"The Eldorado to the South":
French-Canadians in the U.S.
"The Americans may say with truth," Canadian social critic Gordon Smith observed a century ago, "that if they do not annex Canada they are annexing the Canadians." In the last three decades of the nineteenth century, English- and French-speaking Canadians went south to the United States in unprecedented numbers. The era of mass immigration from Europe was just beginning. Tens of thousands of immigrants were arriving in Canada, just as in the U.S. But unlike the United States, Canada was both a receiver and a donor of immigrants. Europeans were arriving, but many native-born Canadians (and some Europeans who had arrived earlier) were leaving. The 1900 U.S. Census counted 1.2 million Canadians in the United States, equivalent to a quarter of the entire population of Canada at the time.
Except for a brief period in the 1920s, Canadians never again migrated to the United States in such large numbers. But Canadian immigration continues down to the present. While few in the United States realize it, the U.S. has received more immigrants from Canada than from any other country in the Western Hemisphere, including Mexico. Historically, Canadian immigrants have faced fewer legal barriers than almost any other group. But the southward pull of the United States has often been stronger than the law. According to the INS, the fourth largest group of illegal immigrants in the United States today are Canadians.
Yet Canadian immigration plays a very small role in most histories of immigration to the U.S. In part, this is because of the ease and eagerness with which Canadian immigrants assimilated. Sharing language, ethnicity and religion with the dominant groups in the United States, English-speaking Canadians rarely formed distinct communities and often appeared to dissolve into the larger mix of English, Irish and Scottish immigrants and their descendants. These "secret Canadians" turn up in central places in American culture: the inventors of baseball and Superman were both Canadians.
Other Canadians had more difficulty –and less interest– in assimilating to English-speaking American culture. While Anglo Canadians spread across the United States, French Canadians migrated to a relatively small area within New England, and concentrated in specific places there. Keeping up ties with nearby Canada, they began an enormous chain migration –900,000 French Canadians went south between 1860 and 1920– that provided a crucial workforce for industrializing America.
Within Canada, French-speakers were concentrated in Quebèc and the Maritime (Eastern) provinces. As the population of these overwhelmingly rural areas began to outgrow the land's ability to feed them, French Canadians looked for ways to supplement their farm income, keep their land, and feed their families. First the canals and, by the 1870s, the railroads offered an easy way to travel south. And after the Civil War, the cotton and woolen mills of New England, the heart of industrial America at the time, were increasingly hungry for labor.
Set up decades before, the mills had always employed a majority-female workforce: first the women were Yankees, the daughters of local farmers, and then they began to be replaced by the Irish. After 1870, the mills would fill with young French Canadians, women and men. Across New England, cities would develop new neighborhoods, "little Canadas," where French was spoken. Other immigrants would arrive to work at the mills, but in cities like Lowell and Fall River, Massachusetts, Lewiston, Maine, and Manchester, New Hampshire, French Canadians would be dominant (see map). In many ways, they had more in common with other European immigrant groups than with Americans or even Anglo-Canadians. They were set apart from "native" Americans by language and, to a lesser extent, by their Catholic religion. But one crucial thing made them different from those who had made the dangerous and expensive passage across the Atlantic: Montreal was never more than a day's train ride away.
This meant that French Canadians did not have to make the dramatic break with "old country" that many other groups did. Like other immigrant groups, French Canadians adapted to America within networks of neighbors and relations from home. Unlike other groups, they kept moving back and forth, using seasonal jobs like lumbering to complement farming in Quebèc, or adapting their schedules in industrial work to be able to return once or twice a year to the farm. Even more than other groups, French Canadians came to occupy a space between two nations: keeping up ties with both, reluctant to abandon their birth place, and with one of the lowest naturalization rates of any immigrant group.
For some U.S. political leaders and labor activists, this made them suspicious, as they did not seem committed enough to the United States. In 1882, labor reformer and Massachusetts government official Carroll Wright declared that "the Canadian French are the Chinese of the Eastern States. They care nothing for our institutions, civil, political or educational... They are a horde of industrial invaders."
Wright's statement was hostile and threatening, and suggests the fear and prejudice with which natives often treated French Canadians. When Wright wrote these words, the U.S. had just passed the Chinese Exclusion Act, banning any further entry of the thousands of Chineese migrants into the United States on the grounds that they undercut the wages of other workers and could not be "assimilated" into American society.
But while this prejudice was real, it also had its limits. Shortly after making his declaration in an official publication, Wright found himself forced to apologize to French-Canadian community leaders. And when actual Chinese workers were brought in during a strike a few years later, as historian Robert Harney notes, they were met with a violent riot. The history of French-Canadian immigration, while full of ethnic tension, had none of this level of violence. Their place as workers in the mills was not disputed until the mills closed. But relatively few French-Canadians became overseers and foremen, and almost none became managers.
The mills and factories that French-Canadians had come to work in were massive: the Amoskeag mills at Manchester were the largest in the world. The world they helped to make in New England was industrial, urban, and modernizing, a far cry from the world they had left in rural Quebèc. But that world had not been left entirely behind: many still tried to return. And the "little Canadas" in the United States continued with the struggle for cultural survival they had long carried out in Quebèc. After all, in Canada they were also ruled by a English-speaking government that recognized some of their rights, but relegated French language and culture to secondary status. Both north and south, French Canadians struggled for "survivance," preserving French and Catholic identity while negotiating their relationship with English-speaking society. The documents in this lesson, all accounts from immigrants or their children, tell of the challenges and difficulties of that search for survival, building a space in between America and Canada, and between the farm and the factory floor.
Documents1. Jacques Ducharme, "The Eldorado to the south", 1870s-1900s
2. David Morin, "French, or American, or Yankees?", 1890s-1930s
3. Cora Pellerin, "I Was a Wildcat", 1910s-1930s
4. Antonia Bergeron, "We Had a Lot of Misery", 1890s-1930s
5. Marie Proulx, "A Life of Glory, to Work in the Mills", 1910s-30sBack to Top
Sources and Further ReadingRecommended Books
Mary Blewett, The Last Generation: Work and Life in the Textile Mills of Lowell,
Massachusetts (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1990)
Raymond Breton and Pierre Savard, eds. The Quebec and Acadian Diaspora in North
America (Toronto: Multicultural History Society, 1982)
C. Stewart Doty, The First Franco-Americans: New England Life Histories from the
Federal Writers' Project 1938-1939 (Orono, Maine: University of Maine at Orono Press,
1985)
Jacques Ducharme, The Shadows of the Trees: The Story of the French-Canadians in New
England (New York: Harper & Row, 1943)
Tamara Hareven and Randolph Langenbach, Amoskeag: Life and Work in an American
Factory-City (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978)
Bruno Ramirez, On the move: French-Canadian and Italian migrants in the North Atlantic
economy, 1860-1914 (Toronto : McClelland & Stewart, 1991)
John Herd Thompson and Stephen Randall, Canada and the United States: Ambivalent
Allies (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1994)
Sources
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1. "The Eldorado to the south", 1870s-1900s
Jacques Ducharme, The Shadows of the Trees: The Story of the French-Canadians in New England (New York: Harper & Row, 1943), 56-62.
Ducharme was a Franco-American journalist, descended from immigrants from Canada, who set out in the 1940s to document the history of French-Canadians in New England. What follows is his description of a "typical" migration.
The whole picture of the migration is not too hard to reconstruct. On the one hand, there was the manufacturer in New England, burdened with orders, and shorthanded for the operation of his mill. Perhaps he had a few French-Canadians, remnants of the thirty thousand and more who had fought in the Civil War. They were handy employees, and some owner must have thought of sending an agent to Canada for more of them. Perhaps one of his French-Canadian employees suggested it to him. When an agent was chosen, it was one who could speak French. This was perhaps the way my great-grandfather went back to the old county, to visit those towns he had known, to speak to all the former acquiantances, and then to wander farther and farther in search of willing hands.
"You should come to Holyoke -to Lowell- to Manchester. The pay is good. You work only twelve hours a day. Think of it. A dollar a day, a dollar and a half a day, just to stand in front of a machine."
That is one side of the story, the business side. There is the other side -the great adventure. Generally the father of the family would make the trip, would find employment through the offices of his agent, and would lay money by for his family to join him. It might be six months before he could afford this. Sometimes the farm was sold. Sometimes it was kept. If the latter, it was with the idea that the family would return ot the soil when enough money had been amassed to pay the mortgage or whatever debts had been incurred. In most instances the farm was sold, and with this gesture the émigrés showed that they were leaving Canada forever.
It was a drastic change of life. The villages of Quebec are small units, where everyone knows his neighbors, where the parish church is the hub of the wheel of life, and where amusement means holiday gatherings and an occasional fair or errant circus.... Classes were rigidly maintained, the notary was monsieur le notaire, just as the doctor was monsieur le Docteur, while Charland the farmer was simply "Charland." Authority was a fearsome thing. In such fear was it held that even today in many villages there is no policeman.
All spoke the same language, held to the same faith, and many owned to common ancestry. It was a bucolic life dependent for stability upon crops and the state of the market. All that people owned was the soil about them. If that failed, what was left?
The first rumors about work in the south must have come from the young men. Tired of the drudgery of the fields, they went to the brickyards of New England during the summer months, returned and no doubt talked. The first rube in any village must have had many listeners. That might well have turned the heads of rebellious youths who knew only the life of their father;s farm, which they looked forward to inheriting sometime in middle life. For la père [the father] did not die young.
The young men were not the only ones who would be interested in tales of the Eldorado to the south, of easy money to be earned in the factories. Older men, fathers of families, men past their forties and fifites, must also have talked long into the evenings with their wives and older children. There would be discussions of ways and means. Was the farm worth keeping? Would they be able to earn their living in States? Who should go?
The farm would seem empty for a while, then letters would come. "I have met Lalime. You will remember him. He used to live in the farm nearby. He helped find a job, and I am staying with his family. I am in the cotton mill. I will put something aside every week, and it will not be long before you can join me. Give my love to the little ones."
In time the reunion would be effected, and the family would go to join the father, who met them at the station. Over the years it became a familiar site in many New England cities -the foreign-looking father and the mother, with the children following in a procession behind. For there were always children, and this was what made the Yankee marvel.
Relative prosperity was not long in coming, for all hands turned to labor. Often the father was the only one who could not work, being of an age when mill labor was too exacting. The children and the mother then became the support of the family, the father housekeeper and cook. Or if he were still hale, he might go into the suburbs of the city and revert to a former occupation -wood chopping.
Six and eight inch trunks were meager food for the sharp ax. There was none of the satisfaction to splitting a hardwood log with wedges. But it did not matter. The farmer was away from the soot of the city and in the shadows of the trees that had kinship with those that had once sheltered his cattle. As his ax rose and fell, doubtless he thought of another farm, far from the new city that he had come to love and hate. It was to prove a dream for him and for others like him, but the nostalgia wa there, to plague him when the wind rose high, and the clouds swept past the brick apartment houses. When the snow came, he might remember how he had once worried aobut his cattle. Oh, it was much better in the new land, but how much more pleasurable in the old.
The mother and children did not mind the new life so much -the children because it was new, and the mother because it was comfortable. The mother knew secutirt for the first time,and could be sure of meat for the pot. There would be no lack of visitors, for many of the old neighbors had followed them to the States.
The "how" of my ancestors' coming is not the "why." When I was back home [after a visit to Québec], and had begun to write about these things, I realized that perhaps the truth of the whole matter was that Québec had simply outgrown its bounds. Some time or other emigration would have been necessary, and industrialism in New England was, after all, only a circumstance that deflected the human tide southward instead of to the west.
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2."French, or American, or Yankees?", 1890s-1930s
David Morin, interview, in C. Stewart Doty, The First Franco-Americans: New England Life Histories from the Federal Writers' Project 1938-1939 (Orono, Maine: University of Maine at Orono Press, 1985), 69-74.
Morin was interviewed by Robert Grady in 1938. He had worked twenty years in a mill, and then become manager of a pool hall in Old Town, Maine.
I came here [to Old Town, Maine] from Quebec in 1882, when I was twelve years old. There were twenty-five of us in the family. We had to sell our farm to get here. A cousin of my old man's wrote to us and asked us to come here and run his farm on shares. When we got here we found that if the farm had been in Quebec it would have been big enough to support two families, but it wouldn't here. Oh, yes, the ground is much richer up there. We couldn't all live off the farm, so some of us had to get jobs.
There were no immigration laws when we came here. They used to go up to get them in those days. They didn't have people enough here to run the cotton mills and the factories. They used to go up there and offer people good jobs at good wages and their fare paid to any place they wanted to go. A lot of them went to Massachusetts. I worked in Salem in a cotton mill for a while... I worked in Salem only six months. It wasn't only me -the whole family went. It was right after the sawmill shut down in the fall, and we all came back in the spring.
A lot of people who came to the States didn't intend to stay here. As soon as they had earned enough money to pay for their farms they went back to Canada. Some of them stayed here, and some of them came back again from Canada. When they come over here now they stay...
My children were born here and brought up here. What would you call them? Are they French, or Americans, or Yankees? What is a Yankee, anyway? The Indians are the only real Yankees, if you come right down to it...Look back through the histories and you'll see that the French were here [in American] just as soon as the English. The only Americans here were the Indians.
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3. "I Was a Wildcat", 1910s-1930s
Cora Pellerin, interview, in Tamara Hareven and Randolph Langenbach, Amoskeag: Life and Work in an American Factory-City (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978), 201-211.
Pellerin was born in Quebec in 1900, one of sixteen children, and went to work in the Amoskeag mill in Manchester, New Hampshire in 1912. She worker in the mill until it closed in 1936, and then worked in other mills and factories until 1972. She was interviewed in the mid-1970s.
When I talk about my work in the mill, to my daughters especially, they think it's a story; and when I say something about living on a farm, to them it's a story. They don't believe it's true that we were that backward.
I came from Canada in 1911. I started working in 1912 when I was eleven. My brother-in-law, Bert Molloy, was overseer, and my other boss was John Jacobson....My father and two of my brothers worked in the mills.... We were thirteen in the family; eleven children and my mother and father. My mother had sixteen children, but five of them died as babies.
When I was eleven, my father had a birth certificate made for me in the name of my sister Cora, who died as a baby, because you couldn't go in to work unless you were fourteen. I worked in the old Amoskeag as Cora, but I was naturalized [as a US citizen] in 1936 as Valeda. Now I stick to Valeda because of my Social Security, but everyone knows me as Cora.
My father didn't want to sell his farm in Canada. He cut the first tree when he was thirteen years old in the forest where he made that farm. He was a farmer, and that was his life. He came to the States because my mother was brought up here, and she talked my father into bringing the whole family together to Manchester [New Hampshire].
People were doing that in Canada. When they had three of four children that could work, they would come out for a few years to make money, and then they'd go back to the farm. It took my father a long time to decide. They came and stayed for three years; and when they went back in 1914, I was thirteen and working here, so I begged my mother to leave me. My mother said, "If I can find a good boardinghouse, I'll let you stay." So she found a family-style boardinghouse that would take me, my sister and my brother. So my mother went back to Canada and we stayed here, but I'm the only one in my family who has always lived in Manchester.
If I wanted to go back on the farm, I'd have to go work in private houses in Montreal and Quebec, take care of the house, wash clothers, help with the food, and whatever there is to be done. Housemaid. My mother didn't want that.... When I was a little girl, I liked it on the farm in Canada. But I didn't miss it, because for me it was paradise here in Manchester. Everything we had on the farm was for a purpose. When we used to go to school, we'd stop and pick up seom berries. We'd bring strawberries or raspberries or blueberries or maple syrup to the village, and the ones that didn't have any farms would give us sugar or some food. We'd exchange that instead of money. I didn't want to live that way, not after I got my pay every other week. Live on a farm, raise eight, ten kids - oh no!... And in the winter, the snow was so high it would come all the way up to the windows. We had a sled. I remeber we sat on the floor of the sled and they put a big fur rug on top of us; that's how we went to church. Otherwise we'd freeze to death.
I never missed Canada. My life is more American. I worked in Canada during the strike of 1922, in Trois Rivières, but I would never go back there to live. It was paradise here because you got your money, and you did whatever you wanted with it.
When I first started in the Amoskeag, I worked in the spinning room in the Amory Mill. We all worked together. The spinning room was for young girls. We used to dance in the aisles. We'd go in the hallways, and one would watch for the boss while the other one took care of our work. We danced, and a Greek boy played the harmonica. We thought the weave room was for married women and old maids.
When I was seventeen, I got my own room. I lived there for four years, and then I got an apartment all by myself.... Not too many women were living alone in their own apartments. I was a wildcat. Some mothers of my girlfriends, after they knew I was in an apartment, they didn't want their daughters to chum around with me any more. In those days, if you lived alone in a room, they were afraid their daughters would get the idea. I had me own home, I had everything. I cooked my own food.
I knew my husband for ten or eleven years before we got married, because I would never get married while my mother was living. No! I wanted to take care of her when she got old and sick.... My husband was also still taking care of his mother.... I was satisfied the way I was. I had plenty of time to raise a family.
I was an old maid at thirty, but I was happy to be an old maid. My friends were all married with four or five kids. Some of them were divorced. I didn't want that. My mother had sixteen children, and I was right in the middle, so I learner in a hurry. I made good money, I dressed up well, I went dancing -I was having a good time. Nobody was telling me what to do and when to go to bed.
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4. "We Had a Lot of Misery", 1890s-1930s
Antonia Bergeron, interview, in Tamara Hareven and Randolph Langenbach, Amoskeag: Life and Work in an American Factory-City (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978), 58-64.
Bergeron was born in Canada in 1879, came to Manchester in 1895, and worked until the birth of her first child. She died in 1976.
I came here in 1895; and in 1900, when the century began, I got married. Before that, I worked in the mills and wove bags.
My father was on the farm in Canada. He wasn't very rich. He met my mother at Chicoutimi. It was a village at that time. She was a schoolteacher. After a few years of being married, he took her to a farm where there weren't even any roads. They spent their winters in a log campe when there wasn't any farming. They had nothing. Don't think my mother didn't find it hard in log camps. I still remember the camps.
We were thirteen children; I was the seventh. I went to a small school in the village with only about ten children. My mother taught school there. That's why we were more advanced. My mother started us... After I finished high school, as they called it, the inspector came and said, "If you want to teach school, you'll have to do model teaching first. I'll give you a small place, and you'll teach school to perhaps ten or twelve children. You'll start by showing them ABCD. It'll be very easy." But it was cold. In the morning, I knew it was the schoolteacher who would have to get up and light the strove to heat the school before the children arrived. So when my neighbors from Lake St. John went to the U.S., I decided to go with them. I said to my mother and father, "You know, instead of teaching school here, I want to go to the U.S." Of course, it cost them a little to let me go -not money, but feelings- but they knew the people well and they had faith in me.
We had a lot of misery when we arrived in Manchester. I still remember the old lady where I stayed. Her daughters started working before us, so she gave them jam. But we didn't work, so she didn't give us any. Had I know that we'd have all that misery here, I'd never have come. If I'd only known what I knew after. But it was too late.
I didn't know anyone when we arrived; and in a few weeks, I owed room and board money. Then I met a women who had taught me school in Canada when I was small. She worked in the mills here. She helped me, found me a job in the mills. After five or six months, I started to get my affairs straightened out. My mother came up later with my little brother and my little sister. She bought some secondhand clothers, an old stove, some beds and mattresses, and she set up housekeeping. As time went on, we'd have another person come up, and another, and finally the whole family was here. My father gave his land to one of his sons and came up to the States, too, but he didn't stay.
At the Amoskeag Company, for a time the bosses were very fresh. The boss would chase the girls and slap their behinds, give them kicks in the rear end. They'd send them away, those whom they didn't like, and not pay them. A little while ago, I saw the second hand [the foreman], Mr. L., on the street. He used to visit his daughter, who lived upstairs from us. I said, "Get out of the way or I'll run you over." I said, "When we worked for you, you ran after us, you'd kick us. So if you don't get out of the way, I'll run you down with the car" [starts laughing]...
The second hands favored people because of nationality. Sometimes we'd have German third hands who favored their own people. At time syou'd have to wait longer than others because they had to start other work before getting to yours. That's what went on. But "real Americans," so to speak, there weren't any working in the mills. The bosses were Americans and Irishmen.
When the Amoskeag closed, oh my God! It was awful. Then there were a lot on relief. I never was because we were not affected. Everything went slack everywhere. Business fell completely.
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5. "A Life of Glory, to Work in the Mills", 1910s-1930s
Marie Proulx, interview, in Tamara Hareven and Randolph Langenbach, Amoskeag: Life and Work in an American Factory-City (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978), 65-71.
Proulx was born in Canada and came to Manchester, New Hampshire, in 1912.
In Canada, my father was a boss in the timber yard. In the summer, they would steer the wood on the river with poles. In the winter, he worked in the timber yard. That was his daily bread. He was on the road year-round, while we were working at home. So we lived well, we ate well, we weren't lacking anything, but we never had a father. One baby was born during the days that he spent away from home. Nine months without coming home! It was a long time for a woman. My mother was tired of seeing my father on the river and in the logging camps, and she said, "I'm always alone with the children. I'm sick and tired of this." He said, "Me, too. I'm tired of being on the road." So they decided to come to Manchester.
At the time we were six in the house. We had to help our mother; she had everythin on her back. My mother already knew of the life in the city of Manchester because she came here when she was fourteen years old and worked in the mills. At twenty-one years of age, she returned to Canada to get married, and she stayed.
When we came to Manchester, my father found work right away. I was twelve years old when I arrived here and started work. At age fifteen, I went to #4 Mill. We [her husband also worked there] were there when we were married, and we stayed there. I was twenty years without going out of that room.... For me it was a life of glory to work in the mills. Oh, did I like it! I liked it enough to miss it when I was all done. I finished in 1935. My little girl was born in 1933; she was two years old when I stopped.
A person who always wanted her work well done there never sat down, never. You had to pick out your time to eat, to have lunch and go for a dringk, so as not to let your work go down.... I lost my eyes at #4 Mill. That was a mill that had all sorts of colors - for a while we had 101 colors. I had good eyes, and when the bodd noticed that I always found faults, he put me in front to look for them...
If a Canadian got a higher job, it was because he had Irish friends. Like my husband Omer, who became a little boss, a second hand, because the big bosses like him. He was very friendly with those guys -they advanced him because he was expert in his work... We often were aware that people favored their own nationality.
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