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By Root 2569 0

their ships were never intended for passengers, that a crossing could take up to three months with the human freight crowded into fetid holds that were breeding grounds for diseases like trachoma and malignant typhus, which in the nineteenth century was so closely associated with Atlantic crossings that it was called ship fever. People were willing to endure almost any hardship to get to America if the price was right, and by packing the passengers in and giving them almost nothing in the way of civilizing comforts, the fares could be made not just low but effectively irresistible. By mid-century a one-way ticket in steerage (so called because it was near the ship’s steering mechanism and thus noisy) could be had for as little as $12 from Liverpool to New York, and for less than $10 ftom Dublin. All but the most miserably destitute could scrape together that.1

Millions did. From 150,000 in the 1820s, the number of immigrants to America climbed steadily with each successive decade: to 600,000 in the 1830s, 1.7 million in the 1840s, 2.3 million in the 1850s. All this was happening in a much more thinly populated America, of course. The 3 million immigrants who came to the United States in the decade 184-55 arrived in a country that had a population of only 20 million to begin with. In just twenty years, 1830-50, the proportion of foreign-born immigrants in America rose from one in a hundred to one in ten.

Never before had there been such a global exodus – and not just to America, but to Australia, Argentina, New Zealand, anywhere that showed promise, though America had by far the largest share. Between 1815 and 1915 it took in 35 million people, equivalent to the modern populations of Norway, Sweden, Austria, Ireland, Denmark and Switzerland. Seven million came from Germany, roughly 5 million each from Italy and Ireland (1.5 million more than live in Ireland today), 3.3 million from Russia, 2.5 million from Scandinavia, and in the hundreds of thousands from almost everywhere else – from Greece, Portugal, Turkey, the Netherlands, Mexico, the Caribbean, China, Japan. Even Canada provided a quarter of a million immigrants between 1815 and 1860, and nearly a million more in the 1920s.2 For smaller countries like Sweden, Norway and Ireland, and for regions within countries, like Sicily and the Mezzogiomo in Italy, the numbers represented a significant drain on human resources. This was especially true of Ireland. In 1807 it was the most densely populated country in Europe; by the 1860s it was one of the least.3

Once across the ocean the immigrants tended naturally to congregate in enclaves. Almost all the migrants from Norway between 1815 and 1860 settled in just four states, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Iowa and Illinois. In much the same way, two-thirds of the Dutch were to be found in Michigan, New York, Wisconsin and Iowa. Sometimes they were given active encouragement to congregate. In the first half of the nineteenth century several German societies were formed with the express intention of so concentrating immigration in a particular area that they could in effect take it over. One German spoke for many when he dreamed of Pennsylvania becoming ‘an entirely German state where ... the beautiful German language would be used in the legislative halls and the courts of justice’. Not just in Pennsylvania, but in Texas, Missouri and Wisconsin, there were earnest hopes of colonizing all or at least a significant part of those states.4

In factory towns, too, immigrant groups were often concentrated to an extraordinary degree. In 1910 Hungry Hollow, Illinois, a steel town, was home to 15,000 Bulgarians. At the same time, of the 14,300 people employed in Carnegie steel mills, almost 12,000 were from eastern Europe.5

Those who had neither the inclination to work in heavy industry nor the wherewithal to take up farming generally clustered in cities – even if, as was almost always the case, their backgrounds were agricultural. So effortlessly did Irish, Poles and Italians settle into urban life that we easily forget that most came from