Our Ethnic Strains

...With a brevity possible only to the historian who is on top of his subject, Maldwyn Jones tells the story from 1607 to now in 10 short chapters...

...All this and much more comes through with great force...

...Jones' knowledge is discriminating, his judgments shrewd, and his prose clear and graceful...

...The accommodation of Lutheranism to American Iatitudi-narianism is described skillfully, but there is no mention of a comparable process in Catholicism and Judaism...

...This policy stigmatizes tens of millions of Americans, not to speak of the overwhelming majority of the human race...

...It also plays tricks on the dead...

...that they stimulated the westward movement: that they kept the social structure fluid...

...The political alignments of the 1850s receive adequate space, but the New Deal coalition goes almost unnoticed...

...Thus, he rejects the tripartite division of "colonists," "old immigrants" and "new immigrants...

...His bibliography suggests that he did not read Robert Cross' superb book on liberal Catholicism in America, nor has he considered Hans Kohn's provocative analysis of the origins of American nationality...

...and, without breaking the narrative flow, he analyzes the role of the immigrant in American society and the outbursts of organized xenophobia from the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798 to the Johnson-Reed Act of 1924...

...Like other British historians of America, who don't have the primary sources easily at hand, he has gotten a lot of mileage out of the best secondary sources...

...But what demands attention is not the obvious, but how America evolved as a result of being the major receiving country for the folk migrations set in motion by the expansion of the modern world...

...The tone throughout is that of a sympathetic but detached outsider who is also something of an insider—in short, the tone of a cosmopolitan...

...Irrespective of time and place of departure, most immigrants were uprooted from the land by economic and demographic changes, they made painful adjustments in the new world, and developed similar patterns of group life...

...And so, 15 years after the defeat of the Nazis, the law of the land proclaims, through the quota system, that America has been, is, and intends to remain a Nordic nation...

...Jones is more successful in handling politics, the economy and demography than cultural life...

...that most of them were politically conservative...

...None of these criticisms invalidates the major conclusions of American Immigration...

...that their variety tested and enlarged the 18th-century credo of freedom and equality...

...Yet there are gaps...

...This book will inform, stimulate and even excite the audience it aims to reach...

...Reviewed by Arthur Mann Author, "Yankee Reformers in the Urban Age," ''La Guardia, A Fighter Against His Times" UP TO 40 YEARS ago the most influential writers on immigration were Nordic supremacists who decried immigration as a threat to American nationality and institutions...

...Even President Eisenhower and Vice President Nixon, who apparently favor the quota system, concede (in an election year) that the United States, peopled for some three centuries by 40 million newcomers from nearly everywhere, is unique in its ethnic strains...

...Jones also endorses a growing consensus that the immigrants quickened economic development...

...It might even perform a public service if it fell into the hands of Congress...

...Perhaps he concentrated mostly on how the immigrant altered America because Oscar Handlin, whom he esteems, has already written brilliantly on how America altered the immigrant...

...it frees the author to get at the real, not invidious, distinctions—and their causes—between the Sicilians of the 1890s and the Scandinavians of the 1850s, but also between, say, the Scotch-Irish and the English of the 18th century, or the Irish and Germans of the 19th century...

...Jones owes much to other writers, but he acknowledges that his purpose is to make a synthesis of the best insights and information current in the scholarly community...

...Without slighting the tensions of a multiethnic society, or explaining away such institutions as Tammany Hall, the author writes about the ingathering of the dispossessed as one of the truly great success stories of history...

...and that organized nativism fed on anxieties deriving from national crises of which immigrants were, at most, an incidental cause...

...Their biases underwrote the restrictive legislation of the 1920s, recently codified in the McCarran-Walter Act of 1952...

...This point of view does not obscure differences...