The Fabric of America (42 page)

To contemplate the courage and resourcefulness of the Anglo-American pioneers who colonized the wide-open spaces of the west was a welcome antidote to such problems. But Turner might have found a more useful key to the American character by studying the people who had crossed the national frontier into the United States.

Will the United States remain a country with a single national language and a core Anglo-Protestant culture? By ignoring this question, Americans acquiesce to their eventual transformation into two peoples with two cultures (Anglo and Hispanic) and two languages (English and Spanish).

SAMUEL P. HUNTINGTON,
“The Clash of Civilizations?” 1993

Immigration has always challenged the values of American society. The conflict is inherent in the democratic structure and the guarantees of freedom that enable those already inside the frontier to mold their society. Because U.S. democracy affords the same opportunities to each new wave of migrants, it is inevitable that existing citizens should resent the new arrivals who come with their own values and priorities, knowing that they will alter what is already in place.

The pattern began with the edicts of the Puritans that guaranteed coreligionists in their “city built on a hill” unprecedented political liberty, but banned the practice of any other religions or even variant forms of Protestantism. As late as the 1700s, the first appearance of Catholic settlers in Massachusetts provoked an order for the arrest of “any Popish Priest and other Papists.”

In Pennsylvania, famous for its protection of religious liberty, the stream of German immigrants in the eighteenth century provoked even Benjamin
Franklin to an outburst of xenophobia. “Why should Pennsylvania, founded by the English,” he demanded in a pamphlet in 1751, “become a Colony of Aliens, who will shortly be so numerous as to Germanize us instead of our Anglifying them, and will never adopt our Languages or Customs, any more than they can acquire our Complexion.”

Such tensions between incomers and residents grew sharply as immigration increased in the nineteenth century, erupting into violence in New York and Boston in the 1850s following the arrival of close to one million Irish Catholics. On the west coast, similar resentment broke out into attacks on Chinese immigrants brought in as cheap labor by the railroad companies in the 1860s. Immigration had always been regarded as the responsibility of the states, but in 1882 Congress stepped in with the Chinese Exclusion Act, restricting entry to male workers with guaranteed employment. Eighteen months before Turner's frontier speech, the federal government took over full control with the passage of the Immigration Act, barring the entry of polygamists and those suffering “loathsome or contagious” diseases, or guilty of crimes of “moral turpitude.” Almost two hundred inspectors were recruited to enforce these rules at the principal ports of entry, more than half being assigned to the main processing center at Ellis Island, New York.

On January 2, 1892, a twenty-one-year-old Irishwoman, Ellie King, en route to Nebraska, disembarked from the steamship
Nevada
and became the first immigrant to walk through the long hallway on Ellis Island and into the United States. Unfortunately for her place in the footnotes of history, she was followed by fifteen-year-old Annie Moore, arriving with two younger brothers in tow to join relations in New York, a much more attractive proposition for the city newspapers, which promoted her to the head of the queue and won her an award of a gold $10 piece from the chief immigration officer.

For the twelve million people who followed them through the hall before the facility closed in 1954, the first and great Americanizing experience was walking through the door at the end of the hall marked PUSH—TO NEW YORK and stepping across the U.S. frontier. On the far side of it lay a seemingly arbitrary confusion of languages and customs. The two Irishwomen at least spoke English, but in Nebraska Ellie King would have known scores of German farmers who had arrived there directly from Bremen, courtesy of an all-in-one purchase from the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe railroad that included a through ticket to Lincoln, Nebraska, and a 160-acre quarter-
section of prairie. In New York, Annie Moore might have found herself listening to a Latin mass alongside Italian seamstresses whose only other contact with Americans came from their compatriots in a Bowery sweatshop. But all of them became American precisely because the confusion was not arbitrary.

What they had entered was a series of areas of freedom—properties, places of work and entertainment, wards, counties, and states—delineated by legally recognized boundaries. Each was subject to regulation by laws and democratic procedures in which, nominally at least, anyone could participate. “It is not by the consolidation or concentration of powers, but by their distribution, that good government is effected,” Jefferson, the great molder of their new country, had written in his autobiography. “… Every State is again divided into counties, each to take care of what lies within its local bounds; each county again into townships or wards, to manage minuter details; and every ward into farms, to be governed each by its individual proprietor.”

In the accounts of immigrants, the emotion that emerges more often than any other is the mixture of fear and hope as they realize what freedom means—the old social structures that looked after them and kept them in their place had gone, and all that prevented them from starving or living in a mansion was their capacity to make money. Yet, according to the economic theories of
The Wealth of Nations
and the eighteenth-century Scottish belief in human sociability, that was the best guarantee of social well-being. “Were we directed from Washington when to sow, and when to reap,” Jefferson had explained, “we should soon want bread. It is by this partition of cares, descending in gradation from general to particular, that the mass of human affairs may be best managed, for the good and prosperity of all.”

Reality did not always accord with theory, and in the early 1900s the left-wing
New York Independent
began printing the stories of what it called “undistinguished Americans,” newly arrived immigrants as well as farmers' wives and released slaves, and their experiences offered a glimpse of the freedoms and dangers contained in Jefferson's structure.

The 1890s immigrants arrived in a world where $5 a week was a living wage only because rent, clothes, and basic meals amounted to $4.50. As garment-maker, slaughterhouse worker, or homesteader, the work was unremittingly hard and life a gamble dependent on the whim of bosses and the fluctuations of fashion and a ruthless market. “I lay down on the floor with
three other men and … did not go to sleep for a long time,” Antanas Kaz-tauskis, a Lithuanian meat-worker, confessed after his first day looking for work in Chicago's stockyards. “My money was almost gone and I thought that I would soon die unless I got a job, for this was not like home. Here money was everything and a man without money must die.”

Although work was what they needed to live and get ahead, it was through their leisure that the immigrants took the second step toward becoming American. They still joined Lithuanian concertina bands, read Italian and Yiddish newspapers, attended fund-raisers for Polish churches, but inevitably more and more of the raw material in the stories that they told, the music that they performed, the dramas that they acted out, and the sports that they played came from the new land. In the 1880s three quarters of a million Americans still spoke German as their first language, but as one parent admitted, “Although our children all speak German and learn to read and write German at school, they are more familiar with English since it is, after all, the language of the country.” As local loyalties and affections became alloyed with the traditional, the children produced literature, music, theater, and above all movies that fused the different allegiances into a new form that was distinctively American. It was, nevertheless, forged in the face of deep suspicion about its un-American roots.

When Emma Lazarus wrote her tribute poem for the Statue of Liberty in 1883, its now much parodied lines “Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore” could not have run more clearly against public opinion. What had given rise to Ellis Island was the rising anger against immigration, and the poem itself was rooted in Lazarus's own efforts to help Russian migrants find work and housing in New York in the face of the city's hostility. Few people other than business interests and the children of earlier immigrants supported their arrival. They were the ones who bought most enthusiastically into the ideals of Israel Zangwill's schmaltzy play
The Melting Pot,
first performed in 1908. Zangwill's story, however, has a sharp edge that is usually overlooked today.

Ostensibly, the plot concerns a brilliant young Jewish composer, David Quixano, who falls in love with the daughter of an anti-Semitic Russian baron and wins her over with his sizzling new symphony and his vision of Europeans becoming American in the crucible of the United States. “A fig
for your feuds and vendettas!” David exclaims. “Germans and Frenchmen, Irishmen and Englishmen, Jews and Russians—into the Crucible with you all! God is making the American.”

Inside the upbeat message about losing their European prejudices, however, was a darker one about overcoming American prejudice against their presence in the country. As an appendix to the play put it on behalf of the migrant, “I am the great American problem. When I pour out my blood on your altar of labour, and lay down my life as a sacrifice to your god of toil, men make no more comment than at the fall of a sparrow. But my brawn is woven into the warp and woof of the fabric of your national being. My children shall be your children and your land shall be my land because my sweat and my blood will cement the foundations of the America of To-Morrow.”

To the accuracy of this forecast, an estimated one hundred million Americans descended from Ellis Island migrants, as well as the quintessentially American movies of Ellis Island alumni such as Sam Goldwyn and Frank Capra, provide eloquent support. Nevertheless, an underlying prejudice remained against the arrival of so many immigrants who spoke no English, were neither Protestant nor Christian, and frequently had an olive-skinned, Mediterranean color.

As president, Woodrow Wilson, whose admiration for the Ku Klux Klan was never concealed, swiftly responded to the widespread sense that the new arrivals were undermining the true Anglo-American spirit of the United States. Under his administration literacy tests were brought in before the First World War to reduce immigration, a lead followed by the governments of Warren Harding and Calvin Coolidge after the war with the introduction of quotas for immigration and the restriction of entry to those with passports and the necessary visas.

Nevertheless, one of the central patterns within the history of the independent United States is the way in which its sense of freedom, once Anglo-centric and exclusive, has been shared with and shaped by successive waves of immigrants. Jacksonian democracy levered the western farming Scots-Irish into power at every level from county to federal. A generation later the city-based Catholic Irish took control of wards and city halls behind political leaders such as Tammany Hall's New York assemblyman George Washington Plunkitt in the 1870s and Boston mayor Hugh O'Brien in the 1880s. As one of O'Brien's successors, the legendary
James Michael Curley
, put it
when boasting of the transfer of power, “The Massachusetts of the Puritans is as dead as Caesar, but there is no need to mourn the fact … It took the Irish to make Massachusetts a fit place to live in.”

Despite the suspicions they aroused, the new Americans acted remarkably like their predecessors. In other words, they acquired property, by the early twentieth century predominantly urban, commercial, and manufacturing, then took steps to safeguard it by acquiring influence in the existing structures of government and law. In addition, they swayed new centers of authority, like the movies, Wall Street, and organized labor.

Politically, the most dramatic sign of their clout came in the 1933 election of Fiorello La Guardia, son of Jewish and Italian immigrants, as mayor of New York, which broke the corrupt stranglehold exerted by the Irish-dominated Tammany Hall. In the long run, however, the economic success in California of Italian-American Amedeo Giannini, whose network of savings and loan associations enabled him to take over the Bank of America in 1928, was more significant, demonstrating as it did the financial heft that the new Americans could exercise, however poor. In Hollywood, Schmuel Gelb-fisz, later Samuel Goldwyn, and Eliezir Meir, soon to be Louis Mayer, achieved a similar feat, using the movies to make storytelling democratic.

Nevertheless from the perspective of the twenty-first century, the nineteenth-century Anglo-Americans had good reason for their hostility. Those crossing the frontier were not just immigrants but, like their predecessors, colonists who changed the society they settled in. That the United States in the first half of the twentieth century possessed a recognizably more vibrant culture, a more liberal outlook, and a more diverse economy than in the last half of the nineteenth was due in large part to the influence of its new Americans.

Against that more variegated background the great revolution of the twentieth-century United States took place. Race and the long history of slavery made the black-American fight to win equality of opportunity exceptional in its intensity and its challenge to the core values of the United States. But African-Americans were also the longest-established immigrants in the country next to the Anglos, and their battle for civil rights followed a pattern established by other migrants who had peopled the continent. It was, in ef
fect, a struggle to colonize the country they lived in—that is to acquire property and to use the law and government to safeguard what they owned.