The Columbia History of the American Novel

Immigration to the United States occurred in two waves: the 'old migration' of 1820 to 1860, which numbered about 3.5 million persons, and consisted mainly of Northwestern Europeans including the British, the Irish, and the Germans, who settled primarily in rural areas, building the railroads (along with Chinese working from the West), manning the mines, supplying domestic labor, and opening up the homesteading regions of the far Midwest; and the 'new' or 'great' migration, from 1870 to 1913, which entailed close to 25 million immigrants, including many of British and German descent, homesteaders from Scandinavia and Bohemia, and increasingly large percentages from Eastern and Southern Europe-Russian-Polish Jews, Austrian and Rumanian Jews, Catholic Poles, Southern Italians, Slovaks, Serbs, and Croatians — who came as wage laborers to build and work the industrial Northeast and Midwest and who settled in urban enclaves that were called, pointedly, 'colonies' of the Old World. Of marked cultural distinction but far less conspicuous in number were 23,000 Japanese and 85,00 °Chinese immigrants as well as those of Spanish-Mexican, FrenchCanadian, or French-Creole descent who had been incorporated by annexation and territorial expansion. By the onset of World War I, the United States had been transformed, in Werner Sollors's phrase, from 'a British-dominated, triracial country' into a 'modern, polyethnic, and also increasingly urban nation.'

Compared to the antebellum immigrants, the newcomers of the great second wave were far more numerous, more concentrated in the -380- cities, and — above all — more distanced from the English Puritanism out of which had been woven much of the country's cultural fabric. Their arrival provoked national fascination, at first curious, but increasingly resentful and obsessive. Why had they come and what did they want? What were their folkways, their habits, their concerns — their religions, especially? Didn't they want to become 'like us'? Were they going to be able to succeed, and if so, what then? What would be the future of the 'American way of life' if it was to be rewoven by hands not of Anglo-Saxon extraction?

From the onset of the great migration through at least the early 1920s, the debate over the ethnic transformation of America was carried out more saliently by writers from established Anglo-Saxon families and their cultural allies of Northwestern European descent. The dominant genre was sociological journalism, running the gamut from xenophobia to pluralist philosophy and from tenement reformism to cross-cultural interpretation: from Charles Loring Brace's The Dangerous Classes of New York (1872), Jacob Riis's How the Other Half Lives (1890), and Henry Pratt Fairchild's The Melting-Pot Mistake (1926) to Hutchins Hapgood's The Spirit of the Ghetto (1902), Jane Addams's Twenty Years at Hull House (1910), and the essays of Josiah Royce and Randolph Bourne. But the most resounding assessment of the new ethnic presence came by deed, not word. In 1924, the United States Congress completed passage of a series of laws that drastically reduced immigration, favoring Northwestern Europeans, restricting Southern and Eastern Europeans, and excluding the Chinese entirely as well as all but the tiniest numbers of other Asians.

Well after the golden door of immigration had been closed to a bare crack, the door of ethnic literary mediation remained open to anyone with a claim to the authority of an 'insider.' The marketplace beckoned to immigrant intellectuals, some of whom had been educated in Europe and most of whom had already established themselves in the foreign-language presses; and it beckoned to the offspring of immigrants raised in the United States, many of whom had risen from poverty and even illiteracy to achieve some form of American higher education and most of whom had already been guided toward letters by an old-stock literary mentor, often of national repute. Whatever their institutional credentials, writers from immigrant backgrounds schooled themselves in the national 'ethnicity' debate, -381- with particular attention to prevailing formulas that denigrated their peoples or equated the pursuit of economic self-determination with assimilation and Anglo conformism. It was natural that they were provoked by the stereotypes and the typifying conventions; natural that they would be interested in righting the portraits of the communities left behind and in exploring for themselves developing ethnic agendas.

For those seeking to depict immigrant experience for a mainstream audience, three major genres were available — autobiography, the social science treatise, and fiction in the realist tradition — each requiring varying credentials and offering varying kinds of cultural impact. The classic ethnic novel was an effort, roughly speaking, to split the difference between populist autobiography and hard-core sociology: to exercise the authority of personal experience, yet to make the story speak to a group history; to reach a considerable public, but to reveal to them unexpected, often unhappy, truths. Told at a more or less autobiographical proximity, the classic ethnic novel ranged from reconstructing the earlier years of settlement ('the ghetto' narrative and its rural equivalents) to depicting more recent dramas of passage out of the colony into the middle classes (the 'up-from-the-ghetto' narrative and equivalents), drawing upon the writer's memories of those left behind and the writer's continuing struggle for cultural rapprochement. It was created by reworking the established nineteenth-century genres of realism, naturalism, and regionalism — the literary conventions with which, in decades past, the quest for upward mobility had been depicted. Of the many dozens of books of ethnic fiction that were produced by mid-century, almost all had as their primary motive setting the record straight: to tell representative narratives that either countermanded or contextualized stereotypes, to acknowledge the opportunities but protest the obstacles facing newcomers, and to introduce the public to the debate within ethnic homes and communities over alternative American dreams.

If not best-sellers, most of these narratives circulated conspicuously enough; they were published by respected houses, previewed and promoted in popular magazines and highbrow journals, favorably reviewed by important critics, given literary prizes, purchased for use as screenplays, reprinted by the Book-of-the-Month Club or the Modern Library, and (then as now) anthologized alongside the -382- canonical high modernists. With singular exceptions, the best of these novels have either remained in print steadily since publication or been granted republication as part of renewed academic interest: a process of recovery that began as soon as the mid-century drew to a close (with the earliest efforts of Isaac Rosenfeld, Harold Ribalow, Leslie Fiedler, and others concerned with Russian Jews) and became a central business after the mid-1970s with the opening up of the canon and the growing effort to recover works depicting the social margins.

From the beginning, immigrants of Anglo-Saxon origin, no matter the desperateness of their working or living conditions, were thought to be too much of a piece with the mainstream culture to warrant special concern except as a kind of picturesque footnote, exemplified in such long-buried narratives as Helen Reimensnyder Martin's Tillie, a Mennonite Maid (1904) and Arnold Muller's Bram of the Five Corners (1915). Immigrants from certain little-known places of Eastern Europe were occasionally depicted in autobiographical and biographical narratives — Czech Simon Pollack's The Autobiography of Simon Pollack (1904), Croatian Victor Vecki's Threatening Shadows (1931), Slovakian Thomas Bell's Out of This Furnace (1941), and Edith May Dowe Minister's Our Natupski Neighbors (1916), about Polish Catholic immigrants. Yet these books did not attract much attention because the groups they depict remained amorphous in the national imagination and did not seem to pose too much of a cultural threat (for various reasons having mainly to do with patterns of settlement and interaction). The first accounts of immigration from outside of Europe appeared by the end of the 1930s — most notably, by Jamaican-born Claude McKay, Korean-born Younghill Kang, and Armenian-born William Saroyan — but the novelistic portrayal of these peoples and those of the incorporated Hispanic Southwest remained largely the work of outsiders until after World War II.

Commentators ranging from Malcolm Cowley to Daniel Aaron have noted that writers with immigrant backgrounds began to appear in mainstream letters — journalism, poetry, drama, criticism, sociopolitical commentary — a short time after settlement had begun in earnest and that they did so in numbers reflecting each group's rate of upward mobility, its pursuit of higher education, and its embrace of secular letters. What seems not to have been observed is that ethnic -383- fiction — particularly the novel of cultural mediation (the phrase is Jules Chametzky's) — developed at an alternative pace. The major novels between the wars came from the Jews (especially those from the Russian-Polish Pale), the Scandinavians (especially the Norwegians), the Irish, and the Southern Italians (including the Sicilians), roughly in that chronology, which is not the order of settlement and is accountable only in part by the demographics of mobility. Between the wars the classic ethnic novel was written by and about these four immigrant populations, who were taken to present the most serious cultural and social challenges to the nation at large.

During the years of the migration itself, the national appetite was for testimonials from inside working-class precincts, reflecting the increasing assumption, in the words of a Chicago clergyman in 1887, 'that every workingman is a foreigner.' The market for insider tales of ethnic labor inspired New England-descended and Yale-