The New Americans, Introduction

In January 1994, speaking in Milwaukee, Vice President Al Gore gave a speech in which he translated the national motto E pluribu unum as "out of one, many". 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 space large enough for all our seperate identities." Seperate identities: Here Gore aligned himself with a view widely prevelant, 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 inwhich just about everyone was like everybody else (with the one important exception, as Gore would surely agre, of blacks.) Immigrants, in this view, were white Europeons -- preety 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 multi-grain.

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. 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 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 distictive 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 War years and who, Benjamin Franklin feared, would never be assimilated. Many 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 a 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 ghettos. 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 sanciton, 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>" Here in Washington's ornate eighteenth-century prose, was the idea of the Melting Pot, long before it recieved its name. Ayone 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 ahre a common citizenship. America would be a proudly multi-cultural nation. But it would be a nation with a common civic culture.

Washigton 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, entitlec 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 had 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 commercially bountiful nation i 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 -- Britian and Ireland, southern Italy and parts of Germany and Scandanavia, the Russian Pale of Settlement within which the Jews were confined a century ago, Poland and other countries in eastern Europe. Immigration has been promoted sometimes by terrible events -- the Irish Potato famine, the Russian pograms -- and sometimes by the pressure that population growth unaccompanied by economic growth puts on a peasantry.

Coming to America gives immigrants a chance to get away from a dysfunctional society, but they also bring with themn habits of mind that turn out to be dysfunctional in the United States -- the deep distrust of institutions among 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 differnet, 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. History has proven them wrong. American democracy emerged strenthened 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 ethnic separatism of Irish, Italians or Jews. Today we hear similar predictions about contemporary immigrants and minority groups. Those predicitons, 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 Washingtons's word 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 respembles 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 sould 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 [referencing his earlier citation of internal migration of blacks - KC Burke], Latinos resemble Italians, Asians resemble Jews. Thus in seeking to assimilate the peoples of the great immigrations 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. ----*****-----Some claim that today's minorities are different because they are of 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 equivelent today. There were plenty of examples of bigotry and discrimination that any decent minded person today must abhor. On the whole, however, assimilation was succesful. It has made us as strong, creative, tolerant nation. We should not vorget the lessons our history teaches.

[At this point he inserts his personal history that has drawn him to this topic and cites the reasons for drawing the parralells he uses to make his points in the book. He then cites the benefits of immigration to society and discusses some of the mechanics of assimialtion when it happens succesfully-- KC Burke]

If there are great resemblances between the immigrants of 1900 and 2000, there is a great difference in the response 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 meneces any more than 50 years ago we could afford to keep the black man merely as an industrial asset and not a human being." The answer was not to end immigration: President William Howard Taft and Woodrow Wilson, an elite Republican and an elite Democrat, both vetoed bills that would have restricted the number allowed in. Americanization, they felt, was the appropriate solution and they saw the process as a mutually beneficial bargain.

[At this point, the author cites the history of the arguements supporting the above as well as citing instances where we came up short.]

In the last third of the twentieth century, however, elite Americans have not been preoccupied with immigration andhave tended to regard "Americanization" as an uncouth expression of nationalistic pride or a form of bigotry. Although immigrants have again moved in large number to our great cities, they tend to live in outlying neighborhoods that members of the elite speeding by on freeways or train tunnels seldom see -- Sout Central and East Los Angeles, the outer boroughs of New York City and so forth. The vast immigration of the late twentieth century, which eleite opinion did not anticipate, has been seen throough 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 assumptions that Latino and Asian immigrants would face the same problems as Blacks -- that they would be met with ethnic or racial discrimination in employment, housing, public accomodation, 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 massive government spending programs. At the same time the civil rights movement and the termoil 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. They came to celebrate, as Al Gore did in 1994, an America that was made up of seperate and disparate "multicultural" groups, forced off in their own communities, entitled to make demands on the large society but without any responsibility to assimilate to American mores. This outlook, along with the governemtnal polocies and administrative practices it fosters, has in many cases retarde assimilation.

[Examples cited and foreshadowing of arguements and history to be told in the book, itself]

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 theis 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 in that sense only, they qualify as new Americans for the puposes of this book.

Saturday we had a thread about a column by Pat Buchanan filled with vigorous comment. As his views represent only a portion of conservative thought, I thought a reference to, and the Introduction from, a conservative that, perhaps, represents a greater percentage of the conservative body of thought would be in order.

I think that Buchanan, a commentator who draws a lot of fire on this issue, has a particular lack of usefulness for that reason alone. Pat has lived exactly in the period of the false turn cited by Barone and perhaps is fighting a battle that conservatives have already won. The efficacy of assimilation and the bigoty of the leftist failed solutions, that confuse immigration and civil rights issues, is now so apparent that fresh attitudes may be welcomed by the general population.

I had felt that this book provided such a fresh attitude and commented about it upon its publication. However, events of 2001 overshadowed the issue and it seemed to pass unnoticed by most. Perhaps even the "elite" of conservative thought can't see Americanization as worth salvaging?

Neither the column from Saturday, nor this book's Introduction sufficiently address the failure of both political parties to properly secure our borders. A problem whose history is tied up in the immigration issue, but also the drug war issue and now the terrorism issue. Perhaps as it is so evident a universal failure by all involved, including the general public who have failed to make it a primary concern, this thread can take it as a given and center on immigration itself, Americanization and history's lessons we might profit from applying. Those are the issues that Barone sets out in this valuable book as outlined by this introduction.

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Speaking of "New Americans," I recommend that everyone take a few hours to watch a repeat of The New Americans, an Independent Lens presentation on PBS about recent immigrants.

Presented with a straight face as advocacy for making life easier for newcomers, you may have quite the opposite reaction.

The most striking scenes involve Islamic Palestinian immigrants who take to the streets in protest of Israel's "occupation" of Palestine.

This is not the America of our forefathers, far from it. And it's not about race. I'm sure that a lot of Japanese farmers, blacks, Latino land owners, and Christian Lebanese are horrified to see the America to which they immigrated disintegrating into this Balkanized state of affairs.

Yet still the elites keep selling us on the idea of "cultural diversity." It's national suicide, nothing short of it.

I liked every one of the immigrants portrayed, even the Palestinians. But I just can't imagine having their problems imported here, and with many of the featured immigrants, it was somehow apparent that they're not coming here to become "American," they're here to make money and setup a landing strip for their own families.

They're coming here to change us, not for us to influence them.

Immigration has been one of the gleaming jewels in the American crown. It has made us what we are, the beacon of the planet, like none ever seen before. It has been a fabulous success story. Of course, the past is not necessarily the future, but I remain bullish on America. The 21st century will be an even more American century than the 20th. It will our golden age. We will remake the planet, in our own image. I really believe that.

Coming to America gives immigrants a chance to get away from a dysfunctional society, but they also bring with themn habits of mind that turn out to be dysfunctional in the United States -- the deep distrust of institutions among Italians and Latinos, for instance.

***I don't know about anyone else but this is certainly true in my family's case. I find myself going :yawn: Okay I'll vote for Bush but otherwise politicians could care less about what I think so back to working for my pennies. That's not dysfunctional culture though. It's par for the course of living in Ole Crusty's state.

Immigration to the US is damned hard.

I'm an Irish, College graduate, journalist with a 14 year work history (never, not worked...in fact, wouldn't know what it was NOT to work)...but if I applied for a Green Card to go to the US to find my fortune I'd get a big ol'..thanks, but no thanks. (I know, I've tried)

Maybe if I didn't speak English (btw, I am bilingual) and I wanted to be a welfare leech, I'd have some chance.

But presently, I need to marry some American mug to get me a Green Card.

Not my style, frankly.

I'd love to see a revitalization of "Americanization," but it's not going to happen. The primary vehicle of Americanization 100 years ago, was the public school. Today, the public schools are run by traitors who devote themselves to inculcating a hatred of America and the English language in their students, and running out on a rail, anyone who would teach otherwise. (I taught in public colleges during much of the 1990s, and God knows, I saw enough of such anti-Americanism there.)

As far as I know, there is no legal mechanism for deporting America's "educators."

I hope it can be pounded home that what G Washington meant still holds.
' 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 ahre a common citizenship. America would be a proudly multi-cultural nation. But it would be a nation with a common civic culture.'

We seem to have lost sight of our common civic culture and I think it is time to get it back.

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