Quiet Invaders Revisited

The Transatlantic Experience: Migrants from Austria-Hungary in the United States, 1870-1930

Annemarie Steidl and James W. Oberly

From 1820 to 1920, up to 3.7 million people left the Habsburg Lands and headed overseas; five out of six of these transoceanic migrants chose the United States of America as their destination. Records of US immigration authorities show that various people from Imperial Austria and the Kingdom of Hungary were the largest single group among the new arrivals during the period from 1902 to 1911, comprising 27.9 percent of all migrants, followed by the Kingdom of Italy and the Russian Empire. The following paper will give a brief overview of transatlantic mass mobility from Imperial Austria and the Kingdom of Hungary by focusing on migrants moving to the US, their demographic and socio-economic characteristics, as well as their settlement and naturalization patterns.1

Nineteenth-century industrialization, the urbanization accompanying it, and the political and economic liberalization encouraging it made massive and voluntary transatlantic migration possible. The growing demand for low-skilled wageworkers in mines, factories and sweat shops, construction, and urban services, especially in the United States, triggered overseas migration. Starting in the mid-nineteenth century, more and more jobs, mainly short-term, attracted Europeans as the American economy was more labor-intensive, and even urban service jobs and factories relied heavily on temporary employments.2 By the end of the century, knowledge of the New World and the advantages of moving overseas were wide-spread all over Europe, which provided perfect conditions for the growing mobile labor force from Central Europe.

In comparison with other European regions such as the western German lands or the Scandinavian countries, inhabitants of the Habsburg Monarchy were latecomers to transatlantic migration. In the first half of the nineteenth century, people from Great Britain (including Ireland) and German territories dominated overseas migration while smaller numbers originated from France, the Scandinavian countries, and Switzerland. However, before the 1850s, only a handful of pioneers came from Southern, Central, or Eastern Europe. According to official surveys, 14,255 people left the Austrian provinces for destinations overseas between 1821 and 1830; from 1831 to 1840, the total was a mere 7,536 people. These low numbers changed rapidly in the decade from 1851 to 1860: The figures for transcontinental migrants from Austria-Hungary suddenly climbed to 27,045, with the US as the major destination.3 The Revolution of 1848 caused a noteworthy transatlantic migration from Imperial Austria. Many political refugees-and in many cases also their families-left Imperial Austria and fled over the Atlantic after 1849; that migration pattern peaked 1852-1854 and declined again until 1857-1858. These early movements lasted until the economic recession from 1873 to 1879 and the appearance of xenophobia against migrants in the US.4 In the Hungarian Kingdom and Croatia-Slavonia, the number of overseas migrants was even smaller-only a few hundred persons per year. American statistics listed 138,125 arrivals from the Hungarian Kingdom between 1821 and 1890.5

At the beginning of the 1890s, people from Imperial Austria reached a first peak of mass migration, until 1893, when the next economic recession in the US created unemployment and labor unrest.6 Austro-Hungarians preferred to postpone their transatlantic migration to the second half of the 1890s, when the US job market again offered lucrative employment. The end of the 1890s saw a more modest increase and then a quadrupling in the years from 1900 to World War I, when a new pattern of long distance migration emerged. By the first decade of the twentieth century, the Habsburg Monarchy was, besides the Kingdom of Italy, the major source of labor migrants for the US economy. Overseas migration was now a generally accepted practice to improve an individual's and a family's financial situation. It was a positively marked instrument for social advancement, and the rise in the number of people who moved over longer distances increased the information available concerning potential destinations. Even if images and visions of America as the land of milk and honey mostly did not correspond with reality, they still influenced migration decisions.7

Figure 1: Migration from Imperial Austria and the Kingdom of Hungary to the United States of America, 1871-1913

Note: While the US migration numbers for the Kingdom of Hungary are available from 1871 to 1913, numbers for Imperial Austria end in 1910.

Source: Hans Chmelar, The Austrian Emigration, 1900-1914, Perspectives in American History 7, (1973): 275-378, 285; Auswanderung und Rückwanderung der Länder der Ungarischen Heiligen Krone in den Jahren 1899-1913. Ungarische Statistische Mitteilungen, neue Serie Bd. 67, Budapest 1918.

According to the US census, the rate of Austro-Hungarian migrants who chose to make a living in the US rose constantly, with the biggest increase in the first decade of the twentieth century. More than a million people born either in Imperial Austria or the Kingdom of Hungary made the trip to the US between 1900 and 1910. Their share of the overall American population was growing as well. While in 1860, only 0.08 percent of the US population declared to be born in Austria-Hungary, by 1920 the number had gone up to 1.7 percent. Since the Habsburg Monarchy no longer existed as an entity in 1920, the US census bureau decided finally to enumerate these people according to their own birth-country statement.8

Transatlantic migration from Austria-Hungary should not be reduced to only one type of mass movement. During the nineteenth century, divergent overseas mobility patterns emerged along various regional, ethnic, and cultural lines and during different stages of economic development as well. Mobility patterns were closely linked with migrants' social status, gender, and religious and ethnic affiliations. In the second half of the century, Bohemians, Moravians, and people from Tyrol and Vorarlberg accounted for more than 80 percent of all international migrants from Imperial Austria. Up to the 1890s, most US migrants originated either in the provinces of Bohemia or Vorarlberg, spoke Czech, German or Yiddish; at the turn of the century, the newcomers from Austria-Hungary were mostly Poles, Slovaks, Croats, Slovenes, Hungarians, Serbs, or Romanians. In the first decade of the twentieth century, Galician Poles had the highest rate of US migration, followed by South-Slavs (Slovenes, Croats, and Serbs) and Slovaks from the Hungarian Kingdom.9 These groups were highly overrepresented in the transatlantic movement. The participation of Ukrainians was corresponded to their percentage in the overall population, while German speakers, Hungarians, Czechs, Romanians, and all others were underrepresented.10 Particularly in the first decade of the twentieth century, the Hungarian Kingdom became a major source of migration to the United States of America as well. There, the idea of transatlantic movements spread, from the Ukrainians in Galicia to people in Upper Hungary. Who were these people, what were their destinations in the US, and did they stay or return to Europe?

A sample of ship passenger manifests from Bremen and Hamburg to New York in 1910 shows differences of US migrants according to their ethnic belonging. It is important to emphasize that the differences between the groups, with some exceptions, are often not great. More than half of all America-bound migrants were male. Married migrants were in the minority, and about three-fourths of all people who made the transatlantic crossing were of prime employment age, between sixteen and forty. The high rate of young people is explained by the simple fact that migration is often associated with particular stages in the life cycle, especially young adulthood. With the exception of Ukrainians and Croats, who had the lowest rate of literacy, anywhere from 70 to 99 percent of the adult passengers from the Habsburg Monarchy were able to read and write. Agricultural work appears to have been the primary means of economic support before the transatlantic move, except for German speakers and other Jews.

We can identify different types of overseas migrants from the Habsburg Monarchy according to their origin regions and the period of departure. While Czech speakers, Jews, and many other German speakers already left during the second half of the nineteenth century from the most economically advanced regions in the west, in 1910, most migrants left from the eastern areas, from Galicia and the Hungarian Kingdom. Aside from the Jewish contingent, transatlantic migrants from Galicia and the northern counties of Hungary, today Slovakia, were a rather homogeneous group in terms of their migration patterns. On the contrary, many Bohemians and Moravians crossed the Atlantic in family groups; these groups had been migrating to the US since the 1850s. Even if only a minority of these families ended up as American farmers, their intention had been to make a permanent rather than a temporary move. Since these people migrated in family groups, their gender ratio was more or less balanced. Settlement on the land seems logically associated with balanced gender ratios among migrants.11 According to data for 1880, nearly 43 percent of people born in Bohemia or Moravia owned a farm in the US. As the contemporary scholar Emily Greene Balch stated, in the first decade of the twentieth century, more than...