The Era of Mass Migration from the Dual Monarchy to the U.S. (Post-Civil War to World War I)
After the Civil War, a growing number of people from the Dual Monarchy migrated to the United States. Initially, most of these migrants were Czechs from Bohemia and Vorarlbergers from the Austrian half of the Habsburg Monarchy. Towards the end of the 19th century, more and more Jews (from Galicia), Slovaks, Slovenes, Dalmatians, Hungarians migrated to the U.S. for economic reasons. They found work increasingly in the new industrial centers of Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Chicago, and New York. Some went to the western mining centers in Minnesota and Colorado. Between 1876 and 1910, some 3.5 million people migrated to the US from the Habsburg Monarchy (1.8 million from the Austrian provinces and 1.7 million from the Hungarian ones). 7.5 percent of Pittsburgh’s half million population came from Austria-Hungary. People from the Habsburg Monarchy constituted the largest immigrant cohort in the years before World War I. The Great War stopped this massive migration flow from Central Europe.
Between 1876 and 1910, some 3.5 million people migrated to the U.S. from the Habsburg Monarchy (1.8 million from the Austrian provinces and 1.7 million from the Hungarian ones).
Two successful migrants from Vorarlberg managed to make it to fame and fortune in the United States. The painter Franz Martin Drexel from Dornbirn first had some success as a portraitist in Philadelphia. In 1837, he began to deal in foreign currencies in Louisville and started the banking house of F.M. Drexel in Philadelphia in the 1840s, adding an office in San Francisco to make a fortune in the gold rush. With his two sons, Franz Martin developed his bank into one of the most successful banking houses in the U.S., also cooperating with America’s premier financier J.P. Morgan. In 1891, the Drexels endowed an institute that eventually became Drexel University in Philadelphia. Drexel’s granddaughter Katherine Drexel became a nun and financed some 60 schools in African-American ghettoes and Native-American reservations from her inheritance. In 1924, she founded Xavier University in New Orleans, the first black college in the U.S. In 2000, the Vatican canonized Saint Katherine.
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, July 2, 1915. Panoramic view of downtown, with rail yards, river, and coal barges. Many poor immigrants from the Habsburg Monarchy searched for opportunities in the industrial centers on the East Coast and the Midwest. Between 1902 and 1911, some 7.5 percent of Pittsburgh’s population came from Austria-Hungary.
Library of Congress
In 1864, Johann Michael Kohler migrated with his family from Schnepfau, Vorarlberg, to Minnesota where he farmed. His son Michael, one of eight children, moved to Chicago, Illinois, married well and moved to Sheboygan, Wisconsin. First working in the iron industry, he began producing enamel ware, such as pots, bath tubs and water closets. By 1900, Kohler Company, in the company town of Kohler Village, employed some 4,000 workers producing enameled toilets and bath tubs for the growing American middle class. The Kohler company became also known for authoritarian anti-union labor practices. Kohler’s son Herbert was elected governor of Wisconsin in the 1920s and his son Herbert, Jr. in the 1960s. The Kohler Company is still in family hands today and employs some 15,000 people.
In Galicia and Bukovina, entire villages were infected with emigration “fever” and travelled on ships from Hamburg and Bremen as well as from Trieste (with the Austro-Americana shipping line). Tens of thousands of poor Jews left for the new world. Anna Kupinski left Bukovina as an 8-year old for New Jersey: “Life was hard in Europe […] we were poor. We didn’t have any luxuries. We hardly had enough food.” Thousands of these poor migrants were injured or died in work accidents in coal mines and steel plants. In 1897, 18 striking workers, protesting poor working conditions and bad wages in the Pennsylvania coal mines (mainly migrants from Poland and Hungary in the Dual Monarchy), were killed in Lattimer, Pennsylvania, by a local sheriff’s posse.
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Sources:
Annemarie Steidl/Wladimir Fischer-Nebmaier/James W. Oberly, From a Multiethnic Empire to a Nation of Nations: Austro Hungarian Migrants in the US, 1870–1940 (TRANSATLANTICA vol. 10). Innsbruck: StudienVerlag, 2016.
Tara Zhara. The Great Departure: Mass Migration from Eastern Europe and the Making of the Free World. New York: W.W. Norton, 2016.
Meinrad Pichler. Auswanderer: Von Vorarlberg in die USA 1800-1938. Bregenz: Vorarlberger Autoren Gesellschaft, 1993.
Scott McDowell, ”The Price of Sovereignty: Indemnification and the
Lattimer Massacre of 1897,” in: Marija Wakounig/Ferdinand Kühnel, eds., Europa Orientalis 20, Vienna/Berlin: Lit Verlag [forthcoming].