Editor’s note:

Great waves of European immigrants swept into the United States to escape the poverty and oppression of their homelands around the turn of the 20th century. This six-part series focuses on how Bangor, as an example of one Maine community, experienced this rush of humanity. Each of the next five stories, beginning Monday, is about representative members of different ethnic groups whose descendants still live in the Queen City.

First of six stories

Henry David Thoreau said Bangor was “a star on the edge of night” twinkling at the border of a “howling wilderness.” That was 1846. By the first decade of the 20th century, things had changed considerably. Most of the wilderness was gone along with the caribou and the wolf. Logs clogged the Penobscot River part of the year, paper mills were sprouting like toadstools, and railroads continued extending their tracks through what remained of the virgin forests.

Because there were too few native workers to fuel this industrial revolution, Bangor’s star had become a blazing beacon for thousands of immigrants swarming into the state from Canada and from the major cities of southern New England and New York. They included Italians, Greeks, Poles, Germans, Lebanese from “Greater Syria,” Jews from the fringes of the Russian empire, post-famine Irish, Chinese, Scandinavians, including many from the Swedish Colony in Aroostook County, and Canadians, both English- and French-speaking.

“Bangor was an important city and Maine was an important place at that time,” said Norman Minsky, explaining why Eastern European Jews including his father came here. The Bangor lawyer is one of thousands of people living in the area who count some or all of their ancestors among the hordes who sailed to America in the great migration between the 1880s and the 1920s.

Minsky addressed a Penobscot Valley Senior College class last fall titled “Into the Melting Pot,” one of several speakers to talk about the experiences of the ethnic, racial and religious groups they represent. They made a convincing case that Bangor and environs are far more than the Yankee bastion often portrayed. While “Americanization” has erased many of the superficial differences among groups so that today at a glance it is often impossible to tell the difference between a Mayflower descendant and a Russian Jew, religious practices, customs and memories passed down by parents and grandparents often survived to take on lives of their own.

In 1910, at the heart of this influx, more than 17 percent of Bangor’s 24,803 residents were foreign immigrants and another 23 percent were the children of immigrants. Hundreds more transient workers – loggers, sailors, laborers – went uncounted.

If you had taken a stroll through downtown Bangor on a workday, you would have seen the Brountas brothers, George and Peter, and some of their Greek relatives working at 68 Main St. at their store, the Bangor Candy Kitchen; Peter LaFlamme, a former resident of the Province of Quebec, cut hair at his barbershop around the corner at 18 Water St. on Pickering Square; while John Patrick Frawley, the son of an Irish immigrant, tended the drug counter down the street at his pharmacy at Main and Cross streets. Maroun George, a native of Lebanon and a former peddler, ran a store at 192 Hancock St. on the East Side – the east side of the Kenduskeag Stream, that is – where he sold “fine and fancy articles” as well as items for peddlers seeking to gain an economic foothold in the new society.

Sterling Dymond, an African American from Fredericton, New Brunswick, worked for Great Northern Paper Co. as a logger and a river driver when he wasn’t home in Bangor with his family. Charles Ah and Goan Bentog were among the small group who worked in the Chinese laundries on Hammond, Park, Hodgdon, State and Exchange streets.

George Cuozzo, son of an Italian shoemaker from the Bronx, had an office at 23 Hammond St. where he was a general contractor. Over the years he had brought thousands of Italian laborers to Maine to work on the Bangor & Aroostook Railroad and other projects. In 1910, he might have been in Veazie supervising construction of the Bangor Hydro-Electric Co.’s new dam. Myer Minsky, who had recently organized a Zionist organization, doubtlessly was peddling goods from a horse-drawn wagon through the small towns outside of Bangor, while planning a new store in Brownville Junction where he would sell kerosene lamps, candy and tobacco until moving back to the Queen City.

Old Bangor reacts

Old Bangor definitely was taking notice of new Bangor, and not without some trepidation. “Not for a number of years has Bangor had such a metropolitan aspect … There are representatives of nearly every race on the globe, all sorts and conditions of men rarely seen outside of the large cities of the country,” commented a Bangor Daily Commercial piece on May 6, 1905, as quoted by Alfred T. Banfield in his paper “The History and Ethnicity of Italians in Maine.”

“Bangor has been likened to a huge sponge absorbing all of the waste of eastern Maine and the provinces, but while it is more or less true, it is somewhat of a libel on the city which supplies that vast country with merchandise …”

The Bangor Daily News complained the same year that there were too many Jewish, Lebanese and Armenian peddlers bothering people in the countryside. The newspaper raised doubts about the honesty of some of them.

Years later, Congregation Beth Israel’s Centennial History explained this important stage of economic development for many immigrants: “Unable to speak English and with little prospect of gainful occupation, these young Jews had no choice but to peddle small wares from a pack … Peddling required little or no investment, and the fertile field was open for the price of a peddler’s license. The rural areas were in need of goods of every description and the Jewish peddler continued to furrow the field now partly deserted by the Yankee. Gradually he went from basket to pack, from peddling on foot to a horse and wagon.”

Many had stores within a few years, and in due time downtown Bangor streets were dotted with stores and restaurants owned by Jews, Greeks, Irish, Lebanese and people of other nationalities.

Observant local people understood the importance of having immigrants come to Maine, whether as peddlers or ditch diggers. “It would be a difficult thing at the present time to build a railroad of any considerable length without Italian labor,” said a report of the Maine Bureau of Industrial Labor Statistics in 1900 (Banfield). Irish, Danes, Finns and members of other groups had performed this backbreaking work in previous years.

“I may say our population is today as cosmopolitan … as that of any state in the nation,” said William T. Haines, a future governor who recognized the value of immigrants. “In any crew of men at work in our numberless industries may be found the native stock, the French, the Irish, the Scandinavian, the German, the Russian … the Italian and the Dane, while the Armenian, Syrian and Greek have found our climate and conditions favorable to their existence.”

Race suicide?

The newcomers stirred latent fears of “race suicide” and political anarchy that ebbed and flowed throughout much of the century, precipitating stern policies for the Americanization of the newcomers. Labor disputes and ethnic competition fueled the fires. If a group of Italians brought from New York or Boston disliked conditions, they would turn around and head home, sometimes demanding money or lodging from local officials.

When the Bangor police chief received a new revolver in 1905, a BDN reporter commented, “It will be handy when the ‘Dagos’ out on the new railroad commence to get busy with the peace of the community.”

Discrimination against blacks and Jews remained more pronounced and ingrained than against any other groups as the years passed. Minstrel shows in which white performers blacked their faces and ridiculed or romanticized African-Americans were a common public entertainment. Shortly after Booker T. Washington spoke at Bangor City Hall in 1904 to respectful reviews, the famous minstrel impresario Lou Dockstader brought his show to the Bangor Opera House. The ironies of this conjunction of events were, of course, lost on the general population, which harbored stereotypes that would be a long time leaving.

Most blacks in Bangor, as in other places, routinely were refused anything but the most menial employment such as shining shoes or carrying luggage, according to the second Sterling Dymond, son of Sterling Dymond, the black Canadian logger. A BDN editorial on July 30, 1906, echoed the sentiments of most white people: “Today a negro is viewed with suspicion – at times with alarm. New England conservatism finds the negro shifty and unreliable. He is fond of pleasure and prefers idleness and poverty to thrift.” This legacy of ignorance would be hard to overcome until the civil rights movement of the 1960s.

Jews faced discrimination even after they had become economically successful. Most were routinely denied access to exclusive clubs and public bodies controlled by an established network of Christians. Deeds, like the one Myer Minsky received when he bought property on Pushaw Pond, sometimes excluded the sale of property to Jews or blacks. Some hotels refused to rent rooms to members of either group.

Dr. Arthur N. Lieberman, a graduate of the University of Michigan Medical School who had completed an internship at a New York hospital, was turned down for medical staff membership at Eastern Maine General Hospital five years in a row because of his faith, according to Dr. P. Maynard Beach in his history of the hospital’s first 100 years.

“Finally in 1952, enlightened medical staff leadership put an end to the odious atmosphere which permitted such injustices,” wrote Beach, a Bangor surgeon for many years.

Humor could make a point sometimes where common sense failed. A story is told in Congregation Beth Israel’s Centennial History of the time Israel Goldman bought a business establishment in Washington County. The former owner complained he was selling out to get away from all the Jews who were infiltrating the area, but he didn’t know where to move. “That’s easy,” Goldman replied. “Move to prison. You won’t find any Jews there.”

Bangor copes

When Jacob Riis, the famous New York City slum fighter, came to Bangor in 1905, he made comments that seemed to indicate he believed there were no slums in the Queen City. Even many Bangoreans may have believed there were no immigrant slums worthy of note. But by the middle of the next decade, Bangor no longer could pretend its immigrants and their problems were invisible.

“There are many of you who probably have no idea what an intimate connection Bangor has with the immigrant question, but if you will listen to the figures I have taken from the census report of 1910 you will realize that we are greatly concerned and should give the matter serious attention,” Miss Marion Porter of Associated Charities told members of the Mission Circle of the Columbia Street Baptist Church in a talk covered by the Bangor Daily Commercial on April 14, 1914. “The figures may surprise you because of their size, but it would seem upon investigation that they are under the mark rather than over.”

Most of the immigrants were clustered in the congested neighborhood around Hancock and York streets on Bangor’s east side. “This section of Bangor is practically unknown to most of you, but it is certainly an interesting one if you care to give it the attention it deserves,” Porter said.

Most of the newcomers aspired to be Americans with a standard of living like Americans, she said, but they were hampered by sickness, especially tuberculosis, poor hygiene, illiteracy, drinking and gambling. More than one-fifth of children in Bangor were foreign-born, but only 217 of the 4,280 pupils attending Bangor schools were aliens, she said.

Another institution interested in the well-being of the immigrants was the “Neighborhood House” for foreign-born women and girls established in 1916 at the request of “young Hebrew ladies” by Bangor social workers on the east side of Essex Street, three doors from Hancock Street. A Commercial story on Nov. 21, 1916, said, “Many of them [the young women] would appreciate advice and encouragement in the common things of life, such as sewing, care of children, hygiene, household management, etc., and … they would enjoy having a place where they could see newspapers in their own language, hear music and talks on topics of interest and profit.”

A sewing machine would be provided. Organizers were looking for donations of a Victrola and records, books and furniture. The first open meeting would be on Nov. 30 when there would be a talk titled “The American Thanksgiving.”

Also catering to the newcomers was the State Street School where “Americanization in the biggest and best sense of the word” was being practiced in the heart of the east side neighborhood, according to the Commercial on May 22, 1920. More than half the students were foreigners. “[I]t is estimated during the last 15 years perhaps 2,000 little foreigners have been taught to speak the first English words they knew, and where a great many other foreign people have been taught English in the night school there first instituted about 13 years ago.”

Miss Mary R. Spratt described to the Rotary Club the school where she taught: “As many know, this school of mine on State Street is largely foreigners and I have had this class of children for 15 years. We have in our city about 300 families of Jews, a large number of Poles, Finns, Syrians, Greeks, Italians, Swedes and some Chinese. They are anxious to acquire property. They are progressive. You are having them for neighbors. They are eager for their children to get an education, realizing that they will be better able to cope with the American in that way.”

Immigration backwater

Immigration to the United States peaked in the first decade of the 20th century and then began declining. World War I, stricter immigration laws and the hostile nativist reaction that included the brief rise of the Ku Klux Klan in Maine all contributed to the decline. Maine became an immigrant backwater and as a result its relative population and political standing in the nation have diminished.

As recently as 1960, Maine had a larger proportion of immigrants than the United States average. But by 2000, only one in every 35 Maine residents was an immigrant, while the national figure was one in nine, according to Richard Sherwood and Deirdre Mageean in the book “Changing Maine: 1960-2010.” In Bangor, a city of 31,473, there were only 1,062 immigrants or 3 percent compared with 17 percent in 1910.

The reason Maine has so few immigrants today is that it is located much farther away from the sources, Asia and Latin America, and it has no debarkation center as Boston does. Numbers tell the story. In 2000, there were 20 Irish immigrants living in Bangor compared with 664 in 1910. In 2000, there were 344 Asian immigrants living in Bangor, compared with 66 in 1910.

Even Canadians are in short supply today. In 2000, there were 331 Canadian immigrants living in Bangor, compared with nearly 2,500 in 1910. Barring another burst of immigrants from Europe or an unlikely industrial renaissance, it is doubtful that the Queen City’s star that once shone so brightly in 1910 will more than twinkle in the years ahead.

Contributing information to this series besides those mentioned in the text were Jeff Tuttle, Sara K. Martin, Dana Lippitt at the Bangor Historical Society, Rhea Cote Robbins, Angela LaFlamme Nickerson and Lou George.

Tomorrow: The Italians