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    Boston's Immigrants: 1840-1925
    Boston's Immigrants: 1840-1925
    Boston's Immigrants: 1840-1925
    Ebook204 pages57 minutes

    Boston's Immigrants: 1840-1925

    By Michael Price and Anthony Mitchell Sammarco

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    Boston is a city rich in the history of residents from all walks of life, every country and every ethnicity imaginable. From 1840 to 1925, Boston's diversity created a city with a thriving nexus of people who wove together a community that reflected their own unique heritage. In this lavishly illustrated book with over 200 thought-provoking and evocative photographs, Anthony Mitchell Sammarco and Michael Price have created an important book chronicling the determination, strength, and often manifold successes of immigrants who arrived in Boston. From the mid-nineteenth century when Boston's burgeoning population included one out of every three as being foreign born, the immigrants' arrival at the East Boston docks increased greatly between 1840 and 1925, where they were to pass into the New World, and a new life. In chapters that deal with the immigrants before their arrival, their first perceptions, to where they went, worked, and played, this book outlines the ancestors of many present-day Bostonians in the evolving process of Americanization.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherArcadia Publishing
    Release dateOct 30, 2000
    ISBN9781439620250
    Boston's Immigrants: 1840-1925
    Author

    Michael Price

    Dr. Michael Price holds a BA in History from West Liberty State College (WV), a MA in American History from West Virginia University, a Master of Divinity from Brite Divinity School, Texas Christian University, and an Ed.D. in Higher Education Administration from the George Washington University. During nearly a quarter century of parish ministry, Price has served churches in Louisiana, Virginia, and North Carolina. Currently, he is the Senior Minister at the First Christian Church in Washington, NC.

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      Book preview

      Boston's Immigrants - Michael Price

      Archives.)

      INTRODUCTION

      Boston is a city of immigrants, be they descended from the Puritans who settled the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1630 or immigrants who have recently settled here from Asia, Europe, Africa, or South America. Today, the city is again experiencing an increase in immigration. In the late 19th century, however, immigration had practically ceased after nearly 150 years of steady increase. In the first wave of immigration, between 1830 and 1860, Boston’s population increased more than 200 percent, primarily by immigration from Great Britain, Ireland, and Germany. The second wave, between 1860 and 1890, included British, Scandinavians, Germans, Austrians, and northern Europeans. The third wave occurred between 1890 and 1918 and included Slavs, Jews from Poland and Russia, and Italian and Greek immigrants. However, immigration was severely impacted by a 1924 law that restricted new immigrants to those from northern Europe.

      Boston is rich in the history of people from all walks of life, from almost every country, and from every ethnicity imaginable. Following the incorporation of Boston as a city in 1822, the city’s steadily increasing population and diversity of those seeking refuge from the Old World in the period between 1840 and 1925, created a thriving nexus of cultures that wove together a unique community. The United States, and Boston in particular, has often been referred to as a City of Nations. From the initial settlements in the New World in the 17th century by western Europeans seeking freedom of worship, over the next three centuries, America would attract people from all parts of the world, broadening Boston’s ethnicities and religions. By the mid-19th century, Boston’s burgeoning population was made up of one-third foreign-born residents.

      Often immigrants were rural peasants who were economically depressed. When positive publicity about life in the New World reached them, they set out on a journey that would change their lives forever. Fleeing political unrest and insecurity, often religious persecution and with hopes of a better life elsewhere, many immigrants traveled to the New World in the hopes of making money and eventually returning home. However, in most instances, these immigrants arrived, married, raised families, and remained in their adopted country. With their language, customs, and traditions, these immigrants wove together a community that created a support system within the alien and sometimes hostile New World.

      In this book with more than 200 photographs, the authors, Michael Price and Anthony Mitchell Sammarco, have endeavored to create an important and visually stimulating book that chronicles the determination, strength, and often manifold successes of immigrants who arrived in Boston. In chapters dealing with the immigrants before they came to Boston as well as their arrival, their perceptions, and where they worked and played, this book outlines the ancestors of many present-day Bostonians in the evolving process of Americanization.

      Mary Antin said in her book The Promised Land that upon arrival in America, she and her family gratefully exchanged our hateful homemade European costumes, which pointed us out as ‘greenhorns’ to the children on the streets for real American machine-made garments, and issued forth glorified in each others eyes. (Italics added.) (Courtesy of the Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University.)

      One

      BEFORE ARRIVAL

      Immigrants who arrived in Boston between 1840 and 1925 came from a wide array of countries, often with distinct reasons for leaving their native country. The Canadians in the early 1840s sought employment, and many became shipbuilders and carpenters in East Boston. The Irish began a long immigration in the late 1840s to avoid the famine caused by the failed potato crop. The Swedish sought land, which their native country lacked. The Germans fled the tyranny and social upheavals that led to the Revolution of 1848. The Chinese fled disorder and violence. The Italians and Spanish fled futility, and the Russian and Polish Jews fled oppression and tyranny.

      According to the Boston Herald in a somewhat patronizing article on April 14, 1896, the immigrants arriving in Boston on the ship Caphalonia were composed of

      women wrapped in shawls, bare-headed girls and girls with theatre hats of wirework; brawny, awkward men in high-cut waistcoats and hobnailed boots. They were a strong, clean, healthy-looking set—Irish and English and Scandinavian, with a dozen Italians—642 of them, with ruddy, expectant faces. Most of them were blue-eyed, Celts and Saxons, with well-knit figures and high cheek bones. Several of the girls were quite pretty; their frank, eager countenances and smiling mouths were worth walking a long way to look upon. The men were solid and slow-moving, a hard-headed lot—none of your jaunty, nervous cockneys, but men. And they stood in line, and waited their turn, patiently and well-behaved.

      However, less than a decade later in 1903, when the immigrants were more apt to be southern European or Slavic, it was said the comparatively unrestricted tide of immigration into the United States is in general a menace to the social and industrial life. With an average of 50,000 or more immigrants annually arriving in Boston, it was thought that these hopeful immigrants, who were often illiterate and unskilled, would create a surplus work force and hinder the economy of Massachusetts. The immigrants were stereotyped, often slanderously, in the press with written work and crude political cartoons.

      The Emigrant Girl was sketched for the cover page of the February 26, 1859 edition of O’Neill’s Irish Pictorial. In the two decades before the Civil War, Boston’s population was doubled with many thousands of Irish immigrants arriving between 1847 and 1860. They sought a better life from the suffering, hunger, and misery in Ireland that followed the failure of the potato crop in the 1840s, often referred to as the Great Hunger.

      This Irish harvest scene in Kilkenny, Ireland, was sketched in 1852 for Gleason’s Pictorial Drawing Room Companion. The scene, according to the accompanying

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