USA > Massachusetts > Essex County > Lawrence > Immigrant city: Lawrence, Massachusetts, 1845-1921 > Part 6
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And so in spite of the Breen-Sweeney split the Irish stuck to- gether sufficiently to thwart nativist efforts to curb their power. After 1885, nativism declined for a few years only to rise even more vigorously against the new immigrants after 1890. The gerrymander failure left the Irish in a strong political position.
15. Sunday Despatch (Lawrence), June 29, 1884; Lawrence Morning News, July 2, 1884; The Evening Tribune, Nov. 30, 1894, Mar. 7, 1898; The Sunday Register, Mar. 19, 1899; Lawrence Journal, Oct. 24, 31, Nov. 7, 14, 1885, Jan. 23, 1886. See Map III, p. 50.
58
IMMIGRANT CITY
Intellectually also, the Irish had arrived. Already they were sending boys away to such colleges as Villanova and Ottawa. The Sweeney Journal reflected the views of at least part of the Irish population. The Catholic Friends Society had a lecture program to match the White Fund lectures. As the Irish became interested in their own tongue, the Irish Benevolent Society sponsored a lecture on Irish literature and language, which led to a talk in Gaelic on Saint Patrick's night in 1882. Fairly pretentious were John Sweeney's biographical sketches on Roger Taney. Katie O'Keefe, however, best represented the intellectual advances of the Irish. Whether composing a eulogy for Garfield, giving a talk on Motley or Tennyson, or reciting poetry at various meetings, this Irish-born school teacher and newspaper woman reflected the busy, but hardly profound, mind of her fellow Irish immigrants in the city.16
Evidence that the Irish had arrived socially was the abrupt decline in the number of newspaper articles accusing them of brawling and other crimes. Back in the 1850's the newspapers had been full of lurid stories of Irish misdeeds. Now the French Cana- dians were under the same kind of attack from the native press. A group of them, according to one article, maltreated a woman in a way that "would shame a community of savages"; French urchins stole apples; a young Canadian stoned a policeman; and a crowd of drunken Frenchmen drove down Essex Street insulting pedes- trians. The climax came in 1890 when within a single month the Tribune blamed the "fighting Français" for a Lawrence-Haverhill brawl, referred to a "cantankerous Frenchman on a rampage," and reported another for indecent exposure. Many of the Canadian fights were with aggressive Irishmen who tormented them, but the newspapers stressed the Canadian participation. But while the Canadians got the blame, the record of arrests between 1874 and 1881 showed that a very small percentage of them were being arrested. Actually the Irish were still the ones getting arrested. The percentages read as follows:
16. Lawrence Journal, Feb. 2, Dec. 14, 1878, Jan. 18, Sept. 20, 1879, Sept. 4, 1880, July 9, 1881; The Lawrence Sentinel, Dec. 26, 1868, Jan. 24, 31, Feb. 7, 14, 21, 1874; The Evening Tribune, Feb. 16, 1895, Oct. 14, 1897; The Evening Tribune, Centennial Edition, 1953, Women's Section.
59
DECADES OF PROMISE, 1865-1890
Nativity of Father Percentage of arrests
Percentage of population 1880
Irish
72
42
British
6
17
Canadian
3
10
German
1
5
All foreign-born
except Irish
10
32
Total foreign-born
82
74
Native-born
18
26
The newspapers, however, ignored the Irish record because the Irish were socially more acceptable than in the 1850's.17
The Irish were also better able to weather the reputation of drunkenness and here the record showed them no worse than several other groups. The two Irish wards in 1871 voted to restrict the sale of liquor to those with licenses; while the German and British wards wanted no restrictions at all. Possibly the strongest organization against drinking was Father O'Reilly's Temperance Society. The only immigrant group supporting the open sale of all beverages was the German Personal Liberty League. In 1887, however, when the city decided to eliminate the sale of liquor en- tirely, it was too much for the Irish, and their precincts along with those of the Germans and Canadians voted against the proposal.18
17. The Lawrence Sentinel, Aug. 31, 1872; The Essex Eagle, Aug. 15, 1874; Lawrence Journal, June 11, 18, 1881; The Evening Tribune, June 16, July 17, 21, 1890; Bureau of Statistics of Labor, "Fall River, Lowell, and Lawrence," p. 258; Census of Mass., 1880, p. 50. See Table VIII.
18. The total vote in 1871 was 978 for restriction and 871 against. Wards Three, Four, and Six, all with heavy Irish population were for; Wards One and Two (German) and Five (English) were against. In 1887 the vote was 2,688 against the sale of liquor completely and 2,460 for the sale with licenses. Lawrence Journal, Dec. 10, 1887.
The Vote on The Restriction of The Sale of Liquor 1871
For Restriction
Against Any Restriction
Ward One (German)
152
179
Ward Two (German)
195
202
Ward Three (Irish)
222
132
Ward Four (Irish)
236
150
Ward Five (English)
92
151
Ward Six
81
57
Total
978
871
The Lawrence Sentinel, May 6, 1871. See also Cole, "Lawrence," pp. 112-13
60
IMMIGRANT CITY
While the Irish were making steady progress, the city's leaders were trying desperately to make Lawrence the model city it had started to be. Recognizing that the city had not fulfilled the promise of 1845, they took steps to develop its intellectual side. The White Fund continued to bring speakers such as Wendell Phillips, Phillips Brooks, and Henry George to elevate the city, but unfortunately few workers attended the talks. Even though the trustees gave free tickets to the mills, the workers did not get them because the overseers gave them to their friends.19
The School Committee kept up with new developments by giving up slates and experimenting with a kindergarten. It took the side of the pupils by ordering less memory work and reducing the numbers in each class. When one teacher put mustard in the mouth of a whispering student, the committee dismissed her. It added a course in American history. But when the committee be- came too modern and suggested free textbooks, the Essex Eagle sarcastically asked whether it was planning a "noontime collation" in the near future.20
The establishment of a public library in 1875 was another brave effort by the city to elevate its workers. The total number of books read in its first year was so high that only New York, Boston, Cincinnati, and Philadelphia outranked Lawrence. From 1873 to 1878 the annual circulation averaged over four books per person registered and it remained over three through 1888. Among the favorites were James Fenimore Cooper, Sir Walter Scott, Oliver Optic, and Horatio Alger. Rags to riches and romance were as popular in Lawrence as elsewhere in the United States.21
As a result of these efforts the city enjoyed a mild intellectual revival shortly after the Civil War. The Riverside Literary Society vied with the Unitarian Shakespeare Club in the field of belles-
19. Edward Everett, Richard Henry Dana, Frederick Douglass, Henry Ward Beecher, Horace Greeley, Lucy Stone, Julia Ward Howe, and John Fiske also spoke in Lawrence. Sunday Sun, Sept. 30, 1906, Jan. 6, 1907.
20. School Committee of ... Lawrence, Annual Report, XXIV (1870), 20; LI (1897), 20-21; LXV (1911), 26, 30; The Essex Eagle, Feb. 21, 1874; Law- rence Journal, Jan. 13, 1883; The Evening Tribune, July 1, 1892, Dec. 29, 1893, Nov. 23, 1894.
21. The Essex Eagle, Dec. 27, 1873; Librarian of the Free Public Library of the City of Lawrence, Report, 1873 (Lawrence, 1874), pp. 11, 16; Librarian, Report, III-V (1874-76); VII (1878); IX (1880); XII-XXI (1882-92).
61
DECADES OF PROMISE, 1865-1890
lettres, while the Natural History Society and the Young Men's Catholic Lyceum set the tone in other areas. In 1875 there was a series of spelling matches. The Lawrence Mozart Association and the Choral Union were native efforts in a field dominated by the Germans. By 1890 at least eleven inventions were patented in Lawrence. But Lawrence was not destined to become the Athens of America. In 1877, for example, the Journal complained that the patrons of the theater had little taste because they flocked to see Kit the Arkansas Traveller but ignored the performance of Madame Janauschek.22
Meanwhile better houses were going up around the city. The Germans with their garden cottages in Hallsville and the British with their frame houses along Broadway lived as well as the natives. The shacks above the dam vanished and even the "plains" boasted superior homes. More than one "spacious mansion" adorned Prospect Hill and one priest lived in a handsome building that cost $8,500.23
The city government did its part to improve the appearance of Lawrence. Essex Street, the shopping center, was macadamized in 1861 and paved with stone blocks a decade later. By 1890 almost all of the streets were paved, but they were still muddy when it rained because most had only a gravel covering. Street lighting and sprinkling made travel about the city safer and more pleasant. The city also turned its attention to sewage. Waste, which drained into the Merrimack or Spicket, left the river banks a redolent breeding place for flies. When the Spicket was high, the sewers backed up into cellars; when it was low, a disgusting array of slime and carcasses was revealed. The newspaper outcry was such that the city undertook to clean up this menace in 1883. And three years earlier it had begun to cart away the noisome garbage that filled every alley.24
22. The Essex Eagle, May 23, 1874, Aug. 12, 1876; L. Frederick Rice, Report on General System of Sewerage for the City of Lawrence (Lawrence, 1876); Lawrence Journal, Aug. 10, 1878, Sept. 11, 1880, Jan. 1, 1881, Nov. 3, 1883; Anzeiger und Post, Aug. 5, 1905; Sunday Sun, June 27, 1909; Robert E. Todd, The Report of the Lawrence Survey (Lawrence, 1912), pp. 225-36.
23. The Lawrence Sentinel, May 8, 1869; Lawrence American, Dec. 10, 1864; Lawrence Journal, Jan. 27, 1883.
24. The Lawrence Sentinel, Sept. 14, 1861; The Essex Eagle, Sept. 17, Oct. 15, 1870; United States Census Office, Eleventh Census of the United States: 1890, Report on the Social Statistics of Cities ... (Washington, 1895), pp. 60,
62
IMMIGRANT CITY
These efforts to trim up Lawrence made the city a healthier place, but the problem of pure drinking water still remained. The completion of a large pumping plant in 1876 provided the resi- dents with a steady supply of water from the Merrimack. No one was much concerned that ten miles above the city the mills and tenements of Lowell dropped vast quantities of chemicals and sewage into the river because studies had erroneously shown the water to be pure by the time it reached Lawrence. The state even made the river a free receptacle for waste and the city govern- ment decided to filter the water only when it had too much silt. From then on immigrant and native alike drank diluted sewage in Lawrence.25
By 1886 the high disease rate prompted the state to establish an experiment station in Lawrence to explore the related problems of sewage and drinking water. When an unusually severe typhoid fever epidemic came in 1891, Hiram Mills, who was in charge of the station, soon diagnosed the source of the infection. He was amazed at first that Lawrence did not have its fever peak in the early fall with the rest of the state, but suffered most heavily in mid-winter, when its deaths often equalled those in Boston. After carefully plotting the fever deaths in the various Merrimack Valley cities, he was able to prove that the disease came down the river from Manchester and Nashua to Lowell and then moved on to Lawrence. His report was for years the most widely known work on water purification in the world because it proved that streams could not purify themselves within short distances and that typhoid fever was easily carried in sewage-polluted rivers. He urged the immediate construction of a plant that could filter all the water used in the city.
When the new filter was put to work in 1893, the results proved
65; Bureau of Census, Special Reports, Statistics of Cities ... 1907 (Washington, 1910), pp. 477, 481, 486.
25. Joint Standing Committee on Water Works, Report on ... the Reports and Estimates of the Water Commissioners (Lawrence, 1875); Water Com- missioners, Final Report (Lawrence, 1876), pp. 4-14, 23-24; Morris Knowles and Charles Hyde, The Lawrence, Mass., City Filter . , reprinted from Transactions of the American Society of Civil Engineers, XLVI (1901), 258-66. The state Board of Health in 1887 maintained that "the Merrimack is a good instance of the ability of a large river to receive . . . polluting material . . . without becoming seriously polluted." Massachusetts Board of Health, Annual Report, XIX (1887), Mass. Pub. Doc. 34, pp. 36-37.
63
DECADES OF PROMISE, 1865-1890
all of Mills's contentions. The typhoid fever averages dropped from forty-three cases and twelve deaths a year before the filter to fifteen cases and fewer than three deaths after. And the general death rate dropped correspondingly. Three-quarters of the typhoid fever cases after 1893 came from unfiltered water, particularly the canal water that mill workers insisted on drinking.26
State help also brought Lawrence closer to ending the smallpox menace, which in 1866 attacked between two hundred and three hundred persons. For years a debate raged between those who favored compulsory inoculation and the others, mostly Germans, who felt it was an invasion of privacy and a scheme to make doctors and druggists rich. When the School Committee finally required inoculations in 1893 and the city doctors agreed to do the work free of charge, within a year all but five hundred of the three thousand school children were protected. Emil Stiegler defeated efforts by the city's Board of Health to pass a general order, but a mandatory state law eliminated all loopholes. The Canadians as well as the Germans were unpopular in this issue because the public believed that the epidemics had originated in Canada. Al- though the water filter and the compulsory vaccination did not come until three years after the end of the 1865-90 period, the progress taken in those directions before 1890 helps explain why these decades were decades of hope.27
Even those who contracted serious diseases had more of a chance because of the Lawrence General Hospital, which the Ladies Union Charitable Society opened in 1882. The immigrants
26. The typhoid fever cases and deaths were for 1887-92 and 1894-99. The typhoid fever annual death rate was three times that of the state before the filter and the same as the state's after it was built. The general death rate went from twenty-four per thousand to twenty. Lawrence Experiment Station, Proud Heritage, 1886-1953 (Lawrence, 1953), pp. 6-12; H. W. Clark and Stephen Gage, A Review of ... Purification of Sewage at the Lawrence Ex- periment Station (Boston, 1909), p. 3 (reprinted from Massachusetts Board of Health, Report, XL (1908); Hiram F. Mills, "The Filter of the Water Supply of the City of Lawrence and its Results," Massachusetts Board of Health, Report, XXV (1893), 545-46, 560; Knowles and Hyde, Filter, pp. 268-69, 307- 17; M. F. Collins, "The Lawrence Filter," New England Water Works Associa- tion, XVII (1903), 295; Lawrence Board of Health, "Report, 1906," p. 12, Lawrence City Documents 1906-1907.
27. The Evening Tribune, May 26, Dec. 13, 23, 1893, Jan. 26, 1894; Anzeiger und Post, Dec, 28, 1901, Jan. 28, Mar. 15, Sept. 13, 1902, Feb. 25, 1905.
64
IMMIGRANT CITY
used the hospital more than the natives. Between 1886 and 1888, for example, even though the immigrants made up less than half of the city, they contributed 62 per cent of the patients. But the more recent immigrant groups did not use it as much as the earlier ones. The Irish, for example, provided more cases than the Canadians.28
As a result of these efforts Lawrence made great progress be- tween the 1850's and the 1880's. The death rate dropped from twenty-nine per thousand to twenty-three, while the average age at death rose from fifteen to twenty-five. Parents had less cause to worry as the percentage dying before the age of two fell from 44 per cent of all deaths to 35 per cent. With fewer babies dying this period ended on an optimistic note. It was a better city in which to live than it had been in 1865.29
It was also a better place in which to enjoy life partly because 28. Ladies Union Charitable Society, Report . . of the Lawrence General Hospital . .. , XI-XVI (1886-91).
PERCENTAGE OF TOTAL NUMBER OF PATIENTS AT THE LAWRENCE GENERAL HOSPITAL
Nativity
1886- 1888
1889- 1891
1894- 1896
1899- 1901
1904- 1906
1910- 1911
American
38(56)*
47(54)
36(53)
39(54)
52(54)
54(52)
Irish
33(20)
22
21
15
8
6(7)
English
14(10)
14
14
11
6
8(7)
Canadian
7(6)
8
7
9
9
9(11)
Scotch
3
3
3
4
2
French
3
1
6
4
5
2
Italian
1
1
3
6
7(8)
Russian
1
2
2
5(5)
Armenian
3
2
3
Syrian
4
4
4(2)
Total Foreign
62(44)
53(46)
1 64(47)
61(46)
48(46)
46(48)
4
3
German
Polish
* In parentheses are the proportions of each ethnic group in the total popula- tion of the city.
29. The death rate averaged exactly 22.5 for the five census years 1870-90. It was 29.4 for the census years 1855-65. Report ... relating to the Registry and Return of Births, Marriages, and Deaths ... , XLIX (1890), Mass. Pub. Doc. 1, p. 373. The average age at death was twenty-five for the census years 1880-90. Ibid., XXIX (1880), vii; XLIV (1885), vii; XLIX (1890), 7. In the period 1867-69, 44 per cent died before the age of two. It was 41 per cent 1877- 79, and 35 per cent 1887-89. Ibid., XXVI (1867), xliv-xlv; XXVII (1868), xliv-xlv; XXVIII (1869), xliv-xlv; XXXVI (1877), xliv-xlv; XXXVII (1878), xliv-xlv; XXXVIII (1879), xliv-xlv; XLVI (1887), 52-53; XLVII (1888), 58- 59; XLVIII (1889), 58-59.
65
DECADES OF PROMISE, 1865-1890
it was close to the countryside. The half-rural Lawrence of the 1850's remained in the 1880's. A brisk walk out Jackson or Prospect or almost any street brought the immigrant, generally from a rural background, into an environment he could understand. The smell of hay, the sight of apple blossoms, the taste of grapes from the vines were there for all to experience. For some a simple walk across fields was enough, others took picnics up the river, and the more adventurous explored the beaches or mountains. In bad times berry picking and fishing offered food and therapy, in good times there were hills and valleys where a man with savings could build a home. Neither metropolitan nor agrarian, Lawrence of- fered the immigrants a chance to escape.
Within the city there were opportunities for relaxation. The city streets offered the excitement of a Saint Patrick's Day parade or simply a place for children to frolic and parents to gossip. Sports and games of every sort existed. The walking craze hit the city in 1879, roller polo in 1883, canoe racing in 1884, and horse racing in 1885; boxing, wrestling, dog fighting, and football were more enduring. Enthusiasm for the old swimming holes never waned. The first and second "sandys" in Stevens Pond near the Arlington Mill were exciting because swimmers could dive from the big mill wheel, but the more intrepid frequented the deep, icy- cold, first and second "stumps" in the Merrimack barely above the dam. By the end of these decades of promise cricket and base- ball, symbolizing the old world and the new, had become the most popular sports in the city.30
Sports heroes and contests brought much color and excitement to the drab existence of the immigrant. Near the close of the Civil War, Frank McAleer of Lawrence fought Professor Levett of Boston to a draw in a prize fight, and the first baseball game took place two years after the Civil War, with the Lawrence team victorious over Lowell forty to thirty-six. One winter seventy-five sleighs met on Canal Street for a race. When the weather became
30. Alice W. O'Connor, "A Study of the Immigration Problem in Lawrence, Massachusetts" (unpublished social worker's thesis, Lawrence, Mass., 1914), pp. 35-39; Lawrence American, May 14, 1864; Lawrence Journal, Oct. 13, 1877, April 13, Nov. 23, 1878, Aug. 16, 1879, Sept. 4, 1880, April 2, June 25, 1881, Oct. 27, Nov. 3, Dec. 15, 1883, July 11, 18, 1885; The Essex Eagle, Dec. 13, 1873, Aug. 4, 1883; Lawrence Morning News, June 19, 1884; The Evening Tribune, 1890-93, passim.
66
IMMIGRANT CITY
warmer, a "select crowd" gathered to watch two big dogs, "Turk" and "Joe," fight each other for two bloody hours. Occasionally the city had record breakers: men such as J. S. Taylor, who was one of the best walkers in the country, and Barney Weefers, who led all the dash men. Not every one enjoyed the fun. The police made many efforts to suppress games on Sunday and The Evening Tribune condemned bicycle speeders who were "scorching" the highways at ten miles an hour.31
But while these were years of promise, Lawrence had not reached the millenium by 1890. All over the United States cities were making improvements, often more than in Lawrence. People were still getting sick and dying-thousands of them too early in life-in the immigrant city. The scarlet fever epidemic of 1876 was an unforgettable tragedy. In each major disease Lawrence had a higher death rate than the state as a whole between 1870 and 1890, and its general death rate was fifth in Massachusetts.32 The disappearance of the shanties only ushered in the tenements. In one a mother and child suffocated while sleeping in a tiny room with two other children. Open staircases inviting a thirty foot plunge to certain death were common. The "stench and pollution of the average tenement traps" drove people out into the streets, where crime flourished. "Starvation alley" off Common Street was crowded with "hovels where sin and crime . . . [were] bred with equal facility." And contributing to all the evils was un- employment, for conditions were unsteady after the Panic of 1873.
Nonetheless, Lawrence had made great progress. The de- scriptions of the tenements were at least partly exaggerated. Most people did not fall down stairways and most did not catch scarlet fever. If one could only reach the age of two he was likely to live a long while in Lawrence. By 1890 almost a third of those surviving the first two years lived past fifty-five.33 And the im-
31. The baseball game was held on the Common. Lawrence American, May 14, 1864; The Essex Eagle, July 27, May 21, 1870, Dec. 13, 1873, Feb. 14, 1874, Feb. 13, 1875, May 13, 1876; The Evening Tribune, Sept. 3, 1897, July 18, 1899.
32. Massachusetts Board of Health, Report, XXIII (1891), xx, lxxxiii, 785-91, 868-71; Report of Births, Marriages, and Deaths, XLIX (1890), 215, 373, 375. The death rate from measles in Lawrence was 74 per cent above the state's; typhoid fever, 70 per cent; diphtheria and croup, 68 per cent.
33. Lawrence American, April 16, Aug. 27, 1864; The Essex Eagle, Feb. 7, 1874; Wadlin, Census of ... Massachusetts: 1895, I (Boston, 1896), 662-64;
67
DECADES OF PROMISE, 1865-1890
migrants were sure that conditions would soon improve in the mills and then there would be jobs for all. As the decades of promise drew to a close, the city's future seemed bright.
Between 1865 and 1890 Lawrence changed from a city of native Americans and immigrant Irish, where the natives were in complete command, to a cosmopolitan city in which the Irish and the natives ruled the French Canadians and to a lesser extent the British and the Germans. Only the French Canadians among the newer immigrants actually suffered much abuse. The Germans and British, more skilled in the mills and wealthier, were never as unpopular as the French Canadians. The key to the promise shown by the decades between 1865 and 1890 lay in the operation of the immigrant cycle. Even the lowliest Canadian operative recognized the progress made by the Irish during those years and could hope to do the same in the years to come. The city's leaders were able to review the years following the Civil War with pride. The dismal Lawrence of the Know-Nothing riots, the Pemberton dis- aster, and the shanties was no more. Conscientious efforts had elevated the city's inhabitants and had improved the environment. People lived longer, had more pleasures, and read more. While clashes between ethnic groups occurred, the bitter hatred and ugly violence of the Know-Nothing period did not reappear in the two decades after the Civil War. Had the I.W.W. strike occurred in 1890, the writers would not have been able to paint such a dismal picture as in 1912. The invasion of the post-1890 immigrants was to change Lawrence again.
Lawrence Morning News, April 14, 1884; The Evening Tribune, Aug. 15, 1890, Jan. 11, 16, 1891, Feb. 10, 1897; Lawrence Journal, Dec. 29, 1877.
CHAPTER V
Decades of Despair, 1890-1912
In January of 1890 the Massachusetts Board of Health made a special report on "the conditions which attended an unusually high rate of mortality" in Lawrence; on Memorial Day the G.A.R. refused to take part in a flag raising ceremony at Saint Mary's parochial school; in June a state meeting of the Hibernians in Lawrence denounced the British; in late July a terrifying cyclone ripped its way through South Lawrence; and that fall the "Micks" opposed the "anti-Micks" in the city election. Thus the decades of promise faded quickly into those of despair. While the transforma- tion was not complete-smallpox inoculations and the filter were still to come-a change began in 1890. Between that date and 1912 massive invasions of new immigrants doubled the city's population and posed problems that the city could not immediately solve. During the first five years about a thousand refugees from the Russian, Austrian, Italian, and Turkish empires arrived in the city, and the total rose to 2,500 in 1900 and 15,000 in 1910. Just before the 1912 strike southeastern Europeans made up one- third of the immigrant population.1
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