We Have Been Here Before, by George Will
June 11 issue of Newsweek — Columbus, an Italian, arrived in the new World with a crew of less than 100 composed of Spaniards, Portuguese, some Jews who had been expelled from Spain, some convicts and an Arab brought along to translate anticipated conversations with Chinese and Japanese—remember where Columbus thought he was going. Now, about this new American thing, "diversity."
CONCERNING
WHICH, Michael Barone says, "We have been here before." As when Benjamin
Franklin, a worrywart, doubted that the Germans who were 40 percent of
Pennsylvanians could be assimilated. It is generally wise to believe
Barone, the author every two years of "The Almanac of American Politics,"
and now of a new book, "The New Americans: How the Melting Pot Can Work
Again." To those who say that traditionally white-bread America has
suddenly become multigrain, Barone says: Fiddlesticks.
America, he says, has always been multigrain. The so-called
white-bread America of the 1950s was the ephemeral result of a 1924 law
that, viewed against the sweep of American history, was aberrant, and was
effectively repealed by the Immigration Act of 1965. In 1924 Congress
slammed the golden door of America on "the wretched refuse"—the phrase is
from Emma Lazarus's poem written for the Statue of Liberty—of Europe's
teeming shores. So by 1970, the percentage of Americans who were
foreign-born, which had been 15 in 1910, was down to 4.7. Today it is back
to only 10 percent.
Some say
assimilation is now harder because a century ago immigrants were white
Europeans like everyone else, whereas today's immigrants are of different
races.
Some say assimilation is now harder because a century ago immigrants
were white Europeans like everyone else, whereas today's immigrants are of
different races. But the three biggest groups who came during the 19th-
and early 20th-century flood of immigration—Irish, Italians and Jews—were
often regarded as other races.
The Irish
were called "lowbrowed" and "simian." Many Jews came to America to flee
racist pogroms. Italians were referred to as "swarthy" with "low
foreheads," a "between" race—"whites, degoes, Negroes." The derogative
term "guinea" may have been derived from a West African source of slaves,
and in the South, Italians often were semisegregated. In 1891, 11 were
lynched in New Orleans. In the late 1930s a sportswriter, referring to Joe
DiMaggio, wrote, "Italians, bad at war, are well-suited for milder
competitions."
Barone ingeniously, and
convincingly, discerns similarities between the experiences of the
19th-century Irish immigrants and blacks, America's internal immigrants of
the 20th century. He also argues that there are crucial resemblances
between Italians then and Latinos now, and between Jews then and Latinos
now.
The Irish were driven across the
Atlantic and blacks were driven to northern cities when ancient
oppressions were aggravated by agricultural cataclysms—the potato famine
of 1845-49 and the coming of the mechanical cotton picker in 1944. They
came to teeming cities (in 1850, 26 percent of New York City residents
were from Ireland) from rural lives that had excluded them from all but
rudimentary education and from cash economies and entrepreneurship. (In
1956, on an Alabama plantation, Martin Luther King met sharecroppers who
had never seen U.S. currency.)
For both
groups, two consequences of traumatic dislocation were family
disintegration and substance abuse. By 1860, three quarters of Boston's
police arrestees or detainees, and 55 percent of New York's, were Irish.
In 1914 half the Irish families on Manhattan's West Side were fatherless.
And in World War I, 10 percent of Irish draftees and volunteers were
rejected for neuropsychiatric disorders—usually alcoholism. About 20 years
after the great Irish and black migrations began, both groups were
involved in urban riots. There were the New York City draft riots in 1863,
Watts and Detroit in 1965 and 1967.
Many
Latino immigrants, like Italian immigrants before them, bring to America a
sustaining trust in family. This is a consequence of deep distrust of
institutions of governance in the countries they left, institutions that
trace, in some instances, to the same ruler—Emperor Charles V (1500-1558).
Latinos are, Barone thinks, perhaps the most family-oriented group in a
society increasingly beset by fraying families. However, Latinos, like
Italians before them, were somewhat slow to take advantage of politics.
Not until 1962 did Anthony Celebrezze become the first Italian-American
cabinet officer.
Many East Asians in the
last third of the 20th century were like Eastern European Jews in the last
third of the 19th century—a distinct minority in countries ruled by
authoritarian regimes, and their commercial acumen was resented. Barone
rightly calls this "astonishing": By the 1940s, the first decade in which
most Jews in America were American born, Jews were substantially more
affluent than most Americans. Many Asians, like Jews, are "people of the
book" (the Mandarin and Talmudic traditions) and are ascending America's
surest ladder of social mobility, the system of higher
education.
Blacks, Latinos and Asians are
becoming as interwoven into American society as the Irish, Italians and
Jews have long since been. Scholars Stephan and Abigail Thernstrom write
that the black middle class is now proportionally as large as the white
middle class was at the end of the Eisenhower presidency, when American
society was described as predominantly middle class. Male Latino
work-force participation—80 percent—is the highest of any measured group.
Asians' academic successes continue to astonish—and to provoke disgraceful
admissions quotas to hinder them.
Page Top