Dillingham Commission Research Articles

Blinded by the facts: Unintended consequences of racial knowledge production in the Dillingham commission (1907–1911)

Blinded by the facts: Unintended consequences of racial knowledge production in the Dillingham commission (1907–1911)

Robber Barons and Wretched Refuse: Ethnic and Class Dynamics during the Era of American Industrialization

Robber Barons and Wretched Refuse: Ethnic and Class Dynamics during the Era of American Industrialization

Making a Modern U.S. West: The Contested Terrain of a Region and Its Borders, 1893–1940 by Sarah Deutsch

Reviewed by: Making a Modern U.S. West: The Contested Terrain of a Region and Its Borders, 1893–1940 by Sarah Deutsch William G. Robbins MAKING A MODERN U.S. WEST: THE CONTESTED TERRAIN OF A REGION AND ITS BORDERS, 1893–1940 by Sarah Deutsch University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln, 2022. Bibliography, index, notes. 656 pages. $50.00 cloth. Making a Modern U.S. West, a volume in the University of Nebraska Press History of the American West Series, covers the period from the 1890s to the eve of World War II. The first of the four chronological sections covers the federal government’s organization of its new continental and overseas empire and the lives of people in its territories. The second section treats trans-border movements involving corporate money, organized labor, women’s suffrage, and government and capital suppression during World War I. Part three focuses on speculative investment in natural resources and tourism in the 1920s, and the fourth part involves the deportation of Mexican laborers, New Deal efforts to organize union workers, and John Collier and the Indian Reorganization Act. To slow speculative activity in public lands, Congress passed the Federal Reserve Act in 1891, permitting the president to withdraw federal forests from the public domain. The problem, Sarah Deutsch writes, was that forests were “under the purview of the Department of Agriculture, which had no foresters. The Department of the Interior had foresters but no reserves” (p. 41). In fact, the opposite was true, the forest reserves were under the Interior Department and foresters were in the Department of Agriculture. President Theodore Roosevelt transferred the forests to the Department of Agriculture in 1905 under Chief Forester Gifford Pinchot and the Forest Service. Deutsch misidentifies the Homestead Act (1862) with the Enlarged Homestead Act of 1909, the legislation designed to settle the arid West. The act doubled land grants to 320 acres, attracting an inrush of homesteaders to arid regions. A period of extended drought “forced three-quarters of those who had arrived since 1916 to leave” (p. 133). The great American dilemma, race, functioned differently depending on location. Deutsch identifies conflicting and inconsistent accounts in federal commissions involving the classification of Mexicans. An Industrial Commission report in 1901 grouped Mexicans and Indians as “foreign whites,” while most of its commentary focused on Chinese and Japanese immigrants who dominated the news. When commissioners learned that Mexicans composed one-third of maintenance workers on Southwest railroads, they devoted one paragraph in the 800-page report to “Mexican peon labor.” The Dillingham Commission in 1911 complained about the lack of data on Mexicans in the United States but still devoted a few pages to Mexicans as an unprogressive race but intelligent enough for common jobs. Deusch devotes considerable attention to cross-border revolutions, giving greater attention to the Southwest than insurgencies north of the forty-ninth parallel. She offers an important reality about the southern border: “The Mexican Revolution laid bare that the history of the Mexican North and the U.S. Southwest were inseparable” (p. 132). Radical democratic movements existed across both southern and northern borders. Women’s movements followed similar trajectories, Montana electing the first woman to Congress in 1916, Canadians electing the first woman to sit in a legislature in the British Empire, and two Mexican states sponsoring Mexico’s first women’s congresses. The federal government joined with western corporations in suppressing the Industrial Workers of America and the Non-Partisan League when the United States entered World War I. To tell the story of the Northwest lumber industry, the government’s organization of the Loyal [End Page 404] Legion of Loggers and Lumbermen, and the suppression of unions, the author relies on Harold Hyman’s nearly sixty-year-old book, Soldiers and Spruce (1963). Making a Modern U.S. West explains the conflicted state and federal efforts to marginalize Indians’ and other minorities’ rights to land ownership. Deutsch cites John Collier’s importance as a forceful proponent of fighting for the integrity of Pueblo lands. During the 1920s, fears about Japanese land ownership among White landowners along the West Coast prompted California to worry that the state was becoming a Japanese colony. Legislatures in...

Letters to the Editor

Letters to the Editor

Theorizing with Archives: Contingency, Mistakes, and Plausible Alternatives

What are “good” kinds of archival evidence for theorizing? Surprisingly, the word archive and discussions of the archival process rarely appear in methods textbooks or discussions of methods in historical sociology. Yet, much recent historicized sociology relies upon documents left over by a small group of actors to make large-scale claims. To address this oversight, we leverage the evidentiary strengths of qualitative sociology and translate them for historical sociology. Our central argument is that three kinds of archival evidence are likely to produce generalizable claims: positive contingency, learning by mistakes, and plausible alternatives. Examples are illustrated with the cases of jail overcrowding in Los Angeles County, anti-redlining policy in the Federal Reserve, and immigration policy in the Dillingham commission.

Performing the Progressive Era: Immigration, Urban Life, and Nationalism on Stage

Performing the Progressive Era: Immigration, Urban Life, and Nationalism on Stage

Review: Inventing the Immigration Problem: The Dillingham Commission and Its Legacy, by Katherine Benton-Cohen

Review: Inventing the Immigration Problem: The Dillingham Commission and Its Legacy, by Katherine Benton-Cohen

Inventing the Immigration Problem: The Dillingham Commission and its Legacy by Katherine Benton-Cohen

Reviewed by: Inventing the Immigration Problem: The Dillingham Commission and its Legacy by Katherine Benton-Cohen Jeanne Petit Inventing the Immigration Problem: The Dillingham Commission and its Legacy. By Katherine Benton-Cohen. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2018. Pp. 342. Photographs, notes, index.) Katherine Benton-Cohen seeks to understand the meaning and legacy of the Dillingham Commission, the three-year congressional study of immigration that began in 1907 and issued its report and recommendations in 1911. She faced a significant challenge in writing this book. The main source is a massive, multivolume government report with thousands of pages of statistics and graphs, but there is little documentation of how the report was created because the papers of the Dillingham Commission were not preserved. Benton-Cohen finds a solution to this dilemma by concentrating on an array of men and women—social scientists, reformers, religious leaders, politicians, and others—who sought to shape the report’s findings and recommendations. In the process, she argues, those who participated in the Dillingham Commission competed to create a framework for understanding migration to the United States, ultimately creating a powerful and consequential vision of the “immigration problem.” While many historians recognize the significance of the Dillingham Commission in justifying immigration restriction, Benton-Cohen examines how participants used complex and competing political, economic, and ideological arguments to shape the report. One interesting insight here is how, perhaps not surprisingly, the work of the commission created unexpected political bedfellows. For instance, while many Jewish lobbyists advocated for Judaism to be labeled a religion, Zionists agreed with the restrictionist Senator Henry Cabot Lodge that Jews should be classified as a distinct “Hebrew race.” Moreover, Jewish philanthropist Jacob Schiff advocated for the redistribution of Jewish immigrants to Texas to counter criticism about their concentration in the New York area. This idea was likewise promoted by Mississippi Senator LaRoy Percy, who wanted to address what he called “the Negro problem” by replacing [End Page 483] low-wage African American agricultural workers in Mississippi with Italian immigrants. A central theme throughout the book is that those with different views on immigration shared a belief in the expanded use of federal power to achieve their goals. Many commissioners used their authority to pry into the personal lives of individuals, particularly vulnerable people. Jett Lauke, a “practical economist” (108) who led an expansive investigation of industrial conditions for the commission, coerced workers in steel towns to answer personal questions about employment history, savings, and even grocery bills. He used the report to argue that the federal government should exclude immigrants to protect what he called “the vanishing American wage earner.” Anthropologist Franz Boas made the opposite argument, that immigrants should not be excluded because they assimilated into what he called “the American type.” To make this case, he, too, used federal authority to get schools to allow him to measure the skulls and other physical features of children. The author includes an entire chapter on each of Lauke’s and Boas’s concepts of American types. Another contribution this book makes is to demonstrate how the Dillingham Commission offered opportunities for those on the periphery of power to shape perceptions of migration. These figures include Yamato Ichihashi, a Japanese immigrant who offered sympathetic portraits of Japanese farmers in California. They also include social worker Anna Herkner, who went undercover on shipping vessels to examine the conditions immigrant women faced. She successfully advocated for a federal law limiting immigrants in steerage. At the same time, Benton-Cohen shows that powerful figures like Henry Cabot Lodge had the ability to shape the final recommendations, which portrayed immigration as a problem to be solved through restriction. Through a focus on historical actors, the author demonstrates the multiple ways Progressive-Era Americans created the “immigration problem” and reimagined the ways federal policy could deal with it. As Benton-Cohen points out, the Dillingham Commission’s legacy shapes the way we understand immigration policy to this day. Jeanne Petit Hope College Copyright © 2020 The Texas State Historical Association

The Stature of Volunteers to the Polish Army in France: An Anthropometric Inquiry

Abstract This article analyzes the stature of volunteers to the Polish Army in France examined in Recruitment Center no. 2 in Chicago in 1917 and 1918. The authors divided the sample according to place and time of birth and compared the statures of volunteers with heights of Polish draftees measured by conscription authorities in Poland. The investigation arrives at two main conclusions. Firstly, Poles born in the US were considerably taller than both volunteers born in Poland and draftees living in the native country. Secondly, the comparison of immigrants and those who remained in Poland shows that people who migrated were taller than those who remained, although the difference diminished over time. Since human stature is positively correlated with length of life and work capacity, we can conclude quoting the opinion of the Dillingham Commission: Although drawn from classes low in the economic scale, the new immigrants as a rule are the strongest, the most enterprising, and the best of their class.

Review: Inventing the Immigration Problem: The Dillingham Commission and Its Legacy by Katherine Benton-Cohen

Review: Inventing the Immigration Problem: The Dillingham Commission and Its Legacy by Katherine Benton-Cohen

Inventing the Immigration Problem: The Dillingham Commission and Its Legacy

Inventing the Immigration Problem: The Dillingham Commission and Its Legacy

Inventing the Immigration Problem: The Dillingham Commission and Its Legacy. By Katherine Benton-Cohen

Inventing the Immigration Problem: The Dillingham Commission and Its Legacy. By Katherine Benton-Cohen

Inventing the Immigration Problem: The Dillingham Commission and Its Legacy

Government commissions are usually not sexy topics, but Katherine Benton-Cohen's vividly written book about the Dillingham Commission brings to life the characters central to this pivotal report and reveals their lasting legacy on U.S. immigration policy. The massive forty-one volume report was published in 1911 after four years of investigation, and although no politician probably ever read it in its entirety, its recommendations were almost universally adopted in the next decade. The evidence in the report showed that immigration was neither a drain on the economy nor a social “problem,” but the recommendations pushed for dramatic restrictions on immigration that would employ a literacy test, a quota system based on nationality, and the continued exclusion of Asians. Digging beneath the recommendations, Benton-Cohen finds debates among commission members and concludes that their evidence contradicted their recommendations. Taking a step back and thinking about the meaning of such a report, Benton-Cohen argues that the commission represented “Progressive Era confidence in nonpartisan expertise” (p. 3). Her most far-reaching conclusion is that the idea of objective social science is itself deeply problematic.

Katherine Benton-Cohen. Inventing the Immigration Problem: The Dillingham Commission and Its Legacy.

Katherine Benton-Cohen. Inventing the Immigration Problem: The Dillingham Commission and Its Legacy.

Inventing the Immigration Problem: The Dillingham Commission and Its Legacy. By Katherine Benton-Cohen

Inventing the Immigration Problem: The Dillingham Commission and Its Legacy. By Katherine Benton-Cohen

The Most Dangerous German Agent in America: The Many Lives of Louis N. Hammerling by M. B. B. Biskupski

Reviewed by: The Most Dangerous German Agent in America: The Many Lives of Louis N. Hammerling by M. B. B. Biskupski William Hal Gorby (bio) The Most Dangerous German Agent in America: The Many Lives of Louis N. Hammerling. By M. B. B. Biskupski. (Dekalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2015. Pp. xi, 175. $29.00 paper) Readers will have an exhilarating time with M. B. B. Biskupski’s vivid biography of Louis N. Hammerling (1870–1935), an enigma to many as “a pathological liar, crook, swindler, ruthless entrepreneur, and a patriot—of which nation he could never decide” (p. 3). In this short volume, Biskupski has done what many social historians dream of writing—reconstructing the life of someone who left a small paper trail. A leading expert of Polish and Polish-American history, Biskupski located shreds of evidence in seventy-four archival collections in America, Great Britain, Poland, Canada, and Austria to painstakingly tell the story of the most significant Polish-immigrant voice at the turn of the twentieth century. Biskupski’s work serves three major functions. First, he tells an amazing yarn about an infamous but, at times, sad historical character. Hammerling emerges as a person able to work in the shadows of political, labor, and business deals. He was the confidant of many important people, but as Biskupski notes, “Memory loss of awkward or potentially incriminating events seems to have plagued poor Hammerling” [End Page 268] (p. 27). He was involved in many nefarious business schemes such as incorporating a business in New Jersey at $200,000 to exhibit coal at the St. Louis Exposition, smuggling diamonds from Austria, and smuggling money into Poland. But he was also a champion of immigrants, speaking out often against immigration-restriction policies and using his newspapers to criticize the notorious Dillingham Commission of 1911. Second, the author fills a gap in the literature on immigrant assimilation and the role of middle- and upper-class immigrant brokers in assisting new arrivals in their host countries. Finally, Biskupski produces a truly transnational history through one man’s complex life. His thorough research abroad highlights the many transnational connections in World War I counterintelligence and immigrant politics between the host and former countries. The book is divided into eight chapters highlighting key roles Hammerling played in his convoluted career. A Polish-Jewish immigrant who converted to Catholicism, Hammerling hailed from Drohojów, a Galician village of mixed Polish, Ukrainian, and Jewish populations. In the late nineteenth century, Hammerling wandered across Europe, to Pennsylvania anthracite country, and even to Hawaii’s sugar fields. The entrepreneurial Hammerling served as a key broker for John Mitchell during the 1902 coal strike, helped Republicans as their agent in “actively buying immigrant votes” (p. 31), was friends with Presidents Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft, and was the “advertising broker to the immigrant press” (p. 11). His control of the American Association of Foreign Language Newspapers (AAFLN) made him a wealthy man by his thirties. Biskupski’s coverage of the AAFLN is fascinating and sheds new light on the role of pro-business immigrant propaganda that discouraged socialism and “suggested” at which “established American business firms” to seek employment (p. 31). His successes were also his undoing. He engaged in several “get-rich-quick” schemes, and his AAFLN business engaged in sketchy business practices. There were no directors, no meetings, and no meeting minutes kept; Hammerling paid dividends only to those [End Page 269] who expected them, fixed the books giving himself an extra cut of profits, and had several employees every year take company records to the boiler room and burn them. His AAFLN office in Manhattan’s Woolworth Building was a center of duplicitous financial dealings, hair-brained schemes, and political espionage. Bribes were exchanged, like Hammerling’s role with Percy Andrea, the brewing industry’s agent. Hammerling made $83,000 from 1913 to 1915, carrying liquor advertising in his newspaper without registering it as such, a violation of an act of Congress. This came while hiding that the brewers paid him to publish their articles under his name and give paid speeches nationwide against prohibition. His Manhattan office was even the site of a supposed...

Sex, Marriage, and State Surveillance of the Intimate in Progressive-Era America

Sex, Marriage, and State Surveillance of the Intimate in Progressive-Era America Kellie Wilson-Buford (bio) Jessica R. Pliley. Policing Sexuality: The Mann Act and the Making of the FBI. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2015. 295pp. Notes on sources, notes, and index. $29.95. Erica J. Ryan. Red War on the Family: Sex, Gender, and Americanism in the First Red Scare. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2015. xii + 220 pp. Notes and index. $69.50. Contributing to the growing literature on state surveillance of the intimate in U.S. history, Jessica R. Pliley and Erica J. Ryan reveal that policing women’s sexuality and protecting the sanctity of heterosexual monogamous marriage were central concerns of state officials and progressive reformers in the first half of the twentieth century. Where Pliley focuses on the Mann Act’s key role in transforming the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) into a national investigative agency, Ryan zooms in on the 1920s to examine how the First Red Scare initiated an era of gender and sexual conformity. While both books are important contributions to the fields of the Progressive Era, immigration history, gender and sexuality studies, and the history of marriage and the family, Red War on the Family is a more specialized must-read for anyone interested in the First Red Scare, discursive constructions of communism and Americanism in post–Russian Revolution America, and the formation of conservative political coalitions. Likewise, Policing Sexuality will appeal to legal historians, scholars of sex trafficking and prostitution, and anyone interested in the creation of the modern police state. Based on nearly 1,000 Mann Act cases from 1910 to 1941 and a wealth of other Bureau of Investigation files, Pliley persuasively argues that the expansion of the FBI in the early twentieth century into the nation’s premier police agency depended in large part on the passage of the Mann Act, the nation’s first anti–sex-trafficking law. The Mann Act criminalized the transport of women over state lines for prostitution or “any other immoral purposes.” Originally intended to protect white, native-born women from being seduced and sold [End Page 484] into sexual slavery, the Mann Act’s vague “any other immoral purpose” clause paved the way for the Bureau’s surveillance of women’s sexual behavior in brothels and the intimate spaces of their own bedrooms. Yet Bureau officials excluded most African American and immigrant women from the protections of the Mann Act, feeding into popular constructions of chastity and respectability as characteristics only white women could possess. By enforcing the Mann Act along decidedly gendered lines that protected the patriarchal nuclear family, traditional gender roles, and husbands’ sole rights to their wives’ sexual services, the Bureau helped normalize heterosexual, monogamous marriage as the bulwark of American stability and values amidst feminist, anticapitalist, and modernist challenges to the status quo. Discourses on sex trafficking emerged in the United States in the 1870s in the context of Chinese immigration and the disproportionate number of Chinese women working as prostitutes, or “yellow slaves,” in the West. Fearful of the influence “yellow slavery” might have on morals and institutions, missionaries and purity activists rescued “enslaved” Chinese prostitutes and agitated for legal reform that would bar the entry of Chinese immigrants into the country. Progressive journalist Dr. Kate C. Bushnell’s 1888 report for the Women’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) on sex-trafficking in Wisconsin lumber camps ignited panic among social-purity activists about white slavery. Uncovering evidence that foreign men working in the lumber camps were trafficking young American women, these activists packaged a “myth” of white slavery to the public, portraying sex-trafficking as a crime with specifically immigrant origins. The anti–white slavery movement did not gain full force until 1907, when the Immigration Bureau and Dillingham Commission investigated the amorphous white slavery problem in response to rumors that Chicago was the center of the trade. Investigators articulated a vision of white slavery that located vice and criminality in the bodies of poor, foreign-born women who constituted a disproportionate number of prostitutes in Chicago. Publicity surrounding the investigation fueled nativist concerns about the moral threat immigrants posed to American values and institutions. In...

Views of European Races Among the Research Staff of the US Immigration Commission and the Census Bureau, Ca. 1910

This paper discusses support for, and opposition to, racial classification of European immigrants among high-level researchers at both the United States Immigration Commission of 1907–11 (the Dillingham Commission) and the Census Bureau during those same years. A critical distinction must be made between the Commission members — political appointees who mostly supported some form of restriction at the time of their appointment — and the top research staff, whose views were remarkably wide ranging. Moreover, even staff members committed to a racialized outlook — such as Daniel Folkmar, author of the Commission’s infamous Dictionary of Races and Peoples — deserve a closer look than historians have given them; for example, Folkmar and his superior on the staff had requested commentary from Franz Boas, who was then emerging as the most prestigious academic critic of racial theories (theories that assume group differences in behavior arise from biological endowments). Another feature of the narrative concerns the surprising number of staff who transferred from the Commission to the Census Bureau to work on the 1910 Census. Debates continued at the Bureau as well, this time over how to present the results of the new “mother tongue” question, which had been introduced to the Census questionnaire in response to pressure for a European “race” question. Indeed, Folkmar was also the chief author of the Census Bureau report on the mother-tongue data.

Other Immigrants: Mexicans and the Dillingham Commission of 1907-1911

FROM 1880 UNTIL THE QUOTA restrictions of 1921 and 1924, nearly twenty-four million immigrants came to the United States. The United States Immigration Commission (also known as the Dillingham Commission) met from 1907 to 1911 to study the resulting “immigration problem.” The Commission’s review of the period from 1898–1910 found southern Italians to be the largest group of migrants to the United States, “Hebrews” second. At a time when 90 percent of immigrants were born in Europe, it may be little wonder that the Commission focused on immigrants from that continent. But another large group of immigrants was crossing a border and entering the United States by land. How did national policy makers and intellectuals think about Mexican immigrants in the era of mass European migration? With Mexicans ranking only twenty-eighth of thirty-nine immigrant groups listed by the Dillingham Commission, the Commission failed to incorporate Mexicans into a larger understanding of migration. Mexicans accordingly occupied an exceptional place in immigration policy. Their numbers were small. They were geographically isolated, and southwestern employers lobbied to exempt Mexican labor from immigration restrictions. The policies that emerged from the Commission’s recommendations—both the literacy test of 1917 and the quota system begun in 1921—worked in different ways to exempt Mexicans. Mexicans did not fit into conceptual frameworks based on European immigration. Nor did they elicit the panic that Asian migration did. Over the last decade, historians have debated James Barrett and David Roediger’s argument characterizing southern and eastern Europeans as “inbetween peoples.” Mexicans were perhaps the quintessential “inbetween” people. Mexicans were both legally white and functionally nonwhite, welcomed and reviled, criticized and neglected, understudied and overlooked. Even when Mexicans made their way into the statistical data of the Commission’s reports, they were underrepresented in textual analysis.

The Jewish Ghetto and the Americanization of Space in Mary Antin and Her Contemporaries

The Jewish Ghetto and the Americanization of Space in Mary Antin and Her Contemporaries Maria Karafilis In the first decade of the twentieth century, Congress appointed the Dillingham Commission to investigate the effects of immigration on the U.S. and to make recommendations for future policy. The commission released its 42-volume report on the "immigration question" in 1911. The commission's report judged recent immigrants, primarily from southern and eastern Europe, inferior to their predecessors, primarily from northern and western Europe. It also advocated specific immigration restriction policies, including the implementation of literacy tests and country-of-origin quotas, which were adopted in 1917 and 1921, respectively; doubling the head tax on immigrants; increasing the amount of money required in the immigrant's possession at the port of arrival; and writing policies that favored the immigration of men with families.1 The recommendations were the culmination of anti-immigrant sentiment that had been brewing for decades. Documents such as the Dillingham Commission report, which told a story of degeneration and decline in the quality of newcomers, were not the only narratives circulating at the time. An alternative account of immigration can be found in Mary Antin's The Promised Land (1911), which challenges the legitimacy and authority of the official report with its own type of Dillingham Commission. In her autobiographical narrative, Antin includes a character named Miss Dillingham, a teacher in the schools of the Boston Ghetto who recognizes the talent and promise of her immigrant pupils and is especially encouraging of Mary, having one of the student's poems printed in a local newspaper as proof of the child's intelligence and aptitude.2 In this essay I read Antin's The Promised Land against nativist narratives, the push for immigration restriction laws, and other turn of the century [End Page 129] depictions by immigrant and nonimmigrant writers of the Jewish Ghetto and its inhabitants. I combine an extended discussion of U.S. immigration policy from the years 1882–1924 with an analysis of how Antin, in response to the often heated debate over the immigration question, manipulated a stock, popular literary genre, the immigrant conversion narrative, to achieve particular ends. One of the ways that Antin appropriates this narrative is by eschewing its most common form, immigrant realism, in favor of what I call immigrant romance. The latter frees her from a focus on the harsh economic and social realities that many immigrants faced; the attendant sensory description of the sights, sounds, and smells of the ghettoscape; and the use of dialect. It allows her, primarily through her use of abstraction and metonymy, as I discuss below, to reconfigure the space of the urban ghetto as a site of infinite possibility. In her narrative, Antin seeks to counter the anti-immigrationist claims of many of her contemporaries, demonstrate the fitness of Russian-Jewish immigrants for U.S. citizenship, and reconceptualize the very notion of "Americanness." Traditionally viewed as a stifling, pestilential space that threatens the surrounding nation, the ghetto for Antin becomes a dynamic space of freedom and openness. She also challenges dominant views of the inhabitants of the ghetto and suggests that immigrants such as herself, individuals devoted to the ideals of liberty and equality and to the ability to improve themselves through education, are not only adequate material for U.S. citizenship but perhaps the "truest" Americans of all. Reading The Promised Land through the lens of spatial practice illuminates how the story intersects with contemporary narratives on immigration and the United States as a field imaginary: the locus of freedom that was either, depending on one's perspective, contracting or expanding.3 In addition, Antin's depiction of the ghetto transforms the mappable locale, making it not just a static, claustrophobic backdrop but an integral, dynamic, and democratizing site of liberation, for it is her mobility, her success in moving through space, traversing psychological and spatial territories, exceeding boundaries, and taking advantage of the mix and heterogeneity surrounding her in various U.S. metropolises that fosters her Americanization. In other words, a primary way in which Mary achieves independence and becomes an "American" is her ability to cross ostensible barriers, both spatial and...