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Immigration, wealth and the ‘mortality plateau’ in emergent industrial cities of nineteenth-century Massachusetts

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 December 2012

SUSAN HAUTANIEMI LEONARD ,
JEFFREY K. BEEMER  and
DOUGLAS L. ANDERTON
SUSAN HAUTANIEMI LEONARD
Affiliation:
Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research, University of Michigan.
JEFFREY K. BEEMER
Affiliation:
Department of Sociology, University of Massachusetts-Amherst.
DOUGLAS L. ANDERTON
Affiliation:
Department of Sociology, University of South Carolina.
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Abstract

The mortality transition in Western Europe and the United States encompassed a much more complex set of conditions and experiences than earlier thought. Our research addresses the complex set of relationships among growing urban communities, family wealth, immigration and mortality in New England by examining individual-level, sociodemographic mortality correlates during the nineteenth-century mortality plateau and its early twentieth-century decline. In contrast to earlier theories that proposed a more uniform mortality transition, we offer an alternative hypothesis that focuses on the impact of family wealth and immigration on individual-level mortality during the early stages of the mortality transition in Northampton and Holyoke, Massachusetts.

Immigration, fortune et „ plateau de mortalité “ au dix-neuvième siècle, dans les villes industrielles émergentes du massachusetts

La transition de la mortalité en Europe occidentale et aux États-Unis a corres-pondu à la conjonction d'un ensemble beaucoup plus complexe de conditions et d'expériences qu'on ne le pensait précédemment. Notre recherche aborde justement ce jeu subtil d'éléments interactifs entre communautés urbaines en croissance, fortune familiale, immigration et mortalité en Nouvelle-Angleterre, en examinant les types de corrélations à la fois au niveau individuel et socio-démographique tout au long du plateau de mortalité observé au cours du dix-neuvième siècle et lors du déclin de la mortalité qui suivit au début du vingtième siècle. Contrastant avec les théories antérieures qui proposaient un modèle uniforme de transition de la mortalité, nous offrons une hypothèse alternative mettant en avant le rôle de la fortune familiale et de l'immigration sur la mortalité individuelle pendant les stades précoces de la transition de mortalité à Northampton et Holyoke, au Massachusetts.

Einwanderung, vermögen und das „sterblichkeitsplateau“ in den entstehenden industriestädten von massachusetts im 19. jahrhundert

Der Sterblichkeitsübergang in Westeuropa und den Vereinigten Staaten umfasste ein sehr viel komplexeres Bündel von Bedingungen und Erfahrungen als man früher gedacht hat. Um die komplexen Beziehungen zwischen Familienvermögen, Einwanderung und Sterblichkeit in den wachsenden Städten in Neuengland anzugehen, untersuchen wir einzelfallbasierte sozial-ökonomische Mortalitätskorrelate, die das Mortalitätsplateau im 19. Jahrhundert und den anschließenden Mortalitätsrückgang im frühen 20. Jahrhundert umfassen. Im Gegensatz zu früheren Theorien, die von einem eher gleichförmigen Sterblichkeitsübergang ausgingen, schlagen wir für die Frühstadien des Sterblichkeitsübergangs in Northampton und Holyoke (beide in Massachusetts) eine alternative Hypothese vor, die besonderes Gewicht auf den Einfluss des Familienvermögens und der Einwanderung auf die individuelle Sterblichkeit legt.

Type
Research Article
Information
Continuity and Change , Volume 27 , Issue 3 , December 2012 , pp. 433 - 459
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2012

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References

ENDNOTES

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11 See Beemer, ‘Social meanings of mortality’; Hautaniemi, ‘Demography and death’.

12 Preston and Haines, Fatal years, see Table 2.

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25 For example, Crimmins and Condran, ‘Mortality variations’; Preston and Haines, Fatal years.

26 For example, Ferrie, ‘The rich’; Higgs, ‘Cycles’.

27 For example, in Boston, see Meckel, ‘Immigration’; in Philadelphia, see Condran, Williams and Cheney, ‘Decline’, and Condran and Cheney, ‘Mortality trends’; and in Northampton, see Beemer, Anderton and Leonard, ‘Sewers’.

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41 In Massachusetts, the minor civil division ‘town’ includes any population centre as well as surrounding suburban and rural areas (analogous to ‘township’ in other states). Attendant on population size, Holyoke was incorporated as a city in 1873 and Northampton in 1884. The boundaries of the cities were the same as when they were towns, and continued to encompass rural, suburban and urban areas.

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45 Hautaniemi, ‘Demography and death’, 54; Beemer, ‘Diagnostic prescriptions’, 310–12.

46 Hautaniemi, Swedlund and Anderton, ‘Mill town mortality’; Beemer, Anderton and Leonard, ‘Sewers’. We constructed areal samples centred on the population centres of Holyoke and Northampton. Because the sample for each decade includes roughly the same number of people, the sample geography become smaller over the decades of the study, and more tightly concentrated around the urban cores as they developed.

47 Hautaniemi, Susan I., Anderton, Douglas L. and Swedlund, Alan C., ‘Methods and validity of a panel study using record linkage: matching death records to a geographic census sample in two Massachusetts towns, 1850–1912’, Historical Methods 33, 1 (2000), 1–29CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.

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49 United States Bureau of the Census, 200 Years of U.S. Census Taking: Population and Housing Questions, 1790–1990 (Washington, DC, 1989).

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55 Not all census records are linkable to tax records (e.g. children). Not all tax records are linkable to census records (e.g. businesses and non-residents). In addition, the database is a geographic subsample of the census records, while tax (and death) records cover the entire area of the towns. These factors affect both the numerators and denominators for calculating linkage rates.

56 Individual wealth was recorded on the US census only in 1850, 1860 and 1870.

57 Steckel, ‘Census manuscript schedules’.

58 Steckel and Moehling, ‘Rising inequality’.

59 Hautaniemi, Anderton and Swedlund, ‘Methods and validity’.

60 Comparing 1860 with 1880 affords high linkage rates for wealth data and few confounding effects, i.e. by avoiding major intervening epidemic years confounded by ethnic-specific variation in inoculation practices described in Green, Holyoke.

61 This can be understood in counter-factual terms, i.e. if the age distributions for each town had been the same as 1870 in the period from 1860 to 1880, what would the death rate look like relative to their unadjusted (non-standardised) rates?

62 It is likely that infants under one year of age are significantly under-represented in our data because of the highly mobile and newly settled population. In all analyses we compared results including and excluding infants and decided to present complete data given the substantive and statistical equivalence of results. We have also stratified analysis by age when appropriate to ensure that conclusions are not contaminated by varying representation of infants and children.

63 Ethnicity was derived from birthplace, recorded on all censuses, usually to a sub-country level in the United States and Canada, as well as for some of Europe, as well as ‘mother tongue’ recorded in the 1900 and 1910 censuses.

64 Mercier and Boone, ‘Infant mortality’; Thornton and Olson, ‘Deadly discrimination’; Woodbury, Infant mortality; Gretchen A. Condran and Samuel H. Preston, ‘Child mortality differences, personal health care practices, and medical technology: the United States 1900–1939’, in Lincoln C. Chen, Arthur Kleinman and Norma C. Ware eds., Health and social change in international perspective (Cambridge, MA, 1994), 171–224.

65 Hautaniemi, ‘Demography and death’, 47.

66 Claude Bélanger, ‘French Canadian emigration to the United States 1840–1930’, Readings in Quebec history, Marianopolis College, http://faculty.marianopolis.edu/c.belanger/quebechistory/readings/leaving.htm [updated 23 August 2000].

67 See Beemer, ‘Social meanings of mortality’, 75; Green, Holyoke, 69; and Hautaniemi, ‘Demography and death’, 47.

68 Joseph Ferrie, Yankeys now: immigrants in the antebellum United States, 1840–1860 (Oxford, 1999).

69 Ferrie, ‘The rich’, 17.

70 Reid, ‘Locality’; Lee, ‘Socioeconomic background’.