THE HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES 1877-1945

SEMINAR 5THE GOLDEN DOOR-THE NEW

IMMIGRATION

REVIEW QUESTIONS

• What factors made the American Industrial Revolution possible?

• What was the symbol of the era and why?• Name leading business figures or industrialists• In what way can trusts develop?• What were the foundations of the early

information systems?

MIX AND MATCH

• Which historical periods, or events can you associate the following terms with?

• Sutter, Glidden, Muir, Custer, • Wounded Knee, Sand Creek Massacre,• railroads, Model T• Ghost Dance Movement, mass production,

conservation movement, Little Big Horn, American Industrial Revolution, Gold Rush, barbed wire, Indian wars and treaties,

THE GOLDEN DOOR

• 1886: Statue of Liberty• Give me your tired, your poor,• Your huddled masses yearning to breath free• The wretched refuse of your teeming shore• Send these, the homeless tempest-tossed to

me• I lift my lamp beside the golden door (Emma

Lazarus, The New Colossus)

SOURCE ANALYSIS

• Why is the poem titled The New Colossus?• Explain: huddled, tempest-tossed,• Wretched refuse, teeming shore,• What does the golden door symbolize?• What is the message of the poem?

EXPLAIN

• They said in America the streets are paved with gold, but when we arrived there were no streets, we had to build them, we had to mine the gold, and we had to do the paving….

• How is the myth and reality of immigration conflicted in the quote?

• Myth: Statue of Liberty, reality: Ellis Island, the hard conditions of immigrants, nativism

WAVES OF IMMIGRATION

• 1607-1787 Colonial period: WASP groups, African slaves

• 1820-1860: Old Immigration: WASP, Mexicans, Chinese

• 1880-1924: New Immigration, non-WASP, Central, Eastern, Southern Europe

• 1945- : Latin America, Southeast Asia

JEWISH IMMIGRATION

• Colonial America: involved in trade and commerce

• European roots• Ashkenazi community: Holland, England• Sephardic community: Spain, Portugal• 1780-1850 Population growth• Jews settle in Boston, Buffalo, Baltimore,

Cleveland, Chicago

IMMIGRATION AND INTEGRATION

• 1881: Start of pogroms in Russia• (discrimination, anti-Jewish hysteria,)• In America: face anti-Semitism• 1890s: 600,000 arrive Immigrants found a

haven instead of a home, their children turned a haven into a home

• 1880-1925: 2 million Jews immigrate• Reason: religious and political tolerance

MAIN FEATURES OF JEWISH IMMIGRATION

• Successful immigrants—integration• Iconic figure: Jewish peddler• Strength of the family• Respect for tradition• Importance of education• Observation of religion• Value of hard work

ELLIS ISLAND

• From Liberty Island to Ellis Island• Official entry point• Reasons for refusal of entry: membership in

radical organizations, fear of prostitution• Medical tests, fear of disease is also a cause

for exclusion

METAPHORS FOR AMERICAN CULTURE

• Melting pot• Salad bowl• Symphony• Rainbow• Kaleidoscope

MELTING POT

• Israel Zangwill: The Melting Pot (1908)• America is God’s crucible• The Great Melting Pot: where all the races of

Europe are melting and reforming. God is making the American-fusion of all races, the coming Superman

• National, cultural heritages are melted into a new ”American identity”

• Madison Grant: The Passing of the Great Race

MELTING POT• The dominant paradigm until the 1960s• St. Jean de Crévecoeur: promiscuous breed: ”a mixture of English,

Scotch, Irish, French, Dutch, Germans, and Swedes” (1782)• ”What then is the American, this new man? He is neither an

European, nor a descendant of an European; hence that strange mixture of blood which you will find in no other country […] He is an American, who, leaving behind him all his ancient prejudices and manners, receives new ones from the new mode of life he has embraced, the new government, he obeys, and the new rank he holds. He becomes an American by being received in the broad lap of our great Alma Mater. Here individuals of all nations are melted into a new race of men, whose labours and posterity will one day cause great changes in the world”

BEYOND THE MELTING POT• ”The alien, who comes here from Europe is not

the raw material Americans suppose him to be. He is not a blank sheet to be written on as you see fit, he brings with him a deep-rooted tradition, a system of culture, taste, and habits that comes into conflict with America as soon as he landed.” (Marcus Ravage Eli)

• Salad bowl, mosaic: groups with similar national and ethnic backgrounds living side by side preserving old identities, cultures, customs (Chinatown, Little Italy)

BEYOND THE MELTING POT

• Other explanations: static, constant change is not indicated

• Lawrence Fuchs: Kaleidoscope theory, reflecting the dynamics of ethnicity: ”American ethnicity is kaleidoscopic: complex and varied, changing form, pattern, color… continually shifting from one set of relations to another, rapidly changing”

• Virágos: a dynamic system entailing the interaction of a primary core and several secondary cores, parallel cultures

NATIVISM

• John Higham: opposition to aliens, their institutions, ideas, a rejection of an internal minority based on its foreign connections

• Three main currents:• -anti-Catholicism 1830-1850s• -fear of foreign radicals (post World War One

Red Scare)• -racial nativism (based on Anglo-Saxon

superiority)

NATIVIST VOICES• ”men of the sturdy stocks of the north of Europe

made up the main force of immigrants, but now ‘multitudes of men of the lowest class from the south of Italy and men of the meaner sort out of Hungary and Poland who had neither skill nor energy nor an initiative of quick intelligence were coming.” (Woodrow Wilson 1901)

• ”wide open and unguarded stand our gates, and through them presses a wild, a motley throng, who bring with them unknown gods and rites.” (Thomas Bailey Aldrich 1892)

EXAMPLES OF NATIVISM

• Indian resistance to settlers• William Bradford-mixed multitude• Benjamin Franklin -”Why should the Palatine Boors be suffered to

swarm into our Settlements?”-”we have so fair and opportunity of increasing the

lovely white” (Observations Concerning the Increase of Mankind)

• Know-Nothings (American Party)

IMMIGRATION RESTRICTION

• 1795: Citizenship restricted to whites• 1798: Alien and Sedition Acts allow the

president to deport dangerous aliens• 1808: Prohibition on slave trade• 1850s : Know Nothing Party seeks restriction

on immigration• 1882: Chinese Exclusion Act

IMMIGRATION RESTRICTION

• 1907: Gentlemen’s Agreement• 1921: Emergency Quota Act Immigrant

admission is restricted to 3% of the total representation of the given nationality recorded by the 1910 census

• 1924: Johnson Reed Act limits annual European immigration to 2 % of the total representation of the given nationality recorded by the 1890 census

MULTICULTURALISM TODAY

• David Hollinger: ethnic identities form into Euro-America-Post-Ethnic America

• Erasure of diversity• Declining significance of race, racial

oppression superseded by class oppression (William J. Wilson)

MULTICULTURALISM TODAY

• Multiculturalism undermines the American Creed

• Post 1960s, non-English speaking mass immigration, dual identities

• ”If someone calls America a nation of immigrants he forms lies from half truths.” (Who are we?: Challenges to the American Identity, Samuel P. Huntington 2005)