The late nineteenth and early twentieth century was a time of great voluntary migration to the United States by Canadians, to New England for work in the shoe and textile industry starting in the late nineteenth century, and to the Midwest - especially Michigan - as part of the automobile-manufacturing workforce starting in the early twentieth century. (8) Between 1850 and 1930, it is estimated that almost a million French Canadians left Quebec for destinations in America. (9) The Franco-American population is comprised of Canadians from Quebec and those from Acadia, but many more are from Quebec. Although the overwhelming majority of emigrants did so for economic reasons, some left for political and religious reasons. They were tired of being discriminated against for jobs as well as education by the British ruling faction. Although some came from cities and towns in Quebec searching for more stable and higher-paying skilled positions, most came from small communities along the St. Lawrence and Richelieu rivers looking for the unskilled jobs that were readily available in factories.
There were two distinct waves of emigration from Canada to the U.S. during the latter half of the nineteenth century and the early twentieth century, during the 1860s-1880s and between 1900-1930. The first wave revolved around farming and rural labor in the borderlands of the United States, and the second around urban factory labor.
Quebec's was a largely agrarian economy, and in the 1800s it had suffered from a scarcity of farmland made worse by a high peasant/farmer population with a high birth rate. During the 1840s-1880s, French Canadians were immigrating to rural borderlands in the United States for work as farmhands, lumberjacks, and bricklayers. The work was tough but familiar, and it was more affordable to travel closer to the border. The majority of the immigrants at this time were single males, although there were a fair amount of single women who worked as maids in the United States.
By the 1860s though, the developing railway system was making traveling farther less of a financial burden, and the immigration pattern was starting to shift to industrial centers within the heart of New England. At the end of the American Civil War in 1865, there was both an increased need for textiles in the form of civilian clothes as well as an increased access to raw cotton from the South. The mills needed lots of cheap labor, and actually sent recruiters to Quebec to entice the peasants, or
habitants,
to come to New England and work in the textile mills. Also active in the recruitment racket were French-Canadian railway ticket agents whose income depended on that travel.
By 1900, French Canadian immigrants and their children made up 46% of the cotton textile industry in New England. (10) Another appeal of the textile mills was that they would employ children. Families could immigrate together, and most of the immigration at this time was by families rather than individuals. The members of these families generally ranged in age from about fourteen to forty, with any younger and older members of the family staying in Canada. Men, women, and children would work long hours in the mills for very low wages. This did not make them popular with the local labor unions and inhibited relations between the immigrants and the rest of the community.
The invention of the steam engine locomotive in the early nineteenth century and the ensuing development over that century of the railway system in Canada and the United States not only made travel between Canada and the United States relatively easy and accessible, but it was also a big industry, especially in the United States and especially after the end of the Civil War. Lots of banks invested heavily in railroad construction at the time and in 1873, one of those banks realized it had overextended itself and filed for bankruptcy. This caused something of a domino effect whereby other banking firms did the same, and a major panic ensued that lasted for the next twenty years. This was known as the Great Depression until the occurrence of what we now call the Great Depression of 1929-1939; it is now referred to as the Long Depression. (11)
Although most immigrants during this time came in families, some young Canadian men fled to the United States between the years of 1914-1918 in an effort to evade the draft during World War I. The immigration boom ended with the onset of the Great Depression in 1929.
La Franco-Américanie in 1900
is a map in the Brault text that shows pockets of French-speaking communities in New England at the turn of the century. (12) Although there are relatively few pockets in Connecticut (mostly clustered around the Northwest corner, sharing borders with Massachusetts and Rhode Island, whose industrial centers attracted many more French speakers), it will be useful to add this map to our geo-timeline to give students a visual representation of the patterns of immigration and settlement at the time. It is also notable that most of these areas of increased immigrant presence are small to mid-size towns or cities located along rivers, which provided the needed resource of water for hydroelectric power.
Selected vocabulary: Assembly Line (
la chaîne, la chaîne de montage
) / Assembly plant (
l'usine de montage
) / By train
(en train)
/ Factory (
l'usine
- f) / Factory worker (
l'ouvrier d'usine
- m) / Garment factory (
l'usine de vêtements
) / Maid
(la domestique – la bonne
= familiar term
)
Textile factory (
l'usine de textile
) / Shoe factory (
l'usine de chaussures
)