Thirty Years War? - Historum

**Patito de Hule** · November 27th, 2011, 09:51 AM

Jacob Riis spent twenty years fighting the slums in New York. As a pioneer in photojournalism, he also wrote How the Other Half Lives in 1890. The following quote got my attention:

Quote:

Perhaps the Bohemian quarter is hardly the proper name to give to the colony, for though it has distinct boundaries it is scattered over a wide area on the East Side, in wedge-like streaks that relieve the monotony of the solid German population by their strong contrasts. The two races mingle no more on this side of the Atlantic than on the rugged slopes of the Bohemian mountains; the echoes of the thirty years' war ring in New York, after two centuries and a half, with as fierce a hatred as the gigantic combat bred among the vanquished Czechs.

Is it really true? Did they carry the grudge to New York?

**unclefred** · November 27th, 2011, 10:58 AM

In the major cities of the German and Bohemian immigration, New York, Chicago, Cincinnati, Milwaukee, the two groups had the same differences, which came over with them. Bohemians were chiefly Catholic, then the unchurched folks,(free thinkers), followed by a minority of Protestants. Bohemians were less involved in the labor movement, and I believe, not sure, the Socialist movement, and the Anarchist movement, than the Germans. I've read that in Chicago, of the 130,000 19th century German immigrants, 100,000 were Bohemians.

From the article you referenced, Riis touches on some of this

"...A chief reason for this is doubtless the complete isolation of the Bohemian immigrant. Several causes operate to bring this about: his singularly harsh and unattractive language, which he can neither easily himself unlearn nor impart to others, his stubborn pride of race, and a popular prejudice which has forced upon him the unjust stigma of a disturber of the public peace and an enemy of organized labor. I greatly mistrust that the Bohemian on our shores is a much-abused man. To his traducer, who casts up anarchism against him, he replies that the last census (1880) shows his people to have the fewest criminals of all in proportion to numbers. In New York a Bohemian criminal is such a rarity that the case of two firebugs of several years ago is remembered with damaging distinctness. The accusation that he lives like the “rat” he is, cutting down wages by his underpaid labor, he throws back in the teeth of the trades unions with the counter-charge that they are the first cause of his attitude to the labor question..."

I would suppose the hard feelings of the two groups naturally followed them here.

**Patito de Hule** · November 27th, 2011, 12:01 PM

Thirty years war? Hyperbole, no doubt. Riis doesn't seem to think they assimilate very well. A few paragraphs down from your quote:

Quote:

Take a row of houses in East Tenth Street as an instance. They contained thirty-five families of cigarmakers, with probably not half a dozen persons in the whole lot of them, outside of the children, who could speak a word of English, though many had been ill the country half a lifetime. . .

His neighbor on the same floor has been here fifteen years, but shakes his head when asked if he can speak English. He answers in a few broken syllables when addressed in German. . .

A man with venerable beard and keen eyes answers our questions through an interpreter, in the next house. Very few brighter faces would be met in a day's walk among American mechanics, yet he has in nine years learned no syllable of English. German he probably does not want to learn. . .

This clearly grates on Riis. He himself was Danish, having emigrated in 1870.

**Patito de Hule** · November 27th, 2011, 12:25 PM

Bohemian Cigarmakers at Work in their Tenement
from Jacob Riis, How the Other Half Lives

Complete with stereotypes.

This material was published in 1890 and is in the Public Domain in the United States.