by Oscar Handlin (At Atlantic Monthly Press Book, Little, Brown and Co., 1952)
Sheltering in place during the novel coronavirus pandemic, with the public libraries closed (except for e-books. . . more on those later), I have begun reading my mother’s books, unread on my shelves since 1984. This is one of those. It focuses on the immigrants who came to America during the 19th century from the villages of Europe. It received the 1952 Pulitzer Prize in history, so it was a good place to start.
Chapter I, “Peasant Origins”: In this first chapter, Handlin describes the peasant societies of Europe, how they had existed for hundreds of years with few changes and then how they fell apart under the pressures of population growth and changes in land ownership, with the result that many peasants were forced to leave their villages and strike out for new places.
Chapter II, “The Crossing”: Handlin breaks down the immigrants’ voyage into five stages:
- over land in Europe,
- in the European seaports, waiting for a ship,
- on the ship,
- in the American seaports where they first came ashore, and finally,
- wherever they ended up in America (if not the above-mentioned seaport)
It was a brutal trip.
Chapter III, “Daily Bread”: How these immigrants earned their living once in America. Most of them came with the expectation that they would farm, as they had traditionally in their villages, but this was true only of a “lucky” few; most never managed to escape the cities they first arrived, or if they managed that, they ended up in some inland urban area instead. As unskilled laborers, they worked in factories, they built roads and bridges and buildings, they manufactured clothing and furniture, they did piecework, they labored in the mines. In this process, they created unions to try to improve the terrible conditions in which they worked. There was no safety net; their lives were very difficult.
Chapter IV, “New Worlds, New Visions”: In this chapter, Handlin discusses the contrast for these immigrants between their Old World and New World lives. In their villages, they respected Nature, the spirit world, and magic, and their (mostly) Christian faith was superimposed on the traditional pagan religions of the distant past. In America, they found isolation, loneliness, helplessness, and resignation. Having lost those pagan remnants, they became more dependent on Christianity, and in their uprootedness were sometimes drawn to new sects, while their suffering bred a resistance to change of any kind.
Chapter V, “Religion as a Way of Life”: Here Handlin expands the ideas about religion he touched on in the previous chapter. He distinguishes between peasants, who were mostly Catholic (obviously, with the exception of the English), and the dissenters, who were not of peasant stock and who tended to be either Protestants (more urban) or Jews. The peasants saw their church as a way of life to be re-established in America, but they discovered that American Catholic churches were unlike the village churches that they knew. Those churches, which had been established by earlier French settlers, were different from the Irish, Italian, Eastern European Catholic parishes that the immigrants would establish later. In the meantime, the peasants split into many different sects. Jews too created the Orthodox, Conservative, and Reformed movements. Handlin says that each new wave of immigrants sought a more conservative worship than it found when it arrived. As a result, religion in the United States never achieved the all-encompassing power/oneness of the Old World church.
Chapter VI, “The Ghettos”: Again, Handlin contrasts the peasant home in the Old World–the place you welcomed friends, celebrated festivals, taught your children, and united your family–with the squalid tenements of the American cities into which the new immigrants crammed themselves. They smelled bad, they were filthy, they were “soul-killing”, and they forced the disintegration of the old ways of life.
Chapter VII, “Fellow Feeling”: This chapter examines the Americanization of the new immigrants: how they formed neighborhood associations and mutual aid/benefit societies, how they built wedding halls, hospitals, orphanages, and homes for the aged (their tenement homes being inadequate for these purposes). They established newspapers, schools, and theaters based on their language, ethnicity or religion of origin. Later, insurance companies took over the role that the mutual aid societies had played, and the public schools educated most of their children (it turned out to be prohibitively expensive to establish a whole school system for an ethnic group). Ethnic separateness was thereby increased. In the strange world of lonely men, the immigrants had reached out to each other, eager in the desire to have brothers with whom they could dwell. (This is not the first place where Handlin completely ignores women. In his telling, the immigrants were all male. The women and children they brought with them hardly rate a paragraph.)
Chapter VIII, “Democracy and Power”: This chapter claims that the peasants arrived in the U.S. without any experience with or expectation of political power (In the business of ruling [the peasant] did not act, was only acted upon.). American political bosses and machines rarely took immigrant concerns into consideration, and these first waves of immigrants were slow to realize the potential of political activism to address their problems.
Chapter IX, “Generations”: This is the only chapter where Handlin wakes up and realizes, surprise! some of the immigrants were women! He describes the breakdown of the traditional family structure and the pressures that immigration and its associated hardships brought to bear on a marriage. He notes that immigrant men lost power and respect as heads of households while women became more dominant in the immigrant home. Further, he describes how the children who were brought here very young or born after their parents arrived refused to obey their parents and struck out on their own, especially into sports, politics, and (?) racketeering. (Really?) The immigrant (father) was essentially powerless to hold his family together in the old way.
Chapter X, “The Shock of Alienation”: Handlin explains that the immigrants were so changed by their experiences that they would never be able to return: These people, once separated, would never belong again. Not only would they never really belong to their old way of life; they would never really belong to the New World, either–partly because they didn’t want to assimilate so totally, and partly because even had they wished it, it would have been impossible. America was open to immigration in the 19th century. Immigrants were quickly seen as “Americans” and could become citizens after only a short residence. The country was expanding rapidly, and American needed the immigrants to populate (and exploit) the new territories, as well as to build their infrastructure and work in their mines and factories. The children of the immigrants, less pliant/compliant, competed for the same jobs the “native”/”indigenous” Americans wanted (Handlin uses these words to designate the earlier settlers who had lived in American for several generations already–not as we use them now), were an unstable element in American society. However, these immigrants, who often spoke English poorly, were uneducated, and who retained a foreignness about them, were sometimes blamed for societal ills they had nothing to do with–a precursor of that was to come in the next century. The end of the 19th century saw the beginnings of the anti-immigrant movement and, although he doesn’t call it that, the white supremacists. Southerners pushed the idea of racial superiority over the former slaves, while Westerners did the same with the Chinese. Early sociologists blamed the immigrants for all of society’s ills: drunkenness, poverty, crime, and disease. Not surprisingly,the immigrants felt frustrated and disrespected. Some reacted with prejudice against newer immigrant groups or against former slaves. Americans had expected a melding of immigrants into the new Americans, but this kind of total assimilation turned out to be harder to achieve than they once had believed.
Chapter XI, “Restriction”: This final chapter brings to an end the great waves of 19th century immigrants, as the early 20th century saw the enactment of laws restricting immigration from all sources.
Chapter XII, “Promises”: Just a few pages which wrap up the book, more like an epilogue than a chapter. Handlin looks at the absence of understanding between the 19th century immigrant (male, of course) and his son, who can never truly understand what his parent went through, just as the parent can never truly understand the experiences of his children in America. The son frames the immigrant experience as a liberation. Handlin says that the immigrants did not welcome this liberation, which took the form of separation from all that they knew, and subsequently from all that they came to. They were truly an uprooted generation.
Handlin’s language is more formal and elaborate than I am used to. I would have expected that a book like this would abound with specific instances where people’s actual experiences would illustrate the author’s points. Instead, Handlin tends to make sweeping pronouncements, as if every immigrant’s experience was the same as every other’s. The few quotations he includes (in the acknowledgments, he says they “are not quoted verbatim”) are not identified by who wrote them. There are no notes, and no citations. Individuals are rarely named; instead, we get sentences like A famous geologist who spoke often on public questions, a respected social scientist, and a widely read popularizer of history and philosophy were among those by now convinced that a radical departure [from the previous immigration policy] was essential to protect the nation. Would Handlin’s readers have known who he was talking about? I certainly didn’t. He never names a single immigrant, in a book all about immigrants. I found this troubling; I often asked myself why I should believe his pronouncements, especially as they pertained to how immigrants felt and what they thought! Nevertheless, I found some things in the book which reflected my grandfather’s experience and that of the 20th century Greek immigrants I know. So I would not say I didn’t like the book. It just didn’t fit my expectation of how a book like this should be presented–more along the lines of a Ken Burns film. Burns’ use of individuals’ letters and diaries, which never fails to identify the writer, brings history alive in a way that Oscar Handlin’s generalizations can never do.
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