CHAPTER 23

Immigration and Identity

If the existence of the American nations seems persuasive enough for the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and the first three-quarters of the nineteenth century, one might still ask how they could possibly have survived to the present day. After all, isn’t the United States a nation of immigrants, and Canada, too, for that matter? In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, did we not welcome to our shores tens of millions of people from all over the world, those tired, poor, huddled masses yearning to breathe free who flowed through Ellis and Angel Islands on their way to create the wondrously diverse America of today? Surely the cultures of the regional nations were subsumed by the great multicultural tide of 1830 to 1924, surviving only in the imaginations of a few old-money white Anglo-Saxon Protestants still hiding out in their last scraps of habitat: Nantucket, Harvard Yard, and Skull and Bones reunions. Did not the arrival of millions of Irish, Germans, Italians, Slavs, Jews, Greeks, and Chinese in the course of a single lifetime herald the birth of a genuinely “American” (or, for that matter, “Canadian”) identity that cemented the country together to fight two world wars?

The short answer is no.

These great immigration waves enriched and empowered these two North American federations, but they did not displace their preexisting regional nations. These remained the “dominant cultures” which nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century immigrants’ children and grandchildren either assimilated into or reacted against. Immigrant communities might achieve political dominance over a city or state (as the Irish did in Boston or the Italians in New York), but the system they controlled was the product of the regional culture. They might retain, share, and promote their own cultural legacies, introducing foods, religions, fashions, and ideas, but they would find them modified over time by adaptations to local conditions and mores. They might encounter prejudice and hostility from the “native” population, but the nature and manifestation of this opposition varied depending on which nation the natives belonged to. Immigrants didn’t alter “American culture,” they altered America’s respective regional cultures. Indeed, in many ways the immigrations of 1830–1924 actually accentuated the differences among them.

A few words on this era of mass immigration. Between 1830 and 1924 some 36 million people emigrated to the United States. They arrived in three distinct waves. The first—the arrival of some 4.5 million Irish, Germans, and British people between 1830 and 1860—has already been touched on; it triggered Yankee fears that those immigrants who were Catholic would undermine the republic through slavish obedience to the Pope, and it motivated New England’s mission to “save the west” by assimilating newcomers to the Yankee Way. The second, between 1860 and 1890, saw twice as many immigrants, largely from the same countries, plus Scandinavia and China. The third wave, from 1890 to 1924, was the largest of all, with some 18 million new arrivals, mostly from southern and eastern Europe (particularly Italy, Greece, and Poland), three-quarters of whom were either Catholic or Jewish; this wave also included many Chinese and caused some alarm among native-born North Americans who feared these new foreigners would be unable to assimilate to local ways. This third wave was cut short in 1924, when the U.S. Congress imposed quotas designed to protect the federation from the taint of “inferior races,” including Italians, Jews, and immigrants from the Balkans and East Europe. Immigration remained restricted—and heavily biased toward northern Europeans—until the early 1950s. Despite the scale of immigration, newcomers were always a small minority. The proportion of foreign-born remained at about 10 percent of the U.S. population throughout the period, peaking at 14 percent in 1914. Its cumulative effect was important but not overwhelming. Even after adding together all immigrants between 1790 and 2000—66 million altogether—and their descendants, demographers have calculated that immigration accounts for only about half the early-twenty-first-century population of the United States. In other words, if the United States had sealed its borders in 1790, in the year 2000 it would still have had a population of about 125 million instead of 250 million. The 1820–1924 immigration was enormous, but it was never truly overpowering.¹

Another key point to note is that these “great wave” immigrants didn’t spread out evenly across the federation but rather concentrated in a few locations. Throughout the period, the majority of immigrants lived in New Netherland, the Midlands, and Yankeedom and most of the rest on the Left Coast. They settled in a handful of gateway cities, especially New York, Philadelphia, Boston, Chicago, and San Francisco. Virtually none of them came to Tidewater, Appalachia, the Deep South, or El Norte. (The Far West, which was still being colonized, attracted only small numbers of immigrants, but they accounted for a significant share of the region’s population—about a quarter in 1870, and almost a fifth in 1910.) New York City alone had more foreign-born residents in 1870 than the entirety of Tidewater, Appalachia, and the Deep South combined. Scholars have shown that immigrant communities tended to fan out to the suburbs as they gained wealth and influence; this kept the influence of “ethnic” communities concentrated in immigration’s “have” nations, and left the “have-not” nations almost untouched.²

It’s not difficult to understand why immigrants avoided the three southern nations. Most were fleeing countries with repressive feudal systems controlled by entrenched aristocracies; until 1866 the Deep South and Tidewater were repressive, near-feudal systems with entrenched aristocracies, and after Reconstruction ended in 1877 they returned to form. With little industry and an agricultural sector dominated by large landholdings, the two lowland southern nations had little to attract newly arrived immigrants. Greater Appalachia remained poor, with few cities and jobs. In the three southern nations, strict adherence to local customs and practices remained key to being accepted as “American,” which made them less attractive to foreigners.

In El Norte an “American” was pretty much anyone who wasn’t a norteño; even a German-speaking Catholic was considered an “Anglo.” But because it lacked major ports or cities, El Norte was simply too remote for large numbers of immigrants to settle there.

By contrast, New Netherland and the Midlands had been explicitly multicultural since their foundation and so were places where it was viewed as normal for people of many languages, religions, and cultures to live side by side. Nearly all of these nations’ major cities—New York, Trenton, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, and the Midland border cities of Chicago and St. Louis—had attracted huge numbers of immigrants and “ethnic” majorities. New York City had an Irish majority in the 1850s, was run by Irish in the 1870s, attracted a quarter of all Italian immigrants in the federation in 1880, and was 25 percent Jewish in 1910. Slavs congregated in and around Pittsburgh, while ethnic enclaves of all sorts formed in Chicago and Philadelphia. Cultural diversity was entirely in keeping with the Midlander worldview. For both these nations, being “American” had nothing to do with one’s ethnicity, religion, or language but was rather a spirit or state of mind. When pundits speak today of America always having been multicultural, multiethnic, and multilingual, they’re really referring to New Netherland and the Midlands. In these nations it’s almost impossible to describe immigrant groups as having acculturated, as it’s not at all clear what they would be acculturating to, beyond an ethic of toleration, individual achievement (in New Netherland) and, possibly, the use of English. The American model of cultural pluralism originates in the traditions of these two nations.³

The Great Wave came at a time when the Left Coast and Far West were still in their infancy, so in these areas many immigrant groups had as much cultural leverage as their native competitors. Here everything was new, and cultural groups competed with one another to shape society. There were limits, of course. On the Left Coast, the Yankee elite worked hard to assimilate settlers from nations foreign and domestic. In the Far West, however, the banks and cartels that dominated the economy were not above using violence against those who threatened their interests. In both nations blacks, Asians, and Hispanics encountered considerable hostility, with Chinese and Japanese treated as an inferior people to be used much like slaves. Japanese children were kept out of California classrooms as late as 1907 on the theory that they lacked the aptitude for higher learning.⁴ But most other immigrant groups were able to take advantage of the fact that these Western nations were still defining their values and power structures, and many were able to play an essential role in that enterprise. On the Left Coast and in the Far West, being “American” was never about being Protestant or being descended from English or British “stock”; rather, it was about embracing individual achievement and pursuing “the American Dream.” When pundits start waxing poetic about how becoming “American” is about embracing the “free-market” mentality and pursuing one’s potential, they are on sound footing in these two nations.

Yankeedom presented a far more complicated situation. Before 1830 this region was remarkably homogeneous, with a well-earned reputation for intolerance. Yankeedom had rejected immigrants for much of the colonial period, but by the mid-nineteenth century its rapidly expanding industrial centers and the forests, farms, and mines on its Midwestern frontier attracted large numbers of foreigners, many of whom were neither English nor Protestant. We’ve already seen how Yankees sought to save not only their own frontier but even the Pacific Coast from the “dangerous influences” of Catholic immigrants, slaveholding Southerners, and German brewers. But as the Great Wave crashed over the United States in the late nineteenth century, Yankees redoubled their efforts to conform newcomers to “American” norms, by which they really meant New England ones.

This crusade focused on educating immigrants and their children. Schools had always been seen as institutions of acculturation in New England and its colonies. Until the twentieth century most people’s “job prospects” as farmers, laborers, or industrial workers were in no way enhanced by knowing how to read, write, and do arithmetic. Rather, children were schooled in order to acculturate them to Yankee ways and to build the community bonds considered essential to preventing the formation of an aristocracy and, thus, the collapse of the republic. The Great Wave only increased the Yankees’ sense of urgency. “It is fatal for a democracy to permit the formation of fixed classes,” the influential educational philosopher (and Vermont native) John Dewey argued in 1915. “The democracy which proclaims equality of opportunity as its ideal requires an education in which learning and social application, ideas, practice, work, and recognition of the meaning of what is done are united from the beginning and for all.” Everyone should be educated together in common schools according to a common curriculum, Yankees had long argued, to ensure social and cultural continuity. From the mid-nineteenth century New England governments required towns to maintain tuition-free schools, and by century’s end many Yankee-controlled states had made attendance mandatory. (By contrast, the Deep South had no effective public education system and actively discouraged the mixing of classes and castes.) ⁵

Immigrants presented additional challenges. “A foreign people, born and bred and dwarfed under the despotisms of the Old World, cannot be transformed into the full stature of American citizens merely by a voyage across the Atlantic, or by subscribing the oath of naturalization,” Horace Mann, the Yankee reformer widely credited as “the father of American public education,” told fellow educators in 1845. Schools, he argued, had to train children to “self-government, self-control,” and “a voluntary compliance with the laws of reason and duty” lest they “retain the servility in which they have been trained” or fall into “the evils of anarchy and lawlessness.” By 1914 that mission had been expanded to include adult immigrants, who were offered free evening classes in English, mathematics, U.S. history, and “hygiene and good behavior.” In Massachusetts and Connecticut, towns were required to maintain these programs, and attendance was compulsory for every illiterate person between sixteen and twenty-one years of age. The programs were also adopted in New Netherland and the Midlands (usually through the efforts of transplanted Yankees) but generally on a voluntary basis. They received little official support in the Deep South, Appalachia, and the Far West, where most state constitutions actually forbade legislators from spending tax dollars on adult education.⁶

The notion of America having been a “melting pot” in which immigrants were transmuted into “Anglo-Protestant Americans” really refers to a Yankee remedy intimately tied to the folkways of a covenanted, utopia-building people who were themselves almost entirely English in origin. Perhaps the greatest popularizing institution for this school of assimilation was the Henry Ford English School, founded in 1914 in the heart of the Yankee Midwest. There, Ford’s immigrant workers were taught not just English but history and the Yankee values of thrift, cleanliness, and punctuality. At their graduation ceremony students dressed in the fashions of their home countries paraded down the gangway of a mock ship and into a gigantic cauldron labeled “melting pot,” which their teachers began stirring with giant spoons; a few minutes later, the graduates marched out of the pot wearing “American” suits and ties and waving the American flag. Meanwhile, historians at Harvard, Yale, and other Yankee institutions were crafting a mythic “national” history for students to celebrate, which emphasized the centrality of the (previously neglected) Pilgrim voyage, the Boston Tea Party, and Yankee figures such as the minutemen, Paul Revere, and Johnny Appleseed. (The Puritans were recast as champions of religious freedom, which would have surprised them, while Jamestown, New Amsterdam, and the early Anglican settlements of Maine were ignored.) In the Yankee paradigm, immigrants were to assimilate into the dominant culture which, from their point of view, was indeed characterized by the “Protestant” (i.e., Calvinist) work ethic, self-restraint, a commitment to “common good,” and hostility to aristocratic institutions. Cultural pluralism, individualism, or the acceptance of an Anglo-British class system was not on the Yankees’ agenda.⁷

 

In the early twenty-first century, a new wave of immigration has prompted a heated debate about what it means to be “American” and what should and shouldn’t be expected of a person who wishes to count himself as one. Conservatives like the late Harvard political scientist Samuel Huntington assert that America is now weakly held together by just two factors: the “continuing centrality” of a dominant “Anglo-Protestant” culture (with special emphasis on the English language and the “Protestant” work ethic) and the shared ideology of a two-century-old “American Creed” championing equality, individualism, liberty, personal prosperity, and representative government. Huntington’s followers fear these precious unifiers are being broken down by their opponents, the foolhardy champions of multiculturalism and ethnic pluralism. In contrast, the multiculturalists argue that America’s true genius is to have created the possibility of a place where people of different cultures, religions, races, and language groups can coexist, each maintaining its own values and identity. Both schools argue a historical basis for their definition of American identity, and find weaknesses in the historical examples their opponents raise in defense of their views.⁸

In fact, both sides are evoking characteristics that were true of only a subset of North America’s ethnoregional nations rather than “America” as a whole. Certainly the Calvinist work ethic has always been central to the Yankee identity at the same time that it was anathema to that of the Deep South or Tidewater, where a leisurely “pace of life” has long been seen as virtuous. (No Deep Southern aristocrat feared he would be kept from Heaven on account of idleness; much of the Yankee elite was haunted by this notion.) “Englishness,” language and all, was absolutely not at the heart of the Midlands and New Netherland identity, where multiculturalism was indeed the norm; applied to El Norte, theories of “Anglo-Protestant” cultural origins look comical. Extreme individualism is central to the Appalachian and Far Western identities but has always been frowned upon in communitarian New England and New France. “Liberty” in the sense Huntington thought of it was absolutely not part of the Deep Southern or Tidewater vision of the American identity, while representative government was championed by their slaveholding elite only to the extent that they themselves did all the representing. Far from embracing multiculturalism, Yankees have spent their history either keeping outsiders away or trying to assimilate them (and the rest of the country) to New England norms. It is fruitless to search for the characteristics of an “American” identity, because each nation has its own notion of what being American should mean.

 

Failing to recognize this, Huntington’s disciples have done a great deal of hand-wringing about the supposedly exceptional nature of the dominant Mexican stream of the current “fourth wave” of mass immigration. In 1970, 760,000 Mexican-born individuals were living in the United States, or about 1.4 percent of Mexico’s population. In 2008, that number had jumped seventeenfold to 12.7 million, or 11 percent of all native Mexicans on the planet. They comprised 32 percent of the foreign-born population of the United States in 2008, the same proportion as the Irish did in the third quarter of the nineteenth century. The vast majority live in El Norte, where they now constitute an overwhelming majority of the population and see no reason to “assimilate” to some Anglo-Protestant norm. This was enormously alarming to Huntington and to others living outside El Norte, who fear a reconquista is taking place. In a sense they’re correct: Mexicans have retaken control of the American portion of El Norte, and large numbers of immigrants from southern Mexico are becoming assimilated into norteño culture. But this isn’t so much a threat to the “dominant culture” of the region as a return to its origins.⁹

There is not, however, any chance of Mexico’s annexing El Norte: norteños on both sides of the present border would sooner break off from both countries and form their own republic. After all, even the Mexican portion of El Norte is three times wealthier than southern Mexico, where it is forced to export tax dollars. As Harvard fellow Juan Enriquez has noted, there’s very little binding the region to Mexico City, which doesn’t provide it with technology, basic services, security, or a market for its products. If El Norte’s Mexican sections—Baja California, Nuevo León, Coahuila, Chihuahua, Sonora, and Tamaulipas—had their choice, Enriquez notes, they’d probably prefer some European Union–style relationship with the United States rather than to remain in Mexico; they have more in common with the American section of El Norte than they do with the rest of their own country. “Southwest Chicanos and Norteño Mexicanos are becoming one people again,” University of New Mexico Chicano Studies professor Charles Truxillo told the Associated Press in 2000, adding that the creation of a separate state was inevitable. His suggested name for the new country: the República del Norte.¹⁰