The New Bostonians

How Immigrants Have Transformed the Metro Area since the 1960s

Marilynn S. Johnson

• Publisher: University of Massachusetts Press
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781625341471, 9781625341464
• eBook ISBN: 9781613764060
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

How immigrants helped rebuild a city—and redefined what it means to be American

Among the most consequential pieces of Great Society legislation, the Immigration Act of 1965 opened the nation's doors to large-scale immigration from Africa, Asia, and Latin America. A half century later, the impact of the "new immigration" is evident in the transformation of the country's demographics, economy, politics, and culture, particularly in urban America.

In The New Bostonians, Marilynn S. Johnson examines the historical confluence of recent immigration and urban transformation in greater Boston, a region that underwent dramatic decline after World War II. Since the 1980s, the Boston area has experienced an astounding renaissance—a development, she argues, to which immigrants have contributed in numerous ways. From 1970 to 2010, the percentage of foreign-born residents of the city more than doubled, representing far more diversity than earlier waves of immigration. Like the older Irish, Italian, and other European immigrant groups whose labor once powered the region's industrial economy, these newer migrants have been crucial in re-building the population, labor force, and metropolitan landscape of the New Boston, although the fruits of the new prosperity have not been equally shared.

Chapter 1

Boston’s “Old” Immigrants

In colonial Boston, no one was more than half a mile from the sea. Ringed by docks, wharves, warehouses, and taverns, the waterfront was truly the lifeblood of the city. As one historian put it, the port was “the gateway between land and sea,” the point of contact between foreign lands and the American interior.1 Perched as Boston is on the northwestern edge of the Atlantic world, the city’s location and early maritime history would shape its economic and social development for centuries.

With hundreds of ships plying the Atlantic, Boston’s trade in sugar, rum, slaves, and codfish helped build the port in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Its connection to the Caribbean was especially strong, with sugar and rum distilling emerging as one of the city’s key industries. Although its economy and population suffered during the Revolution, the city bounded back rapidly after 1780, its population expanding along with its footprint, as wetlands were filled in to make room for homes, businesses, and workshops. During these years, a new trade with China in tea and hides expanded Boston’s commercial reach from the Atlantic to the Pacific. The fortunes earned from this profitable trade helped build new industries, both inside and outside of Boston, most notably in textiles.

The city’s role in the maritime economy thus established the groundwork for much of the dramatic social and economic transformation to come. The profits of its commerce subsidized the region’s burgeoning industries, while the city’s extensive network of ships, business agents, and labor provided the early infrastructure for the mass movement of peoples that would follow. Boston had long been a portal for seamen, sailors, merchants, and foreign visitors from around the Atlantic. But it was not until the 1830s that large-scale immigration from outside Britain would begin to transform the city in previously unimagined ways. From the mid-nineteenth century through the 1920s, the rise of powerful European and American economies beckoned new workers and industries while destabilizing the rural economies and home industries of other regions. In these latter areas, population pressures, agricultural crises, and economic dislocations growing out of capitalist incorporation served to propel millions out of their homelands.

These disruptions occurred across more than a century, but their manifestations in Boston—and the United States more generally—appeared in two major surges of migration. The first, from the 1840s to the 1860s, consisted of migrants predominantly from northern and western Europe, and most significantly from Ireland. The second wave, spanning the 1880s to the 1920s, brought new foreign-born populations from southern and eastern Europe—Italians and Jews most notably—as well as smaller numbers from Asia and the Caribbean.

This chapter looks back on the experiences of the city’s three largest immigrant groups—the Irish, Jews, and Italians—which collectively made up more than half of the city’s foreign-born population at the turn of the twentieth century. We will also look at some of the smaller groups of the second wave—the Chinese, Portuguese, and West Indians—whose settlement in the Boston area laid some important groundwork for those who followed in the late twentieth century. Collectively, these earlier groups defined the immigrant experience in greater Boston, shaping popular thinking about immigration and ethnicity to the present day.

From Whence They Came

During the first great migration era, immigrants from Ireland, Germany, Sweden, the British Isles, and Canada streamed into Boston and its neighboring towns. The city’s foreign-born population jumped from roughly 27,000 in 1845 to nearly 66,000 in 1865. Many of these newcomers—especially the English-speaking, from Britain and Canada—blended easily into the urban population. Germans and Swedes, many of them skilled workers, often settled together in small clusters around woodworking shops, breweries, and other workplaces. Ultimately, their gainful employment and diffusion into different trades and neighborhoods facilitated their integration.2

But by far the largest and most visible group of newcomers was Irish Catholics who arrived in growing numbers after 1820 and would have a profound impact on the city and its future. Irish immigrants had been settling in Massachusetts since colonial times, although prior to the 1830s, the majority were Protestants from Ulster whose artisan livelihoods had suffered as British products displaced the native linen and woolen industries. By the 1830s, however, the bulk of Irish newcomers were rural Catholics whose agricultural prospects at home had soured under British rule. Sustained population growth had led to a fourfold increase in the Irish population between 1732 and 1840, creating extreme land pressures and subdivision into ever-smaller parcels. Falling grain prices after 1815 only aggravated the situation as landholders evicted their tenants to make way for livestock grazing. By 1841, more than half the rural population was left landless, many of them scraping by as bound laborers or tenants on tiny plots where they grew a bare subsistence crop of potatoes to feed their families. This precarious existence soon collapsed with the arrival of phytothora infestans, a fungus commonly known as the potato blight. Devastating Ireland’s primary food crop repeatedly from 1845 to 1850, the blight led to starvation and disease that left more than a million dead and drove some two million more to emigrate, mainly to the United States. The famine struck the south and west of Ireland particularly hard, and callous British attitudes toward its victims provided little relief. Destitute refugees from these areas would make up the majority of migrants heading for Boston and other North American cities.3

The Irish influx was quickly apparent in the Commonwealth. Out of a total population of 136,881 in Boston in 1850, roughly 35,000 were Irish-born; just five years later that number had risen to more than 50,000. Immigration dropped off as the Irish famine subsided, and the city’s Irish population grew slowly for several decades. Further agricultural distress in Ireland fueled renewed emigration in the 1880s, bringing Boston’s Irish population to its peak of more than 71,000—or one-quarter of the total population—by 1890. Thereafter, the number of Irish-born would gradually decline, although the ranks of the second and third generations would multiply along with Irish American visibility and influence. In fact, Irish population levels in the city were among the highest in the country—significantly higher than Irish population levels in New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, or San Francisco.4 For good reason, then, Boston became known as “the capital of Irish America.”

Beginning in the 1880s, however, the arrival of new groups of migrants from Italy, Russia, Poland, and other countries on Europe’s southern and eastern rim posed a challenge to Irish dominance. Coming in tandem, the two largest groups were Russian Jews and Italians. Both communities numbered only a few thousand in Boston in 1880; by 1920, each encompassed roughly 40,000 foreign-born residents. As in Ireland, population growth, industrialization, and agricultural disruption had swept their homelands, prompting many to pull up stakes and venture abroad.

In the region south of Rome known as the Mezzogiorno, the Italian peasantry came under increasing pressure in the 1880s and 1890s. Like the Irish, southern Italians experienced steady population growth that led to continued subdivision of land. Meanwhile, the Italian government’s heavy taxation of crops increased rural poverty, reducing many to tenantry. Drought, crop disease, and poor harvests further aggravated the plight of the poor. Those who hoped to earn extra income through home production found they could not compete with cheaper manufactured goods. By the 1890s, Italy’s grain and citrus industries were undercut by American competition, while its prized wine industry fell victim to a tariff war between Italy and France. This agricultural crisis prompted a growing number of southern Italian men to venture abroad in search of temporary work to supplement family incomes.

After 1900, however, the region’s economic woes were exacerbated by a series of environmental catastrophes including three severe earthquakes in 1905–1908 and the eruptions of Mt. Vesuvius (1906) and Mt. Etna (1910). More than 150,000 Italians perished in that catastrophic decade. Those who survived—including many families of earlier migrants—now looked abroad for new opportunities, giving rise to more permanent Italian communities in Boston, New York, Buenos Aires, and other migrant centers in the Americas. In Boston, the southern Italian presence grew accordingly, overwhelming the small population of Genoese who had come from northern Italy in earlier years. The new migrants came mainly from Sicily, Campania, Calabria, Abruzzi, and Molise, where agricultural and economic dislocations were most severe.5

In Russia, similar trends of population growth and capitalist expansion were also causing hardships. The plight of Jews, however, was compounded by anti-Semitic laws and violence. Following the Russian conquest of Poland in the eighteenth century, the czarist government had confined local Jews to the Pale of Settlement stretching from the Baltic to the Black Sea. Over the course of the nineteenth century, Jews were subjected to periodic expulsions from their villages, interference with religious education, and forced military conscription. In the 1880s, Russian repression intensified following the assassination of Czar Alexander II. Violent pogroms were directed against Jewish communities, while the government passed the May Laws prohibiting Jews from owning or renting land outside towns or cities and excluding them from higher education via harsh quota systems. Working as middlemen traders in the rural villages, Jews were now subject to mass expulsions. Forced to crowd into the larger towns and cities of the Pale, they took up trades in which they faced bitter competition and growing impoverishment. As Mary Antin, an immigrant to Boston in the 1890s, described her hometown of Polotzk, “There were ten times as many stores as there should have been, ten times as many tailors, cobblers, barbers, tinsmiths. A Gentile, if he failed in Polotzk, could go elsewhere, where there was less competition. A Jew could make a circle of the Pale, only to find the same conditions as at home.”6

Seeking to escape these dire conditions, a growing number of displaced artisans and merchants headed west to Europe and the Americas. Their numbers multiplied in the early twentieth century when anti-Semitic violence flared again in 1903–1906, causing thousands of Jewish casualties. Like other East Coast cities, Boston’s Jewish population rose sharply over the next two decades. The new wave of Russian Jews joined a much smaller population of German and Polish Jews who had come to Boston in the mid-nineteenth century. The sheer numbers of newcomers, as well as their greater poverty and more orthodox religious style, would make for complicated relations between the two groups.7

During these same years, a much smaller group of Portuguese immigrants also made their way to the Boston area. Like the Russian Jews, they joined an earlier group of their countrymen who had been visiting and settling in Massachusetts since the mid-nineteenth century. Coming from the Azores islands in the mid-Atlantic, the descendants of the Portuguese who first settled those islands had been recruited by American whaling companies to work on their ships in the years before the Civil War. Some settled in the whaling port of New Bedford in southeastern Massachusetts and nearby Cape Cod. A smaller number—a few hundred at most—went to Boston. Although the whaling industry declined after 1870, rising population, land pressures, and forced military service in the Azores prompted many young men to follow their countrymen to New England. While the vast majority settled in New Bedford and Fall River, some 1,500 were living in Boston by 1915, along with more than 2,200 in nearby Cambridge.8

In these areas, the Portuguese, Russian Jews, Italians, and Irish lived interspersed with an assortment of other groups who had fled similar conditions in their homelands: population growth, land shortages, the decline of artisan crafts, forced military conscription, and religious and ethnic persecution. Among these Boston newcomers in 1910 were more than 4,000 Poles, 3,000 Lithuanians, 3,000 French Canadians, and 1,500 Greeks. The same ethnic groups also populated the nearby mill towns of Lowell, Lawrence, Lynn, and Brockton. Although the vast majority of second-wave immigrants came from Canada and southern and eastern Europe, a smaller number hailed from other parts of the globe. Beginning in the 1890s, a stream of Syrian-Lebanese migrants arrived in Boston, Cambridge, and Lawrence. Soon afterward, Armenian immigrants moved into the same areas, a trickle that became a flood following the Turkish-led Armenian genocide in 1915–1917. By 1930 both groups would number several thousand in the greater Boston area, making it home to some of the largest Armenian and Syrian communities in the United States.9

The plight of the Armenians under the Turks and the Irish under the British were just two of the many territorial and colonial struggles occurring around the world in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. European powers siphoned precious natural resources away from their colonies, while heightening racial and religious tensions where they ruled. Indeed, the yoke of colonial oppression and exploitation was another common spur to emigration, forging human pathways across both the Atlantic and the Pacific. In Boston, small communities of Chinese, West Indian, and Cape Verdean immigrants emerged when sojourning laborers left their colonized homelands and put down roots in the Bay State.

In China, colonization by European powers had led to warfare and anti-Western rebellions in the nineteenth century that ravaged Guangdong and other southern provinces. These conflicts only aggravated a longer-term crisis of overpopulation, land shortages, and recurring famines. Chinese men thus sought work overseas, most notably in the California Gold Rush and as construction workers on the transcontinental railroad. When mining and railroad work ended in the late 1860s, some Chinese came east to take up factory and service jobs in New York and Massachusetts. By 1900, the US census recorded more than a thousand Chinese living in Boston, many of them from the Toishan region of Guangdong province. Soon Boston would have the third-largest Chinatown in the United States after San Francisco and New York.10

The historic role of Massachusetts in the Atlantic maritime trade also gave rise to human networks between Boston and colonies in the Caribbean and the Cape Verde archipelago. Located off the coast of West Africa, the Cape Verde Islands had been colonized by the Portuguese in the fifteenth century and later became a way station in the Atlantic slave trade. Although slaves had initially been brought to Cape Verde to work on sugar plantations, the arid climate and frequent droughts made cultivation difficult. After emancipation, the mixed-race descendants of the African slaves and Portuguese settlers struggled to survive as farmers and fishermen in a depressed colonial economy. In the late nineteenth century, when New England whaling ships came in search of low-paid labor, young men on the islands of Brava and Fogo signed on as crewmen. Like the Azoreans a few decades earlier, most of them ended up in New Bedford and other parts of southeastern Massachusetts, while a few hundred settled in the Boston area prior to World War I.11

Around the same time, an influx of migrants from the British West Indies was also beginning to diversify Boston’s black population. Like the Cape Verdeans, West Indian migrants had looked abroad to survive ailing colonial economies that relied on sugar-based agriculture, a stunted manufacturing base, and high unemployment. Caribbean islanders had developed a migratory existence since the construction of the Panama Canal, to which many island workers were recruited in the early twentieth century. Others sought low-paid employment with the burgeoning fruit export business controlled by the Boston-based United Fruit Company. Coming mainly from Barbados and Jamaica, West Indians followed work opportunities to Massachusetts, with more than 2,800 living in Boston by 1920. Even after the passage of federal immigration restriction laws in the 1920s, West Indian migration (which was not covered under those laws) continued to flow. By 1952, at which time Caribbean migration was curtailed under the McCarran-Walter Act, there were more than 5,000 West Indians living in Boston, making up 12 percent of the city’s black population.12 Together with Cape Verdeans, West Indians and their children would make up a small but growing portion of the area’s population of African descent.

Whether from the islands of the Caribbean, the Irish countryside, or the Jewish ghettoes of the Pale, immigrants found their way to Boston via family, friends, and neighbors. Among most groups, adult men or women came first, secured work, and sent money home to bring over other family members. This process of chain migration was fueled not just by cash remittances but also by migrants’ positive reports of life in America in letters, postcards, and return visits. As one Italian immigrant to Boston recalled, his fascination with America was first sparked by the return visit of a neighbor to his hometown in Apulia: “When he finally came back for a visit, I was much impressed. I remember . . . his purple, showy necktie, and a stickpin with brilliants. What impressed me most of all was the white collar which he wore. These things were great luxuries in our town, worn only by the well-to-do, and not by ‘la gente,’ or common folks, to which he belonged.” Family, friends, and neighbors thus demonstrated the promise of better earnings or higher social status, which inspired migrants from across Europe. Not surprisingly, then, migration streams often flowed from the same regions, towns, or villages, transplanting communities en masse to ethnic enclaves in Boston. The introduction of prepaid tickets for transatlantic voyages in the 1850s facilitated this chain migration, as migrants could send steamer tickets directly to family members back home.13

In some cases, it was employers who recruited workers or otherwise facilitated their migration. For much of the nineteenth century, the influx of poor Irish provided a steady supply of labor for Boston employers, so there was little need to recruit abroad. After 1890, however, the rapid expansion of local industries and mill towns created a pressing demand for labor, and ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. Boston’s “Old” Immigrants
• 2. Roots and Routes
• 3. The Metropolitan Diaspora
• 4. Immigrants and Work in the New Economy
• 5. Nativism, Violence, and the Rise of Multiculturalism
• 6. Immigrant Religion and Boston’s “Quiet Revival”
• 7. The New Ethnic Politics in Boston
• Epilogue. Immigrants and the New Majority
• Notes
• Index