A Larger View of Immigration

...He introduced the highest standards of a professional historian, but...

...Reviewed by Nathan Glazer Department of Sociology, Bennington College THIS IS THE SECOND edition of a book originally published in 1941 : since its original publication, the author has become the most important historian of immigration in America, and from his position as Professor of History at Harvard University has helped raise this field of American studies to a high level of distinction and sophistication...

...The history of the later immigrant groups has scarcely been rescued from filial pietism, and one is at a loss to find even the main outlines of the history and adjustment of such large groups as the Poles, Slovaks...

...Boston's Immigrants goes up to 1880...

...This is not to suggest that there is not important work still to be done on the Irish, Germans and Scandinavians, or that there is not room for work of a higher professional caliber on the Jews and Italians...

...But even in this enormously professional historical work he indicated from the beginning his concern for large significance, large tendencies, large generalizations...

...Slovenes and Croats in America...

...All these innovations stemmed from the central conviction that the ethnic origins and make-up of the American population, and the awareness of the fact that more than half of it was not British in origin, must have important consequences for the understanding of the United States...

...It would not be easy to differentiate the social historian from the sociologically orientated historian such as Handlin is, but we might point to such facts in Handlin's work as a remarkably skillful handling of census and other statistics, a strong concern for problems of economic adjustment, social status, class and occupational affiliation, group consciousness and group conflict, and the processes of assimilation and acculturation...

...The historians have favored the older cities (Boston and New York), the older groups (Irish, German, Scandinavian) and the earlier periods (before 1880...

...Handlin has made these orientations a central and important strand in the writing of contemporary history...

...These problems belong to history as much as to sociology, but it is unquestionably true that, for the most part, historians, even historians of immigration, have told their story without a great awareness of these matters...

...Major studies have been added to the history of American immigration by his students, and he himself has written, in the Pulitzer-Prize-winning book, The Uprooted, the most widey read book on the immigrants of recent years...

...He introduced—in the only way it could be introduced into American history, in a professional work—an emphasis on the kind of problems and analyses typical of sociologists...

...And even when they were aware of these problems, they have tended to use the methods which their specialized training makes easiest for them—methods based on the accumulation of specific details from original sources—rather than the methods most important for understanding these problems—the transformation of these details into statistics, and the use of statistics to give a more complete picture...

...it is in effect, therefore, the story of the arrival of the Irish in Boston, their economic adjustment, their conditions of life, the development of group consciousness among them, and the rise of conflict with the native population...

...But a reading of Handlin's book leads me to regret that I have not been able to consult, for my own work, studies of the same superlative quality on the Poles of Chicago, the Slovaks of Cleveland or the Croats of Pittsburgh...

...With this book he established his position as a historian who could write a monograph that would put the monographers to shame...

...When Handlin began his work, Marcus Hansen had already brought into the study of American immigration a point of view which transcended both the efforts of immigrants to defend and enhance their role, or of opponents of immigration to attack and denigrate it...

...perhaps most important, he went beyond the monographic tendencies of the professional historian to try to discover what large meanings might be derived from the remarkable phenomenon of American immigration...

...It is worth pointing out that important areas in the history of American immigration and immigrant groups are as yet almost untouched...

...Handlin has written the best summary of the most important part of his book : "Depressed to the status of helpless proletarians by the conditions of their flight from Ireland and by the city's constricted economic structure, driven into debilitating slums by their position as unskilled laborers, and isolated intellectually by their cultural background and physical seclusion, the Irish saw insuperable barriers between themselves and their neighbors...

...These differences stimulated and perpetuated group consciousness in both immigrants and natives and left the community divided within itself...