Alan M. Kraut

Immigration, Ethnicity, and the Pandemic

The influenza pandemic of 1918–1919 coincided with a major wave of immigration to the United States. More than 23.5 million newcomers arrived between 1880 and the 1920s, mostly from Southern and Eastern Europe, Asia, Canada, and Mexico. During earlier epidemics, the foreign-born were often stigmatized as disease carriers whose very presence endangered their hosts. Because this influenza struck individuals of all groups and classes throughout the country, no single immigrant group was blamed, although there were many local cases of medicalized prejudice. The foreign-born needed information and assistance in coping with influenza. Among the two largest immigrant groups, Southern Italians and Eastern European Jews, immigrant physicians, community spokes-people, newspapers, and religious and fraternal groups shouldered the burden. They disseminated public health information to their respective communities in culturally sensitive manners and in the languages the newcomers understood, offering crucial services to immigrants and American public health officials.

Dictionary of American immigration history

With some 2,500 entries, this dictionary, the first reference guide of its kind, is designed as a comprehensive reference work on all aspects of American immigration history. All American ethnic groups are included, with essay-entries on general subjects, e.g., immigration, patterns of immigrant settlement in the US, socialization, acculturation, and related themes. Biographical entries on individuals important in the history of immigration are included, along with notices of immigrant historical societies, mutual aid societies, immigrant-help groups, and immigration legislation and restrictionism.

Silent travelers: germs, genes, and American efficiency, 1890-1924.

In a 1902 North American Review article, United States Commissioner General of Immigration Terence Powderly called for stricter health controls on arriving aliens. Powderly cautioned that unless “proper precautions” were taken to detect two contagious diseases—trachoma, an eye infection, and favus, a dermatological disease of the scalp—the future American might be “hairless and sightless.” He called upon Americans to refuse to allow their country to become “the hospital of the nations of the earth” (Powderly, 1902).

John Higham's Critique of His Own Work

In April 2002, the Immigration and Ethnic History Society (IEHS) made its first lifetime achievement award. It was my honor to be president of the IEHS at that time, and I can recall the pleasure and unanimity of board members in designating John Higham the first recipient of that honor. It was a special pleasure for me to notify John and to present the award to him because over the years John had become both a personal friend and a powerful intellectual influence. When I called him at his home in Baltimore, he accepted with delight but as always with the soft-spoken graciousness that was his way. We chatted about the fact that initially he had not defined himself as an immigration scholar, yet in 1967, more than a decade after the publication of Strangers in the Land had found himself one of the founding members of what was then called the Immigration History Society and later one of its presidents. As we often did, we also talked about our hometown, New York. John had grown up in Queens, while I had grown up in the South Bronx. On many occasions we discussed how our New York roots had lured us into thinking and writing about immigration and ethnicity.

Preface and Introduction

There are so many textbooks for undergraduate history courses currently on the market that authors and editors offering yet another for the consideration of instructors and students are under an obligation to explain what they have in mind. In the case of the present volume, the editors feel confident that we are able to make a strong case for the usefulness of this volume, especially at this moment in both national history and in the development of the writing of American immigration history. Our justification will bring together immigration history and the ways in which it has been conceived, exploring the interface of historiography and the past as people in history have lived it, and demonstrating the consequences for our national self-understanding of how we think along that interface. In this way, we are going to merge a “Preface,” in which we explain our editorial choices, with an “Introduction,” in which we review the development and significance of immigration in the American past and present.

Ethnicity and Ethnic Identification

While immigrants continue to be psychologically and practically involved in their homelands and develop the transnational ties to make that possible, they also must make lives for themselves in the host societies they have entered as newcomers. One of the most important mechanisms that exist for facilitating these adjustments is the ethnic group, which brings people together on the basis of common origins, memories, and such common cultural traits as language. Ethnic groups are not simply based on the past, however, for they are creations of present needs in a new society, in which immigrants often face prejudice, poverty, social isolation, and confusing cultural differences. There is nothing stable, let alone inevitable, about the ethnic group. Different groups of immigrants have produced ethnicities that are characterized by wide varieties of intensity and densities of organization, which may include houses of worship, newspapers, schools, insurance societies, and fraternal organizations, but may not have any of these institutional structures at all. What seems necessary, moreover, for the immigrant generation is not necessarily needed by its more assimilated children. If they want to retain ethnicity at all, the second and later generations may take the ethnic group in other directions that represent needs and goals more appropriate to the lives of those who are not foreign to, but instead at home in, a new society.

What the Immigrants Make, America Takes: Work in Immigrant Communities

Throughout the nation’s history, one of the main reasons that Americans have been receptive to immigration has been the need for labor. During the colonial era, indentured servants and black slaves from Africa, involuntary migrants, supplemented the labor that European settlers poured into farms and plantations they hoped would yield sustenance for families and, eventually, commodities for commerce. In the early decades of the nineteenth century, many northern states abolished slavery as a labor system. Northern farmers found slave labor too costly and impractical for the small plot agriculture common in that region. The need for labor in the growing commercial and industrial sectors was satisfied by migrants from northern and western Europe and some free blacks. Much of the South continued to rely on black slave labor on its farms and plantations where large gangs of laborers made cotton production increasingly profitable. There, slavery persisted until the slaves were emancipated by the thirteenth amendment to the Constitution after the Civil War.

The Physical Health and Mental Well-Being of Immigrants

Throughout human history, communities have feared the stranger. One ofthe principal concerns has been that when newcomers arrive in a community, they sometimes bring with them dangerous baggage—diseases that weaken and, at times, kill their hosts. Beginning in the Middle Ages, communities protected the health of their inhabitants by quarantining new arrivals and travelers who had ventured abroad before allowing them to enter the community. American colonial communities had quarantine laws that became state laws after the United States became an independent nation. Still, foreigners were often stigmatized as disease carriers, especially when their arrival was coincident with an epidemic of a particular disease. In 1832, New Yorkers blamed a deadly cholera epidemic on the Irish Catholic population that comprised an underclass in antebellum NewYork and many other cities. As recently as the 1980s, lack of understanding of HIV/AIDS resulted in the stigmatizing of Haitians immigrants in the belief they were responsible for bringing the disease to the cities of North America.

Ethnicity and American Popular Culture

There has been an ongoing debate in American society over how best to characterize the culture of this nation of nations. Some have argued that migrants to the United States engage in an adherence to a slightly modified English style of behavior, an Anglo-conformity, after arrival because so many aspects of the American political and judicial systems are derived from the English heritage of the Founders. While not all newcomers choose to learn English immediately upon arrival, most eventually wholly or partially conform to the linguistic and cultural patterns derived from the experience of the former English colonists who fought the revolution and formulated the constitution, according to this model.

Becoming White: Irish Immigrants in the Nineteenth Century

The rise of ethnic groups out of successive waves of immigration in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries has not been the only or even the major source of social differentiation and at times fragmentation in American history. An even older source is race, which has been a most significant and abiding force in the structuring of society, politics, and economics and in the forming of American self-understanding since the beginnings of European settlement in North America. In sharp contrast to the voluntary immigrations that brought millions of Europeans to these shores, Africans, Native Americans, and Mexicans were incorporated into the population by force, through enslavement and conquest. Race has also been a factor in immigration itself. In a variety of ways specific to different groups, until well into the twentieth century, American law has restricted the entrance of Africans, Asians, and other non-European peoples into the United States and has limited opportunities for citizenship among those non-white immigrants.