Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898

by Edwin G. Burrows

As the weeks before her trial dragged on, with the press lambasting her daily, she became convinced Comstock would succeed in hounding her back into prison. Rather than accept such a fate, she lay down in her tub, filled it half full, and slit her throat from ear to ear. The New York Times declared it “a fit ending to an odious career.”

The fifty-one hundred bankruptcies of 1873 rose to 10,478 in 1878. By 1876 half the nation’s railroads—twenty-one thousand miles’ worth—had defaulted on their bonds and were in receivership.

In 1879 she proposed a law to incarcerate all women under thirty who had been arrested for misdemeanors or who had produced two illegitimate children. To prevent them from transmitting their “moral insanity” to others, they would be sentenced to a reformatory, under the exclusive management of women, where, under “tender care,” the “weak and fallen creatures” would undergo rehabilitation.

Edison proposed that when the Statue of Liberty finally rose on Bedloe’s Island, a phonograph be put in its mouth so that it could talk and whistle to ships passing by in the harbor.

The great bulk of new immigration came from old sources, with German migration actually reaching its peak in the 1880s. Farmers and farm laborers came from Germany’s north and east, uprooted by the ongoing commercialization of agriculture and declining wheat prices. Artisans undercut by factory production left towns and villages, found industrial centers in Silesia and the Ruhr valley as yet unable to accommodate them, and crossed the Atlantic in force (some fleeing the antisocialist laws).

German New York stood third behind Berlin and Vienna as a German-speaking metropolis.

The temptation was therefore strong to underscore the differences between German “Hebrews,” still widely respected, and “low-class Jews,” who were increasingly suspect. Thus the Rev. Dr. J. Silverman complained in an 1889 lecture at Temple Emanu-El that the newcomers were “a standing menace” because their “loud ways and awkward gesticulations are naturally repulsive and repugnant to the refined American sensibilities.” The “thoroughly acclimated American Jew,” the Hebrew Standard agreed, “is closer to the Christian sentiment around him than to the Judaism of these miserable darkened Hebrews.”

German Jews, moreover, had long contrasted their own progressive “Occidental civilization” with Russian “Orientalism.” Now, made prouder than ever of their German inheritance by the triumphs of Bismarck’s empire, many sought to distinguish themselves from Eastern Europeans on all fronts. They derided Yiddish as a “piggish jargon” and ridiculed newcomers as “kikes,” as their names often ended in ki.

Where the Jews had been trapped in the shtetls, southern Italians were mired in the isolated valleys and lowlands formed by the mountain chains into which the mezzogiorno was divided. Within these provincial pockets, society was frozen in a quasi-feudal mode. A handful of aristocrats owned the bulk of the land and exacted profit and prestige from peasant tenants as their forebears had done for centuries. With the higher clergy and professionals, they formed a tiny ruling elite, utterly uninterested in agricultural improvements.

The area also suffered from primitive housing conditions, illiteracy (perhaps the highest rate in Europe), microdivision of farm plots, an absence of public welfare programs, limited diet, earthquakes, deforestation, soil erosion, malaria, and harsh sirocco winds blowing up from North Africa. The result was La Miseria—a miserable, impoverished way of life.

Italian unification provided much of the impetus. The northerners dominating the new nation considered southerners little better than African barbarians, and just as available for colonial plundering. The authorities failed to provide roads or schools, which could help eliminate backward conditions, but siphoned off in taxes what capital and resources existed. Unification also abolished customs barriers and thus opened up the mezzogiorno to northern and European economic penetration.

From the beginning of the Civil War until 1880, Italian immigration to the United States had never exceeded thirty-five hundred a year, predominantly from the northern provinces. Then, from 1881 to 1890, the average annual figure jumped to over thirty thousand. In the succeeding decade, Italians poured in at an annual average rate of sixty-five thousand, becoming the most numerous ethnic group entering the United States.

In 1850 there had been a grand total of 833 Italians in the metropolis. By 1880 the figure had climbed to twenty thousand (of whom twelve thousand were foreign born). By 1900, after two decades of immigration and local reproduction, there would be a quarter-million Italian Americans living in New York City.

People stuck close to the cultural shelter of the colony and when they traveled to lower Manhattan were apt to say: “I have been down to America today.”

wedlock between Irish “apple women” and Asian cigar peddlers was particularly common. Such unions ruffled racists, but the tiny numbers of Chinese involved did not raise the kinds of anxiety black-white “amalgamation” did.

When slavery was banished from British and Spanish colonies, sugar planters in Peru, Guiana, Brazil, Cuba, and Jamaica imported “coolie” laborers from impoverished sections of south China, a practice widely denounced in the United States as cruel and inhuman.

The Chinese community was unique among the new immigrant groups in having its entire community turned into a cultural commodity.

Jews and Italians did attract lovers of the “picturesque” to their neighborhoods, and they experienced the larger community’s scorn as well as its curiosity, but they were never subjected to anything quite like the indignities suffered by the Chinese.

Bryan’s problems went beyond the heat. The populist vision of a republic of small freeholders had little to offer the mass of metropolitan wage-laborers in the mid-1890s. German and Jewish socialists and anarchists were put off by the populists’ evangelical convictions and prohibitionist culture. Unionists like Gompers reasoned that the farmers were themselves employers of wage-labor and so unworthy of support. Tammany did endorse the national ticket and turned out such (largely Irish working-class) support as Bryan got. Gold Democrats of course bolted the party; even Pulitzer’s World refused to back the Nebraskan.