chapter eleven white ethnic groups: assimilation and identity—the twilight of ethnicity? © pine...

Chapter Eleven

White Ethnic Groups:

Assimilation and Identity—The Twilight of Ethnicity?

© Pine Forge Press, an imprint of Sage Publications, 2003

The Twilight of Ethnicity? Between the 1820s and the 1920s, about 40 million people

journeyed from Europe to the United States.

When the immigration ended in the 1920s, the population of the United States had increased from less than 10 million to more than 100 million, and the society had industrialized, become a world power, and stretched from coast to coast, with colonies in the Pacific and the Caribbean.

Industrialization fueled the growth of U.S. military and political power, and the industrial machinery of the nation depended heavily on the flow of labor from Europe.


The Twilight of Ethnicity?


Assimilation and Equality: Should White Ethnics be Considered “Minority Groups”?



In other areas, the evidence for assimilation and equality is also persuasive.

Distinct ethnic neighborhoods that these groups created in American cities have faded away been taken over by other groups,.

The rate of intermarriage between members of different white ethnic groups is quite high.



Although they no longer experience discrimination and inequality, they have not completely vanished.

The traditional prejudices against them persist, even though in weakened form.

Each had a unique assimilation history, that will add variety to our analysis.

Their actions provide a partial explanation for the current situation of racial and colonized minority groups: The rise of the former was possible in part because of discrimination against the latter.

Their experiences established a set of expectations and understandings about immigration and assimilation and acculturation and integration that shape our views of the progress of the post-1965 immigrants.


Industrialization and Immigration

The Industrial Revolution began in England in the mid-1700s, and it replaced the traditional, labor-intensive forms of work and production with capital-intensive forms.

– Agriculture was modernized and the need for human labor in rural areas declined.

– Farmland was consolidated into larger tracts for the sake of efficiency.

– At the same time, the rural population began to grow.


Industrialization and Immigration

In response, peasants began to urban areas where factories were being built opening up opportunities for employment.

– The urban population increased faster than the job supply.

– Many peasants responded to opportunities in the New World.

– As industrialization took hold in Europe, the population movement to the cities and then to North America eventually grew to become the largest in human history (so far).


“Old” and “New” Immigration


European Origins, Conditions of Entry, and the Campaign against Immigration

Northern and western Europeans were similar to the dominant group in racial, religious, and cultural characteristics—low ethnocentrism.

Northern and western Europeans came from developed nations and tended to be more skilled, educated, and brought money and other resources that helped them in their new society.

By dispersing throughout the midsection of the country, they lowered their visibility and their degree of competition with dominant group members.



Norway sent more immigrants to the United States before 1890 than any European nation except Ireland (Chan, 1990, p. 41).

The first Norwegians were moderately prosperous farmers who found abundant acreage in upper Midwest states and turned to their homeland for assistance and used their relatives and friends to create networks and recruit a labor force.

Thus, chains of communication and migration linking Norway to the northern plains were established, supplying immigrants to these areas for decades (Chan, 1990, p. 41).



Today, more Americans trace their ancestry to Germany than to any other country except England.

Germans arriving earlier in the 1800s moved into opened farmland, while Germans arriving later were more likely to settle in urban areas.

The double penetration of Germans is reflected by the fact that by 1870, most employed German Americans were involved in skilled labor (37%) or farming (25%).

This allowed their sons and daughters to translate relative affluence into economic mobility finding their way into white-collar and professional careers.



The northern and western European experience contrasts sharply with the experiences of non-Protestant, less educated and skilled “immigrant laborers” who came in two waves.

The Irish in the 1820s made up part of the Old Immigration, and scores of other southern and eastern European nationalities made up the New Immigration that began in the 1880s.

Their cultural background was less consistent with Anglo-American culture, and as a result, the immigrant laborers experienced greater levels of rejection and discrimination.



The “immigrant laborers” settled in the cities of the industrializing Northeast and found work in plants, mills, mines, and factories in which strength and stamina were more important than literacy or skilled craftsmanship.

To keep wages low and take advantage of an inexhaustible supply of cheap labor, industrialists and factory owners developed technologies and machines that required few skills and little knowledge of English.

As mechanization proceeded, unskilled workers replaced skilled workers in the workforce—not infrequently, women and children replaced men because they could be hired for lower wages (Steinberg, 1981, p. 35).



Immigrant women entered the workforce as domestics or in factories, where they were assigned to menial, low-paid tasks.

Immigrant women often expected to work until they married, and then performed economic activities that permitted them to stay home and attend to family responsibilities.

Children also contributed to the family income by taking after-school and summertime jobs.

Males were usually at the bottom of the occupational structure and most of their descendants remained a blue-collar, unskilled working class until well into the 20th century (Bodnar, 1985; Morawska, 1990).



Much of the prejudice against the Irish and the new immigrants was expressed as anti-Catholicism.

Although Catholics were often stereotyped as single groups, they also varied along a number of dimensions.

Eventually, as the generations passed, the prejudice, systematic discrimination, and other barriers to upward mobility for the immigrant laborer groups weakened, and their descendants began to rise out of the working class.



Eastern European Jewish immigrants began arriving in the 1880s and were generally economic refugees fleeing religious persecution intending to settle permanently in the urban areas of the Northeast and Midwest.

Jews had been barred from agrarian occupations and had come to rely on the urban economy for their livelihoods, skills and job experiences they brought to the U.S.

The garment industry became the lifeblood of the Jewish community and provided jobs to about one third of all eastern European Jews residing in the major cities.

Jewish women, like the women of the immigrant laborer groups and Chinese women, found ways to combine their jobs and their domestic responsibilities.



The Jewish American enclave survived because of the cohesiveness of the group; the willingness of wives, children, and other relatives to work for little or no monetary compensation; and the commercial savvy of the early immigrants.

As with other enclave groups, economic advancement preceded extensive acculturation.

The Americanized, English-speaking children of the immigrants used their greater familiarity with the dominant society and their language facility to help preserve and expand the family enterprise.

Jewish Americans today surpass national averages in income, levels of education, and occupational prestige.



A continued barrier for Jewish Americans is anti-Semitism, or biased sentiments and negative stereotypes of Jews that have been a part of Western tradition for centuries—the ultimate episode in the long history of European anti-Semitism being the Nazi Holocaust.

By the 1920s and 1930s, anti-Semitism had become quite prominent among American prejudices and was being preached by the Ku Klux Klan and some prominent Americans.

Anti-Semitism also has a prominent place in the ideologies of a variety of extremist groups that have emerged in recent years, including “skinheads” and various contemporary incarnations of the Ku Klux Klan.



Campaigns were waged against European immigration, the strength of which waxed and waned throughout the period of mass immigration from the 1820s to the 1920s.

The anti-Catholic, anti-Semitic, and anti-immigration forces ultimately triumphed with the passage of the National Origins Act in 1924.

It established a quota system to determine the number of immigrants that would be accepted each year from each sending nation, a system that was openly racist and remained in effect until the mid-1960s.


Developments in the 20th Century: Mobility and Integration

The social class position and the rapidity of assimilation for white ethnic groups were affected by other factors, including the following:

– The degree of similarity between the immigrant group and the dominant group

– The processes of ethnic succession and secondary structural assimilation

– The broad structural changes in the American economy caused by industrialization



Protestant immigrants from northern and western Europe experienced less resistance than the English-speaking Catholic Irish, who in turn were accepted more readily than the new immigrants, who were both non–English speaking and overwhelmingly non-Protestant.

The most similar groups immigrated earliest, and the least similar tended to be the last to arrive, so resistance to any one group of immigrants tended to fade as new groups arrived.

The sheer volume of the immigration raised fears that American cities and institutions would be swamped by hordes of racially inferior, unassimilable immigrants.



Ethnic succession refers to the myriad ways in which European ethnic groups unintentionally affected each other’s position in the social class structure, with each European immigrant group tending to be pushed to higher social class levels by the groups that arrived after them.

The Irish tended to follow northern and western Europeans and were in turn followed by the wave of new immigrants.

– Political Machines—Boss Tweed of Tamany Hall– Labor Unions—Terence Powderly; Triangle Shirtwaist Company;

Mother Jones– The Catholic Church– Other pathways of mobility—crime; sports; entertainment



Changes in the economy and occupational structure shaped the social class position and speed of integration of European immigrants and their descendants—structural mobility.

Job growth in recent decades has been in the service sector, and in white-collar jobs that depend heavily on educational credentials.

Each generation of white ethnics, especially those born after 1925, were significantly more educated than their parents, and many were able to translate that increased human capital into upward mobility in the mainstream job market.


Comparing European Immigrants and Colonized Minority Groups

Clearly, white ethnic groups were in the best position to pursue integration and equality:

– European immigrants entered the United States though the industrializing, urbanizing sectors of the economy

– colonized racial minority groups, remained geographically and socially distant from opportunities for inclusion

– European immigrants’ status as (relatively) free immigrants gave them control of their fate, which, although minimal in many ways, was superior to the decision-making power available to members of the colonized minority groups.


Comparing European Immigrants and Colonized Minority Groups

In their efforts to penetrate the urban industrial labor market, members of racial minority groups often found themselves caught between the labor unions, which excluded them, and the factory owners, employers, and other capitalists, who wanted to exploit them.

The job prospects of the colonized minority groups were further limited by the continuing mechanization of the economy, the same process that tended to benefit white ethnic groups.

As European American ethnic groups have integrated and attained equality, the opportunities for upward mobility in the mainstream economy for racial minorities have dwindled.


Will White Ethnicity Survive?

Absorption into the mainstream was neither linear nor continuous.

– Marcus Hansen (1952) captured this phenomenon in his principle of third-generation interest.

– In the late 1960s and early 1970s, there was a notable increase in the visibility of and interest in white ethnic heritage, or ethnic revival—interest in genealogical roots, and/or ethnic festivals, traditions, and organizations.

– Among its many other causes and forms, the revival of white ethnicity that began in the 1960s was fueled by competition for resources and opportunities.



Today, white ethnic identity is often described as symbolic ethnicity (Gans, 1979; Lieberson & Waters, 1988).

The descendants of European immigrants have choices: they can stress their ethnicity, ignore it completely, or maintain any degree of ethnic identity they choose.

White ethnic identity has become so ephemeral that it may be on the verge of disappearing altogether—“What the grandson wished to remember, the great-grand-daughter has never been told.”



At the same time, white ethnic identities evolving into new shapes and forms.

In the view of many analysts, a new identity is developing that merges the various hyphenated ethnic identities (German-American, Polish-American, etc.) into a single, generalized “European American” identity based on race and a common history of immigration and assimilation.

Embedded in this emerging identity is an understanding, often deeply flawed, of how the white immigrant groups succeeded and assimilated in the past and a view, often deeply ideological, of how the racial minority groups should behave in the present.


Comparing Minority Groups: Immigration vs. Colonization

White ethnic groups success took generations and was made possible not only by their own efforts but also by structural mobility and the expanding educational opportunities provided by the larger society.

The postindustrial economy provides few opportunities for less educated manual laborers, and the promise of mobility for future generations has a distinctly hollow ring in the impoverished, inner-city neighborhoods inhabited by so many American minority groups.


chapter eleven white ethnic groups: assimilation and identity—the twilight of ethnicity? © pine...

Documents

imprint of sage publications

pine forge press

white ethnics

colonized minority groups

unique assimilation

united states

distinct ethnic neighborhoods

industrial revolution