The American Future (40 page)

The presumptuousness of American university presidents and the grandest of their faculty to speak for their institutions seems only to have provoked dissenters to articulate a challenging view. Boas was determined to act as a “public intellectual” so as to deny Columbia's president, Nicholas Murray Butler, a restrictionist, the right to speak for the college. And there were some sons of Mother Harvard—and students of the philosophers George Santayana and the pragmatist William James—who begged to differ with their president Lowell, another Boston Brahmin crusader for the superior race. In the wake of attacks in the press on “hyphenated Americans” in 1915, Horace Kallen published an article in the
Nation
giving a subtler view of immigrant adjustment to American life. Kallen believed that following the initial urge to assimilate, immigrants often revisited their cultural traditions and language without any sense that they were compromising American allegiance, a step that Kallen called “dissimilation.” His particular target was his colleague at the University of Wisconsin where they both taught: Edward Alsworth Ross. Why, he wondered, was Ross so attached to the white-bread insipidity of one version of American identity, and why so terrified of “difference”—the first time, I think, that that word was used to validate cultural character. Kallen proposed replacing the obligation of homogeneity by “harmony” which he then extended to seeing America as an “orchestra of mankind,” each section with its own tone and musical texture; yet each a part of a miraculously bound whole.

It is too soon to say whether the founders of American cultural pluralism—the likes of Boas, Kallen, and Randolph Bourne, who in 1916 praised what the new immigrants had brought to America's stagnation—have won the war. Perhaps it will always be too soon. Ross's descendants like Samuel P. Huntingdon of Harvard, exercised about a war of civilizations fought out on the Rio Grande border, are still very much with us. And it was the restrictionists who won the immediate battle where it mattered, in the halls of authority and power. University presidents Lowell and Butler managed to establish
quotas for Columbia and Harvard (Yale and Princeton were no better) that sharply reduced the numbers of Jews admitted after World War I, and a more serious quota system was instituted at the same time based on a ranking of ethnic and cultural desirability. It was that policy that shut the door on immigrants who desperately needed Crèvecoeur's refuge and instead perished in their millions in the camps of the Final Solution. But Madison Grant sleeps in his tomb in Sleepy Hollow, New York, along with the patriots of the American Revolution.

It was not until 1965 that Lyndon Johnson, building somewhat on the head of steam supplied by Kennedy's purported authorship of
A Nation of Immigrants
, succeeded in abolishing the quota system. But what helped more than the assassinated president's Irish pride was a different tradition of understanding the immigrant experience, one that had proceeded alongside all the noisy jeremiads about the damage they were doing to the cultural and social essence of the national character. That work was empirical and practical rather than common-room grandstanding, and it was done by an entirely different class of social workers from people like Madison Grant and Edward Ross. Is it surprising that the professors and the patricians holding their noses at the tenements were all men, but those who actually went into them—who listened to the stories, mopped sickly brows, and who actually bothered to travel to the remote regions in Ruthenia and Poland where the immigrants
came from
—were women?

And what women! The most often celebrated has been Jane Addams, who founded the first of the city settlement houses, Hull House on Halsted Street in Chicago. But it was her brilliant and tireless protégée Grace Abbott who, three years after Edward Ross's farrago of paranoid myths masquerading as social science had been published, wrote the first sympathetic work on
The Immigrant and the Community.
Nineteen seveenteen was the year in which the United States entered the World War, and both of the parties had whipped up a froth of patriotic fury, Democrats disgruntled with Wilson's internationalism called for “America First,” while Republicans trying to outbid them demanded “Undiluted Americanism.” If there must be a way, immigrants might constitute a fifth column especially if they were mere “hyphenated Americans.” Grace Abbott wanted to refute, systematically and statistically, each of the truisms recycled by Ross about the new immigration, and she showed conclusively, for example, that born Americans
convicted of crimes constituted a much higher proportion of the population than the foreign-born. In northeast America, where immigrants were principally concentrated, white natives receiving poor assistance were also a higher proportion than among the “new immigrants.”

But what gives Grace Abbott's book its enduring value is not its counterpunch at a pseudo-sociology; rather it is its narrative power: the portrait of the immigrant experience itself, seen through the many life histories to which the author had sympathetically listened. Moving through her pages are her own hours spent in the tramcars and sweatshops, the police courts, the ward boss saloons, and the huckster “immigrant banks.”
The Immigrant and the Community
is, at the same time, the story of the tribulations and endurance of Polish girls without a word of English thrown into farm labor or domestic service, of the Italian railroad worker, of the Jewish seamstress; a handbook for their survival and a prescription to public authorities about how to help these multitudes make it in America. Abbott was no longer interested in debating restrictions. She assumed she and her more liberal kind had, for the time being, lost the argument; that there would be strict criteria of admission in place; but she wanted to do everything in her power to bring the immigrants who passed muster into the stream of American life. Like Kallen, she understood American life not as some imaginary and dull homogeneity, but as a rich adjacency of cultural neighborhoods. That, Grace Abbott supposed, was America's unique glory.

But then Grace Abbott was raised to independent thinking. Her father, a Civil War hero, became a reform-minded governor of Nebraska; her mother was an ardent early feminist and suffragist. Her older sister Edith was a recruit to Jane Addams's Hull House who went on to be dean of the University of Chicago's School of Civics and Philanthropy (later Social Service Administration). Edith's success in Chicago called Grace there too, in pursuit of a doctorate. Once acquired, she knew exactly what she wanted: to be of use in the uproar of the great metropolis. She moved into Hull House, was spotted as exceptional by Addams, and in 1908 became the first director of the Immigrants Protective League, which she ran alongside the equally remarkable Kentuckian Sophonisba Breckinridge.

It was as though Grace figured out, early, what had been wrong with all the grand theorizing about immigrants and American life: that
it had been done by people who had never gone near them, who had no clue where Ruthenia was or what it was, and who would have reached for the smelling salts at the mere suggestion that publicly paid interpreters would be a good idea to help the immigrants in their resettlement. Instead of some lordly overview, Abbott simply went along, as far as she could, for the ride. What she noticed right away was the extraordinary number of unmarried and unaccompanied girls and young women. Between 1909 and 1914 there were a half a million of them aged between fourteen and twenty-nine; 84,000 Polish girls alone, 23,000 from Galician Ruthenia, 65,000 Russian and Polish Jewish girls; all most obviously at the mercy of an entire industry waiting to exploit, cheat, and indebt them in any way it could. Grace listened to stories of girls who had been sent to uncles, who took them in for a night or two in the district around the stockyards, perhaps found them poor lodgings, and then left them to sink or swim. Some who had expected to be met at the railway station never were, and stood with their pathetic little bag without any English on the platform until they were approached by a local vulture who would slip their arm in his and take them off to a saloon. Many were cheated even before they got on the train at the port of entry as steamboat companies who supplied the onward journey rail tickets made a killing from absurdly circuitous journeys; taking passengers, for example, from New York to Chicago via Norfolk, Virginia.

There was not a lot Grace Abbott could do about those frauds except publicize them, but she set up a system of greeting and reception for newcomers, especially females, by taking premises right opposite the stations, staffed by women in particular who spoke the relevant languages. Prominent signs in those same languages were posted on platforms together with staff meeting the trains even when they arrived, as they often did, between midnight and 6 a.m. If they were going on to a farther destination accommodation was found for the night and the next stage of the journey clearly explained, avoiding the fate of the Norwegian girl bound for Iowa who was taken off a westward train from Chicago by men claiming she needed to change trains, robbed, and abused. In 1913 Congress and President Wilson authorized the secretary of labor to make Abbott's receiving stations official; all the more needed because she complained that invariably the administration of the immigration laws was left in the hands of
unsympathetic men. They were especially heartless if faced with pregnancies out of wedlock. Abbott recalled the prewar case of a young Austrian couple from Galicia: the man, prevented by military service from emigrating, finally arrived with his girl in a state of advanced pregnancy. He was admitted, and she denied entry on the moral grounds available to the immigration authorities. Horrified by the separation, Abbott whipped up a campaign among her Chicago women, who mounted enough pressure to get the decision reversed, and the couple were married on the day of the girl's arrival.

Much of the book is a compendium of advice about what to avoid: fake employment agencies that were often a conduit to prostitution; immigrant “banks” that were mostly used to remit earnings back home and that were often swindles managed by Russians or Hungarians who then disappeared along with the deposits; untrained midwives with filthy equipment capable of causing postnatal blindness or worse. (Abbott was hugely in favor of midwifery, not least because women themselves preferred home births to hospital deliveries, but wanted properly regulated training and licensing in whatever languages were appropriate.) Where she couldn't do a whole lot, at least she hoped to educate the defenseless in what to expect: the wretched conditions of seasonal workers in the Maine lumber camps or the Dakota wheat fields, or worst of all the railroad hobos who were made to sleep in freight-car bunks and forced to pay the company four or five dollars out of their pitiful earnings for foul food, liquor, tobacco, and gloves. Nothing good can be expected of the connections between the ward bosses and the police, she warned. Wise up, in particular to the latter, who will expect bribes that may or may not preempt brutality. The Chicago police sometimes treated immigrants as sport. One man who failed to understand the shouted order to get off the garbage can on which he was sitting was shot and killed for his incomprehension. A fifteen-year-old Slovenian boy, playing dice in a house with his pals, ordered to put his hands up by armed police, was nonetheless shot and killed at point-blank range. When the police got news of a wildcat strike or a bomb going off, they were capable of making random arrests in the community without even a pretense of connecting the arrested to the crime, simply as a message to the Italians or the Poles to “behave.”

It's when she gets to the closing passages of her book, though, that
Grace Abbott makes all the hyperventilation of the professors and the patricians seem remote and absurd. When they demand that children repudiate their parents' tradition and language, do they stop to consider that because they have some facility in English, children are the conduit through which fathers and mothers speak to the bosses, the police, the judges, the physicians? And that it is necessary
for the children's sake
to restore the natural authority of their father and mother? How could the wholesale repudiation of their native culture help that or indeed do any good for America? After all, many of the immigrants, Czechs and Lithuanians, had come from countries where the authorities, German or Russian, had attempted to stamp out their native tongues. Abandoning them now would be a betrayal. “In our zeal to teach patriotism we are often teaching disrespect for history and traditions that the ancestors of immigrant parents had a part in making.”

“Americanism,” Grace Abbott says, following Horace Kallen, is a shibboleth, a weak-minded convenience, and she quotes the anthropologist William Sumner approvingly when he commented that what it often amounts to is a “duty to applaud, follow and obey whatever ruling clique of newspapers or politicians command us to say or do.” What is an American? she (more or less) asks, and gives an answer richer and subtler than Crèvecoeur's, an answer for America's modern age: “We are many nationalities scattered over a continent with all the differences and interest that climate brings. But instead of being ashamed of this…we should recognize the particular opportunity for the world's service. If English, Irish, Polish, German, Scandinavian, Russian, Magyar, Lithuanian and all the other races on earth can live together each making his own distinctive contribution to our common life, if we can respect those differences that result from a different social and political environment and the common interests that unite all people, we shall meet the American opportunity. If instead we blindly follow Europe and cultivate national egotism we shall need to develop a contempt for others, to foster the national hatreds and jealousies that are necessary for aggressive nationalism.”

After the war, would it not therefore be right for the United States to champion internationalism, and the cause of “oppressed nationalities…their cause should be our cause?” So it probably came as no surprise to Abbott when Henry Cabot Lodge, the restrictionist par
excellence, spoke bitterly and successfully against American membership in the League of Nations.