Country of Exiles

by William R. Leach

  19. Between 1880 and 1920 American mass manufacturing businesses used every means, including blocking all immigration restriction, to create what labor historian Alexander Keyssar called “brigades” of low-wage workers. See Keyssar, The First Century of Unemployment in Massachusetts (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986), p. 62.

  20. See on this transformation, David Montgomery, Workers’ Control in America (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981), pp. 91–114, and The Fall of the House of Labor (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987).

  21. For a recent history that partly chronicles the use of government troops from 1875 to 1910, see Anthony Lukas, Big Trouble (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1997), pp. 103–18, 225–39, 261–65.

  22. On the American mining engineer’s worldwide reputation at the turn of the century, see Clark C. Spence, Mining Engineers and the American West (Moscow, Id.: University of Idaho Press, 1993), pp. 1–17, 278–317.

  23. Spence, Mining Engineers and the American West, pp. 143, 278, 286, 301; and William Leach, Land of Desire: Merchants, Power, and the Rise of New American Culture (New York: Vintage, 1994), pp. 352–53.

  24. I have laid out this history in Land of Desire.

  25. Josiah Royce, California (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1948; orig. pub. 1886), pp. ix, 182.

  26. Ibid., pp. 174–85.

  27. Josiah Royce, Race Questions, Provincialism, and Other American Problems (Freeport, New York: Books for Libraries Press, 1967; orig. pub. 1908, essay written 1902), pp. 68–69.

  28. Ibid., p. 68.

  29. On these tendencies, see Josiah Royce, The Philosophy of Loyalty (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 1995; orig. pub. 1908), pp. 103–10; and Royce, Race Questions, pp. 61–71.

  30. Royce, The Philosophy of Loyalty, p. 54.

  31. Ibid., p. 104.

  32. Ibid., p. 110.

  33. Royce, California, pp. 180–81.

  34. See Faraghar, Sugar Creek, pp. 51–52, 144–45; and Unruh, The Plains Across, pp. 322–23.

  35. Reprinted in Robert Finch and John Elder, eds., The Norton Book of Nature Writing (New York: W.W. Norton, 1990), p. 196.

  36. George Orwell used the term “without bootlicking” to describe American life in the mid-nineteenth century. “There was poverty and there were even class distinctions, but except for the Negroes there was no permanently submerged class,” he wrote. “Everyone had inside him, like a kind of core, the knowledge that he could earn a decent living, and earn it without bootlicking.” Sonia Orwell, Such, Such Were the Joys (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and Company, 1945), p. 162.

  37. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America (New York: Doubleday Anchor, 1969), p. 237.

  38. For the best single discussion of American patriotism, see Merle Curti, The Roots of American Loyalty (New York: Columbia University Press, 1946). Little of any value has been written on patriotism, but see essays on nationalism by George Orwell, especially “Notes on Nationalism,” in George Orwell, Such, Such Were the Joys (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and Company, 1945), pp. 73–97; books by John Lukacs, esp. Confessions of an Original Sinner (New York: Tichnor and Fields, 1990), pp. 3–4, 141, 191–96; and Lukacs, The Hitler of History (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997), pp. 113–27; and John Bodnar, ed., Bonds of Affection: Americans Define Their Patriotism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996). For an unpersuasive, strained attempt to deal with loyalty from a liberal perspective, see George Fletcher’s Loyalty (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993).

  39. Quoted by Donald Pisani in “Forests and Conservation, 1865–1890,” in Charles Miller, ed., American Forests (Lawrence: University of Kansas, 1997), p. 23. For history of this movement, see this volume and Roderick Nash, Wilderness and the American Mind (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982), pp. 108–81; and Samuel Hays, Conservation and the Gospel of Efficiency (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1959), pp. 36–190.

  40. On this treatment, see Edward Spicer, “American Indians, Federal Policy Toward,” in Stephen Thernstrom, ed., Harvard Encyclopedia of American Ethnic Groups (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1980), pp. 114–22.

  41. Higham, Send These to Me, pp. 58–59.

  42. For different perspectives on this matter, see Richard Alba, The Transformation of Identity in White America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990), and Mary Waters, Ethnic Options: Choosing Identities in America (Berkeley: University of California, 1990). Alba thinks that white Americans, after years of ethnic conflict among themselves, have now begun to think of themselves as “European-Americans … in opposition to the challenges of non-European groups (316).” Waters maintains that Americans still connect to their “ethnic” pasts but only weakly, freely choosing, whenever they wish, to be Irish this month or Italian the next, or whatever, depending on their ethnic mix. Both books are simplistic and mechanistic. Both also do not accept the idea that Americans may be, well, Americans.

  43. Quoted from his essay “The Forgotten American,” written in 1969 and republished in Peter Schrag, Out of Place in America (New York: Random House, 1970), pp. 14–34. Schrag’s view of Americans contrasted sharply with the notion held by one of Schrag’s contemporaries, sociologist Milton Gordon, who argued that most Americans by the 1960s got their “sense of peoplehood” (to quote Gordon), not from being Americans but from being “Negroes, Jews, and Catholics” as well as “white, Anglo-Saxon Protestants” (Gordon, Assimilation in American Life [New York: Oxford University Press, 1964, p. 77]). Gordon’s view became over the years the dominant view. See, for instance, Michael Novak’s The Rise of the Unmeltable Ethnics (New York: Macmillan, 1972), which declared emphatically that ethnic “inheritance colors the eyes through which we discern what is reasonable, fair, cause for joy, or for alarm.” “Each of us is different from any other,” Novak said, “and yet our similarities with some others tend to cluster around shared ethnicities (p. 320).” See also Alba, The Transformation of Identity in White America and Waters, Ethnic Options, note 42.

  44. John Steinbeck, Travels with Charley (New York: Bantam Books, 1963), p. 208.

  45. Quoted in Mann, The One and the Many, p. 172. Mann also wrote that “in the early 70s census,” conducted by the U.S. Bureau of the Census, “close to 80 million Americans did not identify themselves by origin or descent.” In 1975, John Higham, respected immigration expert, said that “contrary to some claims, we are not all ethnics. Everyone has sense of ancestral belonging, but many Americans, much of the time, feel little ethnic identification.” See Higham, Send These to Me, p. ix.

  46. In 1960, English novelist Lawrence Durrell observed in a travel piece in the New York Times (hereafter NYT) that Americans abroad seemed always able to identify other Americans by the states or counties or regions their compatriots came from, simply by listening to accents. To Europeans, Durrell said, most Americans all seemed the same. “The great big nations like say the Chinese or the Americans,” Durrell went on, “present a superficially homogenous appearance; but I’ve noticed that while we Europeans can hardly tell one American from another, my own American friends will tease each other to death at the lunch-table about the intolerable misfortune of being born in Ohio or Tennessee—a recognition of the validity of place which we ourselves accord to the Welshman, Irishman and Scotsman at home. It is a pity to travel and not get this essential sense of landscape values.” From “Landscape and Characters,” collected in Durrell, Spirit of Place, Letters, and Essays on Travel (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1969), pp. 156–63.

  47. Timothy J. Hutton and Jeffrey G. Williamson, The Age of Mass Migration: Causes and Economic Impact (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), pp. 232–33, 245. After World War I and the imposition of immigration quotas, “the globalization-inequality connection was broken” (p. 245).

  48. See Vernon M. Briggs, Jr., Immigration Policy and the American Labor Force (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984). Labor historian David Montgomery also writes that “closing the door to Europeans accelerated the stabilizatio
n of ethnic communities in industrial towns and cities. It reduced the rate of return to Europe to less than half its prewar level, increased the proportion of women among those let in to roughly half the total, and encouraged foreign-born residents to apply for citizenship as some protection against deportation.” See Montgomery, Fall of the House of Labor, p. 462.

  49. Robert Reich, The Work of Nations (New York: Vintage, 1992), pp. 43–57; and Alan Ehrenhalt, The Lost City (New York: Basic Books, 1995), pp. 90–110.

  50. See, on this historical tenacity, Frederick Hoxie, “From Prison to Homeland: The Cheyenne River Indian Reservation Before World War I,” South Dakota History 10 (Winter 1979), 1–24.

  51. John Bodnar, The Transplanted: A History of Immigrants in Urban America (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), p. 212.

  52. Schrag, Out of Place in America, pp. 12–13. Alan Ehrenhalt’s book on Chicago in the 1950s, The Lost City, captures the place-oriented character of the times.

  53. George W. Pierson, The Moving American (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1972), p. 29. See also, Kenneth T. Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), for another view of this historical pattern. “The American population,” says Jackson of the nineteenth-century tendency, “was very transitory. The United States was not only a nation of immigrants, but a nation of migrants.” Yet, “despite such mobility, permanent residence was considered desirable, and, then as now, home ownership was regarded as a counterweight to the rootlessness of an urbanizing population” (pp. 50–51).

  54. Peter Berger, The Homeless Mind (New York: Random House, 1973), pp. 75–77.

  55. On decline in mobility rates in the 1970s, see Larry Long, Migration and Residential Mobility in the United States (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1988), p. 52.

  56. “No-Fault Divorce Law Is Assailed in Michigan and Debate Heats Up,” WSJ, November 5, 1996, 1; for a fine account of the way expanded social security and federal housing loans facilitated mobility, see Deborah Dash Moore, To the Golden Cities: Pursuing the American Dream in Miami and L.A. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996), pp. 27–63; and, for a journalistic, data-filled portrait of the extreme mobility patterns of educated Americans in the 1990s, see “America’s Most Educated Places,” American Demographics, October 1995, 44–51.

  57. “Geographical Mobility: March 1993 to March 1994,” Current Population Statistics, P20–485 (Washington, D.C.: Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, 1995), viii.

  58. Louis Winnick, New People in Old Neighborhoods: The Role of Immigrants in Rejuvenating New York’s Communities (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1990), pp. xv–xvi. For current immigration figures, see Statistical Abstract of the United States 1997 (Washington, D.C.: Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census), 10–13; Bureau of the Census, “Current Population Survey” (Washington, D.C.: March 1998), 111; National Research Council, The New Americans (Washington, D.C.: National Academy Press, 1997), 3–4, 34–36. By 1996, immigrants and their children constituted 56 percent of the population of New York City; by that time as well, immigration to California had exceeded all rates reached in the past (see Los Angeles Times, April 9, 1997, A1, A14; and NYT, December 1, 1997, B3.

  59. On this subject, see Vernon Briggs, Jr., Mass Immigration and the National Interest (New York: M. E. Sharp, 1992); Vernon Briggs, Immigration Policy and the American Labor Force; and Stanley Lebergott, Manpower In Economic Growth (New York: McGraw Hill, 1964).

  60. For the modern accumulation of immigrant “social and civil rights,” see Saskia Sassen, Globalization and Its Discontents (New York: New Press, 1998), pp. 23–25. On welfare, see economist Thomas Sowell, who pointed out in 1996 that “fewer than 5 percent of the immigrants from Britain and Germany went on welfare after arriving in late twentieth-century America, but more than one-fourth of the immigrants from Vietnam and nearly half of those from Cambodia did” (Sowell, Migrations and Culture [New York: Basic Books, 1996], p. 388). In New York, over 40 percent of the Dominican population was on welfare in the late 1990s.

  61. Sanford Ungar, Fresh Blood: The New Immigrants (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995), p. 368. This view has been widely argued, but see Winnick, New People in Old Neighborhoods; Peter Sahlins (provost of New York’s State University system in Albany), Assimilation, American Style (New York: Basic Books, 1997); Joel Millman (staff reporter for the Wall Street Journal), The Other Americans: How Immigrants Renew Our Country, Our Economy, and Our Values (New York: Viking, 1997); and Ruberto Suro (reporter for the Washington Post), Strangers Among Us: How Latino Immigration is Transforming America (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1998).

  62. For percentages of Hispanics and Asians, see Jeffrey S. Passel and Barry Edmonston, Immigration and Race: Recent Trends in Immigration in the U.S. (Washington, D.C.: Urban Institute, 1992), table 8; and National Research Council, The New Americans (Washington, D.C.: National Academy Press, 1997), pp. 37, 113–23. Immigrants did not disperse as they did, for the most part, in earlier waves, although many small towns experienced heavy inflows; for a small sampling of documents, see “East Meets West in the Heart of Texas,” BusinessWeek, November 13, 1995, 18E–2; David L. Wheeler, “Sociologists Watch as the Heartland Adjusts to a Wave of Immigrants,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, June 27, 1997, B2; and The Index to Immigration Hot Spots (Washington, D.C.: Center for Immigration Studies, 1996).

  63. The best study to document this effect is William H. Frey’s “Interstate Migration and Immigration for Whites and Minorities, 1985–90: The Emergence of Multi-ethnic States” (Populations Studies Center, University of Michigan, October 1993); for his update, confirming the same trend, see William Frey, “The Diversity Myth,” American Demographics, June 1998, 39–43.

  64. Lawrence Mishel, Jared Bernstein, and John Schmitt, The State of Working America 1998–99 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999), prepared by the Economic Policy Institute, Washington, D.C., pp. 120, 182. On the negative impact of mass migration on the wages of unskilled workers and on equality generally, both in our time and around 1910, see Hutton and Williamson, The Age of Mass Migration, pp. 231–36, 248–52.

  65. See the following discussions of dual citizenship: “Immigrants’ Pressing Drive for Dual Nationality,” Migration World 25, no. 1/2 (1997), 12; Peter H. Shuck, “Dual Citizens, Good Americans,” WSJ, March 18, 1998, A22; “Dual Citizenship is Double-Edged Sword,” ibid., March 25, 1998; “Torn Between Nations, Mexican-Americans Can Have Both,” NYT, April 14, 1998, A12; and “Pledging Allegiance to Two Flags,” Washington Post, June 6, 1998, 14.

  66. Quoted in Lukas, Big Trouble, p. 479.

  67. “The New Immigrant Experience,” NYT, July 22, 1998, A18, editorial. For another Times celebration of New York City, see “Many Nations, One Big Party,” ibid., August 14, 1998, E1.

  68. On the poorer immigrants as the principal victims (along with poor, unskilled native-born Americans), see James P. Smith and Barry Edmonston, eds., The New Americans: Economic, Demographic, and Fiscal Effects of Immigration (Washington, D.C.: National Academy Press, 1997).

  69. According to Benjamin Barber, political scientist at Rutgers University, the only Americans who have a right to call America “a place” are the Indians; “the rest of us came from somewhere else.” See “National Conversation,” C-Span, September 2, 1995.

  70. The United States, historian Hans Kohn, expert on nationalism, wrote in 1957, “is the embodiment of an idea” or a “structure of ideas about freedom, equality, and self-government.” “To be an American is not … a matter of blood,” observed novelist Robert Penn Warren, but “a matter of an idea—and history is the image of that idea.” Penn Warren is quoted in Michael Lind, The Next American Nation (New York: Free Press, 1995), p. 221; Hans Kohn is quoted in Russell A. Kazal, “Revisiting Assimilation: The Rise, Fall, and Reappraisal of a Concept in American Ethnic History,” American Historical Review 100:2 (April 1995), 460. The classic statement of this argument is Loui
s Hartz, The Liberal Tradition.

  71. Bauer, speech before “Toward Tradition,” a conference convened by Jewish-Americans for Tradition, Washington, D.C., September 22, 1997; Newt Gingrich, To Renew America (New York, Harper Collins, 1995), p. 30; Dole speech, C-Span, May 26, 1996. Bauer was paraphrasing a quotation from Winston Churchill. For similar arguments, see Seymour Martin Lipset, American Exceptionalism (New York: W. W. Norton, 1996), p. 31; Maurizio Viroli (professor of political science at Princeton University), For Love of Country: An Essay on Patriotism and Nationalism (London: Clarendon Press, 1995), pp. 8–13, 164–85; Arthur Schlesinger, Disuniting of America (New York: W. W. Norton, 1992); and Roger M. Smith, Civic Ideals: Conflicting Visions of Citizenship in U.S. History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997).

  72. Quoted by Jacob M. Schlesinger, “U.S. Economy Shows Foreign Nations Ways to Grow Much Faster,” WSJ, June 19, 1997, 1. This interview took place in the context of a meeting in Denver where Clinton explained to visiting European leaders why the American economy, given its “labor flexibility” and “entrepreneurial risk-oriented spirit,” was so superior to the economies of other nations.

  73. Quoted in David Hollinger, Postethnic America (New York: Basic Books, 1995), p. 141.

  74. Lewis H. Lapham, “Who and What Is American?” Harper’s, January 1992, 46.

  75. Janet Wolff, Resident Alien (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), p. 148.