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Much of Iowa’s recorded history is marked by migration to the prairies of Midwestern America. In fact, one of the most distinguishing characteristics of nineteenth century Iowa and Midwestern history is its relative diversity. Although much of the area we now know as Iowa formerly belonged to the Sauk and Meskwaki peoples, the first American settlers in Iowa were, in a sense, migrants from the northeastern United States. Soon after these New Englanders arrived in Iowa, they sent word to their home states of the region’s fertile soil and rich farmland.  This news led to a spike in migration from New England and other middle western states, such as Ohio and Indiana. The expansion of settlements in the Midwestern frontier also coincided with early waves of mass international emigration . Beginning n the 1830s, increasing numbers of Europeans immigrated to Iowa, mostly in search of economic opportunity. By 1860, Iowa’s population was 673,799, substantially higher than the 10,531 settlers in Iowa as of 1836; and by 1880, 25.6% of the roughly 1.8 million settlers in the state were foreign born^[1].

In an increasingly globalized world, the complex history of immigration is a critical topic in the classroom. While the United States has historically had relatively open borders and immigration policies, the road to citizenship by naturalization was not open equally to all persons. The Naturalization Act of 1790, Naturalization Act of 1795, Naturalization Act of 1802, and subsequent iterations were only applicable to “free white persons”, omitting and excluding Native Americans, Blacks, Asians, and other groups of people^[2]. Similar to many undocumented immigrants and refugees seeking entry to the United States in recent decades, many of the first European immigrants came to the United States in search of political asylum and religious freedom, such as the “Forty-Eighters”, political dissidents who participated in or facilitated the failed Revolutions of 1848 throughout Europe.  This contextual essay will address the experiences of different immigrants in Iowa, the difficulties they faced, their motives for immigration, and how immigration has helped shape the history and political landscape of Iowa.

Migration to Iowa

 In the mid 1800s, Europe was undergoing drastic political and socioeconomic changes. Major geopolitical events such as the German Revolution of 1848 and The Great Famine were catalysts for immigration to the United States and Iowa. The majority of these foreign-born agricultural settlers, or “the old immigrants,” came mostly from Northern and Western Europe after the 1830s.

The journey to Iowa was long and difficult.   A representative example, such as that of the Jacob Krehbiel Family, shows a typical voyage required thorough planning: “After much deliberation and long counsels, we finally decided to migrate to America. All our possessions were put up for sale and netted us the sum of 1600 gulden, which was all we had to take to America”^[3].  Even after arranging the transportation of any furniture, there was the likelihood of running out of funds before the trip even began. In Havre, France, before the Krehbiels boarded a ship bound for America, they encountered a German family with nine children. However, the family’s money had dwindled away and they were forced to send their oldest children on separate ships. Though the preparations were already arduous, the voyages themselves were often full of peril. The Krehbiels’ journals detail their many hardships aboard the Walhalla, including violent storms, sickness and death among young children, and general sea sickness. After a forty-eight day journey, the Krehbiels and the surviving passengers arrived in New York City. Immigrants traveling from the Northeastern United States could only reach Iowa in two ways: steamboats on major rivers and and wagons over common roads or roadless country.  These travelers were advised to “go by the way of Lake Erie and Michigan;” and those traveling through Virginia, Kentucky, and other middle states to follow the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers in order to access convenient steamboat routes. Travel by wagon, like the trans-atlanic journey, required a significant amount of planning and expense: “The cost per person is 75 cents per hundred pounds if you sit on top of your luggage. If that is not the case and you take a separate wagon, it costs more, at least $2 per person”^[4]. Immigrants typically settled near friends or family in the region, a practice known as chain migration. This migratory pattern led to the formation of immigrant clusters and communities, such as the considerable German presence in Davenport and Dutch in Pella. A majority of the new European immigrants became farmers, but many also started their own businesses.

Motives for Immigrating and Immigrant Experiences

There was much incentive to immigrate to Iowa. Early American settlers were motivated by the availability of government land and an agrarian fervor that ran rampant in America during the mid-nineteenth century. In addition, advances in transportation technology motivated the westward migration of many Northeasterners, especially the opening of the Erie Canal in 1825, which created a link between the Atlantic and the Great Lakes^[5]. Iowa offered reasonably-priced land–an acre cost $1.25 in 1838.  The state’s high soil quality promised fruitful harvests and healthy livestock, and both these factors meant healthier and longer lives for new Iowans. Many early, foreign-born immigrants to Iowa were asylum seekers, including Germans, Scots, Irish, Danes, and people from the Benelux (or Belgium, Netherlands, and Luxembourg).  A representative example is that of Hans Reimer Claussen, one of the leaders of a rebel movement against the Danish government who fled his home province in 1851 and emigrated to Davenport, Iowa. Claussen studied law and was admitted to the state bar two short years after his arrival; he also tried his hand at milling and joined the Union during the Civil War. Claussen and many other German immigrants sought positions in national politics due to the rapid growth of Know-Nothing groups and the Democrats’ Homestead Act propositions,

Iowa has a rich religious history, beginning with belief systems of Native American people, such as the Sioux, Winnebago, Fox, and Ioway.  After native people were unjustly and forcibly removed from Iowa in the nineteenth century, people migrating to the state brought along their respective religious beliefs and practices. Roman Catholics were the first religious group to arrive in the Iowa region. The earliest Catholic church was built in Dubuque under the supervision of Father Samuel Mazzuchelli, an Italian immigrant, in 1838. Another prominent pioneer of the Catholic Church in Iowa was Mathias Loras, an immigrant French priest and first Bishop of the Dubuque Diocese who founded Loras College in 1839. Immigrants from a range of countries and Christian denominations also settled throughout Iowa: Swedish Lutherans settled in Ogden, Norwegians in Sheldahl and Decorah, Welsh Congregationalists in Johnson County, and Mennonites in Kalona. The city of Pella, settled by Dominee Hendrik P. Scholte and his congregation, played an important role in the founding of the American branch of the Dutch Reformed Church.  Pella is a reference to Pella of the Decapolis in ancient Greece, the refuge of Christians during the Roman-Jewish war of 70 CE. From the Forty-Eighters to Scholte’s Dutch Reformed Church, many of early migrants were oppressed in their native countries due to their beliefs. A closer look at Iowa’s early religious migrants not only improves our understanding of the changes that denominations have undergone over time, but also provides insight into the ways people are still oppressed in the United States and abroad.

Another challenge for immigrants during the mid- to late 1800s was the rise of nativist sentiment. Immigration to rural Iowa declined as industries expanded in towns and cities, providing work to many new immigrants from Europe. In Cedar Rapids, for example, the dominant ethnic group was Bohemian immigrants from a region in today’s Czech Republic. Though the early Bohemian migrant community consisted largely of farmers and skilled artisans, the later decades saw a significant shift in the occupation of these immigrants – more Bohemians found work as laborers, attracted by the growing industrial sector. Yet, despite their sizable contribution to the Cedar Rapids and Iowa economies, the Bohemian immigrants struggled against widespread anti-eastern European prejudice, especially after the 1886 Haymarket Massacre in Chicago. Many newspapers at the time, such as the Cedar Rapids Weekly Times, claimed that “the participants in the murderous riots were . . . Poles, Bohemians, and Italians” and declared that if socialist immigrants “do not like free America, let them go back to the despotic countries from which they came. They are not fit to be American citizens”^[6]. The Times went on to reprint the Iowa Falls Sentinel’s diatribe against the “importation of red-mouthed Poles, Bohemians, and other foreign classes whose whole carcasses are impregnated with socialistic and nihilistic blood and taint, and who have no higher appreciation of our institutions and liberties than so many hyenas fresh from their native jungles”^[7]. The experiences of Bohemian immigrants in Cedar Rapids is only one of the myriad examples of nativism in Iowa. The Knights of Labor, officially Noble and Holy Order of the Knights of Labor, was an American labor federation active throughout the Midwest, Iowa included. While the organization claimed to champion “the rights of all workers, bringing men and women, blacks and whites, skilled and unskilled, native-born and foreign-born into the fold”, they saw Chinese workers and laborers as complicit in the oppression of the working class and strong supported the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 and the Contract Labor Law of 1885 . Additionally, while German migrants were substantial contributors to the American economy and had suffered comparatively little discrimination, the United States’ declaration of war against Germany and entry into World War I in 1917 caused a rise of virulent anti-German sentiment. The Council of National Defense, a legally-unrecognized national organization operating out of Scott County, Iowa conducted investigations into disloyal Americans, which often singled out German Americans and German immigrants. While this anti-German sentiment lessened soon after the end of World War I, nativism, know-nothingism, and racism would continue to plague Iowa for decades.

Immigration and Iowa’s Politics

Immigration is a commonly-debated topic in contemporary politics; in fact, it is often a determining factor in a political candidate’s success or failure in winning an election. This was also true in nineteenth-century Iowa, as immigrants played an important role in shaping the political landscape at that time.  As mentioned earlier, many German migrants sought positions in national politics, advocating for more property rights for independent farmers and settlers. Immigrants political and racial beliefs, Robert Dykstra points out, were shaped by the “various cultural dispositions they brought with them”^[8]. Many German immigrants, for instance, were dissidents from Prussia, where they did not have the right to vote nor to own property. As a result, Midwestern German immigrants such as Theodore Guelich of Davenport were staunch abolitionists, favoring the official end of slavery. Guelich, like many German immigrants, was a also Forty-Eighter, and in 1851, he established Der Democrat, a weekly journal popular among German speakers in the western US. Leading up to the Kansas-Nebraska Act, Guelich earnestly denounced the “Border Ruffians” who sought to establish the new territories as slave states. He also fiercecly condemned Franklin Pierce’s attempts to extend slavery into the free Western Territories.

Immigration has been and remains a widely debated point of contention. Due to advances in transportation and communication technology since the 18th century, globalization has increased and deepened connections between nations worldwide.  These connections have resulted in the growth of international trade, the movement of cultures and peoples around the globe, and the exchange of beliefs and values. And for Iowa and the Midwest, immigration has provided a critical foundation.  Over time, immigrants and their children moved mostly to Iowa’s industrializing cities, and this chain migration enriched daily life in the Midwest. However, when examining 19th-century Iowans’ sentiment towards immigrants and immigration, it is critical to acknowledge that the vast majority of immigrants were Western and Northern Europeans. Immigrants from other parts of the world, many minorities, and peoples of color began to move to Iowa only in the 1920s or later. It is important to acknowledge that while many immigrants sought to perpetuate the lives they knew in their homelands, as many newly-arrived persons strove to learn about and adapt to Iowa.  As a result, no single immigrant group’s experiences have proven dominant or all-encompassing.