ETHNICITY

Traditionally, American immigration was discussed in terms of "Anglo-conformity," and "the melting pot," both processes that assumed the rapid assimilation of the immigrant into the prevalent American culture shaped by English colonial settlement. Implicit in this view was the subordination of the cultural norms, mores, and assumptions brought by other immigrant groups. Marcus Lee Hansen, an early historian of immigration, asked, did the original American settlers make "a bad blunder, when consciously or unconsciously they decreed that one literature, one attitude toward the arts, one set of standards should be the basis of culture?" This question set the agenda for the reexamination of immigration within the context of ethnicity.

What made American immigration extraordinary was and is its sheer scale. Although the primary source in the colonial and the early federal periods was the British Isles, even then, significant minorities came from the Netherlands and the Rhine valley. What historians have defined as the "push-pull factors" explained why immigrants left their homelands and what attracted them to America. The underlying constant was economic pressures at home, particularly affecting the landless, the underemployed, and the unemployed. When combined with rapid population growth, the impetus for departure became overwhelming. But other currents, such as the search for religious tolerance and escape from political oppression, also played a role.

It is noteworthy that some early immigrant groups such as the Mennonites and the Amish remained stubbornly attached to a religious identity that set them off from the mainstream. They also persisted in their use of German, known as Pennsylvania Dutch (from deutsch).But the predominantly British character of colonial immigration set the terms of future assimilation. The core American culture that took shape in the first two centuries was a blend of English, Scottish, and Welsh ethnicity. At its heart stood the English language, English common law, and Protestantism. As self-defined natives, the Anglo-Americans saw other newcomers as a danger to their revolutionary and republican identity, which they thought added a uniquely American dimension to their British inheritance. A central concern was whether a different religion or ethnicity would preclude assimilation. It cemented the nativist conviction that the successful absorption of newcomers required the obliteration of their ethnicity.

One intriguing aspect of ethnicity was the extent to which immigrants made religion a primary dimension of their identity. This took on major significance with the huge influx of Catholic Irish between 1846 and 1855. Driven by the "potato famine," close to a million and a half Irish poured into northeastern ports. Traditional Protestant assumptions about the reactionary nature of Catholicism were combined with ancient English prejudices against the Irish to make the newcomers seem irredeemably alien. The Irish response was to accentuate their group-consciousness. Their Catholicism provided a counter to nativist pressure. Nowhere was this more evident than in the development of a parochial school system to counteract the Protestant bias of the public schools. The process was reinforced by the arrival during the same period of over a million Germans, who did not accept the superiority of English over German. Wherever Germans and Irish settled, ethnic communities intent upon preserving their culture, traditions, and language appeared.

Pressure to restrict immigration was balanced by America's need for labor. Economic growth and immigration complemented each other. But as native workers saw it, the newcomers drove down wages and worsened labor conditions. The immigrants also stratified the working class along ethnic lines, as the newest arrivals tended disproportionately to gravitate toward the lowest kinds of employment. The experience repeated itself as subsequent arrivals propelled earlier arrivals upward economically. Continuing immigration had the further ironic effect of transforming previous arrivals into natives.

The sheer numbers who immigrated to America between 1840 and 1924 were staggering—some 37 million. Their overwhelmingly European origin was overshadowed by their diversity of language, religion, mores, customs, and culture. Even within Catholicism, the difference in religious practices among ethnic groups obliged the church hierarchy to organize national parishes. The dominant Irish clergy had to accommodate ethnic priorities. Efforts to make English the language of common church parlance led to threats of schism. When faced with the subordination of Polish to English, for example, a significant number of Poles defected to form the Polish National Catholic church. By the end of the nineteenth century, Catholic leaders were preoccupied with the task of creating out of the diversity of European Catholicism a distinctly American Catholicism. In a sense, a counterassimilation emerged to resist both the divisiveness inherited from Europe and the pull of the dominant Protestant ethos.

Departure from the old country did not end immigrants' interest in the affairs of their homelands. For many, the United States provided a base from which to mount efforts to overturn the old order at home. European authorities infiltrated immigrant organizations to keep tabs on potential revolutionary agitation. Britain had good reason to suspect that Irish-Americans were the main source of support for the Fenians in the nineteenth century and the Irish Republican Army (ira) in the twentieth. The Czechoslovak republic was in significant measure founded in the United States. Key Bolsheviks such as Leon Trotsky and Nikolay Bukharin were residing in New York when the Russian Revolution began in 1917. Cuban exiles found Miami a convenient base from which to mount opposition to their nemesis Fidel Castro. Perhaps no aspect of ongoing interest in the affairs of another country is more significant than the key role American Jews have played in support of Israel.

Cohesive ethnic communities provided the social, economic, and political environments within which new arrivals began the process of integrating into the larger American society. For first-generation immigrants, these ethnic villages provided a transitional environment in which familiar norms were sustained. An infrastructure of businesses designed to meet their everyday needs created an economic mobility that was independent of the host society. In many former ethnic urban enclaves businesses still survive that continue to cater to the descendants of those who called them home. Another powerful anchor for these settlements was the sprawling industrial factories that provided immigrants with employment. But the diversity of their origins proved a formidable obstacle to worker organization.

America's twentieth-century industrial labor force was drawn from central, eastern, and southern Europe. Between 1900 and 1910 almost 6 million immigrants arrived from Italy, Russia, and Austria-Hungary. Their brawn was complemented by skills necessary to the textile, garment, mining, construction, and other heavy industries. In the silk industry of Paterson, New Jersey, for example, a combination of English, French, and Italian labor was essential to growth. Coal mining witnessed a progression from Welsh, English, and Irish miners to Slavic. The booming New York garment industry owed much of its existence to the Jewish workers who fled the Russian Pale at the end of the nineteenth century. Their ranks were supplemented by Italian seamstresses and then those from the Caribbean. A massive rejuvenation of garment production took place in the late twentieth century as Chinese workers flooded into America. A significant number of immigrant workers were women whose earnings were essential to their family's survival.

Over time, as the sources of immigration shifted, the children and grandchildren of earlier arrivals gradually assimilated into the dominant culture, and the seemingly monolithic solidarity of ethnic communities eroded. The emphasis on endogamous relations deteriorated as marriage across ethnic lines became the norm. The vast majority of Americans were increasingly of mixed ethnicity. The preeminence of the English language confirmed Anglo conformity. A new idea, the "melting pot," emerged, which viewed Anglo dominance as a transitory stage to a new American identity fused from all races, religions, and nationalities. But less evident was the stubborn retention of the unique characteristics of the seemingly submerged ethnicities. A cultural pluralism steadily permeated the homogeneous values that "natives" insisted were essential to the American identity. As ethnics dispersed, hyphenated societies proliferated. As early as 1843 Jewish-Americans had organized B'nai B'rith to protect their interests. Irish Catholics, confronted on their arrival with the Protestant Irish Orange societies, responded with the Ancient Order of the Hibernians. Germans developed the Turnvereins, an athletic, social group derived from the Czech and Slovak Sokols. Italian-American doctors created the Morgagni Medical societies and family associations provided Chinese with social and financial aid. Ethnics had assimilated, but they retained networks that advanced their political and socioeconomic interests.

The nearly unlimited admission of immigrants that largely prevailed until World War I gave way to a deepening drive to limit their numbers when the war ended. Public doubts about whether the United States could assimilate "undesirable" immigrants climaxed in the Immigration Act of 1924, which established national quotas. The lifeblood of ethnic communities dwindled to a mere trickle. The act reduced the number of immigrants to be admitted annually to 164,677, divided by quota almost exclusively among European countries. Eighty-six percent of the total was allotted to northwestern Europe, closing the door to the "new immigrants." The Great Depression further inhibited immigration and World War II practically ended it. For entry-level jobs the United States turned to domestic sources such as Puerto Ricans and southern blacks. It introduced the question of race into assimilation. Foreshadowed was the impending influx of Asians, Africans, and Latin Americans. What had been a bias toward Europeans shifted in 1964 with the reallocation of quotas favoring third world countries.

Immigrants from Asia encountered a different reception than Europeans. The treatment of Chinese immigrants in the nineteenth century had culminated with the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. The resident Chinese-American population steadily declined afterward as only a handful were allowed entry. But those who were in America created the distinctive, secluded worlds of urban Chinatowns, where it was possible for Chinese-Americans to maintain a measure of autonomy. The unofficial exclusion of Japanese was officially confirmed in 1924 when they were denied a quota. The tenuous nature of their presence was grimly revealed when in 1942 they were consigned to detention camps during World War II. The segregation of blacks and the confinement of Native Americans to reservations effectively denied people of color the benefits of assimilation. But these policies came apart as the postwar overthrow of colonial empires obliged the United States to deal on a basis of equality with the citizens of the newly independent nations.

African-Americans had a long history of opposition to efforts that denied them assimilation. In the aftermath of World War II, a surging challenge to Jim Crow discrimination at all levels eroded the foundations of black separation. Employment, education, and public transportation and facilities were protected by federal and state laws guaranteeing racial equality; the black consciousness movement of the 1960s brought to the fore a militant leadership that proclaimed "black is beautiful." From the long-quiet reservations, Native Americans insisted that they receive recognition for their distinctive cultures. Japanese-Americans demanded apologies and compensation for their oppression during World War II. In short, the message was that assimilation had to be color-blind. What had once been a European civilization was becoming a world civilization.

The entry of Africans, Asians, and Latin Americans after 1965 added over 5 million legal immigrants to the population. More than a million Cubans and Vietnamese were admitted under special political refugee provisions. Calculations of the number of illegal immigrants have run between 3 and 10 million drawn primarily by the prospect of economic opportunity. The composition of the American population has been steadily altered as Americans born in Europe dwindled in number. Concern for the dominance of the English language and the cultural impact of immigrants reemerged as resident Americans wondered how these changes would affect them. How best to prepare immigrant children to use the new language had traditionally been the sink-or-swim approach. In the 1960s, a call for bilingual education to ease the transition to English resulted in extensive programs using the immigrants' languages as a bridge. But the process gave rise to the question of whether bilingualism was a temporary or a permanent situation. Many ethnics, particularly Spanish speakers, insisted that their language share equality with English. The appearance of multilingual signs, ballots, applications, and formal notices created a conviction among natives that English be declared the official language, as if that were the test of how fully immigrants embraced their new nationality.

The complex historical origins of the newcomers are evident in their ethnic enclaves. What is also clear is that the American identity is still in the making and that the process is far from over. And non-Americans comment with awe at the remarkable ability of the United States to fuse from diversity a consensus that is an ever-changing mosaic.

Thomas J. Archdeacon, Becoming American: An Ethnic History (1983); Stephan Thernstrom, Ann Orlov, and Oscar Handlin, eds., Harvard Encyclopedia of American Ethnic Groups (1980).

See also Immigration; Nativism.