Liberty, Coercion, and the Making of Immigration Historians

Abstract

As a historian of migration, women, and labor, I react to Gary Gerstle's Liberty, Coercion, and the Making of on two levels. I begin by respecting the advice book review editors usually give reviewers: Accepting Gerstle's scholarly agenda on its own terms, I assess as a specialist its effectiveness and interest for the intended readers, that is, American historians. I then offer the kind of review that more often elicits angry letters from disgruntled authors, who rightfully complain but you wanted me to write a different book. I do wish Gerstle had written a somewhat different article. But my critique of his choices remains firmly linked to his article by two of his most powerful insights-namely, the tension between liberty and coercion, and the power of the nation-state in the making of American historians, not just in the making of Americans from the immigrants we study. Liberty, Coercion, and the Making of begins with the founding mythmaker of what has been called the of American history, J. Hector St. John de Crevecoeur. The immigrant paradigm asserts that American democracy, by defining American nationality, enables outsiders to become fullfledged Americans. Gerstle tests the Crevecoeurian myth against studies by twentieth-century sociologists and historians, most of whom analyzed the lives of southern and eastern Europeans arriving in the United States around the turn of the century. He concludes that recent research has revised the myth in three respects. It has established that as many as half of European immigrants did not intend to become American or even to remain in the country; that southern and eastern Europeans encountered significant obstacles to becoming American, so that their transformation occurred over several generations, not quickly or easily; and that coercion and new forms of oppression -notably, subordination through wage earning in modern industry-were as much a part of Americanization as was emancipation from Old World restraints. I also read Gerstle to say that recent work confirms or even enriches the founding myth in one respect. Americanization arguably failed to melt European immigrants into a single homogeneous or national culture, unvarying across space and time. And when cultural homogeneity -for example, patriotic Americanism resulted, this was as much a response to constraint as a free choice. Still, Europeans