USA > Massachusetts > Suffolk County > Boston > Boston's immigrants, 1790-1865 : a study in acculturation > Part 9
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Precisely the same development revolutionized other indus- tries. Because of the relative importance of transportation costs, Boston, like New York and Philadelphia, had early become a sugar refining center.89 In the first four decades of
[Cambridge, 1932], II, 92 ff .; Aftalion, op. cit., 88 ff .; Karl Marx, Capital, a Critique of Political Economy . .. Translated ... by Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling . .. [Chicago, 1909], I, 514 ff.).
85 Pope, op. cit., 70, 15 ff., 23 ff.
86 Men's Clothing Industry in New York and Boston:
Value of Product
Number of Employees
Average value per Employee
I860
New York
$17,011,370
21,568
$ 788
Boston
4,567,749
4,017
I,I37
1870 New York
34,456,884
17,084
2,017
Boston
17,578,057
7,033
2,322
(Derived from material in Pope, op. cit., 303.)
87 Cf. ibid., 31, 32; Hunt's Merchants' Magazine, August, 1853, XXIX, 253; Paul T. Cherington, Wool Industry ... (Chicago, n.d. [1916]), 194.
88 Cf. Pope, op. cit., 303 ; C. L. Fleischmann, Erwerbszweige, Fabrikwesen und Handel der Vereinigten Staaten . . . (Stuttgart, 1850), 333; Freedley, op. cit., I35.
89 Cf. Paul L. Vogt, Sugar Refining Industry in the United States (Publica-
84
BOSTON'S IMMIGRANTS, 1790-1865
the nineteenth century sugar boiling was a highly skilled but small occupation, carried on in Boston largely by German artisans. Before 1845 the industry employed only about a hundred persons.90 In the forties, however, a series of me- chanical inventions necessitated a complete change in plant and process. All over the country refineries, unable to make the adjustments, closed their doors.91 In Boston, those surviv- ing put more money into expanded factories, and hired addi- tional hands. The number of employees, many of them Irish, tripled between 1845 and 1855; and the industry grew rapidly after 1858 when the Adams Sugar Refinery built the country's second largest plant in the city.92 The manufacture of paper hangings experienced a similar transformation. When J. R. Bigelow entered the business in 1841, it was organized on an in- dividual handicraft basis. By 1853 it became completely mech- anized and Bigelow's factory itself employed 200 workers.93
Many old industries forced out of business by high costs before 1850 resumed on the basis of cheap immigrant labor, and many which suffered no radical change expanded because the surplus of wage-earners was available. In 1848, Jonas Chickering boasted that he employed one hundred men in his piano manufactory; when his sons opened a new plant in 1853 they required 400. Meanwhile the Mason & Hamlin Organ Company opened a mammoth factory in the West End and the total number of workers in the industry rose from 368 in 1845 to 1,248 in 1855. A shortage of hands would have thwarted growth indefinitely.94
tions of the University of Pennsylvania, Political Economy and Public Law Series, no. 21, Philadelphia, 1908), II, 14.
90 Cf. Marshals' Schedules of the Seventh Census (MSS., B. C.); also Boston Pilot, May 17, 1845, January 29, 1853; Franz Löher, Geschichte und Zustände der Deutschen in Amerika (Cincinnati, 1847), 297.
81 Vogt, op. cit., 16; Victor S. Clark, History of Manufactures in the United States ... (Washington, 1916), I, 491. For some of these inventions, cf. Scientific American (New York), October 18, 1851, VII, 36.
92 Bishop, op. cit., III, 303, 305; Dissertation Copy, 448.
93 Bishop, op. cit., III, 305.
94 Cf. Massachusetts House Documents, 1848, no. II0; Bishop, op. cit., III, 285, 287; Freeman Hunt, Lives of American Merchants (New York, 1856), I, 516; Greeley, op. cit., 115; Dissertation Copy, 447.
85
THE ECONOMIC ADJUSTMENT
The creation of new industries most clearly exemplified the importance of cheap labor. The expansion of Boston after 1845 was truly remarkable, particularly in the heavy indus- tries where strong muscles counted most. Scores of new fac- tories, drawing upon the services of hundreds of Irishmen, sprang up in East and South Boston. In 1837 only 776 persons were employed in casting furnaces, in copper and brass foun- dries, and in making machinery; by 1845 this number had grown to only 859. But in the next decade it almost tripled. By 1855 2,412 persons worked in these industries and an addi- tional 1,097 in new rolling mills, forges, and rail factories.95 In this decade, at least seven important iron works began opera- tions in Boston. The Hinckley and Drury Locomotive Works, one of the earliest, expanded steadily after 1848 until it em- ployed four hundred men regularly. Between 1846 and 1848, John Souther launched the Globe iron works, manufacturing locomotives, the first steam shovels, and dredging and sugar mill machinery, an enterprise which alone eventually employed four hundred laborers. In 1847, Harrison Loring built the City Point Iron Works to make engines, machinery, and iron ships. During the same year the Bay State Iron Company was founded in South Boston, and within the next few years, Hawes and Hersey, the Gray and Woods Machine Company, and Chubbuck and Sons established plants in Boston. Mean- while the older Alger works broadened its own activities rapidly.96
In 1845 Donald McKay moved his shipyards to East Boston where he started the most active works in the country.97 This marked the beginning of a resurgence of shipbuilding in the city. Only eighty-six persons worked in shipyards in 1837,
95 Cf. Dissertation Copy, 447.
96 Cf. Dissertation Copy, 447, 470; Eighty Years Progress, 246; Freedley, op. cit., 265, 292, 296, 305, 306; Bishop, op. cit., III, 281, 282, 284 ff., 297 ff., 301, 302, 566; Clark, op. cit., II, 93; Chauncey M. Depew, One Hundred Years of American Commerce ... (New York, 1895), II, 339; Gillespie, op. cit., 37, 45, 110-112, 168.
97 Bishop, op. cit., III, 295; A. B. Hart, Commonwealth History of Massa- chusetts ... (New York, 1930), IV, 442 ff.
86
BOSTON'S IMMIGRANTS, 1790-1865
and but fifty-five in 1845. But ten years later the number had increased to 922 and the business flourished thereafter.98 And this growth characterized all types of industry. Felton and Sons developed their distilleries in South Boston; and James J. Walworth brought his steam fitting and foundry shops from New York, setting up plants in Boston and Cambridge. In these years, too, the Boston Rubber Shoe Company, Robert Bishop and Company, and the Shales and May Furniture Com- pany opened important factories in the city. Upon the dis- covery of oil and the development of kerosene, the Downer Kerosene Oil Company and the Jenney Manufacturing Com- pany established prominent refineries in Boston. The inven- tion of the sewing machine created an industry which employed 168 persons in 1855 and 245 in 1865. The manufacture of glass found a place in the city in the fifties when machinery made possible the employment of unskilled labor, while the shoe industry and the cognate tanning business drifted in from suburban regions in response to cheap labor costs founded on the presence of the Irish.99
In the development of the new Boston the Irish woman was almost as important as the Irish man. When other forms of employment failed her, she turned to the ultimate expedient of women who needed money, sewing at home. The labor of women was used in the domestic manufacture of men's shirts, of women's dresses, and of millinery, where the "making" oper- ations were simple enough to be carried on without super- vision.100 Wages were abysmally low; by constant toil a good seamstress might earn as much as $3.00 a week, but most
98 Cf. Dissertation Copy, 470; Boston Board of Trade, Third Annual Report 1857, 84; Boston Board of Trade, Seventh Annual Report . . . 1861, 175. 09 For all these companies, cf. Gillespie, op. cit., 44, 162, 173, 175 ff., 186; Bishop, op. cit., III, 148, 288 ff., 307, 310 ff .; Depew, op. cit., I, xxvi, II, 367, 541 ; Edwin M. Bacon, Book of Boston . .. (Boston, 1916), 383; Third Annual Re- port of the Bureau of Statistics of Labor, 147; Alfred Pairpoint, Uncle Sam and His Country ... (London, 1857), 154 ff., 156. For the number of em- ployees, cf. Table XIII, infra ; Dissertation Copy, 447.
Boston Pilot, November 5, 1853; Fleischmann, Erwerbszweige, 336 ff .; Virginia Penny, Employments of Women . .. (Boston, 1863), 350, 351.
87
THE ECONOMIC ADJUSTMENT
received as little as $1.50 - just enough for a single woman to pay her rent.101 For this pittance hundreds of women toiled under miserable conditions through all hours of the day
Sewing at once with a double thread A shroud as well as a shirt.
Home sewing had always existed, but after 1845 an increasing number of women found it their only support.102 By 1856 more were seeking such work than could find it, though a single large firm such as Whiting, Kehoe and Galouppe sent material out to more than 8,000 women in the city and through all parts of New England.103 Many German, English, and native women participated, but most were Irish.
To find employment outside the home was a refreshing re- lease from such conditions. After 1846 occurred a gradual but emphatic shift by Irish women to the factory manufacture of women's garments.10 By 1860 there were at least ten large establishments in Boston, some of which employed as many as one hundred girls to produce cloaks, mantuas, and dresses.105 After 1850 the number of immigrant women in all types of industry increased steadily until by the time the War broke out they were prepared to step into whatever places men left vacant. In 1865 fully 24,101 women of native and foreign birth were employed in Boston as compared with 19,025 men. Apart from the 19,268 women workers in the clothing trade, there was a significant number in other occupations, many even in heavy industry.106 The majority of the workers were Irish who, like their men, were contributing an element of fluidity to Boston's economy.
Therein lay the significance of the Irish in the city's eco-
101 Hunt's Merchants' Magazine, August, 1853, XXIX, 253; Isaac A. Hour- wich, Immigration and Labour, the Economic Aspects of European Immigra- tion to the United States (New York, 1912), 364.
102 Cf. Ware, Industrial Worker, 48 ff .; Abbott, op. cit., 237.
103 Boston Pilot, August 30, 1856; Benevolent Fraternity of Churches, Twenty- Second Annual Report . . . 1856, 26.
104 L. L. Lorwin, Women's Garment Workers ... (New York, 1924), 5. 105 Ibid., 10; Eighth Census, 1860, Manufactures (Washington, 1861), lxxxiii ff.
106 Warner, Abstract of the Census of Massachusetts, 1865, 164 ff.
88
BOSTON'S IMMIGRANTS, 1790-1865
nomic life. Before their arrival the rigid labor supply had made industrialization impossible. It was the vital function of the Irish to thaw out the rigidity of the system. Their labor achieved the transition from the earlier commercial to the later industrial organization of the city. Without it "the new and larger establishments could not have been operated." 107 Cap- italists readily admitted that they could not "obtain good inter- est for their money, were they deprived of this constant influx of foreign labour." 108
Those who benefited most from the transition were native Americans. Very few foreigners were manufacturers.109 Eng- lish merchants, like Boott and Lodge, did invest in industrial enterprises, and some Irish and Germans figured prominently in fields where they could readily exploit the labor of their own countrymen. Thus, the Irish firms of Carney and Sleeper and of Mahony and Kenna, and the German, Leopold Morse, were among the leading clothing makers.110 Contrary to the rule, a few other businesses remained in the hands of the immigrants who founded them: John Donnelly, "city bill poster," who helped establish modern outdoor advertising, William S. Pen- dleton, an Englishman who introduced lithography into the United States, and two highly skilled German silversmiths maintained their positions.111 But generally Americans gained control even of the piano industry, the manufacture of glass, brewing, and other industries established in Boston by alien newcomers.112
Immigration advanced other classes in the community as
107 Report of the Bureau of Statistics of Labor Massachusetts Senate Documents, 1870, no. 120, p. 91.
108 Sir Charles Lyell, Second Visit to the United States . . . (London, 1849), I, 187; Jesse Chickering, "Report of the Committee . . . Boston in 1850 . . . , Boston City Documents, 1851, no. 60, p. 50.
109 Cf. infra, Table XIII.
110 Our First Men ... (Boston, 1846), 14, 17, 31; Rev. G. C. Treacy, "Andrew Carney, Philanthropist," United States Catholic Historical Society, Historical Records and Studies, XIII, 101 ff .; Irish American, February 28, 1852; Boston Pilot, September 17, 1853; Dissertation Copy, 166; Reno, op. cit., I, 100. 111 Cf. advertisements in Irish American, October 15, 1859; Boston Pilot, Au- gust 30, 1862 ; Bishop, op. cit., II, 318, 319; Freedley, op. cit., 236, 395-398.
112 Cf. Dissertation Copy, 22, 167-169.
89
THE ECONOMIC ADJUSTMENT
well as the manufacturers. Since the Irish could not satisfy their own needs, others had to. Irishmen needed doctors and teachers; they consumed dry goods and food, thereby quick- ening the city's commercial life. The demand for professional and commercial services directly aided the merchants and clerks, the traders and artisans, - the bulk of the American population of the city. A rise in the prevailing occupational level of the native Bostonians resulted from the general decline in labor costs and the increased value of their own services.
The only Americans who suffered permanently from the Irish invasion were the unskilled laborers and domestics, few in number, who competed directly with the newcomers. More important, although they eventually adjusted to the new con- ditions on favorable terms, was the injury to the artisans dis- placed by the combination of machinery and cheap labor.113 They were a large group, eminently respectable, hitherto pros- perous, and always influential in the community. Their protest against the use of green hands was one of the significant factors complicating the social orientation of the Irish in Boston.114 But though the industrial workers as a class lost ground through- out the period,115 and though most of the individuals within that class suffered immediately by the transition, in the end they gained. The flexibility of the economic organization of the United States enabled the displaced artisans to set up as manufacturers, to enter other trades, or to move west. Edward Everett Hale pointed out :
We are here, well organized, and well trained, masters of the soil. . It must be, that when they come in among us, they come to lift us up. As sure as water and oil each finds its level they will find theirs. So far as they are mere hand-workers they must sustain the head- workers, or those who have any element of intellectual ability. Their inferiority ... compels them to go to the bottom; and the conse- quence is that we are, all of us, the higher lifted because they are here. .. . If into the civilized community made up of hand-workers, and workers in higher grades, you pour in an infusion of a population
113 Cf. Lyell, op. cit., I, 186; "Report and Tabular Statement," loc. cit., 49. 114 Cf. infra, 192.
115 Cf. Ware, Industrial Worker, xii, 6 ff., 26 ff., IIO ff.
90
BOSTON'S IMMIGRANTS, 1790-1865
competent at first only to the simplest hand-work, they take the lowest place, and lift the others into higher places. . .. factory . and farm work comes into the hands of Irishmen. . . . natives . are simply pushed up, into foremen . . . , superintendents rail- way agents, machinists, inventors, teachers, artists &c. . 116
And the experience of all other groups, even of the Negroes, was similar to that of the native whites. With the minor exceptions occasionally noted above, there was little to dis- tinguish them occupationally. Only the Irish stood apart.
The lads who left Skibbereen and Mallow and Macroom where daily wages ranged from sixpence for common laborers to one shilling sixpence for carpenters, the spalpeens who fled from Cork and the west where cash was scarce, received higher pay in Boston.117 Of that there was no doubt. They came expecting better wages and got them. Those who once measured their income in terms of potatoes found dollars, no matter how few, a fair return indeed. But mercilessly linked to these fine dollars was the price system, a ruthless monster which devoured the fruits of Irishmen's labor before they could gather them. The "pratties" and milk were gone from their garden; the garden itself was gone; and there was no room for the pig in Dock Square. Faced for the first time with the necessity of purchasing their own food and clothing, the peas- ants found costs high beyond anything they could have con- ceived, and rising rapidly throughout this period.118 By con- trast, the much more leisurely increase in wages counted for little.119 The British consul noted that in spite of the rise in
116 E. E. Hale, Letters on Irish Emigration, 54, 55; Isaac A. Hourwich, "Eco- nomic Aspects of Immigration," United States Congress, 62 Congress, 2 Session, Senate Documents, no. 696, pp. 10 ff .; Hourwich, Immigration and Labour, 367; Depew, op. cit., I, 12, 13.
117 Cf. First Report of the General Board of Health in the City of Dublin (Dublin, 1822), 56, 57.
118 Boston Pilot, November 28, 1863; also Walter B. Smith and Arthur H. Cole, Fluctuations in American Business, 1790-1860 (Cambridge, 1935), xxvii, 94; Ware, Industrial Worker, 31. For the period 1860-1865, cf. Tenth Annual Report of the Bureau of the Statistics of Labor, January, 1879, Massachusetts Public Documents, 1879, no. 31, pp. 81 ff.
119 Cf. Clark, op. cit., II, 143; Tenth Annual Report of the Bureau of Sta- tistics of Labor, 67 ff., 78, 87; Edith Abbott, "Wages of Unskilled Labor in
91
THE ECONOMIC ADJUSTMENT
wages "it may be doubted if more food and raiment can be purchased by the workman than previously." 120 As a result, the Irish found the value of their labor low, often too low to support them and their families.12
CHART C
WAGES AND COST OF LIVING, 1830-64*
#
1000
-
estimated minimal expenses for a family of four --- average annual wages of laborer (260 days per year).
900
---
average annual wages of master mason (250
-
days per year).
800
700
1
600
500
400
300
200
1830
1840
1850
1860
1864
* Derived from Third Annual Report of the Bureau of Statistics of Labor .... 1872, pp. 517-520.
The conditions of work were as bad as its price was low. They and their employers spoke a different language. Their work week in Ireland had not included Sundays, but in Boston
the United States, 1850-1900," Journal of Political Economy, June, 1905, XIII, 321 ff .; Chart C, infra.
120 Lousada to Russell, May 7, 1863, British Consular Correspondence, F.O. 5/910.
121 The complaints against high costs are most clearly and most poignantly stated in letters from Irish laborers to friends in Ireland, occasionally reprinted in the Irish press. Cf. particularly the letter to his father from James O'Leary, a
92
BOSTON'S IMMIGRANTS, 1790-1865
they must toil the full seven days.122 Their day at home had not excluded time off to chat, to smoke, or just to rest; now they had to accept the rigid discipline of the factory or the contract boss. The leisurely independent peasant life was ended - replaced in a fifteen-hour working day by a feverish struggle for bread under the commands of an alien master.
But no matter - if only that struggle were consistently suc- cessful. It never was. From the day they landed, the immi- grants competed for jobs that were fewer than men. Through all these years unemployment was endemic to the economic system. Even the Civil War brought no surcease; the condi- tion of labor deteriorated steadily. The depression of the first year threw great masses of men out of work, particularly in industrial South Boston, where they starved in their hideous slums.123 Not until the war had drawn thousands of men into the army and stimulated new manufacturing developments did the demand for labor approximate the supply. By that time employers were making hurried efforts to attract new immi- grants - new workers to restore the labor surplus.124
Tossed in the swell of impersonal economic currents, the Irish remained but shabbily equipped to meet the multifarious problems imposed upon them by urban life. Rising prices, ruthless factory exploitation, and unemployment caused "the wreck and ruin that came upon the Irish race in the foreign land!" In the new society "one in a hundred may live and prosper, and stand to be looked at as a living monument of . . . prosperity, but ninety-nine in a hundred are lost, never to be heard of." 12
Killarney immigrant, dated Boston, December 27, 1863 (Cork Examiner, Jan- uary 23, 1864), and the letter from a Cambridgeport immigrant to his former parish priest (ibid., August 19, 1864).
122 Cf. Cork Examiner, August 19, 1864.
- 123 Cf. Cork Examiner, July II, 1861; Boston Pilot, October 5, September 28, 1861; also Commons, op. cit., II, 13; Fite, op. cit., 199 ff., 212. For prices and wages, cf. Wesley Clair Mitchell, History of the Greenbacks . . . (Chicago, 1903), 239 ff., 280 ff.
124 Cf. Boston Pilot, October 18, 1862, January 16, 1864.
125 Jeremiah O'Donovan-Rossa, Rossa's Recollections 1838 to 1898 . . . (Mar- iner's Harbor, New York, 1898), 154.
CHAPTER IV
THE PHYSICAL ADJUSTMENT
How shall your houseless heads and unfed sides, Your loop'd and window'd raggedness, defend you From seasons such as these?
BOSTON's economic transformation set apart one whole section of society - the unskilled, resourceless, perennially unem- ployed Irish proletariat, whose only prospect was absorption into industry at starvation wages. In every phase of their re- action to the new environment, economic maladjustment com- plicated a process relatively simple for other groups. This factor far overshadowed other aspects of Boston's ecological development. By their immobility the Irish crammed the city, recasting its boundaries and disfiguring its physical appearance; by their poverty they introduced new problems of disease, vice, and crime, with which neither they nor the community were ready to cope.
Up to 1840 Boston had easily accommodated the gradual in- crease in residents, of whatever nationality, for it was well on the way toward a solution of its urban problems. Slowly and often laboriously it had surmounted the original limitations constricting its area. By 1845 the peninsula on which it perched was no longer isolated from the mainland. The Mill Dam obviated complete reliance on the sandy neck, at one time subject to frequent floods; and bridges tied the city to Cam- bridgeport, Charlestown, and South Boston, while a ferry linked it to East Boston. With the extension of transit facilities, it was no longer necessary for those who worked in the metrop- olis to live within walking distance of " 'change." Filling oper- ations in the flats created new land and precluded the possibility of an acute shortage. Widespread building prevented over-
94
BOSTON'S IMMIGRANTS, 1790-1865
crowding and led to a notable scarcity of slums. The rise in the number of persons per dwelling was probably "more than overcome by a larger and better class of houses," for facilities kept pace with the demand.1
After 1840, however, growth by immigration - completely unexpected and at a rate higher than ever before - violently upset the process of physical adjustment.2 In 1845 the fore- most authority on demography in Boston confidently asserted that there could be no further increase in inhabitants.3 Yet the next decade witnessed the injection from abroad of more than 230,000 souls, of whom enough remained to raise the population more than a third and to convert a densely-settled into an overcrowded city.4
Those who were able to break away from the most con- gested portions of the town's center continued to have no diffi- culty in securing adequate and comfortable lodgings in many neighborhoods. The rustic villages surrounding Boston eagerly awaited the realtor who might turn abundant farm lands into metropolitan avenues, and welcomed alike foreigners and na- tives, financially able to escape from the teeming peninsula.
Primarily, this centrifugal movement winnowed the well-to-do from the impoverished, and consequently segregated the great mass of Irish within the narrow limits of old Boston. There was no such isolation in the distribution of other newcomers
1 Lemuel Shattuck, Report to the Committee of the City Council . . . Census of Boston . . . 1845 . . . (Boston, 1846), 55.
2 The conventionally accepted figures show an increase of 52.11 per cent for the decade 1830-40 and only 46.58 per cent for 1840-50 and 29.92 per cent for 1850-60 (cf., e.g., Adna F. Weber, Growth of Cities in the Nineteenth Century . .. [Columbia University Studies in History, Economics and Public Law, XI, New York, 1899], 37). This is due to an error of almost 10,000 in the federal census of 1840, which raised the rate of increase for the preceding decade and lowered it for the succeeding one (Shattuck, op. cit., 7 ff.). Cf. also Josiah Curtis, Report of the Joint Special Committee on the Census of Boston 1855 ... (Boston, 1856), 3, 23.
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