Chapter Three
MORE SLOVENIAN AND MORE AMERICAN
How the Hyphen Unites
ON A cold, misty April 19,1875, President Ulysses S. Grant and key members of his cabinet joined the centennial celebration of the beginning of the American Revolution at Concord and Lexington, Massachusetts, where they listened to speeches made by illustrious Anglo-Americans, among them Ralph Waldo Emerson, Julia Ward Howe, James Russell Lowell, and John Greenleaf Whittier. It was a high moment for the Anglo-American leadership of Massachusetts, who were reminded by Thomas Merriam Stetson, the master of ceremonies of the festive day in Lexington, that the fallen heroes of Lexington and Concord all had English names. Speaking of the martyrs of the Revolution, Stetson called their courageous stand against the larger British force “the flower and consummation of principles that were long ripening in the clear-sighted, liberty-loving, Anglo-Saxon mind.”1
The Anglo-Americans, especially in New England, thought of themselves as charter members of the republic. Americans from other backgrounds were relative newcomers, and persons of color, despite the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments, still were treated essentially as outsiders, and within a few years after the centennial their position as outsiders would be more sharply defined. With the end of Reconstruction, blacks in the South were relegated to the position of a subjugated, segregated rural proletariat. Chinese laborers were excluded from immigrating to the United States in 1882, and the Dawes Act was passed in 1887 in an attempt to assimilate Native Americans (Indians) by breaking up tribal lands.
By the time of the centennial in 1875, however, probably most Anglo-Americans accepted the necessity of immigration from northern and western Europe. Employers greedily sought white immigrant labor, and the Republican party platforms of 1864 and 1868 made explicit the connection between capital expansion and the venerable myth of asylum by asserting that “foreign immigration, which in the past has added so much to the wealth, development of resources, and increase of power to this nation—the asylum of the oppressed of all nations—should be fostered and encouraged by a just policy.”2 Immigrants from Germany kept coming in large numbers (718,182 between 1871 and 1880, totaling more than one-quarter of all immigrants and a third of those from Europe), and German-speaking enclaves existed all over the Midwest, but their arrival did not often raise the sharp anxieties that Benjamin Franklin and other Anglo-Americans had expressed in the mid-eighteenth century when they said such immigrants might “Germanize us.” Immigration from Ireland, while substantial (436,871 in the 1870s), had been halved in the twenty-year period between 1861 and 1880 from the previous twenty years, and the percentage of Irish compared with other immigrants had gone down steadily since the 1850s.3
The Irish still aroused hostility even though mine operators, railroad owners, small manufacturers, and a growing number of Americans in commerce and the professions had grown used to having them fill a variety of unskilled and semiskilled jobs. They were more threatening to Anglo-Americans than Germans or Scandinavians not just because they were Catholic (a substantial number of Germans were Catholic, too) but also because, poor and unskilled, they crowded into the cities of the Northeast, where their presence was linked to alcoholism and other diseases, and to crime.
Northern Europe accounted for 90 percent of all immigration in the 1860s and 80 percent in the 1870s, but as the numbers from Ireland went down, those from Scandinavia went up, almost doubling between 1871 and 1880 over the previous decade. Scandinavians were overwhelmingly Protestant, and a large number, like the Germans, moved to the Midwest, where almost everyone came from somewhere else. Their arrival met relatively little opposition; even though they spoke their ancestral languages at home and sometimes in school, they entered the political life of their communities and, as did the Germans, established ethnic associations in the American pattern of voluntary ethnic pluralism.
Immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe
With continued confinement of free blacks to the coercive, segregated labor system of the South and with continued exclusion of Chinese laborers from immigration, the leaders of American industry and commerce in the North looked to European immigrants to keep the cost of labor low. Immigrant labor was cheap for many reasons. A high proportion were young, single men who brought no children for the state to educate. As noncitizens, they were subject to deportation for at least five years, and, lacking language skills in most cases, they also lacked mobility. Native-born workers, on the other hand, were organizing in unions, demanding a shorter work day and work week and higher wages. With the number of immigrants from northern Europe going down (in the last four years of the 1870s never above 177,826 [1879] in any year), employers and labor contractors began to look to southern and eastern Europe for workers. In the 1880s, the number of immigrants more than doubled over the previous ten years (2,271,925 to 4,735,484), and net migration as a percentage of American population growth rose from slightly more than 25 percent to over 40 percent in the same decade.4 American capital looked for labor in southern Italy, where large numbers of unemployed and underemployed single men were willing to come to the U.S. to build roads, buildings, and reservoirs. They took jobs in what economists would later call a secondary labor market—low-skilled, heavy-muscle, often temporary jobs segregated from mainstream economic opportunities. During the 1880s, immigration from Italy, nearly all of it from the poor south, jumped six times over what it had been in the 1870s. It doubled again in the decade of the 1890s to 651,893, and quadrupled from 1901 through 1910 to 2,450,877.
Russia and other eastern European countries provided another source of workers. From the decade of the 1870s to the decade of the 1890s the number of immigrants from Russia, most of them Jews, increased more than ten times, from nearly 40,000 to 505,290; from 1901 through 1910 (when Poles were counted among Russians, Austro-Hungarians, and Germans) the number of immigrants admitted to the U.S. grew to 1,597,306. The percentage of all European immigrants who came from the east and south of Europe rose steadily from nearly 20 percent in the decade of the 1880s to 53 percent in the 1890s and 75 percent from 1901 through 1910 as the exploding industrial revolution in the United States called for workers in the Midwest as well as in the North.5
Most immigrants were Catholics, including Italians, Poles, and Slavs. Along with a substantial number of Greeks and Jews, these were peoples whose languages, appearance, customs, and religions combined with their poverty to mark them clearly as outsiders. That the composition of immigration changed so drastically—in the 1870s one of every four immigrants from Europe was from the United Kingdom, in the 1880s, one of every eight—gave rise once more to apprehensions for the preservation of American identity and unity.
Guarding the Gates: A Racial View of American Identity
But what was the essence of American identity? On what did American unity depend? For Jefferson, American identity was a matter of American ideology, and American unity depended upon newcomers embracing the principles that gave rise to and sustained self-government. He had said nothing about nationality or race. But for the forty years between 1880 and 1920, a period of almost continual national debate over the meaning of American identity and unity, Jeffersonian arguments were mixed in a potpourri of concerns about class, culture, and race.
As always, skilled, semiskilled, and unskilled native-born workers worried about the negative effect that immigrants would have on wages and working conditions. Often confined to city neighborhoods where their children were obliged to attend school with the children of immigrants, native-born workers were much more likely than high-level managers or employers to be upset by the strange ways of the newcomers. But the antiimmigrant appeal was widespread, reaching into the rural South, where there were few immigrants, to small towns in the Midwest, and to the upper reaches of Beacon Hill and the Back Bay, where the Brahmins of Boston kept the Massachusetts idea alive despite and perhaps because of the rising power of the Irish.
Woodrow Wilson, professor of government at Princeton University, observed in 1901 that earlier in the nineteenth century “men of the sturdy stocks of the north of Europe” made up the main