Conflict between settled communities and migratory bands is at least as old as agriculture. The two lifestyles coexist when times are good, but when times are bad, simmering conflicts flare. The usual causes are economic crises, like insect plagues or drought. Today we see the effects in Dārfūr.
What I find interesting is not the persistence of conflict, but the durability of social structures of migration in this country. They’ve been documented again and again by sociologists and historians, especially for centers of large scale movement like Boston and New York.
Still, I was surprised to discover them in my midwestern hometown. I have a city directory form 1869, one of those that lists all the heads of households with their addresses and occupations. I entered the 598 names into Excel, made guesses about ethnic origin based on surnames, and sorted them in various ways.
The town directory was about 2% Irish and 3% German a few decades after the mass migrations began with the potato famine and the revolutions of 1848.
My hometown was on the Michigan Central tracks, but the rail yards and shops were concentrated in two cities to the west and one to the east. Besides a small foundry, it had no specialized employment to distinguish it from any other farm market. It had no particular reason to draw immigrant laborers.
Mrs. E. A. Flanigan headed a family living on one of the streets of worker housing that entered the main street through an area of saloons and tobacco shops. Listed with her were two other Flanigan women, Alice and Libby, and a man, Robert. They probably were her children. Michael Flanigan lived in a local hotel.
There was no indication if she was a widow or had been abandoned. She’s the only female household head listed, and it was unusual for the directory to have listed her children. She and the girls were milliners, the resident male was a tinner, and the one in the hotel a shoemaker.
One could speculate on the economic activities of the family. After all, there must have been prostitutes and they lived in the right area. Or, they could be just what they seemed, immigrants struggling to survive doing the tedious, labor-intensive jobs others didn’t want.
Seven women in town were listed as domestics and one as a laundry woman. Two had German surnames, Ann Ballhousen and Caroline Schultz. There were eight other milliners and one woman was a seamstress. 20% to 25% immigrants in these female occupations.
The other Irish household detailed by the city directory was headed by tailor John Lynch. Four other men lived at his address: Patrick Fanning, Daniel Leary, and James Parrish, all laborers, and Patrick Braedon, a tailor. Lynch apparently took in boarders; possibly one was a partner, apprentice or employee.
Their occupations, too, were typical of the drudge work that employed so many men. Most in town were laborers. A few were merchants, including William O’Donoghue, and some were skilled tradesmen, like stone mason Francis Magennis and marble cutter John Kelly.
Edward McNally and Michael O’Donnell were saloon keepers, as were George Schwer, Blanchard Holden and James Wright. Schwer lived near the main crossroads, Wright near the Flanigans, and the others near the railroad.
Bar tenders included August Waldrougel, Henry Foster, Theodore Markle and William Nicolls. They all lived near the main crossroads, two in the hotel there. At that time, most of the people who worked or serviced a hotel had it listed as their address.
German migrants to my hometown at that time tended to come from eastern Pennsylvania and western New Jersey where their ancestors had settled along the Delaware before the revolution. As a result, the group included more farmers and skilled tradesmen, like carpenters. We had only a few yet who were probably direct migrants. They would come in the next decade when the foundry expanded.
It appears that in this farm town on the railroad, just after the civil war, Irish and German in-migrants lived with others, when they could, and had poor, difficult jobs. Ethnic entrepreneurs had appeared to provide the basic necessities of life. In a town with no restaurants, and many men boarding, saloons provided the only warm places laborers could relax and eat.
Within a decade, John Lynch lead the group that organized a Roman Catholic congregation and raised money to buy land for a church. In 1869, there was already a German clergyman, Frederic Wilhelm. Contemporary histories and directories ignored the existence of both, so I don’t know his denomination.
The basic immigrant social structures were there from the start, family and male support groups, provenders of food and pleasures, and churches.
Fifty years later, a foundry recruited colored labor from the Pensacola, Florida area. Almost immediately, a man from South Carolina relocated from a neighboring town to open a pool hall, and, within a few years, men organized Bethel Baptist and AME Zion churches. The one provided male support, the other spiritual succor.
By the time Blacks moved to town, industry had moved west and so had worker housing. When I was in high school in the 1960s, a store in the original colored district advertised Spanish and Mexican foods.
The identity of the immigrants changed in a hundred years, but the structures, physical and social, that served them remained constant. They don’t appear to be unique to specific ethnic groups, but appear as consequences of migration into urban areas. Their durability, no doubt, stabilizes the lives of the dislocated.
If immigrants today are trying to reestablish their families, stay with their churches, patronize ethnic restaurants and groceries, then they are not dangerous to the well being of the commonwealth. Even those who frequent local bars and clubs are less likely to be problems than those who’ve been in the country for decades. Groups trying to establish social structures are not the ones who ignore and destroy them
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