 "BOOK")
By David Nasaw
BROUGHT FORTH ON THIS CONTINENT: Abraham Lincoln and American Immigration
Author: Harold Holzer
Publisher: Dutton
Pages: 456
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Price: $35
THE LAST SHIPS FROM HAMBURG: Business, Rivalry, and the Race to Save Russia’s Jews on the Eve of World War I
Author: Steven Ujifusa
Publisher: Harper
Pages: 365
Price: $32
Fears that the immigration of non-Protestant “lower races” would weaken, if not destroy, America’s moral fibre, prosperity and peace are as old as the Republic. As the prolific author Harold Holzer tells us in Brought Forth on This Continent, his exhaustive account of Abraham Lincoln and 19th-century immigration politics, Harrison Gray Otis of Massachusetts took to the floor of the newly established House of Representatives in 1797 to declare that he did “not wish to invite hordes of wild Irishmen, nor the turbulent and disorderly of all parts of the world” who might “come here with a view to disturb our tranquillity.”
While xenophobia remains a constant in American life, anti-immigrant rhetoric often grows harsher, and campaigns to close the US border intensify, when more non-Protestant immigrants seek entry to America. From 1845 to 1854, famine and political turmoil brought almost three million European immigrants to these shores, the majority of them Irish and German Catholics. Some 400,000 people arrived in 1854 alone.
That year, secret societies of anti-immigrant, anti-Catholic Know-Nothings made their political ascent and scored huge electoral victories across the nation. (When asked what they were talking about in their meetings, the Know-Nothings routinely answered, “I know nothing.”) Northern Know-Nothings were anti-immigrant and antislavery.
Lincoln, Mr Holzer makes clear, detested these nativists. But, a cagey politician above all else, he refused to publicly condemn them. For Lincoln, the primary goal was to build as large and powerful an antislavery political party as possible. And he succeeded in doing so. As the Know-Nothings fell apart, divided between Northerners who were antislavery and a Southern wing that was not, the Republicans absorbed within their ranks enough Know-Nothings to elect Abraham Lincoln president. Lincoln eventually evolved into “an immigration advocate.” Mr Holzer directs our attention to Lincoln’s 6,100-word “Annual Message to Congress” from 1863, in which he called for government “attention and support” for the “tens of thousands of persons, destitute of remunerative occupation,” who yearned “to emigrate to the United States if essential, but very cheap, assistance can be afforded them.”
Mr Holzer may give Lincoln too much credit here. Immigration advocacy, an element in the Republican platform that aimed at promoting business interests by increasing the size of the workforce, lowering labour costs and lessening union influence, was never a major concern for a president fighting a civil war. Lincoln signed the 1864 “Act to Encourage Emigration” into law, but the Bill was repealed three years later.
This is roughly where Steven Ujifusa picks up the thread in The Last Ships From Hamburg. Most studies of European immigration during this period begin at Castle Garden or Ellis Island, after the boat has pulled into harbour. Mr Ujifusa provides us with the missing back story, the long trek across Europe, the journey across the ocean and the people who made it possible: Albert Ballin, the managing director of the Hamburg-America line; J P Morgan, who organised a rival trans-Atlantic shipping trust; and Jacob Schiff, who contributed millions of dollars to facilitate the passage of Russian Jews to European ports and westward to America. Mr Ujifusa’s central character is Ballin, one of the richest, most powerful and well-connected German Jews on the continent and a sometime confidant of the Kaiser. Ballin recognised early that in order to increase the flow of immigrants into and out of Hamburg, he would have to segregate them from the city’s permanent residents, who feared that an ongoing invasion of Eastern Europeans would bring chaos and cholera.
To ease anxieties, Ballin erected and staffed crossing stations along the border where his customers were policed, examined, bathed and deloused before they were placed on trains headed to a self-contained emigrant village ghetto that the shipping magnate had established on an island near Hamburg.
Stuffing impoverished immigrants into steerage holds for passage to America was a lucrative business. Between 1881 and 1914, Mr Ujifusa writes, some 10 million immigrants bought tickets for the trip across the Atlantic. Ballin accumulated a personal fortune equivalent to $55 million today.
Mr Ujifusa’s thoroughly researched and beautifully written history ends tragically with the outbreak of World War I and the suspension of steamship service across the Atlantic. Ballin died in 1918. In the years that followed, Congress passed a series of restrictive laws including the Immigration Act of 1924, which cut off pathways from which millions of Jews had once been able to escape.
As a result of quotas put in place in the mid-1920s, hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of Jews were left trapped in lands where they and their families would, within less than two decades, perish in the ghettos, killing fields and gas chambers of Nazi-occupied Eastern Europe.
Here is another truth as old as the Republic: Anti-immigrant policies have consequences that reach far beyond the borders of the receiving nation.
The reviewer is the author of The Last Million: Europe’s Displaced Persons From World War to Cold War. @2024 The New York Times
