American Cultural History, Topic 7: The New Immigration and Emma Lazarus s The New Colossus (1883)

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1 Background: America is a nation of immigrants, and, between 1880 and 1924, new immigrants came in record numbers from southern and eastern Europe to the shores of the United States. Push factors such as famine, disease, poverty, war, and oppression drove the migrants away from their homelands in Europe, and pull factors such as opportunities for prosperity, security, and freedom of religion and expression attracted them to the promise of America. Though immigrants from northern and western Europe including England, Ireland, Germany, and Scandinavia had been coming to North America since the 1600s, and though they remained the great majority of immigrants to the United States until after the Civil War, by the late 1870s, the new immigrants were part of a great transatlantic migration that would have a significant effect on American culture. Between 1871 and 1914, almost 37 million people emigrated from Europe to Argentina, Brazil, Canada, or the United States, and the United States received 67 percent of them. Three million came in the 1870s, five million came in the 1880s, 3.5 million came in the depression decade of the 1890s, 8.8 million came between 1901 and 1910, and almost six million came between 1911 and 1920, a plateau that immigration to the United States would not reach again until the 1980s (when seven million would come) and 1990s (when nine million would come). Though the old immigrants from northern and western Europe kept coming, between 1890 and 1914, their numbers were dwarfed by those of immigrants from present-day Italy, Portugal, Spain, Poland, Russia, Hungary, Serbia, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Croatia, Romania, and Greece. In fact, between 1900 and 1910, these new immigrants made up 70 percent of all migrants to the United States, and they settled in ethnic enclaves in America s booming capitalist-industrial cities, where immigrants constituted 41 percent of all newcomers and 30 percent of all residents. Between 1900 and 1920, 22 percent of immigrants to America were Italian, 22 percent were Austro-Hungarian, 18 percent were from Russia and the Baltic states, 22 percent were from northwestern European countries, 6 percent were from Canada, 4 percent were from Asia, and 6 percent were from other homelands. The ethnicities, cultures, languages, and religions of the new immigrants were outside the bounds of mainstream American culture at the time, and they faced widespread nativism intense opposition to foreigners on the grounds that they are not compatible with the dominant culture of a place which was fueled by anti-catholicism, anti- Semitism, anti-radicalism, and Anglo-Saxon nationalism, which bred racism. Nativism on slightly different grounds severely limited Chinese and Japanese immigration, which dwindled between 1882 and 1952 as a result of exclusion acts (for the Chinese, beginning in 1882 and renewed thereafter), a gentlemen s agreement between the U. S. and Japan (for the Japanese, in 1907), and the Johnson-Reed Act of 1924, which effectively eliminated all Asian immigration to America. Though many immigrants to the United States found a better life and stayed to put down American roots, nativism, unfulfilled expectations, or improved conditions in their homelands led one-third of the migrants to return to their native countries. The two-thirds who stayed found opportunity in the midst of challenge. Though some scholars, such as Oscar Handlin in The Uprooted (1951), have argued that most of the new immigrants were communal peasants who had been lured to America by the promise of

2 wealth and then prospered by its individualistic, modern, and capitalist-industrial economy, others, such as John Bodnar in The Transplanted (1985), have asserted that the southeastern European migrants who achieved a comfortable life in America were those who had been exposed to the reaches and methods of capitalist-industrial society in Europe and merely continued doing what they knew in a productive family-household in the United States. These latter scholars claim that new immigrants managed to create a middle-class existence for themselves in America because they had been middle class in their homeland, too, and simply perpetuated familiar business practices to achieve new successes in a new land. Whether they were uprooted or transplanted, the immigrants who came and stayed benefited from America s economic supremacy at the turn of the twentieth century. They planted themselves in rich, fertile soil and more than that usually enjoyed constitutionally protected rights that were unheard of in many of their homelands. Between 1892 and 1947, over twenty million of the immigrants sailed past the Statue of Liberty and entered the United States through a reception center at Ellis Island, one mile south of Manhattan, New York. Only two percent were turned away. Once on American soil, immigrants tended to live and work in ethnic groups. Immigrant enclaves emerged rapidly in the farming communities of the Pacific and upper Midwest, the sprawling cities of the Northeast, and the borderlands of the Southwest. A Little Italy or Little Hungary grew in most major American cities (except for in the Southeast, which experienced little immigration, other than to Florida and New Orleans) and served as a transitional community for the migrants: one in which a new brand of ethnic Americanism an identity that celebrated traditions from both the Old World and the New could be developed. Living in these ethnic enclaves also allowed immigrants from the same homeland to help each other find work, establish mutual aid societies, adjust to new domestic realities, and maintain religious practices by worshipping together. They provided havens in which familiar words, dress, recreation, food, and other customs fostered a sense of belonging due to shared community identity and helped to mitigate the challenges of crowded, often unsanitary, living conditions, grueling jobs in sweatshops and factories, or hostile, xenophobic receptions from Americans whose parents or grandparents had immigrated less recently. Despite immigrants efforts to become loyal ethnic Americans, by 1920, many progressives urban reformers who believed that social problems could be solved through political and civic means agreed that the new immigrants could not assimilate into American culture and lobbied for immigration restrictions. They listened to nativist eugenicists like Madison Grant, who, in The Passing of the Great Race (1916), had warned that racial mongrelization was polluting the nation s Anglo-Saxon and other Nordic racial stock. To Grant s disciples, such as members of the Dillingham Commission that reported its findings to the federal government, it did not matter that the majority of the immigrants from southwestern Europe were deeply committed Christians (Roman Catholics). They could never become American and enjoy life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness as they were intended to be enjoyed because their appearances and cultures were from a Protestant, Anglo-Saxon, nationalist perspective too foreign. Slavic and Latin peoples were inferior, the commission argued, and should not be

3 allowed to dilute the superior races in America. Other progressives rejected racial arguments citing that Americans were supposed to believe that all men are created equal but favored limitation, nonetheless, due to concerns over urban overcrowding, unemployment, overburdened social services, and violence and unrest. As a result, in 1921, the federal government passed the temporary Emergency Quota Act, which imposed on European immigration sharp, absolute numerical limits and a nationality quota system: both firsts in American history. In 1924, the limitations were strengthened and made more permanent with the passing of the Johnson-Reed Act, which limited immigration from countries outside the Western Hemisphere to 165,000 per year and directed that this number was to come from up to 2 percent of the amount of each nationality in America at the time of the 1890 census: the census before the great wave of southeastern European immigration. As such, the Italian quota fell to only 4,000, the Polish quota fell to only 6,000, and the Greek quota fell to only 100 per year. The act also reaffirmed the exclusion of Chinese immigrants and added Japanese and other Asians to the list of undesirables, which effectively barred the door to all Asian immigration to the United States. In 1929, the federal government changed the restrictions slightly, deciding that spots for 150,000 immigrants would be filled in ratio to the distribution of the national origins of the white population of the United States in No quotas were given for countries in the Western Hemisphere, which would lead to Catholic Latin Americans (especially Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, and Cubans) becoming the fastest growing ethnic minorities in the nation. Nevertheless, the progressives had tilted the balance back in favor of the old immigrants from Anglo-Saxon and other Nordic stock, who received 85 percent of the new allowance. President Calvin Coolidge said that the changes were necessary because America is for Americans, but others, both then and now, have wondered how such a definition of Americanness fits with the American creed of liberty and justice for all or with the inscription on the Statue of Liberty that welcomes the huddled masses yearning to breathe free. Though later immigration acts such as the repeal of the Chinese Exclusion Act (1943), the McCarran-Walter Act (1952), the Hart-Celler Act (1965), the Immigration and Nationality Act Amendments (1978), the Immigration Reform and Control Act (1986), and the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act (1996) have opened immigration and citizenship to Asians, abolished the national-origins system, combined ceilings for both the Western and Eastern Hemispheres into a worldwide allowance based on uniform, per-country limits, and attempted to control the growing problem of illegal aliens, the question What makes an American? continues to be debated, and the great-grandchildren of Italian, Austro- Hungarian, and Russian immigrants from the early twentieth century have a lot to say about it. Some of them even question the Americanness of newer immigrants from Mexico and the Middle East and raise the same types of objections to race, ethnicity, language, culture, politics, and religion that were hurled at their great-grandparents. In an immigrant nation, such conundrums are difficult to avoid.

4 Questions to Consider as You Read: How does Lazarus characterize immigrants to the United States? How does Lazarus contrast America with Europe? What claims about the identity, ideals, and promises of America does Lazarus make with the phrases Mother of Exiles, beacon-hand, world-wide welcome, give me, send these, I lift my lamp, and golden door? Research: Emma Lazarus, The New Colossus (written to raise funds for the Statue of Liberty s pedestal in 1883, read at its dedication in 1886, and mounted inside the monument in 1903) As you read, don t forget to mark and annotate main ideas, key terms, confusing concepts, unknown vocabulary, cause/effect relationships, examples, etc. Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame, With conquering limbs astride from land to land; Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame. "Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!" 1 1 SOURCE: Lazarus, Emma. The New Colossus (1883). en.wikisource.org. Accessed 23 August 2011.

5 Notebook Questions: Reason and Record How does Lazarus characterize immigrants to the United States? How does Lazarus contrast America with Europe? What claims about the identity, ideals, and promises of America does Lazarus make with the phrases Mother of Exiles, beacon-hand, world-wide welcome, give me, send these, I lift my lamp, and golden door? Notebook Questions: Relate and Record How does the document relate to FACE Principle #7: The Christian Principle of American Political Union: Internal agreement or unity, which is invisible, produces an external union, which is visible in the spheres of government, economics, and home and community life. Before two or more individuals can act effectively together, they must first be united in spirit in their purposes and convictions? How does the document relate to Leviticus 19:33-34 and 2 Nephi 1:5-7?

6 Record Activity: Multiple Choice Comprehension Check 1. Background: All of the following are true about immigration between 1880 and 1924 except which one? a. Push factors such as famine, disease, poverty, war, and oppression drove the migrants away from their homelands in Europe, and pull factors such as opportunities for prosperity, security, and freedom of religion and expression attracted them to the promise of America. b. Between 1871 and 1914, almost 37 million people emigrated from Europe to Argentina, Brazil, Canada, or the United States, and the United States received 67 percent of them. c. More immigrants came to the United States between 1901 and 1910 than during any other decade between 1870 and d. Though the old immigrants from northern and western Europe kept coming, between 1890 and 1914, their numbers were dwarfed by those of new immigrants from southern and eastern Europe in present-day Italy, Portugal, Spain, Poland, Russia, Hungary, Serbia, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Croatia, Romania, and Greece. e. The ethnicities, cultures, languages, and religions of the new immigrants were outside the bounds of mainstream American culture at the time, and they faced widespread nativism intense opposition to foreigners on the grounds that they are not compatible with the dominant culture of a place which was fueled by anti-catholicism, anti-semitism, anti-radicalism, and Anglo-Saxon nationalism, which bred racism. f. Though many immigrants to the United States found a better life and stayed to put down American roots, nativism, unfulfilled expectations, or improved conditions in their homelands led one-third of the migrants to return to their native countries. g. Though many Americans felt that southeastern European immigrants were too foreign to assimilate into American culture, they welcomed with open arms the hardworking Chinese, especially after they played a large part in completing the transcontinental railroad. 2. Background: All of the following are true about progressive reformers of the first three decades of the twentieth century except which one? a. Despite immigrants efforts to become loyal ethnic Americans, by 1920, many progressives urban reformers who believed that social problems could be solved through political and civic means agreed that the new immigrants could not assimilate into American culture and lobbied for immigration restrictions.

7 b. They listened to nativist eugenicists like Madison Grant, who, in The Passing of the Great Race (1916), had warned that racial mongrelization was polluting the nation s Anglo-Saxon and other Nordic racial stock. c. To Grant s disciples, such as members of the Dillingham Commission that reported its findings to the federal government, it did not matter that the majority of the immigrants from southwestern Europe were deeply committed Christians (Roman Catholics). d. Progressives believed that the new immigrants could never become American and enjoy life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness as they were intended to be enjoyed because their appearances and cultures were from a Protestant, Anglo- Saxon, nationalist perspective too foreign. Slavic and Latin peoples were inferior, they argued, and should not be allowed to dilute the superior races in America. e. Other progressives rejected racial arguments citing that Americans were supposed to believe that all men are created equal but favored limitation, nonetheless, due to concerns over urban overcrowding, unemployment, overburdened social services, and violence and unrest. f. The progressives efforts resulted in the Emergency Quota Act of 1921 and the Johnson-Reed Act of 1924, which limited immigration as a whole and drastically restricted undesirable immigration from un-americanizable southern and eastern Europe and Asia. g. Their efforts tilted the balance back in favor of the old immigrants from Anglo- Saxon and other Nordic stock, who received 85 percent of the new immigration allowance. h. The progressives efforts defined what it means to be an American once and for all, and subsequent generations of Americans have confidently understood that true Americans can be only white Anglo-Saxon Protestants whose families have lived in North America since English settlers immigrated to Jamestown (1607) or Plymouth (1620). 3. Source: Judging by The New Colossus (1883), all of the following about Emma Lazarus are false except which one? a. She would have been in favor of the Johnson-Reed Act of b. She subscribed to the eugenicist philosophies of Madison Grant. c. She was a nativist of the highest order. d. She was a progressive who believed that immigration to the United States was a social problem that America was unprepared to handle. e. She did not believe that new immigrants could become Americans. f. She believed that America, as a beacon to the world and mother of exiles, welcomed the tired, poor, and huddled masses from Europe who yearned to

8 breathe free and longed for the opportunities that lay behind America s golden door. g. She did not believe that both push and pull factors encouraged immigration to America.