Esslinger, Dean R. Immigrants and the City: Ethnicity and Mobility in a Nineteenth Century Midwestern City. Port Washington, New York: Kennikat Press, 1975. Pp. 56. Tables, maps. $9.95


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Urban History Review
Revue d'histoire urbaine

Esslinger, Dean R. Immigrants and the City: Ethnicity and
Mobility in a Nineteenth Century Midwestern City. Port
Washington, New York: Kennikat Press, 1975. Pp. 56. Tables,
maps. $9.95
Michael B. Katz

Numéro 2-77, october 1977

URI : https://id.erudit.org/iderudit/1019581ar
DOI : https://doi.org/10.7202/1019581ar

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Urban History Review / Revue d'histoire urbaine

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0703-0428 (imprimé)
1918-5138 (numérique)

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Katz, M. B. (1977). Compte rendu de [Esslinger, Dean R. Immigrants and the City:
Ethnicity and Mobility in a Nineteenth Century Midwestern City. Port
Washington, New York: Kennikat Press, 1975. Pp. 56. Tables, maps. $9.95]. 
Urban History Review / Revue d'histoire urbaine,(2-77), 133–134.
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133 

structure and consciousness in 19th century Britain with which the 
North American experience can be compared. Furthermore, considering 
the flow of Scottish immigrants to this continent, Gray1 s work may 
provide a more direct insight into the development of industrial 
capitalism in North America. 

Mark J. Stern 
York University 

* * * 

Esslinger, Dean R. Immigrants and the City: Ethnicity and Mobility 
in a Nineteenth Century Midwestern City. Port Washington, New 
York: Kennikat Press, 1975. Pp. 156. Tables, maps. $9.95. 

Immigrants and the City is a study of immigrant mobility in 
South Bend, Indiana, between 1850 and 1880. As it grew in size from 
1,378 to 7,070, South Bend shifted from a commercial to a small 
industrial city with a predominantly native-born population. Esslinger 
studies the minority: all immigrants (at first English, Irish, and 
German, later Polish) and their children. The work is primarily 
quantitative, supplemented by material from newspapers and other local 
historical sources. 

Esslinger traces the geographic origins of the population, 
the extent of population persistence, residential patterns, occupational 
mobility, and community leadership. He finds that only about one-fifth 
of the foreign population remained in the city during intervals of ten 
years and that industrialization had little effect on persistence. 
Residential patterns were not segregated, though by the end of the 
period more clustering by ethnicity and occupation had become evident. 
The Polish immigrants remained in semi-skilled factory work while the 
Irish, English, and Germans more often entered skilled work or non-
manual occupations. Native-born sons of foreign men had more 



134 

occupational success than their foreign-born peers. Immigrants other 
than Poles managed to attain positions of leadership within the city 
largely through participation in a reasonably extensive network of 
voluntary societies. In essence, Esslinger interprets the immigrant 
experience as modified rosy. 

Esslinger does not compare the experience of immigrants to 
that of natives, which makes it hard to interpret his findings. Nor 
does he specify his methodology in any detail. There is no indication, 
for instance, of how he linked people from one census to another. The 
analysis rests primarily on simple two-way cross-tabulation without the 
introduction, in important places, of controls for age or other 
variables. In some places no evidence for conclusions is offered. 

According to Esslinger, the rate of upward mobility among 
manual workers in South Bend was much higher than in Newburyport, 
Massachusetts, as reported by Thernstrom. (p. 81) His conclusion rests 
on an incredible error. He presented Thernstrom1s figures as though 
they applied to all foreign-born manual workers in Newburyport and 
compared them to those for all foreign-born manual workers in South 
Bend. However, Thernstrom1s figures apply only to common laborers who, 
quite naturally, ended up far less often as skilled workers or small 
proprietors than men who began as skilled workers. In South Bend, as 
in most places, the skilled workers outnumbered the unskilled laborers 
and dominated the original group whose movement Esslinger traced. His 
comparison with Thernstrom is thus totally spurious and comparative 
rates of mobility in Newburyport and South Bend remain an open question. 

Michael B. Katz 
Department of History 
York University