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Relatively few emigrants found the paradise promised by the ads and the letters home. The early arrivals were, by and large, poor, ill-schooled and young (two-thirds were between 15 and 39 years old). In Europe's principal ports of exodus -- Liverpool and Cork, Bremen and Rotterdam -- they were beset by thieves and hucksters, cheated by ship's captains (there was no set fee for tickets to America) and, until the age of steam, often even ignorant of where they would eventually land. If they survived the journey -- and as many as one-third died aboard ship or within a year of landing in the New World -- fresh hazards awaited them in America. Among them were streetwise recent immigrants who would rob them of their few remaining shillings or kronen.
No European nation lost proportionately more of its sons and daughters to the U.S. than Ireland: in all, some 4,250,000 from 1820 to 1920. Native-born Americans sniffed at these Gaels -- made desperate by the potato famine that devastated their homeland in the 1840s -- as filthy, bad-tempered and given to drink. The haunting, taunting employment sign NO IRISH NEED APPLY became a bitter American cliche. And yet Irish lasses made the clothmaking factories of New England hum. Irish lads built the Erie Canal, paved the highways and laid tracks for the railroads. In the South the Irish were sometimes considered more expendable than slaves and were hired, at pitifully low wages, for the dirtiest and most dangerous jobs, like clearing snake-infested swamps.
But the Irish had a gift for mutual self-help and taking care of their own. Out of this instinct, manifest in America's dozens of "little Dublins," emerged institutions, like New York City's notorious Tammany Hall, that would transform the quality and character of urban politics in America. As early as 1852, the immigrant vote (principally Irish) was so important that Winfield Scott, the staunchly Protestant Whig candidate for President, ecumenically attended Sunday Mass on campaign visits to New York. Some 210,000 Irish fought during the Civil War, 170,000 of them on the Union side.
As Irish migration began to recede, a second great wave -- of Germans (or perhaps more properly, German speakers) -- began. As Oscar Handlin pointed out in his classic study The Uprooted, most 19th century European immigrants thought of themselves not as ex-citizens of a national state (which, in the case of Poland, for instance, did not even exist) but as speakers of a common tongue, or residents of a particular village or province. The Germans were lured by the vision of unlimited economic opportunity and greater freedom than Central Europe offered in the post-Napoleonic era.
If the Irish brought a new spirit to American politics, the Germans brought culture in varied forms, from singing groups to vineyards to poetry societies. Some German railway workers could recite Homer in Greek. More pioneering than the Irish, they helped develop America's hinterland, from Ohio to Texas. (In 1900, 1 out of 3 Texans was German in origin.) The town of Hermann, Missouri, still known for its wines, was typical: when laid out in 1837, streets were named for Schiller, Gutenberg, Goethe and Mozart.