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Germans
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Immigration >
Kleindeutschland > The End of Kleindeutschland
The End of Kleindeutschland
The End of Kleindeutschland As German New York
matured, class divisions intensified. In 1880, half of the German
population worked in manufacturing, but there was also a sizeable
group of Germans who owned many of those manufacturing operations
and profited from them. Wealthy German-Americans began to move out
of Little Germany in the 1870s, often taking their cultural institutions
with them. Furthermore, German-American workers and capitalists
now fought each other for control of the workplace. German-American
furniture makers, for example, led the massive 1872 strike for the
eight-hour workday, and the focus of their grievance was the Steinway
factory, owned by a prominent German-American businessman.
The cohesiveness of Kleindeutschland was beginning to disintegrate
in other ways. Eastern Europeans began moving into the area in the
1870s. While a third wave of German immigration was building in
the 1880s (nearly 1.8 million arrived in the U.S. between 1879 and
the end of the century), the new arrivals now preferred to settle
in Yorkville (Third Avenue in the 80s on Manhattan's Upper East
Side), where new and better tenements were being built. By 1910,
only 10% of Manhattan's German-born residents lived in the old Kleindeutschland.
Yorkville had replaced it as Manhattan's "Little Germany", and Eastern
European Jews now dominated the Lower East Side.
Stanley Nadel, Little Germany: Ethnicity, Religion, and Class
in New York City, 1845-1880 (Chicago, 1990); Dorothee Schneider,
Trade Unions and Community (1994)
See also: Immigration; Lower East Side; Gumpertz Family.
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