Were late nineteenth century immigrants uprooted

From: Major Problems in American History, Vol II, 3rd Edition, Cengage.

ESSAYS

Immigration history is deeply intertwined with industrialization because workers from Europe provided much of the muscle for the new factories. The great immigration historian Oscar Handlin, retired from Harvard University, articulates convincingly what some have dubbed the "melting pot" theory: that factory work and polyglot cities sheared immigrants of their cultural roots, reduced them to a common human mass, and remolded them in the forms desired by capitalists. In the first essay, an excerpt from Handlin's classic book, The Uprooted, he shows how factories simplified their mechanical processes so that they could utilize unskilled peasants and how peasants came to adapt themselves to the new life. He also argues that industrial labor left the immigrant just as vulnerable to poverty as conditions in the Old World, but with considerably less psychic compensation. A generation and more of younger historians have emphasized the ways in which immigrants and other workers resisted the new industrial work discipline by creating vibrant ethnic enclaves. Mark Wyman of Illinois State University takes this discussion one step further. He argues that immigrants never gave up the fight for personal autonomy, and in fact quite a few returned to their home countries, sometimes sadder and wiser, but sometimes much richer. Wyman's essay leads readers to question if immigrants were genuinely uprooted, or if they simply transplanted themselves according to their own calculations of risks and benefits. Wyman acknowledges the difficult conditions under which immigrants struggled, but he emphasizes the choices they made, rather than the ones made for them by industrialization.

Uprooted and Trapped:

The One-Way Route to Modernity- Oscar Handlin

Let the peasant, now in America, confront his first problem; time enough if ever this is solved to turn to other matters.

How shall a man feed himself, find bread for his family? The condition of man is to till the soil; there is no other wholeness to his existence. True, in retrospect, life on the soil in the old home had not yielded a livelihood. But that was because there was not there soil enough. In consequence, the husbandmen, in their hundreds of thousands, have left their meager plots. They have now come to a New World where open land reaches away in acre after acre of inexhaustible plenty. Arrived, they are ready to work.

Yet only a few, a fortunate few, of these eager hands were destined ever to break the surface of the waiting earth. Among the multitudes that survived the crossing, there were now and then some who survived it intact enough in body and resources to get beyond the port of landing and through the interior cities of transit. Those who were finally able to establish themselves as the independent proprietors of farms of their own made up an even smaller number.

All the others were unable to escape from the cities. Decade after decade, as the Federal government made its count, the census revealed a substantial majority of the immigrants in the urban places; and the margin of that majority grew steadily larger. Always the percentage of the foreign-born who lived in the cities was much higher than that of the total population.

Yet the people who were to live the rest of their days amidst a world of steel and stone and brick were peasants. If they failed to reach the soil which had once been so much a part of their being, it was only because the town had somehow trapped them ....

What could the peasant do here? He could not trade or do much to help the traders.

There was some room for petty shopkeepers; he lacked the training and the capital. Some handicraftsmen supplied clothes and furniture and a variety of other products to the townsfolk; he lacked the skill and tools. Back on the docks at which he had landed were a number of casual jobs with the stevedores. Here and there in the warehouses and stores were calls for the services of porters. But there was a limit to the amount of lifting and carrying to be done. Wandering about in the first days of their arrival, these immigrants learned that beyond these few opportunities there was, at first, no demand for their capacities.

As time went by, they became restless seekers after employment. Yet many remained unsuccessful in the quest or, drifting about, picked up odd jobs that tided them over from week to week. They joined a growing army of the anxious for work, for they could certainly not remain long without income. Perpetually on the

Oscar Handlin, The Uprooted: The Epic Story of the Great Migrations That Made the American People (Boston: Little. Brown, 1973),58-60,65-71,85,90-98. Copyright© 1951, 1973 by Oscar Handlin. Used by permission of Little, Brown and Company, Inc.

verge of destitution, and therefore of starvation, eager to be hired at any rate, these redundant hands accumulated in a fund of available but unused labor. ...

In the 1820's and 1830's, factory employment was the province of groups relatively high in social status. North of Boston, the bulk of the labor force was made up of respectable young girls, many the daughters of neighborhood farmers, girls willing to work for a few years in anticipation of the marriageable young man. In southern New England the general practice was to employ whole families of artisans. Everywhere, paternalistic organization and the closely knit communal life of the boardinghouses did not allow the easy entrance of newcomers. The only immigrants who then found a place in industry were the few skilled operatives who had already mastered the craft in the Old Country and were hired for the sake of their skills.

The reservoir of unskilled peasant labor that mounted steadily higher in the cities did not long remain untapped, however. In the 1840's and 1850's came a succession of new inventions that enterprising men of capital used to transform the productive system of the United States. The older industries had disdained the immigrants; but the new ones, high in the risks of innovation and heavy initial investments, drew eagerly on this fund of workers ready to be exploited at attractively low wages. The manufacture of clothing, of machines, and of furniture flourished in the great commercial cities precisely where they could utilize freely the efforts of the newcomers, hire as many as they needed when necessary, layoff any surplus at will. A completely fluid labor supply set the ideal conditions for expansion.

Thereafter, whatever branch of the economy entered upon a period of rapid ex​ pansion did so with the aid of the same immigrant labor supply. At midcentury the immigrants went to dig in the mines that pockmarked the great coal and iron fields of Pennsylvania, first experienced Welshmen and Cornishmen, later raw Irishmen and Germans, and still later Slavs-a vague term that popularly took in Bohemians, Slovaks, Hungarians, and also Italians. These people spread with the spread of the fields, southward into West Virginia and westward to Illinois, in a burst of development from which impressive consequences followed.

The wealth of new power extracted from the earth, after 1870, set off a second revolution in American industry. Steam replaced water power. Iron replaced wood in the construction of machines. Factories became larger and more mechanized and the place of unskilled labor more prominent. On the payrolls of new enterprises, immigrant names were almost alone; and the newcomers now penetrated even into the older textile and shoe industries. The former peasants, first taken on for menial duties as janitors and sweepers, found themselves more often placed at machines as the processes of production were divided into ever simpler tasks open to the abilities of the unskilled ....

This process, so rich in rewards for the country as a whole, paid mostly dividends of pain for the immigrants involved in it. It cost the peasants this to make the adjustment, that the stifling, brazen factories and the dark, stony pits supplanted the warm, living earth as the source of their daily bread. Year after year they paid the price in innumerable hardships of mind and body.

When he reviewed his grievances the man who went to work said that the conditions of his labor were oppressively harsh. His day was long, he pointed out; not until the 1880’s was the ten-hour limit an objective seriously to be struggles for,

and for many years more that span remained a pleasing ideal rather than a reality. His week was full, he added; seven days, when they could be had, were not unusual. And, he complained, along with the Sunday there vanished that whole long calendar of holidays that had formerly marked the peasant year. Here the demands of industry and the availability of employment alone determined when a man should work and when he should rest.

These were such wrongs as the ache in his muscles recalled. Others were sum​ moned up by an ache ofthe spirit. For this matter of time reflected an unhuman lack of concern with human needs that was characteristic of the entire system. In these great concerns, no one seemed troubled with the welfare of the tiny men so cheap to come by who moved uneasily about in the service of the immense expensive machines. A high rate of industrial accidents and a stubborn unwillingness to make the most elementary provisions for the comfort of the employees, to the immigrant were evidence of the same penetrating callousness.

In the terms of his own experience, the laborer could come to understand his total insecurity by recollecting the steady decline in the span of the labor contract. In the Old Country, and in the old America, a man was hired for the year or for the season. But that period was altogether out of place under these conditions. Now it was not even by the month or by the week that the worker was taken on, but by the day or by the hour. Such an arrangement released the employer from the compulsion of paying hands when he had no need of them. But it left the hands uncertain, from moment to moment, as to how much work and how much income they would have.

The ultimate refinement was the shift to piecework in which the laborer, rewarded in accord with his output, received payment only for the instants he was actually at his task. The peasant sometimes conceived of this as an attractive alternative, for he hated the idea of selling his time, of taking directions like a servant, of cringing under the frowns of a foreman who judged all performances inadequate. Piecework brought the consolation of independence-one's time was one's own-and the illusion that additional effort would bring additional returns. But, though the immigrants often clung to the illusion as a token of hope, the reality was inescapably different. There was no independence and rewards would not rise. For the employer who set the rates manipulated them to his own interest while the employee had no choice but to accept. The net effect was to shift from the employer to the employee the whole burden of labor insecurity.

These elements of insecurity, the immigrant learned, were not confined to the conditions of the working day; they pervaded the total relationship of the worker to the economy. The fluid labor supply that gave the employer complete liberty to hire as many workers as he wished, when he wished, also gave him the ability, at will, to dismiss those whose toil he no longer needed. Under such circumstances there were always some men without jobs. Each industry came to have its seasons, peaks and troughs in the level of employment dictated either by the weather as in construction, or, more generally, by the convenience of the managers. It was a rare individual who did not go on the bricks for some part of the year, for periodic unemployment was an expected aspect of the laborer's career.

Then there were the years when unemployment deepened and spread out. The intervals of idleness grew longer and were less frequently interrupted until unem​ ployment was no longer intermittent but continuous. More men appeared on the streets during the day; children were seen, pail in hand, on the way to the police

station for the doled-out soup. First in the mill and mining towns where there was only one employer or one industry and where a closing had an immediate cataclysmic effect, then in the cities where the impact was delayed by diversity of occupations, but in time everywhere, the laborer knew a depression was upon him.

At such times, the burdens of his economic role became intolerable. The hunger left behind in Europe was again an intimate of the household, and the cold and raggedness. Endurance stretched to the bursting point, and the misery of regret was overwhelming. It was a golden land here in America as long as there was work, but without work it was worth nothing. In the miry slough of inactivity into which he now sank, the peasant had leisure to meditate upon the meaning of his lot in the New World ....

Only by calling upon the earnings of more than one of its members could the immigrant household make ends meet. Not unless it utilized the efforts of wife and child, as well as those of the husband, could the family be certain that there would always be someone working and that the income of the whole would be large enough, secure enough, to withstand the recurrent shocks of American economic life.

It was not the mere fact that wife and child must exert themselves that was hurtful.

These were no strangers to toil in the Old World, or in the New. The degradation lay in the kind of work. The boys drifted into street occupations, blacked boots or hawked newspapers, missed thus the opportunity to acquire a trade and fell into all sorts of outlandish ways. Or they, and girls too for that matter, entered the shops, where they did men's work at child's wages. For the women, there was "domestic service"-maid's work in strangers' homes or back-breaking laundering in their own; or, more often as time went on, service to industry in the factory or by homework. If it was characteristic of these families that they somehow found the room for a boarder, that was only another method of adding to their ranks another breadwinner.

But in America bread never came without complications. The peasant, new to the means of earning his livelihood, was also new to the means of spending it. To his misfortune he discovered that he himself added to the difficulties in making ends meet through inability to use efficiently whatever money came to his hands. In his old life, he had thought of objects in their individuality and uniqueness; the chair, the hat, the cow. Here he had to learn to think of them as commodities, subject to a common quantitative standard of price. Without a clear conception of the relationship of money to things, every transaction involved a set of totally new conditions ....

Often, they would try to understand. They would think about it in the pauses of their work, speculate sometimes as their minds wandered, tired, at the close of a long day. What had cut short the continuous past, severed it from the unrelated present? Immigration had transformed the entire economic world within which the peasants had formerly lived. From surface forms to inmost functionings, the change was complete. A new setting, new activities, and new meanings forced the newcomers into radically new roles as producers and consumers of goods. In the process, they became, in their own eyes, less worthy as men. They felt a sense of degradation that raised a most insistent question: Why had this happened? ...

Every element of the immigrants' experience since the day they had left home added to this awareness of their utter helplessness. All the incidents of the journey were bound up with chance. What was the road to follow, what the ship to board, what port to make? These were serious questions. But who knew which were the right answers? Whether they survived the hazards of the voyage, and in what condition, these too were decisions beyond the control of the men who participated in it. The capricious world of the crossing pointed its own conclusion as to the role of chance in the larger universe into which the immigrants plunged.

It was the same with their lives after landing. To find a job or not, to hold it or to be fired, in these matters laborers' wills were of slight importance. Inscrutable, distant persons determined matters on the basis of remote, unknown conditions. The most fortunate of immigrants, the farmers, knew well what little power they had to influence the state of the climate, the yield of the earth, or the fluctuations of the market, all the elements that determined their lot. Success or failure, incomprehensible in terms of peasant values, seemed altogether fortuitous. Time and again, the analogy occurred to them: man was helpless like the driven cog in a great machine.

Loneliness, separation from the community of the village, and despair at the in​ significance of their own human abilities, these were the elements that, in America, colored the peasants' view of their world. From the depths of a dark pessimism, they looked up at a frustrating universe ruled by haphazard, capricious forces. Without the capacity to control or influence these forces men could but rarely gratify their hopes or wills. Their most passionate desires were doomed to failure; their lives were those of the feeble little birds which hawks attack, which lose strength from want of food, and which, at last surrendering to the savage blasts of the careless elements, flutter unnoticed to the waiting earth.

Sadness was the tone of life, and death and disaster no strangers. Outsiders would not understand the familiarity with death who had not daily met it in the close quarters of the steerage; nor would they comprehend the riotous Paddy funerals who had no insight of the release death brought. The end of life was an end to hopeless striving, to ceaseless pain, and to the endless succession of disappointments. There was a leaden grief for the ones who went; yet the tomb was only the final parting in a long series of separations that had started back at the village crossroads.

Coming and Going: Round Trip to America – Mark Wyman

The Polish priest was surprised as he went over the parish census for 1894. He had known for some time that people were emigrating from the village of Miejsce, and so there was nothing startling in the total of 121 persons going to America in the ten years since the first traveler set out across the Atlantic.

Mark Wyman, Round-Trip to America: The Immigrants Return to Europe. 1880-/930 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press. 1993). pp 3-6. 17-19.32.39-40,53,60-62,67-68,76-77,79.83-87. 127, 129,201-202. Used by permission of the publisher, Cornell University Press.

What surprised him was the return flow: fifty-eight persons had come home to stay, just under half the overseas migration ....

What surprised the Polish priest in 1894 continues to offer unexpected findings to those who look beneath the surface of American immigration. For the incoming tidal wave of peoples has always had an outflow, a reverse movement of immigrants turning their backs on the United States. Ignored by Fourth of July orators, overlooked by historians who concentrate on the newcomers' assimilation, return migration looms so large in world history, with critical implications for the homelands and the United States, that it cries out for attention ....

The perils of ocean travel in these early periods, during the age of sail, helped keep return totals low. But by the middle of the nineteenth century a different picture emerged as railroads crisscrossed the continents and steamships began to ply the Atlantic. Not only were the European masses on the move for America, Canada, and elsewhere, but for large numbers it had become a round-trip. During this era of mass immigration, from approximately 1880 until 1930 when restriction laws and the Great Depression choked it off, from one-quarter to one-third of all European immigrants to the United States permanently returned home. The total may have reached four million persons.

European peasant villages that once seemed impenetrable in their backwardness, their isolation, now boasted residents who could describe the wonders of the New World-skyscrapers, elevated trains, deep tunnels. (Had not they themselves worked on these wonders?) Men and women who formerly quailed at the thought of a visit from the landlord now proudly described how they had seen the president of the United States in person, and one returned Slovenian even claimed to have shaken the hand of "Tedi." European politicians suddenly had to contend with subjects who knew different governmental systems, and clergymen confronted parishioners who had come into contact with other religious ideas. Life was not the same in Miejsce, nor in the Mezzogiomo, nor in thousands of peasant communities across the Continent. ...

The new migration was all built on the centuries-old European tradition of seasonal migration for work in nearby areas. This practice was so old, so extensive, that recent scholars have referred to it as "a way of life" among Russian and Galician Poles; as "the thing to do ... an accepted and socially supported form of behavior" in many areas of east-central Europe; as "a way of life for hundreds of thousands of Slovaks" and "as almost an ordinary routine of village life" in the Italian Apennines. It was known everywhere in Europe ....

This movement within Europe was not new to the late nineteenth century, despite claims to the contrary by some writers. The modern world has struggled hard to maintain the comforting, nostalgic thought of a static peasant culture rooted to the soil, unchanging. Oscar Handlin wrote of "the enormous stability in peasant society .... From the westernmost reaches of Europe, in Ireland, to Russia in the east, the peasant masses had maintained an imperturbable sameness." He described a world where the village's self-sufficiency only rarely yielded to products or influences from outside, while cities were "regions of total strangeness into which the peasant never ventured, where not the people alone, but the very aspect of the earth, was unfamiliar."

But recent examinations into the past of European communities contradict the view of peasant life as stable and unchanging; this picture is inaccurate not only for the nineteenth century but for many centuries before. The Nordic countries' population "has been very mobile for centuries," one scholar found, and another showed that conditions in central Sweden's Dalarna province were driving people to seek work elsewhere perhaps as far back as the Middle Ages .... It was the same in Italy, where two scholars who examined the exodus from a northern community for 1865-192 I noted that this emigration really demonstrated "continuity in an apparently long-standing pattern of intense but short-distance migration." The inhabitants traditionally traveled for work away from home, but not overseas. Balkan men similarly trekked across much of southern Europe looking for jobs. An Irishman was therefore speaking for generations and an entire continent, not just for his 1881 peers, when he told the royal commissioners investigating the vast farm labor migration into England, "We are like wild geese, your honor." ...

Frequently it was specific information from America that drew the emigrant. As an Italian politician put it, "the strongest emigration agent is the postage-stamp." Branko M. Colakovic's interviews with 500 Yugoslavs who had crossed the ocean before 1925 led him to conclude that the pull from America was more important than the push from even the harshest Yugoslav conditions. Higher wages were crucial, and pamphlets from American railroads and state immigration bureaus bombarded the would-be immigrant with statistics to support the agents' claims. "It was almost heaven," a Finn said in recalling tales of the wealth that allegedly awaited workers in the United States. "You could almost just grab the money!" And Swedish children in Smaland called the distant land where their relatives were heading not America but mer rika-"more rich." ...

As this emigration to America mushroomed, its makeup began to shift. It remained a heavily rural, peasant movement, but no longer did family groups dominate. Single women arrived, but their numbers were overwhelmed by those of men, especially young men. "They came in droves of males," a U.S. congressman remarked, and the change was dramatic enough to draw attention: the U.S. Census report for 1910 observed that with the increased immigration from southern and eastern Europe the foreign-born showed "a very marked excess of males"-154.6 males to 100 females from Austria, 160.8 to 100 from Hungary, 190.6 to 100 from Italy, 137.3 to 100 from Russia ....

The transformation in the makeup of this emigration was apparently not driven by racial or regional factors but by economic ones. In the decade ending in 1910, in fact, almost 70 percent of all immigrants into the United States were males, mainly young males. Women continued to arrive, but many found work not in the factories but as servants, or they remained within family groups. And for both men and women it was a migration of youth. Some of the Austro- Hungarian groups had more than 80 percent in the 14-44 age category after 1900; for U.S. immigration as a whole, persons in that age group accounted for 83.4 percent of the total in the exploding influx of 1906-10. This changing flow had a large impact on the emigration districts of Europe, too: the exodus of men from Slovak regions of Hungary was so heavy that by 1910 there were only 532 men in Slovakia for every 1,000 women.

Part of the change in the exodus was that immigrants increasingly planned only a short stay in America-nothing to put down roots for just enough to pile up some savings that could be used for better living or a specific project at home ....

No one expected such work to be easy. "Everyone works like hell," a Finn wrote home from Michigan, and the experiences gave rise to a Polish saying: "America for the oxen, Europe for the peasant." A YMCA leader examining the immigrants' situation in Pittsburgh found that as a rule they earned the lowest wages and worked the "full stint" of hours, including twelve hours daily on a seven-day week at the blast furnaces. Long hours were common for immigrant workers; so was energy sapping labor ....

They agreed: you worked hard in America. One had to "sweat more during a day than during a whole week in Poland," a peasant immigrant wrote home. Returnees to Ireland said that they had worked like slaves, and some argued that "if people worked hard at home they would make as much money at home as anyone in America." Interviewers with Norwegian immigrants found general agreement that they had to work harder in America than in Norway. Similar comments appeared across the Continent as remigrants recounted their experiences ....

Stories of the enormous sacrifices immigrants made to build up savings circulated in the industrial centers and even in the halls of Congress. Common laborers in Pittsburgh were reported to be putting away up to $15 a month; this is consistent with Ewa Morawska's conclusion that the savings by east-central European men in Johnstown averaged $100-200 annually. Italian laborers had the highest savings rate among European laborers, according to a 1907 Bureau of Labor report, putting away $25-27 monthly from railroad work. Floating immigrant workers in the western Midwest and Plains states were reported to have "clear saving" of$1 per day from wages of only $1.25-1.65. An American working in a steel mill found many employees who did not save, but he said that "practically all the 'Hunkies' of twenty-eight or thirty and over saved very successfully"-and these were expecting to return to Europe. One told him: "A good job, save money, work all time, go home, sleep, no spend." ...

Closely related to the immigrants' desire to save and their willingness to put up with dismal job conditions was their acceptance of housing that was primitive and congested in the extreme. Some of this acquiescence stemmed from peasant backgrounds, but much arose also from "the desire of employees from the south and east of Europe to decrease expenses," as a government investigator put it. If they crowded together in sleeping rooms, their rent could be sharply reduced; if all went together in a communal cooking and eating plan, or hired a wife or "boss" to handle cooking-the Italian bordo, the Bulgarian boort, the "boarding boss" system-then costs could be cut even further ....

In coal mining areas the immigrants sometimes lived in deserted pigpens and cowsheds: "You might call them outhouses," one critic said. A manufacturer told of seeing the homes of Italian and Hungarian miners at Honey Brook, Pennsylvania, where the huts were seven feet high, "built of slabs and rotten planks and poles, and I supposed when I saw them that they were places where these people, the miners around there, kept their pigs or something. I didn't really suppose, to look at them, that they were the habitations of human beings." Similarly, a Knights of Labor official

encountered a settlement of Hungarian brick workers near Detroit: it had 127 persons living in a building ten feet by fifty feet, including five families cooped into a single room, "eating from one common kettle of food and sleeping in one common bed." ...

Lacking a long-term commitment, these immigrants often rebuffed those seeking to enlist them in broader campaigns. They suffered their own maltreatment in silence rather than fight for justice. "These creatures are willing to take anything offered them, because they do not intend to remain, and will sacrifice anything to acquire a little fortune," the Brass-Workers national leader asserted contemptuously. Finns working in a Colorado mine drew a similar complaint from a coworker, who said that they were "ignorant of the language and ways of working in this country, and will take from the bosses any insult they may offer, and are willing to accept any usage in the company's boardinghouse." The central European peasant in America, it was said, "kissed the hand of the boss who sent him to work." Ultimately, then, the lower levels of America's booming industries were filling up with persons who willingly endured lower wages, coarse treatment, and poor conditions. They avoided friction with the boss so the paychecks would not stop coming. Because of this, they were widely regarded as a retarding influence in the drive for better conditions in the nation's workplaces ....

It did not take long for reaction to build against such workers. A reporter covering Pennsylvania's mining strikes testified in 1888 that he saw Hungarians, Poles, and Italians "marched up to the shanties" from the train at the Highland mines in the Lehigh region; they were blamed with "breaking down the strike" there.

Recruitment of immigrants to break strikes was sometimes blatant, but often the onrushing tide made recruitment unnecessary: they arrived regardless. The Chicagoer Arbeiter-Zeitung was both pro-union and pro-immigrant and was therefore in a quandary as the influx began to affect the city's labor market: "We are not enemies of immigration and hence cannot choose to fight it; but we must still raise the question:

What should be done to lessen, or eliminate, the decrease in wages resulting from the huge labor supply?" Given Chicago's scarcity of jobs, the newspaper asked, "What, then, can the new immigrants do save offer their labor below the established pay scale?" It feared the result: Chicago's established workers would be forced to give way to the cheaper immigrant labor ....

Without a doubt, many immigrants returned because they had succeeded in America. The Finn who predicted that he would go home as soon as "the pockets [were] full of money" spoke for legions. And though a variety of explanations, including failure, appeared among those returning to Szamosszeg, Hungary, an investigator found that "more considered that they had fulfilled their purpose for going"-that is, they reached their savings target. Three to five years was the most frequent length to stay in America to reach the immigrant's goal, although many stayed longer and some, less. Slovaks reportedly set $1,000 as the "fortune" to be amassed before they would return, and among the workers in a 1919 steel mill pit was "a quiet-eyed Pole, who was saving up two hundred dollars to go to the old country." But interviews with other Poles who returned after World War I turned up many who were much more successful, including one who left the United States with $6,000 in his money belt-and on the ship discovered more: a vest with double lining sewed up with banknotes. Immediately he encountered a Croat running wildly and

yelling, "Has anyone seen my vest?" It was returned to him. Such funds carried in belts, bags, clothing, and pockets formed an important portion of the transfer of American wealth across the ocean.

Interviews with returned Finns and questionnaire data disclosed the fact that, although these immigrants had performed some of the hardest drudgery in American capitalist enterprises during the 1880-1930 years-in such jobs as logging, mining, and steel mill work-they were still overwhelmingly positive about their achievements. A 1934 study found that 40.3 percent (255 persons) reported good results in America, 17.3 percent (109) had "quite good" results, and 16.4 percent (104) had a "fair result." Only 18.5 percent reported a bad result. Later studies uncovered similar findings ....

If the journey to America was based heavily on the expectation of finding employment in American industry, it was therefore vulnerable to the vicissitudes of that industry. The label "migrant industrials" was fastened on these immigrants by an American scholar, but it was contemporary Italians who called the United States "the workshop." Italians flocked to this land of labor mainly in March, April, and May, and their heaviest returns were in October, November, and December, when layoffs were often most numerous. And the workshop could close, as it did at times, abruptly, sending throngs eastward across the Atlantic. One remigrant in late 1894 was a Pole who encountered many of his compatriots "running away from America. The stagnation existing there has now driven them out of their 'new homeland,' " he said. Remigration data revealed that a large proportion of those returning had been in factory work, mills, or mining, occupations especially vulnerable to the boom-andbust nature of the American economy ....

Many immigrants viewed the increasing returns not as a reason to celebrate the American economy but as grounds to condemn it. Some European observers charged that there would be even more returns if not for the shame that prevented some immi​ grants from going home; better to hang on and hope for improvement than return in disgrace. And many who went back were seemingly "worse than when they came, for many had failed and were broken in spirit," Edward Steiner observed after his steerage interviews.

Embitterment against America often followed, as with the Irishman who had arrived in Cleveland just in time for an economic depression. His brother was already there but had lost his savings when a bank failed, and only because a sister was married to a still-employed policeman was the Irishman able to remain alive barely-until he could make his way back to Ireland. "He hates to talk about it, and he even hates the Yanks that come home," a friend later recalled; "he said America ruined his life." Another told of returning Irishmen who were so destitute when they landed that they had to walk all the way home to Kilkenny from the Dublin docks, some seventy miles. They were not proud of their time in America ....

Other travelers on returning ships were repeatedly struck by the large numbers of injured, broken, or ill immigrants on board and the multiplicity of widows. One American was surprised that more than a fifth of those coming back on the steamship Canopic were sick. Steiner looked at returning Polish women who seemed crushed (their cheeks pale and pinched, their skin severely wrinkled) and asked himself how

it could be otherwise: 'They had lived for years by the coke ovens of Pennsylvania, breathing sulphur with every breath; their eyes had rarely seen the full daylight and their cheeks had not often felt the warm sunlight." ...

Looming behind these health problems, the missing limbs and diseased lungs, were the conditions of labor in America. A leading Hungarian-American newspaper, Szabadsag of Pittsburgh, featured in its yearly almanac a chapter titled "Fatal Accidents and Mine Disasters." It had plenty of material to chronicle-eave-ins, explosions, haulage accidents-and one recent estimate is that 25 percent of the New Immigrant workers in Carnegie Steel's South Works in Pittsburgh were killed or injured in the 1907-10 years. Immigrants struggled against such conditions mainly by quitting but also by forming their own mutual aid societies, often a carryover from home ....

High on the list for condemnation, after unsafe working conditions, was the driving of workers in the American system-relentless, shoving, pushing, threatening. Peasants had been raised with different manners and a different pace of daily and yearly work. Gone now were the special holidays and festivals that dotted the work year in Europe; vanished as well were name days and wedding feasts when work was not allowed. And notably absent in the day-to-day handling of employment in large American concerns or labor gangs was consideration for individual problems: an illness, a need to visit a relative, a family problem that took someone away from work for a day.

Now there were supervisors who used fines or dismissal as weapons to enforce the speedup. Herbert Gutman stressed the personal costs of the peasant's transformation to wage laborer, and angry reactions by immigrants are not difficult to locate in the industrial records of the era. Many returned to Ireland to take up fishing again because, it was said, "they preferred that free life to bosses and clocks." One remigrant said that he was glad to be back where work was hard but free and easy, for "there is no clock or watch or boss to watch you here." ...

New structures were going up all across Europe as the nineteenth century c1osedhouses with tile or slate roofs instead of thatch, a large window with a view to the road, walls of brick or plastered white, doorways sporting brass knobs and shiny varnish. Boards replaced logs, tile replaced thatch .... These "American" villages brought together many of the tangible, as well as intangible, results of return migration. The "American houses," which sprang up like mushrooms after a rain, were quickly noticed by visitors. When Carlo Levi was exiled to a tiny southern Italian town by Mussolini in the mid-] 930s, his early walks through the poverty-stricken district brought him to some homes that were surprising, different. These had a second floor and balcony, even fancy varnish and doorknobs. They were exceptional among the drab huts of a peasant village. "Such houses belonged to the 'Americans,' " he noted.

The American houses were outward symbols of changes that affected not only the Continent's physical surfaces but also its inner life, customs, and traditions. For the remigrants were often different people when they returned, and their accomplishments soon reached beyond the Italian saying, "He who crosses the ocean can buy a house." Their determination, as well as the structures they built, could inspire their neighbors. It was said that "the people went wild from envy and

desire" when a Pole returned and bought land on which he built two houses in his Galician community. He and his deeds were noted; his capacity for achievements and the source of his funds were obvious. All were explained by the fact of his round-trip journey abroad. Asked about the home he proudly showed, an Italian commented simply, "America bought this house." ...

But, though negative experiences were abundant, travelers in Europe over the years encountered what seemed to be almost a single view among remigrants, a chorus that overwhelmed dissonant voices. This was a sentiment extolling the United States, an attitude that seemed surprising in view of the conditions they had known. It was surprising because most returners had seen firsthand the contradictions in American life; they could show missing fingers and arms and talk knowingly of the United States as "a challenging giant, both fair and unfair, ugly and beautiful." They accepted the view that life was cruel in America and that the nation's coarse citizenry did not appreciate beauty; as the Italian saying put it bluntly, "Had the peasant known all this, he wouldn't have gone to America." Critics at home feasted on such tales.

Still, despite their difficulties abroad, massive numbers of remigrants carried home attitudes toward America that were overwhelmingly positive. Some of this can be put down to the human tendency to remember happy times and submerge the difficult times. These contrasts did not survive in a simple relationship among remigrants, however: favorable memories involving the United States seem to have coexisted as an intricate part of some very bad experiences. Like a patent medicine that irritates the skin to produce a warm feeling, struggles in America's industrial cauldron were passed through the filter of memory and emerged as recollections of the proud role remigrants had played in creating the American industrial colossus. Their labors were essential. However small their part on the section gang or meatpacking line, they had helped build America.

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