Book Review

Canada and the United States

The aim of this book by Matthew Frye Jacobson is to trace how immigrants to the U.S. from various parts of Europe were constituted as members of the same race. The author is guided by two premises: first, that race is central to the history of his subjects, and second, that it is a product not of nature but of politics and culture. He divides the history of whiteness into three epochs. The first begins in 1790 and runs to about 1840. The 1790 law limiting naturalization to "free white persons" was passed at a moment when color stood out as a mark of status: the only chattel slaves were of African descent, the only "savages" were the indigenous peoples, and most of the rest were British-descended Christians (of the reformed sort). The law expressed the consensus among legislators that geographic origin, religion, nationality, physical type, civilization, republicanism, and fitness for self-government were linked, and for a half-century it presented few problems to those in power.

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The second epoch begins in the 1840s with the massive waves of Irish and German immigration and runs to 1924. During that period, as a result of the new infusions, internal divisions among whites came to the fore, and the monolithic white race of the previous period was fractured into hierarchically ordered distinct white races: Celts, Teutons, Slavs, Hebrews, Mediterraneans, Anglo-Saxons, and so forth. According to Jacobson, it is anachronistic to apply the modem notion of culturally based ethnicity to that phenomenon; Catholicism was biology, and biology was destiny. Races existed on a continuum, and Anglo-Saxons were set off against Irish as well as against Mexicans. But in a period of volatile and contested racial meanings, the logic of Chinese exclusion and imperialism pointed toward the amalgamation of all whites, even as the eugenics movement pointed to the exclusion of some.

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