American Passage_ The History of Ellis I - Vincent J. Cannato [16]
Though it would only later come specifically to define new immigrants, the term “greenhorn” signified anyone new and unfamiliar to the ways of the big city. One’s clothes, one’s accent, and that faraway— part dazzled and part confused—look in the eyes were a signal to savvy New Yorkers that a greenhorn had arrived.
There were certainly a lot of greenhorns on the streets of New York. Between 1820 and 1839, New York received about 25,000 immigrants a year. The numbers kept growing every year. During the 1840s, some 1.2 million people came through New York, which handled three-quarters of the nation’s immigrant arrivals. These numbers may not seem that large, until one considers that the population of Manhattan in 1850 was only slightly more than half a million.
Many New Yorkers looked on these greenhorns with a mix of pity, bemusement, and contempt, but for others these newcomers meant money. The wharves and docks where these immigrants first set foot on American soil were crowded and chaotic. Men like Rynders found opportunity in the chaos. There was profit to be had by exploiting the immigrants’ lack of knowledge and naïveté.
Rynders was at the top of a corrupt totem pole of politicos, gangsters, gamblers, railroad companies, forwarding agents, tavern owners, boardinghouse keepers, and prostitutes. Their base of operations was the taverns and boardinghouses that lined Greenwich, Washington, and Cedar Streets in lower Manhattan. This area, according to one eyewitness, was home to “one hundred and thirty-nine immigrant runners, drinking at boarding houses for immigrants, prostitutes, rummies, watch stuffers, thimble riggers and pocketbook droppers.” There was money to be made in selling railroad tickets at inflated prices, charging exorbitant rates for rooms at boardinghouses, overcharging immigrants for their baggage by playing with the scales, or even outright thievery and extortion. Confusion was the ally of the runner and the enemy of the immigrant.
As soon as a ship docked, runners would board it. If the immigrants were from Germany, the runners would speak German; Irish immigrants would encounter runners who hailed from the old sod. If immigrants were not immediately taken in by these entreaties, runners would forcibly take their luggage to a nearby boardinghouse for “safe-keeping.” When immigrants tried to claim their baggage, they were often induced to stay at the boardinghouse with the promise of cheap lodging and meals. When their stay had ended and it was time to move on, these greenhorns would be handed an excessive bill for their room and food and the storage of their luggage. If they could not pay the inflated bill, lodging house owners would keep the baggage as collateral. It was a prosperous racket, and much of the money made in fleecing immigrants went up the chain to Rynders, who was able to run his operations with little interference from city officials. They were all making a good living from immigration, and now Castle Garden was in danger of putting them out of business.
A committee of the New York State Assembly investigated the situation in the mid-1840s. It had heard the rumors and read the newspaper reports about how runners preyed on immigrants, but the committee confessed that it could not “have believed the extent to which these frauds and outrages have been practiced” until it began to investigate them.
The federal government was largely uninterested in immigration. Occasionally, Congress would be prodded into action to address the overcrowding that afflicted immigrants traveling across the Atlantic in steerage, but it did little in the way of regulating the flow of immigrants. Despite an undertone of anti-immigrant