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It’s easy to forget that most ocean liner travelers were not rich, famous, or titled. There were no dance bands or midnight strolls on deck. They did not check in their jewels with the purser or dress for dinner.Most of them carried everything they owned in their hands. Or on their backs.
The vast majority of steamship passengers between 1850 and the harsh immigration quotas of the early 1920s were immigrants fleeing poverty and persecution in Ireland, Southern Europe, and the Russian Empire. Big liners usually carried about 600 in first class, 500 in second class, and between 1,000-2,000 in steerage. In the peak immigration of year of 1907, New York’s Ellis Island processed over one million immigrants.
Immigration was big business. The model was simple. Charge $25 a ticket (or about $500 in today’s money), provide steerage passengers the absolute bare minimum of space, cuisine, and comfort, and pack as many people into the least desirable parts of the ship as possible.
RMS "Celtic" of the White Star Line, 1901. Built for immigrant profits, with a capacity for 300 1st class, 160 2nd class, 2,350 steerage.
Conditions in third class/steerage varied widely by the shipping line. In some ships, such as the Titanic and Lusitania, steerage passengers were lucky to have small private staterooms that berthed between 4-8 passengers. They were waited on by stewards in spare but spacious dining rooms. In others, such as Hamburg-American’s Kaiserin Auguste Victoria, immigrants slept in vast, open dormitories with no absolutely no privacy. Laundry hung on the makeshift bunks. The smell was rank at best, nauseating at worst: body odor, soiled bedding, and vomit. Food ranged from basic and hearty to barely edible. Many immigrants had never seen a toilet before coming aboard ship. Mass panic ensued when a rat slunk into the general room. Confined to the lowest, darkest parts of the liner, steerage passengers had little access to natural light or air, and rough winter crossings were particularly frightening for people that had never strayed more than 25 miles from their small village. For sport, first and second class passengers would sometimes toss food scraps down to the steerage decks and watch their less fortunate fellow passengers fight over the previous day’s tea sandwiches and pastries.
It was the sight of the Statue of Liberty that proved an indelible memory for those who endured the 5 to 12 day crossing in steerage. As their ship sailed past the great lady, hundreds of immigrants would cram the decks, cheering, crying, falling to their knees.
One such immigrant was 5 year old Israel Baline from Russia, who arrived in New York with this family in 1893, fleeing the brutal czarist pograms. Fifty years later, the famous American songwriter, by then known as Irving Berlin, composed a moving tribute to the millions of immigrants who shared the experience of seeing the Statue of Liberty for the first time. For his text, he used Emma Lazarus’s poem “The New Colossus,” written in 1883 to raise funds to complete the statue’s pedestal.
Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she
With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”
Not everyone welcomed these new arrivals, especially leaders of the growing eugenics and immigration restriction movements. Wrote Yale economics professor Francis A. Walker in 1896: “They have none of the inherited instincts and tendencies which made it comparatively easy to deal with the immigration of the olden time. They are beaten men from beaten races; representing the worst failures in the struggle for existence.”
On a personal note, I recently sang a setting of “Give Me Your Tired” at a performance by the Orpheus Club of Philadelphia. I cannot help getting emotional when singing this piece. A cynic might say that as a popular songwriter, Berlin was a master at pulling heartstrings. His “God Bless America” has been mocked as a “Tin Pan Alley” patriotism. Yet I feel given Berlin’s personal experience, “Give Me Your Tired, Your Poor” (written for the musical Lady Liberty) is as about as sincere and heartfelt as a popular song can get. 120 years ago, my maternal great-grandparents stood at the railing of a steamship after a miserable crossing in steerage and saw the same magnificent sight that inspired their fellow immigrant Irving Berlin. To leave everything they knew behind in the shtetl, sell all but their most treasured possessions, and say goodbye (usually forever) to friends and family, for a better life in a new country — if that isn’t courage, I don’t know what is.
And ultimately for my great-grandparents, the risk was worth the price.
Note: despite the tales of heroism and “women and children first” in the Titanic disaster, the tragic fact is that most of the ship’s 700 third class passengers were locked below until the very last moment. More first class men were saved (55 out of 171) than third class children (25 out of 80). 97% of the the 114 first class women survived, as opposed to 49% of 179 third class women.