May 8, 2006
The Crucible, Salem, and Today Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 12:25 PM EST This past weekend I saw the Royal Shakespeare Company’s new stage production of Arthur Miller’s classic work The Crucible, in London. It’s been some time since I last saw the play, and even longer since I’ve read it. On the whole, I was deeply impressed by the just about every aspect of the show, from the players (who performed their parts expertly), to the set design (which was haunting), right down to the costumes. Seeing The Crucible again inspired me to revisit some of the historical literature on the famous Salem witch trials, which formed the backdrop for Miller’s undeniably present-minded criticism of the anti-Communist hysteria that gripped key American institutions and regions when the play was written. The fever of witch denunciations began in Salem Village, an outlying area of Salem, Massachusetts, in the winter of 1692, when a group of young girls, including the niece of the local minister, Samuel Parris, began exhibiting signs of seizures and fits. When witchcraft was diagnosed as the source of their troubles, the girls began fingering increasingly prominent, propertied, and religiously observant members of the community, 30 percent of whom were men. By late fall approximately 150 Salemites had been arrested, and 20 executed, largely on the basis of “spectral evidence” in the form of visions and apparitions that the afflicted girls claimed to see. The proceedings at Salem had been controversial from the start, and in October, when a number of prominent Massachusetts clergyman, including Increase Mather, called for their suspension, the game was up. By the following spring, all remaining prisoners were released from jail, and in 1697, recognizing the great wrong that had been committed at Salem, the Massachusetts General Court declared a day of atonement. Historians have grappled for explanations of the Salem witch trials. Perhaps the most famous interpretation was proffered by Paul Boyer and Stephen Nissenbaum, whose 1974 study, Salem Possessed: The Social Origins of Witchcraft, argued that the events of 1692 owed to the social dislocations accompanying economic and demographic growth in Massachusetts. Their painstaking examination of the trial records revealed that the accusers tended to hail from Salem Village (known formerly as Salem Farms), a semi-autonomous area to the west of Salem Town that was populated by pious, Puritan farmers. As residents of the interior—Salem Town—moved steadily toward mercantile and commercial activities (prospering, all the while), and away from the organic community sensibility that had marked out New England’s Puritan enclaves since their founding in the early seventeenth century, a moral and interest-driven controversy split the residents of east and west Salem. Ultimately, Boyer and Nissenbaum found, the trials pitted the people of Salem Village, who were uneasy over the mercantile and individualist orientation of Salem Town, against supporters of the emerging order. Cries of witchcraft were not calculated falsehood. In the context of the time, Puritans genuinely believed it was logical and sensible to explain contemporary events through the lens of spirituality and religion. Boyer’s and Nissenbaum’s interpretation won wide praise for its deep research and originality, but subsequent historians have presented challenges to it. Mary Beth Norton, a professor of early American history at Cornell University, found that the socioeconomic analysis does not hold up when one considers the witch trials as a regional, not local, event. Since a plurality of the accused witches in 1692-93 were residents of nearby Andover—not of Salem Town and Salem Village—the events should properly be termed the Essex witch trials. Norton argues instead that many of the accusers’ descriptions of the devil emphasized his “tawny” appearance, and that they and their supporters were either refugees of the bloody Indian wars engulfing nearby northern Massachusetts and Canada, or justifiably ill at ease about the conflict then encroaching on the outlying areas of their county. (Abigail Williams, the villain in Miller’s drama, saw family members hacked to pieces in Maine, which was then still the northernmost part of Massachusetts, just years before the trial.) In Norton’s analysis, the Indian wars did not “cause” the witchcraft crisis, “but rather . . . the conflict created the conditions that allowed the crisis to develop as rapidly and extensively as it did.” As Essex County residents increasingly came to fear a very real, physical threat (Indians), they filtered some of those fears through the imagined invasion of spectral forces (witches). There is a third major explanation for the events of 1692. The historian Carol Karlson’s book The Devil in the Shape of a Woman examined witch trials in and outside of Salem and found that many of the accused were property-holding women who claimed no male kin. In a period of demographic pressure and sweeping economic change, both of which threatened the stability of New England’s small Puritan villages, these women posed a threat to the orderly transfer of wealth and property from one generation of men to the next. To oversimplify a very layered and important argument, the citizens of early colonial Massachusetts understood this problem as best they knew how, by interpreting human events as the devil’s motive. It only complicated matters further that the accusers—particularly in Salem—were often powerless young women who worked as servants in other families’ households. Any way you consider it, the professional historians have moved well past Arthur Miller’s scheme. Yet in his defense, the playwright himself denied any pretensions to scholarly credibility. “This play is not history in the sense in which the word is used by the academic historian,” he said at the time. Even as historians continue to sift through the grains of evidence, The Crucible still has a great deal to offer. In a time when foreign nationals and U.S. citizens are rotting in American prisons unable to learn the charges against them, consult with counsel, or receive a fair trial (or any trial at all); when an American President draws a line in the sand and declares that one is either with America or against it (much as one of Miller’s characters argues, in the play, that townspeople are either with or against the court); and when we run the risk of confusing a very real threat for wholly imagined ones, the events of 1692 are a good way to frame political drama. In explaining his opposition to the Salem trials, Increase Mather, the great seventeenth-century Puritan minister, put it this way: “It were better that ten suspected witches should escape, than that one innocent person be condemned.” Substitute “terrorist” for “witch,” and one suspects that, today, Mather might just receive an unwelcomed knock on his door.
May 5, 2006
Immigration, Continued Posted by John Steele Gordon at 10:30 AM EST Mr. Zeitz made a flat, and wholly unsupported, statement: “It was a group of conservative Republicans who scuttled it [the immigration bill before the Senate last month], by insisting on last-minute amendments that would essentially destroy the compromise ironed out by leading members of both parties, most notably, John McCain and Edward Kennedy.”
In other words, in Mr. Zeitz’s opinion, the blame for the failure of the immigration bill lay wholly with “a group of conservative Republicans.”
Among the evidence I presented to show that that wasn’t true was a quote from The New York Times editorial on the subject saying that, with regard to the failure, “the Democrats’ motives were undoubtedly less than pristine.” Since The New York Times has probably the most liberal and fawningly Democratic editorial page of any major newspaper in the country—many of its editorials could appear on Democratic National Committee stationery and no one would doubt their coming from the DNC—it seemed to me that this was a strong point. Apparently so does Mr. Zeitz, as he follows the old lawyers’ adage: If both the law and the facts are against you, give your opponent hell.
The fact that the Times goes on to say that the “Democrats also had a lot to worry about” has absolutely nothing to do with the issue at hand: whether the Democrats were blameless or blamable. (And whether the Democrats had in fact “a lot to worry about” is dubious at best. See below.) Yet Mr. Zeitz accuses me of a considerable intellectual sin: “What Mr. Gordon has done here is quote a source wildly out of context.” I did, of course, no such thing. Democratic worries and Democratic motives are two different things, and the point under discussion was motives, not worries.
Let me give an example of quoting “wildly out of context.” In his confirmation hearing for Secretary of Defense, the then-president of General Motors, Charles E. Wilson, was asked, if it were necessary, could he make a decision that would be good for the United States, but bad for General Motors. He replied (I’m quoting from memory, but exactitude is not necessary here), “Yes, sir, I could. But I can’t imagine such a circumstance arising as I have always thought that what is good for the country is good for General Motors and vice versa.” Liberal Democrats took “vice versa” and turned it into the robber-baron sounding “What is good for General Motors is good for the country.”
Did I do anything remotely comparable? No. Did I in any way misconvey the thrust of what The New York Times had said regarding the motives of the Democrats? No. My only sin was to produce evidence that helps refute Mr. Zeitz’s ex cathedra argument. I’m sure in Mr. Zeitz’s world that is an intellectual sin indeed, for liberals will tolerate nearly anything except disagreement with their pronouncements by those who do not define themselves as liberals. In their strange, ever more self-referential (and self-reverential) world, they speak only the truth, and the peasants are expected gratefully to accept it.
Further, Mr. Zeitz dismisses my quotes from Senators McCain and Specter as merely partisan political statements and therefore of no probative value: “Should we be surprised that two Republican senators (one of them a probable candidate for his party’s presidential nomination; the other a moderate who has only a tenuous hold on his committee chairmanship due to conservative intraparty opposition) lay the blame for legislative gridlock with the Democrats?”
But a few posts ago he described Senator McCain as one of the “principled conservative Republicans like John McCain and Sam Brownback [who] can revive hopes for a sane immigration bill.” I guess Senator McCain is a man of principle when he is in agreement with Joshua Zeitz and a mere political hack when he is not.
Did the Democrats have a lot to worry about? Mr. Zeitz very conveniently ignores my quote from the Times news story regarding Senator Edward Kennedy: “Mr. Kennedy said they had the votes to defeat those proposals and protect the underlying bill.” Senator McCain said the same. Both wanted to go full steam ahead. They would hardly have been willing—nay, eager—to do so had there been a realistic possibility of the bill being amended to death.
So let’s see. Kennedy, a Democrat—a very liberal one of vast seniority, with great parliamentary expertise, and the leading Democratic senator on the bill—said flatly that the votes to stop any obnoxious amendments were there. Mr. Zeitz, by his own nose counting, would seem to agree with that: All the Democrats and half the Republicans equals absolute control of the legislation, even in the Senate.
But Harry Reid—shortly after declaring a compromise had been reached, shaking hands, patting backs, hail-fellow-well-metting all over television—the next morning is suddenly “worried,” despite the confident assurances of both the Democratic and Republican sponsors, and insists that the Republican leadership deliver the heads of half their caucus on a silver platter or he won’t let the bill come up for a vote. He offered the Republicans a deal they had to refuse and blamed the loss of the bill on the Republicans when they refused it.
Mr. Zeitz chooses to believe what he finds convenient to believe: that Senator Reid’s transparently phony explanation and blame-laying that not even the Washington Post and The New York Times could swallow is true.
I believe Senator Kennedy.
May 4, 2006
Who Really Sabotaged the Immigration Bill? Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 10:30 AM EST John Steele Gordon plays by a strange set of rules. He has, in the past, suggested that I am “nasty, humorless, morally self-congratulatory, and intellectually dishonest.” But when I proffer that he has “spun” the recent history of the immigration reform bill still pending in Congress, he shakes his fist with moral indignation and writes: “The use of the word ‘spin’ in this context is not a word one historian should use regarding another historian’s presumptively honest opinion, unless he means it as a deliberate insult and has not the courage to do it directly. The word inescapably implies a lack of regard for the truth. If Mr. Zeitz wishes to accuse me of what would be professional malfeasance, he is free to do so in so many words. I hope he will provide at least a soupçon of evidence to back up his statement.” Okay, I’ll take the bait. Mr. Gordon has been dishonest with his readers in the service of scoring a point. Let me provide a soupçon of evidence. In his recent post, Mr. Gordon quotes the following line from a New York Times editorial: “the Democrats’ motives were undoubtedly less than pristine.” But Mr. Gordon neglects to quote the lines that immediately followed: “But Democrats also had a lot to worry about. The House had already passed a hard-line bill that would make the current immigration situation worse on every possible front. It’s not surprising that some Democrats wanted some sort of guarantee that the bill the Senate was to send out—which was already very much a compromise—would not be watered down further.” What Mr. Gordon has done here is quote a source wildly out of context. This is a very serious manipulation of the historical record. I wouldn’t go so far as to call it malfeasance. Just good old-fashioned spin. Less deliberately, but no less problematically, Mr. Gordon suggests that he can prove that Democrats, not Republicans, scuttled the immigration bill. His prized evidence: quotes (and newspaper accounts of quotes) from the Republican Senators John McCain and Arlen Specter. Should we be surprised that two Republican senators (one of them a probable candidate for his party’s presidential nomination; the other a moderate who has only a tenuous hold on his committee chairmanship due to conservative intraparty opposition) lay the blame for legislative gridlock with the Democrats? If I muster up a few quotes from Harry Reid and Chuck Schumer claiming that Republicans were to blame for the breakdown of the Senate compromise, I will hardly have proved conclusively that Republicans were at fault. Though in this instance, Mr. Gordon hasn’t deliberately tailored a quote, as he did with the New York Times editorial, he has offered up biased sources and uncritically allowed them to establish historical record. Again, this isn’t malfeasance. Just spin. In his defense, Mr. Gordon does quote honestly from a Washington Post editorial that lays the blame for legislative gridlock squarely with the Democrats. But editorials are, by definition, statements of opinion. The Washington Post piece certainly helps his argument, but alone it proves nothing. So let’s see what the experts say. An article dated mid-April in Congressional Quarterly, a nonpartisan news outlet that is arguably the leading authority on congressional matters, explained the meltdown like this: “Even with a bipartisan compromise in hand, the Senate rejected a sweeping overhaul of immigration policy last week and instead left Washington for a two-week recess caught up in a political stalemate that threatens to sink one of the biggest issues facing Congress this year. Republicans defeated an attempt April 7 to invoke cloture, or limit debate, on the compromise proposal that had been hailed as a ‘huge breakthrough’ a day earlier by Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tenn., and Minority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev. The vote was 38-60. Democrats then returned the favor, blocking, 36-62, a GOP effort to limit debate on the underlying bill (S 2454), which would stiffen border security and immigration enforcement without addressing the status of the 11 million to 12 million illegal immigrants already in the United States.” In other words, moderate Republicans and Democrats reached a compromise agreement that included new border-control measures and limited amnesty for many, tough not all, illegal immigrants; in turn, conservative Republicans (joined by many of their moderate colleagues) tried to renege on the agreement by loading it down with amendments. When the Republican caucus then attempted to secure a vote on a bill that tightened borders and restricted the inflow of immigrants, without addressing amnesty for America’s 11 or 12 million illegal immigrants, Democrats said ‘no.’ Democrats didn’t scuttle a deal on immigration reform. They scuttled a bill that provided only for immigration restriction. They insisted that the terms of the compromise to which they had just agreed be honored. As CQ put it: “The breakdown came just a day after the two leaders stood together with more than a dozen senators from both parties, praising the broad outlines of a compromise. The plan, based on a proposal by Republicans Chuck Hagel of Nebraska and Mel Martinez of Florida, would strengthen border security, create a temporary guest worker program and provide a path to U.S. citizenship for most of the illegal immigrants already here. The floor impasse pits Republicans who want to offer amendments to the compromise against the deal’s Democratic supporters, who want to preserve the language as it stands.” I’ve never claimed that the Democratic party enjoys a monopoly on virtue. But a more liberal immigration policy has long been a central goal of the center left—it was, after all, a coalition of northern Democrats and liberal Republicans that pushed through the 1965 Hart-Celler act, which ended a half-century of draconian limits on immigration. To be fair, labor unions and some left-leaning populists have historically been less than pristine on the immigration question. But we’re talking about the year 2006. Democrats have united in favor of amnesty for millions of hard-working undocumented immigrants. Republicans are split, and they tried to renege on a deal. Undeniably, today’s most obnoxious nativists happen to be clustered on the political right. The record speaks for itself.
May 3, 2006
Why Did Immigrants Go Home (Continued) Posted by John Steele Gordon at 05:00 PM EST On the question of how many late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century immigrants returned home because they were fed up with America, and how many for other reasons, Ellen Feldman writes that “undoubtedly, many immigrants worked hard in this country to get back home to their native lands, but given the high rate of remigration of those who seemed most foreign to American citizens, I think David Kennedy’s implication stands. Faced with enormous obstacles and grinding hardship, many gave up and retreated back to the old country.”
However, she quotes from the original source of the statistics that “it is impossible both to tell how many different people were actually counted as immigrants [as opposed to those arriving as temporary workers, for example] and to judge how many emigrants from America were fulfilling original hopes [to return to their homelands] or escaping unexpected disappointments.”
It seems to me, given what Ms Feldman quotes, that we simply don’t have enough information to make a judgment on the issue.
Further she writes that “it seems likely that once again the matter of the sheer otherness of the new arrivals comes into play. Germans were less alien to a WASP country than were Italians or Greeks, a fact that probably made adjustment easier and prejudice less virulent.”
Germans, of course, had been immigrating to this country for quite a while. The Pennsylvania Dutch, who were German (Dutch in this case is a corruption of Deutsch) made up a substantial portion of the population of late-colonial Pennsylvania. Further, German immigration was more a steady trickle, if a substantial one, over the years rather than a sudden influx.
But major American cities all had areas that each major ethnic group made their own, which would have greatly reduced the sense of “otherness.” I’m reminded of an old joke, from the days when Manhattan’s Lower East Side was still home to a vast number of immigrant Jews. (In 1920 the Jewish population was estimated at 400,000). One day a Jewish man walked into one of his favorite restaurants for lunch and was startled when the waiter turned out to be Chinese. He was even more startled when the waiter spoke to him in accented but passable Yiddish. After he finished, he went up to the cashier and while paying his bill said, “What’s with the Chinese waiter speaking Yiddish?” “Shhhh,” she replied in a conspiratorial whisper. “He thinks he’s learning English.”
May 3, 2006
Who Sabotaged the Immigration Bill? Posted by John Steele Gordon at 04:30 PM EST Joshua Zeitz wrote, “First, when I hoped that ‘in the coming weeks, a coalition of Democrats and principled conservative Republicans like John McCain and Sam Brownback can revive hopes for a sane immigration bill,’ I meant just what I wrote. Mr. Gordon is incorrect in his assertion that Chuck Schumer and Harry Reid, both Democrats, scuttled the bipartisan immigration bill. It was a group of conservative Republicans who scuttled it, by insisting on last-minute amendments that would essentially destroy the compromise ironed out by leading members of both parties, most notably, John McCain and Edward Kennedy.” Mr. Zeitz’s assertion—which, in typical I’m-a-liberal-therefore-I’m-right fashion, he doesn’t bother to support with even a scintilla of evidence—is flat wrong. On April 8, the day after the compromise collapsed, The New York Times reported that “Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, an author of the bipartisan proposal, said the issue ‘will not go away.’ He said he held [Senate minority leader] Mr. Reid responsible for the legislative breakdown because of his refusal to allow conservative opponents of the legislation an opportunity to offer amendments. Mr. McCain and Mr. Kennedy said they had the votes to defeat those proposals and protect the underlying bill.” The next day, the Times editorialized that “the Democrats’ motives were undoubtedly less than pristine.” On April 10 the Times reported that “in a meeting Thursday evening in Mr. Reid’s office, Mr. Kennedy argued for moving ahead with the bill, confident that the votes were there to beat back objectionable changes and that the debate could build momentum for the measure. Mr. Reid and his leadership team countered that the amendments were meant to derail the bill. They feared that without some assurances by Mr. Frist on negotiations with the House, the bill could be hijacked by Republicans. Mr. Kennedy lost.” On April 8 the Wall Street Journal reported that “Mr. Reid’s downside can be his political cunning—and frequent disdain for Mr. Frist—that even admirers sometimes find cynical and unattractive. The Democrat spoke movingly Thursday of how immigrants in Las Vegas hotels needed the new immigration bill; hours later, he refused to help Mr. Frist solve some of his problems with Republicans to advance the compromise.” Later in the same article, the reporter David Rogers reported that, “Sen. Specter [chairman of the Judiciary Committee] made a similar argument, saying that Democrats want to undermine the Senate compromise so that the only Republican bill before the public is the narrower House measure, which is generally harsher on immigrants and the subject of Hispanic protests. ‘There is an advantage to Democrats to have only the House bill before the public,’ Mr. Specter said. ‘The view is—and I think it is an accurate view—that that is harmful to the Republican Party.’ . . . The Senate compromise is a ‘vast improvement’ he said. But ‘it has not gone forward because there is a political advantage to the Democrats to not have an immigration bill.’” On April 8, the Washington Post, not a right-wing rag or Republican cheerleader, editorialized that, “Democrats—whether their motive was partisan advantage or legitimate fear of a bad bill emerging from conference with the House—are the ones who refused, in the end, to proceed with debate on amendments, which is, after all, how legislation gets made. The unfortunate result is that momentum toward balanced reform may be lost. ‘The Democratic leadership played politics with the prospect of 10 million immigrants getting on a path to citizenship,’ said Frank Sharry, executive director of the National Immigration Forum, a pro-immigration group. ‘It seems that Democratic leaders wanted an issue, not a bill.’” The Washington Post editorial continued, “The measure wasn’t perfect, and certainly there are risks in going to conference with the House and its enforcement-only approach. But Democrats putting political self-interest over solving a serious policy problem ought to worry that their actions will backfire with the very people whose interests they are purporting to protect.” So let’s see, Senator McCain, Senator Kennedy, Senator Specter, Frank Sharry, and the Washington Post all state or clearly imply that the compromise fell apart because of the Democrats and even The New York Times said that they had unclean hands. Mr. Zeitz has so far offered only an ex cathedra statement to the contrary. Not very impressive, but perhaps the best he can do under the circumstances. Further he writes, “The Senate Democrats are united in supporting conditional amnesty for most illegal immigrants currently residing in the United States, along with stronger border-control measures. It’s the Republican party that’s deeply divided on this question. Half of the party supports conditional amnesty, on both pragmatic and deeply-felt religious grounds. The other half reflexively opposes immigration.” First, so what that the Democrats are mostly united and the Republicans are deeply divided on the question of immigration? That has no relevance to the discussion at hand, unless he means to imply that all the Democrats are virtuous and half the Republicans are Satan’s minions for holding an opinion on the subject that differs from his (and mine, by the way). The opposite was true in the 1940’s, ’50s, and ’60s on the question of civil rights. Second, accepting Mr. Zeitz’s nose count that all the Senate Democrats were in favor of the bill under consideration as were half the Republicans, then that means 45 Democrats plus 27 or 28 Republicans favored the compromise. That equals 72 or 73 votes in favor. So what did Senator Reid have to fear from the amendments that the other 27 or 28 Republicans wanted to propose? As Senator Kennedy (a liberal Democrat last time I checked) said, they had the votes to defeat them. Finally, he states, “Mr. Gordon and I have tangled before on political questions, but it would be a real stretch for him to spin this issue any other way. Democrats are in favor of liberal immigration policies; Republicans are divided on the question.” The use of the word “spin” in this context is not a word one historian should use regarding another historian’s presumptively honest opinion, unless he means it as a deliberate insult and has not the courage to do it directly. The word inescapably implies a lack of regard for the truth. If Mr. Zeitz wishes to accuse me of what would be professional malfeasance, he is free to do so in so many words. I hope he will provide at least a soupçon of evidence to back up his statement.
May 3, 2006
Repatriation, Again Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 02:55 PM EST Following up on Ellen Feldman’s recent post about repatriation, I think it’s fair to say that, based on the historical literature, immigrants returned home for reasons as diverse as those that originally compelled them to venture to North America, but that many of the considerations figuring into their decision to repatriate were strategic. That is, migration wasn’t always undertaken with the intent to become American. It was a rational economic move. Realizing the potential that America held out for a capital infusion in Europe, for instance, the Hungarian government initiated an “American Action” program that paid money directly to immigrant churches, newspapers, and institutions in the United States; in turn, those institutions actively promoted repatriation (and, by extension, encouraged their constituents to take their hard-earned American dollars back to Hungary). The scheme may very well have worked, as a study of one Hungarian village found that over half of all its migrants to America returned within five years. Moreover, many of those who remained in the U.S. still sank their pay into investment opportunities, mainly land and houses, in Hungary. “We’ll only stay in America and work hard until we have [enough funds for] twenty acres,” explained one early twentieth-century immigrant, “and then well go home.” One can’t help but contrast these stories with those of today’s immigrants, particularly the 11 million undocumented aliens who want nothing so much as to put down roots in the United States and become American. If we could accommodate the economic strategy of Hungarian repatriates, surely we can accommodate hardworking newcomers who want to cast their lot with us.
May 3, 2006
Why Did Some Immigrants Go Back Home? Posted by Ellen Feldman at 12:10 PM EST John Steele Gordon poses a valid question about whether immigrants gave up and returned home or retired to happy sunset years in their native countries, and I am grateful to Joshua Zeitz for providing some answers to it. I’d like to enlarge upon them just a little. Since, like John Gordon, I admire David Kennedy’s excellent Freedom from Fear, I accepted Kennedy’s implication that the difficulties rather than the rewards of building a new life in a new land drove many to retrace their steps. Kennedy bases his figures on the exhaustive history of American immigration Becoming American, by Thomas J. Archdeacon. The author writes that from the statistics, “it is impossible both to tell how many different people were actually counted as immigrants [as opposed to those arriving as temporary workers, for example] and to judge how many emigrants from America were fulfilling original hopes [to return to their homelands] or escaping unexpected disappointments.” But Archdeacon also points out, as does Joshua Zeitz, that Jews had the lowest frequencies of return of all the late-arriving ethnic groups. He also argues that the large remigration rate of Italians drastically reduced the impact of their original influx. The story of Greek immigration and remigration is similar to the Italian, while the proportion of Germans who returned home was low.
Though, as Archdeacon states, we have no statistics to prove why immigrants returned home, it seems likely that once again the matter of the sheer otherness of the new arrivals comes into play. Germans were less alien to a WASP country than were Italians or Greeks, a fact that probably made adjustment easier and prejudice less virulent. Jews, on the other hand, might be considered the most alien of all the new arrivals—but as both Archdeacon and Joshua Zeitz point out, they had known more terrible conditions in the countries they had fled, and they had no place to which to return.
Undoubtedly, many immigrants worked hard in this country to get back home to their native lands, but given the high rate of remigration of those who seemed most foreign to American citizens, I think David Kennedy’s implication stands. Faced with enormous obstacles and grinding hardship, many gave up and retreated back to the old country.
May 3, 2006
Immigration: Answers to Two Questions Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 11:30 AM EST John Steele Gordon posed two questions yesterday—one to me, and one to Ellen Feldman. Though Ellen is more than capable of speaking for herself, I hope she won’t mind my addressing Mr. Gordon’s queries: First, when I hoped that “in the coming weeks, a coalition of Democrats and principled conservative Republicans like John McCain and Sam Brownback can revive hopes for a sane immigration bill,” I meant just what I wrote. Mr. Gordon is incorrect in his assertion that Chuck Schumer and Harry Reid, both Democrats, scuttled the bipartisan immigration bill. It was a group of conservative Republicans who scuttled it, by insisting on last-minute amendments that would essentially destroy the compromise ironed out by leading members of both parties, most notably, John McCain and Edward Kennedy. The Senate Democrats are united in supporting conditional amnesty for most illegal immigrants currently residing in the United States, along with stronger border-control measures. It’s the Republican party that’s deeply divided on this question. Half of the party supports conditional amnesty, on both pragmatic and deeply-felt religious grounds. The other half reflexively opposes immigration. Mr. Gordon and I have tangled before on political questions, but it would be a real stretch for him to spin this issue any other way. Democrats are in favor of liberal immigration policies; Republicans are divided on the question. That said, I should not have suggested that conservative Republican opponents of immigration are unprincipled. In fact, they’re quite principled. I just happen to find their principle highly objectionable. From his eloquent post in support of America’s historic relationship with immigration, I can only assume that Mr. Gordon is likewise turned off by those conservatives who fear the presence of newcomers in our midst. As far as the repatriation issue is concerned, I’d suggest John Bodnar’s excellent synthesis of American immigration history, The Transplanted. Bodnar draws on hundreds of historical monographs and articles to reach a number of conclusions about the nature of American immigration. Among his conclusions are an understanding that movement to the United States was just one part of a large-scale, global migration of capital and labor in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Agricultural modernization, industrialization, and urbanization compelled tens of millions of people to move from farm to city (say, from rural Ireland to Liverpool), from one region to another (from small-town Poland to Paris), and from one continent to the next (Europe or Asia to America). Push and pull factors influenced the courses that migrants followed, but if America was a popular and logical destination many people, by no means was it a providential destination. For millions of migrants, coming to America was a temporary strategy. There, they earned and saved money, and either sent it home to help support family members in the old country or carried it home themselves, in order to buy property and realize a more stable economic existence in their homelands. Not surprisingly, Jewish immigrants had the lowest repatriation rates. They faced political and social disabilities in Eastern Europe that generally made life in America more attractive despite its many hardships and challenges.
May 2, 2006
Invasion of the Hedge Clippers Posted by Frederic D. Schwarz at 05:05 PM EST What the debate on immigration needs, and will not get, is honesty. The biggest problem with the current situation is that it requires us all to shrug off massive violations of the law. Everyone knows that large numbers of workers in restaurants, landscaping, the building trades, and many other industries are illegal aliens, usually paid off the books, yet we pretend that nothing is wrong. Not only does this breed disrespect for laws in general and force legitimate business operators to become criminals, but it makes the problem hard to address by the usual means: Why bother replacing a law that doesn’t work with another law that doesn’t work? Cases like this, where a law with important consequences is unenforced or unenforceable, have occurred in the past in American history, and they have usually led to trouble. The Boston Tea Party took place not because the British government had imposed a new tax but because it was trying, through devious means, to collect an old tax that had been almost universally evaded. Some unenforced or underenforced laws have been bad (fugitive slave laws, prohibition) and others good (the Fifteenth Amendment, which supposedly guaranteed equal voting rights regardless of race), but either way, the remedy is the same: You must either (1) do what it takes to enforce the law and deal with the consequences, (2) repeal the law, or (3) alter it to reflect what can actually be achieved. Otherwise you’re just encouraging both sides to resort to extralegal measures. In our current immigration situation, option (1) not only would present a massive enforcement problem but would play havoc with the economies of the U.S., Mexico, and Central America. No one can say that illegal immigrants are being exploited; if they were, they wouldn’t hike hundreds of miles across the desert to come here. Keeping illegal immigrants out, let alone sending home the ones who are already here, would amount to a way of artificially elevating wages above market levels. Schemes like that never work; in this case, it would increase unemployment here and create a crisis for our southern neighbors, who depend on remittances from abroad to keep their economies afloat. Option (2) would be even worse, depriving us of any control over immigration. Option (3), on the other hand, in the form of true border enforcement coupled with a guest worker program having no restrictions on wages and benefits, would work quite well. America’s and the guest workers’ home economies would both benefit; immigration could be monitored and controlled; and the rule of law would be reinforced instead of being brought into contempt. Unfortunately, as I said at the start, it would require some honesty, which is in eternal short supply in American politics. Both sides would have to admit that illegal immigrants aren’t going away, that they make an important contribution to our economy—and that what makes these things true is the crummy wages they’re paid. In the examples I mentioned above, it took war, depression, and a decades-long protest movement to make this nation face reality. Will something similar be needed to bring us a set of immigration laws that aren’t a joke? Anything is possible, but the historical record is certainly not encouraging.
May 2, 2006
The Immigration Debate Today Posted by John Steele Gordon at 01:00 PM EST Joshua Zeitz writes in his recent post that “perhaps, in the coming weeks, a coalition of Democrats and principled conservative Republicans like John McCain and Sam Brownback can revive hopes for a sane immigration bill.” This would seem to imply that all Democrats and only some Republicans—especially conservative ones—are principled on this issue. Perhaps this is a typo and Mr. Zeitz meant to write “a coalition of principled Democrats and Republicans.” If not, I would remind him that the Senate, only a few weeks ago, had a deal on a sane immigration bill, one endorsed by a coalition wide enough to include the likes of John McCain, Ted Kennedy, and George Bush. But Senator Chuck Schumer, who is a Democrat, decided he preferred having the issue of immigration as a means of winning the Senate in November to having a good immigration bill passed in April. Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid promptly sabotaged the compromise that had been so painstakingly worked out the day before. That is not my idea of being principled.
May 2, 2006
The Immigration Tradition Posted by John Steele Gordon at 12:00 PM EST In the 1930s Franklin Roosevelt, addressing a meeting of the Daughters of the American Revolution, famously greeted the assembled ladies—one imagines them drawn by Helen Hokinson—as “my fellow immigrants.” FDR, of course, was of quite as “old stock” as anyone in the audience that day. While eight American presidents (the Adamses, Zachary Taylor, Ulysses Grant, James Garfield, FDR, and the Bushes) have descents from Mayflower passengers, only FDR, Taylor, and the Bushes have more than one each. Taylor has two, George H. W. Bush three, and his son four. FDR has no fewer than six. Roosevelt’s point—besides needling his audience, which was unlikely to vote for him anyway—was that while some Americans have ancestors who got here earlier than others, we are all descended from immigrants, and very, very few of those immigrants were prosperous on arrival. The prosperous, after all, are usually content with the status quo. Many immigrants in the colonial era paid for their passage by selling their labor for a number of years as indentured servants. Others arrived one jump ahead of the sheriff. And some were one jump behind, having been transported for felony. (A major reason for the establishment of a colony in Australia in 1788 was to provide the British government with a new dumping ground for felons, the former American colonies being no longer available for that purpose.) If Americans are famous for our get up and go, that cannot be unconnected with the fact that we all descend from people who got up and came. Whether it was on a leaky, perpetually damp, terribly crowded little cockleshell of a ship like the Mayflower or in steerage in a turn-of-the-twentieth-century passenger ship, our ancestors decided to take control of their lives by taking a tremendous gamble: They gave up all they had ever known and loved in hopes of making a better life in the New World. Even the slaves, who of course had no choice in the matter, survived an ordeal that is quite beyond modern comprehension and passed that strength on to their descendants. Obviously enough immigrants prospered to entice their relatives to come too in ever greater numbers, as the Atlantic migration is one of the great movements of people in human history. When the hand-loom industry collapsed in Scotland with the introduction of power looms in the 1840s, many families were in desperate straits. One got a letter from a sister who had emigrated to Pittsburgh saying, “This country’s far better for the working man than the old one, & there is room to spare, notwithstanding the thousands that flock to her borders.” That settled it, and the family packed up and came to America. One son of that family, named Andrew Carnegie, prospered beyond the wildest dreams of avarice. But millions of others did better than they could ever have hoped to do at home. That is why I wonder about the figures cited by Ellen Feldman of the percentage of late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century immigrants who “gave up” and returned home. I don’t doubt that they returned home, only that that many “gave up,” having been defeated by the struggle to survive in America. How many of those returnees, for instance, didn’t give up but instead retired to the old country, having accumulated a nest egg sufficient to allow them to do so with more comfort than they could have enjoyed had they stayed, or because their descendants who remained in America funded their retirement in the land of their birth? Also, many immigrants came to this country, got settled, and then returned to their countries of origin only long enough to gather their families, sell any property they may have had, and then leave permanently for the United States. I would be interested to know if the figures cited by Ellen Feldman (from David Kennedy’s excellent Freedom from Fear) are simply a count of immigrants who, for whatever reason, departed for their countries of origin, or are actually the percentage of immigrants who said, in effect, “The hell with this; I’m going home.” I have no idea.
May 2, 2006
The Immigration Debate Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 10:20 AM EST I couldn’t agree more with Ellen Feldman’s post in defense of a more open immigration policy. When I read the nativist screeds emanating from prominent conservative opponents of immigration like Rep. Tom Tancredo, or the alarmist anti-immigration tracts written by the likes of Samuel P. Huntington, whose most recent work, Who Are We? The Challenges to America’s National Identity, will sadly mar what was an otherwise serious and important career, I’m reminded of an earlier time when many ordinary Americans agreed that African-Americans and non-”Anglo-Saxon” immigrants were a menace to the nation’s racial and ethnic makeup. Back in the 1910s and 1920s, leading public figures sounded many of the same concerns that Huntington and others give voice to today, though the earlier nativists often invoked a cruder discourse. The outspoken segregationist Sen. Ben Tillman of South Carolina then complained, “We have admitted the dregs of Europe until America has been orientalized, Europeanized, Africanized, and mongrelized to that insidious degree that our genius, stability, and greatness, and promise of advancement and achievement are actually menaced.” His colleague Ira Hersey of Maine lamented that “we have thrown open wide our gates and through them have come other alien races, of alien blood, from Asia and southern Europe, the Malay, the Mongolian, the oriental with their strange and pagan rites, their babble of tongues.” Congressman Earl Michener of Michigan only echoed conventional wisdom when he argued, “the Nordic [race] laid the foundations of society in America,” and to compromise Nordic genius was pure race suicide. These ideas, also widely shared among American intellectuals in the 1910s and 1920s, became increasingly unpopular in Depression-era America. The Columbia University anthropologist Franz Boas, and his protégés Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict, blasted away at the edifice of “race,” proving that human behavior and intelligence were products of environment, not blood. Nazi race policy further delegitimized racialist thinking, influencing works like Ashley Montagu’s Man’s Most Dangerous Myth: The Fallacy of Race, a celebrated volume that argued race was a scientifically “artificial” and “meaningless” invention. In 1938 the American Psychological Association and the American Anthropological Association broke new ground in formally repudiating scientific racism. Other academic organizations followed, and ever since, scientists have steadfastly maintained that race and national distinction are, at best, a social phenomenon—at worst, a lie. It’s a shame, then, that we have to revisit the issue today. Historians of immigration know that today’s second-generation immigrants are learning English, becoming property owners and taxpayers, and forging stable communities and families at rates that actually exceed those of many of the earlier immigrants who arrived on America’s shores in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In short, we’ve been here before. And we’ve gained far more than we’ve lost from a liberal immigration policy. Even if there are differences between yesteryear’s and today’s new arrivals, those differences may very well cut in favor of the new immigrants. Whereas earlier immigrant groups like Italians, Greeks, and Slavs had terrifically high repatriation rates, the millions of undocumented immigrants currently living in the United States clearly have an expressed desire to stay here, raise their families on American soil, and weave themselves into the social fabric of the nation. They are, in short, more loyal compatriots than many of the “birds of passage” who exercised immigration as a temporary economic strategy in the early twentieth century. Perhaps, in the coming weeks, a coalition of Democrats and principled conservative Republicans like John McCain and Sam Brownback can revive hopes for a sane immigration bill. There’s a lot riding on the outcome of such negotiations.
May 1, 2006
About Immigration Posted by Ellen Feldman at 07:20 PM EST On the issue of immigration, America is in a bind. We need the energy, vision, and willingness to work of immigrants, but we fear their otherness. The situation is not new. In the nineteenth century, we permitted Chinese laborers to build the railroads but believed they were so alien they were not capable of citizenship in the growing country. As more immigrants came to stay, the fear of unknown cultures and people escalated. Between 1890 and the 1920s, the nation’s population almost doubled, and nearly a third of this growth was the result of immigration from southern and eastern Europe. The influx of these mysterious strangers led to a revival of the Ku Klux Klan, who turned their hatred on Catholics and Jews as well as African-Americans. By the 1920s, the Klan claimed five million members, but so many others shared their fears that in 1924 Congress practically cut off immigration. By the 1950s many of these earlier arrivals had assimilated so successfully that they were in a position to pull up the gangplank after them. Catholic Sen. Pat McCarran pushed through a restrictive immigration bill that his fellow Democrat, Sen. Estes Kefauver, warned was “motivated by bias, discrimination against certain racial stocks or religions and which violates our Democratic tradition.” The law also exposed the United States to ridicule, he said, because one section excluded professors from the class of aliens admissible regardless of quotas. McCarran feared Communists, but it is not farfetched to suggest that the intellectual elite has always scared Americans. There is, however, another aspect of the immigrant debate. We have all heard tales of those from other countries who came to these shores and went on to great success. Less is said of those who failed. In the early part of the
last century, life in America was so harsh for immigrants that, according to David Kennedy in Freedom From Fear, more than half the Greeks, Russian, Rumanians, and Bulgarians; almost half the Italians; and nearly a third of the Poles, Slovaks, and Croatians gave up and returned home. Life is no easier for current newcomers to the country. That
America is a land of immigrants is a truism. That we need to start paying attention to how we treat our newest arrivals is the real issue of the day.
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