Historiography of the Immigration into the United States

THE MELTING POT

Israel Zangwill was a British-Jewish author who wrote about immigrant Jewish life in the East End of London.  In his 1908 play The Melting Pot he turned his attention to immigrants into America:

“America is God’s Melting Pot, where all the races of Europe are melting and reforming! Germans, Frenchmen, Irishmen and Englishmen, Jews and Russians – into the Melting Pot with you all! God is making the American."

But was immigration ‘making Americans’? 

THE CHICAGO SCHOOL

One of the earliest studies of immigrants into America was by Chicago University sociologists Thomas and Florian Znaniecki in The Polish Peasant in Europe and America (1918-20).  The Znanieckis identified how contact with modern America changed the new arrivals, by a process of ‘organisation’, ‘disorganization’ and ‘reorganization’, until they became a “new Polish American society”. 

In 1921 Chicago sociologist Robert Park published Introduction to the Science of Sociology, in which he proposed that different racial and ethnic groups go through four stages in their interaction with their adopted society: ‘contact’, ‘competition’, ‘accommodation’, and in the end ‘assimilation’.  This theory became known as the Chicago school of assimilation, and was the basis for most histories of immigration for the next forty years. 

Park’s co-author, Ernest Burgess – seeing the passage through times of successive waves of immigrants through certain slum areas – realised that it was the slum, and not the particular group of immigrants living there, which was causing the disease, crime etc of immigrant communities. 

THE JOHNSON-REED IMMIGRATION ACT, 1924

Historians in the early 20th century were not immune from the antagonism that had been growing up towards the ‘New’ immigrants who had started arriving from southern and eastern Europe. 

You may know of President Woodrow Wilson as the liberal visionary who fought for self-determination and the League of Nations.  But Wilson was an historian who, in his History of America (1902), had written:

“Throughout the [19th] century men of the sturdy stocks of the north of Europe had made up the main strain of foreign blood … but now there came multitudes of men of the lowest class from the south of Italy and men of the meaner sort out of Poland and Hungary, men out of the ranks where there was neither skill nor energy nor any initiative of quick intelligence; and they came in numbers which increased from year to year, as if the countries of the south of Europe were disburdening themselves of the more sordid and hapless elements of their population.”

And when, in 1924, a Council of Learned Societies advised the government about whom might properly be labelled as ‘Americans’, it excluded: Asians and their descendants; the descendants of ‘slave immigrants’, and the descendants of ‘American aborigines’ [i.e. Native Americans].  Comments American historian Roger Daniels:

“If anyone requires evidence that Congress, most scholars, and the American people in the 1920s regarded the United States as a ‘white man's country,’ this clause - subsection ‘d’ of section 11 of the Immigration Act of 1924 – provides it.”

One of the members of that Council was the historian Marcus Lee Hansen.  Hansen is regarded as ‘the father of immigration history’ on the basis of his 1927 article: ‘History of American Immigration as a Field for Research’.  But the editor of his 1961 posthumous book revealed that Hansen had intended to show how “the United States was able to avoid the creation of powerful racial and national minorities such as have plagued many European countries”.  Given that Hansen himself was the son of Danish/Norwegian parents, this is a glaring example of how the ‘Old’ immigrants pulled up the drawbridge on the ‘New’

THE ROMANCE OF IMMIGRATION

Other historians, in contrast, regarded the immigrants much more favourably. 

In 1926 George M Stephenson published his History of American Immigration 1820-1926, regarded by many as the first serious historical study of the subject. 

The son of Swedish immigrants, Stephenson portrayed the immigrants as peasants and factory workers leaving their “humble dwellings” for five reasons: over-populations at home, religion, economic aspirations, adventure, and political ambition.  Arriving in America, they held onto their own cultures, but learned English and established themselves (particularly the Irish and Germans) in politics.  For them, America had worked a “marvellous transformation” by which they became “a living advertisement of American Prosperity”. 

American Professor of Intersectional Studies Melissa Wright sees Stephenson’s book as a ‘romance’ of how immigrants “triumphed over America’s obstacles to establish their own place in the world of American politics”. 

More than a decade of rabid anti-immigrant sentiment later, the American historian (and son of a successful German immigrant factory owner) Carl Wittke wrote: We Who Built America (1939).  Its message was how immigrants had helped build “a new composite American civilisation” by their contributions to the arts, medicine, engineering, manufacturing, media and technology.  Wittke saw America as a constantly-evolving nation, as each immigrant group assimilated and made its contribution; they were, he explained, trying to build their promised land. 

Melissa Wright describes Wittke’s book also as a ‘romance’, but it seems to me more like a justification in the face of hate. 

THE TRAGEDY OF IMMIGRATION

By the 1950s, the assimilation theories of the Chicago School – the idea that the immigrants who came to America were absorbed into American society – were still dominant, but the tone had changed. 

Oscar Handlin in The Uprooted (1951) focussed less on the immigrants’ contribution than on their experiences, as they left their peasant origins to be replanted “in a strange ground, among strangers”.  This, notes Melissa Wright, was not romance, but tragedy – loneliness, separation and despair.  Handlin’s immigrants are victims not actors, powerless people trapped in a modernism they struggle to comprehend, “driven by a helpless alternation of fortunes by the power of remote forces”. 

John Higham’s Strangers in the Land (1955) argued similarly, only for him the underlying force besetting forlorn immigrants was not modernity, but anti-Catholic, racist, anti-radical nativism. 

FROM IMMIGRATION TO ETHNICITY

By the 1960s, historians were beginning to feel that these traditional histories, with their preoccupation with assimilation/victimisation and East Coast/ ‘Old immigrant’ bias were inadequate. 

In 1960 English academic Frank Thistlethwaite (1960) challenged the established view.  The representation of European emigrants as peasants leaving a feudal Europe to go to a thoroughly-modern America, he said, was a myth designed to make America look good.  Not all emigrants went as settlers – some were almost commuters.  Above all the migration was HUGE, a central event in both European and American history, and it merited cross-Atlantic study. 

Building on this, Italian-American historian Rudolph Vecoli urged closer study of individual European groups of immigrants – their choice to migrate, and their life-choices on reaching America (i.e. he wanted to establish their ‘agency’, rejecting models which portrayed them as swept powerlessly along by impersonal forces).  Seeing the latest generation of immigrants’ descendants celebrating their cultural heritage, he argued in an 1970 article on ‘The Invention of Ethnicity’ that contact with America had not transformed these immigrant families into ‘Americans’, but into ‘ethnics’

American historian John Bodnar’s The Transplanted (1985) formulated the immigrant’s response to American society as a negotiation.  Some values and ideologies could be retained, others required adjustment – notably, in the world of work. 

ETHNICITY’S DEATH

As historians did more case studies of ethnic communities, this model of negotiated adaptation became more sophisticated – especially ethnicity over generations, and between communities.  Professor of American History Kathleen Conzen (1992) suggested that ethnicity is not an innate constant, but a constructed identity which keeps being reinvented. 

And all this, of course turned the circle the full 360 degrees, because to show that the racial identities of the early 20th century immigrants, two or three generations later, have completely disappeared … is to suggest that the adoption of ethnic identities is in fact a kind of assimilation – ‘Americanization from the bottom up’. 

Lawrence Fuchs (1990) suggested that, at the same time as the immigrants were redefining their identities, America was gradually widening its definition of ‘American-ness’ to accommodate religious and racial diversity, thus making it possible for more groups to claim an American national identity.  David Hollinger (1995) has described this idea as “ethnicity’s death”. 

… to the extent that in 1998 American historian asked Donna Gabaccia could ask: ‘Do We Still Need Immigration History?’ (though her answer was: ‘yes’). 

RECENT HISTORIOGRAPHY

What are the most recent immigration histories addressing? 

In 2011 American historian David Gerber suggested that there are “matters about which we now possess finely grained understanding as the result of extensive research”, which he listed as: why they emigrated, where they went and why, how and when the different layers occurred (and thereby caused future migrations), their lived experience as immigrants, the formation of ethnic communities and their interaction with public and political organisations. 

One area he identified as needing study was to see immigrants “in the context of the racial fault lines of American society”.  Hitherto, historians have tended to give a wide birth to the issue of RACE in immigration history, though it was not just a factor in some Americans’ opposition to the immigrants, but a key influence in the immigrants’ reaction to Americans –  e.g. in his 1991 book The Wages of Whiteness American historian David Roediger suggested that European immigrants actively tried to become ‘white’ so that they might be able to share in the benefits that being white conferred (an opportunity not available to non-white immigrants and America’s racial minorities).  Roediger’s theories have been challenged, but there have been a whole string of ‘whiteness’ studies investigating the idea. 

Recently, also, immigration historians have investigated cross-national issues and the links between immigrants’ home and host countries.  Other researchers have studied the experiences of second-generation immigrants and the impact of immigration policies. 

Finally, the most recent ‘turn’ of history has been the History of Emotions and historian of the emotions Susan Matt has written Homesickness (2011) which includes a chapter on ‘Immigrants and the Dream of Return’.  Where homesickness was a requirement of a virtuous immigrant in the 19th century, she found, such a man came to be looked down on as weak, backward and “the world’s hod-carrier” in the thrusting capitalism of the 20th century.