Chapter 6

Transformation

Combining New York and Brooklyn into a single city was an old idea. Sometimes, as with Alden Spooner’s disgusted reaction in 1833 to a Brooklyn city charter that did not address the issue of ferry and riverfront rights, it took the form of incorporating Brooklyn into New York as just another couple of wards of the larger city. Sometimes it went the other way, as with the Brooklyn Eagle’s proposal—tongue firmly planted in cheek—to annex New York to Brooklyn. However it was expressed, the notion of combining the two cities recurred often enough to give it the aura of inevitability to many who lived on both sides of the East River. Yet to turn this seemingly simple idea into a real project needed more than the passage of time; it needed the efforts of a powerful, clearheaded, and determined proponent to start the process and a set of equally powerful proponents to see it through.

The proponent who finally mattered was Andrew Haswell Green, the tight-fisted but visionary comptroller of both the Central Park Commission and the City of New York, who was active in many projects for the betterment of the city, from the New York Public Library to the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the American Museum of Natural History, the street plan and parks of the northern end of Manhattan, the bridging of the Harlem River, and the Bronx Zoo. Green broached the subject of the consolidation of Manhattan and its surrounding New York counties into a vast and politically integrated metropolis as early as 1868. He does not appear to have been involved when serious discussions arose in 1873, nor was he the force behind a consolidation proposal by the New York State Chamber of Commerce in 1887. But he became the principal advocate of this proposal, and in 1890 convinced the state legislature to create a Greater New York Commission. The commission elected Green as its president and for vice president turned to James S. T. Stranahan, Brooklyn’s most powerful consolidation supporter.

Green’s commission did not agree on a specific plan for consolidation but kept the promised benefits before the public eye. Consolidation assured that Chicago, which was steadily absorbing the smaller towns around it, would not grow larger than New York and usurp its role as the national center of finance and trade. It promised greater coordination and economies in the expansion of municipal services, which in turn would spur more rapid development in the less-settled parts of northern Manhattan and the annexed counties. To Brooklyn it promised a lower rate of taxation to homeowners (Brooklyn’s rate was twice as high as Manhattan’s because it had fewer large commercial buildings to absorb the costs of municipal government); escape from a rapidly approaching, state-mandated limit to the city’s borrowing capacity; and perhaps above all, water. Brooklyn’s water system was approaching capacity as the city continued to grow, and the expansion of its Long Island supply was opposed by the growing towns of Suffolk County. New York City’s Croton system could provide all the water Brooklyn would require for years to come. These were compelling reasons, but Green knew there was opposition in Brooklyn, and he searched for additional allies. In 1892 some of the wealthiest business leaders formed the Brooklyn Consolidation League. This group had yet another motive for approving consolidation. Most were “Swallowtail” Democrats opposed to Hugh McLaughlin’s control of Brooklyn’s Democratic Party. Consolidation would at a stroke remove the foundation of McLaughlin’s power.

Armed with support in Brooklyn and Manhattan, Green’s commission approached the legislature for a bill authorizing a referendum on consolidation to be held in all the affected counties. The referendum was held in 1894, and the result was a large majority in favor—everywhere except Brooklyn, where consolidation was approved by 277 votes out of the 129,211 cast. Not easily interpreted, this slim margin may well have reflected concerns that the devil would reside in details concocted only after the voters had spoken, for this vote was on the idea of consolidation rather than a fully articulated plan. A recent report on police corruption in New York City no doubt increased the wariness of many Brooklyn voters. The opposition, in any case, did not rest. Within a week a League of Loyal Citizens was formed to argue for a new referendum.

This new league did not get its referendum, but it thrived on the uncertainties that lay ahead. At the moment of triumph for Andrew Green’s commission, the political landscape changed with a statewide electoral victory by the Republican Party. When Green, a Swallowtail Democrat, arrived in Albany early in 1895 to seek authorization to draft a consolidation charter, he was rebuffed in favor of a proposal for a new commission by the new Republican governor, Levi P. Morton. Thomas C. Platt, the real power in New York’s Republican Party, guided a new bill through the legislature in 1896 and engineered approval of the new commission’s proposed city charter the following year. Green was a member of that commission, but illness prevented him from having much impact on its deliberations. He was happy to acknowledge Platt as “the Father of Greater New York.” Platt, in return, named Green its “Grandfather.”¹ The date set for consolidation was January 1, 1898.

Celebrations were held in Manhattan and Brooklyn on a rainy and cold New Year’s Eve to greet the midnight advent of the new metropolis. The City of Brooklyn passed into history at that moment, but Brooklyn did not, for as a concession to Brooklyn’s deep sense of identity, the commission created a form of government in which each of the consolidating cities and counties would be known as boroughs within the new City of New York. Each borough would have a president, a borough hall, a degree of local autonomy, and a name. On that New Year’s Eve Brooklyn’s political leaders gathered in the Common Council chamber of what was about to become Brooklyn Borough Hall. Among the speakers was Eagle editor St. Clair McKelway, who concluded: “And, therefore, not farewell to Brooklyn, for borough it may be, Brooklyn it is, Brooklyn it remains, and Brooklynites we are.”²

McKelway had opposed consolidation. His refusal to eulogize Brooklyn— his creation, rather, of an apt motto for many generations of Brooklynites—calls attention to an opposition focused primarily on Brooklyn’s long-cherished identity as the City of Churches, whose most outspoken leaders included Protestant clergy and laymen who maintained a strong Yankee identity: Richard Salter Storrs of the Church of the Pilgrims, Lyman Abbott of Plymouth Church, Theodore L. Cuyler of the Lafayette Avenue Presbyterian Church, Charles H. Hall of Holy Trinity Church, Bishop Abram N. Littlejohn of the Episcopal Diocese of Long Island, and Robert D. Benedict of the New England Society of Brooklyn. A. A. Low and Henry E. Pierrepont represented two of Brooklyn’s oldest and wealthiest Yankee families. “What distinguished the Loyal Leaguers … was their vision of Brooklyn,” writes one historian of this era. “All of them were deeply devoted to Brooklyn’s Anglo-American Protestant institutions and to the way of life those institutions symbolized and encouraged.”³ Theirs was a world, writes another, of “New England virtues, seasoned, mildly, with a dash of Dutch character.”⁴

These men feared the changes consolidation would bring to that way of life and their authority over it. The simple fact of unification with sinful New York was troubling enough, but the transfer of most aspects of municipal authority to a mayor who might care little about Brooklyn’s laws and traditions, and to a city council on which Brooklyn’s representatives would always be outnumbered, raised more specific concerns. Would the new city government threaten the sanctity of Brooklyn’s Sabbath even more than Coney Island and the unlocked side doors of Red Hook saloons? How free with licensing would this government be and how tough on houses of ill repute? What influence could the old Yankee leaders exert over a City Hall on the wrong side of the river? Beyond these concerns were even deeper ones based on demographics. To New Yorkers consolidation promised a transportation system that could begin to relieve the overcrowding of Manhattan’s immigrant East Side, reputedly the most congested acreage on the planet. Brooklynites of the League of Loyal Citizens saw this as more threat than opportunity. When Richard Storrs looked across the river, he saw the tenements of the East Side “into which the political sewage of Europe is being dumped every week.”⁵ With consolidation, he feared, this “sewage” would seep into Brooklyn, altering the balance between suburban homes and tenements and between its comparatively homogeneous population and a most un-Yankee-like population of Jews and Catholics from Eastern and Southern Europe.

In 1896, as the consolidation bill worked its way through the state legislature, Brooklyn’s final mayor, the German-American Frederick W. Wurster, wrote with equanimity about the changes to come: “Brooklyn is largely a New England and American city. That element is large enough to assimilate any foreign element in or coming to Brooklyn.”⁶ But Storrs’s fears, expressed with an exaggerated notion of Brooklyn’s existing homogeneity, were well grounded. Storrs did not live to see it, but the twentieth-century Borough of Brooklyn would be transformed by the migration of Eastern and Southern Europeans from Manhattan’s East Side. Consolidation, through the promotion of inter-borough transportation, facilitated this mass movement of people.

During the first fifteen years of the twentieth century more than thirteen million immigrants arrived at American ports, a number far exceeding any comparable period in the nation’s history. Nearly six million, many of them Jewish, arrived from Russia, the Baltics, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and other areas of Eastern Europe. Three million came from Italy. British, Irish, German, and Scandinavian migrants arrived as well, but their numbers were dwarfed by the so-called New Immigrants from the east and south.⁷ The majority of these immigrants entered the country through New York, and some found their first American homes in the tenements of Manhattan’s East Side, which were already crowded with immigrant families. The two square miles of this district housed more than four hundred fifty thousand people at the turn of the century and added another one hundred thousand by 1910, even as some began the flow across the East River.⁸

As Storrs spoke of the dangers to Brooklyn’s character, plans were underway to improve the physical connections between the two great cities. The Brooklyn Bridge had become increasingly crowded over the years and it did not take long for proposals to emerge for a second bridge over the East River. Construction began in 1896 and was completed in half the time it took to build the Brooklyn Bridge, opening to traffic on December 19, 1903. Built almost entirely of steel, it eclipsed the Brooklyn Bridge as the world’s longest suspension bridge by four and a half feet. Most notable, though, was its route. Its Brooklyn terminus was Williamsburg, near Broadway, the long thoroughfare forming the boundary between Bushwick and Bedford and ending a stone’s throw from Brownsville and East New York. The bridge’s Manhattan terminus, as Storrs knew when he spoke of Europe’s sewage, was Delancey Street in the heart of the predominantly Jewish East Side. Almost immediately, the Williamsburg Bridge began carrying thousands of East Side tenement dwellers, many of them displaced by the bridge itself, to new homes in Williamsburg’s Dutchtown, in Bushwick and Bedford, and in Brownsville and East New York. The bridge quickly acquired two nicknames: the Jews’ Highway and the Passover Bridge.

Even before the Williamsburg Bridge was completed, construction began on a third bridge between Manhattan and Brooklyn. Built between 1901 and 1909, the Manhattan Bridge linked Canal Street in Manhattan to Brooklyn’s Flatbush Avenue. Because its location was so close to the Brooklyn Bridge, and particularly its downtown Brooklyn terminus, the Manhattan Bridge at first played a somewhat smaller role in transferring immigrant homes to Brooklyn. It became more important after 1915 when it began to carry a Brooklyn Rapid Transit (BRT) subway line across the river and down Brooklyn’s Fourth Avenue, rejuvenating suburban growth in the southwestern quadrant of the borough as far as Bay Ridge. New York’s new subway system, which fed more lines to Brooklyn through tunnels under the river, was an enormous stimulus to Brooklyn’s expansion. The first to link Manhattan to Brooklyn, an Interborough Rapid Transit (IRT) line, tunneled from Manhattan’s South Ferry under the East River and Brooklyn Heights (the Joralemon Street Tunnel) to Borough Hall and a terminus at Flatbush and Atlantic Avenues, where there was also a terminal of the Long Island Railroad. This subway allowed Brooklynites access to Manhattan from many neighborhoods, old and new. It opened in 1908, more than a year before the Manhattan Bridge, and seven years before the bridge began to carry the BRT’s Fourth Avenue subway. Three more subway tunnels linked the two boroughs by 1924, the last carrying a BRT line from 14th Street in Manhattan into Williamsburg and, within a few years, all the way to Canarsie in the southeast corner of Brooklyn.

Three bridges and four subway tunnels bound Brooklyn to Manhattan more closely than the ferries had ever done. They also put these old watercraft out of business. The Fulton Ferry, which operated from a slip only a few yards from the eastern tower of the Brooklyn Bridge, sent out its last boat in January of 1924, nearly three centuries after ferry service began on the East River, 110 years after Robert Fulton’s steam ferries began to ply the river, and forty years after the great bridge was supposed to make ferry service obsolete. Brooklyn’s South Ferry held on until 1933. Whatever mourning there may have been for the loss of these ancient services (and for the magic Walt Whitman described in the river crossing) was overshadowed, in the local press at least, by dozens of favorable descriptions of the various new transit facilities, and by predictions of booming real estate markets. The League of Loyal Citizens had predicted that these improvements would destroy Brooklyn’s unique character. But once the bridges and subways were built they were greeted, even by consolidation opponents such as St. Clair McKelway’s Brooklyn Daily Eagle, as routes to a brighter future.

The numbers confirmed both Yankee anxieties and promoters’ dreams. Between 1900 and 1910 Brooklyn added some six hundred thousand new residents; in the next decade it added four hundred thousand more. These new Brooklynites put the old “town across the river” on the cusp of passing Manhattan in size. During the 1920s it became New York’s most populous borough, its nearly 2.6 million inhabitants easily surpassing Manhattan’s 1.9 million. Manhattan lost nearly half a million people between 1910 and 1930 to Brooklyn, the other outer boroughs, and more distant suburbs. Much of that outward migration originated from the East Side, which accounted for more than half of Manhattan’s population loss.⁹ Brooklyn grew from other sources as well, but its population mix in 1930 reveals the importance of the borough as an area of second settlement for the New Immigrants. In that year immigrants and their children amounted to fully 78 percent of Brooklyn’s population. African Americans contributed another 3 percent (growing, but still small), which means that native-born white Brooklynites with native-born parents constituted only 19 percent of the total population.¹⁰ Since a large if unknowable number within this 19 percent were third-generation Irish Catholics and German Protestants, Catholics, and Jews, the proportion of Anglo-Dutch Protestants in the City of Churches must have been very small. Already an important feature of the nineteenth-century city, Brooklyn’s ethnic and religious diversity was the defining fact of the early twentieth-century borough. Although Yankee Protestants retained elements of their former influence in this new urban mosaic, the extent of that influence was contained as never before by the massive influx of immigrants that so worried the Rev. Richard Salter Storrs.

Nearly eight hundred thousand of Brooklyn’s population in 1930, a little more than 30 percent of the total, were Eastern Europeans and their children. This group included Russian Orthodox Christians as well as Jews and Catholics from the Baltics and the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Many were Jews fleeing the pogroms and restrictive laws of Russia and attracted by the economic opportunities of the United States. The Jewish presence among this diverse population is difficult to calculate. The 1930 census reported 317,485 immigrants in Brooklyn whose mother tongue was Yiddish.¹¹ If we assume all these Yiddish speakers were from Eastern Europe (a few might have emigrated from Central and Western European countries) and that all the Eastern European Jewish immigrants in Brooklyn reported Yiddish, rather than Russian, Polish, or Hungarian, as their mother tongue, we can conclude that 85 percent of Brooklyn’s Eastern European immigrants were Jews, and that, counting their American-born children (who were not asked the language question), about 675,000 Eastern European Jews lived in Brooklyn in 1930.¹² This calculation does not, however, account for German-speaking Jews among 265,000 German and Austrian immigrants and their American-born children, a sprinkling of Spanish and Portuguese speakers from South America, and a number of third-generation Jews whose parents and grandparents (mostly German in background) had formed the Jewish communities of Brooklyn and New York City in the nineteenth century. We estimate the actual number of Brooklyn’s Jews in 1930 as within the range of 750,000 and 850,000, at least fifteen times the 50,000 or so who lived in the new borough at the turn of the century. From the small if visible community of the 1890s they had become Brooklyn’s largest population cohort.¹³

A significant portion of Brooklyn’s Eastern European Jews arrived in the borough during the dozen or so years between the opening of the Williamsburg Bridge and World War I. According to contemporary estimates, the Jewish population of Brooklyn grew to approximately three hundred thousand by 1910 and to five hundred thousand or more by 1916, the year before the United States entered the war.¹⁴ The bulk of this new population settled in two areas—the old Dutchtown district of Williamsburg and the more distant former New Lots village of Brownsville—both in the path of transit lines leading away from the Williamsburg Bridge. Both offered inducements beyond easy transportation for would-be commuters to East Side jobs, including existing synagogues and kosher butcher shops. Williamsburg’s 16th ward (extending eastward into the 18th) was a settled urban neighborhood that conformed to no one’s image of a suburb. Even before the bridge, the Eagle portrayed it as Brooklyn’s equivalent to Manhattan’s East Side.¹⁵ But it was not as crowded as the East Side and cost became a significant attraction when, in 1904 and 1905, East Side landlords increased rents that many families already struggled to afford.¹⁶ Some East Side Jews thought of Williamsburg as a step up in the world; for others it was merely an affordable place to live.

Brownsville was different. It was a suburb in the older meaning of a hybrid urban periphery, more affordable than lovely, where stores, taverns, workshops, a few factories, and a surviving farm or two shared space with the small frame houses and shanties of a semi-rural working population that included a number of immigrants from Scotland. The rustic and ethnic character of Brownsville began to change during the 1880s, when a Russian Jewish clothing contractor named Elias Kaplan transferred his large East Side shop there and arranged to have two-family houses built for his workers. Businesses in clothing and other trades followed, and Brownsville was gradually transformed into a Jewish community that attracted much larger numbers after the Williamsburg Bridge was opened.

As it grew, Brownsville was transformed from a small village of unpaved and unlighted streets into a more imposing if distant urban section of Brooklyn, with a full range of municipal services and a growing commercial center (its main artery, Pitkin Avenue, named after the region’s visionary pioneer) surrounded by streets lined with one- and two-family homes. In the years following the opening of the bridge, Brownsville attracted more East Siders than Williamsburg, and as the local population climbed past one hundred thousand, tenements, not houses, dominated the townscape. As it pushed upward and outward into still-empty fields, Brownsville gave the impression of a walled town.¹⁷

The two core Eastern European Jewish communities of pre–World War I Brooklyn soon became as densely populated as Manhattan’s East Side. Rising density brought higher rents, as it had done on the East Side. Not surprisingly, these led to a leveling of the growth of Williamsburg and Brownsville, which was also affected by the slowing of foreign immigration during and after the war, and by an exodus from both places to other, more suburban neighborhoods in and beyond Brooklyn. Some of those who moved sought cheaper rents, while others who had prospered looked for better homes in more prestigious neighborhoods. Williamsburg’s better-off Jews, for example, moved slightly southward into brownstone neighborhoods near downtown Brooklyn and in South Brooklyn, where, as it happens, nineteenth-century German Jews had lived without creating a distinct Jewish quarter. Others went further south, to Borough Park, Dyker Heights, Bensonhurst, and Bath Beach, where land was cheap and brand-new suburban homes could be purchased on easy terms. Brownsville’s out-migrants found similar conditions in nearby Flatbush and Canarsie.¹⁸ A detailed postwar study of the expansion of Brooklyn’s Jewish population indicated a typical sequence in each: initial single-family homes, followed by duplex homes, and then by apartment houses, the latter making possible a still larger local migration.¹⁹

This pattern of resettlement from Manhattan’s East Side to Williamsburg, Brownsville, and then more suburban areas fits well with an often-repeated story of immigrant upward mobility in the United States—the realization of the American Dream for millions, Jews and others, who came in search of a better life for themselves and their families. The house in the suburbs was and still is an expression of that success. But the outward migration from neighborhoods of initial immigrant settlement was a more complicated phenomenon, even among immigrants who were not just looking for cheaper housing.

An episode in Michael Gold’s 1930 novel Jews without Money—a fictionalized memoir of growing up on Manhattan’s East Side before and after the turn of the century—captures the most significant of these complications. Mikey, the narrator, describes his father Herman as a man of fierce if often-thwarted ambition who seems finally to have found an avenue to success as a foreman for Zachariah Cohen, a painting contractor who is dabbling in home construction in the embryonic suburb of Brooklyn’s Borough Park:

“We are going to move from the East Side,” my father announced one night. “My Boss advised me to move out to Borough Park, where he himself lives. He is willing to sell me a house and lot on the installment plan. He says a man with a future should not live on the East Side.”

“But all my friends live here,” my mother said. “I would miss them. It is only people with money who live in Borough Park.”

“What of it?” said my father. “I also will soon be rich.”

The family journeys one Sunday to Borough Park, where they visit Cohen’s gaudy house, and then “through slushy weeds under the damp sky” the row of eight wooden houses within which stands the one Herman hopes to buy. On the way home Herman asks his wife what she thought of it:

“I don’t like it,” said my mother.

“And why not?” my father said indignantly. “Are you so much in love with that sewer of an East Side?”

“No,” said my mother. “But I will be lonesome here. I am used only to plain people; I will miss the neighbors on Chrystie Street.”

“But there will be neighbors here,” said my father.

“Herman, don’t make me do it,” my mother pleaded. “I can’t do it, Herman. My heart is heavy thinking about it.”

“Foolishness!” my father exclaimed, biting his cigar. “We will move here, I say! You must not hold me down! I refuse to be an East Side beggar all my life! Do you hear?”

My mother turned her face from him, and stared at the weeds, the slush, the exultant signboards of Borough Park.²⁰

Mikey’s family never makes that move. Two months after the visit to Borough Park Herman falls from a scaffold, breaking both of his feet and ending his dreams of wealth and suburban living. After a year of convalescing he finds work peddling bananas on the East Side. Mikey’s mother continues to experience the hardships and satisfactions of a poor ghetto family in a familiar and mutually supportive community.

In this episode Gold conveys the opposing values that made departure from the ghetto, in proletarian novels and in real life, more complicated than escape to a better life. Gold’s sympathy with Mikey’s mother reflects his left-wing ideology—he was editor of The New Masses and a columnist for the Communist Party’s Daily Worker—but his book is more than a political polemic. His portrayals of the crowded Jewish quarter of New York illuminate the lives that could be lived there, with synagogues, shops, cafes, and Yiddish theater giving them shape and meaning.²¹ Most of the Jewish immigrants in this community did leave, and many were glad to go. Real-life Zacharias Cohens had little trouble selling their rows of wood-frame houses in Borough Park. But dense social worlds do not surrender their children or their communal identities easily.

Among the ligaments of these Jewish communities—the East Side, Williamsburg, Brownsville, and beyond—were the institutions that were built there. Unlike the German Jews, who in Brooklyn built a small number of poorly attended (mostly Reform) synagogues, Russian and other Eastern European Jews founded many active and well-attended traditional synagogues that in turn spawned social and mutual benefit societies intended to provide a physically mobile and generally needy community with sociability, health care, loans, life insurance, and places to be buried. They also established numerous charities independent of the synagogues, along with a (mostly German) Brooklyn Federation of Jewish Charities to coordinate their efforts. To serve the five hundred thousand Jews in Brooklyn, the Eagle noted in 1916, “it would seem as if there were nearly 500,000 charitable organizations.”²²

Clubs, a revived YMHA, labor unions, and Zionist and other political organizations attracted more secular and radical members of the community.²³ For the religious, though, synagogues were the vital centers of community life. Synagogue membership and attendant benefits were sometimes tied to the immigrants’ communities of origin, which echoed the immigration process itself. Many Jewish immigrants arrived with the promise of employment from family members or former neighbors who had preceded them to the United States (Mikey’s father had a job waiting for him in the suspender-end factory of a neighbor from his Rumanian village), which could lead to synagogue and other memberships, a process that personalized these institutional and contractual relations in the American shtetl.²⁴

Secular Jews did not need the synagogue to find their way into mutual benefit societies, some of which were formed among residents from the same village or shtetl without reference to religion, nor did they lack other forms of organized sociability. The unionists and political radicals among them enjoyed a particularly extensive associational life in union halls, political meeting rooms, cafes, and the Labor Lyceum. These two poles of the Jewish community (call them the Orthodox and the Radicals) account for some of the organizational density within the community, for each pole insisted on its own institutions. The separation was not absolute—religious garment workers belonged to unions, and both groups promoted Zionism and expressed support for Jews who remained in the Old World—but numerous organizations catered to one or the other of these poles of Jewish society. What the Orthodox and the Radicals shared, beyond some overlap of membership and purpose, was the inclination and the ability to form institutions from their own resources, within the narrow spaces of Siegel Street and Pitkin Avenue.

They also shared the benefits that came from resources beyond the East European Jewish community. A number of German Jews of Manhattan and Brooklyn had become quite wealthy. Despite the rise of elite anti-Semitism signaled by the Seligman affair, these Jews—uptown Jews in common parlance—had carved out a significant if largely separate space for themselves in the upper strata of American society. The arrival in America of massive numbers of poor Eastern European Jews and the settlement of many of them in New York presented wealthy Jews with a philanthropic opportunity that grew from two different motives. They desired to help coreligionists in their adaptation to new surroundings; and they feared that these easily reviled, Yiddish-speaking aliens, Orthodox and Radicals alike, threatened their own standing in American society. Both motives led to the dual strategy of uplifting and Americanizing the refugees through institutions that lay beyond the financial reach of the immigrants themselves.²⁵ In Brooklyn a large Jewish Hospital, which opened in 1906, was one such institution. But a somewhat earlier one, the Hebrew Educational Society of Brooklyn, was perhaps the most important.

In 1898 Adolphus S. Solomon, acting as the American general agent of the Europe-based Baron de Hirsch Fund, financed a small vacation school for Brownsville’s Jewish children that also offered English-language instruction for adults. A year later, he and another de Hirsch Fund trustee, Abraham Abraham, proposed the enlargement of this school into a multi-purpose community center. Abraham’s leadership was especially important. Born in Manhattan to Bavarian immigrants, Abraham made his fortune as the principal owner of Brooklyn’s largest department store and became the city’s most important leader of local Jewish institutions. He was a long-term president of Brooklyn’s (Reform) Temple Israel and the Hebrew Orphan Asylum, as well as president of the new Jewish Hospital, and an influential member of the Brooklyn Federation of Jewish Charities and other Jewish philanthropies. He was not the founding president of the Hebrew Educational Society; that distinction fell to his son-in-law, Simon F. Rothschild, an appointment that underscored the role of this family, and of wealthy German Jews more generally, in the founding of vital new Brownsville institutions.²⁶

From its new home on Pitkin Avenue, the Hebrew Educational Society (HES) offered schooling from kindergarten to adult night school, a library, a gym, public baths, lectures, youth clubs and dances, English and Yiddish theater (they did not ask Yankee Protestants or German Jews if this was suitable), even a branch bank. In its varied educational program, the HES revealed an important motivational distinction between the German Jewish founders and local leaders from the Russian Jewish community. The former stressed classes in English and citizenship training as a route to a rapid and thorough Americanization, while the latter insisted on a weekday afternoon school in Hebrew and Judaism intended to preserve Jewish identity even as Brownsville’s residents sought American citizenship. The Abrahams and Rothschilds who supported the HES may have wished for a more complete washing of Jewishness from Brownsville’s growing Eastern European population. The Brownsvillians themselves, whether they gravitated to the Orthodox or Radical poles of Jewish society, were interested in becoming Americans without surrendering their notion—however different that may have been from Abraham Abraham’s—of what it meant to be Jewish.²⁷

The Hebrew Educational Society did not seek to replace Brooklyn’s public schools. Some of Brownsville’s Jewish children attended the afternoon Hebrew schools of local synagogues or the HES, but nearly all of them attended public schools, which have long been recognized as the great assimilators of immigrant children. Perhaps this Americanizing effect was modified in homogeneous neighborhoods such as Brownsville, where nearly all the students were Jewish. Significantly, however, when the parents of these students protested against the singing of Christmas carols and other forms of Christian celebration and worship in the public schools, as they did regularly throughout this period and beyond, their objections were directed to the entire school system of Brooklyn, not only to schools in their own neighborhoods. And they made it clear that they were speaking as American citizens in defense of the Constitutional principle of secular governance, not as a religious minority who lacked the power to insert their own celebrations and sacred texts into the curriculum.²⁸ By speaking up, frequently and forcefully, Jews asserted that they were not strangers in a strange land but Americans with the same rights as the Yankee Protestants who put Christian celebration in the schools in the first place. They made the same claim, more implicitly and not without irony, in their support of Jews who remained in Russia and of the Zionist idea of establishing a Middle Eastern Jewish homeland. Expressions of this support contain no hint of an intention to leave the United States, either to a reformed, less anti-Semitic Russia, or a restored Jewish homeland. The Jews of Brooklyn, Orthodox and Radical, rich and poor, Brownsvillian and Borough Parker, were here to stay, as Americans and as Jews.

Reconciling these dual identities constitutes a central theme in Jewish-American literature from Abraham Cahan to Philip Roth. It is beautifully conveyed, too, in the memoir of a Brownsville native, Alfred Kazin. As a teen, Kazin took long, solitary walks during which he reflected on the limits Brownsville placed on him. “We were of the city,” he writes, “but somehow not in it.” His favorite route took him up a hill to the old Ridgewood reservoir, where he looked across Brooklyn to the skyscrapers of Manhattan. “I saw New York as a foreign city…. I would come back to Brownsville along Liberty Avenue, and, as soon as I could see blocks ahead of me the Labor Lyceum, the malted milk and Fatima signs over the candy stores, the old women in their housedresses sitting in front of the tenements like priestesses of an ancient cult, knew I was home.” “We were at the end of the line,” Kazin continues. “We were the children of the immigrants who had camped at the city’s back door, in New York’s rawest, remotest, cheapest ghetto.” Finally: “They were New York, the Gentiles, America; we were Brownsville—Brunzvil, as the old folks said—the dust of the earth to all Jews with money, and notoriously a place that measured all success by our skill in getting away from it.”²⁹

Kazin may have feared a stunted life in Brunzvil, but he got away from it by becoming a master of American literature, one of the most respected literary scholars and critics of his time. In another memoir he proclaimed himself a New York Jew, but this identity (larger than Brownsville) comported well with his comfort in the works of Emerson, Faulkner, and Fitzgerald. For all his insight he might not have fully appreciated the extent to which Brooklyn’s “rawest, cheapest ghetto” launched him to his larger American life.

Jewish New Yorkers such as Kazin were acutely aware of how they differed from Anglo and Dutch Protestants who seemed to own the city, as well as Irish-Americans and German-Americans who had long since claimed their share of comfort and influence. But they differed, too, from other recent immigrant groups, such as Italians, who arrived in Manhattan and Brooklyn around the same time. Italian immigration to the United States increased gradually during the last two decades of the nineteenth century, and dramatically between 1900 and the beginning of World War I. In Brooklyn, an Italian immigrant population of barely more than a thousand in 1880 increased to thirty-seven thousand in 1900, and more than one hundred thousand by 1910. There were also American-born children in Brooklyn’s growing Italian community, but fewer than in other immigrant groups, mainly because many Italian men came to Brooklyn to work and save rather than form families. Some were “birds of passage,” keeping alive an old southern Italian tradition of repeat migration between Italian homes and work in distant lands. The Eagle estimated in 1902 that there were three times as many men as women among the Italians of Brooklyn, suggesting the presence of men who did not see America as their permanent home.³⁰ Almost surely an exaggeration, this ratio moderated over the years. The 1920 US census recorded 122 Italian males to 100 females in Brooklyn, still a larger gender imbalance than among Eastern Europeans, but an indication that this characteristic of the Italian community was disappearing. In 1930 the ratio of second-generation to immigrant Italians was only slightly lower than it was among Eastern Europeans. The Italian population of Brooklyn was just under four hundred thousand in that year, and nearly all of these people—a community about half the size of the Jews—apparently had no intention of returning to Italy.³¹

Another difference was the greater dispersal of the new Italian communities across the Brooklyn townscape. Like Jews who lived in Brownsville and Williamsburg’s Dutchtown, most Italians settled first in Manhattan, mainly in a Little Italy just to the west of the Jewish East Side and came to Brooklyn during the same time Jews were pouring over the “Passover Bridge.” But while Brooklyn’s new Jews settled mostly in two communities, the Italians created at least nine or ten. The larger Italian settlements were nearer to the old ferry landings than to the Williamsburg Bridge (for which there was no Italian nickname), and the ferries, not the new transportation links between the boroughs, played the larger role in carrying Italians to Brooklyn. One Italian neighborhood was along the South Brooklyn waterfront still served by the South and Hamilton ferries. Another was in Vinegar Hill and the old downtown near the Catherine and Fulton ferries. A third, in Williamsburg’s 14th ward, was near but not centered on the river, not especially close to a ferry, and significantly north of the bridge’s Brooklyn terminus. Smaller settlements were in Gowanus, near Green-Wood Cemetery, a slice of the northern end of Brownsville (soon to be known as Ocean Hill), East New York, and a few other distant locations, including Flatbush, Coney Island, Bensonhurst, and Bay Ridge.³²

The best explanation for the location of Italian settlements, especially the bigger ones, is that the Irish had preceded them there. Both groups, especially in the earlier years of their American residence, contained large numbers of men whose experience as small farmers and farm laborers in their home country gave them little access to the better paying jobs of the American urban economy. Many of them gravitated to areas on and near the East River waterfront, where they found jobs as day laborers on the docks and ditch diggers in nearby city streets. The Irish were the first to take these jobs and create neighborhoods in the old downtown, near the South Brooklyn and Williamsburg waterfronts and in Gowanus. Italians followed them, but only in part because of employment near the river and the Gowanus Canal. Roman Catholic churches, built for the Irish but available to Italians, were already numerous in these neighborhoods, as were parochial schools and other institutions maintained by each church. Irish parishioners often spurned Italians, and several new parishes were formed specifically for the newcomers. There would have been more of these, but the communities themselves were in transition as the Irish left for suburban neighborhoods, abandoning their old parishes to Italians. To the latter this was a significant housewarming gift, a set of crucial institutions they did not have to build for themselves.

Partly for this reason, and partly because a smaller population was spread over a larger number of settlements, Italians created and sustained fewer institutions than did Jews. Institution building may have been delayed somewhat, too, by the presence of those birds of passage who saw a village in southern Italy rather than a neighborhood in Brooklyn as their home. But the existing parish institutions did provide vital services to Italian neighborhoods, even when Irish clergy and laity did the heavy lifting. The Immaculate Conception Day Nursery on Sands Street served the downtown Irish for many years before opening an Italian branch on Front Street, in the heart of one of the largest Italian neighborhoods. The supervising clergy were the Right Rev. C. E. McDonnell (bishop of the Diocese of Brooklyn) and the Very Rev. P. J. McNamara, and the lay officers consisted mostly of Irish women. No woman with an Italian surname was listed among them, but 150 Italian children attended the nursery, others enrolled in after-school programs for older children, and some parents made use of the nursery’s employment agency.³³ The charitable Women’s Auxiliary of the St. Vincent de Paul Society of Brooklyn, another Irish-run organization, reached across the entire diocese, including places Italians had settled.³⁴ Well-to-do Protestants also got involved: “some of the best of Brooklyn’s citizens,” all from Brooklyn Heights, opened the Little Italy Neighborhood House in 1904 on Sackett Street near the South Brooklyn waterfront.³⁵

Italians, though, were not simply passive receivers of other people’s efforts. They formed their own benevolent societies, often based on their villages, cities, or districts of origin. La Lega Mutua Marsalese was organized by immigrants from the city of Marsala on the west coast of Sicily. La Societa Gragnanesi di Brooklyn assisted campagnoli from the Neapolitan district of Gragnano. La Societa Cittadini Giffonesi di Brooklyn did the same for migrants from the small city of Giffone in the heart of Calabria. There was also a Societa Nazionale Italiana, but whether this organization coordinated the work of the more parochial ones is difficult to say.³⁶

The smaller mutual aid societies also functioned as social clubs, sponsoring dances, banquets, and summer picnics. They became visible to the outside world during parades and feasts celebrating a local patron saint.³⁷ Italians took to the streets more often than other ethnic groups, celebrating saints and Catholic holy days such as the Feast of the Assumption.³⁸ As expressions of the continuing tug of Italian nationalism they paraded everywhere on the birthday of Christopher Columbus and the anniversary of the 1861 unification of Italy, insisting, usually with success, that the Italian flag be flown on public buildings along with the Stars and Stripes.³⁹ They turned out in great numbers to mourn the assassination of King Umberto I on July 29, 1900, driven to the streets in part by the embarrassment that his assassin was an Italian-American anarchist, Gaetano Bresci, who lived not far from Brooklyn in Paterson, New Jersey. Bresci, alas, underscored for some Americans a stereotype of the Italian male as violent, lawless, and resistant to assimilation. To counter that stereotype and prove their American patriotism, Italians paraded with gusto on the Fourth of July (“il Quattro glorioso”), carrying American and Italian flags.⁴⁰ The surrender of Austria at the end of World War I brought a fresh and somewhat raucous expression of Italian nationalism into the streets, but the Eagle assured its readers that “our naturalized Italians are as good Americans as we have. There are no better citizens.”⁴¹

Brooklyn’s Italian men received some favorable coverage in the local press, which frequently described them as hard-working, thrifty, devoted to family, vivacious, picturesque, and moderate in their drinking.⁴² But less generous or more apprehensive Americans distilled darker elements into the stereotype of the dangerous and resolutely alien Sicilian or southern Italian male, skilled in the use of a stiletto or gun, and possibly the member of a secret criminal society.⁴³ A somewhat less threatening stereotype could be the occasion for attempted humor, as in an Eagle profile of South Brooklyn’s “Little Italy,” which claimed “the first business of the Italian child of the laboring class is to get dirty, and during the rest of his life he exercises proper care that he does not become clean…. After he matures he still loves dirt, as evidenced by the fact that he usually shovels it at $1.25 per diem.”⁴⁴ Italian workingmen, of course, did not love either dirt or low pay, but the number of Italian ditch and cellar diggers provided visible verification of this stereotype to Brooklynites who passed by in the streets—in contrast to poorly paid Jewish garment workers who worked indoors, out of sight to those willing to make simplistic judgments about immigrant workers’ lives. Somehow, the cleanliness of the small businessmen in the Italian quarters did not register as forcefully as the dirt that covered men who toiled with shovels.

The dirt was real, as were episodes of violence that occurred when Italian men worked alongside Irish workers. A fistfight, or a general brawl, could be provoked by even a small ethnic insult; on one occasion it was an Italian worker’s effrontery of humming an Irish tune, on another an Irishman’s making fun of an Italian’s clothes.⁴⁵ Again, ethnic conflict often played itself out in outdoor spaces, reinforcing negative perceptions about the larger communities to which they belonged.

Stereotypes arising from fistfights and dirty outdoor work were not as serious as those that branded Italian men as murderously criminal. The press often attributed reports of extortion under the threat of murder, kidnapping, or the bombing of businesses to the Black Hand, a frightening term suggestive (rightly or wrongly) of a single and secretive criminal organization alien to the American experience.⁴⁶ That the Black Hand was real, and responsible for all or most of the crimes attributed to it, was attested to by frequent reports on it in Il Progresso, New York’s principal Italian-language newspaper. Il Progresso feared the damage the Black Hand and its imitators were doing not only to their individual victims, most or all of whom were Italian, but to the reputation of the entire Italian community. Editors stressed that secretive crime syndicates violated Italian values, posing a serious problem to law-abiding Italians whose fears and outrage were as great or greater than that of Americans who read about organized Italian crime in English-language newspapers.⁴⁷ The damage the Black Hand inflicted on the reputation of the Italian community persisted for decades, perpetuated by the infamy attached to the name Mafia.⁴⁸ Brooklyn’s Jews grappled with anti-Semitism, a problem that came from outside the Jewish community and helped strengthen solidarity within it. Organized crime, in image and reality, was an internal problem for Italian-Americans who wished to prove themselves valuable and law-abiding citizens of their adopted country.

Jewish and Italian migrations do not complete the story of Brooklyn’s growing diversity, though these two groups amounted to nearly half of the borough’s population by the end of the 1920s. Catholics from Eastern Europe were decidedly different from Jews and did not mix with them any more in the United States than they did in Europe. Polish Catholics settled in Greenpoint in the far northwestern corner of Brooklyn, in the northern part of Sunset Park, and in other areas far from Jewish neighborhoods. They found jobs in the sugar refineries, iron foundries, and other heavy industries (and as gravediggers in Green-Wood Cemetery), places where Jews did not work.⁴⁹ By 1930 there were half a dozen Polish parishes and five that served Lithuanians, Slovaks, and Ukrainians. Another three were created for Catholics from the Middle East.⁵⁰ Greek and Russian Orthodox were also present, though not yet in large numbers. About ten thousand Greeks lived in Brooklyn in 1930, and the Russian Orthodox community might not have been much larger, but the churches of both groups added something new to Brooklyn’s Christian world. A larger addition, at once familiar and foreign, were Norwegians and other Scandinavians who settled first in Red Hook, then moved southward to Sunset Park and, finally, to Bay Ridge. In 1930, about fifty thousand Scandinavian immigrants and their thirty-four thousand American-born children lived in Brooklyn. All these groups, and others, brought new languages, folkways, and institutions to Brooklyn’s social mosaic. Older immigrant sources, meanwhile, were by no means outpaced. Next to Eastern Europeans and Italians, Irish and Germans constituted the largest immigrant groups in the borough, new Irish and their American-born children amounting to more than 150,000, and Germans more than 265,000. The most familiar of ethnic groups in early twentieth-century Brooklyn, they still bore the newcomers’ hyphen. They were not to be confused with Yankees.⁵¹

The dozen or so years before the war saw the most explosive growth of Brooklyn’s immigrant communities. This growth heightened concerns of Anglo and Dutch Protestants about the prevalence of hyphenated Americans, concerns that deepened during the war itself, even as the pace of immigration slowed dramatically. Once the war began (and especially after the United States became involved), the issue was not only numbers but the loyalty of immigrants and their children to the United States.

Interestingly, it took some time for that issue to be focused on Brooklyn’s German population, even after popular sentiment toward the combatants had taken a decided turn in favor of the English and French. Apart from their resistance to boring Yankee Sundays and their dogged demand that German be taught in the public schools, Germans had long since established themselves as the most favored of Brooklyn’s hyphenated Americans. Not many of them were poor or prone to crime or violence. They brought with them the gifts of lager beer and the beer garden, which even Yankees found difficult to criticize. Some were well educated, most were Protestant, and their attachments to the past were more cultural than political. They provided Brooklyn with three mayors (one of them American-born) during the latter years of the preconsolidation era.

In 1910 the Eagle published a series of long, favorable articles on “Our German-American Neighbors,” and even as tensions mounted in Europe the tenor of reporting on the German community in Brooklyn remained mostly positive. The paper lauded a German Day festival in 1913 that included German, not American, patriotic music. In 1916, with the war well underway, an article on the contributions of “Germanic Citizens” to Brooklyn’s progress was subheaded: “Local Institutions Exhibit Finest Traditions and Traits Making for The Development of Advanced Civic Life—What the Singing and the Turner Societies Have Done for Co-operation in the Community.” Making no mention of the war, the article featured an illustration of a monument to Brooklyn’s Germans who had died in the American Civil War. Even in 1918, just over five months before the end of a war in which American soldiers were dying from German bullets and mustard gas, the Eagle’s report on a Loyalty Parade of immigrant groups noted that the “most significant was the division of ‘Americans of German origin’—no longer German-Americans, observe—marching with mottoes: ‘Born in Germany—Made in America,’ and ‘We are loyal to the country of our children.’ ”⁵²

Positive assessments of Brooklyn’s Germans by the Eagle were offset by concerns rising within the larger community. Late in 1917, for example, with the outcome of the war in doubt, the Rev. Newell Dwight Hillis railed from the pulpit of Plymouth Church against a series of concerts by the Austrian violinist Fritz Kreisler (born Jewish, baptized as a child), pointing out that his nightly thousand-dollar fee could buy fifty rifles to use against American soldiers. Hillis could not prove that Kreisler subsidized the enemy arsenal, but he did succeed in getting this renowned violinist to cancel his concerts. A month later three German high school teachers were convicted of disloyalty, and in May of 1918 the Brooklyn Board of Education eliminated German from the school curriculum. “Our nation is aligned against German kultur,” the board argued. “We have had too much of it. We need no more of it.” In the same month the Riding and Driving Club of Brooklyn, following the actions of other clubs, forbade the use of German in its clubhouse during the duration of the war. In July, police charged a man named Edward Hall with snatching a German-language paper out of the hands of a passenger on a Brooklyn trolley car. “Five dollar fine,” ruled Magistrate Dooley. “It was worth $10,” Hall responded. “ ‘Well, I’ll make it $10,’ decided the magistrate, agreeably.” And in an Eagle column written less than two months before the armistice, Julius Chambers argued that the naturalization of Germans should be halted. The upsurge of applications for American citizenship, Chambers noted, came from Germans who “had no misgivings about remaining enemy aliens” as long as Germany stood a chance of winning the war. “These last hour applicants ought to be rejected and never accepted as American citizens.”⁵³

Anti-German sentiment continued after the end of the war. A curious expression of it, less than a week after the armistice, was the refusal by a Brooklyn judge to allow Dr. Charles Isador Weinsweig to change his last name to Warner. “I will not grant such leave,” the judge explained, “where the effect of doing so is to enable persons of German extraction to conceal their origin…. Neither will I permit the adoption of the names of American families by foreigners.” This was a negative way of eliminating the German-American’s hyphen—he was simply a German and clearly not an American. Two weeks later the Board of Aldermen, acting at the urging of Brooklyn Borough president Edward Reigelmann (himself a German-American), voted to remove German names from Brooklyn’s streets. In May 1919, an increasingly active American Defense Society criticized Brooklyn’s Germania Club for a planned fundraising drive to benefit interned German soldiers and sailors. The club’s president announced the cancelation of the drive, while insisting “we are Americans, first, last, and all the time.” Concerts by German orchestras and singers were also canceled, and one Eagle correspondent objected to German-language preaching and instruction at the First German Presbyterian Church of Williamsburg. That July, one Frank Savolksi was convicted of disloyalty and sentenced to thirty days in the workhouse for flying a small German flag alongside the American flag. The sentencing magistrate added his personal opinion that the offender should be deported, inventing as he did so the category of “undesirable citizen.”⁵⁴

Even before anti-German sentiment heated up, native Brooklynites, like their counterparts throughout the United States, worried about the loyalties and prospects of assimilation of hyphenated Americans. Early in the war Brooklynites took steps to ensure all immigrants respected America’s neutrality and evinced no loyalty other than to the United States. Only days after the war began a correspondent to the Eagle cautioned “the naturalized American citizen” to be “mindful of his renunciation of allegiance to his native country and his assumption of obligations and fealty to the United States of America.”⁵⁵ Made long before American policy hardened against Germany, the warning applied as much to Russian, Italian, and even English immigrants as it did to those from Germany or Austria. Within a few months a new National Americanization Committee began a multifaceted effort to eliminate Old World loyalties within American ethnic communities, focusing on the New Immigrants from Eastern and Southern Europe. A poster distributed nationally by this committee in conjunction with the US Bureau of Education encouraged immigrants to study English and become citizens, offering this advice in English, Hebrew, Italian, and four Slavic languages, but, oddly, not in German. A swarthy Uncle Sam pictured in the poster shakes the hand of a young workingman devoid of stereotypical ethnic features. The large heading reads: “America First.”⁵⁶

The National Americanization Committee was one of many groups, formed mainly by upper- and middle-class white Protestants, that addressed the issue of hyphenated Americans. Another organization, New York’s Colonial Daughters of the Seventeenth Century was addressed in March of 1916 by Mrs. A. H. Hildreth, president of the New York State Federation of Women’s Clubs. A month later the better-known Daughters of the American Revolution formed a Brooklyn branch of its Loyal League under the leadership of Mrs. George Chapin Taft of Stuyvesant Heights. The league promoted patriotism among public school children with a variety of exercises, including patriotic essays and the signing of a now familiar pledge to the American flag (“and to the Republic for which it stands”). Although the DAR did not refer specifically to immigrant children as targets of these efforts, the organization’s leaders understood that most of them, save for the Catholics, attended the public schools, and there can be little doubt that the Loyal League’s patriotism program was aimed at them.⁵⁷ The Americanization initiative also targeted factories. In February 1917, a Brooklyn Community Chorus was organized to lead workers in singing “patriotic and other well-known songs” on their lunch break. Before the year was out smaller groups in Greenpoint and other neighborhoods were using the same approach.⁵⁸

Americanizers applied their programs to all hyphenates well into the postwar period; indeed, this strategy received fresh impetus from a decided turn of fear and animosity away from Germans and toward Russians and other immigrants suspected of sympathy with or complicity in the Bolshevik Revolution and the international Communist movement. This first Red Scare was fueled not only by the revolution in Russia but by an escalation of labor conflict in the United States. Strikes increased dramatically in 1919, many of them led by the most radical of American labor organizations, the International Workers of the World (IWW), or Wobblies.

Brooklyn experienced few strikes in 1919, but there were many political radicals in and outside of the borough’s labor movement, nearly all of them drawn from immigrant communities. Voices were raised against them from editorial and legislative desks, the pulpit, and judicial benches. In January a young “Bolshevist-dentist” named Morris Zucker was sentenced to fifteen years in prison and denied bail pending an appeal, for giving a “Red” speech at Brownsville’s Labor Lyceum in violation of the Espionage Act. “Today there is nothing more important to the country than that its citizens be loyal,” declared the judge, “and disloyalty to the United States will not be tolerated.”⁵⁹ In February, the Rev. G. A. Simons, a former head of the Methodist Episcopal Church in Russia, declared before a Senate subcommittee that “the predominating influence on Bolshevist propaganda was the Yiddish element of the East Side.”⁶⁰ Had he known New York better or waited two months he would have added Brownsville, where a meeting of prominent Bolsheviks took place in April. At least 1,100 of the 1,200 people in the audience, the Eagle reporter estimated, were immigrants or the children of immigrants, and most of them spoke Yiddish.⁶¹ Yiddish was also the native tongue of a socialist hired in October by a private school in Brownsville to teach, of all things, English.⁶²

US Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer launched his (now infamous) raids in Brooklyn on November 8. Federal Secret Service agents and local police rounded up more than two hundred Reds in Brooklyn and more than five hundred throughout the city in raids on thirty district headquarters of the Communist Party. In Brownsville they raided Russian, Lithuanian, Ukrainian, Italian, and Jewish branches of the party and discovered a Communist Party dance underway in a hall on Pitkin Avenue. After allowing the women to leave they arrested fifty-two men. The largest haul in Brooklyn, though, was of members of the Finnish Socialist Society, which was staging a play that evening titled The War. More than one hundred Finns were arrested, again after women (and children) were allowed to go home.⁶³ The widely shared conviction that communism was an alien force was emphasized in Brooklyn six days after the raids when the Eagle published a political cartoon (drawn by Nelson Harding) showing a stereotypical Italian man, mean-looking, stiletto-armed, and labeled “Alien Red,” about to be clubbed on the head by the star-studded arm of Uncle Sam.⁶⁴

The Palmer raids resulted in the arrest of more than three thousand suspected radicals nationwide and the deportation of more than five hundred of them. Support for this draconian policy quickly waned, however, and fears of an American communist revolution gradually abated, temporarily at least, with the return of prosperity in the early 1920s. But the popular association between subversion and hyphenated Americans remained. The 1921 murder trial in Massachusetts of two Italian immigrant anarchists, Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, helped solidify the connection. Later assertions of their innocence were at once a landmark outcry against unjust treatment of the dispossessed and a reminder of the political radicalism of two immigrant men.

Attempts to deal with hyphenated Americans were three-pronged and occurred in overlapping phases: first, hastening Americanization through instruction of immigrant adults and their children in American civic values and the English language; then, arresting and deporting Communists and other political radicals deemed dangerous and incapable of assimilation; and, finally, pressing to restrict further immigration. At almost the same moment as the Sacco-Vanzetti trial the United States Congress enacted the Emergency Quota Act, limiting immigration from countries outside the Western hemisphere to 3 percent of the population from those countries residing in the United States in 1910. This draconian restriction, aimed at would-be immigrants from Eastern and Southern Europe, was significantly reinforced by the Immigration Act of 1924, which reduced the quota to 2 percent and changed the base year to 1890 when the population of non-Western Europeans was much smaller.⁶⁵ In effect, this legislation ended the era of the New Immigration. But it did not end this new era of pluralism, which consisted not merely of enforced or cajoled Americanization, but, among the Italians, Jews, Finns, Greeks, and Poles permitted to arrive and stay, of continuing ethnic and religious traditions, adaptations to new circumstances, self-generated and self-defined Americanization, and, when the need was felt, assertion and resistance. To millions of new Americans this was what the hyphen was for.

The immigrant response to Americanization was both positive and qualified. Most Brooklyn immigrants were refugees from political oppression or the collapse of regional economies, glad to be in a freer and more prosperous country. Becoming American was a widely embraced goal. But attempts to make pure, unhyphenated Americans, or anything like them, were doomed to fail, especially when they were linked to contemptuous attitudes toward immigrants and their cultures.

A series of articles in the Eagle by Frederick Boyd Stevenson exemplified this contempt. Stevenson insisted that immigrants learn not only to speak in English, but to think in it, and surrender attributes that distinguish them from other Americans. In 1916 he quoted approvingly the German Jew Jacob H. Schiff: “If the Jews in America insisted upon being different from other Americans they would bring upon their posterity a heritage of suffering.” In 1924 he asked Joseph A. Guider, the new Brooklyn Borough president, about his attitude toward education. “The Education that teaches One Hundred Percent Americanism,” Guider replied. “One Hundred Percent Americanism!” Stevenson repeated, before turning to a Brooklyn speaker who claimed to be a “Fifty-Fifty American—Fifty Percent of my heart here and Fifty Percent of it in the land whence I came.” “Why not,” Stevenson responded, “put the 100 percent on the other side?”⁶⁶

Although they were featured in the Sunday edition, of which Stevenson was editor, these articles were not representative of the Eagle’s coverage of immigration during the rest of the week. More common were descriptions of different sorts of Americanizers, including settlement house workers who appreciated and even learned from immigrant traditions. “Americanization Leaders Plan to Win New Citizens” was the heading of a 1920 article that quoted a Mrs. Schoonhoven, bearer of a fine old Dutch name: “Americanization is not seeking to take away from anyone what he has brought from other shores that is good and beautiful, but is giving him something so fine that he is eager to add it to what he already has.”⁶⁷ Also differing from Stevenson was the Eagle’s advice columnist, Helen Worth. In the early days of her column, which began in November of 1922, Worth’s opinions regarding the presence of hyphenated Americans in Brooklyn were guarded. She did not object when one writer insisted on finding for a mate “a 100 percent American,” or when another refused to join a Lonesome Club that admitted “people from all countries and classes.”⁶⁸ She was skeptical of the prospects of interfaith or interethnic marriages, advising one Jewish correspondent to find a wife within his “church.”⁶⁹ But as time wore on Worth’s attitude toward diversity softened, and by the late 1920s she was firmly on the side of young Protestant women who wanted to marry Catholic or Jewish men over their parents’ objections. “Do not let family opposition deter you,” she wrote late in 1929. “There are many happy marriages where the parents are of different faiths.”⁷⁰

Immigrants, then, faced several, often contradictory attitudes among the natives. And their responses to America included and went beyond the retention of a portion of their European identity. They expressed their interests, and their grievances as well, as in the insistence by Jewish-Americans that Christianity be removed from public schools, or the call by Italian-American IWW members, less than a month before the Palmer raids in Brooklyn, for a longshoremen’s strike.⁷¹

Most immigrants seized the rights of American citizenship along with its obligations in the name of their distinct communities. When a local judge declared that “all aliens are undesirable” and all further immigration must cease—a year before the Emergency Quota Act of 1921—the United Italian Democrats of Brooklyn sent a delegation to the Eagle to express their indignation. Rabbi Levinthal of the Brooklyn Jewish Center (a newly built, million-dollar structure on Vaux and Olmsted’s Eastern Parkway, itself a statement that Jewish-Americans were a force to be reckoned with) declared that “to shut the gates to aliens would be cutting away from the very principle on which America was founded.” Protests were also lodged from Greek, Italian, and Russian small businessmen, and from the president of the New York City Board of Aldermen, a Yiddish-speaking Italian-American Protestant named Fiorello H. La Guardia.⁷² Speaking at the Brooklyn Jewish Center four years later, La Guardia, now a congressman, Rabbi Levinthal, Brooklyn-born congressman Emanuel Celler, and others condemned the introduction in Congress of the new Immigration Act. A thousand people attended the meeting; two thousand were turned away.⁷³

Protests in Brooklyn and other boroughs and cities did not prevent the enactment of immigration restrictions laws. Nor did they prevent the emergence on the national stage of a new if closely related challenge to Brooklyn’s immigrant communities and its much smaller community of native-born African Americans. Once confined to southern states and devoted entirely to the preservation of white supremacy there, the Ku Klux Klan suddenly surfaced in northern states. Stimulated by the increase in Catholic and Jewish immigrants and the first major wave of African American migration from the south to northern cities (and inspired by the 1915 movie, Birth of a Nation, that glorified the original Klan) this new KKK reasserted the primacy of white Protestantism in the United States, offering this idea as the purist form of patriotism. By the mid-1920s it claimed a nationwide membership of four or five million men.⁷⁴

A Brooklyn branch appears to have been formed in November of 1922, but it is likely that it existed more on paper than in reality, at least in its early days. Reports of a Klansman addressing a Brooklyn Baptist church in full regalia at the invitation of its pastor that December turned out to be a hoax designed to attract congregants and fill the collection plate.⁷⁵ The arrest of eight men in January uncovered a Klan meeting that yielded almost no information to authorities about the Klan’s progress in Brooklyn.⁷⁶

Even after the Klan had more time to recruit and organize it had little impact on Brooklyn’s non-white and non-Protestant communities. The African American population in Brooklyn had grown to about thirty-two thousand in 1920, and would more than double to sixty-nine thousand during the decade—still a small component of a borough of more than two million souls but large enough to serve as a target of a militantly racist organization.⁷⁷ The migration of mostly poor and rural southerners, which accounted for much of the growth of Brooklyn’s Black population, reinforced the opinion held by many whites (who found it easier to perceive the poverty of these migrants than the advances of Black Brooklynites of longer standing) that nature and God consigned African Americans to the bottom rungs of society. Racial animosity was stoked in this borough of expanding residential neighborhoods, moreover, by well-publicized incidents of attempted integration.⁷⁸ And yet Brooklyn’s KKK did little to cultivate this fertile racist ground.

The Klan’s primary focus was on Roman Catholics, and more specifically on Catholic parochial schools. Public schools, the Klan argued, should promote Protestantism and white supremacy, and laws should be passed requiring all children to attend them. To advance this idea the Klan formed alliances with a number of Protestant ministers, including in Brooklyn no less a figure than Rev. Newell Dwight Hillis, who lent legitimacy to the Klan and preached against the Catholic school system.⁷⁹ But if some Brooklyn preachers gave succor to the KKK, greater numbers, Protestants and Catholics alike, denounced its goals and methods.⁸⁰ At the mass meeting to protest the 1924 Immigration Act Monsignor John L. Belford, pastor of Brooklyn’s Roman Catholic Church of the Nativity, explained the rise of the KKK and, perhaps unintentionally, its failure in Brooklyn: “The revival of this organization, the Klan, is due to a consciousness of the power of the people against whom they are directing their efforts—the Catholics, the Jews and the negroes.” This power, Belford continued, made the men who revived the Klan jealous; hence, their nationwide mobilization of men in robes and hoods to put down groups they despised as enemies of the white Protestant republic.⁸¹

In Brooklyn, it turned out, the power of Catholics and Jews, if not African Americans, was far too great for the Klan to diminish or defeat. That power came from overwhelming numbers, the rising wealth and organizational strength of Brooklyn’s Catholic and Jewish majority, and the refusal of many Protestant ministers to cooperate with the Klan.

It is telling that the KKK flourished for a time well to the east of Brooklyn in Nassau and Suffolk county towns to which many Brooklyn (and Manhattan) Protestants had fled.⁸² It gained influence in suburban New Jersey as well. Three years after Monsignor Belford spoke about the Klan at the Jewish Center two hundred hooded and robed Klansmen arrived at the Glenmore Presbyterian Church in Brooklyn in automobiles bearing license plates from New Jersey. The minister surrendered the pulpit to their leader, a man later identified as an ordained Baptist minister from “somewhere in New Jersey.” The intruders held their service, got back in their cars, and went home. They may have intended to intimidate, but their visit had little or no impact on Glenmore’s Presbyterians.⁸³

And so, the KKK did not get much traction in Brooklyn. It little mattered that the Klan had the backing of the latest occupant of the pulpit of Henry Ward Beecher’s church on Brooklyn Heights. The Rev. Hillis’ irrelevance to the Klan’s attempt to restore the Protestantism of white men to something like its old influence underscores the magnitude of Brooklyn’s transformation.

This is not to say that the long-standing Yankee Protestant hegemony was replaced by another that was, say, Jewish, or Italian, or (somehow) Jewish and Italian, or by any other ethnic group or alliance. Protestant elites continued to wield considerable economic power. At the same time, ethnic communities living in Brooklyn during the early decades of the twentieth century were often able to contest, and even ignore, Protestant cultural interventions, and did little themselves to shape the values and behaviors of other groups. In their lived experience (and before the emergence of a formal theory of cultural pluralism) members of each ethnic community found their own place and tended to their own ways within twentieth-century Brooklyn’s urban and suburban sprawl.⁸⁴

The result was a collection of relatively (but by no means perfectly) homogeneous neighborhoods, sitting side by side, often uneasily, not without flashes or enduring episodes of interethnic or interracial conflict, but with no prospect of ruling over or eliminating the other. Two generations earlier, Irish and German immigrants, and then their children, had introduced a degree of ethnic diversity to Brooklyn, and asserted the need for the city’s Yankee rulers to recognize and accommodate to their presence and their ways of living. More diverse and more numerous, the New Immigrants helped transform Brooklyn into a place where diversity was not just a countercurrent to something larger and more powerful. By the 1920s, the urban mosaic of ethnic and racial neighborhoods defined this borough that was still, in many ways, a city unto itself. This Brooklyn, perhaps more than Chicago, or San Francisco, or the immigrant towns of the upper Midwest—or even that “town across the river,” the East River—contributed significantly to a new understanding of pluralism in American life.

In March 1930, the Eagle published, as a Sunday feature, an article by Alice Rayfiel Seigmeister, titled “Brooklyn’s New Citizens.” Below that title is a drawing, extending across the entire page, with a shaded urban skyline dominated by the Brooklyn Bridge. Under it are a dozen images of confident-looking immigrant types, including an old, bearded Jewish man; a Norwegian seaman in pea jacket and cap, smoking his pipe; a younger, mustachioed Italian with a slim cigar; and in front of them all a pretty young woman, her head covered in a shawl but of no definite ethnicity, who stares hopefully forward. A tour of Brooklyn’s ethnic groups, the article is a refutation of the nativism of Frederick Boyd Stevenson. It takes us first to a Spanish, Portuguese, and Cuban settlement along the waterfront from the Brooklyn Bridge toward Atlantic Avenue, where it borders on “Syrian territory.” It then jumps to Bay Ridge and Sunset Park, where Norwegians, Swedes, and “a sprinkling of the Finnish and the Danes” are employed at the sprawling Bush Dock and Shipyard. A much larger leap takes us to Greenpoint where Czechs and Hungarians have joined an existing Polish community. Greeks, Mexicans, and a few other groups are noted while passing on to the much greater concentration of Russian, Hungarian, and Galician Jews in Brownsville and Williamsburg, and to Italians in South Brooklyn and other places. The Germans and the Irish “are everywhere.” “There are other countries, too,” Siegmeister explains, but it is growing late. “What’s that? The Dutch? Why, of course, there are Dutch…. Remember the Cortelyous, the Stuyvesants and the Remsens?” Yes, the Dutch in this “veritable League of Nations” are remembered. Only one group—the Yankees—is not.⁸⁵