Chapter 5

Newcomers

Julian Ralph’s characterization of Brooklyn in 1893 as a vast suburb was shaped by his view of thousands of men crossing Brooklyn Bridge after a day’s work in New York City—a nightly return to their wives and “the only female among our cities—the sister city to New York.” But Ralph also reports from a different vantage point: “There is a view of Brooklyn which gives it the appearance of a smoky seat of manufactures. It is obtained from the east side of New York, looking over at the great sugar-refineries which tower like Rhenish castles beside the swift East River.” This view led him to tabulate Brooklyn’s industrial might—more than ten thousand manufacturing firms employing more than one hundred thousand workers—and a catalog of “very large hat-works, chemical-works, foundries and iron-works, candy factories, coffee and spice mills, and boot and shoe factories.” Less easily characterized as female, this Brooklyn did not interest him. His essay quickly pivots to Brooklyn’s excellent schools, the natural product of a “city of homes,” and again of women’s influence: “Whatever a mother would concern herself about is what thrives in Brooklyn, and everything else is poor or despairing.”¹

Ten thousand workshops and factories speak as much of dynamism as of despair, even if few of them resembled Rhenish castles. Many were small companies of men in the construction trades—carpenters, masons, painters, plasterers, plumbers—called upon to build homes, shops, churches, wharves, and factories for a rapidly growing city; others were small shops of bakers, blacksmiths, and custom tailors serving the neighborhoods construction workers had built. Still others were cigar makers, seamstresses, other artisans, and semiskilled outworkers who toiled in tenement sweatshops to feed goods into large networks of wholesaling and retailing on both sides of the river. Factories came in all sizes, and some industries combined factories, independent artisans, and outworkers. In boots and shoes, for example, Brooklyn at the end of the century was home to forty-four factories employing 3,500 workers and 1,250 shops with 1,260 proprietors and only 535 hired hands.² Many of the larger factories, including the sugar refineries, clustered along and near the waterfront, which now extended north to the city boundary with Queens County at Newtown Creek—Astral Oil was there—and south to and along Gowanus Bay and up the Gowanus Canal. Among the departures from this pattern, the Knox Hat Company factory, reputedly the largest hat factory in the world, was located well inland at the boundary of the suburban neighborhoods of Prospect Heights and Crown Heights.

The growth of manufacturing in Brooklyn was part of a larger story of industrialization in the United States. Once a minor contributor to a predominantly agricultural economy, manufacturing became the American economy’s leading sector by the end of the nineteenth century, accounting for more than half the value of the nation’s vast economic output. Brooklyn contributed substantially to this industrial revolution.³ During the last four decades of the century its industrial sector increased tenfold, outpacing the sevenfold growth in the entire country. In 1860 about 15 percent of working-age Brooklyn men held industrial jobs. By 1900 that ratio had increased to about 25 percent. Among women the increase was from 1 percent to 7 percent.⁴ If Brooklyn’s factories and workshops failed to overwhelm the City of Churches and Homes, along with its docks and warehouses they continued a robust transformation of the East River (and New York Bay) waterfront, sallying beyond it on occasion into the suburban world that seemed so distant from its purposes.

While Brooklyn’s industrial sector was expanding so rapidly, the city’s population grew more diverse, continuing a trend that began before the Civil War. In the 1840s and 1850s immigrants compelled to work for low wages helped stimulate the take-off phase of the city’s waterfront development.⁵ Many things contributed to this critical moment in the economic history of Brooklyn (and the United States), including a new rail and canal system of inland transportation that expanded markets at reduced costs, the stabilization of banking after the 1837–43 depression, and the implementation of more centralized modes of production. But just as crucial to industrial growth was the arrival of large numbers of Irish workers, their potato crops having failed just when American manufacturers and shippers were in particular need of cheap labor. German immigrants supplied some of this labor as well, although many arrived in America with enough skill and capital to operate their own small workshops.

Post–Civil War manufacturers continued to rely on immigrant labor, and for some years much of it came from familiar sources. Before the 1880s, Germany was the largest source of immigrants to the United States, and Great Britain was second, although Ireland probably would have ranked ahead of Britain if records reflected the ethnic Irish among the latter’s emigrants. After 1880, though, new sources added to and even surpassed the old. Scandinavia contributed as many immigrants to the United States as Ireland. Poland, Russia, and other countries of Eastern Europe outpaced them both, as did Italy during the 1890s.⁶ The impact of these new immigrants on Brooklyn, however, would occur mainly after the turn of the new century. As late as the 1890s, the pattern of arrival and settlement was much as it had been for more than half a century.

The familiarity of the immigrant stream during the post–Civil War period helped calm native Protestants in Brooklyn, as did the partial assimilation of earlier immigrants and their American-born children. The proportion of the foreign-born within the local population actually declined from 39 percent in 1860 to 30 percent at the end of the century. (In 1855, near the end of the major burst of migration from Ireland and Germany, it was 46 percent.) But as the immigrant proportion decreased, the second generation expanded. By 1900 the native-born population with foreign-born parents constituted more than 40 percent of Brooklyn’s population.⁷ Ethnicity, if not place of birth, set them apart.

Within a brief period the Anglo and Dutch Protestants of Brooklyn had become a distinct minority in the City of Churches. Nonetheless, their dwindling presence did not fuel a revival of the nativist and anti-Catholic disturbances that had characterized the antebellum era. Surprisingly, perhaps, xenophobia and Protestant anxiety did not dominate in politics or public discourse, or on the streets of the city. At least temporarily, they had lost some of their power.

The presence of immigrants and second-generation Americans in Brooklyn’s sprawling suburbs is an interesting aspect of this story of relatively calm interethnic relations. That presence can be traced in large part through the founding of Brooklyn’s Catholic churches. Before 1860 twenty Catholic churches were built in Brooklyn, mostly in the downtown wards, Brooklyn Heights, and the 6th ward, the latter to serve the mostly Irish neighborhoods on and near the South Brooklyn waterfront. Five of these churches, though, among the last of those built, were located much further from the waterfront in emerging suburbs, a pattern that soon became pronounced. Between 1860 and 1900 the Diocese of Brooklyn more than quadrupled its parishes by building sixty-two new churches, forty-five of them in the new suburbs. Twenty-eight of these churches were built during the last two decades of the century. The Catholic Church was tracking—and in many instances leading—its faithful to Bedford, Bushwick, Flatbush, East New York, and Bay Ridge.⁸

Many of Brooklyn’s suburban immigrants were domestic servants, living in houses they could not afford. But there were householders as well, especially among second-generation ethnics, and especially in the more modest suburban neighborhoods. Foreign-born householders, to be sure, were still more concentrated in the older wards, where many, particularly the Irish, worked at low-paying, waterfront jobs.⁹ In a pattern similar to pre–Civil War days, Irish immigrants were overrepresented only in the least skilled occupations, while the German-born were overrepresented in skilled neighborhood trades such as baking and butchering and, to a lesser extent, in factory work and retail storekeeping.¹⁰

There was now, however, a greater occupational diversity within these groups, including the Irish. As in other American cities, immigrants achieved success in business, politics, and social and cultural leadership. Politics was a route upward for Thomas Kinsella, who emigrated from Ireland as a boy, became a printer in the upstate New York town of Cambridge, moved to Brooklyn in 1858, and ascended from typesetter to editor of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, a position he held until his death in 1884. From his editorial chair, Kinsella functioned as a leader of Brooklyn’s Democratic Party and was rewarded with terms in Congress and as local postmaster.¹¹ For Frederick A. Schroeder, a German immigrant, politics was not a route but a destination after a successful business career. Schroeder learned the trade of cigar making as a youth, opened a cigar factory in Williamsburgh, and became a tobacco importer. He was also a founder and long-time president of the Germania Savings Bank, which gave him a significant Dutchtown base for political office. He won his race for city comptroller in 1871, was elected mayor in 1875, and later served in the New York State Senate.¹² Dutch-born Martin Kalbfleisch followed a similar path, settling in New York as a young manufacturer of paint before moving to Greenpoint, where he opened a chemical plant. Elected alderman in 1854, Kalbfleisch became Brooklyn’s first non-Anglo-Protestant mayor in 1862, went to Congress in 1863, and served as mayor again from 1867 to 1871.¹³

The success story of Charles M. Higgins, who was born in Ireland in 1854 and brought to America as a boy of six, is perhaps the most interesting of this era. Charles and his family settled into the South Brooklyn waterfront, where his father worked as a laborer and his mother as a housekeeper and later a teacher. As a young man Higgins found employment in a New York patent solicitor’s office, where he filed patent claims for clients and his own inventions. The latter ranged widely, from window screening to shoe manufacturing machinery to a new kind of India ink, from which he made his fortune. Charles M. Higgins & Co., founded in 1885, produced ink and adhesives from a factory near the Gowanus Canal in the lower part of Park Slope. Higgins Ink became a highly profitable brand, known to school children (and their parents) well beyond the borders of Brooklyn.

Near the end of the century the Higgins family moved up the Slope to a brownstone mansion facing Prospect Park, a short walk from the Montauk Club where Charles was now a member. He was a member of other clubs as well, including the Brooklyn, which cemented his status among the city’s elite. Higgins bought a sprawling country estate in Smithtown, Long Island, where he bred horses and show dogs, supported cultural and civic organizations, helped found a Kings County Historical Society, and involved himself in commemorations of the Battle of Brooklyn, which included building a war memorial in Green-Wood Cemetery, just in front of the burial plot he had bought for himself and his family. These activities may have been intended to enhance his social position, but Higgins was also iconoclastic. When he left the Catholic Church as a youngster, he announced himself a freethinker. Instead of joining a prestigious Protestant Church when he began his social ascent, he associated himself with a Brooklyn offshoot of Felix Adler’s Ethical Culture Society, an organization springing from Reform Judaism. He often expressed interest in Eastern religions. Later in his life he became a leader of the national Anti-Vaccination League. Missing from the chronicle of his life is evidence of sustained interest or activity in institutions related to his identity as an Irishman.¹⁴

Higgins’s life in Brooklyn is the story not only of rags to riches but also of the seemingly perfect assimilation of a poor immigrant boy into the ways of his adopted land. Higgins’s story, however, should not unduly shape our understanding of the immigrant experience, for, apart from its atypicality, it posits assimilation—a progressive path from one definable way of life to another—as the overriding goal of immigrants and as the inevitable arc of their collective history.

In their classic study, The Polish Peasant in Europe and America, William I. Thomas and Florian Znaniecki offered a different perspective. The issue of any Polish immigrant’s assimilation, they wrote, is entirely “secondary and unimportant…. The fundamental process … is the formation of a new Polish-American society, … which in structure and prevalent attitudes is neither Polish nor American but constitutes a specific new product.”¹⁵ The notion of a singular and superior American way of life and culture that immigrants and their children must aspire to was at bottom a nativist conceit. Most immigrants, even those eager to prove their American credentials, did not see their lives as a process of shedding one culture and adopting another. They made their way in America as Irishmen, or Poles; the lives, institutions, and social and political values they built were not Irish, or Polish, or American, but Irish-American or Polish-American, and that was different from simply becoming American as a fixed and prior cultural property. Nor was this process necessarily deliberative, an explicit program of retaining just so much of the old country’s ways and values and adopting just so much of what American natives demand. It was an outcome—a set of outcomes, variable and even contestable—of predilections expressed in day-to-day life, identities shaped and reshaped by experience, and more and less persistent longings for the old country and acceptance by the new. Its result, as Thomas and Znaniecki insisted, and as is invariably the case as human societies pass through time, is both old in its traditions and new as circumstances dictate. In understanding immigration and ethnicity, the hyphen was, and remains, an indispensable tool.

The Irish-Americans of post–Civil War Brooklyn offer important insights into these identity-forming processes of shedding, retaining, and becoming. The country they left was different from the nations of the other immigrant groups. Ireland is a small and relatively homogeneous country in which long-standing parochial identities were increasingly joined to a vigorous nationalism bred by the struggle for liberation from British control. As early as the 1820s Irish immigrants in Brooklyn formed institutions that expressed a strong commitment to their country of origin, and on occasion gathered in support of Irish liberation and, when the occasion arose, famine relief. Their annual St. Patrick’s parade was more secular than religious, a celebration not so much of a Catholic saint as of Ireland and Irish identity. During the last four decades of the nineteenth century older and newer immigrants supported the Fenian, Land League, and Home Rule movements in Ireland, while continuing to build local institutions that perpetuated a distinct Irish identity. By this time the roster of organizations named Erin, Emerald, Shamrock, Hibernian, St. Patrick, or Irish had reached impressive levels, with an Irish Convention of Kings County that was a kind of parliamentary meeting ground for two distinct societies, the Ancient Order of Hibernians and the St. Patrick Alliance. The latter, as the name suggests, was itself a federation of groups based in Brooklyn’s Irish Catholic churches, while the Ancient Order of Hibernians was a collection of individual lodges, seventeen of which marched in the 1870 St. Patrick’s Day parade.¹⁶

The Irish Convention of Kings County did not have a long or happy life. In 1874, in a dispute over policies toward the homeland, the St. Patrick Alliance walked out of a convention meeting and a few years later the Hibernians split into two factions.¹⁷ Nonetheless the institutional density of Irish Brooklyn endured. Less than three weeks after the split-up of the Hibernians and the Alliance the St. Patrick’s Day parade featured twenty-six Hibernian divisions, fourteen branches of the St. Patrick’s Alliance, and six Catholic temperance societies, demonstrating on a rainy mid-March day “that the sons of Hibernia, like good Irish whisky, can, without diminution of spirit, stand a great deal of water.”¹⁸ The parades of the following two years were impressive (thirty Hibernian divisions and twenty-two Alliance branches marched in 1876), but they dwindled by the end of the decade.¹⁹ In 1880 a decision was made to divert the funds that would have been spent on a parade to the Land League in Ireland, and for four years Brooklyn hosted no St. Patrick’s Day parade. The turnout was large when the parade resumed in 1884, and it remained so for some years despite the division among the Hibernians that generally required two separate events.²⁰ When the factions reunited in 1894 a new dispute arose. Mayor Schieren, an immigrant from Germany, refused to fly the Irish flag over City Hall on St. Patrick’s Day. After much wrangling his decision prevailed. “We would as soon think of employing dynamite to kill flies or a sledge hammer to repair a watch,” the Eagle scoffed, “as to get excited over something just about the size of the flag question.”²¹ But the controversy testifies to the continuing presence of Ireland in the American lives of these immigrants and their children.

Hibernian lodges were located in many Brooklyn neighborhoods, as were church-connected associations. We cannot tell how many laborers, dock workers, carters, and other low-wage workers participated in them, but the sheer spread of these organizations indicates that they penetrated deeply into the Irish-American working class.²² Other organizations did not. Founded in 1850 on the model of the New England and St. Nicholas Societies, the St. Patrick Society served for many years as a convivial club for Brooklyn’s Irish businessmen and professionals, convening on St. Patrick’s Day each year for a sumptuous banquet. Led by Irish-born men such as Thomas Kinsella, who was elected six times as president, the St. Patrick Society paid as much heed as the Hibernians to Irish affairs and the celebration of Irish culture, placing a bust of the poet and composer Thomas Moore in Prospect Park, for example, and raising $1,000 in response to Charles Stewart Parnell’s appeal for funds for the Land League.²³ But there is little to indicate that it cooperated with the Hibernians, the St. Patrick Alliance, or any other broad-based group.

Formed in 1875 by relatively affluent second-generation Irish, the Irish-American Union also celebrated the big day with a dinner rather than by marching with other groups in a parade. Describing itself as a social, literary, dramatic, and musical society of young people of Irish descent, it modeled itself on native Protestant organizations such as the Hamilton Literary Society rather than any of the Irish societies. But if the Irish-American Union signaled an assimilationist turn among the second generation, the signal was not a strong one. The Union may not have lasted beyond its first anniversary dinner in 1876.²⁴

More than any of these organizations, big or small, long-lasting or ephemeral, broad-based or elite, the institution that defined the Irish presence in nineteenth-century Brooklyn was the Roman Catholic Church. Unlike other immigrant groups, the Irish worshiped at a church that was singular and centralized, and in some ways—the schooling of children, for example—reached more deeply than Protestant churches into the daily lives of its adherents. Although a few Protestant Irish lived in Brooklyn—Kinsella was one of them—the overwhelming majority were Catholics, and they all came from a country where the Catholic Church exerted enormous influence over everyday life, a cultural inheritance that endured in the United States. There were, of course, German Catholics in Brooklyn, but many if not most German immigrants were Protestants of different denominations, and some were Jewish. By the 1890s, when Italians arrived in significant numbers, the Catholic Church in Brooklyn had become a more diverse institution in the ethnic composition of its parishioners and increasingly its priesthood. But through much of the nineteenth century the Church belonged to the Irish on both sides of the communion table.

The price the Irish paid for their ownership of the Catholic Church was virulent anti-Catholicism in the antebellum era, which was often inflected with scorn for the Irish as a people. Animus of this sort did not disappear from Brooklyn, but it did not carry over in especially consequential forms into the postwar period.²⁵ Indeed, the Catholic Church gained in stature among Brooklyn’s Protestant leaders, partly because of its growing physical presence in the city, partly because of the perception that it anchored immigrant neighborhoods in ways that promoted peace and good behavior among its parishioners, and partly for its role in advancing the moral and benevolent agenda the Protestants endorsed.

On numerous occasions ministers and priests appeared together on the dais at the opening of an orphan asylum or an old-age home. Bishop Loughlin was widely admired, and Catholics as well as Protestants appeared on several lists of notable Brooklyn clergy.²⁶ Among the favorites was Father Giuseppe Fransioli, a small, quick-witted, and good-natured Italian Swiss appointed rector of the new parish of St. Peter’s by Bishop Loughlin in 1859. Serving an Irish working-class neighborhood on the South Brooklyn waterfront, Father Fransioli quickly overcame any hesitation among his flock, some of whom no doubt saw him as an Irishman with a funny accent. He proved to be a popular pastoral leader and builder of institutions. As construction began on the new church he announced his intention of establishing a parochial school, St. Peter’s Academy, and then moved on to St. Peter’s Asylum for orphans and the poor, which expanded into Brooklyn’s first Catholic hospital. Before he died in 1890, he added a Home for Working Girls.²⁷

These institutions were central to Catholic life in Brooklyn, particularly in poorer parishes such as Father Fransioli’s St. Peter’s. Churches also sponsored temperance societies, mutual aid societies, and social clubs for men and women, while parochial schools spread all over Catholic Brooklyn. The teachers in these schools were drawn mostly from nearly a dozen male and female religious orders, several of which Bishop Loughlin brought directly from Ireland.²⁸ Churches and church-related organizations were important to Protestants, too, but most Protestants did not experience so strong a connection between the church and the school, and certainly not as a force for perpetuating ethnic identity.

Like the Irish, German immigrants came to America from a region where the politics of nationhood was of the utmost importance. German unification before and after the 1871 proclamation of the Prussian Empire gave former Prussians, Saxons, Hessians, Bavarians, and others much to discuss in the beer gardens of Brooklyn’s 16th ward. But German immigrants were not called on for financial or moral support against an external tyrant, largely because unification was widely greeted as a positive event, and even Catholic Bavaria quickly shed its qualms about domination of the new German state by Protestant Prussia. Hence, there were no patron saints to celebrate in defiant demonstration of pre-Prussian nationalism, and no anniversaries that demanded public affirmation of either a parochial or an imperial German identity. Of the two German-American celebrations of note in Brooklyn, one was a parade that followed the German victory over the French in 1871. Nationalist to the core, the march was not repeated in subsequent years. The other was the annual celebration of Pfingstmontag, or Pentecost Monday, which consisted of a parade of German groups from Williamsburg to parks in Williamsburg, Bushwick, and Ridgewood, with some marchers peeling off at each park for an afternoon of picnicking. Though Pfingstmontag was nominally a religious celebration, Germans did not carry or display religious pageants or emblems (unlike traditional Whitsun and Whit Monday processions in England and elsewhere). Pfingstmontag had little to do with the German nation or with any form of pre-national, national, or imperial politics. The parade did not pass City Hall, the mayor was not asked to stand in review, and organizers did not attempt to fly the German flag from Brooklyn’s public buildings.²⁹

Even more than the Irish, Germans built and joined institutions. As with the parades, their institutions expressed German culture with little need for political nationalism. German immigrants flocked to turnvereine (the gymnastic clubs that also promoted German culture and liberal politics) and music societies of various kinds—brass bands, singing societies, groups devoted to Baroque or classical music or a specific German composer. They joined shooting clubs, militia units, fraternal lodges, benevolent societies, and labor unions in German-dominated trades. All through the 16th ward, and beyond to adjoining wards as Dutchtown expanded, meeting halls hosted hundreds of these groups—Turn Hall, Germania Hall, Union Saenger Hall, Humboldt Hall, Burger’s Hall, Baumgartner’s Military Hall, Teutonia Hall, to name a few.³⁰ The comings and goings of group members were part of the fabric of German-American Brooklyn. A few halls and organizations carried names suggestive of German political nationalism, but many expressed the German notion of the volk, a type of nationalism that transcended politics and national boundaries on behalf of a deeper unity based on common traditions and language. This sentiment was not absent from Irish-American nationalism, but it ran more deeply among the Germans and was not animated—or complicated—by political struggles in the homeland.

Language was central to German-American identity, not least because it established this immigrant group as an alien minority within an English-speaking country. An organizing principle of unification in the Old World, language brought into one nation nearly all the German-speaking states, principalities, and still-independent Hanseatic cities of central Europe.³¹ So when immigrants brought the German language to America they brought a good deal of cultural baggage with it. Almost inevitably the most prominent issue arising from the settlement of Williamsburg’s Dutchtown was whether German should be taught in Brooklyn’s public schools. Raised first in 1870, and again in 1873, the issue became significant in 1876 when Mayor Schroeder proposed adding German to the curriculum.³² Schroeder had practical reasons for doing so—Dutchtown’s public schools were underutilized, as many German immigrants sent their children to German-language private schools. But the issue transcended practicality. Some of the Germans who appeared before the board of education spoke of the German language as offering “further culture” and a “moral influence,” and Schroeder argued that better-off Germans would never send their children to a school that did not teach this central element of German identity.³³

Perhaps the most telling contribution to the controversy came from James J. O’Donnell, a member of the St. Patrick’s Society. The Irish, too, had a language, O’Donnell pointed out, and its introduction into the public school curriculum would be more efficient because its alphabet had ten fewer letters than either English or German. That said, “the Irish will waive all claims” if Germans agreed to allow their children to learn only the language of the United States Constitution.³⁴ Evidently, it took an Irishman to chastise the Germans. A Philo-Celtic Society emerged in Brooklyn a few years later to urge a boycott of Irish-American newspapers that did not include instruction in the Irish language, but it soon left the scene.³⁵ The battle over German in the schools, by contrast, raged on and was resolved temporarily when the board of education voted 23 to 16 against introducing it into the curriculum. It appeared again, not for the last time, in 1890, when a “monster meeting” of representatives of 166 German societies pressed the issue.³⁶ Brooklyn’s Germans were clearly no more amused on the subject of language than its Irish were on the subjects of tenantry and British rule in Ireland. The difference was that the Irish battle had to be fought overseas, while the German one focused on life in America.

The concept of a German volk did not extend easily to the Jews among Brooklyn’s German immigrants. Some Jewish immigrants, especially the wealthier and better educated, maintained a German identity that reflected their partial integration into nineteenth-century German society—an integration that, among other things, gave birth to a religious Reform movement emulating practices of their Christian neighbors. But the ethnic identity of German Jews, even within the Reform community, remained above all that of the Jewish diaspora, and the power of that identity was even stronger among Jews who had migrated to Germany from Russia and the Austro-Hungarian Empire before departing to the United States. That identity would manifest itself late in the century in relief efforts for Russian Jews.

It is difficult to estimate how many of Brooklyn’s German immigrants were Jewish and still more difficult to know how many Jews brought with them important elements of German culture. Among the delegates to the large 1890 meeting protesting the absence of German from the public school curriculum was Rabbi Leopold Wintner, a Hungarian-born, German-educated leader of the Reform community.³⁷ He was almost certainly not alone, but evidence of cooperation among Christian and Jewish German immigrants is rare in the historical record. Although they may have shared a language and culture, these two communities appear to have remained largely distinct.

Before the Civil War few Jews lived in Brooklyn, which had only two places of Jewish worship, both in rented rooms. The first, a small Orthodox congregation, Kahal Kadosh Beth Elohim, was organized in Williamsburgh in 1848; the second, Baith (Beth) Israel, also Orthodox, met from 1856 in a room above a store in Atlantic Street before building Brooklyn’s first synagogue on the corner of Boerum Place and State Street in 1862.³⁸ Several more congregations soon appeared, some as splinter groups from the first two. Within a decade of the end of the war, Brooklyn had six synagogues, and a newspaper account of the Rosh Hashanah services in 1877 estimated five thousand worshipers, a clear indication that the Jewish population of Brooklyn was growing significantly.³⁹ Later estimates confirm this perception: twelve thousand Jewish residents in 1886, twenty-five in 1891, and fifty-thousand at the end of the century.⁴⁰

These figures suggest that Brooklyn’s Jewish community was large enough by the 1880s or 1890s to generate the kinds of institutions established by the Irish and the Christian Germans. The levels of organization among the Jews, however, did not match these other immigrant groups. Interestingly, even the most German of these immigrants did not form music societies or turnvereine, nor did they spend their Sunday afternoons in beer gardens. To be sure, they did establish Jewish benevolent societies, a YMHA of uncertain longevity, a number of fraternal lodges and men’s clubs, and a Ladies’ Sewing Circle that made garments and linens for the jewel in Jewish Brooklyn’s institutional crown, the Hebrew Orphan Asylum.⁴¹ Incorporated in 1878, the orphan asylum began modestly with four boys and girls in a small rented house on Stuyvesant Avenue in the suburban neighborhood later known as Stuyvesant Heights. Within five years, when four children became forty, a larger house was built on the adjacent property, and in 1892 the Orphan Asylum Society, now an organization with more than five hundred members, erected a still larger structure to house more than a hundred Jewish children. By far the most visible Jewish benevolent institution in nineteenth-century Brooklyn, the orphan asylum attracted Christian dignitaries such as Kinsella, Beecher, Father Sylvester Malone, and mayors Seth Low and David Boody to its fundraisers and dedications.⁴² The attention it received points to both the tradition of Jewish benevolence and the limited organizational life of Brooklyn’s Jews during those formative years.

The synagogues’ role as centers of communal life was more limited than that of Protestant and Catholic churches. Orthodoxy was declining in Brooklyn, with many synagogues adopting or moving toward the less demanding—and less cathartic—practices of the Reform movement. The synagogues, too, did not have large memberships and generally attracted small groups of worshipers to their services. Some German Jewish immigrants were agnostics and atheists, and some professed believers were drawn more to secular than religious life. Equally important, many Jewish businessmen could not afford to close their stores on the Jewish Sabbath, their busiest day of the week. Some of them embraced the radical idea of shifting the Sabbath services to Sunday, an initiative Temple Israel adopted.⁴³ The deeper problem, though, was an apparently widespread indifference to religion and the communal life synagogues might have encouraged. Near the end of an article in 1886 about the city’s Jews, the Eagle concluded that though Brooklyn “will soon have cause to be proud of its synagogues as it is now proud of its churches,” the present state of Jewish worship was not encouraging: “There are many thousands of Hebrews in Brooklyn who pay no attention to the synagogues—not even on holidays…. In the synagogue and out of it there is much indifference.”⁴⁴

Related to the weak religiosity of Brooklyn’s German Jewish immigrants was a similarly weak sense of Jewish exclusivity. Orthodoxy expressed that exclusivity in various ways, including the clothing and long beards of its men. Continuing traditions that made some Jews visibly alien stimulated no small amount of anti-Semitism in neighborhoods where Orthodox Jews and Gentiles lived in close proximity.⁴⁵ But Reform Jews did not set themselves apart in this way. Their clothing and personal grooming were indistinguishable from those of native Christians and the German secular education of the more affluent among them enhanced the possibilities of mutual discourse, even if the newcomers gave voice to their learning in accents strange to the native-born. And the relatively small footprint of Jewish religious institutions offered little challenge to the City of Churches, a phrase used without resentment or any sense of exclusion by two Jewish speakers at the cornerstone ceremony of the Hebrew Orphan Asylum.⁴⁶

An example of positive discourse across the divides of religion and nationality was the friendship between Plymouth Church’s Henry Ward Beecher and Rabbi Leopold Wintner of Temple Beth Elohim. By 1878, when Wintner arrived in Brooklyn to take the helm of this Reform congregation Beecher had already established himself as a friend of the Jews. A year earlier he delivered a sermon titled “Jew and Gentile” that responded to the denial of accommodations to Jewish banker Joseph Seligman by the Grand Union Hotel in Saratoga Springs. Seligman’s wealth and prominence turned the incident into one of the first major anti-Semitic scandals in American history. Beecher pounced eleven days later with a forcible embrace not only of Seligman, a personal friend, but of the Jewish people as “the unrecognized benefactors of the human race” through long-ingrained “attributes of truth, of justice, of humanity, of morality, of gentleness, and of humility.”⁴⁷

Beecher had spoken before, earnestly and glowingly, of the Jewish people and of Judaism as the indispensable source of Christianity. In a letter to President Grover Cleveland, Beecher argued that Brooklynite Oscar Straus should be appointed US minister to Turkey because he was Jewish. “Christianity itself suckled at the bosom of Judaism,” he explained. “We are Jews ourselves gone to blossom and fruit.”⁴⁸ Beecher went far beyond metaphors of this sort in his praise of the current generation of Jews, including those who migrated to America. That the Jews of Brooklyn revered Beecher as a friend and bulwark against local anti-Semitism is not surprising. Nor is it surprising, given Rabbi Wintner’s background and ideas, that the two should have developed a warm friendship. Both men were sons of clergy, and both saw themselves as modernizers of their faiths. Both had held pastorates in the American Midwest. Beecher no doubt admired Wintner’s extensive German education (he studied at several universities and received a PhD from Tübingen), while Wintner could not have failed to be impressed by Beecher’s cosmopolitanism and fame. That one was a Christian and the other a Jew might even have strengthened the bond between them. Beecher gave his first address to a synagogue at Temple Beth Elohim; when he died, Wintner spoke at Plymouth Church after having eulogized Beecher at Beth Elohim that morning.⁴⁹

One friendship, of course, does not prove a wider accommodation between Reform Jews and Protestants, nor did it mean that anti-Semitism in Brooklyn was confined to harassment of Orthodox Jews on the streets of Williamsburg or East New York. The Eagle no doubt failed to capture many discriminatory incidents in the relations between Jews and Gentiles, but journals such as the American Hebrew and Jewish Messenger deepen the historical record with reports intended to sharpen the vigilance of local Jews. An example was its description of attacks by Shelter Island residents on a fruit store opened by a Jew. The attackers broke windows, smashed in doors, and “intimated that another raid will follow if the Jew does not pack up and leave town.” Sitting between the North and South Forks of the eastern end of Long Island, Shelter Island is far from New York and Brooklyn, but the American Hebrew did not miss the opportunity to lampoon rubes who could not grasp the advantages a Jewish storekeeper could bring to a place “said to be good only for hoeing potatoes and burying the dead.” “This is a country,” it explained, “where, when a train is stalled in a snowdrift, it is allowed to stick there till the heat of the Fourth of July thaws it out.” These jokes might have made the Shelter Island incident seem remote to city people, but the journal did not allow its readers to dismiss the danger on that account: “This is not a cablegram from Russia or Germany, or France or Algiers; nor yet is it a telegram from the wilds of Louisiana, where such things have been done before, nor from the southern states, where the lynch law prevails.”⁵⁰

And the American Hebrew provided examples much closer to home. In 1896 it reported some surprisingly inflammatory language from the “acknowledged liberal and fair-minded spiritual leader,” Rev. Lyman Abbott, Beecher’s successor at Plymouth Church. Abbott told his congregation that the Jews of Jesus’ time “rose in wrath and would have mobbed him” because “in that age Jews hated Christians a little more than Christians hate the Jews today. And that is saying a great deal.”⁵¹ Abbott surely intended no harm, but the Jewish people of his city were now warned that dangerous language could come from a friend almost as easily as from an enemy.

Nearly ten years earlier, Jews in New York and Brooklyn had seen for themselves the effects of a decision by Austin Corbin, the president of Coney Island’s Manhattan Beach Hotel, to exclude them from the hotel and its adjoining beach. In an interview with a reporter from the New York Herald in 1879 about this replay of the Seligman affair Corbin explained that since respectable Christians were being driven away by the presence of Jews, the exclusion was no more than a practical business decision. He then undermined this rationale by expressing his own anti-Semitic feelings: “Personally, I am opposed to Jews…. They are contemptible as a class, and I never knew but one ‘white’ Jew in my life.”⁵² Corbin’s views were amplified by his standing as a Wall Street banker as well as the president of the hotel and its feeder railroad. The policy of the Manhattan Beach and the reasons for it, though, are not clear. Another of the hotel’s proprietors spoke of excluding only ill-behaved lower-class Jews from Manhattan’s East Side and claimed wealthy Jews continued to be welcome and even approved of the policy.

Perhaps the best thing that can be said about the incident at the Manhattan Beach Hotel is that it was controversial enough to require Corbin to explain at length why Jews, and no other group, were being singled out for exclusion. To be sure, many Christians appeared to accept as reasonable his description of Jews as “contemptible.” One who did not was James H. Breslin, Corbin’s competitor at the Brighton Beach Hotel. After calling Corbin “a devilish good fellow,” he stood up for his own Jewish guests as “just as well behaved and respectable and as prompt to pay their bills as anybody else. There are several staying here now and we are glad to have them.” Breslin seemed pleased with his contribution to the debate over the qualities of Jewish people. He asked the reporter: “Is that all you want of me? Well, let’s go and have a drink on it.”⁵³

In the mid-1870s another group arrived in Brooklyn that was more alien to the City of Churches than Jews. “MONGOLS” was the Eagle front-page headline on September 1, 1876. Beneath it was “Brooklyn Invaded by the Celestials.” The occasion for this dire warning was the opening of a laundry on Court Street by three Chinese men. These were not the first Chinese to move to Brooklyn; the 1870 US census recorded seven Chinese residents.⁵⁴ If it seems ludicrous to consider these newcomers invaders, racial mockery was the Eagle’s intent. The article on the Chinese laundry included reporting, real or imaginary, of a fearful reaction by the white and Black washerwomen of South Brooklyn, who created “a vigilance committee of indignant Amazons … who should in the dead of night seize the Chinamen by their pig tails,” march them to the ferry landing, and warn them “never again to disfigure the streets of the City of Churches with their ungainly shadows.” When this banishment did not happen, the paper concluded that wiser heads had decided that “the almond-eyed gentlemen” would never find favor among the people of Brooklyn, so no action would be necessary. The laundry succeeded, however, even though the “pagans” were not happy about the crowds of small boys and indignant washerwomen who “continually crowd the doorway and drive the poor fellows nigh crazy with their yells, imprecations, and maledictions.”⁵⁵

This tiny Chinese presence in Brooklyn increased gradually over the ensuing decades, reaching 1,206 “Celestial” souls by the end of the century (along with 94 people from Japan). The Chinese-born were distributed evenly through the city, a clear indication that their economic role in Brooklyn continued to be in laundering and perhaps other neighborhood services.⁵⁶ Even in the early stages of this population increase some native Christians in Brooklyn saw the Chinese as a civic and missionary opportunity, and opened Sunday schools to instruct them in English, “the duties of citizenship,” and “the truths of the Bible.” The first school for the Chinese was hosted by the YMCA in 1879. Within a year or two half a dozen more appeared in Baptist, Congregational, and Reformed churches, some of which also conducted overseas missions to China.⁵⁷ In 1882 the students at the First Baptist Church arranged a Chinese New Year public reception, which might well have been the first (but not the last) occasion at which non-Asian Brooklynites tasted Chinese food.⁵⁸ These efforts were underscored by Beecher, who, on a trip to California, objected to the treatment of the Chinese on the West Coast as “shameful and ridiculous” and announced his opposition to the recently enacted Chinese Exclusion Act.⁵⁹ The Chinese in Brooklyn, Beecher implied, were treated more tolerantly than those on the West Coast.

That relative tolerance continued through the latter decades of the century, but so did objections to the Chinese, on the grounds of race as well as unfair competition with Irish and African American washerwomen. Sunday school instruction in English, American public institutions, and Christian doctrine were intended to benefit the Chinese, but at the core was the motive of missionaries to convert them to Christianity.⁶⁰ And complaints on behalf of the washerwomen easily slid into racial epithets. “But it is not with the commercial aspect of John Chinaman’s immigration that we have to deal,” wrote the Eagle in 1886. “It is with his habits, his vices, his foibles. Wherever the moon eyed stranger goes, there go his vices,” including opium smoking, illegal gambling, and “bestial habits.” Like other articles on the Chinese, this one included an alleged interview with a laundryman, which allowed the reporter to ridicule the latter’s English and caricature his values and behavior.⁶¹ The Eagle and several of Brooklyn’s Protestant notables rose in defense of the Chinese when a new national law extended the 1882 Exclusion Act and required the Chinese who were already in America to register and carry a resident permit.⁶² But these high-profile protests against violations of minority rights did not erase the belief, no doubt more widely held, that the Chinese were an alien, inferior race.

Part of the problem in accepting the Chinese was their newness to and scarcity in the city. These challenges did not exist with respect to another minority, African Americans, some of whom could boast of Brooklyn roots as deep as those of the Dutch and sniff at Yankees as Johnnies-come-lately. But precedence made little difference in matters of race. The Brooklyn press headed stories with “Our Colored ‘Bredren’ ” or “Rejoice ye Darkies All” as easily as “Brooklyn Invaded by the Celestials,” and the stories themselves revealed a society deeply divided by race. The white and Black populations of Brooklyn were not entirely segregated, but they were largely so, and encounters in public spaces and on public facilities such as ferries and streetcars often led to conflict and questions about what rights Black people could assert within a largely unsympathetic white society.⁶³

This question arose in explicit fashion when well-known African American leaders came to Brooklyn to address racially integrated audiences. The results of these public meetings were mixed. Harriet Tubman spoke to a large audience at the Bridge Street AME Church in October 1865, recounting her extraordinary experiences as an escaped slave, a Union spy, and a guide to freedom on the Underground Railroad (for which the Bridge Street Church was a stop). According to an Eagle reporter, who had little to say about the substance of the speech, the decrepit gallery of the church was on the verge of collapse, and Tubman’s “negro phrases” provoked “shouts of laughter from the congregation,” with whites, who apparently came to be entertained rather than enlightened, “entering most heartily into it.”⁶⁴

Less than a month later, when two members of the YMCA asked to use the Brooklyn Academy of Music for a speech by Frederick A. Douglass, several members of the academy’s board of directors expressed the fear that an address by Douglass would set a precedent for other appearances by African Americans, “negroes would begin to crowd the audiences at the Academy,” and white people would no longer be willing to attend productions there. A truer motive for this dissent may have been concern that this powerful orator would use the occasion to repeat his harsh critique of President Andrew Johnson’s efforts to undo the gains in Black civil rights set in motion by President Lincoln and Congressional Republicans. How else to understand the claim that approval of the speech would set a dangerous precedent when Douglass had already spoken to a racially integrated academy audience of three thousand people, in May 1863, on the subject “What Shall be Done with the Negro,” and was “received with loud applause”? In any case, persuaded in part by Theodore Tilton, then a close associate of Beecher, the board voted 11 to 6 to authorize the event. One dissenting member resigned in protest.⁶⁵

Douglass appeared at a packed Academy of Music on January 29, 1866, eliciting “volley after volley of applause” from a mostly white audience as he excoriated Johnson and rebuked those who had opposed his visit: “The day is coming when Brooklyn will be quite ashamed that any subjection could have been made to a man appearing before it for the purpose of vindicating the cause of justice, of humanity, and of liberty.” The Eagle, which had so recently mocked Tubman, printed a transcript of Douglass’ two-hour speech in three prominently placed columns.⁶⁶

The enthusiastic reception of Douglass at the Academy of Music did not translate into support by a majority of Brooklynites for equal rights for African Americans. In 1869, a referendum to retain New York State’s property qualifications for Black suffrage passed by a relatively narrow margin. Offsetting upstate Republicans’ support for repeal, substantial majorities in New York City and Brooklyn voted to retain the property qualifications (58.2 percent in Kings County, with Irish Catholics mostly likely to support retention, and Yankee Protestants most likely to support repeal). Shortly before the vote, the Eagle asked its readers: “Are you willing to declare by your vote that you are exactly and precisely the equivalent of a negro, neither more nor less?” Brooklyn answered this question with clarity.⁶⁷ African Americans did not achieve universal manhood suffrage in New York State until the ratification of the 15th Amendment to the US Constitution in 1870.

Support for Reconstruction, and for Black rights generally, soon waned in the North, and though Black activists continued to oppose discrimination in employment and public accommodation, white Brooklynites evinced little interest in these issues. The only sustained discussion of race in Brooklyn during these years concerned the public school system. State law did not mandate racial integration or segregation of the schools; it gave considerable latitude to local school boards, and in Brooklyn the board of education created and maintained an almost entirely segregated system. But local decisions led to local disputes. On at least two occasions, an African American father demanded that the board enroll his child in a white school closer to their home than that district’s school for Black children. In both instances the demand was fueled not merely by questions of convenience but also by new Constitutional amendments and civil rights laws that seemed to guarantee the rights of African Americans to equal treatment under the law.⁶⁸

This mixture of motives appeared in other disputes. In 1869, while deciding whether a white teacher should be continued at Colored School No. 2 in Weeksville, a special committee of the Brooklyn Board of Education (chaired by Thomas Kinsella) reinforced the principle and practical necessity of school segregation: “The healthy public sentiment which aids in preventing a more intimate relationship between blacks and whites, your Committee believe ought not be impaired…. The welfare and perpetuity of our Public school system demand separate schools for the two races.” After discovering that forty white children were enrolled in this school intended for African Americans, the committee recommended that both the teacher and these children be relocated to white schools.⁶⁹

The “healthy public sentiment” in favor of racial segregation was repeated often in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle. But the assumption that the separation of the races was the natural order of things occasionally coincided with advocacy for improved conditions for Brooklyn’s African Americans. “The Brooklyn Board of Education maintains separate schools for the accommodation of the children of the colored people of Brooklyn,” it wrote in June of 1880, and “this arrangement is desirable and satisfactory.” But the Eagle also argued for better schools for Black children and for adding an African American to the board of education.⁷⁰ This last reform was achieved in 1882 with the appointment of Philip A. White, a Brooklyn-dwelling New York City druggist. White’s appointment was appropriate, the Eagle opined, because he provided leadership and oversight for the city’s colored schools, not because he was an advocate for integration. “The reasons for maintaining separated colored schools are obvious enough, but they can only be deemed valid if it also appears that they work no disadvantage to the colored child.”⁷¹ The Eagle got more than it bargained for. The year after he joined the board, White offered a motion to permit Black children to enroll in any school in the city. It was adopted, and though a second motion (not offered by White) to abolish the Black schools altogether was postponed, Brooklyn was on its way to a single and racially integrated school system.⁷²

Although White’s initiative ultimately produced de facto integration of Brooklyn’s schools, the distinction between colored and white schools was not removed for another decade. White died in 1891 and was replaced on the board by another influential African American, the lawyer and sometime Methodist Episcopal minister, T. McCants Stewart. Responding to the plan for a new school in Weeksville, Stewart insisted on the elimination of the designation “colored” from the existing school before moving on to proposals for the racial integration of both. The battle was long and complicated, resulting for a time in an African American school on the first floor and a school for white students on the second floor of the same building. Stewart and his allies on the board of education ultimately achieved the full integration of the student body and the faculty in P.S. 83. Brooklyn had been slow among northern cities in integrating its schools, but this school may have been the first to have African Americans teaching white children on a regular basis. Within a short time, all formal racial distinctions were removed from the Brooklyn school system, even as racism remained a fact of life in the County of Kings.⁷³

An important context for this history of race in the Brooklyn school system, and in particular the resistance of white leaders to integration, was the small size of the city’s African American population. In 1870 fewer than five thousand Black people resided in Brooklyn, a little more than 1 percent of the total population and an increase of only six hundred or so from the year before the Civil War. Only five hundred African American children attended Brooklyn schools in 1870, compared to more than sixty-five thousand whites. Since well over half of the Black population was concentrated in only four wards (about 20 percent in the 9th ward, where Weeksville and Carrsville were located), most areas of the city would have seen no more than a handful of Black students in their neighborhood schools, and some none at all, if the system had been racially integrated.⁷⁴ African American school enrollments doubled during the next decade while the overall African American population increased by about two-thirds, but there were still very few Black school children in Brooklyn when the issue of integration was resolved.⁷⁵ Had they had a mind to, the Eagle editors could have likened the resistance to school integration to “employing dynamite to kill flies or a sledge hammer to repair a watch.”

The small size of the Black population (still less than 2 percent of Brooklyn’s overall population at the end of the century) was relevant as well to organized community life among adult African Americans, as were the limited means available to people still largely confined to the lower rungs of the economic ladder.⁷⁶ In addition to several wealthy Black Brooklynites (led by Elizabeth Gloucester, who ran an elegant Brooklyn Heights boarding house and owned several rental properties) there was a small class of well-off professionals and businessmen.⁷⁷ But about two-thirds of Brooklyn’s African American workers were concentrated in a small number of low-paying jobs—laborers, laundresses, seamen, porters, and whitewashers; many of the rest were gardeners, carmen, drivers, hairdressers, cooks, waiters, coachmen, and stewards. African American men were underrepresented in the skilled trades and small proprietorships. They were greatly disadvantaged in municipal employment, a significant channel of upward mobility that belonged largely to the Irish, through the patronage belonging to the Democratic Party.⁷⁸

The controller of that channel was Brooklyn’s political boss, Hugh McLaughlin, who was born and raised near the docks of South Brooklyn and rose through the party, based on fast fists and firm leadership, to exercise complete authority for decades over municipal employment. Whether McLaughlin was interested in Ireland’s struggles is unknown, but many Irish immigrants and second-generation Irish-Americans wound up in City Hall offices, on the streets as policemen, and in other public positions. What the Irish got African Americans did not.⁷⁹ Only two Black men served on the Brooklyn police department during these decades. Their appointments were newsworthy enough to earn long biographical articles in the Eagle.⁸⁰ A few patronage positions did go to Brooklyn’s African Americans, but they were with the federal Custom House in New York, which was usually under the control of the Republican Party. Nearly all of these appointees were porters and messengers.⁸¹

Black Brooklynites, then, had neither the numbers nor the resources to bring to life the hundreds of organizations created by white native Protestants and Irish and German immigrants. Nonetheless, they developed an organized communal life. Brooklyn’s fourteen Black churches were powerful neighborhood centers, some of which formed literary societies and lyceums. In 1892 the Eagle profiled several of them, commenting that “there is no class of Brooklyn’s citizens that is fonder of literary pursuits than the Afro American,” and “there is no other city in the Union that possesses as intelligent a community of young people as the City of Churches.” Bringing African American organizations under Brooklyn’s City of Churches umbrella was notable for the Eagle, and the profiles that followed were devoid of racist satire.⁸² African American men also formed fraternal lodges that functioned not only for fellowship but as much needed mutual benefit societies. There were Masons, Good Samaritans, Knights of Pythias, Knights Templar, a United Order of St. Luke, an Order of Love and Charity, and no doubt others.⁸³ A Williamsburgh Colored Coachmen’s Club and a Saloonsmen’s Protective Union were closer in form and purpose to these mutual benefit lodges than they were to labor unions.⁸⁴ There were at least two women’s benevolent societies, the Abyssinian Benevolent Daughters of Esther Association and a local branch of the New York-based interracial society, King’s Daughters. Organizations beyond this axis of mutual benevolence included a militia unit named the Weeksville Guard and a baseball club, the Weeksville Unknowns.⁸⁵

For several years near to and after the end of the Civil War the most powerful secular organization in Brooklyn’s African American community was the African Civilization Society. Founded in New York in 1858 to promote emigration to Africa, the society relocated to Weeksville in 1864 after redefining its goal to address the interests, and in particular the education, of freed people in the American South. By 1868 it operated multiple schools in nine southern states and published a newspaper, the Freedman’s Torchlight.⁸⁶ Similarly, a Kings County Colored Men’s Association, which may have been a 9th ward appendage of the Republican Party, met in 1866 to petition Congress “to restore the freedmen to their homes and give them all necessary protection.”⁸⁷

For the small number of Blacks who had migrated to Brooklyn from the South, efforts for the relief of racial brethren “back home” were something like the Land League and Home Rule contributions of Irish immigrants; for home-grown Black Brooklynites they more closely resembled the stateless, ethnic-based responsibilities of Jews. Philanthropic and political efforts ranging beyond the local community, in any case, reflected the political moment of emancipation and the reintegration of the Union.

That moment did not last. The African Civilization Society did not survive into the next decade, in large part because of controversies over its management of the Black orphan asylum in Weeksville.⁸⁸ The Kings County Colored Men’s Association seems to have folded as well, although a Kings County Colored Club and a Kings County Colored Citizens Republican League were actively promoting local African American interests within the Republican Party in the 1880s.⁸⁹ The fraternal and benevolent societies that had emerged by that time focused mainly on their own members and on the well-being of Brooklyn’s Black community. In 1891 a new Afro American League preserved something of the wider vision of the early post–Civil War organizations, while attending as well to local affairs. Its constitution referred to school funding and (mostly local) taxation, but also to lynching, racial discrimination on railroads and steamboats, penal reform, and assistance to “healthy immigration from terror ridden sections to other and more law abiding sections.”⁹⁰

Brooklyn’s African Americans held an annual celebration, but unlike the Irish on St. Patrick’s Day, or the Germans on Pfingstmontag, they did not do so by commandeering public space. Instead of parading in public streets or meeting in a public park, celebrants gathered in one or two private pleasure grounds. No community organization or committee seems to have been involved; the celebration appears to have been organized as a commercial event. Attendees enjoyed music, dancing, games, food, drink (not including “spirituous liquors”), and other attractions. Many of those who paid the price of admission may have looked forward to no more than a rollicking good time. But there was also content of considerable meaning to the African American community. The celebration was held each August 1st, beginning apparently during the 1850s, to commemorate at first the freeing of slaves in the British West Indies and then, after the Civil War, both the British and American emancipations. Along with dancing and games were speeches by local and national African American leaders (Frederick Douglass addressed at least one of these events), readings of both proclamations of emancipation, and cheers for Douglass, Lincoln, and other heroes of American emancipation. The celebration was staged each year through 1877 and during at least some of the years that followed. The Eagle took note of an 1884 celebration as “never more enthusiastically observed in twenty-eight years.”⁹¹ Some of those who listened to the speeches and readings—and some who just danced and had a good time—came to the pleasure ground to celebrate their own emancipation from slavery. Others expressed their identification with the liberation and continuing struggles of a people.

If the African Americans of Brooklyn were unwilling or unable as a group to utilize public space to protest continuing struggles, others did, and not always peacefully. The first stages of American industrialization were also the first stages of the American labor movement. In the take-off years preceding the Civil War critical changes in key industries often violated traditional understandings between the workers and employers of a preindustrial craft economy. As industrial development accelerated in the post–Civil War period, producing more and more factories and mills the size of Rhenish castles, these divergences between what was now called capital and labor deepened. Worrisome enough during the relatively prosperous years following the war, they became calamitous during and after the depression of the mid-1870s, setting off a period of the deepest conflicts between capital and labor in American history. The City of Churches and Homes, and also of factories, docks, tenements, and a mostly immigrant working class, Brooklyn had its share of this conflict and of workers’ institution building that helped carry it into the streets of the city.

The formation of unions and other workers’ associations during this period was a significant phenomenon. A good sampling of an admittedly incomplete record is provided by the local press, which often reported on meetings of labor unions and generally identified the organization behind a strike or strike threat. At the beginning of the depression in 1873, for example, a Brooklyn carpenters’ union threatened a strike for a raise and an eight-hour day. The following year a meeting of the Plumbers’ and Fitters’ Protective and Benevolent Society, once a traditional trade association open to masters and journeymen, revealed that it had evolved into a workers’ union from which “bosses” were excluded. A strike by brewery workers against three large New York companies in 1881 resulted in a workers’ boycott of their beer that extended to Brooklyn. Unions representing, among others, piano makers, cigar makers, wood carvers, clothing cutters, silk weavers, and bakers organized the boycott.⁹² Stories touching upon specific episodes of unionization or union activity in Brooklyn multiplied over the years. They reached another level in 1891 when the Eagle reported on the seven-year expansion of Brooklyn’s Central Labor Union, founded in 1884 and now representative of more than 125 local workingmen’s organizations.⁹³

As they read about unionization in the newspapers, Brooklyn’s white-collar suburbanites also saw union men take to the streets. Brooklyn witnessed numerous strikes, many of them small and often quickly broken by the hiring of replacement workers, or scabs, who were easy to recruit among recent immigrants eager to work and not yet integrated into Brooklyn’s working-class organizations. Often, as in a coopers’ strike in 1882 involving eighty men, much of the strikers’ energy was directed toward the scabs, beginning on occasion with friendly pleas to stay home but often escalating into violence.⁹⁴ These strikes were usually futile. Laws did not yet compel employers to negotiate with duly constituted unions. Business owners could usually count on more than a little help from their friends in the courts, City Hall, and the state Capitol. And they invariably had the resources to outlast the workers in lengthy work stoppages.

Although smaller strikes were hardly noticed outside their immediate neighborhood, the walkout of some 2,500 sugar refinery workers in the spring of 1886 was too big to ignore. The grievances that led to the strike were low wages, long hours, and Sunday work, but other forms of exploitation lay in the background of the dispute, such as the installation in each refinery of a beer saloon open to the workers after their long hours of work in stifling heat. The workers could drink as much as they liked, and the tab would be deducted from their monthly pay. Many workers went home to their families on payday with less than half of what they had earned. The refinery workers were mostly German and Polish immigrants, many of them non-English speaking, and their Sugar House Workingmen’s Union was less than a month old. Although the Central Labor Union helped and the refinery’s drivers and longshoremen vowed to stay out for the duration, the asymmetry of resources between the sugar companies and the strikers was as great as it usually was in smaller strikes. The Eagle called it “the most extensive and probably the most desperate labor strike that Brooklyn has ever known,” and covered it daily until the strikers, running out of money, applied to return to work at the old rates of pay.⁹⁵

The sugar strike of 1886 was not especially violent, largely because the refineries shut most of their operations instead of hiring replacement workers. A more violent strike that affected Brooklynites living far from the waterfront sugar refineries occurred nine years later. A massive turnout of transit workers had a devastating impact on late-nineteenth-century Brooklyn, with its many miles of lines connecting commuter suburbs to downtown Brooklyn and New York City. It began on January 14, 1895, with some five thousand motormen and conductors on all but two of Brooklyn’s trolley lines refusing to work until they received a twenty-five-cent raise. The strike started out peacefully, with the Eagle observing that “of all the strikes which have ever taken place in this city this is by far the quietist.” The next day’s headline was VIOLENCE, although very little violence was reported. A fully justified headline, BAYONETED, appeared after several days of escalating attacks on cars operated by replacement motormen resulted in intervention by the state militia. In response to the taunts of a large crowd that had gathered near the East New York trolley barn, militiamen charged with bayonets fixed and wounded one man. The crowd responded with more than taunts. Before the day was done several more militia charges resulted in fifteen ambulance calls to cart away wounded civilians. Later in the evening club-wielding mounted police joined the militia. The crowd was finally dispersed by one o’clock in the morning. The violence waxed and waned over the next three weeks as trolley service was restored, and the battle moved into the courts and the chambers of the Common Council. Defeated on all fronts, the strikers offered a peace proposal. The strike had lasted a month and gained the strikers almost nothing.⁹⁶

Brooklyn’s workingmen had found a happier way of taking to the streets in 1887 when the state legislature, acting on a proposal from New York’s Central Labor Union, established Labor Day as a legal holiday. On September 5 of that year the first Labor Day parade assembled in Williamsburg for a long march to Ridgewood Park to meet “sweethearts and wives and dance and eat and drink and be merry from 2 o’clock in the afternoon till slumbrous midnight.” Alongside fifty bands an estimated twelve thousand workers representing fifty of Brooklyn’s two hundred labor unions, plus assorted socialists, anarchists, prohibitionists, Republicans, and Democrats, participated in an event intended to be entirely free of politics. The police were not mobilized, and the Eagle wondered whether Ridgewood Park would be “rent asunder” when the union men of Vinegar Hill and South Brooklyn came in contact with the socialists of the 16th and 18th wards (i.e., radical Germans), “to say nothing of the old standing prejudices of Hibernians and Teutons.” It was not and the day was considered a big success, except perhaps by the socialists, who were prevented from adding red flags to the procession or radical speeches to the festivities in the park.

In this and following years the Labor Day parade showcased Brooklyn’s unions, including those of nonindustrial trades and occupational groups, such as transit workers, longshoremen, laborers, and, in their considerable variety, the construction trades. (Among the latter were two unions that spoke to Brooklyn’s suburban character: the Brown Stone Cutters Association and the Brown Stone Rubbers Association.) The parade also revealed divisions between socialists and practical unionists that was at the same time an ethnic division between Germans and nearly everyone else. Another division was even more significant: This was a specifically working-class event, organized by unions and lacking any representation by Brooklyn’s religious and political leadership. Clergymen did not offer opening prayers or benedictions; political leaders did not stand in review. Significantly, the parade moved eastward through the city’s Eastern District, and was reviewed at Williamsburg’s Labor Lyceum by the marshals and other officers of the Central Labor Union, and not by the mayor at City Hall.⁹⁷

The unions on display at the Labor Day parade were formed by workingmen interested primarily in higher wages, shorter hours, and better working conditions. Some of Brooklyn’s working women were organized too, but into clubs rather than unions, and for far different purposes. The clubs offered sociability among “working girls,” classes in cooking, sewing, hygiene, English, and other useful subjects, and amusements free from “all taint of frivolity and immorality.” They were formed by middle- and upper-class Protestant women who were not interested in challenging the very low wages paid to seamstresses, milliners, and female factory workers. As Mrs. Barnard, a founding matron of one of the Brooklyn clubs explained, “we do not seek to inspire them with ideas above their position in life. We simply wish to develop their intellects; to help them in the performance of their duties.” So explicit a rejection of labor militancy and so clear a dedication to moral amusement and sociability accords well with the tradition of religion-based intervention in working-class affairs. The philanthropists, it is worth noting, kept explicit religious exercises and instruction at arm’s length from these working girls’ clubs. In part a strategy to bridge religious differences among the members, their approach also reflected impatience with the results of overtly religious intervention in the clubs’ affairs. When Mrs. Barnard told her minister, “Keep away from us,” she added, “we shall do better if left to our own devices.”⁹⁸ Those devices were moral influences steeped in Protestantism. Still, the working girls’ clubs established an explicitly religion-free zone for their activities, and this made them similar, outwardly at least, to the much larger number of men’s labor unions, which were entirely secular in their purpose and organization.

The changes we have identified in the last two chapters require an assessment of Brooklyn’s long-established Protestant hegemony. What was the power and reach of Yankee Protestantism at the end of the nineteenth century, when so many Brooklynites were neither Yankee nor Protestant? Clearly, the reach of the old order across the newly settled eighty-one square miles was more limited than it had been when Brooklyn was a much smaller city. It did not extend easily to the immigrant-dominated neighborhoods of the waterfront and an expanding industrial zone. Samuel Lane Loomis, minister of Brooklyn’s Tompkins Avenue Congregational Church, no doubt spoke for many members of the Protestant establishment when he sounded the alarm about the threat urban laborers posed to traditional religious practices and values. At a time of social and political upheaval, Loomis wrote in 1887, when civilization “depends upon the purity of its faith,” Protestant churches in the nation’s cities, “as a rule, have no following among working men.”⁹⁹

Nor did the old order fully control the gaiety of Coney Island, or the city’s half-dozen theaters, or episodic outbreaks of Sunday baseball in places like Red Hook. The mayors of Brooklyn during this period were likely to be immigrants who did not enforce Yankee-driven blue laws with the rigor of a George Hall or an Edward A. Lambert. Seth Low was there to hold the fort for several years as mayor during the 1880s, but he was more intent on promoting secular progressivism than preserving Yankee Protestant culture. Beecher and Talmage, the great Protestant magnets (and magnates), were gone, and Richard Salter Storrs would die in 1900. Even some of Brooklyn’s famed suburbs were now ethnically diverse, places where the neighborhood church was as likely to be Roman Catholic as Protestant.

Looking back on these years in 1915, Brooklyn Life wrote of the diminishing power of the “New England element.” Gertrude Lefferts Vanderbilt had written in a similar vein in 1881 of the passing of the era of Dutch dominance in Flatbush. Noting that the “first ripple of the rising tide has touched our borders,” Mrs. Vanderbilt predicted that “before long the sudden rush of some great wave will sweep away every trace of village life,” leaving in its wake only “reminiscences and traditions, while the old family names mark the localities still, as the projecting peaks mark the submerged rock. All that relates to home and kindred has its interest, especially when we know that the home is soon to be broken up and the ties of kindred sundered.” Echoing Vanderbilt, another old-timer wrote with resignation from the heart of Yankee Brooklyn that “strangers from apartment houses sit in the ancient family pews of Samuel Harrison Cox’s First Presbyterian Church and Henry Ward Beecher’s Plymouth Church. The old home of the Church of the Pilgrims, where Richard Salter Storrs once held forth, is now the Maronite rite Catholic Church of Our Lady of Lebanon.”¹⁰⁰

But if Yankee (and in Flatbush, Dutch) Protestantism was no longer hegemonic, it was by no means dissolved and without force. Large numbers of Brooklynites and large areas of this “moral suburb” were still attentive to its strictures and responsive to its values. Outnumbered, and even surrounded, Protestant leaders of the old order were not outgunned. Native white Protestants continued to control Brooklyn’s (and in some cases New York City’s) largest manufacturing, mercantile, banking, transportation, and real estate industries. Massachusetts-born Horace B. Claflin, who owned one of the world’s largest dry goods establishments, cofounded the Continental Bank of New York, lived on Pierrepont Street in Brooklyn Heights, and was a founding trustee of Beecher’s Plymouth Church, was an exemplar (if a particularly wealthy one) of the continuing status and power of those who constituted the old order.¹⁰¹ At the same time, the Irish, Christian and Jewish Germans, and African Americans were establishing their own social, cultural, and religious institutions, and within their own communities were less subject to the direction and dictation of wealthy, white, native-born Protestants. Some had acquired the wealth that led to power. In the waning decades of the nineteenth-century, then, the New England element and its allies ruled but did not reign. And in the new century they would retreat further before a much larger army of Others who would create in Brooklyn a place like no other, not even its former self.