New Views About Immigrants: Black and White David M. Reimers (bio) Marilyn Halter. Between Race and Ethnicity: Cape Verdean American Immigrants, 1860–1965. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993. xix 213 pp. Illustrations, notes, appendix, bibliography, and index. $32.50 (cloth); $14.95 (paper). Janet E. Rasmussen. New Land, New Lives: Scandinavian Immigrants to the Pacific Northwest. Northfield, Minn. and Seattle: Norwegian-American Historical Association and University of Washington Press, 1993. xiii 320 pp. Illustrations, notes, map, appendix, bibliography, and index. $24.95. Marilyn Halter’s Between Race and Ethnicity: Cape Verdean American Immigrants: 1860–1965 and Janet Rasmussen’s New Land, New Lives: Scandinavian Immigrants to the Pacific Northwest represent different approaches to the study of American immigration. They do share some things in common. The authors rely heavily on oral history and both are concerned primarily with immigration in the twentieth century. Rasmussen’s book, except for headnotes and a brief introduction, is basically an oral history, while Halter’s account uses traditional immigrant sources as well as oral testimony. Both books are micro history and both make special efforts to include women immigrants even though they were outnumbered by the men. Halter’s account is more narrow in focus, but is in some ways an important book. Janet Rasmussen began to collect oral histories of Scandinavian immigrants around 1979. With the help of grants and students she collected the testimony of 240 first-generation Scandinavian immigrants who settled in the Pacific Northwest (primarily Washington) from 1900 to 1930. The study is divided into five parts: homeland, new land, work, family, and tradition. These obviously reflect what Rasmussen believed to be the more salient aspects of the experiences of her interviewees. There are familiar stories here. We hear of the importance of economic pressures in inducing emigration from the Nordic lands, the use of kinship networks in determining patterns of settlement, the struggle of immigrants in making a living in the New World, the maintenance of language among first-generation [End Page 260] immigrants, and the role of ethnic organizations (such as the Lutheran churches) in helping to preserve one’s ethnic identity in America. Most make interesting reading and certainly add the human dimension to the use of statistics or social science approaches to the study of history. At the same time, because the histories usually run only a few pages, many large issues are explored only fleetingly or hardly at all. One wonders, for example, just how some of these immigrants managed to accumulate funds to buy property and educate their children. Their children seem to have done fairly well, educationally and occupationally (a source of pride for many of the respondents), but how this happened is left unexplored. These immigrants, in traditional migratory fashion, mostly started at a young age (one came alone at age thirteen and attempted to begin anew in the United States). While facing hardships, they generally persevered and looked back on their lives with few regrets. But bitterness does show at times, perhaps more among women than men. Christine Emerson notes that she had to drop out of school to take care of the house when her mother died. “I had just finished eighth grade and I was planning to go to high school. But dad needed someone to stay at home. It was hard. It was hard on everybody and it was very hard on me, because I thought I would go to school. The others did so. My sister became a nurse, my brother became a doctor” (p. 251). Yet the overall impression is upbeat. But this is no surprise. These oral histories are of those who survived into old age and on the whole were satisfied with their lives. These are not the diaries or letters of those who died at a younger age of disease, poverty or accidents. While the narratives tell of economic hardships and sometimes the loss of children, these are not stories of desertion, divorce, alcoholism, or crime. Is it possible that persons reflecting back on a long life tend to romanticize their experiences? Or perhaps experiences on the negative side will not come out unless different questions are asked. In short, just how...
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Jul 1, 2017
Jennifer Eastman Attebery 
Open Access