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Chapter 6 The widening mainstream

In the early twentieth century Henry Ford sponsored citizenship and language classes at his Michigan automobile factories, which depended heavily on immigrant labor. The climactic moment in the graduation ceremony was when individual immigrants, with placards around their necks or small fl ags in their hands that identifi ed their homelands, mounted the stage and walked into a giant wooden kettle labeled “melting pot.” After emerging on the other side of the kettle, the placard or fl ag was gone, and each held a small American fl ag in his hand. They were now Americans.

Around the same time, the University of Chicago sociologists William I. Thomas and Florian Znaniecki, who were pioneers along with their Chicago colleagues in the academic study of immigrants, offered an infl uential explanation for why such a ceremony was based on simplistic wishful thinking. They found that immigrants developed their own group life and identities, and that all efforts, well-meaning or malign, to speed them rapidly into an assimilation that effaced their pasts were doomed to fail because they were conceived outside the immigrants’ own experiences and needs. They wrote in the midst of a political climate in which large numbers of native-stock Americans demanded immigrant political and cultural conformity in the name of “Americanization.” Americanization might mean the

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EBSCO : eBook Academic Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 10/1/2018 4:02 PM via MIDDLE TENNESSEE STATE UNIV AN: 365577 ; Gerber, David A..; American Immigration: A Very Short Introduction Account: s4672406.main.ehost

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Great example of Americanization

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suppression of foreign language newspapers, as many local and state governments demanded during World War I, or it might mean the generally benign efforts of employers, school teachers, and social workers to teach what they deemed American citizenship, manners, and beliefs alongside the English language. Whatever the form of such cultural instruction, the two sociologists believed it would probably, at best, have only a superfi cial infl uence on immigrant identities. At worst, if insensitively enforced and accompanied by derision for the immigrants’ cultures, it might create hostility to assimilation and animosity toward Americanizers.

Documented in what became a classic study of Polish immigration as well as a template for understanding the problems all modern

11. The graduation ceremony at the Ford automobile factory English School in which the graduates entered a simulated melting pot, often holding fl ags or having placards around their necks that identifi ed their native lands, and emerged holding American fl ags.

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Use this description for all immigrants

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voluntary immigrants faced in resettlement, their assumptions were based on understandings of how human beings confront all-encompassing transformations that shake the very foundations of their world. In the midst of the social disorganization and individual demoralization that came with leaving the land, emigrating, and resettling in the industrial cities of the United States, these immigrants created “a new society,” neither completely Polish nor completely American. Its purpose was mutual support, consolation, and continuity in the midst of the struggles to fulfi ll material aspirations. In other words, like the immigrants of the past and those entering the country alongside the Poles, they formed an ethnic group , with its own institutions, such as churches and mutual aid societies, informal social networks based upon family, neighborhood, and community, and an identity based on common experience, memory, language, and history.

In light of its elementary, sustaining functions, ethnicity has been a phenomenon common to all immigrant groups. While the most racialized voluntary immigrant groups, such as the Chinese, Japanese, and Mexicans, had their cultures disrupted by prejudice, legal and social discrimination, and violence, within the enclave communities they created their ethnic groups had many of the same functions one might observe among peoples who were more widely accepted. Efforts to interfere with the group and individual processes of ethnicity are more or less futile. People cannot live successfully, in comfort with themselves or with others, without some continuity of self-understanding, personal relations, and sources of self-worth. Would the result then be an America where people could not know one another, and in which revered institutions of government and society were destined to die? Would Americans become strangers in their own land? Not according to Thomas and Znaniecki and other University of Chicago sociologists, for they were the original sources of the crucial understanding of assimilation as not simply a process of the immigrants becoming Americans, but ultimately of mutual

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accommodation, in which society changes alongside the changing individuals and groups that compose it.

Immigrant accommodation has taken place at the individual, group, and institutional levels. Little that immigrants do after leaving their homelands can realistically be construed as foreign. Especially in the necessary daily acts of working, creating a household, and functioning in the marketplace, immigrants must learn new rules and new behaviors. Immigrant generation parents often struggle mightily to master these new ways; their self- transformation is rendered more diffi cult because it must be accomplished in adulthood. In contrast, their American-raised children learn them more easily, though not without occasional pain, both at school, which has been the central site for formal socialization in modern society, and informally, on the streets among peers. School teaches the offi cial version of American society, and the streets, the rules for coexisting and gaining advantage in ordinary interactions.

Ethnicity may mask this process of accommodation by highlighting difference, but ethnicity has not only been about preserving an old identity. It also has been a central agent of assimilation, because the ethnic group is among the principal sites for absorbing the new rules and behaviors necessary for the immigrants to fulfi ll their aspirations. Within the ethnic group, learning American ways by taking instruction from fellow ethnics has occurred with less pressure, ridicule, and rejection, and hence fewer penalties and less humiliation for being an inadequate student. Immigrants also have learned lessons from longer- resident ethnic groups. In this role the Irish have loomed especially large in oral tradition, because they were relatively slow to prosper, and lived longer in the proletarian neighborhoods that received recently arrived groups. Their length of American residence made the Irish veterans in the processes of ethnicity and assimilation, and assisted them, along with their knowledge of English, in obtaining political power at the neighborhood and

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Living in ethnic groups

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municipal levels. In the eyes of newcomers, they possessed authority about getting along in America. Ironically, the Irish embodied America for many newcomers.

The lessons learned have not been the offi cial formulation of American values and ways. They contain much practical realism about class inequalities of power and wealth, and the ordinary corruption of government. They constitute recognition that for all the bright promises America offers, one must never trust that it is everything patriots say about it.

Individuals seeking opportunity

Ethnic fi ction develops narratives that vividly portray these painful transitions. In such stories of immigrant experience as Mario Puzo’s The Fortunate Pilgrim (1964) , Pietro DiDonato’s Christ in Concrete (1939), Abraham Cahan’s The Rise of David Levinsky (1917), Anzia Yezierska’s Breadgivers (1925), and Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club (1989), the same themes reappear, from male and female perspectives and across group lines. Informed by the authors’ personal experiences as young immigrants or as the American-born children of immigrants, these narratives relate to a common theme: the aspirations for a liberated self, given hope by American opportunities, but frustrated by the constraints of poverty and Old World traditions rendered dysfunctional in a new land. Associated with the diffi culties in realizing this aspiration is often a confl ict between parents who defend tradition and children who seek to embrace the future.

The fi ctional characters move painfully toward fi nding a place for themselves within America. It is not necessarily the place they had aspired to, as in the case of DiDonato’s Paul, a sensitive young man with intellectual yearnings for truths beyond the consolations of his mother’s peasant Catholic piety. He must work a construction job after his father’s death in a work accident. He sees his hopes for attaining an education snatched from him by

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Learn to be skeptical of Americans

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the family burdens he must assume. Or, they fi nd that what they thought they aspired to turns out to be hollow, as in case of Cahan’s David Levinsky, who wants to be rich, uses American opportunities to become so, and is disappointed that it does not make him happy. Or, as in the case of Yezierska’s Sarah and Tan’s Chinese daughters, they may transform themselves into independent American women, only to fi nd that a complete break with the past is neither possible nor desirable. But to the extent these fi ctional characters consider it their right to transform themselves, they represent the energies born of American opportunities.

Often lacking as a major plot element are struggles by the major characters against prejudice and discrimination. This is hardly because prejudice and discrimination have been absent. For the immigrants, social acceptance and a full range of opportunities came more grudgingly than the chance to make a living at a low-wage job and to set down roots. But strategies for dealing with whatever forces limited opportunity, without having to challenge them directly from a position of relative weakness, seem always to have been available to individuals, and were often successful in providing at least partial relief. If barred from skilled building trades by antisemitic discrimination, as they were in a number of cities, Jews had other avenues of opportunity in small business, owning corner grocery stores and discount clothing stores. They had an ethnic niche in the garment industry, in which Jews owned fi rms that used Jewish subcontractors and hired co-ethnics. All apparel-making businesses, independent of the owner’s ethnic identity, looked for experienced, skilled pressers, sewing machine operators, and fancy stitch makers, who were widely found among the immigrant Jews.

Enclave economies also provided opportunity for the Chinese, who faced signifi cant employment discrimination. They, too, developed their own niche in the apparel industry. They also profi ted from the exoticization of American Chinatowns, in which

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Working around discrimination

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they opened restaurants, bars, nightclubs, and brothels for non-Chinese consumers, and employed their own people to work in them. In contrast to such urban employment niches, the Japanese in western states created a space for themselves in vegetable and fruit farming and landscaping, in which they founded successful family enterprises, using family labor and that of wage labor from their own ethnic group. Barred from owning land by discriminatory legislation, these immigrants often arranged to have their property placed in the legal control of their American-born children. Their ownership might survive internment during World War II, though local offi cials sometimes destroyed records proving ownership, and neighbors entrusted with guardianship took advantage of the situation to seize property.

A key question for understanding assimilation is whether such ethnic niches might become a permanent trap. This did not happen. Later generations have not wished to enter these occupations, which seemed parochial, limiting, and embodiments of ethnic stereotypes they wished to shed in order to become more American. While they might provide security, they paid relatively poorly and offered fewer chances for advancement. In the twentieth century, strategies were devised, often employing education, to enter public employment, the professions, or corporate business. When they encountered discrimination in admissions to private higher educational institutions, they turned to public colleges, universities, and graduate schools. The number of these public institutions grew greatly after 1945 to accommodate millions of World War II veterans, who took advantage of generous government programs to obtain higher education, and later the postwar baby boom generation. While discrimination might be encountered in private sector job markets, government served as a substitute, especially as the role in society of the state, at all levels, expanded in the immediate postwar decades. Federal government programs subsidized the acquisition of single-family housing and made it affordable for

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The Japanese - ethnic group

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many to leave crowded older neighborhoods for the emerging urban fringe areas.

The barriers presented by discrimination also appeared increasingly permeable in the private sector. The American economy expanded so dramatically after 1945 that signifi cant shortages of skilled, educated, and credentialed workers were present everywhere. With enough opportunity available for everyone, the old prejudices were gradually relaxed, and alongside them the old barriers to mutual accommodation. Indeed for millions of European ethnics the types of discrimination they often encountered in the immediate postwar decades, in private businessmen’s clubs, golf clubs, and resort hotels and in suburban housing markets, were artifacts of their growing prosperity. They were efforts to impede upwardly mobile people from making their presence felt in places where they had been absent. Those barriers, too, eventually greatly declined, and where social acceptance lagged, individuals often chose not to care, protected by ethnicity and by the force of their own ambitions. They might also adopt such passing strategies as name changes and false family histories.

Yet the American mainstream itself widened greatly in the second half of the twentieth century. Common enrollment in public colleges and universities, and common residence in the suburbs created new, shared patterns of life among diverse peoples. Of key importance, too, was a dramatic national self-examination spurred by various civil rights movements based on race and various liberation movements based on gender, sexual orientation, and disability. As it did, the circle of “We” in conceiving of the identity of Americans widened signifi cantly. Passing soon became an embarrassing remnant of self-hatred. By the 1970s ethnic origins were being widely celebrated and publicly asserted. Immigrant peoples who had been read out of history were now being credited with signifi cant contributions, such as the critical role Chinese railroad laborers played in building the

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transcontinental railroad. Historic wrongs were admitted and offi cial apologies rendered. In 1988 Congress passed and President Ronald Reagan signed legislation apologizing for Japanese internment and appropriating more than $1.6 billion in reparations for those interned or their heirs. Some argued that such actions were too little—done too late, but it is very diffi cult to argue that national denial of embarrassing facts and terrible wrongs is a better course to follow.

Institutions come to embody diversity: labor unions and electoral politics

The widening mainstream was also the result of processes through which ethnic groups as groups, and hence diversity itself, came to be integrated into American society. Without an ancient feudal inheritance to guide its passage into modernity, the United States was invented from the ground up, especially when it came to the relationship between its diverse peoples. This is evident in electoral politics and the labor movement, both of which highlight the ways in which basic American social processes and institutions were shaped in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries around the necessity of accommodating difference.

The American labor movement has been a tentative achievement. It was slow historically to organize and win recognition. It is vulnerable in the current age of globalization, because of the erosion of employment among its members, as overseas and domestic nonunion competition undercut the mighty mass production industries of the mid-twentieth century. Organized labor reached the height of its power around 1945, when the federal government encouraged unionization for the sake of effi cient war production, and approximately 36 percent (14.5 million) American workers were unionized. While smaller than the percentage of organized workers in other advanced capitalist democracies at the time, organized labor nonetheless had substantial infl uence and power in politics and the industrial

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economy, especially in such key sectors as garments, consumer electronics, household appliances, automobiles, steel, rubber, and chemicals. It was a dependable part of the Democratic coalition that controlled national politics between the 1930s and the 1970s, and successfully advanced a social democratic program for government in society. With job losses in basic industries after 1980, as the fortunes of organized labor declined—about 14.7 million workers (11.9 percent) were unionized late in 2010—so, too, did the Democratic Party. The numbers belie organized labor’s contemporary importance, for it is especially prominent in the dynamic public employment sector.

The tentativeness of labor unionism’s achievements has many causes, but one that looms especially large historically, alongside the great diversity of the economy and the size of the country, is the cultural diversity of the workforce, especially its immigrant character. The immigrants understood the virtues of solidarity. Ethnic group formation was premised on collective action in such endeavors as forming burial societies, churches, and sectarian school systems (for Catholics, Lutherans, and Orthodox Jews) as alternatives to state-funded schools. Large numbers of immigrant workers, especially the nineteenth-century English, Scots, and Germans, had already experienced the class confl ict, radical politics, and union organizational campaigns born of protests against proletarianization during the industrial revolution in Europe. But while many experiences taught the value of solidarity, immigration itself was ultimately based on individual initiative and individual and family aspirations. During the most sustained drive to form mass production industries, immigrant workers were enabled by the revolution in transoceanic transportation to make money and quickly return home. Organizing campaigns and prolonged strikes were an impediment to these aspirations. When provoked by employer actions such as reneging on wage agreements, even these birds of passage might react with a job action, but these short, sudden spasms of militancy did not create a labor movement.

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Thus, though voluntary immigration was entirely about material rewards, it did not necessarily inspire worker solidarity in pursuit of those rewards. Observing immigrant behavior, unions saw most immigrants as unorganizable and an impediment to labor’s progress. Furthermore, most unions in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries represented skilled craft workers. In contrast, the immigrants were for the most part unskilled workers, merely machine tenders on assembly lines or outdoor construction laborers. If they worked in the same industries with skilled unionized workers, they were not represented by their unions and did not share their wage scales. Unions of skilled workers also were, by and large, made up of native-stock white workers and the northern and western European ethnics who were long settled in America. A good deal of nativist contempt for foreigners frequently informed their response to recent eastern, central, and southern European immigrants, people of dubious whiteness, who seemed willing to take any sort of abuse to make a dollar. Asians, Mexicans, blacks, and other non-whites inspired even greater hostility. The occasional use of immigrant workers as strikebreakers hardened the view that immigrants were poor union material.

What was needed was a new union movement, which simultaneously reached out to all workers and organized workers by industry, not by skill level, in the interests of both collective power and countering the use of immigrants to break strikes and wage scales. Skilled workers, too, knew that they could be replaced by a new machine worked by an unskilled immigrant, especially if the latter felt no sense of moral obligation to them and was not bound by union discipline.

The impediments to the development of this sort of unionism were many, not the least of them the distrust among ethnic groups and the power of employers when supported, as they frequently were, by state power in the form of both court injunctions against striking unions and use of state militias and federal troops to

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Immigrants involved in Unions as a form on Americanization

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protect strikebreakers and break picket lines. Yet gradually during the fi rst half of the twentieth century in one mass production industry after another, unions with strong multi-ethnic, and ultimately multiracial, foundations were formed. These unions did not deny cultural differences but respected them, and balanced them off against a common commitment to American values of fairness and equality and to class solidarity. While immigrant and ethnic workers, such as Mexican and Filipino agricultural laborers and Chinese, Jewish, and Italian garment workers, showed considerable initiative in organization campaigns when encouraged to participate, leadership in union organizing often came from the more class-conscious elements of American and older ethnic group workers, who were the veterans of past struggles. Walter and Victor Reuther, the sons of German immigrant socialists, spent their lives in the labor movement and were instrumental in the formation of the multi-ethnic, multiracial United Auto Workers. A similar evolution toward inclusiveness may be traced in the United Steelworkers of America, whose founder and fi rst president, Philip Murray, was born in Scotland, and in the United Rubber Workers, whose fi rst president, Sherman Dalrymple, a native-born Anglo-American, was raised on a farm in West Virginia. Recognition in apportioning union offi ces and leadership positions in the workplace on negotiation committees or as shop stewards was proof of the willingness of such union leaders to reach out to immigrant workers. Thus, a vital element of American social democracy emerged out of multicultural foundations. It continues to do so. After internal debates that closely resembled those of the past, sectors of the American labor movement have once again become committed to organizing immigrant workers, such as the large numbers of women employed in housekeeping by corporate hotel chains.

A similar societal evolution took place in electoral politics, though much more rapidly. The stakes in American elections, especially at local levels, have always been greater than the offi ces contested,

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because the victor has taken control of public resources, especially government jobs, which might be apportioned to friends, family, and electoral supporters. Proudly self-conscious heirs of the Founding Fathers, native white Americans rarely saw it that way, believing elections were not about opportunity but about principles and ideas. Early in the history of American elections, however, as the electorate swelled beyond the narrow ranks of substantial property holders through democratization of the franchise by the individual states, politicians came to understand that political patronage in the form of jobs was a useful tool in mobilizing plebian supporters.

They also came to understand that it was impossible to mobilize a mass electorate one voter at a time. What was needed was a way of approaching the voters as members of groups with their own leaders, who might become simultaneously clients of politicians and power brokers in their own right. From the arrival of the Irish, Germans, and various groups of Scandinavians in the mid-nineteenth century, political parties came to see the advantage of mobilizing ethnic leadership and voters to form electoral majorities. The numbers of immigrants seemed endless, and after only fi ve years of American residence, they were entitled to become citizens and hence to vote. For their part, ethnics proved disciplined voters, if offered incentives. Solidarity in electoral politics came easier to the immigrants and their descendents than it did to Anglo-Americans, whose belief in principled individualism made them slower to recognize group interests. Ethnic groups voted undeviatingly for the party of their choice, often for many decades. Scandinavians were longtime proud Republicans. Irish Americans were Democratic loyalists and party leaders at every level for well over a century. Jews have been among the most solidly Democratic of the white ethnic groups for decades. Superimposed on these ethnic preferences has been a succession process, by which each new wave of immigration has displaced the previous one in positions of party leadership.

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In return for votes, politicians promised a variety of symbolic recognitions and benefi ts, and the ethnic groups discovered a new, fortuitous path to fulfi lling their aspirations. In addition to nominations to offi ce and public employment, there has been assistance to communities in the form of such social services as neighborhood public schools, police protection, public health programs, and parks and recreational facilities. Also, there was support on issues such as the long-abiding confl ict over the social control of alcohol, in which many immigrants, possessing European standards of tolerance for drinking and ethnic cultures that revolved around the social uses of alcohol, were aligned against American Evangelical Protestants, who saw the use of alcohol as sinful and a source of social disorder.

The gradual progress of civil service reform led to apportioning most public employment through objective measures of fi tness determined by job experience and performance on standardized tests, and undercut patronage politics. Yet ethnic bases for mobilizing the American electorate abide, because politics still apportions a variety of resources and recognitions along partisan lines.

Another long-standing function of ethnic politics has concerned homeland affairs, and because it is transnational in its reach, it has always been especially controversial. As a source of controversy, however, it, too, suggests the mutual accommodations by which American pluralism has been formed. Among these homeland issues have been not only demands for changes in immigration restrictions and support for increased numbers of refugees, but also in matters directly involving American foreign policy, such as support for opposition to international aggression or for homeland liberation. There is a long list of instances in which pressure has been exerted through the power of ethnic votes. These efforts emerged fi rst with the nineteenth-century Irish. Soon after attaining signifi cant numbers in politics in the 1850s, they organized a strong effort on behalf of American

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support for liberation of Ireland from British rule. An Irish campaign about homeland affairs continued through the creation of the Irish Free State in 1921 and the independent Republic of Ireland in 1949, and would ultimately include the question of control of Northern Ireland and support for the Catholic rights protests there in the late twentieth century.

The Irish have not been alone in using their vote and the possession of free speech as a wedge to infl uence American law and policy. Poles and Slovaks wanted support for independent homelands before and during World War I. During the Cold War, a wide variety of Eastern and Central European ethnics pressured the American government to free their homelands from Soviet control. Jews hoped to infl uence American refugee policy in the 1930s, so that more visas were issued to those wishing to fl ee Germany and, after the creation of Israel in 1948, began a decades-long effort on behalf of government support for Israel’s security. To combat that effort, Arab Americans, whose numbers have grown since 1965, mobilized their votes behind politicians sympathetic to the Palestinians. Italian Americans in the two decades after World War II organized to obtain increases in the admission of Italian immigrants and refugees above quota levels. Since the Cuban Revolution of 1959, Cuban Americans have used their large numbers in South Florida to infl uence American refugee policy and to support the American economic boycott of Cuba.

Such transnational ethnic political actions have been criticized on the grounds that the groups involved manifest disloyalty—or sometimes, more generously stated, unresolved dual loyalties. Yet ethnic activism of this type actually has drawn ethnic groups into the American mainstream, while widening that mainstream to legitimize their presence and concerns. The Irish, for example, became more American in substantial measure through decades of advocacy for their homeland, and the same dynamic process can be seen in other American ethnic groups, from Europeans in the past to contemporary Tibetans and Rwandans. When

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criticized by Americans for confl icted loyalties, Irish Americans justifi ed their activism saying they were demonstrating their American patriotism. They explained that the ideal situation for a liberated Ireland would be for it to adopt the values and institutional models of the American polity. Involvement in the processes of politics, moreover, integrated the Irish into the political party system and taught them to present their issues to those outside their group and to lobby the American government. It was no contradiction in the minds of Irish Americans that their St. Patrick’s Day parades routinely gave representation simultaneously to symbols of American loyalty and Irish nationalism.

Across the continent, the same phenomenon manifested itself in the San Francisco area in the 1930s and 1940s, as Chinese Americans assumed a public role as advocates for China in its struggle against Japanese aggression. Voting was of less consequence than among the Irish, because there were far fewer Chinese citizens, and they were concentrated in a small number of electoral districts. But through large, well-planned public rallies, parades, and demonstrations, they infl uenced American policy and public opinion. Chinese American women worked through their labor union, the Independent Ladies Garment Workers Union, to organize a boycott of Japanese goods. During the war, they joined the American women’s armed forces in signifi cant numbers in order to play a role in defeating Japan.

Such examples of cohesive pluralism demonstrate the power of ethnicity simultaneously to strengthen the group and to assist it in speeding its way into the mainstream. America has not always enthusiastically welcomed immigrants. But its homogenizing social and political arrangements have created opportunities for them to become a part of an American society that becomes more unifi ed and hence stronger because of the integration of diverse peoples, who retain their differences, even as they come to act and think in common.

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