On the morning of Saturday, June 22, 1889, the SS Trave docked in New York Harbor. On board was a young German immigrant named Gustav Adolph Lipp. Lipp was born in December 1871 in the village of Möckmühl, near the city of Heilbronn in the German state of Württemberg.1 Ten days before his seventeenth birthday in December 1888, Adolf applied for an Entlassungs-Urkunde or release document from emigration authorities in Württemberg. Upon approval, the document enabled Adolph to renounce his Württemberger citizenship and entitled him to legally emigrate from the state within six months.2
Less than a month later the SS Germanic arrived from Liverpool and docked in the same harbor. On board was another young immigrant, Nicholas Taaffe, from the small village of Bohermeen, near Navan in Co Meath, Ireland. Taaffe was born in December 1866 and was the oldest of seven children born to James and Kate Taaffe (nee Callaghan). At the age of twenty-three years he decided to leave Ireland and try his luck in the United States.
By 1900, both men had made their way to St Louis, Missouri. Lipp found lodgings with Henry Eckhardt, a saloon keeper and his family who lived at 2624 Cherokee Street in south St Louis and obtained work as a brewery clerk at Otto Stiefel’s Union Brewing Company in St Louis.3 In April 1901, Lipp married Mathilda Studt, a second-generation German-American woman who was born in St Louis.4 Taaffe on the other hand, found work in a blacksmith’s workshop. He married Catherine (Kate) Finnegan, a fellow immigrant, in 1894 and their daughter Julia Catherine Taaffe was born on January 25, 1899 in St Louis. Both Taaffe and Lipp went on to live two very different lives, one marred by tragedy and the other blessed with a long life and prosperity.
The stories of Adolf Lipp and Nicholas Taaffe are by no means unique, and their immigrant experiences reflect that of hundreds of thousands of German and Irish emigrants who left Europe during the second half of the nineteenth century. During the wave of ‘old immigration’, generally acknowledged to have taken place from 1790–1890, Ireland and the German states were the two largest contributors to the influx of immigrants in the US. Although both emigrations exhibited varying motivations, each group had a unique influence on their new homeland. Upon arriving in the United States, many immigrants initially settled in port cities such as Boston, New York, and Philadelphia. Although many were content to establish themselves on the east coast, others decided to migrate west, where the rapidly industrializing cities of the Midwest and West offered the prospect of a better life. Archdeacon argued that the process of acculturation required an approximate seven-year period on the east coast before immigrants were in a position, both financially and socially, to migrate west.5 For others, kinship networks meant that arrival in the Midwestern states was almost immediate because relatives and friends had already settled in the Midwest and vouched for its employment opportunities and standard of living. Consequently, the states of Indiana, Ohio, Illinois, and Missouri became popular destinations for immigrants. This former Northwest Territory formed the epicenter of German immigration during the latter part of the nineteenth century, with approximately 47% of the German-born immigrant population settling in the region. According to Archdeacon, their Irish counterparts accounted for only 20% of the Midwest’s foreign-born population because many Irish immigrants chose to remain in the New England states in the east.6
The purpose of this book is to profile and examine four German and Irish immigrant communities in two cities in the American Midwest, specifically those established in St Louis, Missouri and Fort Wayne, Indiana. Concentrating on the period from 1850 to 1900, this book surveys these communities through economic, social, religious, political, and gendered lenses.
The cities of St Louis and Fort Wayne provide the basis of this examination for a variety of reasons. First, by 1850, St Louis was a large, developing, industrial city and because of that, it had attracted migrants of both American and foreign birth. By 1860, the US Federal Census recorded that St Louis had 47,970 inhabitants of German birth and 29,925 residents who stated that their birthplace was Ireland.7 Not only were those two communities the two largest immigrant groups in the city, but in conjunction they accounted for approximately 42% of the city’s population. As the city continued to grow, so too did the influence of both the German and Irish immigrant communities and by 1900 those two immigrant communities continued to be the most dominant ethnic influences in the city.
Fort Wayne, by comparison, was a significantly smaller city and did not undergo industrial development on the same scale as St Louis. Despite that, Fort Wayne was established at the junction of three rivers and had sustained economic prosperity during the canal era in the 1830s and 1840s. However, it was the arrival of the railroad in the 1850s that established Fort Wayne as an immigrant destination to European settlers. In the 1850 US Federal Census, the city had a population of 4282, of which 1260 were of German birth and 190 immigrants had been born in Ireland.8 Like St Louis, both the German and Irish immigrant communities were the two largest foreign-born groups in the city, but significantly, given the smaller size of Fort Wayne, assimilation appeared to be achieved in this city at a swifter pace than in St Louis.
Writing in the Journal of American History, Kevin Kenny identified the need to examine immigration in a comparative context. ‘Comparative approaches’ he notes, ‘examine specific similarities and differences in the experiences of similar migrants who have settled in different…regions.’9 Although he is referring to a multi-locational investigation of one immigrant group, there are certainly advantages to expanding this model further to provide a multi-locational, multi-ethnic approach. However, in utilizing a comparative approach, an appreciation of immigration through a transnational lens which considers the importance of linking, what Delaney terms, ‘the movement of people…to an understanding of the[ir] background’ is also necessary.10 While, nineteenth century European migration to the United States has long been a preoccupation for historians, existing historiography and contemporary discourse on this theme largely considers only one migrant group at a time. Such studies usually focus on the millions of transatlantic migrants who sailed west to the United States, their motivations, their journeys, and the acculturation and assimilation processes at their places of settlement. However, it is difficult to assess the apparent success or failure of such an assimilation when only one immigrant community in one specific location is considered.
Noting its absence in the United States, Doyle has called for a ‘more imaginative cross-community’ approach to the study of the Irish diaspora.11 In recent years, historians have embraced that call, and many researchers, including Campbell and Jenkins, have begun to employ a transnational approach in their examinations of the Irish diaspora.12 However, to fully embrace the cross-community approach that Doyle alludes to, it is also necessary to consider the interactions between the Irish and other immigrant communities, not just in a contextual sense, but also in a more directly comparative way. The benefit of examining two communities not only contextually, but also compositionally, promotes and encourages fresh historical debates which focus on multi-ethnic experiences in multi-ethnic cities. The cohesive approach utilized here personifies the immigrant experience and examines it heterogeneously rather than homogeneously, as many historians have done in the past.
In attempting to redefine the character of the Irish diaspora and identify new areas of debate, historians have overlooked the importance of understanding Irish immigrant communities in terms of other ethnic groups. Furthermore, Kenny has also suggested that examining the Irish in a transnational context accentuates the fact that ‘the Irish fared poorly in the American Northeast and Midwest’.13 However, the findings from this study certainly contradict that sentiment. The Irish immigrant experience in the Northeast and the Midwest are equally as diverse in character as comparing Irish communities in America and Australia. In examining Irish communities in the Midwest in relative terms, this research shows that occupational advancement and social integration were both achieved more quickly than they were on the east coast. Furthermore, the fact that smaller Irish communities characterized the immigrant experience in the Midwest and West, necessitates that the variables in their immigrant experience must be adjusted accordingly. Undoubtedly, more thorough examinations of smaller immigrant communities in America are required to fully understand the complexity of immigrant life in smaller settlements.
Historians also emphasize the importance of comparing and contrasting the interconnectedness of the Irish diaspora in terms of their interactions across time and within space.14 However, in understanding the Irish immigrant experience in a particular region, it is beneficial to look closely at the interconnectedness and interactions pursued by immigrants in compact multi-ethnic communities. Examining...