Ethnic Americans: Immigration and American Society

By Leonard Dinnerstein and David Reimers

For more than three decades, Ethnic Americans has been hailed as a classic history of immigration to America. Leonard Dinnerstein and David M. Reimers begin with a brief overview of immigration during the colonial and early national eras (1492 to the 1820s), focusing primarily on the arrival of English Protestants, while at the same time stressing the diversity brought by Dutch, French, Spanish, and other small groups, including "free people of color" from the Caribbean. Next they follow large-scale European immigration from 1830 to the 1880s. Catholicism became a major force in America during this period, with immigrantsfive million in the 1880s alonecreating a new mosaic in every state of the Union. This section also touches on the arrival, beginning in 1848, of Chinese immigrants and other groups who hoped to find gold and get rich. Subsequent chapters address eastern and southern European immigration from 1890 to 1940; newcomers from the Western Hemisphere and Asia who arrived from 1840 to 1940; immigration restriction from 1875 to World War II; and the postwar arrival and experiences of Asian, Mexican, Hungarian, and Cuban refugees.

Taking the past fifteen years into account, the fifth edition of Ethnic Americans considers recent influxes of Asians and Hispanics, especially the surge in the Mexican population, and includes expanded coverage of nativist sentiment in American politics and thought.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Release date: Oct 6, 2008
• ISBN: 9780231512701

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Preface

The original impetus for writing this book was Americans’ heightened concern with, and glorification of, ethnicity and ethnic values at the end of the 1960s and early 1970s. Both of us were brought up in the 1930s and 1940s, when one learned that becoming a good American meant shedding foreign ties, culture, and religion, and adapting to what now might be called the values and beliefs of white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant America. By the 1970s, however, ethnicity had become chic. People wore buttons announcing that they were proud to be Polish or Italian, reporters wrote favorably on the virtues and values of ethnic working-class neighborhoods in cities like Baltimore and Pittsburgh; and people of a variety of backgrounds, instead of Anglicizing their names, ethnicized them. In such a context we prepared the first edition, confident that Americans were showing renewed interest in the experiences of their immigrant forebears.

Since that time the peoples of European ancestry have mixed with one another in a manner that their grandparents did not dream of, and much of the assertion of ethnicity of the 1970s has proved to be superficial. Yet the interest in ethnicity is stronger, and scholars of immigration and social history have published a remarkable number of books and articles exploring the nation’s immigrant past. The new scholarship has greatly enhanced our understanding of several peoples, and particularly of the women of those cultures. We now know so much more than we did only a few years ago of the Huguenots and Scots of colonial America, of the Irish and Germans throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, of Italians and Jews in a wider variety of American cities and of their unique experiences. There are also a plethora of works on Hispanics and Asians, written by members of those groups, that simply did not exist thirty-five years ago. As a result of this explosion of knowledge, we have attempted to revise this volume, incorporating as much of the recent scholarship as possible while adjusting and enhancing earlier interpretations.

As in the earlier editions, we have focused on those non-English people who came to the New World after 1607. By limiting the topic in this fashion we have obviously excluded Native Americans. Their history is in many respects unique and requires separate treatment. In Ethnic Americans we have, of course, discussed blacks who came to the United States, both involuntarily and voluntarily, from Africa and the West Indies. Indeed, more black immigrants have come to the United States in the last fifty years than in the entire period of slavery.

Two years after the publication of the third edition of Ethnic Americans in 1988, Congress passed a law that increased yearly immigration allowances by 35 percent; in 1996 Congress made other significant changes. We have incorporated the impact of the provisions of those laws in this text. When the third edition was being written in the middle 1980s, new trends in the history of immigration became visible, and these trends have continued. The last years have witnessed the greatest wave of immigration in American history, and it appears that immigration will remain high for at least the foreseeable future. An overwhelming majority, probably 85 to 90 percent, of newcomers hail from Latin America and Asia rather than from Europe. In 1960 the leading country of origin for immigrants in this country was Germany, with nearly one million Germans in the United States. Next was Canada, followed by Poland and the Soviet Union. In 2005 Mexico, the Philippines, India, China (excluding Taiwan and Hong Kong), headed the list. Just at a time when members of older European groups have been undergoing rapid change, and in some cases virtually disappearing as separate cultures, whole new ethnic communities have emerged. In the last decade of the twentieth century totals for immigration approached ten million people, more than the sum in any previous 10-year period in American history. During the first decade of the 21st century, immigrants have kept coming and their continued arrival of individuals without appropriate documents has caused consternation among millions of Americans.

We offer this fifth edition in the hope that it continues to be not only a brief summary of the immigrant experience but also a reflection of the most recent scholarship and public policies.

Leonard Dinnerstein

David M. Reimers

Introduction

Since the end of the sixteenth century the greatest migration of people in the history of the world occurred. Sparked by the expansion of Europe, the quest for gold and silver to enrich the new modern nations, and the Industrial and Agricultural Revolutions that forced peasants off of the land and into the cities, the movement also gained momentum from many other factors in social history, including the doubling of the European population between 1750 and 1850. At the same time, intensified religious persecutions and relaxation of emigration restrictions in various nations combined with a transportation revolution to facilitate the movement of peoples who wanted to seek adventure, economic security, and/or social stability.

More than 100 million people left their native homes between 1600 and 2008. A majority of them reached first the British colonies, and later the United States. Other migrants have gone to every continent in the world. The United States, however, is the first nation to bind together a disparate group of people who eventually emerged as one indivisible nation that celebrated its multicultural past while, at the same time, trying to make all white people look like they came from the same cookie cutter. Non–Anglo-Saxon newcomers have always been expected to adapt to, and blend in with, the people already here. People of darker skin, and later those of other races, were kept in subordinate positions and shunned when they tried to blend in with the majority. Thus, along with multiculturalism, immigrants of varying stripes were made to feel inferior and less worthy as individuals until their differences no longer stood out.

Thus, along with a quasi tolerance for other people to help build the British colonies, and later the United States, into major political powers, demands were made that those who chose to live in this country absorb the major elements of the dominant culture. For those who would, or could, not do this because of race, religion, or political beliefs, acceptance would not only be withdrawn but they would be physically attacked, disparaged, and discouraged from remaining among us. At the same time, however, from the colonial period to the present, as the American economy grew, there have been varying degrees of labor shortages, and people, regardless of their backgrounds, have been encouraged to settle here—permanently or temporarily—to help meet the nation’s economic needs.

Respect for the newcomers did not coincide with the economic benefits that they helped provide to the nation. There seemed no tolerance on the part of members of the dominant culture for people who worshipped differently from mainstream Protestants, who spoke a foreign language, or whose cultural values differed from those valued by Americans. Moreover, there seemed, and even seems today, that there was no understanding that newcomers felt most secure living among others like themselves, speaking the same language, and continuing with customs that nurtured them before their arrival in the United States. Thus, from the denunciation of Scots-Irish and others in colonial America, through the attacks upon the Irish, the Chinese, the Italians, the Slavs, and the Jews in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and the scorning of Latinos in the twentieth century, we see the ugly heads of racism and nativism coexisting with our rhetoric of welcome and tolerance.

Even in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries people are still disparaged for following the precepts of religious teachings that do not conform with the Judeo-Christian tradition or whose behavior mocks the values of the nation’s dominant culture. Americans, for example, who have wanted to assist or elevate newcomers to fit in with the majority in the United States have, in effect, told immigrants that aspects of their cultures were less than praiseworthy and that to become real Americans they had to absorb existing values. Also, in our own day, we look down upon people who do not show high regard for educational and business accomplishment, who prefer glorification of family and group over individual achievement, and who may practice some other religions that are not fully understood by the Judeo-Christian tradition.

While reading this text it is important to keep these ideas in mind. Note always how immigrants are treated and how they are evaluated in terms of how closely they approach the Anglo-Saxon ideals physically, emotionally, and intellectually. And notice, as well, how scorned, how rejected, and how viciously they have been treated because they could, or would, not conform to dominant American values. These traits have always been present in the United States and have reflected themselves in different ways, at different times, and with different groups. Thus, racism and nativism have always been present along with acceptance and encouragement. And in every era most Americans, even those who have descended from groups previously denounced, accept the ways of the dominant culture and are threatened by others who they claim desire to undermine the pillars of society.

In spite of the hostility that many immigrants encountered, millions kept coming to America. Some sought political rights and others wanted to worship as they pleased. Still others were refugees and had no hope for changes at home. Most, as is still the case today, were searching for economic opportunities. The immigrants often struggled to get ahead, but for those who did not speak English, were not white, and had little education, mobility was difficult. Still, they usually managed to improve their lot, if only modestly. Yet the chances they found in America prompted them to tell their families and friends that they too should come to the United States. For many, American dreams were about their children and grandchildren. For white immigrants a better life for their descendants was usually realized. For nonwhites the path upward was much more difficult. Even today these hopes are strong, and the list of those wanting to try their luck in America remains long.

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The Beginnings

Immigration to America, 1492 to the 1820s

Nearly every school child knows that Christopher Columbus, sailing under the flag of Spain in 1492, inaugurated the European exploration, conquest, and eventual settlement of the Americas. Columbus himself completed four voyages to the New World, but he never set foot on what became the continental United States. Spain, like Columbus, looked to the Caribbean islands, Central and South America, and Mexico as the valuable regions to be explored and conquered, for there lay the treasures of gold and silver that enriched the Spanish conquistadors and monarchs.

Within thirty years after Columbus’s first voyage, Hernán Cortés conquered Mexico and demonstrated the riches of the New World. In the long run Spain wasted the products of the Western Hemisphere, but the initial wealth proved immediately attractive. Cortés was quickly followed by other Spanish explorers and conquerors who also found valuable metals in South America.

While the main Spanish empire lay below the southern border of the eventual United States, the Spanish were active north of the Rio Grande River too. In the 1540s Vasquez de Coronado searched for gold in what is today Arizona and New Mexico. Some Spanish explorers went as far north as Virginia on the East Coast and what is now Colorado in the Rocky Mountain West. Iberians founded the first European colonial settlement, St. Augustine, in 1582, and later several other places in present-day Florida. The colonies in Spanish Florida, however, were never large, and when Great Britain took over Florida, many of the Iberian settlers fled. They came back when Spain resumed control of the area. The government in Madrid, however, never encouraged other Spaniards to settle in Florida, and restricted their possession to Roman Catholics and native inhabitants, whom they tried to convert to the true faith.

Spanish settlements were also developed in the Southwest of what is now the United States. They included present-day Texas but the adventurers did not find gold or silver there. Instead they worked as ranchers and farmers. In an attempt to boost the population of its Texas lands, Spain imported Spanish-speaking Canary Islanders, but only a few thousand people came. Several thousand Canary Islanders, though, went to Louisiana when Spain took over that territory from the French in 1763. But the French dominated the culture of New Orleans and Louisiana, and in 1803 Spain returned the area to France. In turn, the French sold the entire Louisiana territory, which stretched north and west as far as present-day Montana. At the time of the transfer Louisiana contained only 40,000 persons, half of whom were black slaves.

It was in the present state of New Mexico that Spain made its major impact and where most of its colonists resided. Santa Fe, the capital of the present state, was founded in 1610, three years after the English arrived in Jamestown. Spaniards ruled harshly in the Southwest and the Pueblo Indians in New Mexico revolted in the 1680s, remaining independent until Spain resumed control after putting down the insurrection only a few years later. When the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo with Mexico and the United States was signed at the end of the Mexican-American War, this country acquired the entire southwestern territory, which stretched into present-day California. However, about 60,000 of the 75,000 people residing there lived in what is now New Mexico. In 1854 the United States purchased an additional stretch of land in New Mexico and Arizona, to facilitate the building of a transcontinental railroad in the southern portion of the country.

Although Spaniards pursued gold and silver in the Western Hemisphere, the Spanish government restricted the numbers of settlers to Roman Catholics. As a result, Franciscan missions dotted areas in New Mexico, Arizona, and along the coast of California, where the towns were run by priests, soldiers, and government officials. Elite Spaniards living in the newly acquired territories had already turned to the cattle industry and had prospered before the United States took control of these lands. When the United States took over, and despite promises made in the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo to respect the rights of the people already there, many of the original owners lost their property, while the others who retained control were weakened when the cattle boom ended in the 1880s.

Despite the beauty of the American Southwest, few Spaniards desired to start life anew in a distant and undeveloped continent. Eventually, only a few thousand of the 600,000 Spaniards in the New World chose to live north of the Rio Grande River. Without a substantial number of women, with or without families, willing to go to the New World, the settlements remained small. Thus intermarriage, as well as rape, occurred to satisfy men’s needs. When the United States annexed much of Mexico’s northern territory in 1848, it found most of the inhabitants, mestizos, were a product of mixed Spanish and Indian blood.

In the sixteenth century, when other European nations saw wealth arriving in Spain, British, French, and Dutch ships attacked and looted the vessels returning from the New World. Jealous of Spain’s acquisitions, these other nations joined in the hunt for riches. However, the nations that began their search later founded colonies in the Caribbean and then on the North American continent. Not only were they searching for minerals but sugar produced in the Caribbean offered another form of wealth for plantation owners. So, too, did animal furs as well as several products produced on the mainland like tobacco, rice, and cotton.

The main French interest in the New World was in Canada but not many people settled there. Like the Spanish, the French government wanted only Roman Catholics in their colonies and, again like the people in Spain, most of the French preferred to remain at home. France had some influence in introducing French culture in Louisiana and especially in New Orleans, but since the area was poor, unhealthy, and dangerous, it lacked appeal to women. So the French government sent mostly male prisoners and indentured servants to labor in Louisiana, and also encouraged the slave trade. These three groups constituted the majority of newcomers in France’s Louisiana territory.

In 1624, Dutch colonial efforts began with the founding of New Amsterdam (later renamed New York when the British assumed control of the colony in 1664). The West India Company that ran the colony from Holland cared primarily about profits, which they found to some extent in the fur trade with the American Indians. Unlike the French and Spanish governments, the Dutch, and later the English, welcomed almost anyone of European heritage to reside in the areas that they controlled. As a result of this policy not only did the colony become diverse and prosper, but it set the tone for future settlements in New York City of people from every area of the world. No other city in the United States, not even Chicago, has the diversity that continued and still exists in the nation’s largest city.

Despite the liberal policy of acceptance that characterized the Dutch and English governments, as well as the chartered companies that promoted growth in the New World, both the Dutch and English settlers sought to isolate themselves from other colonists. Most of the non-Dutch and non-English regarded these groups as aloof, but that did not seem to bother those developing their own communities and celebrating their own cultures. The Dutch, who settled mainly in New York and New Jersey, are representative of immigrants to America who held on to their cultures and values for several generations. They considered their heritage too important an aspect of their lives to relinquish it easily. Unlike the English, Dutch law gave women greater property and inheritance rights. Partners in a Dutch marriage held property equally, and widows with children split inheritances. Gradually, English customs crept into Dutch practices and women found themselves receiving less of their husband’s estate than they had formerly. This change, like others within the eighteenth-century Dutch community, marked the gradual loss of Dutch culture.

But other aspects of Dutch culture lived on long after the British conquered New Netherland and renamed it New York. Worship in the Dutch language continued in some parts of New York and New Jersey until the 1820s, while some future generations of farmers continued using the Dutch dialogue in these states as late as the twentieth century. Both the Dutch and the English, like most other Protestant groups, then and in subsequent generations, regarded education highly, and their children learned not only the three Rs but also enough religion to make them God-fearing Christians. Instruction was in their native tongues until approximately the eighteenth century when English became dominant, but not universal, throughout the United States. Both sexes were taught the same things in their earliest years, including careful instruction in the Bible. As the children grew, girls received instruction in sewing and other domestic arts while boys were directed toward more sophisticated learning. Among a mother’s prime responsibility was the education of her children.

In the long run, English settlers came to dominate life in British America. They sent more people to the colonies from the homeland than did any other European nation before the end of the eighteenth century. These men and women, and later the Scots and Scots-Irish, set the tone of the colonies while expecting others to give up their own cultures and blend with the majority. No group was absorbed immediately, although one of the fastest to disappear, the French Huguenots (Protestants), practically passed from the scene by the second or third generation. For some newcomers, however, such as some of the Germans in Pennsylvania and South Carolina, it took two to four generations, and even longer in some cases, before acculturation and then assimilation occurred.

The first English colonists to arrive on the North American continent came directly from England to Virginia. The settlement at Jamestown in 1607 resulted from the visions of some London-based fortune hunters. These early colonists had difficulty surviving and many died within a few months. Those that lived struggled against disease, poor work habits, and hostile Indians. By 1622, famines, pestilence, and Indian wars had practically destroyed the colony, and the English crown assumed possession.

More successful were groups of Pilgrims and Puritans who journeyed to New England in the 1620s and settled in what is now Massachusetts. They left Europe to avoid the plague of a faltering European economy but their move to the New World also afforded them the opportunity to implant their own cultural values. No other groups, no matter how large, were ever as significant in the development of the United States as these two groups. Their ideologies emphasized the importance of the Protestant faith, diligent application to work, and individual accomplishment. They often paid homage to those who attained great wealth. They cherished the Anglo-Saxon legal heritage and revered the written compact. They brought the English language to the New World, along with a strong sense of the role of families. Men dominated their families and were political leaders. But women too had roles in society: they ran the households and reared the children. All of these aspects of their culture were firmly implanted in American soil and became the foundations for American society. Every succeeding immigrant group that came to the English colonies, and later to the United States, had to absorb these aspects of the dominant culture to be accepted as Americans.

After Charles I succeeded his father, James I, on the English throne in 1625, domestic concerns prevented him from giving much attention to the colonies. Nevertheless, he granted an area of land north of Virginia to George Calvert, Lord Baltimore, which was christened Maryland. Calvert, a Roman Catholic, hoped the colony would be financially profitable and serve as a haven for his coreligionists. He died before actually receiving the grant from the king, and the deed went to his son, Cecilius, who embarked on a voyage to the New World in 1634. From the beginning there were large numbers of Protestants in Maryland, and to protect Catholics in case of eventual discrimination, Lord Baltimore urged passage of the Toleration Act in 1649; it granted freedom of religion to all who believed in the divinity of Jesus Christ. Five years later, however, under the domination of a Protestant legislature, the act was repealed and Catholics were denied legal protection. The repeal signified quite strikingly how the colonists, and in later centuries other Protestants, regarded the Roman Catholic faith.

From 1649 until 1661 Oliver Cromwell governed England as a protectorate, but upon his death Charles II, son of the beheaded monarch, reinstituted the monarchy and claimed the throne as his birthright. During his reign (1661–1685) England discouraged emigration. The mercantile theory, which held sway for the next century, dictated that the wealth of nations lay in their inhabitants and their production, and that loss of population meant, in effect, loss of riches.

Many colonies therefore had to devise ways to attract immigrant laborers. Along with ship captains they sent agents (newlanders) to Europe to promote their attractions. Newlanders often dressed in fancy attire and wore pocket watches with heavy gold chains to attest to the wealth found in the New World. They carried tales of maids who became ladies, tenants who became landlords, and apprentices who had advanced to artisans only a few years after reaching their new dwellings. But the best advertisement for the colonies, one historian wrote, was clearly the success of the pioneers. Messages they sent back home inevitably had the effect of removing the last psychological barrier from the minds of many already inclined to leave. It is as good Country as any Man needs to Dwell in, one Scots-Irishman wrote home in 1767, and it is much better than I expected it to be in every way. Going to America thus came to mean, as one scholar put it, not launching into the vast unknown but moving to a country where one’s friends and relatives had a home.

Most Europeans, especially the ones willing to try their luck in the colonies, could not afford the fare to the New World. That proved to be a minor matter, or so the would-be immigrants were led to believe. Shipping agents accepted indigents who signed indentures agreeing to work in the colonies for a period of three to seven years to pay for their passage. Immigrants who accepted these terms were often sold on board ship, and often members of the same family wound up with different masters. Some parents had to sell their children as if they were cattle, and if parents or spouses died, the remaining members of the family had to serve extra time to pay for