Immigration, language and adopted words

The Eric Andersen song, The Eyes of the Immigrant, reminded me of these passages from Bill Bryson's Made in America. While the book is "an informal history of the English language in America", it is really a quite fascinating history of the country. Bryson, always a careful researcher, makes language and history come alive in a fashion not often experienced in other books.

By the early 1830s, America's cotton trade with Britain had become so vast that up to a thousand ships at a time, a significant portion of the Atlantic fleet, were engaged in carrying cotton to Liverpool. The problem was that most made the return journey largely empty. Casting around for a convenient cargo for the return trip, the shipowners hit on an unusual one: people.

Never mind that their ships were never intended for passengers, that a crossing could take up to three months with the human freight crowded into fetid holds that were breeding grounds for diseases like trachoma and malignant typhus (which in the nineteenth century was so closely associated with Atlantic crossings that it was called ship fever). People were willing to endure almost any hardship to get to America if the price was right, and by packing the passengers in and giving them almost nothing in the way of civilizing comforts, the fares could be made not just low but effectively irresistible. By mid-century a one-way ticket in steerage (so called because it was near the ship's steering mechanism and thus noisy) could be had for as little $12 from Liverpool to New York, and for less than $10 from Dublin. All but the most miserably destitute could scrape together that.

Millions did. From 150,000 in the 1820s, the number of immigrants to America climbed steadily with each successive decade: 600,000 in the 1830s, 1.7 million in the 1840s, 2.3 million in the 1850s. All this was happening in a much more thinly populated America, of course. The three million immigrants who came to the United States in the decade 1845 - 1855 arrived in a country that had a population of only twenty million. In just twenty years, 1830 - 1850, the proportion of foreign- born immigrants in America rose from one in a hundred to one in ten.

Never before had there been such a global exodus - and not just to the United States, but to Australia, Argentina, New Zealand, anywhere that showed promise, though the United States took by far the largest share. Between 1815 and 1915, it took in 35 million people, equivalent to the modern populations of Norway, Sweden, Austria, Ireland, Denmark, and Switzerland. Seven million came from Germany, roughly five million each from Italy and Ireland (1.5 million more than live in Ireland today), 3.3 million from Russia, 2.5 million from Scandinavia, and hundreds of thousands from Greece, Portugal, Turkey, the Netherlands, Mexico, the Caribbean, China, and Japan. Even Canada provided a quarter of a million immigrants between 1815 and 1860, and nearly a million more in the I 920s. For smaller countries like Sweden, Norway, and Ireland, and for regions within countries, like Sicily and the Mezzogiorno in Italy, the numbers represented a significant drain on human resources. This was especially true of Ireland. In 1807 it was the most densely populated country in Europe; by the 1860s it was one of the least.

Once across the ocean the immigrants tended to congregate in enclaves. Almost all the migrants from Norway between 1815 and 1860 settled in just four states, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Iowa, and illinois. In much the same way, two-thirds of the Dutch were to be found in Michigan, New York, and Iowa. Sometimes they were given active encouragement to congregate. In the first half of the nineteenth century, several German societies were formed with the express intention of so concentrating immigration in particular areas that they could, in effect, take over. One German spoke for many when he dreamed of Pennsylvania becoming "an entirely German state where . . . the beautiful German language would be used in the legislative halls and the courts ofjustice." Not just in Pennsylvania, but in Texas, Missouri, and Wisconsin there were earnest hopes of colonizing all or at least a significant part of those states.

In factory towns, too, immigrant groups were often concentrated to an extraordinary degree. In 1910, Hungry Hollow, Illinois, a steel town, was home to 15,000 Bulgarians. At the same time, of the 14,300 people employed in Carnegie steel mills in western Pennsylvania, almost 12,000 were from eastern Europe.

The bulk of immigrants settled in cities even when their backgrounds were agricultural, as was generally the case. So effortlessly did Irish, Poles, and Italians settle into urban life, we easily forget that most came from rural stock and had perhaps never seen a five-story building or a crowd of a thousand people before leaving home. Often they arrived in such numbers as to overturn the prevailing demographics. In a single year, 1851, a quarter of a million Irish came to America, and almost all of them settled in New York or Boston. By 1855, one-third of New York's population was Irish-born. As immigration from northern Europe eased in the third quarter of the century, the slack was taken up by eastern European Jews. Between 1880 and 1900 an estimated one-third of the Jewish population of Europe came to America, and again settled almost exclusively in New York.

By the turn of the century, New York had become easily the most cosmopolitan city the world had ever seen. Eighty percent of its five million inhabitants were either foreign-born or the children of immigrants. It had more Italians than the combined populations of Florence, Genoa, and Venice, more Irish than anywhere but Dublin, more Russians than Kiev. As Herman Melville put it: "We are not so much a nation as a world." In 1908, a British Zionist named Israel Zangwill wrote a play about the immigration experience that gave Americans a term for the phenomenon. He called it The Melting-Pot.

The popular image, recreated in countless movies and books from The Godfather to Kane and Able, is of an immigrant arriving wide-eyed and bewildered at Ellis Island, being herded into a gloomy hail and subjected to an intimidating battery of medical tests and interviews, being issued a mysterious new name by a gruff and distracted immigration official, and finally stepping into the sunshine to realize that he has made it to the New World. Except possibly for the last part, it wasn't quite like that.

For one thing, until 1897 immigrants didn't pass through Ellis Island, but through Castle Garden, a former opera house on the Battery. Even after immigration facilities were transferred to Ellis Island, only steerage passengers were taken there. First- and second-class passengers were dealt with aboard their ships. Nor was Ellis Island (named for an eighteenth-century owner, Samuel Ellis) the drab, cheerless institution we might imagine. It was a beautiful, richly decorated complex with first-class health facilities, a roof garden with inspiring views of lower Manhattan and the Statue of Liberty and good food for the relative few who were subjected to detention. Its Registration Hall with its brass chandeliers and vaulted ceiling containing 29,000 tiles handset by Italian craftsmen was possibly "the grandest single space in New York" according to The New Yorker. Although immigration officials were unquestionably hard-worked - they processed up to five thousand arrivals a day and just over one million, four times Ellis Island's supposed capacity, in a single peak year, 1907 - they performed their duties with efficiency, dispatch, and not a little compassion. (Many were themselves immigrants.)

Though the list of those who could be denied admission was formidable - it included prostitutes, lunatics, polygarnists, anarchists, those with "loathsome or contagious diseases," those deemed likely to become public charges, and some ninety other categories of undesirables - only about 2 percent of applicants were denied entrance, and so few were given names they didn't willingly accede to as to make the notion effectively mythical. Far from being a cold and insensitive introduction to the New World, it was a dazzling display of America's wealth, efficiency, and respect for the common person, one that made many truly believe that they had passed into an earthly paradise.

On landing in Manhattan the new immigrants would immediately find further manifestations of the wondrousness of America. Often they would be approached by fellow countrymen who spoke their language, but who were friendlier, easier in their manner, and far more nattily dressed than anyone they had seen at home. With astounding magnanimity, these instant friends, or runners as they were known, would offer to help the newly arrived immigrant find a job or lodgings and even insist on carrying their bags. Then at some point the immigrant would turn to discover that his new friend had vanished with his belongings, and that he had just learned his first important lesson about life in a new land. Few newly arrived travelers weren't fleeced in some way within their first few days.

Most of the millions of lower-class immigrants settled in the four square miles that were the Lower East Side, often in conditions of appalling squalor, with as many as twenty-five people sharing a single windowless room. As early as the 1860s, three-fourths of New York City's population - more than 1.2 million people - were packed into just 37,000 tenements. By the end of the century the population density of the Lower East Side was greater than that in the slums of Bombay. In an effort to improve conditions, a law was passed in 1869 requiring that every bedroom have a window. The result was the air shaft. Though a commendable notion in principle, air shafts turned out to be a natural receptacle for garbage and household slop, and thus became conduits of even greater filth and pestilence.

Crime, prostitution, begging, disease, and almost every other indicator of social deprivation existed at levels that are all but inconceivable now. (But not murder; the rate is ten times higher today.) A study of Irish immigrants to Boston around mid-century found that on average they survived for just fourteen years in America. In 1888, the infant death rate in the Italian quarter was 325 per 1,000. That is, one-third of all babies didn't survive their first year.

Gangs with names like the Plug Uglies, Dead Rabbits, and Bowery B'hoys roamed the streets, robbing and mugging (an Americanism dating from 1863; also sometimes called yoking) with something approaching impunity. Although New York had had a police force since 1845, by the second half of the century it was largely corrupt and ineffectual. Typical of the breed of nineteenth-century policeman was Chief Inspector Alexander "Clubber" Williams, who was brought up on charges no fewer than 358 times but was never dismissed or even apparently disciplined, and who was so magnificently talented at corruption that by the nine of his retirement he had accumulated a yacht, a house in Connecticut, and savings of $300,000.

Against such a background, it is hardly surprising that many irnmigrants fled back to Europe. At one point, for every one hundred Italians who arrived in New York each year, seventy-three left. Perhaps as many as a third of all irmnigrants eventually returned to their native soil.



Nonetheless, the trend was relentlessly westward. The pattern for European immigrants was for one group to settle in an enclave and then disperse after a generation or so, with a new concentration of immigrants taking its place. Thus when the Irish abandoned their traditional stronghold of the Five Points area, their place was taken almost immediately by Italians. The old German neighborhoods were likewise taken over by Russian and Polish Jews. But there were finer gradations than this, particularly among the Italians. Natives of Genoa tended to accumulate along Baxter Street, while Elizabeth Street housed a large community of Sicilians. Calabrians congregated in the neighborhood known as Mulberry Bend. Alpine Italians - those from areas like Ticino in Switzerland and the Tyrol near Austria - were almost invariably to be found on 69th Street.

Immigrant groups had their own theaters, newspapers, libraries, schools, clubs, stores, taverns, and places of worship. Germans alone could choose from 133 German-language newspapers by 1850, some of them, like the New York Staats-Zeitung and Cincinnati Volksblau, nearly as large and influential as their English-language counterparts. Yiddish-speaking New Yorkers by the 1930s had a choice of a dozen daily newspapers, one of which, the Jewish Daily Forward, had a circulation of 125,000. Nationally, even Norwegians had forty papers in their own tongue. It was possible - indeed, in some cases not unusual - to live an entire life in the United States and never use English.

Dutch, for instance, remained widely spoken in rural New York well into the nineteenth century, some two hundred years after the Netherlands had retreated from the continent. The celebrated abolitionist, feminist, and public speaker Sojourner Truth, for instance, was raised as a slave in a Dutch household in Albany and spoke only Dutch until she reached adulthood. According to Raven I. McDavid, Jr., "a few native speakers [of Dutch] survived in the remoter parts of the Hudson Valley as late as 1941."

Though the Dutch were only a passing political presence in America, their linguistic legacy is immense. From their earliest days of contact, Americans freely appropriated Dutch terms - blunderbuss (literally "thunder gun") as early as 1654, scow in 1660, sleigh in 1703. By the mid-eighteenth centur Dutch words flooded into American English: stoop, span, coleslaw, boss, pit in the sense of the stone of a fruit, bedpan, bedspread (previously known as a counterpane), cookie, waffle, nitwit (the Dutch for I don't know is Ik niet wiet), the distinctive American interrogative how come? (a literal translation of the Dutch hoekom), poppycock (from pappekak, “soft dung”), dunderhead, and probably the caboodle in kit and caboodle. (Boedel in Dutch is a word for household effects, though J. L. Dullard, it is worth noting, mentions its resemblance to the Krio kabudu of West Africa.)

Two particularly durable Americanisms that emanate from Dutch are Santa Claus (out of Sinter Klaas, a familiar form of St. Nicholas), first recorded in American English in 1773, and Yankee (probably from either Janke, a diminutive equivalent to the English Johnny, or Jan Kees, "John Cheese," intended originally as a mild insult).

Often Dutch words were given entirely new senses. Snoepen, meaning to slip candy into one's mouth when no one is watching, was transformed into the English snoop meaning to spy or otherwise manifest nosiness. Docke, "doll," became doxy, a woman of easy virtue. Hokester, an innocuous tradesman, became our huckster, someone not to be entirely trusted. Doop to the Dutch signified a type of sauce. In America, transliterated as dope, it began with that sense in 1807, but gradually took on many others, from a person of limited mental acuity (1851), to a kind of lubricant (1870s), to a form of opium (1889), to any kind of narcotic drug (1890s), to a preparation designed to affect a horse's performance (1900), to inside information (1910). Along the way it spawned several compounds, notably dope fiend (1896) and dope addict (1933).

Still other Dutch terms came to English by way of nautical contacts, reflecting the Netherlands' days of eminence on the seas, among them hoist, bumpkin (originally a short projecting spar; how it became transferred to a rustic character is unclear), bulwark, caboose (originally a ship's galley), freebooters, hold, boom, and sloop.

As Dutch demonstrates, a group's linguistic influence bears little relation to the numbers of people who spoke it.