American Passage_ The History of Ellis I - Vincent J. Cannato [19]
With the runners seemingly vanquished, the Board of Commissioners won lavish praise. Friedrich Kapp, a member of the board, described the institution he helped manage as “one of the most benevolent establishments in the civilized world . . . it forestalls untold misery, need and suffering.” One English emigrant called it “a great national refuge for the emigrant from all lands. . . . It stands alone in its noble and utilitarian character.” In William Dean Howells’s 1890 novel A Hazard of New Fortunes, the book’s main character, Basil March, describes how well officials at Castle Garden treated newcomers. “No one appeared troubled or anxious; the officials had a conscientious civility,” March mused. A journalist called Castle Garden “one of the most beneficent institutions in the world.”
Despite the accolades, Kapp had trouble understanding the country’s laissez-faire attitude toward immigration. “People look with indifference at this colossal immigration of the European masses,” Kapp wrote in 1870, “whose presence alone will exercise a powerful influence on the destinies of the Western World; National and State legislators care little or nothing for the direction which is given to this foreign element.”
That would soon change. By the 1880s, it seemed as if all of America had become interested in—even obsessed with—immigration. The industrial revolution was transforming the way Americans worked and lived. The United States was now a continental nation from the Atlantic to the Pacific, unified by transcontinental railroads. The nation saw its population nearly double between 1870 and 1900, while the gross national product increased sixfold. The United States was transforming itself overnight from a predominantly rural, agrarian society into an urban, industrial nation.
Between 1860 and 1910, the number of Americans living in cities rose from 6 million, or 20 percent of the population, to 44 million, or 40 percent of the population. In 1885, a Protestant minister named Josiah Strong wrote a best-selling book, Our Country, where he complained that cities were “a serious menace to our civilization” and possessed “a peculiar attraction for the immigrant.” Census data showed that these cities had become foreign territories. Immigrants and their children would soon account for nearly 80 percent of the population of cities like New York and Chicago.
A few years after Strong published his jeremiad, historian Frederick Jackson Turner looked at the 1890 Census and declared that the American frontier was officially closed. Open land, at least in theory, was disappearing. To Turner, open land had made earlier immigration possible, as the frontier became the crucible in which “immigrants were Americanized, liberated, and fused into a mixed race.”
If the frontier was now closed, where would new immigrants go? Critics feared that the city would be the new frontier, but without the same ability to assimilate newcomers. Overcrowded cities populated by those who spoke in foreign tongues marked the end of the Republic, as the United States was in danger of becoming just like Europe: corrupt, overindulgent, class-ridden, contemptuous of republican government, and doomed to revolution. Political corruption, alcoholism, and socialism would reign.
A writer in the Atlantic Monthly worried in 1882 that “our era . . . of happy immunity from those social diseases which are the danger and the humiliation of Europe is passing away.” The new immigrants evoked not just fears of overcrowded and corrupt Old Europe, but also ancient Rome, which had been threatened by an urban rabble and an increasingly non-Roman citizenry: “In spite of the magnificent dimensions of our continent, we are beginning to feel