City of Nations E-Book

Eva Kolb

• Herausgeber: Books on Demand
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 142

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Beschreibung

This book deals with the formation of New York City’s multicultural character. It draws a sketch of the metropolis’ first big immigration waves and describes the development of immigrants who entered the New World as foreigners and strangers and soon became one of the most essential parts of the city’s very character. A main focus is laid upon the ambiguity of the immigrants’ identity which is captured between assimilation and separation, and one of the most important questions the book deals with is whether the city can be seen as one of the world’s greatest melting pots or just as a huge salad bowl inhabiting all kinds of different cultures. The book approaches this topic from an historical and a fictional point of view and concentrates on personal experiences of the immigrants as well as on the cultural impact immigration had on the megalopolis New York. "City of Nations" includes 43 historical photographs and illustrations which give an impression of the early immigrants as well as their living and working conditions.

Leseprobe

To my family

&

the city which has stolen

my heart

This book is a new edition of the book “The Evolution of New York City's Multiculturalism: Melting Pot or Salad Bowl:

Immigrants in New York from the 19th Century until the End of the Gilded Age”.

Cover: Statue of Liberty from below, front.

Photo shot by Derek Jensen (Tysto), 2004-September-26

List of Contents

Introduction

I. A Historical Summary

II. Ellis Island: „Island of Hope, Island of Tears”

III. Five Points, Tenements and Sweatshops: The Living Conditions

IV. From Little Italy to Chinatown: The Ethnic Districts Evolve

V. Melting Pot or Salad Bowl: The Ambiguity of the Immigrants’ Identity

Conclusion

Bibliography

United States Food Administration color lithograph World War I poster by Charles Edward Chambers (1883-1941), showing immigrants arriving in New York harbor. Caption (translated from the yiddish): "Food will win the war. You came here seeking freedom, now you must help to preserve it. Wheat is needed for the allies. Waste nothing." Charles Edward Chambers (illustrator). Rusling Wood, Litho., New York (publisher), 1917

“Give me your tired, your poor,

Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,

The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.

Send these, the homeless, tempesttost to me,

I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

(Emma Lazarus, 1883, final stanza of her poem about the Statue of Liberty: ‘The New Colossus’)

2007 Presidential $1 Coin image from the United States Mint

Introduction

This book deals with the formation of New York City’s multicultural character during the 19th century until the end of the third decade of the 20th century. It draws a sketch of the metropolis’ first big immigration waves and describes the development of immigrants who entered the New World as foreigners and strangers and soon became one of the most essential parts of the city’s very character.

A main focus is laid upon the ambiguity of the immigrants’ identity which is captured between assimilation and separation. One of the most important questions the book deals with is, whether the city can be seen as one of the world’s greatest melting pots or just as a huge salad bowl inhabiting all kinds of different cultures. The book approaches these topics from an historical and a fictional point of view and concentrates on personal experiences of the immigrants as well as on the cultural impact these immigration waves had on the megalopolis New York.

During the first chapter the book summarizes the historical development of immigration in New York and gives a short overall view on the topic. Chapter II deals with the journey and the arrival of the immigrants in the New World. This part of the book takes a look at the hopes, fears and disappointments which accompanied the newcomers. It also gives a description of the famous immigration station Ellis Island.

The third chapter examines the living and working conditions of the early immigrants. It draws a sketch of some of the notorious districts, illustrates life inside the tenement buildings and reports about sweatshops and settlement houses. Besides, this chapter refers to the improvements made by organizations and social reformers. The third chapter also takes a look into the present to draw a parallel between the lives of the early and contemporary immigrants.

Chapter IV informs about the evolution of several ethnic districts of the city. Some of these quarters like “Kleindeutschland” or “Jewtown” are described in detail. It is mentioned what life in the several districts was like and why the immigrants started to create these miniaturized replicas of their mother countries. Furthermore, one can read about the immigrants’ movements within the city over the decades and centuries.

The fifth chapter deals with the ambiguity of the immigrants’ identity and therefore with the book’s main thesis. This part investigates the often twofold kind of life which was lived especially by the first generation immigrants. The question arises, if New York City is a perfect example of the melting pot or just another salad bowl, or if none of these two characterizations defines the city’s soul.

The book wants to show that the metropolis is a unique example of multicultural urban life. It’s a place where melting pot and salad bowl exist next to each other, a city where amalgamation and separation, tight and vast social structures, old and new values, modern and antique styles and attitudes live together and manage to harmonize.

City of Nations displays a variety of visual impressions of the early immigrants. These pictures help to imagine their living and working conditions.

Since there were a huge number of writers, a couple of them very famous, others rather unknown, among the early immigrants, this book approaches its topics and main thesis with the help of several fictional texts.

Some of these novels and stories discussed in this book are Bread Givers, Hungry Hearts & Other Stories, Red Ribbon on a White Horse, Salome of the Tenements and How I Found America by Anzia Yezierska, Yekl and The Rise of David Levinsky by Abraham Cahan, Manhattan Transfer by John Dos Passos, and others.

Redraft of the Castello Plan New Amsterdam in 1660. John Wolcott Adams (1874–1925) and I.N. Phelps Stokes (1867–1944), drawn in 1916

I. A Historical Summary

The “American society may be visualized as a cluster of immigrant-ethnic communities lapped by an expanding core population of mixed origins and indeterminate size” (Higham, 1998, p.13).

The Unites States have not received the most immigrants worldwide; Argentina or Brazil, for example, became the home of much more aliens. But there was certainly no other nation which had incomers originating from such a variety of countries and cultures, especially in New York.

New York has always been a colorful city of different nations united under the roof of one single city. When the Dutch founded New Amsterdam in 1625, after they had bought the island from the Indians for trinkets, it took less than twenty years until 18 diverse languages were spoken in the colonial town. In 1643 the Dutch colony had already gained its multicultural and multiethnic character which it should never ever lose again throughout its almost 400 years of history and its development from a Dutch, over a British colony up to an independent American city.

The first immigrants, though involuntary, arrived in 1626 and were slaves, imported from Angola. These African-Americans arrived in the New World long before any Jews or Roman Catholics inhabited the city. Even though they had to live under brutal and cruel conditions, they managed to survive. And in 1644 there was already the first free black community which consisted of 11 people who were given a piece of land they could cultivate. However, this right of possessing own ground was revoked from the free black people in 1716, after some slaves had started a revolt.

In New York slaves used to be domestic servants or artisans. During the long time of slavery, resistance occurred almost every day and often it found a violent end. The ways rebellious slaves were killed exceeds all imagination. Historical documents describe the burning of one slave “over slow fire for eight to ten hours” (Homberger, 1998, p.44).

During their supremacy, the Dutch always had the commanding position in the New Netherland society – at no time it was one of their immigrants. And even when the British took over power in 1664 and turned New Amsterdam into New York, the Dutch remained the dominant group among the settlers for the first 20 years. This was due to the fact that there were just a few English, Irish and Scottish families who emigrated to New York during that time.

However, the internationality of the city had already found its beginning during the Dutch reign, with the first schoolmaster of the city being a French immigrant who came to New Amsterdam in 1637, with all public documents being issued in English, Dutch and French between 1648-58 and with the fact that town proclamations were bilingual, namely Dutch and French since 1656. As a consequence the French Church was founded in the Dutch colonial town in 1659.

The first Jews, respectively Sephardic Jews who came from Portugal and Spain, arrived in New Amsterdam in 1654. They had to flee from their former asylum home Pernambuco over Curacao when the Portuguese re-conquered the Brazilian city. At first Peter Stuyvesant, the last Dutch Director-General of the colony of New Netherland, and his Council were against the immigration of Jews to the city. However they finally had to accept them since the Dutch West India Company was supported by a considerable number of Jewish investors. This small amount of 27 Jews was finally allowed to stay and after a while they got the opportunity to possess real estate, gain a foothold in trade and eventually became citizens of the city with all burgher rights.

Since the 1680s, when more and more people came to the U.S. to search for political and religious freedom, the process of immigration had found its beginning. Although there were several immigration restriction laws, wars and economic crises which helped to reduce the numbers of new arrivals drastically from time to time.

After 1685 more and more Jews and French Huguenots arrived in New York. Together with the British they soon became the commercial elite of the city. The Huguenots who survived the bloody massacre of Saint Bartholomew’s Day in 1572, had been protected for more than one hundred years with the so-called Edict of Nantes which was formulated by Henri IV. However, in 1685 the revocation of the Edict forced about 200,000 Huguenots to emigrate to other countries. They moved to England, the Netherlands, Germany and of course, however in small groups at first, to the colonies in America.

Under the British supremacy prosperous times started, especially for the Jews. Jewish burial grounds, the first Hebrew School as well as the first synagogue were established within the city’s borders between 1682 and 1730. With the growing cosmopolitan character of New York, the Dutch language also could not persist in the long run. According to the diversity of churches situated on the tip of Manhattan Island by the middle of the 18th century, one could already recognize the manifold cultural, ethnic and religious appearance of New York.

The immigrants and the ideology they brought to their new home country, helped the Americans to clearly separate from their former British mother country. This was absolutely essential for their argumentation towards independence from England.

Already in the 18th century one could describe the Americans as a cosmopolitan people. These were the first steps towards the multinational city of New York as it is known today. However, vast multiculturalism with its tremendous multiethnic character and its colorful appearance which will find no equivalence all over the world was shaped a good deal later, when the masses from abroad streamed into the metropolis and formed the whole city structure totally new.

After the American Revolution and the War of Independence the British colonial town New York turned into an American city, inhabiting 12,000 people by 1783.

At the time of the city’s rebuilding there were still a couple of thousand slaves. Only a small number of about 1,000 blacks were free at that time. However, the “Gradual Manumission Act” of 1799 freed all children of slaves who were born after July 4th of the same year. Already in 1810 the city of New York had the largest amount of free blacks in the whole country and in 1820 there were only a little more than 500 slaves living in the metropolis. By 1827 all slaves were freed finally.

By the end of the 18th century inhabitants with a Dutch background were becoming less in proportion. Despite the Germans who populated the city with some thousand people, the Irish with about 5,000 souls became one of the largest and fastest growing groups of immigrants after the English.

The Irish were also the first big group of immigrants who had to experience the harsh urban conditions of the city which later became so symptomatic of life in a metropolis: “Poverty, overcrowded housing conditions, political prejudice, religious discrimination. Irish immigrants were living in conditions which made them particularly susceptible to the yellow fever epidemics which spread through the overcrowded city. A majority of the victims of the 1795 epidemic in New York were from Ireland” (Homberger, 1998, p.56).

Only in the 19th and 20th century, when immigration took on gigantic and sometimes even alarming dimensions one could recognize that the former Dutch and British colony was transformed into an international metropolis, an immigration megalopolis.

With the beginning of the 19th century immigration started on a large scale and soon the city turned into a colorful pot full of contrasts. The paradoxical face of the megalopolis showed wealthy and golden streets or even whole districts, where old aristocratic families and self-made men strolled down Fifth Avenue, surrounded by splendid mansions and stores designed with marble and magnificent decoration. However, it also displayed the foul and rotten areas of the city, where the poor population of New York City was at home. These poor quarters were crowded with people who were mostly immigrants hoping for the American Dream. A dream which was reflected in the personal immigrant success story, a few of them could actually tell. People like the merchant A.T. Stewart who was an orphan born in Belfast, Ireland and who immigrated to New York in 1818, or Madame Restell represented this desired ideal since they both finally ran their own successful businesses and owned a luxurious mansion on Fifth Avenue.

Within 30 years during the first half of the 19th century, the population of New York grew from 200,000 people to nearly one million inhabitants. Most of them started out in the slums and tenement districts of the metropolis. In his book The Historical Atlas of New York City, Eric Homberger gives a definition of this city of extreme contrasts in the 19th century:

The notorious Old Brewery at Five Points and A.T. Stewart’s Fifth Avenue mansion establish the extremes of a pervasive, simultaneous sense of opposite social, economic, and moral orders which defined the character of New York. Contrasts were legion: consider the magnificent commercial palace of Lord & Taylor on Broadway, and the cheap clothing shops on the Bowery; the elegant brownstone row houses above Washington Square which lined lower Fifth Avenue and the overcrowded, dilapidated structures on Delancey, Rivington, and Stanton Streets which housed the Irish immigrants. During the day, Broadway was the home of the fashionable and elegant, at night it was haunted by prostitutes, conmen, and criminals. [...] Fifth Avenue was as much a complex symbol of the new spirit of the age of “go ahead” as were the notorious slums of Five Points. (Homberger, 1998, p.74/75)

There are a lot of myths and partial truths concerning the interpretation of immigration or immigrants’ status on the whole. “One legend puts the immigrant, and all he represents, at the center of American experience. Another relegates him to the periphery” (Higham, 1984, p.4).

Maldwyn Jones writes in A Nation of Immigrants (1964) that immigration is “America’s historic raison d’être... the most persistent and most pervasive influence in her development” (in Higham, 1984, p.4).

To a certain extent one can say that immigration plays one of the most important roles in the whole history of American life. American ideals like mobility, success stories or the American Dream result from the immigrant character of the nation.

Despite that, displacement describes an essential part in an American’s experience. There exists a certain memory of being displaced from somewhere else which turns migration into a possible key to the character of the Americans.

Since the United States cannot look back on a deeply rooted national tradition, they believe in the future. This orientation towards a time to come has brought along American traits like “idealism; flexibility and adaptability to change; a dependence on the self and the immediate family more than the wider community; a high respect for personal achievement; a tendency to conform to the values of peers and neighbors instead of holding stubbornly to ancestral ways” (Higham, 1998, p.5). The immigrant built and builds America. However, the problem of separation and segregation had always been present in the history of the incomer.

The term immigrant occurred for the first time by the end of the 18th century. Only in 1789 the English language entitled newcomers with “immigrants” which was a result of a change in attitude. By then the new arrivals were rather identified with their new country of choice than with their former home country. This meant that there already had to be a nation and society in existence to which these people could choose to come. Therefore the term immigrant, which replaced the word emigrant, does not refer to the colonists or settlers who founded the nation and created the basis for everyone else to live there. More or less the immigrant can be described as someone who brings along a foreign culture to another nation.