The New Americans by Michael Barone Click here to return to book details Introduction THE NEW AMERICANS In January 1994, speaking in Milwaukee, Vice President Al Gore gave a speech in which he translated the national motto E pluribus unum as “out of one, many.”1 One might guess that this was an inadvertent error, or evidence that Gore did not take Latin at St. Albans or Harvard. Except that in the words that followed he made it clear that the words had come out as intended. “You all share the American belief that there is strength in all our differences,” he said, “that we can build a collective civic space large enough for all our separate identities.” Separate identities: Here Gore aligned himself with a view widely prevalent, and not just among his fellow partisans, of the course of American history. America in this view was for a very long time monocultural, a white-bread nation in which just about everyone was like everybody else (with the one important exception, as Gore would surely agree, of blacks). Immigrants, in this view, were white Europeans-pretty much like everybody else. But now, with the influx of immigrants from Latin America and Asia, and with our laws classifying people by race, we have suddenly become a multicultural society. White-bread America has become multigrain. For someone Gore’s age and with no knowledge of the longer run of American history, this view superficially makes sense. America in the 1950s was famously called a conformist society, a nation of organization men. Immigration from Europe had been cut close to zero by the Immigration Act of 1924; old ethnic neighborhoods seemed to be dying out. The percentage of foreign-born residents, which was 15 percent in 1910, dropped steadily to 4.7 percent in 1970.2 Most Americans, until the civil rights movement of the late 1950s and early 1960s, paid little attention to the legally enforced racial segregation of the South or the racial discrimination prevalent in the North. It was possible, though not entirely accurate, to think of America as “one.” But these years were the exception, not the rule, in American history. The United States has never been a monoethnic nation. The American colonies, as historian David Hackett Fischer teaches in Albion’s Seed, were settled by distinctive groups from different parts of the British Isles, with distinctive folkways, distinctive behaviors in everything from politics to sexual behavior. And this is not to mention the German immigrants who formed 40 percent of Pennsylvania’s population in the Revolutionary years and who, Benjamin Franklin feared,3 would never be assimilated. Many different religious groups-Catholics and Mennonites, Shakers and Jews-established communities and congregations, making the thirteen colonies and the new nation more religiously diverse than any place in Europe. We were already, in John F. Kennedy’s phrase, a nation of immigrants. One who understood this was George Washington. In August 1790, the first president wrote a letter to the Touro Synagogue in Newport, Rhode Island. Always aware that he was setting precedent for a republic that he believed would someday encompass more than 100 million people, Washington used this occasion to set forth his vision of civic equality and of how people with diverse backgrounds should live together as Americans. Jews everywhere in Europe had lived for centuries under civil disabilities, unable to participate in politics and government, limited in their right to own land and to travel outside their ghettoes. Washington opposed such barriers to citizenship, and went further. Responding to the congregation’s letter congratulating him on his election to the presidency, he wrote, “It is now that tolerance is no more spoken of, as if it was by the indulgence of one class of people, that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent natural rights. For happily the government of the United States, which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance, requires only that they who live under its protection should demean themselves as good citizens, in giving it on all occasions their effectual support.”4 Here, in Washington’s ornate eighteenth-century prose, was the idea of the Melting Pot, long before it received its name. Anyone could become an American. The nation would welcome newcomers of all backgrounds-there were no restrictions on immigration then-and treat them as equals, not out of generosity but on principle. A diverse people would share a common citizenship. America would be a proudly multiethnic nation. But it would also be a nation with a common civic culture.5 Washington provided Americans with a good working formula for assimilating the tens of millions of immigrants who would come here over the next two centuries. They would be eligible _for citizenship, entitled to be treated as the equal of every _other American, provided that they accepted civic obligations and the civic culture. During most of the succeeding two centuries, mass immigration has been the rule, not the exception, in American life. The reason for much of this immigration was _simple economics, for even in the 1790s the United States was, for ordinary people, the most economically bountiful nation in the world. But economics cannot explain everything. There _was never mass immigration to the United States from some countries that had lower incomes-France, for example, or Spain, or northern Italy. Mass immigration has come from only a few places-Britain and Ireland, southern Italy and parts of Germany and Scandinavia, the Russian Pale of Settlement within which Jews were confined a century ago, Poland and other countries in eastern Europe. Immigration has been prompted sometimes by terrible events-the Irish potato famine, the Russian pogroms-and sometimes by the pressure that population growth unaccompanied by economic growth puts on a peasantry. But it is usually sustained-it only becomes chain migration, with one relative and family and neighbor following another-when there is a sense that the way of life in the old country is in some fundamental way unfair or dysfunctional, a sense strong enough to overcome the usual human desire to live where one grew up. And it sometimes happens that different countries are dysfunctional in similar ways-southern Italy and Mexico, for example. Coming to America gives immigrants a chance to get away from a dysfunctional society, but they also bring with them habits of mind they developed to adapt to that society, habits of mind that turn out to be dysfunctional in the United States-the deep distrust of institutions among southern Italians and Latinos,* for instance. These habits of mind are not easily discarded; they are handed down from parents to children, generation to generation. But in time the environment of the United States fosters different, more functional habits of mind-a process that can be called assimilation. Many savants predicted a hundred years ago that the immigrants of their day could never be assimilated, that they would never undertake the civic obligations and adapt to the civic culture of the United States.6 History has proven them wrong. American democracy emerged strengthened from the tests of depression and war, the American economy has proved to be the strongest and most supple in the world, and if the American common culture is not in as good a condition as many would like, no one can seriously argue that it is because of the ethnic separatism of Irish, Italians, or Jews. Today we hear similar predictions about contemporary immigrants and minority groups. Those predictions, too, will in time be proven wrong. The spirit of welcoming immigrants, enabling and expecting them to become Americans, was set early on, as witness George Washington’s words to the congregation of the Touro Synagogue. Over the past two centuries the United States has attracted immigrants more than any other nation. It has also generated a vast internal migration-the movement of blacks from the rigidly segregated, rural South to the great cities of the North from 1940 to 1965-that in many ways resembles the mass migrations from Europe, Latin America, and Asia to large American cities. Overall, 35 million immigrants arrived from 1840 to 1924, in the first wave of mass immigration, and the percentage of foreign-born residents ranged between 13 and 15 percent from 1850 to 1920. Then the 1924 immigration act virtually shut down immigration, and as a result the percentage of foreign-born residents dropped to the 1970 low of 4.7 percent. The Immigration Act of 1965 and successive immigration laws have opened up the door again, and the percentage of foreign-born residents rose to 10 percent in 2000. Ethnic diversity is as American as apple pie-or pizza or bagels, or soul food or tacos or dim sung. The thesis of this book is that minority groups of 2000 resemble in important ways immigrant groups of 1900. In many ways blacks resemble Irish, Latinos resemble Italians, Asians resemble Jews. Thus, in seeking to assimilate the peoples of the great migrations of our times, we need to learn from America’s success in assimilating these earlier immigrants, as well as from the mistakes that were made along the way. This does not mean obliterating their original identities or cutting off people entirely from their heritage; it does mean helping them to transform dysfunctional habits of mind into those that are functional in this new country. Immigrants and minorities need to be interwoven into the fabric of American life, but the process of interweaving means that the fabric itself will change in subtle ways over time. One cannot understand the character of American life today without understanding the contributions of the Irish, Italian, Jewish, and other immigrant groups of a hundred years ago. One will not be able to understand the character of American life in 2100 without understanding the contributions of the blacks, Latinos, and Asians of today. America in the future will be multiracial and multiethnic, but it will not-or should not-be multicultural in the sense of containing ethnic communities marked off from and adversarial to the larger society, any more than today’s America consists of unassimilated and adversarial communities of Irish, Italians, or Jews. Some claim that today’s minorities are different because they are different races, but a hundred years ago the Irish, Italians, and Jews were considered to be other races. Contrary to what Vice President Gore implied in 1994, we are not in a wholly new place in American history. We’ve been here before. We should not make the mistake of assuming that assimilation was painless or that the way Americans dealt with the immigrant groups of a hundred years ago was flawless. The pointed and often hurtful ethnic stereotyping that was so prominent in American popular culture a century ago has little equivalent today. There were plenty of examples of bigotry and discrimination that any decent-minded person today must abhor. On the whole, however, assimilation was successful. It has made us a strong, creative, tolerant nation. We should not forget the lessons our history teaches. I came to write this book partly out of my personal background and experience. My own life is linked to each of the three immigrant groups of 1900 mentioned here. I am of Italian and Irish ancestry; my former wife is Jewish. My paternal grandfather was the son of Italian immigrants, born the year after his parents left Sicily for Buffalo, New York. (What did they think of the climate?) He married my grandmother, born in West Virginia, the descendant of Scots and Germans who had come to America in colonial days. My maternal grandfather was born in Canada, in a farming town full of Irish whose forebears had moved there shortly after the Irish potato famine of the 1840s; he immigrated to Michigan in the 1890s. He married my grandmother, born in Detroit, the descendant of Irish Catholics who had come to Boston in the famine years. As it happened, the public school I attended in Detroit in the early 1950s had a student body about one-third Catholic, one-third Protestant, and one-third Jewish: the Melting Pot. The private schools I later attended-Cranbrook School in the Detroit suburbs, Harvard College, and Yale Law School-had student bodies about one-third Jewish, much more than one-third Protestant, and much less than one-third Catholic, plus small numbers of blacks. My school years spanned the 1950s and the first half of the 1960s, in many ways America’s most culturally homogenous, white-bread years. Yet I was conscious from my very early years of America’s ethnic and religious diversity, aware that we were part of one country yet of many different backgrounds. One could not grow up in Detroit in those years unaware of the vast migration of southern blacks into northern cities. Large parts of Detroit were undergoing racial change as many blacks moved into formerly white neighborhoods. The Detroit newspaper _classified ads had separate sections for apartments-“white” and “colored”-and whole square miles would change from all-white to mostly black within a year or two. When I became active in politics in the mid-1960s, I learned how different ethnic and racial groups had very different party preferences. Hopeful that blacks and whites could work together despite racial animosities, I canvassed white neighborhoods for black candidates and black neighborhoods for white candidates. In the summer of 1967, I worked as an intern in the office of Detroit mayor Jerome Cavanagh, and in the riot that year I was a witness to the destruction of the city, large parts of which I knew block by block. Since 1969 I have lived in two cities, Detroit and Washington, with black majorities. More recently, in the 1990s, I have worked to learn more about the new immigrant communities of America. In 1998 Reader’s Digest assigned me to write a story on America’s Latinos, with the Digest characteristically encouraging me to travel to Los Angeles, Houston, El Paso, New York, Chicago, and Miami to see how Latinos are living, how they are coping and moving upward. I have continued to cover Latino immigrants and Asian immigrants as well. In addition, I have been coauthor since 1971 of The Almanac of American Politics with Grant Ujifusa, the grandson of Japanese immigrants, who grew up in Wyoming near one of the camps where Japanese-Americans were interned during World War II. So I have had a close acquaintance with all six of the ethnic groups that are the subject of this book. I began to notice the resemblances between each of the three pairs in the 1990s. It started with the Italians, when friends at the National Italian American Foundation and other organizations asked me to comment on the political experiences of Italian-Americans. What became immediately obvious was the difference between the mostly apolitical Italians, who never wholeheartedly embraced either major American political party, and the highly political and, for most of a century, almost entirely Democratic Irish. That led me to look into the background of Italians in politically dysfunctional southern Italy. Then, as I began researching the Reader’s Digest piece, it struck me that today’s Latinos were very much like the Italians of a hundred years before. They both came from politically dysfunctional countries whose major institutions had their roots in the sixteenth-century governance of Emperor Charles V; they had low levels of trust in large institutions; they came to America with little in the way of a political agenda and often with an intention to return to the old country; they worked hard, stayed close to their families, and had little involvement in politics. Indeed, the resemblance between the Latinos and the Italians is the closest of any of the three in this book. The resemblance between blacks and the Irish is obvious to anyone with a knowledge of, and affection for, the works of Daniel Patrick Moynihan. In his controversial report on the black family, issued in 1965, Moynihan wrote of “important differences in family patterns surviving from the age of the great European migrations to the United States, and these variations account for notable differences in the progress and assimilation of various ethnic and religious groups.”7 There is no doubt which ethnic group Moynihan had in mind: his own, the Irish. Moynihan’s father, a talented man given to drink, abandoned his family. This was not at all uncommon for the Irish; it is the theme of a popular book of the 1940s, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, and a popular book of the 1990s, Angela’s Ashes. In his brilliant and heartbreaking chapter on the Irish in Beyond the Melting Pot, published in 1963, Moynihan wrote, “There was a touch of Sambo in the professional Irishman: he was willing to be welcomed on terms that he not forget his place.”8 The Irish in British-ruled Ireland and the blacks in the rural, segregated South lived in societies whose fundamental unfairness they could never ignore: they were barred entirely from politics and kept almost entirely from the market economy; their men, barred from discharging their responsibilities, were left to behave irresponsibly in ways that hurt those around them. Today, of course, it is natural to say that their experiences could not have been similar (and in fact they were far from identical) because blacks are members of a different race. But we must recall that the Irish immigrants of the nineteenth century were widely considered to be of another race, a fact reflected in the wry title of a recent book, How the Irish Became White.9 While the resemblance between Irish and blacks is not as close as that between Italians and Latinos, their experiences are still in many ways eerily similar. Anyone familiar with elite American universities, where Jews and Asians are found in proportions enormously higher than their share of the population, will recognize the resemblance between those two groups. Indeed, both Jews and Asians have been victims of university-imposed quotas: Jews were often kept out of prestigious universities from the 1920s to the 1960s, and Asians have been denied places at elite universities by means of racial quotas and preferences since the 1970s. Even so, they excel: it is said, perhaps apocryphally, that two decades ago the most common last name in the Harvard faculty directory was Cohen, and now it is Chen. The resemblance between Jews and Asians is the least close of the three examined here, however. The Jews who immigrated in vast numbers from 1890 to 1924 were almost all Yiddish-speaking Ashkenazim from the Russian and Austro-Hungarian empires, with a similar cultural background; they quickly outnumbered the German Jews who had come over in much smaller numbers earlier. In contrast, Asians come from many different countries and cultures. The concentration here will be on the Chinese and other East Asian groups that have been subject, in different ways, to persecution and the vicissitudes of war, as were the Jewish immigrants of a century ago. It should be added that some groups of immigrants have been left out, not because they were or are unimportant, but because I do not see resemblances between those of earlier times and those of today. For instance, there seem to be today no equivalents to the German, Scandinavian, Polish, and other non-Jewish eastern European immigrants of a hundred years ago, and the South Asian or Middle Eastern immigrants of today seem to have no parallels from a century ago. If there are great resemblances between the immigrants of 1900 and 2000, there is a great difference in the responses of the American elite then and now. In the early twentieth century, elite Americans were preoccupied with immigration. This was perhaps because immigrants were so numerous and visible in the center of the great cities where the elite was concentrated-New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Chicago. These elites responded with a call for “Americanization.” Foremost among the advocates of Americanization was Theodore Roosevelt, who said in 1915, “We cannot afford to use hundreds of thousands of immigrants merely as industrial assets while they remain social outcasts and menaces any more than 50 years ago we could afford to keep the black man merely as an industrial asset and not as a human being.”10 The answer was not to end immigration: Presidents William Howard Taft and Woodrow Wilson, an elite Republican and an elite Democrat, both vetoed bills that would have restricted the numbers allowed in. Americanization, they felt, was the appropriate solution, and they saw the process as a mutually beneficial bargain. John Miller describes its terms: “Immigrants needed to become a part of American society, not mere sojourners in it. They had responsibilities to their new home. In a rough order of priority, these included living by its laws, working at jobs, learning English, and earning citizenship. The native-born population would reap some reward when immigrants performed any of these duties, ranging from simple matters like the preservation of the peace to more complex benefits like economic gain, national cohesion, and domestic tranquility. The immigrant would profit as well, went the thinking, since assimilation underwrote success in the United States.”11 Elite organizations and government agencies fostered the teaching of English and appreciation of American civic ideals.12 Of course, the elites did not entirely welcome immigrants into their midst; Jews especially were excluded from elite corporations, law firms, universities, and clubs. Even so, by any measure Americanization was an overwhelming success. In the last third of the twentieth century, however, elite Americans have not been preoccupied with immigration and have tended to regard “Americanization” as an uncouth expression of nationalistic pride or a form of bigotry. Although immigrants have again moved in large numbers to our great cities, they tend to live in outlying neighborhoods that members of the elite, speeding by on freeways or in train tunnels, seldom see-South Central and East Los Angeles, the outer boroughs of New York City, and so forth. The vast immigration of the late twentieth century, which elite opinion did not anticipate, has been seen through the prism of the civil rights experience; indeed, President Lyndon Johnson made immigration reform a priority in 1965 because he saw the old system of national origin quotas as a form of unfair discrimination. Based on the assumption that Latino and Asian immigrants would face the same problems as blacks-that they would be met with racial or ethnic discrimination in employment, housing, public accommodations, and admission to elite institutions; that they would be plagued by poverty-the solutions became to give immigrants the protections of civil rights legislation. This quickly came to mean granting them the benefits of racial quotas and of massive government spending programs. At the same time, the civil rights movement and the turmoil of the late 1960s filled the elite with doubt about basic American values, even as that movement prompted the country to live up to those values as it never had before. Elites came to see Americanization as the unfair subjection of members of other races and cultures.13 They came to celebrate, as Al Gore did in 1994, an America that would be made up of separate and disparate “multicultural” groups, fenced off in their own communities, entitled to make demands on the larger society but without any responsibility to assimilate to American mores.14 This outlook, along with the governmental policies and administrative practices it fosters, has in many cases retarded assimilation. We risk forgetting the lessons our history teaches when we say that America suddenly and for the first time has become a multicultural nation. Though it may have seemed natural in the wake of the civil rights experience to view Latino and Asian immigrants as new races whose experience and whose problems would be similar to those of blacks, the needs and experiences of blacks are very different from those of Latinos and Asians. Ethnic or racial discrimination has been only a small obstacle to the success of these immigrant groups. It is far more instructive to observe that the experiences and problems of Latinos and Asians more closely resemble those of Italians and Jews a century before, just as the experiences and the problems of the blacks who moved out of the rural, segregated South to the urban centers of the North more closely resemble those of the Irish Catholics who left British-ruled Ireland. By stepping back from the prevalent view of the immigrant and minority groups, we see how misguided some of our policies and programs are. It is absurd, for instance, to grant immigrants quotas and preferences that are based on past discrimination because, as John Miller points out, “foreign-born newcomers almost by definition cannot have experienced a past history of discrimination in the United States.”15 Even more absurd and counterproductive have been the so-called bilingual education programs, which have kept Latino immigrants’ children in Spanish-language instruction and denied them the knowledge of English that they need to advance in American society. What these immigrants need is what Americanization supplied the immigrants of a hundred years ago-a knowledge of English and basic reading and mathematics skills, an appreciation of the American civic culture, a fair chance at moving ahead as far as their abilities will take them. We need to learn the good lessons our forebears taught, even as we strive to avoid their mistakes. A word about the title. Many may object that blacks are not new Americans. They are of course right. Americans of African descent tend to have ancestors who arrived earlier in this country than most Americans. But it is also true-indeed it is the central tragedy of American history-that blacks did not enjoy the full rights of American citizenship until the 1960s. In that sense, and that sense only, they qualify as new Americans for the purpose of this book. Price: $21.95 - Click here to order: Click here to return to book details