Ask an American historian to define the Great Migration and
you’ll hear one of several answers. Most
will describe the movement of 6 million African Americans from the rural South
who headed north and west, from
World War I through 1970, seeking economic
opportunity and relief from Jim Crow laws. This is the story so beautifully
told in Isabel Wilkerson’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book, The Warmth of Other Suns.
A Jack Delano photo of migrants heading north from Florida, 1940. |
There’s another group of historians who might describe the
Great Migration as the 20,000 English men, women, and children who crossed the
Atlantic between 1620 and 1640, seeking opportunity and relief in New England.
These are the Mayflower names, the families that delight and provide such rich
insights for genealogists. Since 1988
the New England Historic Genealogical Society has sponsored the Great Migration Study Project, scheduled for completion in 2016.
In his monumental What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1848 Daniel Walker Howe describes “one of the greatest
migrations in America,” when Andrew Jackson encouraged white squatters from the
Carolinas, Georgia, and Tennessee to move onto 14 million acres expropriated
from the Creeks. By 1819 this flood of humanity had established Mississippi and
Alabama. “The Alabama fever rages here with great violence,” one North Carolina
farmer moaned, “and has carried off vast numbers of our citizens.” Never, Howe
remarks, had so large a territory been settled so rapidly—though the peopling
of the Old Northwest Territory was not far behind.
Still, there has been another kind of Great Migration in America, less dramatic, but in some ways the steadiest and perhaps most
influential. It also has great bearing upon one of today’s hottest political
issues, immigration policy, and helps explain why Silicon Valley is so vested
in the bill currently making its way through Congress.
"The Puritan Migration to America, 1620-1640." From Bedford/St. Martin's MapCentral. |
Brooke Hindle (1918-2001) was the historian emeritus at the
Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History when he, along with (current)
Brown University’s Steven Lubar, authored Engines of Change: The American Industrial Revolution 1790-1860. It’s a beautiful book that emphasizes the
material aspects of innovation (later reinforced in Hindle’s excellent
Emulation and Innovation). It also answers in a very simple way a very profound
question: How did a nation of farmers stage their own Industrial Revolution and
by 1851 stun the world with their technological prowess at London’s Crystal
Palace Exhibition?
One answer, of course, is theft and industrial espionage. If
good ideas can be stolen and copied, from Samuel Slater’s work in duplicating
an Arkwright-type spinning factory at Pawtucket, to Francis Cabot Lowell’s
study of English power looms, then revolution is possible. Indeed, even Eli
Whitney—who all good Americans know invented the cotton gin—relied upon a
millennium of global cotton gin technology (and not very well, Angela Lakwete’s
Inventing the Cotton Gin tells us). One wonders if the talk in 19th-century
Parliament about Americans wasn’t roughly akin to that of today’s U.S government and its recent indictment of China’s military for stealing
industrial technology.
A second answer is that Jefferson’s virtuous farmer also just
happened to be conversant with machines of all kinds; a healthy farm required
that cams, ratchets, escapements, pistons, and even (or especially!) whiskey
stills be in good working order. Lubar and Hindle quote one New Jersey
farmer-tavern keeper, who told an astounded visitor not long after the
Revolution, “I am a mover, a shoemaker, furrier, wheelwright, farmer, gardener,
and when it can’t be helped, a soldier. I make my bread, brew my beer, kill my
pigs; I grind my axes and knives; I built those stalls and that shed there; I
am barber, leech, and doctor.”
Finally—and here’s the Great Migration aspect—America (with a
few notable decades excepted) has long been a welcome destination for skilled
artisans. Dutch and Polish glassworkers, Italian silk reelers, and German
sawyers arrived in Jamestown, the authors tell us, at the invitation of the
Virginia Company. England, itself a destination for German miners, Flemish
weavers, and French glassworkers and horologists, in turn transferred those
technologies to America as skilled artisans crossed the Atlantic.
As early as 1754, Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, had a pumped and
piped water supply courtesy of Moravian Germans. The famous Pennsylvania rifle
and Conestoga wagon evolved from German prototypes. The sawmill, so important
to America’s growth, was brought by artisans from Hamburg. England passed along
navigational and mathematical instruments, clockmaking, gunnery, and coal-fuel
industries. In the 1830s and 1840s when the steam engine pushed the geographic
center of industry from New England to Pennsylvania, it was English, Scottish,
Welsh, and Cornish miners and ironworkers who brought their skills to bear.
“The leading cities—Philadelphia, Boston, and New York—received a continuing
stream of artisans,” Hindle and Lubar write, “most of them from London, quickly
making available the skills and newer developments of the British metropolis.”
Occupational portrait of a skilled worker, ca. 1850. Courtesy of the Library of Congress. |
There seems more than a casual relationship between the fact
that, from 1824 to 1831, more than 1,000 Englishmen classifying themselves as
“machinists” immigrated to the United States, and by 1860 American machinists
were among the best in the world.
Like a modern CEO warning his engineers that they will surely
fail if they adopt a “not invented here” mentality, George Washington told his
countryman in his first address to Congress that “the introduction of new and
useful inventions from abroad” could be as valuable as those created by the
“skill and genius” of Americans. Those kinds of “foreign entanglements” were
ones that the Commander in Chief appeared to welcome.
While Hindle and Lubar focus on cutting edge technology, we
also know that sometimes the sort of “artisan talent” that migrated to America
came in the form of incredible persistence and sheer ambition. In The Maritime History of Massachusetts, Samuel Eliot Morison tells us that conditions on
whaling vessels became so abysmal that American citizens refused to serve; this
left opportunity for “Kanakas, Tongatabooras, Filipinos, and even Fiji
cannibals like Melville’s hero Queequeg” to make their way in America. By
taking jobs that Americans would not, these hearty immigrants supported an
enormously profitable global trade and enriched their adopted country.
It’s a powerful historical reminder that this Great Migration
of skills that advanced America’s innovation economy over the last 300 years
sprang from both the most advantaged and the least advantaged immigrant groups.
Once again we are embroiled in a great debate about
immigration. (For two sides of the coin, see Howie Carr’s piece here and David Brooks’ here.) I don’t pretend to know the best policy, nor do I suggest that
three centuries of this Great Migration of talent and technology should be the
only thing considered in the debate. I just hope, given the impact of this
extraordinary gift, that it is at least one of the factors considered by those
who might otherwise close our borders.
2 comments:
A lovely piece, Eric.
One of the things that fascinates me about immigration is that, until the late 19th c, it was considered imperative to build a strong nation. Not until the immigrations acts of 1882 did America take the position that more workers were a bad thing. Times and conditions change, of course, but many people seem to have forgotten that the anti-immigration thought so prevalent in the 20th (and 21st) centuries is a new phenomenon. (Perhaps attributable in part to longer lifespans, come to think of it.)
Don't forget the Dutch during the same time, to ueber-entrepreneurial NA/NYC!
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