The following is a book review of "City of Dreams: The 400-Year Epic History of Immigrant New York" by Tyler Anbinder
In publishing as in politics, timing is everything. Tyler Anbinder’s sweeping “City of Dreams: The 400-Year Epic History of Immigrant New York” scores big on both counts. A richly textured guide to the history of our immigrant nation’s pinnacle immigrant city has managed to enter the stage during an election season that has resurrected this historically fraught topic in all its fierceness.
With the exception of a thinly argued final chapter, the writer, a professor of history at George Washington University and the author of two previous books on early American history, rightly avoids drawing explicit lessons for today’s controversies from the past, though readers can find plenty. Support for the ideals of diversity and tolerance on the one hand and fears of tribalism and social fragmentation on the other collide on almost every page, beginning in the chaotic, polyglot trading outpost that was New Amsterdam. At the southern tip of Manhattan, Dutch fur traders, English merchants’ sons, random fortune seekers from Spain or Norway, Welsh tavern keepers, Gaelic blacksmiths, religious dissidents and a smattering of Jews and freed slaves somehow managed to conduct business even while speaking 18 different languages.
Over the next two centuries the arrival of starving, war-ravaged, oppressed or just plain restless huddled masses, almost all of them from Europe, pushed the settlement north, turning New York into the largest and most diverse city in the United States. By 1860, an extraordinary 69 percent of voting-age New Yorkers were foreign-born. Only Vienna and Berlin had more German inhabitants, and they were still considerably outnumbered by the Irish. Fifty years later the flood of foreigners, who began disembarking at the iconic Ellis Island in 1892, showed no signs of receding. As many as a million migrants, an increasing number of them Italians and Russian Jews, arrived annually in the years leading up to World War I. After Congress passed restrictive laws in the 1920s, the city experienced its first and only sustained immigration drought. But in 1965, with the passage of the Hart-Celler Act, Gotham began to return to its original immigrant-rich identity. Today more than a third of the population is foreign-born. “To me this city appeared as a tremendous overstuffed roar, where people just burst with a desire to live,” a Russian immigrant, Morris Shapiro, recalled about his arrival in the 1920s. His description might well strike today’s migrants, now largely from Latin America, the Caribbean and Asia, as apt.
Anbinder devotes at least one chapter to each of the major immigrant groups — Irish, Germans, Russian Jews and Italians — vividly detailing the political turmoil, famines and pogroms that led them to leave their homes and families, the horrific steerage voyages across a turbulent Atlantic Ocean and their lives in New York. Despite the Babel of cultures, newcomers adapted to New York in similar ways, by first creating their own isolated ethnic islands. Early Irish arrivals moved into the wooden tenements in the notorious, gang-infested Five Points. The area we now know as the Lower East Side was Kleindeutschland, a German enclave further subdivided as South Germans, Hessians, Prussians and Bavarians laid claim to separate neighborhoods. Likewise in Little Italy, Sicilians clustered near Elizabeth Street while Neapolitans and Calabrians kept company along Mulberry Street.
The social benefits of the immigrant enclave were immense, especially at a time when governments didn’t provide much in the way of garbage collection — roving pigs were about the best slum dwellers could expect until later in the 19th century — much less social services. In their transplanted villages, newly arrived Irish found jobs on the docks or as servants with the help of a cousin’s brother-in-law on the next block. Lower East Side Jews could track down tailoring jobs on a tip from a neighbor. Ethnic groups sorted themselves into distinct occupations, as they still do: Italians became barbers, shoemakers, longshoremen and newsboys; Germans ruled the brewery, peddling and saloon businesses.
Some of the enclaves became reeking, overcrowded slums that would catalyze progressive reformers like Jacob Riis, the author of the classic “How the Other Half Lives.” But they also hummed with Tocquevillian energy. Immigrant civic groups sprang up to meet every sort of need from the medical to the recreational to the spiritual. Neighborhood churches, some of them built and sustained by successful fellow immigrants with a stake in edifying their greenhorn countrymen, were crucial, especially to the poorest migrants. As early as 1756, Scottish immigrants founded the still extant St. Andrews Society under the auspices of the Presbyterian Church. Churches also started schools and hospitals; by the early 20th century, New York had eight Catholic hospitals alongside an assortment of Lutheran, Methodist, Jewish and Baptist institutions. The Germans were avid participants in gymnastic societies. Every ethnic group had its own home-language newspaper.
Hostility from the native-born majority undoubtedly intensified ethnic separatism. “Hordes of wild Irishmen” were especially reviled: “Any country or color . . . except Irish,” read one 1853 Herald help wanted ad. But Jews and Italians were hardly spared: Rental ads might warn, “No Jews and no dogs.” In the eyes of many New Yorkers, the immigrants’ “low moral tendency” — the words are Theodore Roosevelt’s — made them seem hopeless as future citizens. As the numbers of foreigners grew, officials passed harsh restrictions, starting with Peter Stuyvesant’s limits on the rights of Lutherans, Quakers and Jews, continuing with the Alien and Sedition Act of the late 18th century and the Naturalization Act (which expanded from five to 14 the years before an immigrant could become a citizen) and then in the 19th century a variety of statutes barring convicts, “idiots,” paupers, polygamists, epileptics, anarchists, prostitutes and other outcasts. Finally, in 1924 the National Origins Act, “one of the most momentous laws enacted in all of American history,” imposed strict quotas and turned Ellis Island into a historical curiosity.
It’s tempting to chalk up this anti-immigrant record to simple bigotry, but “City of Dreams” casts doubt on that conclusion. The Know Nothing party accused German states of programmatically shipping their poorest and least desirable citizens to the United States; according to Anbinder, they turned out to be right. Decades later, New Yorkers worried that newcomers would become a “public charge” for a reason. Their city was ill-equipped to help the many desperately poor and ill; housing was scarce and shoddy, creating disease-ridden slums more crowded than modern Mumbai. And accusations of divided loyalties and subversion were not necessarily paranoid fantasies. As World War I broke out, German immigrants were discovered preparing to return to fight for their home country. It was most likely Italian immigrant anarchists who killed 38 in a Wall Street bombing in 1920. And during World War II, Anbinder writes, “New York was crawling with immigrant spies.”
These stories raise the question: How did New York turn so many of its immigrants into able American citizens? The enclaves were a life preserver for recent arrivals, but also isolated them in their Old World customs and their poverty. Women and children in particular didn’t venture beyond their immediate blocks. “I did not see any reason for learning English,” one immigrant woman recalled. “Everywhere I lived, or worked, or fooled around there were only Italians.” The text of “City of Dreams” clocks in at nearly 600 pages, yet it gives little insight into how newcomers like these assimilated, and how their children and grandchildren were educated into the growing middle class, as they so often were.
To delve into that question, an especially crucial one today as immigrants struggle to make their way in an “hourglass” postindustrial economy, readers of this admirable history will have to look elsewhere.
This piece originally appeared at The New York Times
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Kay S. Hymowitz is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and contributing editor at City Journal. She is the author of the forthcoming book, The New Brooklyn: What It Takes to Bring a City Back.
This piece originally appeared in The New York Times