Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [586]
By mid-century organs of middle-class opinion like Harper’s Monthly were making ever more condescending references to manual laborers: their sun-darkened skin, tattered clothes, rough hands, mental sluggishness, even their “bestial” character. The widening cultural divide was enormously exacerbated by the fact that, in an astonishingly short period of time, the class landscape had been drastically rearranged. Most merchants, professionals, shopkeepers, and clericals could consider themselves socially superior, not simply because the city’s laboring force still worked with its hands but because, augmented by a torrent of immigrants, it had become overwhelmingly alien in tongue and habit.
42
City of Immigrants
Ireland, the summer of 1845: the air reeked with a sickly odor of decay as the potatoes blackened and died. Nearly a third of the crop rotted that year, nearly all of it the next. Starving men and women ate grass, then died along the roads. Skeletal children grubbed the fields in search of food, their faces “bloated yet wrinkled and of a pale greenish hue.” Before the famine ended five years later, as many as a million and a half people would perish, most of them poor laborers and cotters.
England, whose imperial exactions had led to the crisis, now worsened it. The British government required relief committees to sell rather than give food to the starving, lest charity foster dependency. It permitted cattle and grain to flow out of Ireland rather than tamper with the free market. It supported Protestant landlords in evicting over half a million tenants. (Soon, crowed the London Times, “a Celtic Irishman will be as rare in Connemara as is the Red Indian on the shores of Manhattan.”) Of the two million sons and daughters of Eire who eventually escaped the devastation, perhaps three of every four headed for the United States. Crammed below decks in “coffin ships” by shipmasters bent on maximizing returns, more than one in every ten didn’t survive the journey.
Thousands of peasants in the southern and western German states also fell victim to the potato blight and made their way to Bremen, where they booked passage for the United States. Joining them were thousands of other Germans: small proprietors forced off the land by agricultural depression, spinners and handloom weavers unable to compete with English textiles flooding down the Rhine, skilled shoemakers and furniture makers facing proletarianization, and handfuls of merchants and manufacturers frustrated by economic stagnation and political repression.
Emigration from German states accelerated following the suppression of the short-lived revolutions of 1848. The recapture of Berlin by forces loyal to the Prussian monarchy precipitated a flight of craft workers, small shopkeepers, and intellectuals, all of whom had backed a program of radical social and economic change: universal suffrage, socialized workshops, a minimum wage, a ten-hour day. They too set their sights on America. Kein König da, said the republicans among them—no king there. “Since Capital so commands Labor in the Fatherland,” explained a group of radicals departing Baden, they would go to a new country “where the reverse relationship prevails.”
In the gray industrial towns and villages of England rose still another stream of emigrants, including unemployed handicraft workers, disgruntled factory hands, and defeated Chartists. A largely working-class movement, Chartism had hoped to secure economic justice through political reforms: universal manhood suffrage, secret balloting, and annual Parliaments. In 1848, after a decade of having their petitions rejected by Parliament, Chartists talked about linking up with European revolutionaries, but a combination of internal division and government suppression squelched their attempt to march on Parliament. Many fled to America, scant steps ahead of the police, beaten yet unrepentant. (Similarly defiant were the defeated Italian