMixed foreign means, according to the census, native whites whose parents were born in different foreign countries. In this table, one or sometimes both parents spoke Polish as a mother tongue. Children of one foreign-born Polish speaker and a native-born American are not recorded here.
Table 8.2 looks at the mother tongue data from the 1910 census in a different way: It examines the languages spoken by immigrants and their children from the three European empires and Hungary. Although the mother-tongue enumeration is certainly not exact, nothing else in the American census gives so relatively clear a picture of the complexity of ethnic and linguistic stocks in Eastern and Southern Europe. More than seventy years later, in the 1980s, ethnic unrest would be making headlines from the Baltic to the Soviet Republics of Georgia and Armenia, and other ethnic conflicts attracted attention all over Europe, from the Basque provinces of Spain, to the Italian Tirol, to the frontier area between Romania and Hungary, and that between Bulgaria and Turkey. Unlike many of these groups, the stateless Poles brought to America a relatively high degree of national consciousness, a national consciousness nurtured by Poland’s long history as a sovereign nation prior to its partitions. Some other groups had a less developed self-consciousness, identifying, as did many Italians, with village or province rather than nation or ethnic group. As one immigrant spokesman told a meeting in Brooklyn just after World War I: “Us Slovaks didn’t know we were Slovaks until we came to America and they told us!”
Table 8.2
Foreign-Born White and Foreign White Stock, by Mother Tongue, from Russia, Austria, Germany, and Hungary, 1910
RUSSIA
MOTHER TONGUE |
FOREIGN BORN |
FOREIGN STOCK (2ND GENERATION) |
Yiddish and Hebrew |
838,193 |
1,317,157 |
Polish |
418,370 |
655,733 |
Lithuanian and Lettish |
137,046 |
204,070 |
German |
121,638 |
245,155 |
Russian |
40,542 |
65,612 |
Finnish |
5,865 |
8,861 |
Ruthenian |
3,402 |
4,798 |
Othera |
37,646 |
66,149 |
Total |
1,602,752 |
2,567,535 |
AUSTRIA
MOTHER TONGUE |
FOREIGN BORN |
FOREIGN STOCK (2ND GENERATION) |
Polish |
329,418 |
494,629 |
Bohemian and Moravian |
219,214 |
515,183 |
German |
157,917 |
275,002 |
Yiddish and Hebrew |
124,588 |
197,153 |
Slovenian |
117,740 |
174,943 |
Croatian |
64,295 |
81,094 |
Slovak |
55,766 |
110,829 |
Ruthenian |
17,199 |
23,793 |
Russian |
13,781 |
23,622 |
Serbian |
11,618 |
13,304 |
Slavic, not specified |
11,196 |
21,821 |
Italian |
10,774 |
17,182 |
Otherb |
41,448 |
73,305 |
Total |
1,174,924 |
2,021,860 |
GERMANY
MOTHER TONGUE |
FOREIGN BORN |
FOREIGN STOCK (2ND GENERATION) |
German |
2,260,256 |
7,725,598 |
Polish |
190,096 |
513,446 |
Yiddish and Hebrew |
7,910 |
15,510 |
Dutch and Frisian |
6,510 |
21,580 |
Bohemian and Moravian |
6,263 |
17,382 |
Danish |
5,232 |
9,766 |
French |
3,131 |
8,271 |
Lithuanian and Lettish |
1,486 |
3,840 |
Otherc |
20,297 |
115,073 |
Total |
2,501,181 |
8,430,466 |
HUNGARY
MOTHER TONGUE |
FOREIGN BORN |
FOREIGN STOCK (2ND GENERATION) |
Magyar |
227,742 |
318,596 |
Slovak |
107,954 |
168,636 |
German |
73,338 |
99,412 |
Yiddish and Hebrew |
19,896 |
32,539 |
Romanian |
15,679 |
16,613 |
Croatian |
9,034 |
11,140 |
Slavic, not specified |
6,837 |
9,367 |
Slovenian |
5,510 |
7,919 |
Servian |
5,018 |
5,613 |
Ruthenian |
4,465 |
6,616 |
Polish |
2,637 |
4,005 |
Otherd |
17,490 |
26,698 |
Total |
495,600 |
707,154 |
aIncludes 29,330 and 52,943 unknown.
bIndudes 30,672 and 59,021 unknown.
cIncludes 16,864 and 109,374 unknown.
dIncludes 12,374 and 18,687 unknown.
As was the case for so many other groups, a few Poles came to colonial America, including a handful in the very first colony at Jamestown and a group of Polish Protestants who came to participate in William Penn’s “Holy Experiment” in Pennsylvania in the first half of the eighteenth century. The first real impact of a Polish presence came during the American Revolution. About a hundred Poles with military experience came to participate in a fight for freedom that inspired many European liberals and revolutionaries. The two best known, both recruited by Benjamin Franklin in Paris, were Count Casimir Pulaski (1748–79), a cavalryman killed during the Battle of Savannah, and Tadeusz Kósciuszko (1746–1817), a military engineer who survived to lead a liberal insurrection against the Czarist forces in 1794. Other early Poles to come to America were refugees from later failed rebellions or insurrections in 1830 and 1863.
The first Polish American parish in America, in Texas southeast of San Antonio, was established by German Poles from Silesia, in 1854 and named Panna Maria after the Virgin. They and other Poles who came to Texas to found similar villages in subsequent years, were part of the 10 percent minority of Polish immigrants who settled on the land. Most of them were not landowners but agricultural laborers. German Poles also pioneered rural villages and enclaves in at least eleven other states, most of them in the north-central region.
These, and the majority of the Poles who settled in American cities, were largely impelled by economic motives, za chlebem (for bread), as the Poles said, which Eva Morawska has modified to “for bread, with butter.” As early as the 1850s some Poles referred to America as the land of the “golden mountains”; in the same decade the Chinese characters developed to stand for California may be translated in the same way. The mass movements of Poles can be seen as west-to-east movement within the partitioned areas, with first German Poles, then Austrian, and finally Russian Poles joining the exodus. As we have seen German Poles began to come in the 1850s and, all told, more than four hundred thousand landed, with perhaps seven-eighths of them arriving in the nineteenth century. The eight hundred thousand Poles from Austrian Galicia almost all arrived between 1890 and 1914—about half in the 1890s, the rest in the twentieth century. The emigration from Russian Poland was predominantly a twentieth-century phenomenon. More than three quarters of the eight hundred thousand from that territory arrived after 1900. Thus we are talking about from two to two and a half million ethnic Polish immigrants, of whom perhaps one-third returned to Poland. A Polish folk song, “When I Journeyed from America,” describes the return of a foundry worker; successive stanzas tell of his work, his departure from New York, arrival in Hamburg, passage across Europe, and arrival in Krakow:
There my wife was waiting for me.
And my children did not know me,
For they fled from me, a stranger.
“My dear children, I’m your papa;
Three long years I have not seen you.”6
Most Poles, of course, stayed, and settled primarily in the “rust belt.” Victor Greene, the leading scholar of Polish America, has estimated first and second generation Polish American urban settlement as follows:
Table 8.3
Seven Leading Polish American Population Centers, 1905 and 1920
CITY |
1905 |
1920 |
Chicago |
250,000 |
400,000 |
New York |
150,000 |
200,000 |
Pittsburgh |
70,000 |
125,000 |
Buffalo |
70,000 |
100,000 |
Milwaukee |
65,000 |
100,000 |
Detroit |
50,000 |
100,000 |
Cleveland |
30,000 |
50,000 |
While the primacy of Chicago’s Polonia was early established and remains unchallenged, the incidence of Poles in some smaller centers, such as Buffalo, was much higher, and in a few smaller cities, such as Hamtramck, Michigan, Polish Americans were the predominant ethnic group.
Polish immigrants often had the lowest or next to the lowest jobs. One anonymous letter from Brooklyn in a collection of contemporary letters sent back to Poland complained bitterly about conditions:
What people from America write to Poland is all bluster; there is not a word of truth. For in America Poles work like cattle. Where a dog does not want to sit, there the Pole is made to sit, and the poor wretch works because he wants to eat.
Yet, as the writer complained, this was not the majority report. Most Poles were induced to come to America by other Poles: priests, relatives, and friends. Greene reports that in 1908, for example, “virtually all” incoming Poles told immigration officials that they were joining family or friends.
As noted, the words Polish and Catholic are all but inseparable in describing the American ethnic group, but Polish American Catholicism was different. Poles often respected and followed their clergy—the beginnings of the Silesian settlement in Texas had been prompted by the Franciscan Leopold Mozygemba—but they also fought fiercely with them about lay control and other matters. One unfortunate priest, Joseph Dabroski, was the intended victim of an assassination plot in rural Wisconsin in 1870—disgruntled parishioners put hollowed-out logs filled with gunpowder in his woodpile—and was physically thrown out of a Detroit church by women parishioners when he tried to replace a popular priest. But Poles—and some Polish clergy—had a more fundamental quarrel with the American Church hierarchy—what many of them called, bitterly, “One Holy, Irish, Apostolic Church”—which did not, they felt, represent their interests. One Polish-born priest, Rev. Wenceslaus Kruska of Ripon, Wisconsin, put it nicely in a famous (or infamous, depending on one’s point of view) article he wrote just after the turn of the century, “Polyglot Bishops for a Polyglot Church.” He argued, “If a diocese is polyglot, the bishop must be polyglot, too.” He went so far as to insist that a bishop without language skills who took his chair in such a diocese was committing a mortal sin. What Kruska and many other Poles wanted was equal treatment within the ecclesiastical hierarchy, or, more pointedly, the appointment of Polish priests as American bishops. Kruska stayed within the church, but his statements seemed even more menacing to the established order because in the previous decade dissident Poles in Pennsylvania had begun the secession which became the only full-fledged schism to develop in American Catholicism: the formation in 1904 of the Polish National Catholic Church.
Although the standard history of American Catholicism writes off the schismatic church as arising out of a “quarrel over control of church property and ecclesiastical jurisdiction” the root of the matter was clearly Polish American nationalism and the feeling that American Poles were putting more into the church than they were getting out.7 The man who led the schism, Rev. Francis Hodur of Nanticoke in the Pennsylvania coal region, insisted:
The Polish people [should] control . . . all churches built and maintained by them; . . . the Polish people [should] administer their own church property, through a committee chosen by their own parishioners; . . . the Polish people [should] choose their own pastors.
By 1916 Hodur’s church had more than thirty parishes and perhaps thirty thousand communicants and half a century later had a quarter of a million adherents. These were, of course, but a fraction of the five million Polish Catholics then in the United States. And, it should be noted, the American hierarchy did react, without ever admitting that it had done so. In 1908, just four years after the schism was formalized, a Chicago priest, Paul Rhode, was appointed the first Polish American Catholic bishop.
The devotion of most Polish Americans to the church was demonstrated by their strong support for parochial schools. By 1921 the 511 schools in the 762 parishes that constituted Polish America taught 219,711 pupils, about two-thirds of Polish Americans’ schoolchildren. John Bukowczyk suggests that even this figure understates the influence of the parochial schools, as some immigrant children attended church schools for part of their education, especially while preparing for confirmation, and argues that, since classes were conducted largely in Polish, the system was “a veritable bulwark against assimilation.”
Nationalism also was the crucial issue among Polish secular organizations which were long oriented more to Polish politics than to American. And Poles in America were joiners. It has been estimated that by 1910 some seven thousand Polish ethnic organizations existed in America and that two-thirds of Polish Americans belonged to at least one of them. The two largest, the Polish National Alliance (PNA), founded in 1880, and the Polish Roman Catholic Union (PRCU), founded in 1873, had some 220,000 and 188,000 members respectively in the mid-1920s. For a long time the two organizations were bitter rivals, a rivalry that focused on what kind of Poland each envisaged. The PNA leaders tended to favor a middle-class, secular Poland; those of the PRCU envisaged a Poland under clerical leadership or tutelage. Their opposition was not polar and both groups lobbied—and lobbied effectively—with Woodrow Wilson, who called for the establishment of “an independent Polish state” after World War I, a goal all the elements in Polish America could and did support. But beneath the religious and the secular conflict lay a deeper question: Were the immigrants who stayed in America essentially Roman Catholic Poles or Polish Roman Catholics? Eventually, they became Polish Americans, but only in the 1930s would that term become part of the name of an important ethnic organization in the United States.
Although, as we have seen, most Poles were working people, they were generally in industries which were not organized until the drives of the CIO in the mid-1930s and after. Poles were not hostile to trade unions as such. In mining, the one unionized industry in which they were represented in any numbers, Poles were enthusiastic and loyal trade unionists, but the leadership of their unions remained almost completely British American until after World War II. Industrial employers had learned to play ethnic groups off against one another, hiring one national group for one kind of job, a second for another kind of job within the same plant. And the ethnic slurs—Polak, Hunky—of earlier immigrants and their children did nothing to promote solidarity among the multiethnic work forces. Similarly, in politics, Polish Americans had far less impact than their numbers would suggest. Even in Chicago, where every eighth person was a Polish American, no person of Polish birth or ancestry was elected to Congress until 1920. There were a number of reasons for this, including a low level of participation in American politics, a preoccupation with the politics of Poland on the part of many activists, the fact that many were not citizens in an age when alien suffrage was rapidly disappearing, and the desire to hold on to power by ethnic groups already established. All these reasons contributed to the relative lack of Polish clout measured, in the traditional American way, by success in gaining elective office and patronage positions. But Polish American nationalists might well reply that since their influence contributed to the existence of a new Poland they had achieved much in American politics.
Eastern European Jews
In 1880 there were perhaps two hundred fifty thousand Jews in the United States, a few of them descended from Jews who had come during the colonial period, and most of the rest German Jews and their descendants.8 Fewer than fifty thousand were from Eastern Europe. When, in 1924, Congress cut immigration from Eastern Europe down to almost nothing, there were perhaps four million Jews in the United States, more than three million of them Eastern Europeans and their children and grandchildren. Since neither the immigration records nor the census recorded religion, counting Jews is even more difficult than counting subject nationalities. Almost all Poles spoke Polish as a mother tongue, but Jews might record Yiddish—as most of the Jewish immigrants of those years surely did—or any one of a number of national languages: German, Russian, Romanian, and so on. Table 8.4 recapitulates the 1910 data on Yiddish and Hebrew as a mother tongue.
The Jews of Eastern Europe were impelled to migrate for two basic reasons: Like other contemporary Eastern European migrants they wanted to improve their standard of living; in addition, they fled from religious persecution that became more pronounced after 1881. The number of Eastern European Jews had increased dramatically during the nineteenth century, from perhaps 1.5 million to nearly 7 million, a rate of increase roughly twice that of the population generally. Their increased incidence was a factor in their persecution. Although few of these Jews were really well off, most were seen by their neighbors as having a better standard of living, and this made the poison of religious prejudice more effective. Some of that prejudice was fanned by churches and governments. The Russian government, particularly after the assassination of Czar Alexander II in 1881, became even more repressive, sponsoring pogroms and passing laws which restricted Jewish residential, occupational, and educational mobility. Decrees banished 20,000 Jews from Moscow in 1891, and later, more Jews from Saint Petersburg and Kharkov. In 1905 the outbreak of the Russo-Japanese War, the abortive revolution of that year plus a series of pogroms caused Jewish emigration from Russia to peak in 1906 at perhaps 150,000 persons. (In that same year about 275,000 Italians came; those two groups made up almost 40 percent of the 1.1 million immigrants of that year.)
Table 8.4
Country of Origin, Yiddish or Hebrew “Mother Tongue,” 1910 Census
COUNTRY OF ORIGIN |
FOREIGN BORN |
FOREIGN STOCK (2ND GENERATION) |
Russia |
838,193 |
1,317,157 |
Austria |
124,588 |
197,153 |
Romania |
41,342 |
56,524 |
Hungary |
19,896 |
32,539 |
England |
13,699 |
15,100 |
Germany |
7,910 |
15,510 |
Canada |
1,434 |
1,541 |
33 other categoriesa |
4,705 |
5,870 |
Mixed foreignb |
— |
35,368 |
Total |
1,051,767 |
1,676,762 |
aThis includes five of each generation from Japan.
bMixed foreign means, according to the census, native whites whose parents were born in different foreign countries. In this table, one or both parents spoke either Yiddish or Hebrew as a mother tongue. Children of one foreign-born Yiddish or Hebrew speaker and a native-born American are not recorded here.
Migration was physically difficult for the Eastern European Jews. Not only were distances to the ports of embarkation long, but serious legal difficulties often presented themselves. One example will have to suffice. Jews from the Ukraine might simply have gone to the Black Sea port of Odessa and embarked for the United States from there. However, most traveled west, often through Austria-Hungary—avoiding Romania where the border guards had a deserved reputation for brutality—to German ports. They did so because the sea voyage was longer and more expensive from Odessa than from Hamburg or Bremen, and Russian passport control was unpleasant, especially for young men of military age. Most Russian Jews who emigrated in these years probably did not have the necessary papers, so that most of them were crossing borders illegally. However, for a determined emigrant crossing a border rarely presents an insuperable problem. In addition, in this instance, Jewish emigration was good business for German shipowners, so the government often winked at illegal border crossing. The immigrants traveled across Germany on sealed trains as they were not welcome there. Albert Ballin’s Hamburg-America Line alone was making an annual profit of ten million marks on the emigrant trade by the 1890s, and much of that trade was Eastern European Jews.9
The Jews who left Russia were not representative of the population there; as is usually true of emigrants they were young, with some seven out of ten between the ages of fourteen and forty. Those with industrial skills, usually in the needle trades, were more likely to emigrate, those in mercantile pursuits less likely. Arthur Goren has suggested that nearly a third of employed Russian Jews were mercantile, but only about a twentieth of all Russian Jewish emigrants were. Conversely only two-fifths of the Russian Jewish population was skilled while nearly two-thirds of Russian Jewish immigrants with occupations were skilled.
Apart from their religion, what most clearly set Jews off from other contemporary migrants was their great propensity to stay in the United States. There is a general consensus among scholars that about one Jewish emigrant in twenty returned to Europe, and some of those were sure to emigrate again later. Of all the other ethnic groups of the period for whom return rates have been calculated, only the Irish have a rate below 10 percent. Among other Eastern Europeans the remigration rates were higher: 20 percent for Lithuanians; 36 percent for Slovaks; 66 percent for Romanians; and a high of some 87 percent for several Balkan nationalities. A corollary of the permanence of Jewish migration was the large number of females who came, although fathers and/or older sons would often lead the way. Females have been calculated at 45 percent of Jewish migration; only the Irish, whose later migration contained large numbers of single women, had a higher rate, 55 percent. About 33 percent of Lithuanians were female, about 35 percent of Slovaks, 16 percent of Romanians, and just under 10 percent of several Balkan groups.
Unlike the relatively dispersed German Jews of midcentury, the Eastern European Jewish immigrants settled overwhelmingly in New York and other cities in the Northeast and Midwest. Most came through Ellis Island and perhaps seven out of ten stayed in New York City. It has been estimated that a quarter of American Jews lived in New York in 1860, about a third lived there in 1880 and close to half in 1920. In the latter year about three-fifths of Jewish Americans lived in the region from Boston to Baltimore; in terms of incidence, Jews were about a quarter of New York’s population, a tenth or more of the populations of Cleveland, Newark, Boston, Baltimore, and Philadelphia, and just under a tenth for Chicago. Most were members of the working poor and crowded into ethnic enclaves that were breeding grounds for disease and crime. In 1910 more than five hundred thousand Jews were wedged into tenements in the 1.5 square miles of New York’s Lower East Side. The five- and six-story walk-up tenements, often without hot water and with only one toilet on a floor, were divided into three- and four-room apartments that were dark and often served as workplace as well as living quarters for families with four or more children and boarders as well. One 1908 survey showed that in a quarter of the apartments two people slept in each room, in half three or four slept in each room, and in a quarter there were five or more. Similar conditions prevailed in Jewish neighborhoods elsewhere and in most contemporary large city immigrant neighborhoods.10
That generation of Eastern Europe Jews lived in a Jewish world in which Yiddish was the medium of communication and most contacts were with other Jews. Goren quotes a 1905 observer who noted:
Almost every newly arrived Russian Jewish laborer comes into contact with a Russian Jewish employer, almost every Russian tenement dweller must pay his exorbitant rent to a Jewish landlord.
This was a different pattern than that experienced by most other contemporary immigrants, who might have a padrone or straw boss of their own ethnicity but did not generally toil for fellow ethnic entrepreneurs. The vertical socioeconomic structure of the American Jewish community was heightened by the Jewish concentration in the garment industry. In New York City alone before World War I, perhaps three-quarters of the more than three hundred thousand garment workers were Eastern European Jews. Likewise, most of the industry’s sixteen thousand factories, or shops as they were called, belonged to Eastern European Jews. One of the great industrial tragedies of the era, the Triangle Shirt Waist fire of 1911, in which 146 workers, almost all young women, were burned to death or died leaping from high windows in the sight of horrified crowds, took place in one of those Jewish shops.
These conditions, and the fact that many of the urbanized skilled workers who came had already had exposure to socialist ideas, led to the relatively early organization of garment workers roughly a generation before other mass-production industries were organized. These garment worker unions were largely Jewish unions with Jewish leaders. Gary Fink’s Biographical Directory of American Labor Leaders (1980) lists no fewer than thirty-nine foreign-born Russian Jews, four of them women; by comparison, only five German-born persons are listed, none of them Jews. The other great economic concentration of these Jewish immigrants was in retail trade, which accounted for perhaps a fifth of the gainfully employed. These retailers ranged from ragged pushcart vendors and peddlers to proprietors of substantial stores. From the earliest days of their migration there was thus a significant entrepreneurial element among the Eastern Europeans, but most were, in Mike Gold’s memorable phrase, “Jews without money.”
The culture of the Eastern European Jews, both religious and secular, was quite different from that of the Jews of Germany and other Western European countries and even more different from that which had been developed by the highly acculturated American Jewish community with its largely German and Iberian roots. The newcomers from Eastern Europe were poor, had a communal tradition that had been nurtured in the shtetls—largely self-contained rural communities—and their religious observances often had a messianic fervor foreign to the more staid American Jews, whether of the Orthodox, Reform, or emerging Conservative persuasion. In addition, the ideology of many of the newcomers, particularly those who had come from the cities of western Russia or Russian Poland, was socialist or Zionist or both. American Jewry, on the other hand, was essentially bourgeois and anti-Zionist. A great deal has been written, much of it by the grandchildren of the Eastern Europeans, about the conflicts between the “uptown” or German-American-Jewish leadership and the masses of “downtown” Eastern European Jews and their leadership. That these conflicts were real and deeply felt is beyond any question. That most of the German-American-Jewish leaders patronized the newcomers and were embarrassed by their squalor and their enthusiasms—religious and political—and sneered at their language—Yiddish—as a “jargon,” and that the Eastern European Jews knew and resented this, are among the basic facts of the communal history of American Jewry.
But it is often forgotten that the existence of an established American Jewish community, no matter how condescending and patronizing it might be, was of great advantage to the Eastern European newcomers—an advantage most other contemporary immigrant groups did not have. The “uptowners” gave financial assistance right from the start, just as Jews in Germany had formed organizations like the Hamburg Jewish Committee for the Support of Destitute Jewish Emigrants. Even though some of the initial distaste of the uptowners for their coreligionists was stimulated at least in part by fears that resentment of the newcomers would heighten American anti-Semitism, both groups joined to fight a growing anti-Semitism in twentieth-century America. One important uptown leader, Louis Marshall (1856—1929), became in the process the first civil rights lawyer in American history, combating discrimination in the courts in cases that involved not only the rights of Jews but of Catholics, Asians, and blacks. This collaboration produced, in 1906, the American Jewish Committee, the first national organization that claimed—and still claims—to speak for all American Jews. In 1915, a rival group, the American Jewish Congress, was founded by American Zionists and drew its greatest support from the Eastern European Jewish community. Its leaders, however, were long established American Jews such as the native-born Louis D. Brandeis (1856–1941) and the Hungarian-born, American-educated Rabbi Stephen S. Wise (1874–1949). And, despite continuing differences, American Jews were unified in helping Jews overseas, particularly in Russia and Eastern Europe. The American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee raised and disbursed more than sixty million dollars for their relief during and immediately after World War I.
But most downtown communal activity was micro- rather than macro-organizational. Most characteristic were landsmanschaftn, organizations of persons who came from the same town (landsleit). These organizations were both sacred and secular. Most of the synagogues on the Lower East Side—one 1907 survey found 326—were basically for landsleit, some of them so small that they had difficulty in maintaining a minyan, the ten “adult” Jewish males necessary to hold formal religious services. Both these and secular landsmanschaftn performed the kinds of communal services as had the associational groupings of earlier immigrants: They helped greenhorns find jobs and learn the ropes, provided interest-free loans and sick and death benefits, established cemetaries or burial plots, and, not least, provided a familiar setting in an alien land.
The establishment of relatively large and contiguous urban enclaves of Jews transformed the face of American Jewry. While Jews had participated in American politics with some individual successes, they did not generally represent ethnic constituencies. Certainly none of the six Jews who sat in the United States Senate before World War I—David Levy Yulee, who represented Florida (1845–51; 1855–61); Judah Philip Benjamin and Benjamin Franklin Jones who represented Louisiana (1853–61 and 1879–85); Joseph Simon of Oregon (1898–1903); Maryland’s Isidor Rayner (1905–12); and Simon Guggenheim from Colorado (1907–13)—was a surrogate for any large body of Jewish voters. This began to change in the twentieth century: The Congress that declared war in 1917, for example, contained six Jews in the House of Representatives. Four of them clearly represented ethnic communities in New York, New Jersey, and Chicago; one of them, the Socialist Meyer London, was the darling of the Lower East Side.
Many have written—and some still write—as if all Eastern Europe Jews were devoted adherents of their religion. Such was not the case with Jews any more than for any other large immigrant group. Many of the earliest immigrants were the most secularized, the least traditional, persons in their communities who had only what the great Berlin rabbi, Leo Baeck, called Milieu-Frömmigkeit, piety by association. A distinct minority were agnostics or atheists, who scandalized most of their neighbors with such goings-on as Yom Kippur balls. Rabbinical authorities in Eastern Europe did their best to discourage emigration to what one called the trefa (ritually impure) land. Another rabbi, who actually came to America to see for himself, went back after writing a tract designed to inhibit immigration, which Jonathan Sarna has recently translated as People Walk on Their Heads. A recent writer in the American Jewish Yearbook has noted that the immigrants conspicuously neglected Jewish education (while eagerly embracing the American public school system) and usually failed to provide adequate mikvoth, ritual baths for women. Joseph Blau’s conclusion on this matter is judicious: “Accounts of the extreme religiosity of the immigrants of the 1880–1914 wave [have been] greatly exaggerated.”
The enthusiasm with which most Jews participated in American education is one of the hallmarks of American Jewish history and a key to their relatively rapid upward social mobility. As a people of the book, Jews had traditionally respected the learned man in ways that some other cultures do not. In addition, the bar mitzvah, the traditional rite of passage by which young Jewish men were publicly proclaimed adults, required the candidate to read aloud a passage from the Hebrew scriptures, so that most Jewish men achieved at least marginal literacy. Although the great flowering of Jewish intellectual activity in the United States would be largely a product of later generations, even by the 1920s Jewish academic success was so pronounced that Harvard, Yale, and other elite institutions were establishing quotas to keep the number of Jewish students below a certain level. Nevertheless, Jews were already overrepresented in these colleges, as they soon would be in certain of the learned professions, notably law and medicine.
One Jewish American writer, Abraham Cahan (1860–1951), a graduate of a Russian teacher’s college before he came to America in 1882, was influential in both Yiddish and English at the very height of the Eastern European migrations. His novel The Rise of David Levinsky (1917), which was first published in Yiddish, is one of the most important immigrant novels. He is, however, best known for the Jewish Daily Forward, a Yiddish newspaper, which he founded in 1897 and edited for the rest of his life, save for an early four-year interval. Its peak circulation of 175,000 made it the largest foreign language daily of its time—during World War I there were four other Yiddish dailies in New York City—and its influence on the Jewish masses is hard to overestimate. Anthologies today almost always print examples from its delightful letters-to-the-editor column, called a Bintel Brief (a bundle of letters), which include answers that are a guide to life in America. (That some of the letters were fabricated in the Forward office is beside the point.) What is too often ignored is the fact that the Forward was a socialist paper. While the following twenty-fifth birthday tribute to the Forward, by its longtime managing editor, B. Charney Vladeck (1886–1938), is obviously biased, it nevertheless gives some notion of the role the newspaper played in the community.
The Forward steadily grew to be a great leader of the Jewish masses. Conditions in New York shops fifteen and twenty years ago were appalling—long hours, unsanitary lofts, brutal treatment on the part of the employers and foremen and utter lack of self-respect and self-confidence. Under the leadership of the Forward the scattered and demoralized masses of Jewish immigrants in New York and elsewhere began to acquire spirit and to organize. . . . The Forward led every strike. It served the purpose of a large trumpet which warned of danger and summoned help. It was with the working immigrant in his shop, on the picket line, at his home. It collected money for strikers, and it created for them a favorable public opinion. It lifted the Jewish immigrant from the position of a slave and competitor to the American working man, to the position of leader and forerunner in the American Labor Movement.
The Forward survives today only as a pale weekly shadow of its former self. Its multistoried building on the Lower East Side has long since been sold and, symbolic of the ethnic succession among New York’s immigrants, its exposed side is now emblazoned with a large sign that says, in Chinese characters, “Jesus Saves”: The building is headquarters for a group seeking to Christianize Chinese immigrants.11
Many Jewish immigrants, however, never worked for others, and many more quickly left labor’s ranks. Large numbers were petty tradesmen, and, in the garment industry, others soon became substantial entrepreneurs. Young immigrant Jews were among the first to show motion pictures in “theaters” hastily set up in vacant stores, and others soon began to make films. Most of the major studios in Hollywood were founded, or were soon controlled, by immigrant Jewish magnates such as Samuel Goldwyn, Carl Laemmle, and Harry Warner. There was no particular reason for Jews to become moviemakers: It was simply an economic niche, an opportunity, that developed just at the time when many ambitious Jews were, so to speak, “on the make.” (The same could be said for the other prominent immigrants in the business, Greeks like the Skouras brothers or the theater magnate Alexander Pantages.)
Jews also attained prominence on the performing side of the entertainment world. There was an important Yiddish theater both in Europe and in New York, the latter noted for imperious stars such as Jacob Adler, Maurice Schwartz, and Molly Picon, who played in original Yiddish works as well as a repertoire in translation ranging from Shakespeare, Chekov, and Ibsen to turgid melodrama. Few of its personnel ever made the transition to the English language stage and many did not want to. But from Broadway and Tin Pan Alley to Hollywood and Vine, Jewish creative talent was very important. In the musical theater, for example, immigrants such as composer Irving Berlin and the singer Sophie Tucker were important pioneers, to be followed by second-generation figures such as Jerome Kern and Fanny Brice. And a list of important Jewish American comedians, many of whom started in vaudeville, would have to begin with the Marx Brothers and go on almost indefinitely.
One other area of particular Jewish American influence must be noted: the burgeoning field of social work and social reform. Here were joined together middle-class children of German Jewish immigrants, such as Julia Richman (1855–1912) and Lillian Wald (1867–1940), and immigrant Eastern Europeans such as Boris Bogen (1869–1929) and Jacob Billikopf (1883–1951). In no other professional field were Jewish American women so important. While some were clearly in the “lady bountiful” tradition of Anglo-American social work and none of those mentioned here had the professional training that began to become available around the turn of the century, their role as mediators between the immigrant masses and middle-class society cannot be overestimated. Belle Moscowitz (1877–1933), today best remembered as a “brain truster” for the Irish American politician Alfred E. Smith, is one such person. She had previously been a worker for the Jewish Educational Alliance and an investigator of Lower East Side dancehalls. She also became an expert on factory legislation and was employed for a time as an official of the famous “protocol” that brought peace—or at least an armed truce—between employers and employees in the New York garment industry.12
Hungarian Americans
Hungarian—Magyar—immigrants are, in one sense, more representative of emigration from Eastern Europe than are either Poles or Jews. Males were highly predominant among the Magyars (about two-thirds), and nearly half of them returned to Hungary, some of them, to be sure, to return again to America. Unlike most Eastern European nationalities, Magyars are found in significant numbers in only one nation, Hungary. The data from the 1910 census show, in Tables 8.1 and 8.2, that more than 99 percent of those immigrants claiming Magyar as a mother tongue emigrated from Hungary and that, conversely, Magyars were a minority (46 percent) of immigrants from Hungary.13
There was a small Hungarian presence as early as the American Revolution, when several professional soldiers came, including the cavalryman Mihály Kováts de Fabricy, killed in the battle of Charleston in 1779. Later, there was an occasional entrepreneur such as Agaston Haraszthy (1821–69), who introduced Hungarian Tokay grapes to California and became a pioneer winemaker. But the first Hungarians to arrive in any number were political refugees, followers of Lajos Kossuth after the failed revolutions of 1848. Kossuth himself, after a triumphal tour of the United States, returned to Europe, but hundreds stayed. Many of them, military veterans, were among the roughly eight hundred Hungarians who served in the Union Army during the Civil War. These men left few traces after the war and established no communities. Hungarian America really began with labor migration in the late nineteenth century.
Worsening economic conditions in Hungary after 1880 and the attraction of relatively high-paying jobs in the United States drew, first of all, members of ethnic minorities in Hungary to the United States. After some of these began to send home remittances, and the worsening economic conditions extended to the better-off Magyars, the latter, too, began to come to America. Hungarian statistics show that in 1899 only one emigrant in four was a Magyar speaker, but by 1903 they comprised a majority. They, too, sent home remittances, and these began to transform the rural economy of their local regions. In one county alone, Veszprém, more than half a million dollars were received from America in 1903. While some of this surely went to buy railway and steamship tickets, some settled overdue taxes, reduced mortgages, bought land, and improved old houses and built new ones—all of which, of course, increased the attractions of America for those who remained.
This Magyar migration was short lived, extending from the late 1890s to the outbreak of World War I. In that time more than 450,000 Hungarians came. Most were under thirty, and the immigration data show that more than 88 percent were literate, about 30 percent higher than the rate for Hungary as a whole. Coming largely without industrial skills, they, like members of most other Eastern European ethnic groups, took dirty, dangerous jobs at wages that were low for America but high for Hungary. Initially they worked long hours, spent little, and saved relatively large amounts to send or take back home with them. Like so many others, most Hungarians clearly came intending to sojourn, and obviously many did. Many others stayed, whatever their original intention, and soon began establishing families and communities. While many Hungarians started in coal mining, more eventually worked in heavy industry in the Northeast and Middle West. Ohio in general and Cleveland in particular became a focal point of Hungarian American settlement, with churches, both Catholic and Protestant, and beneficial organizations in the typical American immigrant pattern we have seen before.
Because of the superb work done by the Hungarian scholar, Julianna Puskás, we can use a Hungarian American extended family case history to illustrate concretely an important and usually neglected aspect of the phenomenon of immigration to America—the complex pattern of relationships and residence that a pattern of sojourning could create. No one knows enough to say precisely how representative the family experience described below was, but it was clearly not a unique instance.
Puskás tells us of one Lajos P., born into a farming family in 1883, the youngest of seven children. In 1903 he left for America (he may have been there before), where he already had a sister. He went to West Virginia and worked in mines there. He also encountered there a young woman from his own village, Lea L., who bore their illegitimate daughter, probably in 1905. By 1908 Lajos P. had abandoned them and returned to Hungary, where he married Hermina A. They lived with his parents on the family farm and had two sons, Jozsef P. (1911) and Lászlo (1912). In 1913 Lajos P. and his wife returned to the United States, but left their sons with the grandparents. Lajos and Hermina first returned to West Virginia, but then moved from job to job. The couple had three more sons, each in a different town: Lajos, Jr., in Placement, New Jersey (1915); Ferenc (1917) in Philadelphia, and István in New Brunswick, New Jersey (1919). Shortly after that the couple and their three American-born sons returned to the native village in Hungary, and the family of seven was reunited. With money saved they built a house and purchased about an acre and a half of land. The middle son, Lajos, the eldest born in America, attended a university and became a Protestant minister. The other four completed only elementary school. In 1938 and 1939 the two youngest boys born in America returned to the United States. As they were native-born citizens, they were able to obtain American passports and were neither reflected in the immigration data nor affected by the quota system. At least one of them served in the U.S. Army during World War II, both married Hungarian American women, and they and their descendants still live in the United States. In the meantime, Lea L., the mother of Lajos P.’s illegitimate daughter, Julianna, had returned to their common village in the early 1920s and brought their daughter with her. As Puskás puts it, “The village knew who the father was.” Lea married a man from the village and they had four children. Julianna also married, but the marriage was not a success; in 1937 or 1938 she remarried and, soon after, used an American passport to return to her native country and shortly thereafter her husband was able to join her. As the husband of an American citizen, he was admissible without reference to the quota.14
As this complex family tale demonstrates in petto, the notion that people either came or did not come is far too simple. Generalizing about this Hungarian village she studied, Puskás notes that the migration of couples and family from there was unusual. A more typical pattern was for the siblings in a large family to migrate serially at intervals of a year or more; most were either married men or single young men and women. If the single immigrants got married in America, as most of them did, they were more likely to stay there. The married men most often returned to their families in Hungary. If a couple came to America, they often, as Lajos and Hermina P. did, left children with grandparents and returned with their American-born children.
In the subsequent decades very different kinds of immigrants came from Hungary. In the 1920s and 1930s refugees from the Horthy regime and later from Nazism came to the United States. Perhaps fifteen thousand in number, these included some very distinguished intellectuals. Leo Szilard (1898–1964), the physicist who encouraged Albert Einstein to write President Franklin D. Roosevelt about the necessity of the United States developing an atomic bomb, was only one of a number of distinguished scientists from Hungary who aided the United States during World War II and after. Others included two leading atomic physicists, Eugene Wigner (1902–95) and Edward Teller (1908– ), and the distinguished mathematician and game theorist, John von Neumann (1903–47). There were also a number of important figures in the world of music and the theater, including one of the twentieth century’s greatest composers, Béla Bartók (1881–1945), Hungary’s most noted playwright, Ferenc Molnár (1878–1952), and five men who made their reputations as conductors of American symphony orchestras: Fritz Reiner (1888–1963), George Szell (1897–1970), Eugene Ormandy (1899–1985), Antal Doráti (1906–1988), and Georg Solti (1912–97). Many of these, of course, were Hungarian Jews.
In the years immediately after World War II some twenty thousand Hungarians were among the displaced persons and other refugees admitted to the United States, while after the failed Hungarian Revolution of 1956 some thirty-five thousand persons, many of them freedom fighters who had resisted the Soviet occupation forces, also came to the United States. Needless to say, few of these returned to Europe. While some have settled in places where long-standing Hungarian American communities exist, such as Cleveland or New York, many others settled, or were settled by various voluntary agencies, in other parts of the country, including the Sun Belt of the South and West.
Similar capsule histories could be written about most of the other immigrant groups from Eastern Europe mentioned at the beginning of this chapter. I say “most” only because some of them are still awaiting their first historian. And each history would be somewhat different from the others, just as biographies differ. For Finns, for example, one would note their settlement pattern in the Great Lakes region, and how many of them either came here as convinced socialists or were converted by others after they came. Although the stereotype of the Jewish immigrant radical is widespread and has some historical basis, on a per capita basis Finnish American radicalism was much more pronounced. But what these groups have in common may be as important or almost as important as their differences. All came at a time when backbreaking physical labor was the rule in American industry under conditions that present-day American workers can hardly imagine. In the steel industry, for example, well into the 1920s, many workers—mostly immigrant and black workers—worked 12-hour shifts. As the open hearths ran twenty-four hours a day, there were no shut-down days. Workers got every other Sunday off but at a price: a thirty-six-hour shift around that other Sunday.
Nor were immigrant women exempt from toil. Married Eastern European women made important economic contributions, largely by keeping boarders. One study of Johnstown, Pennsylvania, by the federal government before World War I showed that fewer than a third of all immigrant households drew their entire income from the husband’s earnings. Nearly half relied on the combined earnings from husbands and boarders, while the rest had contributions from children and other sources. Eva Morawska reports that the typical income derived from boarders in that era was about five dollars a month per boarder, and that many kept five or more boarders. (Twenty-five dollars a month would be between two-thirds and three-fourths of a husband’s earnings.) Her research shows that, in Johnstown, 10 percent of boarder-keepers had ten or more boarders, and one woman she interviewed reported that her mother had kept fifty boarders in a three-story house with four bedrooms.
Single immigrant women also scrimped and saved. Of the quarter of Johnstown’s immigrant women who were single, Morawska reports:
They stayed with relatives or boarded with fellow immigrants from the home country. For the single woman, the source of income was housework, cooking, or working in the cigar factory . . . or in the match factory. . . . If they could read and write, young immigrant women could work as clerks and cashiers in the neighborhood stores. Young women working as housemaids and servants received $2.00 to $3.00 a week with board. In the local cigar and match factories, a young foreign woman could make as much as $4.00 to $5.00 a week. In a store, if she was not working for a relative who paid her nothing, earnings were also about $4.00 or $5.00 a week. According to an estimate made by the local newspaper in 1913, a single American woman needed an absolute minimum of $10.00 a month to support herself ($2.50 for rent, $5.00 for food, $1.50 for clothes, $.75 for church and other purposes, $.25 for insurance.) A young immigrant woman, spending no more than $2.00 for a “cot with the family” in the foreign colony and about $3.00 for food plus the maximum of $1.00 for clothing, $.25 for insurance, and $.25 for church, needed even less. A thrifty East Central European housemaid could then, have saved $50.00 to $90.00 a year. . . . The cigar and match factories, if they worked steadily for at least ten months a year, allowed their young women employees willing to reduce spending to the bare minimum to save $90.00 to $130.00 annually.15
All these groups had their immigration process short-circuited, first by the outbreak of World War I, and second, by the curtailment of the immigration of their groups by the American government in 1921 and 1924. This happened at a time when many of their communities were nascent, while sex ratios were still heavily male, and before the emergence of a large adult second generation. The Great Depression of the 1930s, in any event, would have brought one stage of American economic growth to a halt. These were, until very recently, the last European groups to come to the United States as economically motivated immigrants; most of those after them, such as the latter-day Hungarians, would be refugees.