AMERICA 1900-1910 -- 'THE IMMIGRANTS' ORDEAL' (Part 1)

SEIFERT

Posted By: David (email)
Date: 3/7/2004 at 21:15:50

'AMERICA 1900-1910'

'The Newcomers'

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THE IMMIGRANTS' ORDEAL

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Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free. Send . . . homeless, tempest-tossed, to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!

-- Inscription on the Statue of Liberty.

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The scum of creation has been dumped on us. The most dangerous and corrupting hordes of the Old World have invaded us. The vice and crime which they have planted in our midst are sickening and terrifying.

--Native-Born Politician Thomas Watson.

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"Becoming an American," wrote a grateful but case-hardened immigrant, "is a spiritual adventure of the most volcanic variety." Heedless of such cautionings, some nine million immigrants came knocking at America's "golden door" between 1900 and 1910. Many were so poor that they could barely scrape together their fare in steerage -- sums as small as $12 for the voyage from Italy. But all were irresistibly drawn by the conviction that in America they would find what the old country had denied them.

What they found in America severely tested the immigrants' faith -- and their courage and stamina as well. For most of the newcomers, the ordeal of Americanization began on a bleak scrap of real estate in New York harbor, Ellis Island. In l907, more than a million immigrants poured through the island's overtaxed processing facilities. Once admitted to the "Land of Opportunity," most newcomers were doomed to years of toil (12-hour days and six- or seven-day weeks), at subsistence pay (an average of less than $12.50 a week), in the garment-making sweatshops of New York, in the coal mines of Wilkes-Barre, in the spinning mills of Fall River and the grimy factories and slaughterhouses of Pittsburgh, Chicago and other Midwestern cities.

Though the immigrants were welcomed by Americans of good will, they also met with plain and fancy prejudice. Xenophobic natives ridiculed their alien ways, and regarded them as subhuman animals. Men as influential as Senator Henry Cabot Lodge lent prestige to bigotry by insisting that the latter-day immigrants were inferior peoples whose prolific issue threatened the very foundations of Anglo-American civilization. No less a savant than Francis A. Walker, president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, was so seized by prejudice that he pronounced the newcomers "beaten men from beaten races; representing the worst failures in the struggle for existence. They have none of the ideas and aptitudes which belong to those who are descended from the tribes that met under the oak trees of old Germany to make laws and choose chieftains."

Disillusioned by bigotry and poverty, many immigrants gave up and returned home; 395,000 departed in l908 alone. But the vast majority persevered. "Their hearts," said sociologist Charles B. Spahr, "cannot be alienated. The ideals, the opportunities of our democracy change the immigrants into a new order of men."

Among the hordes to arrive in Amereica in that climactic year of immigration, l907, was a small boy of 10 from Italy, Edward Corsi, who later became U.S. Commissioner of Immigration and Naturalization for New York. Corsi's tour of duty as an official on Ellis Island kept fresh the memory of his own childhood arrival there; years later he recalled the October day that brought him and his family from shipboard in the haze-hung harbor to their new home in an East side tenement.

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"Mountains!" I cried to my brother. "Look at them!" "They're strange," he said. "Why don't they have snow on them?" He was craning his neck and standing on tiptoe to stare through the haze at the New York skyline.

A small boat, the "General Putnam" of the Immigration Service, carried us from the pier to Ellis Island. We took our places in the long line and went submissively through the routine of answering interpreters' questions and receiving medical examinations. We were in line early so we avoided the necessity of staying overnight, an ordeal which my mother had long been dreading. Soon we were permitted to pass through America's gateway.

Crossing the harbor on the ferry, I was first struck by the fact that American men did not wear beards. In contrast with my own countrymen I thought they looked almost like women. I felt we were superior to them. I saw my first negro.

Carrying our baggage, we walked across lower Manhattan and then climbed the steps leading to one of these marvellous trains. On this train I saw a Chinaman, queue and all! It had been a day of breath-taking surprises. I decided that anything might be true in this strange country.

To Be Continued . . . Old World Beauties Greeted..

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Copied by Nancee(McMurtrey)Seifert
February 25, 2004