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Fecund Newcomers or Dying Ethnics? Demographic Approaches to the History of Polish and Italian Immigrants and Their Children in the United States, 1880 to 1980
JOHN RADZILOWSKI
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INTRODUCTION | |
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THE MASSIVE WAVE OF immigration to the United States from east-central and southern Europe between 1880 and 1924 remains one of the most significant migration events in American history. The size of this migration was well understood even by contemporaries. However, interest in immigrant demography after the initial act of immigration has been infrequent, if not wholly lacking. This has limited our understanding of the communities formed out of this migration and their impact on U.S. history. |
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This is particularly unfortunate as the large-scale immigration from east-central and southern Europe created very special demographic conditions that not only have shaped the nature of the communities created by this migration but have played a major role in forming contemporary and later scholarly perspectives on those communities. Immigrants from east-central and southern Europe arrived in the United States largely as young laborers, either unmarried or recently married. Unlike immigration from Ireland or Germany, immigration from east-central and southern Europe occurred very intensively within a fairly short period of time. As a result, these immigrants had large numbers of children within the span of a few decades after arriving in the New World. This immigrant "baby boom," which peaked roughly in the years 1915–25, has been largely overlooked by scholars and yet represents an important explanatory tool for understanding the impact of this period of immigration on subsequent U.S. history. |
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Efforts to understand what were once called "new immigrants" generally have emphasized cultural explanations, traditionally revolving around the question of the degree to which immigrants and their children "assimilated" into American culture and society or retained their ethnicity.1 Most recently, this line of inquiry has tended to focus on the degree to which European immigrants and their children were considered (or considered themselves) "white."2 |
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Views of immigrants at the time of their arrival tended to see the massive wave of newcomers as a threat to the American way of life. A wide variety of books and articles raised alarms that the new immigrants were "out-breeding" old-stock Americans and those with preferred ethnic pedigrees in northern and western Europe. In the writing of the time, views of the newcomers had distinct racial, biological, and sexual overtones. Edna Ferber, in her novel American Beauty (1931), contrasted the crude sexual energy of Polish immigrant men with the weakness of the New England Yankees: "These men were very male, too. ... You saw the sinews rippling beneath the cheap stuff of their sweaty shirts. Far, far too heady a draught for the digestion of this timorous New England remnant of a dying people. For the remaining native men were stringly of withers, lean shanked, of vinegar blood, and hard wrung."3 |
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In the decades following World War II, this image of vigorous, young (though racially threatening) immigrants was forgotten, replaced with the image of ethnic communities that were assimilating and/or dying out. They were viewed as communities in which only the old retained significant traces of ethnicity. This was a view countered in the late 1960s and 1970s by proponents of the "new ethnicity."4 |
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