In the single decade from 1846 through 1855, 1,288,000 Irish and 976,000 Germans landed on the East Coast. They brought not only the Irish and German cultures with them — both different from all four of the British streams — but also Catholicism, which until then had been rare in the United States.
The Irish who arrived during that surge were not like earlier generations of immigrants, who had been self-selected for risk-taking and optimism. They were fleeing starvation from the potato famine. More than half of them spoke no English when they arrived. Most were illiterate. They did not disperse into the hinterlands but stayed in the big cities of the East. Since those cities weren’t actually that big in the mid-19th century, the Irish soon constituted more than a quarter of the populations of New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Providence, New Haven, Hartford, Jersey City, and Newark. Large urban neighborhoods became exclusively Irish and Catholic — a kind of neighborhood that America had never before experienced.
The Germans were the antithesis of the Irish, typically highly skilled craftsmen or farmers who practiced advanced agriculture. Michael Barone’s description of the culture they brought with them (in his book Our Country) is worth quoting at length:
As soon as they could they built solid stone houses and commercial buildings. They built German Catholic, Lutheran, and Reformed churches, and they maintained German-language instruction in private and public schools for decades. They formed fire and militia companies, coffee circles, and especially singing societies, staging seasonal Sangerfeste (singing festivals). They staged pre-Lenten carnivals, outdoor Volkfeste, and annual German Day celebrations. They formed mutual-benefit fire insurance firms and building societies and set up German-speaking lodges of American associations. Turnvereine (athletic clubs) were established in almost all German communities and national gymnastic competitions became common. German-language newspapers sprung up — newspaper baron Joseph Pulitzer, a German-speaking Hungarian Jew, got his start in one in St. Louis — and German theaters opened in New York, Philadelphia, Cincinnati, Chicago, and Milwaukee. Some German customs came to seem quintessentially American — the Christmas tree, kindergarten, pinochle.
In the 1870s, large numbers of Scandinavian immigrants began to augment the continuing German immigration, and most of them headed straight toward what Barone has called the “Germano-Scandinavian province,” consisting of Wisconsin, Iowa, Minnesota, and the Dakotas, overlapping into parts of Missouri, Kansas, Nebraska, and Montana. The mixed cultures of Scandinavia and Middle Europe in the small towns of those regions persisted long into the 20th century, famously chronicled by Willa Cather in the early 20th century and over the past 40 years by Garrison Keillor.
The Civil War created or intensified several kinds of cultural diversity. First, its conclusion marked the emergence of African-American culture from the shadows. Communities of American blacks in the South were no longer limited to the size of a slaveholder’s labor force but could consist of large neighborhoods in Southern cities or the majorities of populations in rural towns. All the categories of folkways that distinguished the various white cultures from one another also distinguished black American culture from the white ones.
The Civil War also led Southern whites, whether descendants of Cavaliers, indentured servants, or the Scots-Irish of the backcountry who had never owned slaves, to identify themselves as Southerners above all else. In many respects, they walled themselves off from the rest of the country and stayed that way for a century. White Southern culture was not only different from cultures in the rest of the country; it was defiantly different.
In the 1890s, America’s cultural diversity got yet another infusion from Eastern Europe and Mediterranean Europe that amounted to 20 million people by the time restrictive immigration laws were enacted in the 1920s. They came primarily from Italy, the Austro-Hungarian empire, and Russia, with this in common: Almost all of them had been second-class citizens in their homelands. The Italian immigrants came from rural, poor, and largely illiterate southern Italy and Sicily, not from the wealthier and more sophisticated north. Austro-Hungary’s immigrants were overwhelmingly Czechs, Serbs, Poles, Slovaks, Slovenians, and Jews, not ethnic Hungarians or Austrians. The immigrants from the Russian Empire were almost all Poles, Lithuanians, and Ukrainians, not ethnic Russians, with large proportions being Jewish as well. Occupationally, the Ellis Island immigrants had usually been factory laborers, peddlers, and tenant farmers, near the bottom of the economic ladder.
The size of these immigrant groups led to huge urban enclaves. In New York City alone, the Italian-born population at the beginning of the 20th century was larger than the combined populations of Florence, Venice, and Genoa, mostly packed into the Lower East Side of New York. A few blocks to their west were 540,000 Jews, far more than lived in any other city in the world. To enter either of those neighborhoods was to be in a world that bore little resemblance to America anywhere else. And that doesn’t count New York’s older communities of Irish, Germans, and African Americans.
Another one often ignored is the million French-Canadians that moved to the US during the 19th and early 20th century. Jack Kerouac was a late example.