Back to the Melting Pot

...Back to the Melting Pot The Ethnic Myth: Race, Ethnicity and Class in America By Stephen Steinberg Atheneum 277pp $14 95 Reviewed by Stephen J. Whitfield Associate Professor of American Studies, Brandeis, author, "Into the Dark Hannah Arendt and Totalitarianism" "My fellow immigrants," Franklin Delano Roosevelt once began a speech delivered to the DAR, and that is the way virtually all of our fellow Americans ought to be addressed Our government proclaims, e pluribus unum The Statue of Liberty pleads, "Give me your huddled masses yearning to breathe free " At least quadrennially, our politicians are obliged to appeal to certain ancestral loyalties Our courts must decide whether a Scandinavian-American named Bakke was deprived of equal rights when he was denied medical school admission because places were reserved for other minority groups No wonder, then, that "ethnicity" has almost become the new opiate of the intellectuals American history seems to make little sense without acknowledging how our national identity was composed of the most disparate elements any country has ever incorporated Our past cannot be rendered completely without recording the white settlers' conquest of the native Indians, the enslavement of imported Africans and its legacy of racism, or the impact of the 32 million Europeans who disembarked at Ellis Island between 1820-1930 Take the literature of the turn of the century Celebrated books like Jacob Rus' How the Other Half Lives and Upton Sinclair's The Jungle are as fascinating for their portrayal of ethnic struggle as for their searing indictment of poverty and exploitation Even BookerT Washington's "AtlantaCom-promise" (1895), so often interpreted as a surrender to racial segregation, was in fact based on the hope the Southern employers would keep foreign laborers out of Dixie And future historians of our own era are unlikely to ignore the demands for black equality in the 1960s, or the impact of immigrants from Korea, Vietnam, Cuba, Mexico and elsewhere, or the emergence of Kunta Kinte as a household name The Ethnic Myth is a well-argued attempt to deflate some of the exaggerations that heightened interest in this subject has generated Despite the title of his book, Stephen Steinberg does not deny that ethnic awareness exists in contemporary America, nor does he pretend—any more than our elected officials do—that pride in a previous homeland or a certain distinctive heritage has evaporated He simply tries to place in proper perspective the influence that ancestral allegiance exerts Earlier social scientists, believing earnestly in assimilation, overestimated the efficacy of the melting pot Steinberg marshals evidence to demonstrate that, the heralds of ethnicity notwithstanding, now we actually are becoming a more homogeneous society A sociologist who teaches urban studies at Queens College of the City University of New York, Steinberg can make such an argument by saying far less about Asian Americans and His-panics (who comprise the bulk of today's immigrants) than about those who arrived primarily in the 19th century Though his book does not pretend to be comprehensive, its laudable historical focus tends to distort the extent to which the remarkable decline of nativism, not to mention the pervious-ness of the "tortilla curtain" at the Rio Grande, are likely to keep America a multiethnic society More pertinent to Steinberg's thesis is his contention that ethnicity is not the fundamental reason for differences in the status, wealth and power of immigrant groups Ethnic consciousness, he asserts, is hardly so mystical and inaccessible as to defy rational analysis (not that Steinberg accuses any scholar of abandoning rational analysis, because in reputable circles at least, no such social scientist exists) Instead, he claims that historical circumstances and class factors best account for the varying rates of adaptation to the dominant culture among minority groups This effort to anchor the debate in economic history may well be his most distinctive contribution to the understanding of race and nationality in American society The idea of pluralism, Steinberg reminds us, was stimulated by the need to legitimize what the industrial development of the host society had created anyway—a cheap labor force drawn from the ends of the earth, especially from Europe (Neither native Americans nor the involuntary immigrants from Africa were deemed integral to the pluralist ideal) The irony, however, was that even as the ideology of cultural pluralism was being voiced, forces of assimilation were already eroding ethnic variety Between the second and third generations of immigrants, non-English languages were rarely transmitted, and the essence of tradition was presumably lost in translation Public schools did the rest, transforming the enclaves that might otherwise have resisted the norms established by the descendants of those first immigrants from the British Isles As arrivals from Southern and Eastern Europe adapted to Anglo-Saxon culture, prejudice against them and their children diminished But their own resourcefulness in sustaining an authentic sense of continuity declined as well The demands of industrial society, Steinberg implies, are bound to shatter the idols of the tribe "Increasingly, cultural values and life-styles are shaped by influences alien to the ethnic milieu—the mass media and popular culture, on the one hand, and educational institutions committed to universal values, on the other" The priorities of the workplace make neighborhoods into little more than outposts of local color, exotic residues of a past that prompts mostly nostalgia By the third generation...

...Catholics are unlikely to marry spouses who share their ethnic ancestry, and one out of every three Catholics is marrying outside the faith The intermarriage statistics are comparable for Jews Neither worship of the same God nor the delights of a special idiom matter as much as before It is a shared interest in, say, soft rock that may lead to wedlock To cite another relevant bit of popular culture The film The Deer Hunter vibrantly depicts a Russian Orthodox wedding in a small Pennsylvania town-yet when an Army physician in Vietnam later asks the character played by Christopher Walken whether his surname is Russian, the reply is "No American " Steinberg himself may be guilty of exaggerating the velocity of that change, but its direction is clear The most provocative chapters in The Ethnic Myth concern the touchy question of why some minority groups have been more upwardly mobile than others Although they arrived during roughly the same period, for instance, Jews rose more rapidly than Italians The answer in that case, suggests Steinberg, is that the Italian was a con tadmo, an often illiterate peasant who lacked capital and skills, while the Jew was likely to have lived in a city or town even in the Pale of Settlement, and could therefore adjust more readily to the demands of an increasingly sophisticated urban economy Only one fourth as many Jews came to America as Italians and Poles combined, yet in absolute numbers the Jews outnumbered them among skilled workers, and gravitated toward a garment industry which, as luck would have it, was growing much faster than the rest of all American business Steinberg does not entirely neglect the cultural baggage Jews brought along with them in steerage, but he does minimize the influence of a religiously inspired love of learning Here the author's desire for consistency with his economic approach outstrips the need to make an argument plausible as well The Ethnic Myth is on firmer ground in its chapter contrasting Italian and Jewish women with Irish women, who entered domestic service in disproportionate numbers Steinberg explains that this was not the result of any cultural proclivity, but because Irish women tended to immigrate alone Unattached, they found in domestic service a measure of personal security that came with a roof over their heads Since they spoke English, they were also attractive to their employers Significantly, their job choice was not so ingrained as to be transmitted to their daughters Almost three out of every four immigrant Irish women became servants in the United States, but only one in four of their daughters fell into this category in 1900 Steinberg's inclination to find the secret of ethnic differences in a material nexus is least applicable to blacks, as his own evidence in many ways suggests He describes how, after the Civil War, Reconstruction was contrived to keep blacks in peonage, picking cotton and sharecropping Only when World War I stanched the flow of cheap immigrant labor from Europe did Northern cities and factories urge blacks to leave the South Yet the author concedes that racial discrimination and bigotry, and not merely the blacks' lateness in ceasing to be peasants, have a role in the persistence of a growing black underclass unable to share in the opportunities others have seized Unpersuasive, too, is the material the author transposes from part of his previous book, The Academic Melting Pot, to analyze the Kulturkampf earlier in the century between some Ivy League colleges and Jews from Eastern European backgrounds clamoring for admission There the issue was not economic competition, as Steinberg would have it, but a cultural definition of what a graduate from an elite college was supposed to be (as opposed to know) On this point the patriciate eventually yielded—on grounds unrelated to the class antagonisms Steinberg claims to discover beneath the ethnic conflict The Ethnic Myth tackles so many themes that no simple conclusion emerges But Steinberg's application of his thesis—that historical accident and economic pressures rather than cultural heritage, account for the difference in ethnic performance—brings a bracing, if not always convincing, hard-headed-ness to a discussion too often enveloped in a haze of sentimentality At the very least, he has provided a useful corrective to those "culture of poverty'' theories that ignore the failure of the economy to pay a living wage Steinberg also writes well, introducing statistics so suavely that the temptation to skip them is quite resistible In his attention to class antagonisms, Steinberg is manifestly a man of the Left Perhaps his ideological bent kept him from being more discriminating in distinguishing between ethnicity and religion, and more detailed in exploring their relationship In addition, he does not say enough about the political system that allowed minority conflict to ricochet around without touching off the civil wars that have exploded elsewhere Nonetheless, Stephen Steinberg's The Ethnic Myth is a cogent, stimulating presentation of the issues implicit in an open society...