The Mobilization of Immigrants in Urban America

Abstract

1 The Mobilization of Immigrants in Urban America* by John Higham Early in the twentieth century sociologists inaugurated the scholarly study of immigrant communities in urban America. A whole new world came into view, especially well disclosed in the masterpiece by William I. Thomas and Florian Znaniecki, The Polish Peasant in Europe and America.1 Historians, however, paid no heed. The discovery of the immigrant as a major theme in American history was made later, in the 1920s, and made by historians with no interest in urban sociology. It was made not in great cities like Chicago or New York but rather in midwestern state universities by young scholars still close to a small-town or rural background, who had gained their essential vision of American history from Frederick Jackson Turner. Between the two world wars the "Turnerverein" (as it was affectionately called) was so preeminent in our discipline that a Greek from Milwaukee , Theodore Saloutos, made his reputation as a student of American agriculture and shifted only in the 1950s to the history of his own forebears. The immigrants who fired the *This paper was originally presented at a conference at St. Olaf College, October 26-27, 1984, on "Scandinavians and Other Immigrants in Urban America." The present article is a revised version of the paper as it was published in the proceedings of that conference. 3 4 John Higham imagination of historians in the 1920s and 1930s were those whose odyssey could be understood as part of the westward movement - people who belonged to the earth like Antonia Shimerda in Willa Cather's Nebraska and Per Hansa struggling to endure the Dakota plains. The pioneers of American immigration history, above all Marcus Lee Hansen and Theodore Biegen, gave an international sweep to the Turnerian theme of the impact of the natural environment on the people it receives. This approach connected American history with European history; yet it left the familiar motifs of the American story undisturbed.2 A specifically urban approach to immigration history by which I mean a focus on processes of social interaction in a dense and complex milieu - awaited the discovery of urban sociology and anthropology by historians whose own roots were in the great cities. By the 1940s a new generation, for whom the Turnerian vision of the American past would no longer suffice, was emerging from the graduate schools. Among these "asphalt flowers" (to use the sobriquet some Turnerites applied to them) was Oscar Handlin. His doctoral dissertation, Boston's Immigrants , published in 1941, offered a model of how the insights and methods of sociology could be adapted to the materials of American history. Guided by a sociological understanding of ethnic communities, Handlin looked - as no historian had before - at how immigrants coped with the process of urbanization and how a major city changed under the stress of their coming.3 After this superb beginning, progress was curiously slow. In the next two decades only one comparable monograph attempted, as Handlins had, to embrace the multiethnic structure of an American city at a significant moment of transition; and this second effort was an implicit warning of the difficulty of the task, for it touched on too many disparate matters to make a strongly focused argument. The tremendous complexity of the modern American city discouraged comprehensive studies. An adequate successor to Boston's Immigrants materialized only in 1962, when Handlin's student, Moses Rischin, published The Promised City , but Immigrants in Urban America 5 limited his subject to the experience of a single ethnic group, the eastern European Jews.4 Several more of Handlin's early students studied immigrants in urban or industrial contexts, as did some of Merle Curti's.5 Gradually scholars overseas - activated by the spread of American Studies and the widening horizons of modern history - were attracted to the history of European emigration. Sources were close at hand, and the subject touched their own national histories in vital ways. Although foreign scholars have written mostly about the backgrounds and movement of emigrants, their contribution has been essential and is being continually enlarged.6 Leadership, however , remained in the United States, and in the late 1950s it visibly waned. Addressing this...