5. Immigration

Some 334,203 immigrants arrived in the United States in 1886, the year of the statue's dedication. A Cuban revolutionary, Jose Marti, wrote: "Irishmen, Poles, Italians, Czechs, Germans freed from tyranny or want--all hail the monument of Liberty because to them it seems to incarnate their own uplifting."

The immigrants who would catch a glimpse of the statue would mainly come from eastern and southern Europe.

In 1900, 14 percent of the American population was foreign born, compared to 8 percent a century later. Passports were unnecessary and the cost of crossing the Atlantic was just $10 in steerage. ($283 in 2014 money)

European immigration to the United States greatly increased after the Civil War, reaching 5.2 million in the 1880s then surging to 8.2 million in the first decade of the 20th century. Between 1882 and 1914, approximately 20 million immigrants came to the United States. In 1907 alone, 1.285 million arrived. By 1900, New York City had as many Irish residents as Dublin. It had more Italians than any city outside Rome and more Poles than any city except Warsaw. It had more Jews than any other city in the world, as well as sizeable numbers of Slavs, Lithuanians, Chinese, and Scandinavians.

Unlike earlier immigrants, who mainly came from northern and western Europe, the "new immigrants" came largely from southern and eastern Europe. Largely Catholic and Jewish in religion, the new immigrants came from the Balkans, Italy, Poland, and Russia.

Let's start thinking about the experience of immigrating. This video gives us an idea of what it is like to come across the ocean on ship, and then passing through an immigration center that was once located on Ellis Island. Watch this video first.

This is the story of Edward Bok.  He is from the Netherlands and speaks about coming to the America from an immigrant's perspective. He went on to become an author. 

WHEN I came to the United States as a lad of six, the most needful lesson for me, as a boy, was the necessity for thrift. I had been taught in my home across the sea that thrift was one of the fundamentals in a successful life. My family had come from a land (the Netherlands) noted for its thrift; but we had been in the United States only a few days before the realization came home strongly to my father and mother that they had brought their children to a land of waste. Where the Dutchman saved, the American wasted. There was waste, and the most prodigal waste, on every hand. In every street-car and on every ferry-boat the floors and seats were littered with newspapers that had been read and thrown away or left behind. If I went to a grocery store to buy a peck of potatoes, and a potato rolled off the heaping measure, the groceryman, instead of picking it up, kicked it into the gutter for the wheels of his wagon to run over. The butcher’s waste filled my mother’s soul with dismay. If I bought a scuttle of coal at the corner grocery, the coal that missed the scuttle, instead of being shovelled up and put back into the bin, was swept into the street. My young eyes quickly saw this; in the evening I gathered up the coal thus swept away, and during the course of a week I collected a scuttleful. The first time my mother saw the garbage pail of a family almost as poor as our own, with the wife and husband constantly complaining that they could not get along, she could scarcely believe her eyes. A half pan of hominy of the preceding day’s breakfast lay in the pail next to a third of a loaf of bread. In later years, when I saw, daily, a scow loaded with the garbage of Brooklyn householders being towed through New York harbor out to sea, it was an easy calculation that what was thrown away in a week’s time from Brooklyn homes would feed the poor of the Netherlands. At school, I quickly learned that to “save money” was to be “stingy”; as a young man, I soon found that the American disliked the word “economy,” and on every hand as plenty grew spending grew. There was literally nothing in American life to teach me thrift or economy; everything to teach me to spend and to waste. 

Answer the following questions:

2. Edward Bok- Becoming America

 a. What is thrift, and where did Edward learn the importance of being thrifty?

b. What was the most shocking part about American culture that Edward wrote about?

c. What did Edward do when he saw coal fall off of the scuttle (cart that carries coal)?

 d. Generally, how does Bok feel about the “American” way of doing things? Does this bother you that he feels this way? Why?

Commonly, immigrants would change their names themselves when they had arrived in the United States, and for a number of reasons. Someone might change their name in order to make it sound more American, to fit in with the local community, or simply because it was good for business. There is at least one instance of a small businessman arriving in the United States from Eastern Europe changing his name, at least his public name, to something that sounded Swedish, because he had settled in a Swedish neighborhood in New York City. Immigrants would sometimes officially record their name change, when naturalizing for instance, but often, as there was no law in New York State requiring it be done, no official record of a name change was made. People would just start using a different name. 

Use the following link if you'd like to try to find out where your name originates.

http://surnames.behindthename.com/