David A. Gerber

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David A. Gerber | "Yankeys Now"?: Joseph and Rebecca Hartley's Circuitous Path to American Identity—A Case Study in the Use of Immigrant Letters as Social Documentation | Journal of American Ethnic History, 28.3 | The History Cooperative

"Yankeys Now"?: Joseph and Rebecca Hartley's Circuitous Path to American Identity—A Case Study in the Use of Immigrant Letters as Social Documentation

IN RECENT YEARS, there has been an international resurgence of interest among historians in immigrant letters,¹ the documents that almost a century ago were at the interpretive center of The Polish Peasant in Europe and America (1918–1920), the foundational text in immigration studies. William I. Thomas and Florian Znaniecki saw their study ultimately as a means for testing a model of the modernization of the European peasantry. But the genius of their understanding of the subject lay in seeing the Polish peasant immigrant's experience of modernization not simply in terms of its visible manifestations in behavior, but also in the recesses of the peasant's consciousness. In no social location was that experience more revealed than in the letters the immigrant peasant wrote back to Poland for the purpose of maintaining relationships with family that were threatened by long-term separation amidst the difficulties associated with urbanization and industrialization. For even if the goal might be to reunite families in a new world, or ultimately to return to Poland, the future remained uncertain, and nostalgia and loneliness caused time to pass agonizingly slowly, even as the felt need for family solidarity remained unabated.²	1
In the maintenance of these epistolary ties, however, more was at stake ultimately for the peasant than a relationship itself. As I have argued in my recently published study of nineteenth-century British immigrant letters, at stake was the immigrant's self-understanding, for personal identity is founded in the abiding continuity of familiar relationships.³ Thomas and Znaniecki understood this, though their analytical language was not that of post-structural cultural analysis. For them, the peasants' often heart-rending difficulties in preserving their ties through painful exercises of literacy and the uncertainties of postal exchange were a window on the inner world of the individual's experience of modernization, from which a realistic psychology of social change might be derived.⁴	2
Since the publication of The Polish Peasant in Europe and America, the dominant tradition of interpretation of the immigrant letter has departed from Thomas and Znaniecki in that the letter has been used predominantly as a source for social documentation. It has been employed not for the purpose of examining the psychology of ordinary folk experiencing extraordinary social change, but instead to shed additional light on, and add the color of individual experience to, subjects that come to our attention as parts of the conceptualization of the immigrants' narrative from other types of sources and other places in our historiography. Immigrant letters thus are called upon to assist in documenting, for example, the process of immigration; the journey to the land of resettlement; finding employment; the formation of families, domestic economies, and networks; the creation of the immigrant community and its institutions; and political integration and shifting national identities.⁵ Also, the immigrant letter has been the basis of increasingly sophisticated collections of letters, elaborately edited for accuracy and contextualization in biography, local history, and language and dialect.⁶ The gain to our knowledge has indeed been substantial, and the work of historical editing and collection publication has been advanced immeasurably in the production of exquisite books that are a delight to read. But on closer scrutiny, to read documents that were produced to satisfy the cravings of individuals for connections vital to their sense of themselves for other ends than those for which they were produced may come at the cost we have been slow to realize and slower still to investigate. It is this conceptual tension that I wish to explore.	. . .

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