Immigration and Life in 1800s America
You come home after a few hours of martial arts training or hitting the gym and your mum just looks at you: in your weightlifting belt, shorts, special shoes, gym bag and all.
You feel like a legionary come back from the great Thracian conquests.
At least that’s what you’ve been telling yourself. And its working. You’re gushing with confidence like Zam Zam in the valley of Mecca.
You are a deluge of great self-respect.
You could say that, you’re feeling pretty damn good.
But when you come into the kitchen where you mum is hardily working away at a million different things, and she turns to look at you, she’s just perplexed at the enigma that is standing in her kitchen.
“What is this ‘gym’ that you’re obsessed with?”
“But ma…I gotta make gains.”
There’s a sort of disconnect of generations.
“Why do you need gym…?”
You debacuherous fiend!
And as a whole, most people who are alive today, regardless of if they are in their 80s or young kids DON’T have the same presence of physicality in their day-to-day life that once existed a hundred years ago.
Its shocking to see how differnet things are. And although we’re looking at a North American context here, its nuts.
It may be hard to believe but there are still timeless struggles of people that we can relate to.
Struggles that are like a common language that we can dive into and use as a way to look through the eyes of others across the world but just as much, across the generations.
Goals:
- Realize the similarities in struggles between the generations and provokes you to seek knowledge from different living generations (grandparents, mom/dad, great grand parents)
- Make you aware to the changing climate of the world
- Put North American Culture into Perspective
Now, no one’s saying training in the modern world is something WRONG. That’s got to be in context too. You know if you’re messing up.
But it can help to blur that disparity between you and your mum by going back a hundred years and creating distance, to a time where the world was quite different from it is now, and then looking forward.
So let’s get walking. We’re getting in some light intensity steady state work in. You’re going to need it because let’s face it, you’re into that 25+% body fat range and been putting off ‘cardio’ for a LONG time.
Besides, its good base building.
Motivations of Migrants and the Cultivation of Prosperous Land
[caption id=”attachment_2199" align=”aligncenter” width=”1024"]
“From the Old to the New World” shows German emigrants boarding a steamer in Hamburg and arriving in New York. Harper’s Weekly, (New York) November 7, 1874[/caption]
So what motivated people to travel all across the world to come to the roughshod frontiersman-life of America? and Really north america in general?
What motivates everyone gym-bro: Imposed Demands and the need for specific adaptations to those demands.
Whether its several years of poor farming in the fields of Germany, or the talk of making it rich to provide for a burgeoning extended family, or just to get away from the crazies in your village, moving across on a wide adventure to America was a dream to many men in their prime.
Many sacrificed all their life to take themselves as well as their families to the foreign land of liberty.
Whether from Germany, Hungary, Sweden, or Italy in Europe.
Or China or Japan in East Asia.
Or even from Lebanon and Syria in the middle east.
People saw America as a land for opportunity. A place to earn enough to pay off long debts, build a nest egg for a new family, or turn up profit over several years of famine and scarcity.
They had imposed demands and they took their first leap to establishing specific adaptations.
And it was challenging.
You think doing bodybuilding work is metabolic stress?
Try being packed liked sardines in the bottom level of a huge steamship for weeks and having to deal with the odor of not bathing properly for the entire time.
You’re too scared to rent in a basement. Imagine THEIR suffocation.
From passing through health examinations within their country to passing under steerage in ships to eventually leave for America.
What kind of conditions?
Imagine sitting in steerage, consistently poor sleep, having use one set of bed sheets for the duration of your trip, and eating food that would be described as ‘miserable’.
“They didn’t get the gains?” you think as you fearfully think of your epic refueling meal of rice pilaf and jerked chicken or turmeric infused Sri Lankan shrimp curry, or your favorite: sumo wrestler stew.
Gains, we hardly know yee.
Our disgruntled travelers had cooked cereal, bread, and jam for breakfast.
Seems okay right? I mean they needed more carbs in those days. They did more work.
But it was other foods that brought the ‘misery’.
upon boarding, you were given a food pail and utensils for food throughout the day. Food was sloshed around and only a latrine was available to clean oneself.
Then, upon arriving, you were checked for eye disease using a button hook (along with a variety of other diseases).
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That’s not pretty.[/caption]
A New Frontier for Farmers of the Old World
Many farmers saw America as the opportunity to become independent and successful agriculture specialists. A place to take their mastery of agriculture from a variety of climates and bring them to the vast, open acres of American farm country.
To ascend to the next plateau.
And although with great struggle, they did. With immigration of all kinds of farming people American agriculture knowledge diversified.
As farm folk landed on cheap, fertile land, they still had to pay a sum for machinery to run it. And that meant taking on some more diversified performance. A little GPP.
Actually what you, the excited time travelling gym bro will notice is that a lot of people in rural America in that time, compared to both modern rural and modern urban, were skilled in many areas.
Today, in the knowledge economy we know specialized information with specialized experiences. This grants us the ability to buy and sell commodities. It is the way it is.
But back in the time of the Second-Wave of migration, these farmers had a diverse set of skills. Especially with the sheer distances that separated them from one neighbor to the other.
In this way, a farmer knew a bit of blacksmithing, how to pull eggs, milk a cow, sewing, fix a tractor, and digging a new outhouse.
It’s somewhat like our example of the tea clipper ships. They were built like football players. If you compare the powerlifter to the football player, yes they both seem to be specialized but the football player has had to take on a wide variety of skills, building them up to the level of proficiency needed for his sport and apply them to that.
This variety isn’t as wide with the powerlifter.
In this way, being a great farmer meant also being great at a wide variety of skills.
The government helped though. It passed the Homestead Act in 1862.
Immigrants could get vast regions of land from the Mississippi River to the Pacific Coast and those intending on becoming citizens (giving a declaration) were included in its benefits.
How much land?
160 acres.
The other requirement?
Retain it. build a home on it, clear five acres of it, and live there for five years.
pretty sweet deal huh?
And so families settled with one another. Eventually local ethnic groups formed in different geographic regions.
By the 1900s, 90% of Eastern Minnesota composed of Swedes. Norwegians made up 75–100% of Western Minnesota.
Germans? They became part of Wisconsin, Missouri, Minnesota, and Texas.
After settling in, these farmers had to clear their land. A task requiring the whole family.
It was grueling work. From planting, weeding, rolling stones or logs, pulling roots, hoeing, and planting, farmer’s had an incredulous amount of field labor. So pardon your mom for thinking going to the gym for ‘beast -mode’ constitutes a hard days work.
In many cases, even the hard labour in modern physical jobs doesn’t compare to the rigors of similar tasks back in the 19th century.
On top of the field labor, settlers had to improve their homes, build their own furniture, cook their own food, sew, wash clothes and really, stay alive.
Now, the government helped quite a bit with the land purchasing but there was still a need to actually buy equipment to run a farm.
Horses, oxen, plough, all cost premiums and required farmers to take on wage work to supplement their income. Where cows and horses cost anywhere from $200 to $400 dollars, farmers could earn a daily income of $1.25 to 1.50 laying tracks for the railroad or working with a logging company.
An attainable task but not one without a heavy toll on the body.
That’s taking work capacity to an entirely new level for the modern man and you, the modern bro.
A Division of Labour
Unfortunately today much of the household tasks required to maintain an efficient home are looked down on and seen on an unequal footing as outdoor work. Note, this isn’t work that is exclusively done in the home, but things that IMPROVE the inside of the house and improve the live of the people inhabiting it.
Laundry, cleaning, food preparation all fall under this and were generally taking part by mostly women in immigrant families.
But where today that work is seen as being very little, and not very physical, the same was NOT the case for farm folk in the late 1800s.
You, as the proper gym bro coming home from the ‘Temple of Gains’ would have to do a tonne of laundry, right?
Well imagine doing your laundry OUTSIDE, going to a river and using a washboard to clean your clothes. Now imagine having to go and gather water by the river in the WINTER.
But don’t fret, it’s not like our immigrant settlers were smiling while facing the frigid conditions of America. Even a Scandinavian couple, who brought a thermometer from back home said that one day their thermometer stopped working after reaching -25 and they knew it was even colder than that.
But it’s the price paid for the reward that many of these immigrant farmers hoped for: Big reward.
Do you find your parent’s missing the closeness of family ties back home?
Well don’t be to alarmed its something that resonated with immigrants long ago as well. Farmers who had lived in much smaller land and thus more close-knit with a wider circle of fellow farmers saw solidarity and strength in one another.
In America, the lands were so wide apart that one woman longed for the comforts of her mother back home who would care for her while other farmers helped pitch in until the person rose from their sickness. Not in America.
Regardless of being ill, people NEEDED to still work in order to ensure survival.
But in all, the impact was powerful. The ingenuity brought by immigrant families allowed the development of resistant germs of wheat to be planted throughout the year. Northern Italians used their wine industry knowledge to grow grapes in California and helped raise the wine industry in the state.
However, farm life only constituted a fraction of the roles that migrants took on when arriving from overseas. Most took on life in the city to make a living and see their goals achieved.
Immigrant Fitness in the Urban World
Imagine a work place where the only requirement was to withstand long hours and arduous working conditions. That’s what the majority of American industry was looking for in its workforce in the late 1800s and early 1900s.
From working in mills to slaughtering animals, to hauling , digging,and other kinds of construction projects, immigrants jumped on the opportunities of Industrial America. Although it often led to exploitation.
So why take them?
People Upset with Working Conditions. Not so much Wages
Much like the financial benefits to be gained for farmers travelling to America, urban workers had incredible opportunity in better wages compared to their home countries.
For instance, in Hungary, immigrants compared the $2.75 per week they received as foundry workers to the $1.05 — $1.80 PER DAY that they could make in America.
And the Italian agricultural laborer bore no less reason to move either, earning 26–45 cents per day. Nor the Greek in 1908 who made 58–72 cents per day.
Now, you still need to factor in cost of living. However, many of these immigrants didn’t plan on living in America forever. Many thought to earn a good amount of cash and head back home. This was a cause of grief for American citizens who saw this ac as stealing money from the American economy.
regardless, the incentive was too great not to pass up. Which makes working to the bone a more tolerable task. And what do we mean by working to the bone?
Not 20 reps of a 10 repetition max squat. Not running an ultra marathon (I mean come on, you’re practically walking the thing). Not even playing contact sports.
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Bethlehem steel works in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, 1881[/caption]
spending 12 hours in a blast furnace working 7 days a week, where you might have to do a dreaded double were a mainstay of the types of industrial work people were doing.
Operating on two shifts, most labourers could see Sunday off but, depending on what shift they had, they may have had to return to work at six in the evening.
The conditions were usually very harsh and damaging to health. Now the jobs were quite dirty and vigorous but many of the positions were downright dangerous.
Working with free-hanging ‘skull-cracker’s’ (a pear shaped iron weight, hanging six feet in the air and used to break hardened metal buildup in the ladle of foundries), or repairing cranes amid noxious gases (with the fear of asphyxiation), the life of these steelworkers was in constant threat.
But its important realize the importance of the work these men were doing. They were working on the emerging steel industry that, along with American agriculture had bolstered America to the peak of the industrial revolution’s impact over three decades after the American Civil War.
Talk about fast action.
Int his world results were heavily weighted in and those that couldn’t keep up with the imposed demands of factories, soon found themselves without work.
But not only did these experiences with such large immigration allowed America to push into the peak of production, it also provided a playground for the establishment of American ethnic stereotypes int he work place.
Ethnic stereotypes…A possible evolution in a coal mine
Naturally, amid a suspicious first generation immigrant population, these second generation immigrants struggled to find work. Coming together in alcoves of like-origin communities helped in farms but also in the workplace.
Certain industries and factories became known for being predominantly of one immigrant ethnicity. More so, the division of labour and the departments within a given factory became associated with the kind of work that a particular culture became intrinsically good at or poor at.
Even amid managers and supervisors, theses stereotypes perpetuated the further establishment of them as employers would hire only certain ethnicities for specific kinds of work.
Although stereotypes continue to be developed and transformed through culture and time, its interesting to see how immigrants from a hundred years ago impacted many of our modern stereotypes of workplace as it relates to ethnicity and cultures.
And you wonder why your parents want you to become an engineer or a doctor.
Shame on you!
Break out of the Bubble of the Knowledge Economy
Okay my friend. We’re back.
Hopefully you had a chance to really see the motivations and experiences of American life and immigrant life. And hopefully its helped bridge the impact of that kind of world in the modern age. From stereotypes to the true culture of North America; forever present.
More importantly, its time to take action. Lets turn that accumulation into intensification.
How?
Pick up a physical skill.
Do more with your physicality. See what problems that you can fix within your domain of competence and strive to grow it.
Learn from other sources about your mom’s life and the mentality of her generation. It’s sometimes easy to forget that our parents aren’t the only people in their generation. Its filled with a variation of people with stark similarities but also gross differences.
Hit ’em up, show value, use that vicarious experience in the way you talk with them, hell learn their language, and see the impact that has. See the impact of showing others that you’ve tried to understand where they come from and see how powerful that relationship can make YOU.
Maybe it’ll awaken in you that confidence and that ability that a steel mill worker has being pushed to work 12 hour days in a piping hot furnace with maybe a Sunday off but a double shift along the way. And maybe you can apply that work ethic to something that is meaningful to you.
Further Reading:
Daily Life in Immigrant America 1870–1920 by June Granatir Alexander
