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n 87 CHAPTER 7 Looking Back According to Carlos Martinez, who left Mexico ten years ago for a better life in the States, immigration is part of nature’s plan. “People are always looking for something better,” he says, beginning with the first humans to leave their African homeland. It is a good and natural thing, he thinks, because we can learn from one another. As Jared Diamond so compellingly argues in his book Guns, Germs, and Steel, for better or worse, we would not have the life we know today if our forebears had not strayed from home, since “the history of interactions among disparate peoples is what shaped the modern world.”1 But let’s fast-forward many millennia to look at the history of our own country, when the original inhabitants—who themselves had migrated from Asia—encountered new groups of people who intended to stay. After a turbulent century, by 1800 the Spanish had established settlements in today’s American West. In the eastern colonies there lived not only the mainstream English, but, among others, slaves and “free persons of color” from Africa, Dutch, Scotch-Irish, French, Swiss, and Jews—the first synagogue in America dates from 1695. A popular legend has it that there were so many Germans that German came close to being an official language. Even though historians disclaim it, they were here in great numbers: some 277,000 88 n Chapter Seven in 1790, about half of whom lived in Pennsylvania, where they constituted one-third of the population. The Great Wave It is the first Great Wave of Immigration, however, that created the image of America today as a multicultural land. Between 1790 and 1840, less than a million immigrants had arrived, a situation that would soon change as better transportation, Ireland’s potato famines, and unrest in Europe sent hordes of poor, tired, “huddled masses yearning to breathe free,” or at least yearning to eat. Between 1841 and 1860, 4,311,000 came to stay.2 Germans came in great numbers—more than 5 million in the nineteenth century—as the word spread that life was good for farmers in America. Many communities boasted German schools and German newspapers, until World War I made it unpopular to be known as German. The centenarian Evangeline Lindsley vividly recalled that then there was a “great hatred of anything German. There were many schoolteachers of German extraction in Dayton, and there was quite a protest against them teaching because of their German parentage.” She remembered the “shocking” burning of German books, the closing of German schools, and the harassing of even highly respected German Americans.3 The Irish made up a good part of that first wave, most making the dangerous journey in “coffin ships.” They were called that for good reason: Due to a lack of food, water, and sanitation, “in the most disastrous year of all,” Thomas Sowell reports, “about 20 percent of the huge famine immigration died en route to America or upon landing,” more than on slave ships from Africa in the nineteenth century.4 Many who proudly acclaim their Irish roots today, however, would have been ashamed to admit kinship with their immigrant ancestors, if contemporary accounts are reliable. Martin Scorsese’s film Gangs of New York, although fictionalized and made with some poetic license, sticks closely to the nonfiction book that inspired it. In Herbert Asbury’s The Gangs of New York, written in 1927, the same gangs are described: the Dead Rabbits, the Pug Uglies, the Roach Guards, the Bowery Boys . . . And the same kinds of colorful characters were real, those with names like Hell-Cat Maggie, Sadie the Goat, Gallus Mag, Mush Riley, and Boiled Oysters Malloy. The Daniel Day-Lewis character was based on a Native American gang leader called “Bill the Butcher” Poole. The Old Brewery, the locale for much of the action, once housed more than one thousand men, women, and children. It’s said that for fifteen years there was an average of a murder a night in the building. Dickens described a tenement in the notorious Five Points neighborhood when he wrote: “Where dogs would howl to lie, Looking Back n 89 men and women and boys slink off to sleep, forcing the dislodged rats to move away in quest of better lodgings.” He spoke of “hideous tenements which take their names from robbery and murder; all that is loathsome, drooping and decayed is here.”5 If...

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