·BY THE SAME AUTHOR
Sex Race Ethnicity and Education
(Co-author)
Conflict Permanency Change and Education
(Co-author)
Women-an International Perspective
(Co-author)
Ethnicity Women and Education
(Co-author)

·Immigrants and Ethnics
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·CONTENTS CHAPTER PAGES Vi IX XII 1 2 17 w 41 4 Preface Introduction Notes on Contributors Immigration and Quantification Recent Studies in Post Civil War Immigration RALPH SHOUB The American Achievement A Report from Great Ireland ANDREW M GREELEY The Italian Americans A Bicentennial Perspectives RUDOLPH J VECOLI Carpatha-Ruthenian Resources and Assimilation 1880-1924. A Preliminary Survey RICHARD RENOFF The Ukrainian Community in Obio 1885-1976 G KULCHYCKY The Early Russian Feminists and the Struggle for Higher Education for Women RUTH A DUDGEON Poles in American , A Bicentennial View FRANK MOCHA Ethnicity and Social Control. MICHAEL V BELOK Ethnicity and Educatian Some Sociological Considerations A L FANTA 53 5 79 6 95 7 107 8 118 9 129

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·PREFACE Immigrants and Ethics brings together a collection of papers by distinguished scholars each addressing himself to one immigrant and ethnic group or to aspects of ethnicity All the writers are recognized specialists Thus they bring authority and wide command of the sources to their topics Each is allowed to explore their topic on their own terms and considerable depth The first paper is devoted to an overview of immigration literature It is followed by papers devoted to the Irish, Italians, Poles, Ruthenians and Ukrainians The last two papers discuss important aspects of ethnicity Hopefully, taken collectively they present fresh insights, facts, and interpretations from an interdisciplinary perspective The editor would like to express a debt of gratitude to the authors Their contributions unfailingly display superlative scholarship and literary craftmanship A debt is acknowledged to Andrew M Greeley, Nancy Gallagher Mc Cready and George Connelley foi allowing us to publish their touching poetry MICHAEL V, BELOK

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·INTRODUCTION Recently, there has been a revival of interest in the study of immigrants and ethnics Books and articles have poured forth from the printing presses in increasing numbers One cause has been the increasing interest in their own past shown by the many ethnic groups making up American society But ethnicity has been a far ranging phenomenon and the renewed interest of scholars in ethnic groups may partially be attributed to the disorders of the present Throughout the world, various ethnic groups are once more pushing their claims for recognition Almost no country is free of ethnic conflicts In the United States, the revival of interest in ethnic groups and their immigrant forebearers can be attributed, in part, to the disorders of the 1960's brought on by the struggle of the visible minorities for civil and economic rights As the white ethnics watched the Black, Hispanic Americans, and American Indians utilizing different strategies to achieve greater social, political and economic equality, they too began to adopt some techniques of these groups If there could be Black, Red and Brown power, then there could be Irish power, Polish power, etc Soon there was a revial of interest in the ethnic heritage Not that interest in the history of immigration and the Americans response to it had ever entirely subsided but the revival could be measured in quantitative terms There were more studies of various immigrants groups than there had been for decades A trend was unmistakable , scholars were paying more attention to groups who had been neglected in prior years The yearbooks of the National Council of Social Studies illustrate this trend The yearbook published in 1961, Interpreting and Teaching American History, did not discuss the subject of Immigrant and ethnic history The latest yearbook devoted to American history, The Reinterpretation of American History and Culture, published in 1973 devotes a whole chapter to the literature of Ethnic History written by Ruloph Vecoli, one of the contributors to this volume Furthermore, the Yearbook makes a distinction between white ethnics and the other groups whose differences are primarily one of race ·The present volume, Immigrants, Ethnics and Women, also concentrates on ethnics and immigrants but does pay some attention to the matter of ethnicity and its relationship to social control Immigrants, Ethnics, and Women also is unusual in that considerable space and attention is given to the "new Immigrants," the Italians, Ukrainians, Ruthenians and Poles, groups that usually do not have much space devoted to them in more recent collections of research In fact, the Ruthenians are virtually ignored in most writings on immigrants and ethnics It is hoped that the inclusion of the chapter by Richard Renoff devoted to the Ruthenians will introduce this groups to many who are unaware of them and also stimulate research concerning the Ruthenians Ralph Shoub begins the volume with an overview of immigration research paying particular attention to new research models and techniques used by contemporary historians He is followed by several papers devoted to the ethnic groups Although several of the papers are celebrative in some respects, they do not fall into the error of fileopietism so common in earlier writings about immigrants The authors display the kind of sophistication one has a right to expect from distinguished scholars It is in this respect that the volume diffeis from many of the same genre Andrew M Greeley, a master of empirical research and quantification, writes a beautiful paper on the Irish which celebrates the Irish achievement but does so with subtle insights and solid research His is the only paper dealing with a group that is not of the "new immigration.' Rudolph Vecoli discusses the Italians and again displays the skills of a master historian while moving beyond his role of historian to offer some ideas about the future influence of Italians on American life Renoff presents a great deal of information about the Ruthenians and displays an immense knowledge of these people and an admirable objectivity objectivity George Kulchycky discusses the Polish Americans Finally Michael V Belok discusses ethnicity and social control.

·NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS RALPH SHOUB is a doctoral candidate at Arizona State University, Tempe, and the author of several scholarly articles He has presented papers to several scholarly conferences DR. ANDREW M GREELEY is the Director, Center for the Study of American Pluralism, University of Chicago He is the author of several outstanding books. His latest is The American Catholic. DR RUDOLPH J VECOLI is Professor of History at the University of Minnesota and Director of the Center for Immigration Studies. He is the author of numerous articles and people of New Jersey DR RICHARD RENOFF 18 Professor of Sociology at Nassau Community College and the Editor of Proceedings of the Conference on Carpatho-Ruthenian Immigration He is the author of several articles and has a book in preparation, Celibacy and Schism The Loss of Community among the American Carpatho- Ruthenians DR. GEORGE KULCHYCKY 18 Associate Professor of History, Youngstown State University, Youngstown, Ohio-U S A. He has read papers at regional and national scholarly conferences DR RUTH A DUGEON teaches at Georgetown University and has read papers at scholarly conferences DR FRANK MOCHA teaches at the University of lllinois at Chicago Circle, Chicago and his latest book (in press) is Poles in America Bicentennial Essays DR. MICHAEL V BELOK 1S Professor of Education, Arizona State University He published numerous articles and books His latest book is Conflict, Permanency, Change and Education coauthored with James Van Patten and Joseph Roucek. DR AL FANTA teaches at the College of Education, University of Delaware, Nevark, Delaware, U.S.A He is the author of many papers

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·1 Immigration and Quantification • Recent Studies in Post-Civil War Immigration RALPH SHOUB During the past decade and a half quantitative research dealing with late 19th and early 20th century immigration has generally not engendered the controversy that quantitative studies dealing with the slavery issue have To a great extent the reason for this may be the limited controversiality of the immigration issue itself and also the limited disagreement between the findings of these studies and those of a more descriptive nature Although many of these quantitative studies are still debating the relative importance of the "pull" vs the "push" factors as the dominant stimulant to immigration, more recent research has dealt with immigrant distribution in America, relative income levels of native and immigrant workers, and immigrant voting behaviour The purpose of this paper is to briefly review a sampling of this research and its relationship to the more tradıtional interpretations of these issues The question of whether the immigrant was "pushed" into immigration due to conditions in the sending country or “pulled" by conditions in the receiving country (in this case, the United States) has generally been resolved by the descriptive historian by emphasizing both If he was "pushed" out of his home country by changing political, economic, or social conditions, he was ·2 IMMIGRATION AND QUANTIFICATION attracted to America by the "pull" of better conditions existing here rather than some other location As Maldwyn Jones stated in his survey of American immigration The motives for immigration have been very similar first to last, they have been always a mixture of yearningsfor riches, for land, for change, for tranquillity, for freedom, and for something not definable in words Whenever (the immigrants] came, the fact that they had been uprooted from their old surroundings meant that they faced the necessity of coming to terms with an unfamiliar environment and a new status 1 93 For the economic historian interested in immigration, the debate still continues as to which factor or group of factors was the most significant Richard A Easterlina in his study concerning the influences in European overseas emigration before World War I opted for the importance of the "pull" factors Largely replicating the work of Kuznets and Jerome, Easterlin although considering the importance of population increase and income level in the sending country as factors affecting immigration, concluded that “ the relation (was] not pervasive enough to dominate the picture More significant were the “. fluctuations in the growth of the demand for labor abroad, particularly in the primary destination country, the United States This influence [was] apparent both in short term business cycle fluctuations and the longer Kuznets cycles of 15 to 20 years duration 4 More recently, Maurice Wilkinson, utilizing a neoclassical production and consumer model, has claimed that prior to World War I European migration to the United States was, “ significantly influenced by both employment opportunities in the particular European country and the gain in real income to be achieved by migration to the United States "8 Thus push factors figure significantly in stimulating emigration through both a decrease in employment opportunities and lower relative wages in relation to those offered in the United States In addition to these findings Wilkinson discovered that an inyerse relationship existed between 66 the significance of United States demand for labor and the level of economic development of the European countries "?

·IMMIGRATION AND QUANTIFICATION 3 The push-pull controversy is intensified when one examines studies concerned with specific countries Gallaway and Vedder,8 in examining emigration from the United Kingdom to the United States between 1860 and 1913, generally supported the conclusions reached by Easterlin concerning the relative importance of the “push” factors in international migrations Utılızıng a regression analysis, they found business conditions in the United States explained 27 per cent of the variation in the dependent variable (level of migration) while unemployment in the United Kingdom accounted for only 17 per cent Additional factors such as the * Panic of 1907, which added 6 per cent, wages in the United Kingdom, which added 4 per cent, and "panic” variables, which added 8 per cent, were identified to explain emigration fluctuations Thus, they concluded “ that the 'pull' variables (were] capable of explaining just over 40 per cent of the variation in emigration flows from the United Kingdom to the United States in the period 1860-1913 ", while the "push" factors represented just 21 per cent of the variation John Quigley, 10 however, in examining Swedish emigration between 1867 and 1908 demonstrated that " at least for Sweden, it (was) unfair to conclude that the pattern of emigration was dominated by economic conditions in the United States "l1 Although indications were that the influence of both Swedish agricultural and industrial conditions were as important as corresponding conditions in the United States, Quigley found that the wage variable for Swedish industrial growth was a powerful retardent A one percent increase in industrial wages in Sweden [could] be associated in the short run with a reduction in the level of non-agricultural emigration of over 8 per cent On the other side of the Atlantic, Deither the agricultural nor the industrial wages exerted as strong a 'pull' effect 12 There also appeared to be weak, but consistent, evidence that the success or failure of the Swedish harvest and population pressures measured by the lagged birth rate influenced migration among both agricultural and industrial workers. To illustrate the influence of the push factors, Quigley concluded his study by constructing a counterfactual proposition that relocated Swedish economic development and increased real !

·4 IMMIGRATION AND QUANTIFICATION wages in the 1850's rather than in the 1870's as it had actually occurred He estimated that the annual migration rates during the period 1868 to 1888 " would have been insignificant instead of the observed annual level of about 21,000,"13 had this counterfactual been the case Several variations of the push-pull theme have attempted to explain fluctuations in migration rates by isolating specific factors that seem to be most responsible John Tomaske, using a regression analysis, discovered that “ the relationship between variations in per capita income levels and emigration rates can only be observed when the effects of friends and relatives who had previously migrated are taken into account in the specification of the model "14 Thus, an important factor influencing both migration and spatial distribution of the European immigrant in the receiving country was the availability of creditable information concerning overseas alternatives In a related study, Poulson and Holyfield15 claimed that systematic fluctuations in European migration to the United States could be explained by the potential emigrant's awareness of the discounted value of the costs and returns involved in staying or leaving his native country At the point that the European country began to experience modern economic growth, the returns from migration were most likely to exceed the costs Therefore, changes in relative income between the United States and European countries appeared to be most relevant in explaining the surge in immigration to the United States from most of these countries and the long swings in immigration to the United States from the United Kingdom Probably the most ambitious of the studies concerning factors influencing European migration was Jeffrey Williamson's study16 of the long term influences and impact of immigration Williamson identified three forces that appeared to act in concert in determining European emigration (1) differences in migration responsiveness of various countries (e g, Swedes required greater incentive to migrate than Englisbmen), (2) the industrial structures of various European economies, and (3) the magnitude of industrial ization and population pressure in the sending country The interrelationship of these three factors acting in concert created' what Williamson calls, negative push factors, that tended to retard emi- ·IMMIGRATION AND QUANTIFICATION 5 5 gration from the Northwestern European countries initially and then spread to the Central and Southern European areas in the late 19th and early 20th centuries Using a counterfactual that eliminated these negative push factors by maintaining European employment and living standards at their 1870 levels, Williamson contended that " America would have had a stock of immigrants in 1910 some 20 per cent larger than was in fact the case "17 In the latter half of his article, Williamson constructed four additional counterfactual models to explain the impact and influence of immigration on the United States Responding to Brinley Thomas' position that 6 each crisis of overpopulation was a milestone in the process of building up the industrial strength of America,” Williamson prcsented a counterfactual world with no European “push” factors between 1870 and 1910 He found that total additions to the foreign born in America would have been some 19 per cent larger had push conditions been absent in Europe [but] the real wage in Eastern industry would have been lowered by only one percent either in 1890 or 1910, and industrialization, GNP growth and capital formation rates [would have only been] slightly influenced "18 The second counterfactual involved the impact of the frontier on immigration In the first variation of this model, the Midwest land stock was held constant at its 1870 levels, in the second, the land stock continued to grow at the 4 per cent per annum rates of the early 1870's In both variations, the 1910 figures confirmed that conditions at the frontier had a trivial impact on real wages, job vacancy and thus immigration from Europe "19 Had the land stock remained at the 1870 level, the immigrant population would have been only three-tenths of one percent less than the actual 1910 levels In the third counterfactual, Williamson was concerned with the impact of American demographic forces on immigration In this model he allowed the population of the Northern United States to increase at the rates existent in the early 1870's rather than the decreasing iates that actually occurred between 1870 and 1910 Under this condition the average rate of labor force growth would have decreased by 4 4 percent, but “ the total stock of foreign born would have been altered by only (one) per cent"20 Thus it appears unlikely that the decreasing birth rate ·6 IMMIGRATION AND QUANTIFICATION in the United States had a great deal to do with the increasing flow of immigrants during the period Williamson's final counterfactual proposes an America without immigrants after 1870 In this model he hoped to identify the effects of immigration on real wages, industrialization and the per capita GNP While real earnings would have increased by 11 per cent in Eastern industry between 1870 and 1910 without immigration, the per capita GNP (based on 1870 prices) would have grown only 3 per cent above its actual level and industrialization would have been 67 per cent less than the actual level for 1910 As Williamson points out in the conclusion of his study, an America without immigrants indeed would have grown very differently from the way she actually did in the late nineteenth century The impact, however, would have been felt on the distribution of income and the level of industrialization rather than aggregate per capital income performance 21 A second major area of research in recent quantitative studies dealing with immigration has been concerned with the distribution of the immigrants once they arrived in the United States The Dillingham Commission, created in 1907 to study the “new” immigrants, concluded that the "new" immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe settled in the cities because they were more prone to do so than the "old" immigrants from Northern and Western Europe Marcus Lee Hanson,22 however, explained the migration to the cities by the immigrants as part of a larger urban population shift occurring in most industrialized nations during the period More recently, Maldwyn Jones has identified the lack of capital, the limited interest in and ability to farm, and the lower agricultural wages as factors that influenced the urban rather than rural settlement of the late 19th and early 20th century immigrants 23 Orsagh and Mooney24 have attempted to construct a model in order to explain the dispersion of immigrant labor in the United States between 1880 and 1920 Using the Marshallian demand and supply apparatus, they found that ** employers tended to use more foreign-born labor relative to native labor at higher wage levels,'*25 probably as a means of decreasing labor costs. The immigrants, however, were discovered to be no more responsive ·IMMIGRATION AND QUANTIFICATION 7 to differences in wage levels than their native counterparts The most significant variable, it was found, in influencing the relative geographic distribution of the immigrants was the importance of friends and relatives in the respective areas of immigrant concentration This appears to corroborate Tomaske's findings that were described earlier In regard to the immigrant's supposed propensity to settle in the cities, Gallaway and Vedder26 attempted to test the increasing urbanization thesis that was advanced by the Dıllıngham Commission and to a limited extent implied by Hansen and Jones In their study Gallaway and Vedder found that not only did the "new" immigrants show less tendency to congregate in the cities than the "old" immigrants, they were less prone to " congregate in urban areas relative to the native-born "27 Gallaway, Vedder, and Shukla,28 in a more recent article, analyzed the distribution of immigrants in relation to economic factors They found that turn of the century immigrants tended to have been, quite responsive to interstate income differentials, job opportunity , the presence of friends and relatives in a state, the existence of ports of entry and population density Very simply put, the settlement patterns of immigrants in this period do not appear to be the result of ignorant, random behaviour but seem to reflect instead a good deal of purposive rational action on their part Contrary to Orsagh and Mooney, and in some respects contradicting Gallaway and Vedder's previous study, Gallaway, et al found that, native boin Americans tended to migrate to the less densely populated states whereas immigrants were inclined to locate in the more densely populated states This indicate[d] a greater tendency for the foreign-born to locate in the more urbanized areas than was true for the native-born 30 Thus, from this study it would appear that the immigrant was more sensitive to wage levels than was the native-born In regard to the apparent contradiction with Gallaway and Vedder's previous study, it would appear that Gallaway, et al chose to deal with the immigrants collectively rather than as "old" or "new" source immigrants. 29 .

·8 IMMIGRATION AND QUANTIFICATION The economic issues related to immigrant dispersion raise another area that has intrigued historians of immigration, that of immigrant income and its relative level in comparison to nativeborn workers The standard interpretation of these questions found in both Handlin31 and Jones, 32 and more recently in Taylor33 is that the immigrant worker was paid far less for his services than the native-born worker and was generally exploited As Handlin states, “the immigrant was an exploited laborer but, as qualified by Jones,“ that was simply a reflection of the fact that immigrants tended to enter the poor-paid occupations "34 Robert Higgs35, however, in his study of race, skills, and earnings, questions whether there exists any evidence to support the hypothesis of ethnic discrimination Using information collected by the Immigration Commission in 1909 for workers in mining and manufacturing, Higgs attempted to show that skill differentials provided an adequate explanation for earnings differentials among various immigrant groups and native workers Hypothesizing that literacy and the ability to speak English were the skill variables most influential in affecting wage levels, he employed a multiple regression to the Commission's data His findings revealed that the two variables explained almost fourfifths of the variance in average earnings among the groups A percentage point gain in literacy-- [his] proxy for general skills — was about twice as important as the same gain in the ability to speak English, [and] the ability to speak English was almost perfectly correlated with the duration of a group's residence in America 36 The major limitation to Higg's findings, and one that he briefly touches upon, is the difficulty in making such a comparison based on weekly earnings The immigrant laborer, much like present day minority workers, was most sensitive to the ups and downs of the economy The “new” immigrant since he was the most recent arrival was usually layed off first and rarely was able to get a full year's work A more seriously flawed study is Peter Hill's 37 investigation of the relative skill and income level of foreign born and native workers between 1840 and 1920 Hill claims that « migrants, instead of being an underpaid, exploited group, generally held an economic position that compared very favourably to the im- ·IMMIGRATION AND QUANTIFICATION 9 that of the native-born members of the society "38 Hill's selection of data, however, seriously impairs his conclusions First, in attempting to distinguish between the relative wage rates of native and immigrant labor, his choice of the Sixth Annual Report of the Commissioner of Labor (1890) has over 25 per cent of the sample families (534) located in Southern states Since these states not only had lower incomes but also fewer immigrants, it is likely that the income levels computed for the nativeborn could have been composed of upto 40 per cent of these Southern workers Secondly, the ethnic origins of the foreign born sample (1196 families) puts this particular portion of the study additionally in question Over 60 per cent of this group came from English speaking countries, while an additional 23 per cent came from Germany If there is any validity to Higgs' findings presented earlier, then one would certainly have to question any comparison between Southern literacy rates as compared to those of German and English speaking immigrants In a latter part of the study Hill again attempts to show the relative similarity between the wages of the native and foreignborn worker in 1901 Again his sample is flawed, in this instance, because nearly 90 per cent of the foreign-born workers come from "old" immigiant sources There are no recent descriptive studies, to my knowledge, that contend that immigrants from Northern and Western Europe were exploited any more severely than the native worker, with the possible exception of the Irish during the first half of the 19th century The recent emphasis has nearly always been on the “new” immigrant from Southern and Eastern Europe Thirdly, in attempting to show that the total family income for the foreign born workers was 3 per cent higher than that of the native worker, Hill fails to see the social and economic implications of this difference in relation to the well-being of the native and foreign-born family While the native-born family could generally sustain itself on the husband's income, the foreign-born family, which was 10 per cent larger and whose head was earning 6 per cent less, was forced to supplement its income by having additional members of the family employed In purely economic terms, aside from the social implications, this meant that at least ·10 IMMIGRATION AND QUANTIFICATION > some of the children were forced to abbreviate their schooling and seek employment, thus limiting their upward mobility as adults In relation to this aspect, Cohen39 found that Italian girls in New York City in 1920 showed a marked drop off in school attendance after the age of fifteen and high absentee rates previous to this age in order to supplement the family income Finally, Hill in attempting to compare the relative skill and income levels of native and foreign-born workers between 1870 and 1920, again comes to questionable conclusions For example, he finds it quite surprising that “ the native-born had a greater portion of their labor force in the unskilled category than the foreign-born 40 It should not be all that surprising when one includes Blacks and the children of immigrants in one's data When he does provide a seriously abbreviated table that includes only native-born whites, one finds that the percentage of unskilled native-born workers drops by over 7 per cent in 1890 while the number of skilled workers increases by nearly 6 per cent Again the problem of viewing the entire foreign-born collectively distorts the traditional interpretation since nearly 50 per cent of all foreignborn found in the cities in 1920 were from 'old' immigrant sources Thus to argue, as Hill does in his conclusion, that " the innigrants did not differ markedly in any economic sense from the native-born and probably adjusted quite rapidly to economic opportunities in the United States,"41 is to alter the issue so drastically that the study adds very little to our knowledge in this area The final major area of recent quantitative research concerns the immigrant's political behavior The standard descriptive interpretation is best summarized in Maldwyn Jones That the mass of immigrants were extremely conservative in politics was attributable to their ſundamental pattern of thought It was not so much perhaps that their preponderantly peasant origins bad bred an attitude of acceptance which remained with them even in the New World, had that been the case, the majority would never have crossed the Atlantic Nor was submission to clerical leadership a universal factor It was rather that their political inexperience, and the need for immediate practical help imposed upon them by circumstance, combined to prevent their accepting, or even grasping, the strange new assumption that politics was a ·IMMIGRATION AND QUANTIFICATION 11 sphere wherein the general good might be realized through common action Reform thus remained to them a remote and fanciful panacea, irrelevant to their needs 42 Most recent quantitative studies concerned with ethnic political behavior during the latter half of the 19th century and the early part of the 20th century would question mnch of Jones' interpretation, particularly that immigrants had difficulty accepting, or even grasping, the strange new assumption that politics was a sphere wherein the general good might be realized through common action Reform, for many ethnic groups, was far from irrelevant and hardy a panacea In many instances reform was an intrusion on the lives and a cause for "common action" to protect their "general good" Roger Wyman's43 study of Wisconsin ethnic groups and the election of 1890 illustrates this most succinctly Wyman's detailed, statistical analysis of the retuins for this election, revealed that although the McKinley tariff issue was in part responsible for the loss of thousands of votes by the Republicans, of equal importance, particularly in the eastern section of the state, was the Bennett Law This supposed reform that required compulsory attendance for every school age child in some public or private day school also insisted that specified areas of the elementary curriculum be taught in English Viewed as an attack on various ethnic groups and particularly the Germans who maintained their own school system, Wyman discovered that either the tariff or the Bennett Law would have been sufficient for the Republicans to lose the state As it was, the resulting landslide, intensified by the interaction of the two issues, caused a shift of thousands of German Protestants from the Republican to the Democratic camp and continued to affect elections until 1896. Frederick Lueble's 44 study of German voting behavior in Nebraska between 1880 and 1900 discovered similar voting patterns existing there In general, what he found was that, the fewer interpersonal contacts that an immigrant had with members of the host society, the slower was his rate of conformance to its norms and standards Conversely, if an immigrant had numerous contacts with native Americans, he could be expected to assimilate rapidly "45 In testing his hypothesis, Luebke analyzed the biographies of ·12 IMMIGRATION AND QUANTIFICATION As in to purge 600 predominantly middle class persons of German stock He found that occupation and location of residence (urban or 1uial) were the least reliable indices of party identification, followed closely by economic factors The most reliable measure of immigrant voting behavior was found to be church membership Those immigrants that continued to maintain contact with distinctly ethnic churches tended to be sympathetic to the Democratic Party, while those that attended churches with predominant native-born parishioners tended to lean toward the Republicans Wisconsin, local issues of an eth nocultural nature solidified much of the German vote in the 1890's behind the Democratic Party and continued throughtout the decade and into the 20th century Paul Kleppner'546 social analysis of Midwestern politics between 1850 and 1900 replicates many of Luebke's findings, particularly in regard to the importance of religious affiliation and its effect on political behavior He concludes that much of the political conflict during the period was the result of pietistic gioups of political activists that hoped, through united action, “ society of fungodly' acts of behavior, eliminate the 'sins of intemperance and Sabbath desecration and, through the agency of their public schools, to socialize the children of the 'sinners' into a 'righteous' value system "47 Opposing the “moral reforms" of the pietists, the ritual. ists“ distinguished spiritual from secular activities and did not view as sinful those social costoms against which the pietists inveighed "48 During the 1870's and 1880's, conflicts between the two groups persisted over local and state "reform" issues, with each group using its respective political party as a vehicle to protect its values What occurrded during this period was an increasingly strong Democratic Party and a splintering of the Republican Party into third parties The condition persisted until the economic traumas of the early 1890's allowed the Republican's to coalesce their power and regain control of the area during the later half of the decade Richard Jensen's 49 study of social and political conflicts in the Midwest during the 1888-1896 period attempts to analyze the political reformulation that Kleppner identified and generally supports Klepper's findings Again, Jensen discovered that, The dominant forces that animated the electorate were ·IMMIGRATION AND QUANTIFICATION 13 party loyality and, more fundamentally, religion Only in two grave circumstances did numbers of voters fail to support their traditional party They did this, first, if the old party giossly disappointed them, usually in an economic crisis The second circumstance came when outside loyalties— religious, ethnic or ideological- conflicted with party loyalty 50 Since both conditions existed during the period, they provide a valuable matrix for interpreting the political upheavals that ensued Finally, John Alls wang'$51 study of ethnic politics in Chicago between 1890 and 1936 provides an in-depth analysis of immigrant political behavior over an extended period of time The immigrant in Chicago during the 1890's, according to Allswang, displayed a political behavior that seems most consistent with Jones' position stated earlier Most of Chicago's immigrant populace at that time could not vote and almost all of [them] were concerned primarily with surviving in a hostile environment, as such they were a rather passive force and one which politicians tended to take for granted . "52 By 1930, however, these groups had solidified and were able to reshape Chicago politics, nearly irradicating the Republican hold on the city that had existed since the 1890's The factors that led to this striking political shift appeared to be concentrated in what Allswang labels the critical period, 1928 to 1932 It was during this period that ethnically attractive and attentive national and local politicians began to appear, the Democratic Party began to take a positive stand on issues of ethnic concern , ethnics began to appear on party tickets and receive patronage positions, local political corruption involving Republican office holders was exposed and the Democratic Party organization solidified and became an efficiently run machine As Allswang points out, in his conclusion, however, an effort to isolate the variables of political behavior must not lead to oversimplification of the complexities of political relationships and the elements of irrationality in political decision-making by individuals and by groups Just as the study of political behavior which ignores quantitative tools cannot possibly be complete, so too is a study limited by an ·14 IMMIGRATION AND QUANTIFICATION ignoring of the irrational and subjective forces which are always present 53 In the preceding pages an attempt has been made to review some of the more recent studies of immigrants and immigration that have employed quantitative techniques for the most part, these studies have generally not challenged existing interpretations concerning these areas The work of Williamson, however, and the spate of recent political studies have presented new questions for investigation in regard to the immigrants' impact on America Continued studies of this quality should afford the historian a much clearer picture of the importance of immigration in shaping 20th century American life FOOTNOTES 4. Ibid, 1 Maldwyn Jones, American Immigration (Chicago University of Chicago Fress, 1965), pp 4-5 2 Richard A Easterlin, "Influences in European Cverseas Emigration Before World War I," Economic Des elopment and Cultural Change, IX (3 1963), pp 331-351 3 Ibid , 341 348-49 5 Maurice Wilkinson, "European Migration to the United States An Econometric Analysis of Aggregate Labor Supply and Demand," Review of Economics and Statistics, LII (3 1970), 272-279 6 Ibid, 277 7 Ibid 8 Lowell E Gallaway and Richard K Vedder, “Emigration from the. United Kingdom to the United States 1860–1913," Journal of Economic History, XXXI (4 1971), 885–897 895-896 10 John Michael Quigley, “An Economic Model of Swedish Emigration," Quarterly Journal of Economics, LXXVI (1 1972), 111-126 11 Ibid, 124 12 Ibid, 123 13 Ibid, 126 14 John A Tomaske, “The Determinants of Intercountry Differences in European Emigration 1881–1900," Journal of Economic History, XXXI (4 1971), 853 (84 -853) Is Barry W Poulson and James Holy field, Jr, “A Note on European Migration to the United States A Cross Spectral Analysis," Explorations in Economic History, XI (2 1974), 299–310 9 Ibid, > ·IMMIGRATION AND QUANTIFICATION 15 16 Jeffrey G Williamson, "Migration to the New World Long Term Influences and Impact," Explorations in Economic History, XI (3 1974), 357-- 389 17 Ibid, 377 18 Ibid, 381 19 Ibid, 382 20 Ibid , 384 21 Ibid , 387–388 22 Marcus Lee Hansen, The Immigrant in American History, (New York Harper & Row, 1964), pp 3–29 23 Jones, American Immigration, p 214 24 Thomas J Orsagh and Peter J Mooney, “A Model for the Dispersion of the Migrant Labor Force and Some Results for the United States, 1880 1920," Review of Economics and Statistics, LII (3 1970), 306-312 25 Ibid, 311 26 Lowell E Gallaway and Richard K Vedder, “The Increasing Urbanization Thesis— Did (New Immigrants to the United States Have a Particular Fondness for Urban Life ?" Explorations in Economic History, VIII (e 1971), 305-319 27 Ibid, 316 28 Lowell E Gallaway, Richard K Vedder, and Vishwa Shukla, "The Distribution of the Immigrant Population in the United States An Economic Analysis," Explorations in Economic History, XI (2 1974), 213—226 29 Ibid, 223-224 30 Ibid, 225 31 Oscar Handlin, The Uprooted (New York Grosset & Dunlop, 1951) 32 Jones, American Immigration 33 Philip Taylor, The Distant Magnet, (New York Harper & Row, 1972) 34 Handlin, The Uprooted, p 195, Jones, American Immigration, p 313 35 Robert Higgs, "Race, Skills, and Earnings American Immigrants in 1909," Journal of Economic History, XXXI (2 1971), 420-428 36 Ibid, 426 37 Peter J Hill, "Relative Skill and Income Levels of Native and Foreign Born Workers in the United States," Explorations in Economic History, XII (1 1975), 47-60 38 Ibid, 48 39 Miriam Cohen, "Italian Immigrant Women and Their Daughters," (paper presented at the 5th biennial convention of the American Studies Association, San Antonio, Texas, November 7, 1975) 40 Ibid, 56 41 Ibid, 60 42 Jones, American Immigration, pp 314-315

·16
IMMIGRATION AND QUANTIFICATION
43 Roger E Wyman, “Wisconsin Ethnic Groups and the Election of 1890," in
Quantification in American History, ed by Robert P Swierenga (New
York Atheneum, 1970), pp 239-266
44 Frederick C Luebke, Immigrants and Politics (Lincoln University of
Nebraska Press, 1969)
45 Ibid , 180
46 Paul Kleppner, Cross of Culture (New York The Free Press, 1970), pp
239-266
370
48 Ibid
49 Richard Jensen, The Winning of the Midwest (Chicago University of
Chicago Press, 1971)
50 Ibid,
51 John M Allswang, A House for All Peoples (Louisville University Press
of Kentucky, 1971)
52 Ibid,
205
53 Ibid , 210-211
47 Ibid,
X11-XIV

·The American Achievement. A Report From Great Ireland ANDREW M GREELEY Somewhere in the Icelandic saga of Eric the Red, that marvelous character (and himself doubtless seven-eighths Irish) sails beyond Iceland and beyond Greenland to a place which he refers to as “Great Ireland," a great land across the sea already inhabited by Irish monks If we are to take Eric the Red at his word and, of course, we must- then substantially after the Holy Navigator Brendan and substantially before that "Eyetalian" fella (to use Jimmy Carter's pronunciation) Christopher Columbus there was an Irish settlement somewhere on the North American mainland Serious scholars will tell you that Great Ireland, if it existed at all, was probably in Newfoundland or Nova Scotia , but those of us who really understand such things know better Great Ireland was either Queens in New York or Cook County in Illinois Let me make it clear before I begin that if I refer to the Irish in North America as “Great Ireland" I intend no qualitative comparisons, only quantitative There are in Great Ireland 22 million people who claim to be Irish--presumably most of them have some justification for the claim. This is five times as many, give or take a few million, perhaps, as there are on this ancestral isle As to qualitative matters ah well, those of us from Great ·18 THE AMERICAN ACHIEVEMENT Ireland will be very modest indeed We have a long way to go to catch up with "Little Ireland" Before I set about my principal task of describing the economic and social achievement of the American Irish and the costs of that achievement, let me clear away the grounds by making some preliminary observations First, Bernard Shaw once said that England and the United States were two nations separated by a common language If I may modify his paradox, Great Ireland and Old Ireland are two nations separated by a common heritage, and if the two Irelands are to understand one another (to say nothing of the other Irelands that have sprung up in England, Canada, New Zealand, Australia, and all the other places of the world to which the Irish made pilgrimage), we must be conscious of those things about which we differ I am always struck when I get off the plane at Shannon or Dublin that everybody in Ireland looks Irish It is like I am back home on the south side of Chicago except that the Slavic, Latin, Teuton, and Anglo Saxon faces are all gone But each time I must make the mental adjustment to the fact that the people at the airport may look like the crowd that used to come pouring out of Christ the King Church in my neighborhood in Chicago in the 1950s and 1960s, and in many critical respects they are the same kind of people, but they have had different experiences for the last hundred years. If I wish to understand them and they wish to understand me, we must be clear about these different experiences The first thing to note is that while there has been a stream of Irish immigration to the United States up to the present, most of the immigration was finished by 1900 Eighty per cent of the Irish Catholic population in the United States are third or fourth generation, which is to say that their grand-parents or their great grandparents were the immigrants That means that many of our predecessors left Ireland quite unaffected by what I take to be two of the most critical cultural influences that shaped contemporary Ireland, the Celtic revival and the political conflicts that led to the emergence of the Republic of Ireland My own grandparents, as far as I can calculate, left about the time of the Land League, they were certainly gone before the fall of 'arnell, and knew, for ·THE AMERICAN ACHIEVEMENT 19 the most part, only what they read in American newspapers about the political history of Ireland after the turn of the century What's more, they had their own political and cultural problems in the United States, and while some of my parents and grandparents' generation may have bothered to be interested in what was going on in the home country, it was an interest from a distance for the most part More recent Irish immigrants to the United States often complain to me about the low levels of interest among the American Irish in either the Irish literary heritage or (depending on the immigrant's particular cause) the political struggles in the north My answer to such complaints is that most of us were gone before the Easter Rising, indeed long before the Irish language revival For us, these events took place in another country, we had more than our hands full in the country that was now our own I do not mean, as I hope to demonstrate in this paper, that we have ceased to be Irish, but our experience of the last eighty to one hundred years has not been the same as yours On both sides of Brendan's ocean, we ought to be clear about that Secondly, I will limit my remarks today to that slightly less than half of the Irish-American population that is Catholic I do so neither to slight the contributions of the so-called Scotch-Irish to American life (more presidents, according to some counts, than other ethnic group, for example), nor do I intend to slight the contributions made by Protestant citizens in the Republic of Ireland I make my decision for two reasons first of all, it would appear that most of the Irish Protestant immigration came before 1800, and that this so-called "Scottish-Irish" group had a very different cultural and historical background than the later migrations of "mere Irish”, most of whom were Irish Catholic (as still are most of their descendants) Also there is very little literature available about Irish Protestants in the twentieth century Paradoxically enough, they are a relatively unknown segment of the American population, perhaps in part because they tend to live in southern rural and mountainous districts To try to talk about these two groups with different cultural backgrounds and different experiences in American life in the same talk would confuse and obscure the issue, I think So I shall limit myself to the perhaps ten million Irish Catholics in the United States, virtually all of whose ancestors migrated from ·20 THE AMERICAN ACHIEVEMENT what is now the Republic of Ireland (and the Catholic districts of the Six countries) and who came from the late 1840s to the late 1890s for the most part. Thirdly, there are many different ways to judge the achievements of a people My concern as a sociologist is not with the individual but with the general population I do not intend for a minute to deny the achievement of artist, the poet, the tycoon, the general, the entertainer, the athlete, the novelist, my concern as a professional sociologist and as a speaker today is with the ordinary people and their efforts to climb out of poverty and misery, to overcome the obstacles of oppression, bigotry, and fear, and find a new and better life for them selves and their children To anticipate one of my majort heses, the economic and social achievement of the American Irish is one of the most remarkable accomplishments in social history My final prelim inary remark has to do with terminology I intend to make use of four tool words” in stating my theses А "tool word” can have many different meanings and a writer is free to attach any one of the various available meanings that suit him so long as he is precise about which meaning he is using writer has the right to ask his readers to accept the fact that he is using his tool word only in the narrow sense in which he defines it, and presumably the rea de r will extend to writers the privilege of defining their own terms My four terms (a) Population By population" I mean the collectivity of people of whom a given attribute can be predicated without any implication that the mermbers of this collectivity relate to one another in any institutionalized or self-conscious way When I speak of the Irish American population, I mean that group of Americans who when asked their nationality background will say "Irish" and when asked their religion will say “Catholic" (6) Community By “community” I mean a population insofar as it is institutio na Zly organized or psychologically self consch- А ous (c) Culture. By "culture” I mean, in this particular paper at any rate, those characteristics of a population on which its members have higher or lower mean scores than do members of other populations on measures such as family structure, the nature of ·THE AMERICAN ACHICVEMENT 21 interpersonal styles, political propensities, attitudes and values (particularly those concerning the ultimate nature of reality), eating and drinking patterns, attitudes toward child-rearing, etc, etc (d) Heritage By "heritage” I mean self-conscious culture, that is, a person is aware of his heritage when he realizes that in some respects his culture is different from that of other populations and when he understands and appreciates the most important, most significant, and most excellent creations of his cutural history Now, after this all too lengthy preliminary, I am in a position to state my thesis The Irish population has flourished economically and socially in the United States, but the Irish community is loosely organized, if at all, and only intermittently strong in its self-consciousness The Irish culture has persisted, indeed somtimes with remarkable tenacity, but self consciousness about the Irish heritage is almost non-existent However, because of the survival of an unself-conscious Irish culture, there is always room for a revival of the heritage and some signs that it is in fact reviving I shall say little in my remarks today about the institutional organization of the Irish-American community except that it ought to be self-evident that there are no national organizations or journals which speak either for or to more than small segments of the Irish-American population First of all, then, the facts of the social and economic achievement of the American Irish They can be stated rather briefly the Irish Catholics in the United States are the most successful economically, occupationally, and educationally of any of the Gentile groups in American society The national average in educational attainment is 11 5 years, for the Irish Catholics it is 12 5 years (one-tenth of a year higher than that of the British Protestants, though less than the Jewish attainment of 14 0 years) On a scale running from zero to one hundred, the national occupational prestige score is 40, the Irish Catholic score is 44, again higher than any other Gentile ethnic group in American society (British Protestant score 43) though less than the Jewish score of 48 In income, Irish Catholic annual family income is $2473 above the national average less than the $3387 above the ·22 THE AMERICAN ACHIEVEMENT national average for Jewish families but substantially more than the $401 above the average for Biitish Protestants Let me fill in with some technical comment for the social scientists who may be lurking in the audience We are working with a national probability sample of 18,000 respondents, the largest ever used in religio-ethnic research in the United States The comparisons being made are limited to whites (so the Protestant average is not pulled down by the lower income and educational levels of black Protestants), and we have taken into account the possibility that the concentration of the Irish in cities in the northeast and middle west sections of the country might have given them some disproportionate geographic advantage Finally, the superior achievement of the Irish in income does not result from the fact that there are more wagearners among the Irish families than in other families These data run counter to much of the conventional wisdom about Irish Catholics in the United States, indeed, the data are at variance with the conventional wisdom among many of the Irish themselves Such distinguished American-Irish commentatois as Daniel P Moynihan and William Shannon have lamented the failure of the American Irish to be economically, socially, and educationally successful Many of the Irish and non-Irish wiiters on the subject have evolved all kinds of complex explanations for the economic "failure” of the American Irish, including rigid church control, lower middle-class respectability, and, of course, “the cieetur” Many such writers (though scarcely Ambassador Moynihan) have not bothered yet to try to find an explanation for the Irish success which this data suggests Indeed, not a few of them reject it out of hand One crypto-Irishman on the Harvard faculty (his name doesn't brand him, although, if you're good at such things, his face surely does) told me that he once attended a Harvard faculty dinner party in which the report containing these findings was ridiculed as being patently absurd (Let me simply note here that oui findings are unassailable and that no competent specialist in demography would ever expect them to be reversed ) What's more, it would appear that the Irish success in the United States goes back a long time Our data enabled us to estimate that college attendance rates for Irish Americans was high ·THE AMERICAN ACHIEVEMENT 23 as far back as the First World War At that time the national average for college attendance of young people of college age was 17 per cent, but one-quarter of the Irish Catholics who came of age in that era went to college, and the national college attendance rate for Irish Catholics has been substantially above the national average ever since At present a little more than two-fifths of American young people in their twenties have attended college, but three fifths of the Irish Catholics have, which is an attendance rate approximately that of American Episcopalians It is perhaps the misfortune of the American Irish that the group to which they have always been compared is the Jews, whose success in American society has been even more spectacular But the Jews, while victims of persecution and discrimination in eastern Europe, were a literate, urban, or at least town people, many of them had several generations of background in small commercial activites The overwhelming majority of the Irish, however, were land-hungry iural proletarians In the first decades of the immigration, at any rate, the Irish were often illiterate and even non- English speaking or speaking English only as a second language Comparisons are odious - especially when they are between two groups that have fought, cooperated, competed, and joined hands in a complex relationship in the cities and in the Democratic party of the United States One can simply say that the Irish have not been as successful as the Jews, but neither has anyone else, and the Irish are more successful than any other Gentile group in the United States Who would have thought it? In fact, who believes it? My second point is that a very heavy price has been paid for this achievement To detail the nature of this price, let me sketch out very quickly what I take to be four critical components of the Irish heritage- hoping that your reverences will excuse me for drastically oversimplifying First, I take it that most of the things that shaped modern Europe did not happen in Ireland Therefore the line between Irish culture- stories, poetry, language, music, dreams- and the remote past is cleaner, purer, and more direct that it is in most European countries Ireland was never invaded by the Romans, the Teutons, or Goths It was far distant from the religious controversies of the early councils of the church, it was relatively ·24 THE AMERICAN ACHIEVEMENT uninfluenced by the Reformation, the Renaissance, the French Revolution, and, until very recently, the Industrial Revolution The ancient ways survived much longer in Ireland than in any other place in western Europe For example, it seems that our ancient ancestors had far more extensive vocabularies than we moderns do They may not have been able to read and write, but they had much richer and more flexible ways of expressing their thoughts to one another In the modern world this has been lost The typical human vocabulary for ordinary usage is about 4,000 words, but among the Irish speaking in the west of Ireland, it is 6,000 words, and the closer one gets to the Gaeltak, the more words one has in one's vocabulary, The love affair with words that is part of being Irish, and to a very considerable extent part of being Irish American, represents a direct line to the very ancient and very rich past That this old Irish culture was worth anything began to be appreciated only with the Celtic revival that began around 1900 I would note again that by that time most of our ancestors had left the country My second comment is that Irish politics has rarely been the politics of ideology and issue but of loyalty, friendship, coalition, compromise, consensus (this despite Ireland's history of revolts, which were exceptions) My friend and colleague Professor Emmet Larkin has pointed out that the modern Irish political style grew up in the middle nineteenth century when men like Daniel O'Connell and, later, Parnell combined the Whig skills of the English parliament with west of Ireland clan loyalty Larkin points out, appropriately, I think, that this was precisely the kind of political style that would prove indispensable in American urban politics Contrary to popular belief, many of the Famine immigrants came not knowing the language necessarily but knowing politics, which was, in fact, more important My third comment is that the Irish Catholic tradition is very ancient, perhaps the oldest in Europe It is thoroughly Catholic, of course, but also very, very Irish, which makes it also unique and special (Incidentally, I do not mean by "Ilish Catholic tradition" the set of rigid pieties that some people equate with it, As Larkın has pointed out, this is mostly a middle nineteenthcentury addition to a much older religious tradition) In truth we don't know how Ireland was converted, King Leary of Tara was not, after all, converted by Patrick, and one hundred and ·THE AMERICAN ACHIEVEMENT 25 fifty years later, his descendant, King Dermot, was still not a Christian By the time the great missionary saints like Brendan and Columkılle set forth to other countries, Ireland was still probably only half Christian Yet it is the only country in Europe to become Christian without conflict, without martyrs, without compulsion Slowly, gently, it would seem almost without knowing it, the land became Catholic As the result of this gradual and gentle change, much that was good and rich and wonderful in pre-Christian Irish paganism was preserved For example, the Celtic cross was originally a fertility symbol The monks did not throw it out, they merely used it to represent Jesus and Mary and the reflection of the unity of masculine and feminine in God We also know that the Brigid cross, which I am wearing today, is an ancient Indo European sun symbol that represents the wheel of the sun moving back and forth across the sky The pre-Christian goddess Brigid was the goddess of the sun, and the cross was her symbol Her feast was February 1 and her sacred fire burned in Kildare Conveniently enough there was also a Christian Brigid, who wears on her ieligious habit (and on the ancient Celtic brew, be it noted) the sun symbol The Christian Brigid's feast 18 February 1 and her monastery just happened to be in Kildare To make the tie-in with the femininity of God just about perfect, at least some of the early Irish Christians, not completely cured of their pre-Christian past, thought that Brigid might just possibly be the Virgin Mary reincarnate a nice touch if theologically untenable There was a very stiong strain of penitential discipline in Irish monasticism (Many writers today think that its rigors were exaggei ated in order to impress the Romans in the controversy over the dating of Easter- and aftei all, exaggeration is an Irish trait with which we are not unfamiliar Incidentally, the Irish lost the fight with Rome over the dating of Easter On historical grounds it is now clear the Irish were right-we usually are, though it's only official when a Roman admits it!) There was also a grcat love of nature, for color, for human friendship, for argument, and fur warm sensuousness (in the good sense of the word) The old pagan stories and tales of people like Deirdre, Maeve, and Finn McCool were not suppressed but lovingly written down in beautifully illustrated and illuminated texts in the same way the Bible was written down Warmth, beauty, softness, sensi ·26 THE AMERICAN ACHIEVEMENT tivity to the God that lurked everywhere in nature were and are very much a part of the essence of Irish Catholicism St Brigid (or more likely the monkish bard who put the words in her mouth) pictures God as an Irish king come to a great feast that has been prepared for him She says she would like to have a great pool of ale for the King of Kings, and she would like the heavenly host to be drinking it for all eternity- a religious sentiment that I think would hardly be held inappropriate here at the Cumann Merriman Now this poem is very Catholic, and I would suggest that only in the Irish Catholic tradition would anyone be so brave and so daring as to picture God coming to a party and actually enjoying it (much the way Jesus must have enjoyed the marriage feast at Cana) So when I occasionally refer to God as "the Old Fella," I am doing so right out of the old Irish Catholic tradition Another part of the Irish tradition is learning The Diuids may not have had an elaborate written language, but they were passionately interested in understanding how things worked Their successors the monks were committed scholars as well as holy men. They wrote down all the ancient pagan folk tales and sagas of Ireland and at the same time preserved Europian culture during the terrible invasions of the fifth, sixth, and seventh centuries It is no exaggeration to say that had it not been for the Irish monasteries, much of the Greek and Roman learning would have been lost The modern world might never have come to be (Incidentally, no one can read the tales of ancient Ireland that the monks set down and think that the Irish were rigid, narrow puritans Such characters as Finn McCool, Dermot, Grania, Deirdre, and Maeve were no better than they had to be- and it turns out they didn't have to be very good ) Let it be noted in winding up this point that now the modern world has suddenly rediscovered the importance of these things I have suggested Ireland has had all along We are now convinced that in folk song, dance, and story there are rich resources from the past that should not be lost We are also becoming increasingly convinced once again that neighborhood, freedom of choice, pluralism, and the politics of coalition and consensus are the way free humans ought to govern themselves, that loyalty is saying that after all we do encounter God not merely in abstract ·THC AMERICAN ACHIEVEMENT 27 philosophy books, dry catechisms, or tiresome sermons but in the experiences of the warmth and beauty of daily life Characteristic of all things Irish, we are finally praised when it is almost too late for us to enjoy it As I have said, the performance of the American Irish in the social and economic world has been remarkable- and not easy. They said we were too poor, too ignorant, too contentious, too church-ridden, and too often drunk to make it They pictured us as no better than an ape in a stovepipe hat, clutching a mug of beer in one fist and a shillelagh in the other They laughed at us, and now we can laugh all the way to the bank and the country club The host society looked on us as ignorant, dirty, illiterate, intolerable peasants and said we would never be good Americans They even moved out of the cities and into the suburbs, many of them, to get away from us Well, we showed them and we showed them good One of the reasons for our success was our immense stoie of political skills We knew how to put together coalitions, to arrange compromises with which everybody could live even though they made no one completely happy We did so I think, usually unself consciously, not realizing that we were engaging in particularly Irish behaviour but just taking it for granted that that was how people acted in the politics of neighborhood, precinct, ward, city, and nation Similarly, in the ecclesiastical area, despite many disasters past and present, the Irish leadership of the American church, including that great man of Chicago in the first decade of this century, Archbishop James Quigley, held together a coalition of incredibly variegated immigrant groups And in the case of Quigley, for example, it was done with a style and pluralistic delight that I'm sure will awe historians for centuries to come But even though the Irish political style (about the neighborhood manifestations of which I suspect Professor McCready will have someting to say this afternoon) has been immensely successful in holding together urban coalitions, we were never able to articulate a rationale for it We left the political philosophy and the political science to the "goo-goos" or the "goody-goodies", the reformers, the “better” people, those who thought that government could be run like a corporation, the “rational," ·28 THE AMERICAN ACHIEVEMENT scientific bureaucratic types who think that politics is about universal principles, abstiact issues, and buieaucratic regulations Now we have per mitted ourselves to be ashamed of machine politics, and if we are sufficiently well educated and successful, we rejoice when periodically it is announced that that last of the great urban political machines is dead (Chicago has a machine, the city is not bankrupt, New York hasn't a machine and is bankrupt ) Our young people at colleges and universities are put through the deracinating experience that university life is supposed to be and frequently end up with hatred and- contempt for a political style and approach (called by my colleague Terry Clark “nonideological particularism") that is the only way to build effective urban coalition governments in America's polyglot, polychrome society So just now, precisely when neighborhood communities, coalition, decentialization, and affective politics are becoming fashionable among the most advanced and radical, or, alternately, the most thoughtful and perceptive, of American thinkers, we are abandoning a political style that had all these character istics fiom the beginning It is an example of what I call Greeley s Law When Catholics give something up, other people are just brginning to discover (Like the Virgin Mary whose praises are now being sung by Protestants while many American Catholics try to pretend that she is not there ) We still have our love affair with language and many of us still speak poetry without realizing it, but we have pretty much left behind, at least in any self-conscious and explicit way, an appreciation for the Irish cultural heritage Oh, we may sing songs on St Patrick's Day (though they are usually Inish- American songs- we haven't heard of the Chieftains, for which God forgive us), but we don't read much poetry and (God forgive us again) we write less of it, and as the greatest storytellers the world has ever known, we don't tell very many any more. Now I'm not making this as a critical comment, I do not see how it could have been any different for us Perceive what happened we came to America desperately poor and clearly unwanted, we were told we could never become respectable Americans efforts were bent at proving them wrong, that we could become Americans, successful Americans, and still remain Catholic It meant we had to give up some of our Irish ways, but, after all, they did not seem to be all that important. All our ·THE AMERICAN ACHIEVEMENT 29 Let me speak of my own family for a moment Given the time and place my grandpaients were born, they were certainly Irish-speakers, they spoke English too, but Irish was their first language Yet there is only one word in our family memory from that fantastically rich and culturally valuable language, and that IS "amadon" Obviously, my grandparents made the decision that to become Americans they had to suppress their own language I remember very clearly riding downtown on a Lake Street “El” with my mother and noticing that the people across the aisle were speaking Italian She shook her head in dismay, "You really can't be an American," she told me, "unless you speak English ” My mother must have heard that from her parents I think that losing the old language was a heavy price to pay, even if we had no choice, it was still costly Oddly enough there are now thousands of young people all around the country (including two of my nieces) who are taking courses in the Irish language There are four hundred students enrolled in such courses at the University of Pittsburgh alone History has a funny way of doing things Or take the matter of names In my family there are two female names that keep recurring, 'Grace' and 'Jule' Well, those are certainly not Celtic names We never could figure out where they came from until I went back to the old country and discovered all kinds of relatives who were 'Granias' and 'Sheilas? The grandparents must have decided that they even had to Anglicize their names And then, of course, the common culture played a trick on us and Sheila became perfectly legitimate as a name for Americans, as did Brian, Kevin, Eileen, Sean, Kathleen, Maureen, and even Deirdre (One of my associates at NORC is named Deirdre, and she's black You see what I mean about history justifying the Irish in the 'long run' It reminds me of Mr Dooley's famous comment that history always vindicates the Democrats but only after they're dead, "f'r nothin' is iver officially true 'til a Repooblic'n admits it, and by th' time 'a Repooblic'n admits anthin' is true, all th’ Dimocrats are long since dead') I even know people who changed their names from Brigid to Beatrice when they came to this country because they felt that Brigid was too Irish to be "respectable" (To say nothing of those marvelous nicknames, Bridey and Biddy) The pames of the great goddess of light and of the great Irish saint ·30 THE AMERICAN ACHIEVEMENT not respectable enough? Baloney But that's what many of our ancestors thought You can't blame them for thinking that way in the circumstances in which they found themselves they had no choice Nor is there in Irish-American culture much of the softness, the warmth, the love of nature, the sensuousness, the earthiness that is characteristic of the Irish Catholic tradition at its best It may be that that part of the tradition is not strong in Ireland just now either, or so it seems to me, but I can tell you that Catholicism in Ireland is less up tight, more relaxed, and more playful than it is, or at least has been until very recently, in the United States Sometimes, just for the sake of making trouble, I tell people (particularly young radicals who are convinced that their generation has developed something new in the way of sexual freedom) that trial marriage, wife swapping, swinging, and equal rights for women is something the Irish invented I go on to describe the customs of the Brehon laws and some of the practices of the Irish nobility up to at least the time of the Synod of Monnooth Well, they are shocked That isn't the way the Irish are or ought to be Fair enough, but “The midnight Court" is a Catholic poem, and we could do with a lot more of Brian Merriman's attitudes toward sexuality in the church (both in Ireland and the United States) and in the non-Catholic world too Sex without laughter, Merriman seems to be saying, is also sex without love I guess the best way to sum it all up is to say that I don't suppose ninety nine out of one hundred American Irishmen have ever heard of Brian Merriman I hadn't myself until about five years ago Such a lack of awareness of something authentic, unique, and remarkable out of one's past is just plain tragic On the other hand, and I think this is critically important to my argument, as well as to the future of the American Irish, we have not stopped being Irish Perhaps the best way to demonstrate this is to point out that miy colleague Professor McCready thought to investigate some time ago the extent to which one could be accurate in predicting the scores of various American ethnic groups on a wide variety of attitudes, values and behaviors merely on the basis of what one could derive as hypotheses from the European iterature about the cultures from which these ·THE AMERICAN ACHIEVEMENT 31 groups came McCready's hypotheses were overwhelmingly sustained Interestingly enough, even though they were relatively early immigrants to American society, the Irish were more distinctive from the British-American mainstream than many of the ethnic groups that came after them You don't have to realize you are Irish, in other words, to act Irish For example, the Irish are the most politically activist group in American society, they are also the most likely to drink and the most likely to have a serious drinking problem, they overchoose journalism and law as professions, their family structure is strong on authority and low on explicit affection and is sharply distinct from that of other American ethnic groups Their basic world view is the highest of all ethnic collectivities on both fatalism and hope- which is for others a contradiction but for us merely a paradox that makes sense The Irish are also the American urban ethnic group most likely to visit siblings each week (Jews and Italians are most likely to visit parents) They are, despite the adverse publicity given to them in international media the most socially and politically liberal of Gentile groups in America, and, oh, yes, they are also that group which is best able to cope with the problems of growing old In other words, in politics, in profession, in basic belief, in drinking, in family life, and in growing old, the American Irish are still distinctively and recognizably Irish (There is some data that show the Irish are more likely than other American ethnic groups to have frequent sexual intercourse I don't know whether to believe this or not, and I'll refrain from all judgments about how much they might enjoy it!) How can culture persist if heritage does not? The answer to that question gets us into one of the most fascinating and fundamental research topics in the study of cultural diversity in the United States Our tentative answer, however, is that certain basic attitudes, traits, values, and behaviours are transmitted across generational lines in the very early years of life not so much from explicit instruction from parents as from clues provided by * See William C McCready, “The Persistence of Ethnic Variation in American Families, Chapter 7, Ethnicity in the United States by Andrew M Greeley (New York Wiley & Sons, 1974) pp 156-176, and William C McCready and Andrew M Greeley, "The Transmission of Cultural Heritages", in Ethnicity Theory and Experience, edited by Nathan Glazer and Daniel P Moynihan (Cambridge, Mass Harvard University Press, 1975) pp 209-235 ·32 THE AMERICAN ACHIEVEMENT the subtlé interpersonal environment created by the interactions and atmosphere of family life, particularly that atmosphere of intimacy between father and mother If ethnic characteristics are passed on at early stage of life in such a subtle fashion (and all available evidence indicates that they are), then such characteristics will have remarkable durability and can persist largely undimin. ished for many generations even without self-conscious intention to transmit such characteristics Thus, for example, to take two of the most characteristic of American Irish traits, their political activism and their weakness for the creature", we could find no diminution of this effect either by education, by occupation, or by length of time a family has been in the country, also there was no relationship between Irish self-consciousness and these two effects It is precisely the fact that some ethnic traits can be transmitted across generational lines without any self-conscious intent that makes it possible for a heritage to revive Young Irish Americans are still writing poetry and short stories without any realization, for the most part, of the link between singing and storytelling on the one hand and their past on the other In fact, the present generation seems more likely to sing and to tell tales than its predecessors perhaps because it feels more free to indulge its literary propensities Amazingly enough, some of these young people write poems and tales or so it seems to me that are quintessentially Irish I remember one young Irish-American poet to whom I gave a collection of Frank O'Connor's translations of the old poems say to me after devouring the book, "Hey, those people think just like I do?" As these young people become more and more conscious of the origins of their heritage and the current ethnic revival in the United States makes this heightened self-consciousness likely I would suspect that their Irishness will be strengthened and reinforced Hence I am more optimistic than people like my friend Professor McCaffrey about the revival of ethnic self consciousness I don't say that such a revival will occur, I simply say that the raw material is present for such a revival If you ask me for my prediction, I will respond with an appropriate mixture of Irish fatalism and hope, For as you know, in any serious Irish conversation two things must be said First of all, “Ah, they were ·THE AMERICAN ACHIEVEMENT 33 " great times and great places and marvelous people, but, sure, it's all over, it's done with, they'll not see our like again Then, as the evening wears o n and more of the creature is consumed, "Well, sure, there's still some of us around" So by way of brief summary, we became successful, we kept our political style (though unself-consciously and unexplicitly), but we forgot about or pushed down into our subconscious or unconscious minds the rich memories of our cultural and religious traditions Yet these traditions still lurk in our personalities because of our early socialization experiences, and they can be recalled and revitalized with suprising case, perhaps What about the future of the Irish Americans? First of all, I think we should not kid ourselves about the persistence of anti- Irish feeling in American society In the environments where most of us live and work, it does not exist, but it is powerful indeed in the great universities, the elite national media, the large foundations, and in many of the more intellectual government bureaucracies Few Irish Catholics are to be found there and they are not wanted— not unless they have apostasized and have turned vigorously against their own heritage and their own people Neither Mayor Richard Daley of Chicago nor Ambassador Daniel Moynihan would be subject to as much hatred and vituperation as they are if they did not have the misfortune" to be Irish Recently, for example, I read two insanely vicious attacks on Pat Moynihan, both quite explicitly explaining that he hates starving little children because he is Irish In the world of lots of people who do the thinking, writing, interpreting, and funding for American society, the old anti-Irish prejudices are as strong as ever- and usually unconscious When you ask, "Don't you think it's bigotry to suggest that most Irish politicians are dishonest or that Pat Moynihan is a stage Irish comedian 7" the response is likely to be, “But isn't it true that most Irish politicians are corrupt, and isn't it true that Moynihan says most of the things he does for effect? And isn't that the Irish way of doing things? These people may not affect our lives directly, but let me assure you, my friends, they affect the world in which we live and in which our children grow up Incidentally, on the subject of Richard J Daley . I have been asked repeatedly by Irish journalists and intellectuals how ·34 THE AMERICAN ACHIEVEMENT us the Irish Americans ever managed to be captured by such a reactionary fascist My standard response is that I didn't know Irish journalists and intellectuals judged a political leader by what they read about him in a half-column article in Time magazine Like all political leaders Daley made his mistakes, he was still, by almost universal agreement, the best municipal administrator in America Every time he ran for office he was reelected not by the Irish but by the blacks and the Poles, capturing 80 per cent of the vote from those two very different ethnic groups In the last election, Daley polled 65 per cent of the Jewish vote against a Jewish opponent No man who is either a reactionary or a fascist could possibly do that Daley was a very astute, skillful, and sensitive Irish politician- perhaps the best in the twentieth century It is a measure of the pervasive influence of anti-Irish feelings in the elite sectors of American life that Daley's image in the world press is what it is But the anti-Irish feelings ought to be no effective barrier to In the final analysis, what comes of the American Irish is something that is up to them I am sure that there are three or four extremely wealthy Irish millionaires in this audience who will dash up to me after my presentation, checkbook in hand, and ask me what they can do to revitalize the Irish-American community and Irish-American self-consciousness Let me tell you what I think The future challenge for Irish Americans will be to recover the spirit of scholarship and learning that is part of our heritage We are well educated— indeed, the best educated Gentile group in American society, but we are thin on scholarship and learning While we have produced writers like O'Neil and Farrell, O'Connor and Power, they have been alienated from, one might say eyen pushed, out of the Irish-American community Let me illustrate what I mean by pointing to the unbelievably brilliant and beautiful book, World of Our Fathers by Irving Howe, a book about the New York Jews No one could write such a book about the Irish-American experience And it is not that we do not have writers as skilled as Howe, though he is indeed a superlative writer, but because an Irish Catholic Irving Howe would not have available the scholarly and literary resources with which to work Our Jewish brothers have produced a fantastic amount of scholarly research and literary publications describing their experience in ·THE AMERICAN ACHIEVEMENT 35 this country There are Jewish research centers, Jewish studies programs, Jewish endowed chairs at universities, Jewish scholarly conferences, Jewish literary prizes, Jewish artistic and literary commissions Even though we are only slightly behind them in income, we have little if any comparable resources for culture study We cannot talk about our politics, we cannot recapture our experience in either Ireland or America, we cannot rediscover the roots of our own immense cultural heritage without such resources I am not suggesting that we are inferior to the Jews because they have done it and we have not, I am simply pointing out that we have had different histories in the USA and that now we are beginning to enter an era, I think, when the institutes, the research centers, the funded chairs in Irish or Irish-American studies, the literary prizes, the historical competitions could be as useful a part of Irish-American life as their like are to Jewish- American life It would be an effective way to refute the bigots and an even more effective way to equip our young people to realize how rich a resource their own tradition is as they begin to enter the worlds of the foundation, the national media, and the university. There is one very strong response that might be made to this plea of mine for a rediscovery of Irish scholarship and learning, as well as the encouragement of literary and poetic activities And that is, who needs it? Who cares what they think about us? Who cares what others say? Let the Jews have their novels, their poetry, their magazines, and their chairs of Jewish studies. Why should we be bothered ? It is an arguable position However, it seems to me that there are two weaknesses to it First, we cheat our fellow Americans that way There is much in the Irish tradition of politics, culture, and religion that responds to the needs and desires contemporary humans are feeling again for a warm religion of emotion, the politics of neighborhood, coalition, and loyalty, and for a culture that reaches far into the past and deep into the roots of the human personality We have that from our traditionhowever much we have forgotten it, it would be a shame not to share it with others But there is a more important reason, I think, why we should recapture our tradition of scholarship and learning It is the ·36 THE AMERICAN ACHIEVEMENT Irish thing to do Granted that we first had to establish ourselves in this country, granted that much of our education was practical and pragmatic, but now we have made it, and not to be interested in scholarship and learning, not to try to rediscover and share with others the riches of our past would be a horrendously un-Irish way to act How dare we say that ideas, history, and learning are unimportant, we whose ancestors kept alive the light of civilization for Europe through the Dark Ages? How dare we not respect poetry and storytelling among our own kind, we whose predecessors were the finest poets and the greatest storytellers in the history of the human condition? That we had not the time or the resources to do it until now is understandable, but, God forgive us, and I fear Brigid, Patrick, Columkille, Brendan, and all the rest will not if we turn aside now from the scholarly dimensions of our own tradition Let me be blunt about it For a people whose past is filled with writers, storytellers, poets, and scholars, we have produced in America very few of any of these and have encouraged even fewer In truth, and again, heaven forgive us for it, we have often discouraged those who wished to pursue learning and culture And too often it was not merely what one wrote- since what one wrote was rarely read- but the mere fact of writing was sufficient to make people suspicious of one of their own who dared to pursue the literary arts (And if this sounds like a comment on personal exprience, let me assure you that it is) We did not even have to read our own writers to know we didn't like them Well, the past is the past, and it had its own reasons, which we must try hard to understand sympathetically We are still Irish We are not Irish like our relatives in Ireland are, because for several generations now we have had different expriences But we are in love with language, we dream great dreams, we are masters of politics, we are paradoxically hopeful fatalists, and we tend to drink too much. We are still Irish We are the heirs to one of the richest religious, cultural, scholarly, and political traditions of human history It is time we learned more about it, time for us to understand it better, time for us to give more self-conscious thoughts to who we are and where we came from It is t me we shared our rich resources with our fellow Americans, ·THE AMERICAN ACHIEVEMENT 37 By way of conclusion, let me do a fauly Irish thing and quote three poems, one written by an Irish-American woman, one by a fourteen year-old boy, and one, oddly enough, by me A MINSTREL CALLING Once I tripped over a piece of music and never been the sane, Can't remember exactly when nor even know the name It may have been in Church one morn, Or it may have been in carnegie hall, But it matters not at all for the call still spoke my name Come, it said- come to my feast, put furrowed brow aside, There's always time for peace dear friend, but now's a holy war War against the yawn- my boy, We need heroes and some clowns You laugh but ever was a fiend, More dread than a puffed up frown? Takın' itself so serious, you'd think the godhead had passed on, That there was no reason for the dance, no purpose to the song Ah, the world is filled with mischief, it's a tease to men like ye, To make you throw your hands up, in a gesture if you please To say there's not a hope on earth of things ever working out, That fear and worry carried the day, and death won out, no doubt. But the music plays forever, for those with ears to hear, And the stone keeps rolling back again, for over a thousand years So listen friend, come now it said, Don't waste time to clear the shelf Hold the flute in earnest now, You might just trip another dolt yourself Nancy Gallagher McCready May 14, 1976 WHERE IS THE LIGHT? Where is the light? Has it left our minds and tragically left the candle Which ignites our love That we forever base our life on Where is the light? Is it just aware of that solemn glare And decided to leave the presence.

·38 THE AMERICAN ACHIEVEMENT Where is the light? Has it left our minds to disappointively find Our passion, bluer than ever Where is the light? Has it met its match in the tunnel below Where light can't shine and goom can glow Is this tunnel too thick for the light to shine? I see the tunnel I see the light! George Connelly April 21, 1976 DEDICATION At morning's first misty light They came out of the primal bogs And worshiped in the holy woods They tended the sacred fire And sang of the land of promise beyond the seas in the fabled west They told tales of heroines and gods Sad Deirdre, mighty Fion Noble Dermot, frenzied Maeve Then Podraig And soft as summer rain A new and loving god came gently to their dreams Ah, great men they were and women too But it's all over, 'tis the end We shall not see their like again Bards and monks, scholars and saints Bishops and kings, hermits and pilgrims They printed the books and taught the schools and claimed they prayed the whole night long By the smoking peat the learned scholar With weary eye and bobbing head read his sacred text, And zealous Pangar Ban pursued the local mice While Holy Brigid kept a great pool of ale for the welcoming of the King of Kings ·THE AMERICAN ACHIEVEMENT 39 Doubtless brave and a little mad They lit the lamps of Europe Conquered the conquering Dane and then lit the lamps again While Holy Brendan sailed to the land of promise in the west Insula sanctorum ? Not always Still, great men they were and women too But it's all over, 'tis the end We shall not see their like again Through rocky fields they walked, down the muddy lanes Past the empty cottage and by the youthful corpse On to the leaky ships, across the mountain sea Sick, hungry, poor, afraid Into the slum, the tavern, the gutter The mill, slaughterhouse, the early tomb Like Holy Brendan they sailed to the land of promise in the west and found hatred, misery, and sudden death Oh, yes great men they were- and women too But it's all over, 'tis the end We shall not see their like again Out of their neighborhoods they climbed Onto “the cars," into “the force" Teacher and priest, mayor and doctor Lawyer and crook, nun and nurse They sang, they danced, they talked the whole night long They cried at births, they laughed at wakes They drank, they talked, they fought and then they talked again And on dark gray autumn afternoons they prayed for the triumph of Notre Dame. Indeed great men they were--and women too But it's all over, 'tis the end We shall not see their like again So it is all over now And tears flow at the country club For all the glories that were And all the greatness that might have been We made it at last in the land of promise And damn proud we are We showed them We won, we got in ·40 THE AMERICAN ACHIEVEMENT It is the end of our tale But what does it matter? We glow briefly in the sun's lingering flame As, martını glass in hand, for the final time we pray for the triumph of Notre Dame Ah, great men we are and women too But it's all over, 'tis the end They shall not see our like again So lean thinker and towering poet What are you two doing here? Have you not heard my sad refrain ? The tale is told, 'Tis over, finished, done Join the others at the wake and sing and drink to the end of it all Poet and wise man, druid and monk Migrant and rebel, monsignor and cop All dead and buiied in the ground Today in the land of promise, can it be? Is it true ? Are there still some of us around ? Are there stories yet to be told? A few mysteries still to be probed ? Songs to be sung, work to be done in the melting pot that didn't melt? Not yet curtains for the crazy celt? So, generous teachers and loyal friends, The sun still rises over the misly bogs, Not all that far from Scarsdale to Mayo or from Kerry to Oak Park Let it then be wiit on the morning sky God help them all But it is not the end They shall indeed see our like again Andrew M Greeley June 21, 1976 ·w w The Italian Americans A Bicentennial Perspective Dep Arca c > # RUDOLPH J. VECOLI "Accidenti al America e a quel Colombo che l'ha scoperta, (Curse America and that Columbus who discovered her) was growing up in Connecticut, I heard this expression frequently on the lips of my mother and our paesani Said in moments of frustration, of homesickness, of anger, this imprecation expressed a judgment about the experience of immigration, a judgement made by the immigrants themselves I take this then as a motif of the history of the Italians in America During this Bicentennial year, it may seem inappropriate to dwell upon the less happy aspects of the Italian American experience After all this is a celebration isn't it? Should we not speak of Colombo and Vespucci? of Mazzei and Beltramı? of Meucci and Fermi ? of Sinatra and Dimaggio? Or perhaps we should extoll the glories of the rinascimento, of Michelangelo, Leonardo, Raphael, Galileo Should we not catalogue the contributions of the Italian genius to American culture to its art, its music, its architecture? It would be so easy to indulge in such puffery, and it would be so pleasing to the ears of my audience After all we all enjoy flattery and what harm would a little pat on the back do? My basic objection to self-congratulatory "history" is that it is a counterfeit, it falsifies, indeed denies the real story ·42 THE ITALIAN AMERICANS of the Italian Americans Rather than history, it is a kind of mythology which obscures rather than clarifies the experience of the Italian immigrants By doing so it makes it more difficult for those of us who are Italian Americans to know and to accept our authentic past We- and American society as a whole in my judgement are deficient in self-knowledge, in part because while all human history contains pain, suffering, and defeat, the history of these United States has been told as a triumphal procession towards unlimited progress and happiness, to suggest that it has been something less seems almost unpatriotic We, Italian Americans (as has been true for other ethnic groups) have simply tried to make our history conform to that national success story But it seems that after the traumas of the 1960s, political assassinations, domestic violence, Vietnam, and Watergate, we are all sadder and wiser The mood of this Bicentennial Year is far from the spirit of self-satisfied nationalism of 1876, rather we are in a skeptical mood of self-sciutiny The history of the Italian Americans should be approached in the same spirit What follows are my reflections on that history, personal reflections, informed by my experience as the son of Italian immigrant parents as well as by study Another person would probably see things differently The most tragic aspect of the immigration probably was the way it divided immigrant parents from American born children In the schools and on the streets, the children learned more quickly than their fathers and mothers the English language and American ways They also learned to be ashamed of the old country manners, the speech, the very appearance of their greenhorn parents I remember at a certain age how I hated to go downtown with my mother, perhaps my schoolmates would see me with her, they would know I was different, an Italian and not an American I would always lag behind a few steps and pretend to be by myself And I remember the shame of having to go to the townhall to serve as an interpreter for my father know how universal this feeling was among the children of immigrants, generated by the pressures of American culture which deemed anything foreign as inferior and contemptible With their keen instinct for survival, children learned quickly that to be Italian or Polish or Greek was to be bad, to be American was to be good And how we ached to be American ! When we Now we ·THE ITALIAN AMERICANS 43 come to contemplate our autobiographies as adults, and our collective histories, we must deal with those feelings of inferiority which were inculcated in us by our teachers (well-meaning Yankee ladies and Irish nuns who wished to make us into good little Americans) So when we discuss Italian American history, we would rather speak of Giuseppe Verrazzano and William Paca than of our parents, yet it is they who are the main protagonists of that history Of course, this type of filiopietism (itself a misnomer since it stems from a rejection of, not reverence for, one's ancestry) is not peculiar to Italian Americans, it has been characteristic of all ethnic groups which have been stigmatized as inferior by the dominant Anglo-American society Since we could not identify with John Winthrop, Nathan Hale, George Washington, Robert E Lee, etc, we had to find our own ethnic heroes to demonstrate that we too had played a role in American history, ie, that we had as good a claim to being good Americans as they- except we didn't believe it A very healthy recent development in my judgement is our new perception of the United States as a pluralistic society The “new ethnicity” movement rests upon the basic tenet that no one ethnic group, no one cultural tradition, no one history, should dominate this country, it also rejects the “Melting Pot” ideal in which all groups and cultures are to be assimilated into an American type Rather we are coming to perceive and appreciate the way in which ethnic diversity can enrich the lives of all of us, rather than being a source of share and stigma, differences are being affirmed as a source of pride and identity What a wonderful thing that in our lifetimes, groups long oppressed by a sense of self-hatred and inferiority have been able to assert that “Black is Beautiful," "Polish is Beautiful," "Italian is Beautiful ” Of course, they all are, and this is the glory and beauty of America This ethnic renaissance, this rediscovery of the richness of America's multiple cultures constitutes a cultural revolution, a quiet, nonviolent (for the most part) revolution, which will have enormous liberating effect upon future generations of Americans Imagine an America where no one need feel ashamed or rejected because of his skin color, nose shape, the sound of his name, the food he eats, or the religion he practises- and where no one will be subjected to the cruelty of so-called ethnic jokes. an ·44 THC ITALIAN AMERICANS We know that a child who accepts himself, who enjoys self-esteem, has the best chance of becoming an effective, mature adult We also know that the child who has a positive identification with his own family history and cultural traditions is most likely to develop an integrated, positive self-identity The study of the history of the Italian Americans or any other ethnic group therefore becomes much more than an academic enterprise , it is for the members of that group an adventure in self-discovery and selfunderstanding, a path to greater maturity But the study of these various ethnic histories must not be limited exclusively to group members, indeed we need to know the stories of other groups in order to better understand our own and to comprehend the manner in which the total American pluralistic society has evolved Thus we do not approach the history of the Italian Americans in a spirit of ethnocentiicity, we are not intent on proving that “we” are better than anyone else, we know that all groups, including ours, has an equal place in this American mosaic What then can we say about the history of the Italians in America in the few pages alloted to us? First, we should ognize that this is a vast and complex suhject, one which would require a library of books to describe adequately, books most of which have not as yet been written Consider the magnitude of the Italian immigration, over five million men, women, and children have come to this country over the past 150 years, two thirds of them in the first two decades of this century At the high point, 1907, almost 300,000 arrived in one year A viitual tidalwave of humanity swept upon the American shore Who were these newcomers whose faces, apprehensive, frightened, determined, look out at us from the photographs taken at Ellis Island ? "America, the land that gathers the rebels, the miserable, the very poor," declared Emanuel Carnevali, himself an immigrant at age 16 Certainly it is true that for the entire history of European immigration, it was not the upper classes, the nobility, the wealthy, who emigrated, rather those who came were seeking a better life The great majority of the Italians were artigiani and contadını, working people, attracted by America la terra del dollaro, here they hoped to earn higher wages, often to return to their paese They came from all regions of Italy Among the first were the figurinai, who made statues of plaster, ·THE ITALIAN AMERICANS 45 from Lucca and fruit peddlers from Liguria, stone workers from Friuli and barbers from Sicily, masons from Lombardy and tailors from Campania, and contadını (peasants), from all over, but especially from the poor regions of the South Initially the men came, only later after they had decided to remain did they send for wives, daughters, and sweethearts Following the old adage, “Moglie e buoi da paesi suor" (Wives and cattle from your own towns), they preferred to send back for their brides rather than marry American girls “L’America, donne senza colore e frutta senza sapore,” (America, women without color and fruit without taste), they said Most striking was the youthful age of the immigrants, mostly between 15 and 30, and not a few boys emigrated alone at ages of 14 or younger Certainly emigration was undertaken in the spirit of adventure but it was basically motivated by economic need, a growing population, inadequate, exhausted land, high taxes, all these sent the young people abroad in search of pane e lavoro (bread and work) In thinking about the immigrants then we must see them as full of life and spirit, capable of prodigious of work, willing to submit to untold hardships in order to fulfill their mission, to save a few hundred dollars so as to return to the paese to buy land, pay off the mortgage, provide a dowry for a sister, or an education for a son And many, almost half, did return, some having achieved their goals, others defeated, mutilated in industrial accidents, ill with tuberculosis Observers remarked on how a few years in America wore out of these vigorous young people Because in truth, they found in America una vita dura Italians were welcome in America for a time, because they were needed by American industry Emma Lazarus's lines on the base of the Statue of Liberty, “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore Serd these, the homeless, tempesttost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door," had they been able to read them, would have brought a cynical smile to the faces of the Italian immigrants America was for them not refuge, an asylum, rather it was a place to work, and work they did incessantly On the railroads and the subways, in the mines, and the steel mills, in the sweat-shops of the garment industry and textile factories, they worked sometimes 12 hours or more a day, six or even 7 days a week, for wages of $1 50 or $200 a day ·46 THE ITALIAN AMERICANS Exploited? Of course, they were exploited Yet they usually submitted because of their determination to earn the sacred American dollar, or because they had no choice, ignorant of the language and the customs, often at the mercy of a countryman who acted as the padrone- boss Then they rebelled, as in Lawrence, Massachusetts in 1912, Paterson, New Jersey in 1913, the Mesabı range in 1916 As a result the Italians earned a reputation as docile workers for which they were hated by American labor, and a reputation as violent anarchists for which they were feared by American employers. Among the many different nationalities in America, few have encountered more hostility and prejudice than the Italians They were denounced as wagecutters by organized labor, as radicals by business, as inferior breeds by the scientists of the day, “beaten men of beaten races" in the words of future president Woodrow Wilson, as bloodthirsty criminals adept in the use of the stiletto Italians were victims of physical assaults in the streets by gangs, on the job by other workers In the southern and western states, quite a number were lynched by mobs The Italians were not even welcome in the Catholic Churches, since they were viewed by the American (Irish) Catholics as little better than pagans Many residential neighborhoods were closed to Italians until recent decades, as were social clubs, and high status occupations This story of systematic discrimination to which the Italians were (and to some extent still are) subjected is yet to be told Once American industry decided it no longer needed the "Dago" ditch diggers, the immigration restriction laws of the 1920s almost entirely excluded them The Italians as "undesirables' were limited to a quota of 5,802 a year by the law of 1924 The quota system which was based on explicitly racist assumptions remained in effect until 1965 Of course, the effect of this policy was to severely limit the number of Italian immigrants I have touched upon these painful and negative aspects of the history of the Italian Americans not to stir up bitter memories, but to remind us that these are fundamental qualities of that history. Any discussion which omits them falsifies that history If we are to be true to the memory of our immigrant ancestors, we must also remember what they suffered and endured Hopefully, this will make us more sensitive to and sympathetic with those who continue to be exploited and despised One of the ·THE ITALIAN AMERICANS 47 dangers of achieving some success, upward social mobility as the sociologists call it, is that we tend to forget, even reject our humble social origins To do so, in my opinion, is to cut ourselves off from a source of inspiration ana direction At least for me, as I think of my father, a construction laborer, and my mother, sometime seamstress and laundry-woman, I find their example of fortitude, determination, and resourcefulness, a valuable heritage which I hope my children will know and cherish But to dwell on suffering and hardship would also be a distortion of the Italian immigrant experience, because there was also much joy and satisfaction Most of the immigrants accepted the harsh realities and made the best of them In their tenement rooms or company houses, they created homes for their families alive with love and beauty Once families were established they served as the focus for social and cultural life Domesticity may be the highest art perfected by the Italians, everything revolved about the household and the family In so far as possible the way of life of the paese was maintained, for the immigrants took to heart the proverb “Chi lascia la via vecchia per la nuova, sa quel che perde ma non sa quel che trova (He who leaves the old way for the new knows what he is losing, but not what he will find ) In the intervals between work and in the household routines, the husband and wife then found the traditional satisfactions, the cultivation of a vegetable garden, the making of Pasta, the glorious season of winemaking, the family meals together, the gatherings with paesani and relatives, the holidays of pasqua and Natale, the feastdays of the patron saints Here in this round of life, our parents created a world of meaning to which they could withdraw from the confusion and harshness of the factory and the city In short, the Italian immigrants, although often semi-literate peasants brought with them a humanistic way of life, a sense of measure, of order, of morality, which they maintained despite the pressures of modern society In retrospect, we can see that this was no small accomplishment, and although as children we may not have fully appreciated the discipline and the restraints, we now see more clearly the need for such a domestic culture as essential to a civilized life Of course, our immigrant parents were not paragons or saints, there were domestic conflicts aplenty Some families functioned more lovingly than others, but beneath it all ·48 THE ITALIAN AMERICANS there was a sense of order, of proper relationships between husband and wife, between parents and children Thus, the family was the major strength of the Italian immigrants as they made their way in a strange, often hostile, environment Within the family were cultivated the love of food, music, and sociability, which gave to Italian American life its distinctive quality Of course, times have changed since those days of half a century ago, more or less, when “Little Italies" were being established in cities all over the country The immigrant generation is slowly passing from the scene, the average age of the survivors is now in the eighties The second generation, the American born children, are now middle-aged or beyond often with grown children who constitute the third generation Altogether the three generations may number some ten million Italian Americans To attempt to describe this population today is indeed a hazardous business Italian Americans are scattered all over the country and at all levels of the social structure Certainly as was to be expected a great deal of assimilation has taken place. La via vecchia has in fact been abandoned for la via nuova, to a greater or lesser degree, by the second and third generations This reflects, of course, the upward social mobility reflected in higher levels of educational achievement, of professional and managerial occupations, and in higher income levels According to a recent study by Andrew Greeley, Italian Americans rank higher in income than any Protestant group This may be a reason for self-congratulation considering the point of departure from a position among the lowliest and least regarded element in the working class To observe that the children and grandchildren of the contadını have become professionals, managers, and technicians is a tribute to the open class system of American society (in fact the promise of American turned out not to be a fraud for the second and third generations), but it is even more a tribute to the immigrant generation which provided the base, moral as well as economic, from which their descendants could move upward It was the immigrants who spent a lifetime carrying a hod, as did my father, or mining coal, or mending shoes, who paid the costs of our progress, if we have been able to realize some success it is because of their sacrifices With upward social mobility have come other cultural changes; the old neighborhoods have largely been deserted for ·THE ITALIAN AMERICANS 49 more comfortable, suburban districts In part this has been due to the bulldozing of those areas to make way for freeways, public housing, and new commercial developments Certainly urban renewal and housing policies have hastened the demise of the “Little Italies" Of course, they are not all gone, one can still find compact Italian neighborhoods on the West Side of Chicago and the North End of Boston, in Brooklyn, South Philadelphia, and elsewhere Now we find a new concern to sustain these ethnic communities which are at last recognized as sources of stability and vitality which are so urgently needed in our cities Although only a minority of the Italian American population forms part of ethnic residential communities, does this mean that the majority have become completely assimilated and no longer participate in a meaningful way in an Italian American culture ? Quite the contrary, it appears that thanks to the automobile and the telephone it is possible to maintain membership in an ethnic community without living in a compact settlement. Through various societies and associations, cultural clubs, and religious institutions, many Italian Americans retain an active sense of ethnic identity and participation Whereas in the past such affiliations were usually defined along regional or local lines, such as the societa di mutuo succorso of the paesani, now it tends to reflect the social class differentiation among Italian Americans The old exclusiveness of companilismo appears to have been replaced by class distinctions But the substance of these associations, whether it be politics, culture or religion, seem often to have more to do with America than with Italy, and this is probably as it should be Although the maintenance of la via vecchia would have been possible only by complete separation from American society as 18 practised by the Hutterites, the transition to la yra nuova is for many Italian Americans far from complete and many of us are now questioning whether it is completely desirable The headlong rush toward total Americanization (whatever that might mean) which was characteristic of many of the second generation during the 1930s and '40s is no longer typical of Italian Americans. Rather more and more we are asking what is it that we are losing? what are we surrendering? what price assimilation ? As we review the options offered by our market economy for cultural goods and services, la via vecchia, at least in certain respects, ·50 THE ITALIAN AMERICANS looks better and better American white bread sticks in our throats, we yearn for the crusty pane that crunches under the teeth, we think of the lost art of home winemaking and seek to revive it, but more important than the things of the stomach, we seek nourishment for the spirit (although for the Italian the two are closely related) We know now the value of that network of famiglia and paesani, but once it has been rent can it be mended ? of the warmth and security of relationships which are not functional or contingent, but are as secure as the elements of nature As we see our children adrift in a normless society, we stand in awe of our immigrant ancestors who had such a firm grip on themselves and on reality One cannot help feel that Americanization meant among other things filling the head with illusions and delusions Can we recapture for ourselves and for our children that sure sense of self, that clear-eyed view of the world ? In short, it seems to me that many of my generation are seeking a via media (another Italian quality) Unable to return to la via vecchia, unwilling to embrace entirely la via nuova, we seek to find firm ground somewhere in the middle Is it possible? While individually we work out our particular answers to that question, collectively as Italian Americans we have certain responsibilities to fulfill Collective action has never been a forte of the Italians, either in Italy or America Here as there for too* long the ancient prejudices of regionalism have obstructed the development of community, and the lack of unity has certainly hindered the collective progress of the Italian Amerians Realizing this, we have looked to the Jews and more recently the blacks as models of ethnic solidarity (little realizing the internal divisions within those groups) Recently there is evidence that in the second and particularly the third generations, such internal differences are being increasingly surmounted, and the possibility for cooperation is being realized What then should be our common objectives? Perhaps because I am an historian, I would place the cultivation of Italian American history high on the list of priorities, I also happen to agree with Ole Rolvagg, the Norwegian American novelist, who asserted “If a man is to realise in full measure the potentialities of his own being, he must first of all learn to know his own people's history and literature" We need to preserve and study the history of our immigrant ancestors, not ·THE ITALIAN AMERICANS 51 are out of a spirit of reverence, but in order to understand that experience which has contributed so largely to making us what we That history as I have indicated is vast indeed, it includes literally millions of individual stories, many of which I am sure deviate sharply from the general experience outlined above Most of those stories are now beyond our reach, although there may be some records, letters, diaries, photographs, which have captured bits and pieces of them, these should be preserved But of those survivors who are still with us we should take full advantage recording their memories which are a part of our heritage Oral history as historians call it is not a mysterious process With a limited amount of training, anyone can become a recorder of value able historical information Certainly it should be a community project and not restricted to professional historians Advice and guidance can be provided by the American Italian Historical Association, an organization of some 300 members, both lay persons and scholars It is also logical to assume that those of us who identify as Italian Americans tend to be more interested in the fortunes of Italy than other Americans Certainly we have relatives ther with whom we correspond or whom we visit on occasion W also tour the peninsula and island and often develop an interest 11 the history and culture of the country Thus when adversity strikes the Italian people, we identify more perhaps than others do with the victims It is only natural that after the recent earthquakes in Friuli Italian Americans should take the initiative to provide relief to the bereaved and the homeless Most Italian Americans do not follow Italian politics closely, a difficult task in any case, and as compared with certain other ethnic groups, they are less involved with such political conflicts in the country of origin The recent elections posed a dilemma for Italian Americans While the entry of the Communists into the Italian government is certainly an issue to be debated with pros and cons, the instinctive anti-Communist reaction of many Italian Americans appears to be rather mindless But it was most offensive to have a discredited political hack such as John Connally, presuming to be the spokesman for democracy in Italy, as chairman of the Citizens Alliance for Mediterranean Freedom Conoally indulged in an extraordinary display of presumption and stupidity, but unfortunately a number of prominent Italian Americans followed themselves to ·52 THE ITALIAN AMERICANS be taken in by his anti-communist game Where are the Italian Americans willing to stand up and say it is time for the CIA and the USA and the John Connallys to stop meddling in Italian affairs ? If there is an Italian American culture, as I believe there is, It should also be a concern of our ethnic community to support and nourish that culture One of the most impressive developments in recent years has been the flowering of Italian American talent in the arts Creative artists for the first time are drawing upon their Italian heritage for themes and forms One need mention only Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorsese in films, Mario Puzo and Gay Talese in literature, Gregory Corso and Lawrence Ferlinghetti in poetry, Frank Stella and Mark Di Suvero in painting and sculpture; and Dominick Argento in opera The Italian American community should recognize and encourage such creative artists more than it has in the past It should celebrate such artistic achievements as well as the heroes of popular culture It should also do much more to encourage the teaching of Italian language, literature, and culture, from the grade school level to the university We are entering a new stage in the continuing evolution of an Italian American identity and an Italian American community If I were to make a prediction, I think we are on the verge of an era of unity and creativity in which the Italian influence will permeate American society The basis for this new age of Italian American emergence will be a cooperative relationship between the Italian American community and the Italian American artists and academics This will be a fitting and long cherished memorial to those immigrant ancestors who laid the basis for these accomplishments through their sacrifices and sufferings Then perhaps the ancient curse, "Accidenti al'America e a quel Colombo che l'ha scoperta," will be laid to rest ·4 Carpatho-Ruthenian Resources and Assimilation, 1880-1924 A Preliminary Survey* RICHARD RENOFF Even in this era of heightened ethnic awareness and pluralism most Americans are probably unaware of the existence of the tiny Carpațho Ruthenian group which was part of the 1880–1924 “new immigration" to the new world 1 The ancestors of these Slavic- Americans inhabited the southern slopes of the Carpathian Mountains in pre-World War One Northern Hungary (present-day Eastern Czechoslovakia and Western Ukraine), where they had lived since the fourteenth century or earlier ? Although a thorough exposition of their distinguishing characteristics is beyond the scope of this paper, their unfamiliarity produces a necessity for more description than such highly familiar and larger groups of the "new immigration" such as Italians, Poles, and Russian Jews Major reasons for the unfamiliarity of these people are the absence of a distinct national consciousness among their European peasants and day-laborers and the varying identifications chosen by their intelligentsia in Europe and America A peasant might only identify himself or herself as a resident of a local area such as a county, valley, or village and would be so provincial that he or she lacked a consciousness of the existence of culturally similar people living a short distance away To this day, many descendants of these immigrants not infrequently identify their group as *This paper is a greatly revised version of an address delivered at Mt St Macrina, Uniontown, Pennsylvania, 11 August 1975, ·54 CARPATHO-RUTHENIAN RESOURCES & ASSIMILATION, 1880-1924 5 nası liudi (our people) and describe their spoken and written language as po-nasemu (according to our own way) These vague designations- yet precise in the minds of these people- add to the many already existing names the people call themselves or have been called by others 3 During the era of their mass immigration they were termed variously Rusyns, Rusnaks, Ruthenians, Uhro-Rusyns (Hungarian-Ruthenians) and even Greek Catholics, the latter name being, for reasons we shall discuss below, a not completely surprising fusion of ethnic identity and religion Especially since World War One substantial groups in the immigrant communityoften for nationalistic, political, or religious reasons-have termed themselves Carpatho-Ruthenian, Carpatho-Russian, or Carpatho- Ukrainian and today some descendants of the immigrants even consider themselves Slovaks of the Byzantine (Greek) Rite 4 At the same time, members of the European intelligentsia frequently identified themselves as part of a larger group the Hungarian, Russian, or to a lesser extent Ukrainian nationalities The peasants, however, generally did not accept these broader identities An additional reason for their unfamiliarity is the fact that Americans typically use the nation-state from which one's ancestors migrated as an indicator of ethnicity This is quite understandable for these nations may be found on maps and their representatives in the halls of the United Nations There is, after all, a Germany (or Germanies), a Greece, an Italy, and a Poland, but no nation-states called Carpatho-Ruthenia, Frisia, or Macedonia It is frequently very difficult for an American of English, French, Irish, or other Western European background to comprehend that while one's ancestors may have come from Czechoslovakia one is neither “Czechoslovak" nor Czech nor Slovak, but Carpatho-Ruthenian It might also be noted in passing that the United States Census Bureau has followed this orientation throughout most of its history and has avoided such possible indices of ethicity as self-identification and ancestry, a policy which poses problems for the demographic study of Carpatho-Ruthenians and other numerically small peoples Although the masses typically lacked a national consciousness amongst themselves, there were distinguishing cultural and social characteristics which set the Carpatho-Ruthenians apart ·CARPATHO-RUTHENIAN RESOURCES & ASSIMILATION, 1880-1924 55 from the Slovak peasants, whose ethnic territory was to their west and south, the Magyar peasants who inhabited the plain to their south, and the Magyars and Jews who lived amongst them as bureaucrats, businessmen, and landlords Carpatho-Ruthenian “habitation, dress, customs, folklore, occupations, and general life-style came to be hardly distinguishable from those of their immediate Slovak and Magyar neighbors,"s but their language and above all their religion produced and perpetuated their distinctiveness Originally Eastern Orthodox, the Carpatho-Ruthenians united with Rome with the Union of Ungvar (Uzhorod) in 1646 9 This agreement was merely legal, and the liturgy of St John Chrysostom, recited in Old Slavonic, the married secular lower clergy, the Julian calendar, and the various folk religious customs and magical practices were retained The Greek Catholic (Uniate) Church in large measure distinguished them from the Protestant and Roman Catholic Slovaks and Magyars, was very crucial for socializing the young, and facilitated the transmission of much of their culture Membership in the Greek Catholic Church and the Carpatho Ruthenian nationality became virtually synonymous, in fact, at the end of World War One ninety-five per cent of the Carpatho-Ruthenians in Europe were Uniate 10 While their language, basically Ukrainian, came to be influenced by the Hungarian, Great Russian, Old Slavonic, Polish, Slovak, and even German languages11 and was intelligible to the Eastern Slovaks,12 it did differentiate them from the non-Slavic Magyars and Germans, and the Western Slavic speaking Slovaks Still, religion was probably more crucial than language for maintaining their distinct identity because even those persons of Carpatho Ruthenian descent who had assimilated into the Magyar culturels usually retained their Greek Catholic faith To understand the European background and the American experience of Carpatho-Ruthenians something should be said about the social and economic character of the region from which they migrated A perusal of the places of birth listed in the death notices which have appeared in the Amerikansky russky viestnik (now called Greek Catholic Union Messenger) reveals that most migrants came from what is today northeastern Czechoslovakia, the former Hungarian counties of Szepes (Slovak. Spis), ·56 CARPATHO-RUTHENIAN RESOURCES & ASSIMILATION, 1880-1924 Saros (Saris), and Zemplen (Zemplın) 14 A sizeable portion also migrated from Ung (Uz) County which is the westernmost section of what is today the Transcarpathian Oblası' of Soviet Ukraine, but the migration from the more easterly counties of Maramaros (Maramaros), Ugocsa (Ugoca), and Bereg was less substantial 15 In 1910, Emily Greene Balch in her pioneer work, Our Slavic Fellow Citizens, commented on the spread of the migration from this region The movement seems to have begun in the northeastern part of the Slovak district in Zemplen, Saros, Szepes and Ung This district is racially very mixed, containing large numbers of Jews, Germans and Ruthenians, besides Slovaks From the counties where emigration first began the movement has spread, affecting both the Ruthenians of Hungary in the counties to the east of the Slovaks, and the Slovak counties to the west of the first emigration district, and quite recently those to the southwest also 16 Why did these people come? Why did they leave the intimacy of village life for the loneliness, perils, and uncertainties of the crossing? In general, the major causes of this emigration were demographic and economic Following the abolition of seifdom in Hungary in 1848, the people began to subdivide the land among their children 17 This land was unable to support the growing population and many farmers were reduced to being propertyless day-laborers Many became foresters and others worked as seasonal migrant laborers in the Hungarian Plain to the south Eventually, they learned of the wealth and wages of the new world and the distance of their migrations increased Other factors "pushing" and "pulling" the migrants were attempts to avoid army conscription, the influence of steamship agents, and the letters from relatives and the friends who had already journeyed across the ocean 18 Eastern Slovakia and Ruthenia were economically underdeveloped There was virtually no industry and agricultural techniques were primitive The timber industry was probably the most prosperous sector of the economy as about one-half of Ruthenia was covered by forest and there was relatively little arable land 19 Of all the nationalities of pre-War Hungary the Ruthenes .

·CARPATHO-RUTHENIAN RESOURCES & ASSIMILATION, 1880-1924 57 were perhaps the poorest and most neglected The prosperity which they are said to have enjoyed in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries had given place to a long decadence The outer world hardly knew them, save when they descended 10 their dioves at harvest-time and stood about the market place of Debreczen or Nyiregyhaza for hiring the Ruthenes were not thought fit for any better employment than lumbering, acting as ghillies on the huge deer forests which covered most of the country, or scratching a miserable livelihood out of the tiny plots left to them under the shadow of the trees 20 The United States Immigration Commission reported that the mean daily wage when food was provided for farm laborers in Slovakia in 1905 was 23 cents for men, 13 cents for women, and 9 cents for children, without food, the corresponding figures were 32 cents, 20 cents, and 14 cents 21 Most likely the wages in Eastern Slovakia and Ruthenia were slightly lower Thus, the wages of $1 92 for Ruthenian mena- and $1 36 for women23 paid in American factories and mines were considered attractive and pulled the Carpatho Ruthenians from their homeland to industrial states like Connecticut, Indiana, New Jersey, New York, Ohio, and Pennsylvania CONCEPTUAL ORIENTATION AND METHODOLOGY During an analysis of the concept of social power Robert Bierstedt cited resources as a source of power and argued that if two groups are about equal in numbers and similar in social organization access to greater resources would give a group superior power Resources may be of many kinds- money, property, prestige, knowledge, competence, deceit, fraud, secrecy, and, of course, all of the things usually included under the term “natural resources” There are also supernatural resources in the case of religious associations, which as agencies of a celestial government, apply supernatural sanctions as instruments of control 24 Some years later, Hubert M Blalock used thu same term to denote “the actual sources of power, oi those properties of the individual or group that provide the power potential or the ability to exercise power In this paper the concept of resources is utilized with a some- 9925 ·58 CARPATHO-RUTHENIAN RESOURCES & ASSIMILATION, 1880-1924 what different purpose from Bierstedt's and Blalock's While the indicatois are similar to those of these writers, those resources of the Carpatho-Ruthenians are examined which potentially promoted or retarded their assimilation to American culture rather than enhanced their power We shall explore some resources which Carpatho-Ruthenians biought from the old country and the adaptability of these resources to the structural and cultural conditions encountered in the host society More precisely, our notion of resources includes some demographic and socio-economic variables stated or implied by Bierstedt and Blalock under the term “natural resources and some institutional characteristics some of which were especially peculiar to Carpatho-Ruthenians The demographic characteristics to be examined are return migration, sex ratio, and age distribution, the socio-economic are literacy, and occupations The institutional characteristics of these people which will also be discussed mutual aid, societies, boarding houses, the ethnic press, and the Church, both helped and hampered their assimilation and shall be examined following the discussion of demographic and economic factors Assimilation will be used in the sense of cultural assimilation, defined by Milton M Gordon as a "change of cultural patterns to those of the host society Such structural components of assimilation as entrance into primary group relationships with majority group members and intermarriage are not the main focus of this paper although the implications for these issues will be occasionally discussed It might be noted that cultural assimilation also facilitates or is a concomitant of socio-economic mobility While not wishing to confound these concepts, some of the data, (eg, literacy, occupations) have implications for the potential socio-economic mobility of these people Although much of the early literature on immigration emphasized the desirability of the disappearance of the cultures of Eastern and Southern European immigrants, 27 we wish to avoid considering the Americanization of immigrants as a positive goal either for the host society or the immigrant community In fact, Carpatho-Ruthenian institutions, most notably the church, have been crucial in promoting cultural pluralism In the third century of our country's existence, there seems no longer a question of 9926 ·CARPATHO-RUTHENIAN RESOURCES & ASSIMILATION, 1880–1924 59 whether we shall have cultural pluralism, we do and apparently will The method employed was a perusal of the sparse literature dealing with Carpatho-Ruthenian immigration, much of it contemporary to their mass migration Published American and Hungarian statistical data were also examined in an attempt to roughly gauge the demographic and socio-economic nature of the immigration and its relevancy for resources and assimilation The preliminary nature of this survey should be stressed, indeed, relatively little data are available on these people which are not presented combined with data and discussion of other groups THC RETURN MIGRATION Many Carpatho-Ruthenians evidently did not initially intend to stay in the new world For these early migrants America was often just another place to engage in migratory labor 28 Although more stayed and continued to arrive then subsequently returned, the repatriation of Carpatho-Ruthenians was extensive enough to warrant an examination of Hungarian and American statistics in order to gain an approximation of its scope Although the data of the two countries are somewhat inconsistent and the Carpatho- Ruthenians were statistically confused with other ethnic groups (eg , Slovaks and Ukrainians), a rough guess is that possibly as many as one-third of the migrants returned to the old country at least once An examination of Table 1 which is adapted from Hungarian emigration statistics reveals that between 1899 and 1913 there were about thirty return migrants to the Hungarian counties of Szepes, Saros, and Zemplen (present-day Eastern Slovakia) for every hundred departing These statistics, while they are for the counties whence most Carpatho-Ruthenians migrated during the peak migration years, include not merely Carpatho-Ruthenians, but also Slovaks, Hungarians, and others Since according to Hungarian statistics only 6 per cent of the emigrating population of Szepes, 9 per cent of Zemplen, and 14 per cent of Saros was Ruthenian, we must not commit the fallacy of assuming that the total return migration rates for these counties are exactly characteristic of the Carpatho-Ruthenians Nevertheless, an interesting association obtains between the percentage of Carpatho-Ruthenians ·60 CARPATHO-RUTHENIAN RESOURCES & ASSIMILATION, 1880-1924 in a county and the number of in-migrants relative to out-migrants for the three counties listed in Table 1 TABLE 1 EMIGRATION AND IMMIGRATION- HUNGARIAN COUNTIES (PRESENT EASTERN SLOVAKIA), 1899–1913 Percentage of Nuniber arri- County Emigrants Ruthenians among Immigrants ing per 100 emigi ants departing Szepes 46,007 6% 10,884 24 Zemplen 82,584 9% 26,763 31 Saros 50,390 14% 18,472 36 Source "Kıvandorlasa es visszavandorlasa a Magyar szent Korona orszagainak, 1899-1913” (“Emigration and Return of Emigres of the Nations of the Hungarian Holy Crown from 1899 to 1913 ?), Magyar statisztikai kozlemelyek, vol LXVII, new series (Budapest Anonymous Publishing Society of Pest, 1918), 2-5, 21-23 In contrast, Hungarian statistics indicate relatively little return migration to the counties of Ung, Ugocsa, Bereg, and Maramaros, which had higher proportions of Carpatho-Ruthenians in their population than Szepes, Saros, and Zemplen Table 2 shows data on emigration and immigration for the four more eastern counties which later became part of the autonomous Czechoslovak province of Sub-Carpathian-Ruthenia and are now part of the Trans-Carpathian Oblast' of Soviet Ukraine TABLE 2 EMIGRATION AND IMMIGRATION - HUNGARIAN COUNTIES (PRESENT WESTERN SOVIET UKRAINE) 1899-1913 Percentage of Number arriva County Emigrants Ruthenians among Immigrants ing per 100 emigrants departing Ung 82,584 27% 26,763 32 Ugocsa 11,916 33% 1,503 13 Bereg 22,868 49% 4,094 18 Maramaros 11,980 62% 2,424 20 ·CARPATHO-RUTHENIAN RESOURCES & ASSIMILATION, 1880-1924 61 Source “Kıvandorlasa es visszavandorlasa a Magyar szent Korona orszagainak, 1899-1913" ("Emigration and Return of Emigres of the Nations of the Hungarian Holy Crown from 1899 to 1913') Magyar statisztikai kozlemenyek, vol LXVII, new series (Budapest Anonymous Publishing Society of Pest, 1918), 2-5, 21-23 A possible explanation for the relatively small reverse migration to the more homogeneously Carpatho Ruthenian counties of the East is the fact that the emigration from the eastern counties commenced later than in the West, the return flow having not yet begun Also, a slightly higher degree of economic development in the West (present day Eastern Slovakia) might have stimulated more people to return there than to the more impoverished East Further analysis of the Hungarian statistics on a year-to-year basis would be warranted 29 The United States Immigration Commission only began compiling statistics on repatriation for the various "races and peoples" in 1908 Immigration statistics for the fiscal years 1908, 1909 and 1910 show that only twelve (12) Ruthenians departed for every one hundred admitted during those years This figure is substantially below both our own guess and the Hungarian data for the years 1899–1913 presented in Tables 1 and 2 The American statistic places the Ruthenian well below such Slavic groups as “Croatian and Slovenian"- fifty-six (56) and “Bulgarian, Serbian, and Montenegran"- twenty-eight (28) In fact, of the twenty-nine European and Middle Eastern nationalities listed, the Ruthenian ranked only twenty-first of significance for future research is the fact that the statistic reported for the Magyars is sixty-four (64) and for the Slovaks fifty-nine (59),3 Many Carpatho-Ruthenians were probably classified as Slovaks since they migrated from the predominantly Slovak counties of Szepes, Saros, and Zemplen This suggests the possibility, of more actual repatriation than was reported for Ruthenians Furthermore, the American authorities combined Ruthenians from south of the Carpathians with migrants from Galicia which was north of the mountains in the Austrian part of the Dual Monarchy Due to this confusion concerning ethnic identity, the American statistics on Ruthenian repatriation are probably even 31 ·62 CARPATHO-RUTHENIAN RESOURCES & ASSIMILATION, 1880-1924 less reliable than the also inadequate Hungarian data for attempting to assess the magnitude of Carpatho-Ruthenian repatriation A variety of personal, familial, social, and economic factors stimulated the return to the homeland Personal and familial factors include the death of a relative and the desire among the males, who found a scarcity of women from their own group, to find a wife As H J Habakkuk has argued, economic development and migration patterns are affected by family structure, among the Slovaks and Ruthenians the abscence of a single-heir system produced a temporary rather than permanent migration 32 Downtrends in the American economy appear to be an extremely singnificant factor accounting for repatriation For example, during 1908 more persons entered Hungary than departed from Szepes, Saros, and Zemplen, the predominantly Slovak counties which also contained substantial Carpatho-Ruthenian minorities An economic panic occurred in America during 1907 which evidently also stimulated more Italians to leave America than were admitted in 1908 33 Not only was the Carpatho-Ruthenian immigration pushed by economic conditions in the homeland, the stimulus for the reverse migration may also have been economic in large measure Much has been written about the effects of repatriates upon their native land, 38 but far less on the functions and dysfunctions of reverse migration for the immigrant community Although reverse migration promoted the retention of old world cultural traits and slowed down assimilation, it also strengthened group cohesion Language and ties to the Greek Catholic Church would be retained longer and both were crucial in promoting cohesion and identity among Carpatho-Ruthenians More so than for most other groups, the Church, as we have seen, was the symbol of their identity, distinguishing them from others and promoting social solidarity This special character of the Church, retained at little longer due to reverse migration, became an additional resource easing their anomie and alienation in the new world Carpatho-Ruthenian repatriation was probably not substantially greater than that of the typical "new immigration" group What may well be unique about the Carpatho-Ruthenians was the temporary residence of many of their early clerical leaders ·CARPATHO-RUTHENIAN RESOURCES & ASSIMILATION, 1880-1924 63 who (until 1907) were subject to their old world bishops rather than to their own or Roman rite bishops in America Furthermore, the presence of Greek Catholic emigre priests did not please American Catholic church officials 35 Thus, the Carpatho Ruthenian intellectual elite was not always disposed to encourage the Americanization of the immigrants because it contemplated a return to Europe Whatever its causes, the Carpatho-Ruthenian repatriation probably temporarily slowed the short-term assimilation of this community to American culture, but at the same time promoted its long term cultural assimilation, adjustment, and social cohesion 36 THE SEX RATIO In his classic, The Italian Emigration of Our Times, Robert F Foerster described a "law” of emigration, which epitomizes the trends among Carpatho-Ruthenians The first immigrants are nearly all men, after a while the women and children follow, emigration ceases, the cycle is complete 37 Concerning the question whether Carpatho-Ruthenians differed appreciably from other immigrant groups in their sex ratio, American and Hungarian statistics are somewhat more congruent than the repatriation statistics Based on these data, a guess of two male migrants for every female migrant prior to World War One is possibly a conservative figure Although no sub-division according to mother-tongue was presented, there are Hungarian statistics on the sex of emigres from the seven counties with substantial Carpatho-Ruthenian populations, again we must avoid the fallacy of assuming these statistics as representative of Carpatho-Ruthenians per se The data in Table 3 show that the percentage of males among the emigrants is generally highest in those counties- Bereg, Maramaros, and Ugocsa- that are farthest east (A significant exception is Ung County which has a lower percentage of men than Saros and Zemplen ) This geographic distribution probably reflects the fact that the migration from the eastern counties did not reach substantial numbers until the migration from the western counties was well underway.

·64 CARPATHO-RUTHENIAN RESOURCES & ASSIMILATION, 1880-1924 TABLE 3 SEX OF EMIGRES FROM HUNGARIAN COUNTIES WITH SUBSTANTIAL CARPATHO-RUTHENIAN POPULATIONS, 1899-1913 Western Counties Per cent (present Eastern Men Women Total Male Slovakia) Szepes 26,867 19,140 46,007 58% Saros 31,078 19,315 50,393 68% Zemplen 51,578 31,006 82,584 66% 109,523 69,461 178,984 61% Eastern Counties (present Soviet Ukraine) Ung 28,354 17,303 45,657 62% Bereg 15,972 6,896 22,868 70% Ugocsa 8,715 3,201 11,916 73% Maramaros 9,530 2,450 11,980 80% 62,571 29,850 92,421 68% Source “Kıvandorlasa es visszavandorlasa a Magyar szent Korona orszagainak, 1899–1910" ("Emigration and Return of Emigres of the Nations of the Hungarian Holy Crown from 1899 to 1913''), Magyar statisztikai kozlemenyek, vol LXVII, new series (Budapest Anonymous Publishing Society of Pest, 1918), 10-13 American data are substantially consistent with the Hungarian The Immigration Commission published the sex ratios of immigrants for the years 1899-1910 inclusive Of the twenty-nine European and Middle Eastern "races or peoples" reported, the Ruthenians ranked twelfth highest in percentage of males among the total number of immigrants With a range of 47 9 per cent males for the Irish to 96 3 per cent for the Turks, the Ruthenian figures of 74 438 indicate that these people were not radically different from most Slavic and non-Slavic groups for those years An excess of males would conceivably lead to exogamy and promote the structural assimilation of some individuals and stimulate the formation of boarding house communities and delay the development of stable family and community life among others.

·CARPATHO-RUTHENIAN RESOURCES & ASSIMILATION, 1880–1924 65 The extent to which this factor actually did affect community life and adjustment is difficult to assess with accuracy, but Carpatho- Ruthenians probably experienced no greater barriers against cultural assimilation because of it than the typical Southern and Eastern European groups Carpatho-Ruthenians do seem to fit the “law" of early male arrival followed by women and children Hungarian statistics on the sex of emigrants from the seven counties where most Carpatho-Ruthenians resided were divided according to the years 1899-1904, 1905-1907, and 1908–1913 These data, showing number of women per 100 males, are summarized in Table 4, TABLE 4 WOMEN PER HUNDRED MALES EMIGRATING FROM HUNGARIAN COUNTIES WITH SUBSTANTIAL RUTHENIAN POPULATIONS FOR SELECTED YEARS County 1899–1904 1905-1907 1908-1913 Szepes 56 74 99 Saros 54 63 79 Zemplen 44 60 84 Ung 42 54 94 Bereg 21 36 73 Ugocsa 24 25 50 Maramaros 22 20 33 Source “Kıvandorlasa es vissza vandorlasa a Magyar Szent Korona orszagainak, 1899-1913” (“Emigration and Return of Emigres of the Nations of the Hungarian Holy Crown from 1899 to 1913"), Magyar statisztikai kozlemenyek, vol LXVII, new series (Budapest Anonymous Publishing Society of Pest, 1918), 11-13 In general, these statistics show a steady increase in the proportion of women among the migrants during these years, the only exception being slight drop in Maramaros for 1905–1907 relative to 1899-1904. These data also indicate that the eastern counties (Bereg, Ugocsa and Maramaros), which are also those with the highest proportion of Carpatho-Ruthenians, were lagging behind the western countries in developing a balanced sex ratio among the emigres. This could reflect a peculiar characteristic of Carpatho-Ruthenians, but more likely is due to the relative recency ·66 CARPATHO-RUTHENIAN RESOURCES & ASSIMILATION, 1880-1924 of mass migration from the East Unfortunately, the lack of data on Carpatho-Ruthenians per se is a serious limitation of these statistics THE AGE DISTRIBUTION While the disproportion of men among the immigrants produced dysfunctions for family life, their youth and strength enabled them to initially take unskilled jobs which the English-speaking groups such as the English and Irish were beginning to reject The Slavs have brawn for sale Herein, at bottom is the drawing force which accounts for such a moving in of peoples with the readiness with which they find their places in the specialized industries of the district Pittsburgh has clamorous need for these men Take the average Lithuanian, Croatian, Ruthenian, or Slovak, and his physique would compare favorably with that of any people These men come to be the hewers of wood and the carriers of water' 39 Hungarian data for the years 1905–1907 and 1911-1913 reveal (see Table 5) that about sixty-five per cent of the migrant (family heads and isolates) were under thirty years of age and approximately eighty-five per cent were under forty This finding is not surprising, the age distribution of Carpatho-Ruthenians is typical of other international migrants The youthfulness of immigrants eased their adjustment to the host society and enabled them to take advantage of, the economic opportunities in the industrial Northeast TABLE 5 AGE DISTRIBUTION OF RUTHENIAN EMIGRANTS FROM HUNGARY FOR SELECTED YEARS (HEADS OF FAMILIES AND ISOLATES) Age 1905-1907 1911-1913 Under 20 30% 26% 20-29 35% 39% 30-39 25% 19% 40-49 10% 14% Over 50 2% '1% 1 101%* 100% Rounding Error ·CARPATHO-RUTHENIAN RESOURCES & ASSIMILATION, 1880–1924 67 Source “Kıvandorlasa es visszavandorlasa a Magyar szent Korona orszagainak, 1899-1913," ("Emigration and the Return of Emigres of the Nations of the Hungarian Holy Crown from 1899–1913"), Magyar statisztikai kozlemenyek, vol XLVII, new series (Budapest Anonymous Publishing Society of Pest, 1918), 34 LITERACY AND OCCUPATIONS If a sophisticated attempt were made to determine the most culturally, socially, and economically deprived immigrant group, the Carpatho-Ruthenian would be among the contenders for this distinction Their cultural and material deprivation seems to have rivaled or surpassed that of other non-Magyar minority nationalities of Hungary such as the Croats, Rumanians, and Slovak s40 and their financial straits may even have been more desperate than the Sicilians and Southern Italians An assumption is usually made that groups with high literacy rates such as the Czechs, Germans, and Scandanavians- albeit in their native tongue-had a head-start toward cultural assimilation, educational attainment, and economic mobility in American society If this assumption is valid, the Carpatho-Ruthenians arrived in America with a distinct disadvantage United States immigration statistics for 1899 to 1910 show that fifty-three (53) per cent of the Ruthenian (both Galician and Sub-Carpathian) migrants over fourteen years of age could neither read nor write, this percentage was exceeded only by the Portuguese, Southern Italians, and Turks among the twenty-nine European and Middle Eastern groups on which statistics were compiled 41 Although the study of Carpatho-Ruthenian inter-generational and intragenerational mobility is beyond the scope of this paper, we should note that this handicap surely contributed to the relegation of these people to the most strenuous and unsafe unskilled occupations in the mills and mines immediately following their arrival Hungarian emigration statisics on the occupations of migrants most of whom went to America, reveal that twenty-two (22) per cent of the Ruthenian emigres were “independent" farmers, fifty (50) per cent were domestic or agricultural workers, and seventeen (17) per cent were day laborers For the years 1911- 1913, the corresponding figures were twenty-six (26) per cent, fifty-six (56) per cent, and thirteen (13) per cent. Data for other ·68 CARPATHO-RUTHENIAN RESOURCES & ASSIMILATION, 1880–1924 Hungarian nationalities show that their situation was roughly comparable to that of the Slovaks and that they had a significantly greater proportion of independent farmers but fewer domestic and agricultural workers than the Rumanians 42 American data are not directly comparable to the Hungarian because the occupational categories differ, but the general tendency is similar Table 6 which we have adapted from immigration statistics, shows the occupational distribution for selected European and Middle Eastern "races or people" for the years 1899-1909 It reveals that Ruthenians were lowest of all groups in the proportion of immigrants having what we have termed "middle class occupations" (professionals, skilled workers, and farmers), and third highest in the proportion of "working class occupations" (farm laborers, common laborers, and servants) 2 2% TABLE 6 OCCUPATIONAL DISTRIBUTION OF EUROPEAN IMMIGRANT GROUPS, 1899-1909 (A partial display of 29 groups, ranked by the percentage of the group classified as "working class") Working Middle Miscellaneous and Group Rank Class Class no occupation Rumanian 1 88 1% 3 2% 8 8% Bulgarian, Serbian, and Montenegran 2 87 7% 67% 56% Ruthenian 3 84 5% 13 4% Croatian, and Slovenian 4 82 4% 62% 11 3% Greek 5 75 6% 92% 11 2% 19 groups not shown Spanish 25 24 3% 38 4% 37 3% Welsh 26 17 0% 40 2% 42 8% English 27 16 2% 36 8% 47 0% Scotch 28 15 8% 43 0% 41 2% Hebrew 29 48 7% Source, United States Immigration Commission, Abstract of Reports of the Inmigration Commission, vol I (Washington Govt. Printing Office, 1911), p 173, 13 9% 37 5% ·CARPATHO-RUTHENIAN RESOURCES & ASSIMILATION, 1880-1924 69 CARPATHO-RUTHENIAN INSTITUTIONS The preceding discussion of Carpatho-Ruthenian demographic and economic characteristics would suggest that in several respects Carpatho-Ruthenian immigrants did not possess a background which facilitated assimilation into urban, industrial America They were semi-literate where literacy was needed to fully function, they were farmers entering an industrial society, and they were poor in a society that valued riches Yet other cultural and social characteristics, less amenable to numerical tabulation, functioned to reinforce the cohesion and organization of their community and helped conserve many aspects of their culture, at the same time facilitating their assimilation and adjustment to American society In the paragraphs below we shall discuss four Carpatho- Ruthenian institutions the mutual and society, the press, the boarding house, and the Greek Catholic Church None of these, of course, was unusual or peculiar to Carpatho-Ruthenians, indeed, some other small groups (e & , Lebanese, Rumanians, and Ukrainians) were partly comprised of Greek Catholic Uniates Still, their religious institution, being a national church, was distinctive enough from the larger Roman Catholic Church to prevent the complete absorption of the Carpatho-Ruthenians into American Catholicism Along with the lodges and newspapers (which were quasi-religious), the Carpatho-Ruthenian Church became a prime buttress of Carpatho-Ruthenian pluralism The first and major Carpatho-Ruthenian mutual-aid society is the Greek Catholic Union founded in 1892 Some years later the United Societies and the Carpatho-Russian Benevolent Association-Liberty were founded 44 These organizations functioned to unite the people in the presence of hardship and the hostility of their neighbors who did not understand their customs, to ease the financial hardships resulting from industrial accidents and death, to provide contacts for newcomers to the parish and town, and they also had recreational functions These societies were criticized by some observers, however, on the grounds that they tended to slow down the Americanization of the immigrants Margaret F Byington in her volume prepared for “The Pittsburgh Survey", Homestead The Households of a Mill Town, noted the importance of these societies in the social life of 45 ·70 CARPATHO-RUTHENIAN RESOURCES & ASSIMILATION, 1880-1924 immigrants 46 Interestingly, a statistical table in this volume indicates that the death and disability benefits paid by the Greek Catholic Union were about as high as those of any of the nine Hungarian and Slavic societies she studied 47 Byington summarized the contributions made by these societies to communal life and to the indiyidual These lodges play an important part in social life They offer some amusement in a community where there is little else available for the Slavs The meetings themselves, while nominally for business, afford a chance for coming together, while dances and other festivities are held at intervals Through them the stranger comes quickly into touch with his own people Especially is this true of men who move from one part of the country to another in search of work Traveling cards issued by the home lodge of a society, and recognized by members of the local lodge in any community, assure a man welcome and assistance wherever he goes This service, a strong feature with any fraternal order, is particularly valuable to the Slav, with his ignorance of the ways of the new county and even of its language The fellow members of a lodge become nurses who care for the sick or injured during nights of suffering, and friends who give comfort in times of bereavement 48 A second institution that reinforced communal life and facilitated both assimilation and pluralism was the immigrant press By reading the Amerikansky russkyvestnik, Prosvita, Rusin, Vostok or other papers, 49 the immigrant became conscious that he (or she) was part of a wider world than his or her) native village, boarding house, neighborhood, or work place The newcomer became not just a person from Saros or Zemplea but a “Carpatho-Russian" or Carpatho-Ruthenian Thus, the piess, notably the Amerikansky russky viestnik, was crucial in broadening Carpatho-Ruthenian national consciousness 50 The Carpatho-Ruthenian language, the use of which was eroding in Europe, was perpetuated by the immigrant press and the people came to perceive themselves as belonging to a special group 51 These publications also contained secular and spiritual advice which helped ease alienation and loneliness in the new land In a word, by reading an ethnic newspaper the immigrants learned ·CARPATHO-RUTHENIAN RESOURCES & ASSIMILATION, 1880-1924 71 52 that they were not alone and that others shared their plight A third institution was the boarding house A prime reason for its existence was the imbalance in the sex ratio- the excess of men The boarding house, of course, was neither unique to nor the exclusive property of the Carpatho-Ruthenians Croatians, Lithuanians, Magyars, Poles, Russians, Slovaks, and Southern Italians all had them However, the Immigration Commission reported that, among some samples of families it studied, the Ruthenians (both Galician and Sub-Carpathian) had the fifth highest percentage of families that took in boarders (57 per cent) among thirty-nine foreign-born groups What was life lıke in a boarding house ? Single men would move into a house supervised by a boarding boss and his wife, the Carpatho-Ruthenian women did not typically work outside the home, but they were very likely to take in boarders Each man would pay about three or four dollars a month for a place to sleep, for having his clothes washed, and his food cooked Also, an account was kept of the food purchased and divided pro rata among the men on pay day For special orders such as veal or fruit, the men were charged individually Sometimes the boarding boss and his wife and children slept in the same room as the men, even the cooking might be done in that room. There is a photograph in the 1909 volume of the journal, Charities and the Commons, entitled, “Night Scene in a Slavic Lodging House” It shows twelve men in a room, hats and coats hung on hooks or nails, and what appears to be empty beer bottles The sub-caption states that in many of these boarding houses the men slept in shifts, day workers sleeping at night and night workers sleeping by day 53 The immigrant boarding house is an institution that has been neglected by sociologists of the family and sociologists of community Among its functions was to provide a quasi-family setting for lonely men who were either single or whose wives and children were in Europe It also gave the immigrant an opportunity to experience the comfort of being with people of his own ethnic group after experiencing draining, exhausting, and dehumanizing work in the foundries, factories, and mines Very important was the cheapness of living in this setting, social workers were amazed at how cheaply Slavic boarders could live Due to their low ·72 CARPATHO-RUTHENIAN RESOURCES & ASSIMILATION, 1880-1924 expenses the men were able to eventually send for their families or perhaps go back to Saros, Szepes, Zemplen, or farther east and return with a wife. Thus, families, houses, churches, and communities were built on the labor and savings of these boarders Another institution that strengthened pluralism and social cohesion was the Greek Catholic Church 51 The religious customs of the Carpatho-Ruthenians were not only indicative of their communal ties but also reinforced them First, the liturgy was sung by both priest and people Most of the Carpatho-Ruthenian lay people were very familiar with the religious rituals since they participated in singing the liturgy in the Old Slavonic tongue, which, although not a living language, was much more intelligible to them than the Latin language was to the laity of the Western Church In contrast, prior to the Second Vatican Council, the priests of the Western Church celebrated Mass with their backs to the congregation and there was much less interaction between priest and people and virtually none among the faithful themselves Furthermore, the aloofness expected of the clergymen of the Western Church was spurned by most married priests of the East A survey of Eastern Christian clergymen produced findings which support the contention that married priests are close to their fold After conducting a poll of ninety-seven married Orthodox and Uniale priests, Father Robert Clement, writing in Eastern Churches Review, concluded that the "married priest seems by his very nature better adapted to be head of a parish on a down to earth level "55 The Carpatho-Ruthenians themselves defined their married priests as an essential mark of their Eastern rites and feared that the introduction of celibacy would separate the clergy from the people Hence, the presence of the wife and children of a married priest made him both a spiritual and earthly father and made him a more integral part of the community In addition to the promotion of social cohesion by the liturgy, the fact that a very high percentage of Carpatho-Ruthenians always attended services further strengthened this closeness. Professor Andrew Perejda summarized this very well when he stated, . in the life of the Rusyn the church was a unifying factor The people live around the church Very few, if any, did not go 66 9956 ·CARPATHO-RUTHENIAN RESOURCES & ASSIMILATION, 1880-1924 73 Besides the institutions we have discussed mutual aid societies, the press, boarding houses, and the Church - future studies of community among the Carpatho-Ruthenians might focus upon such topics as family and kinship, 57 trade unions,58 athletic organizations such as the sokols, neighborhoods, schools, and even saloons Their functions and dysfunctions and the conflict and consenus they generated could be examined by sociologists of various theoretical and empirical orientations CONCLUSION Our preliminary survey of Carpatho-Ruthenian resources indicates that Carpatho-Ruthenians did not differ appreciably in their demographic characteristics (repatriation, sex ratio, age) from other "new immigration” groups, but ranked near the bottom among these groups in literacy rates and occupational distribution To compare the Carpatno-Ruthenian group with old immigration" would be very problematic and unfair , in fact, Oscar Handlın has carefully noted the biases against "new immigrants” inherent in the reports of the Dillingham Commission 59 Although their educational and occupational mobility was probably slowed due to these handicaps, their communal and institutional resources produced a pluralistic response and hastened their adjustment and their partial cultural assimilation This pluralism is still evident, Carpatho-Ruthenian communications, fraternal, and religious institutions are very viable despite the attempts of religious and secular authorities to "Americanize” these people Future research should focus on local communities using such sources as parish records of the Orthodox and Greek Catholic (Uniate) Churches, city directories, and the now publicly available United States Census Schedules for 1930 Unexplored areas besides the ones we have surveyed include ethnic and religious inter-marriage rates, family size, housing characteristics, intragenerational and inter-generational socio-economic mobility, and internal migration patterns FOOTNOTES 1 A rough guess as to the present number of Carpatho-Ruthenian Americans with at least one Carpatho-Ruthenian ancestor is 750,000 ·74 CARPATHO RUTHENIAN RESOURCES & ASSIMILATION, 1880-1924 Membership in the two ethnic Churches, the three Ruthenian Byzantine (Greek Catholic) dioceses (278,766) and the American Carpatho-Russian Orthodox Greek Catholic Church (about 100,000), totalled 378,766 in 1975 This figure, of course, does not take into account those persons who have joined tie Roman Catholic Latin-Rite, the Russian Orthodox Church, the religiously unaffiliated and the handful who have joined Protestant bodies For the statistics see, The Official Catholic Directory (New York PJ Kenedy, 1976) p 530, p 628, p 631, Yearbook of American and Canadian Churches, ed Constant H Jacquet (Nashville, Abingdon, 1976), p 28 2 CA Macartney, Hungary and her Successors The Treaty of Trianon and its Consequences, 1919-1937 (London Oxford University Press, 1937), p 206, an excellent review of the research on the date the early Carpatho- Ruthenian settlement of this region is, Paul R Magocsi, "An Historiographical Guide to Subcarpathian Rus”, Austrian History Yearbook, IX-X (1973–1974), 214-218 3 Rev John Slivka has enumerated seventeen national or religious names used for this group, cf John Slivka, Correct Nomenclature Greek Rite or Byzantine Rite Rusin or Ruthenian, Rusin or Slovak (Brooklyn, NY privately printed, 1973), pp 2–3 4 Cf Michael Lacko, “A Brief Survey of the History of the Slovak Catholics of the Byzantine Slavonic Rite,” Slovak Studies III, Cyrıllo-Methodiana (1963), 199-224 Lacko argues that most Greek Catholic inhabitants of Eastern Slovakia are, in fact, Slovaks who during the early period of immigration could not understand the preaching of priests from Ruthenia 5 The emigre intellectuals most of whom were priests, were also usually either Magyarone or Russopoile prior to World War One, Stephen C Gulovich, “The Rusin Exarchate in the United States " Eastern Churches Quarterly, VI, no 8, (October-December, 1946), 463 6 Florian Znaniecki, Modern Nationalities A Sociological Study (Urbana University of Illinois Press, 1952), pp X111-XIV, William Petersen, “On the Subnations of Western Europe" in Ethnicity Theory and Experience, ed Nathan Glazer and Daniel P Moynihan (Cambridge Harvard University Press, 1975) pp 177-182 7 The United States Census Bureau has for the most part recorded country of origin and to a lesser extent mother-tongue for the foreign-born and the first-generation An early statement on the problems in determining the ethnic background of American immigi ants is, Richard Boechk, “The Determination of Racial Stock among American Immigrants,” American Statistical Association Journal, n-s, X (December, 1906), 199–221 proposals to modify these shortcoming see Michael Novak, “The Census of 1980," Empac, no 10 (October, 1976), pp 3-5 8 Pavel Macu, "National Assimilation The Case of the Rusyn-Ukrainians of Czechoslovakia,” East Central Europe, II, no 2 (1975), 103 95 ·CARPATHO-RUTHENIAN RESOURCES & ASSIMILATION, 1880-1924 75 9 Michael Lacko, “The Union of Uzhorod", Slovak Studies, VI (1966), 7–190, Basil Boysak, The Fate of the Holy Union in Carpatho Ukraine (Toronto privately published, 1963) pp 17-86 10 Aldo Dami, La Ruthenie Subcarpathique, (Geneva Les Editions du Mont- Blanc, 1944), p 104 In America a substantial minority converted to Russian Orthodoxy Consult, for example, Keith S Russin, “Father Alexis G Toth and the Wilkes-Barre Litigations," St Vladimirs Theological Quarterly XVI, no 3, (1972), 128-149 11 On the various linguistic influences see, Michail Lesiow, "The Language of Carpatho-Ruthenian Publirations” in Proceedings of the Conference on Cai patho-Ruthenian Immigration-8 June, 1974 ed Richard Renoff and Stephen Reynolds (Cambridge Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute, 1975), pp 32-42 12 Paul R Magocsi, "Carpatho-Ruthenian Language and Literature" Address delivered at Mt St Macrina, Uniontown, Pa , 12 August, 1975 13 On the magyarization of the Carpatho-Ruthenian intelligentsia see Macartney, Hungary and her Successors p 210 et passim 14 Place-names are given in Hungarian with Slovak or Carpatho-Ruthenian names in parentheses 15 Cf Nicholas Dürko, “The Geographical Background of the Faithful of the Apostolic Exarchate of Pittsburgh", Slovak Studies, IV Historica 2 (1964), 217-221 Dorko, who considers most of these people "Slovak”, surveyed the death notices and found that over one-third came from Zemplen (Zemplın) and the vast majority of the remainder from the other thiee western counties, 16 Emily Greens Balch, Our Slavic Fellow Citizens (New York Charities Publications Committee, 1910) pp 99-101 17 Ruthenia and Slovakia did not have single-heir inheritance, HJ Habakkuk, “Family Structure and Economic Change in Nineteenth Century Europe," Journal of Economic History, XV, no 1 (1955), 9 18 Balch, Our Slavic Fellow Citizens, pp 47-53 19 Dami, La Ruthenie Subcarpathique, p 60, Macartney, Hungary and her Successors, p 235 20 Ibid, pp 204-205 21 US Immigration Commission, Reports of the Immigration Commission, vol IV Einigration Conditions in Europe (Washington Government Printing Office, 1911), p 365 22 U S Immigiation Commission, Reports of the Immigration Commission, Immigrants in Industries part 23 Suininary Report on Iminigrants in Manilfrcturing and Mining vol I (Washington Government Printing Office, 1911), p 104 23 Ibid , p 106 ·76 CARPATHO-RUTHENIAN RESOURCES & ASSIMILATION, 1880-1924 24 Robert Bierstedt, “An Analysis of Social Power", American Sociological Review, XV, no 6 (December, 1950), 737 25 Hubert M Blalock, Toward a Theory of Minority-Group Relations (New York Wiley, 1967), p 113 Cf also, R A Schermerhorn, “Toward a General Theory of Minority Groups," Phylon, XXV, no 3 (Fall, 1964), 244 for a similar point on power 26 Milton M Gordon, Assimilation in American Life The Role of Race, Religion and National Origin (New York Oxford University Press, 1964), p 71 27 Cf, Jerome Davis, The Russians and Ruthenians in America, Bolsheviks or Brothers (New York George H Doran, 1922), xiv and 155 pp Also, Kenneth D Miller, Peasant Pioneers An Interpretation of the Slavic Peoples in the United States (New York Council of Women for Home Missions and Missionary Education Movement, 1925), vil and 200 pp 28 On seasonal migration within Hungary see Mecartney, Hungary and her Successors, p 237, an American analysis of some positive features of temporary nature of Austro-Hungarian, Italian, and other migrations of that time is W B Bailey, "The Bird of Passage," American Journal of Sociology, XVIII, no 3 (November, 1912), 391-397 29 Cf the annual statistics for 1899–1913 compiled by the Slovak demographer Tajtak, see his, "Pereslennja Ukrainians Sxıdnoji Slovaccyny do 1913 r (“The Emigration of Ukrainians from Eastern Slovakia before 1913') Duklja IX, no 4 (1961), 101 See also his presentation of the annual Hungarian statistics on emigration and immigration for Eastern Slovakia which do not treat Carpatho- Ruthenians separately, Ladislaw Tajtak, "Vychodoslovenske vyst'ahovalectvo do prvej svetovej vojny, (“Eastern Slovak Emigration before the First World War") Nove obzory, III (1961), 239 30 United States Immigration Commission, Abstract of Reports of the Immigration Commission, vol I, (Washington Government Printing Office, 1911), p 113 31 Ibid p 113 32 Hadakkuk, "Family Structure and Economic Change," p 9 33 Betty Boyd Caroli, Italian Repatriation from the United States, 1900-1914 (New York Center for Migration Studies, 1973), p 11, p 38 See the statement of Theodore Saloutos on the recession of 1907 as a stimulus for the repatriation of Greeks in his, They Remember America The Story of the Repatriated Greek Americans (Berkeley and Los Angeles, University of California Press, 1956), p 32 Hungarian annual statistics for Eastern Slovakia may be examined by consulting Tajtak, “Vychodoslovenske vyst’ahovalectvo," p 239 34 Cf Betty Boyd Caroli, Italian Repatriatio, vill & 110 pp Francesco P Cerase, “A Study of Italian Migrants Returning from the USA, "International Migration Review, I, ns, no 3 (Summer, 1967), 67–74, Cerase, "Expectations and Reality A Case Study of Return Migration from the > ·CARPATHO-RUTHENIAN RESOURCES & ASSIMILATION, 1880–1924 77 United States to Southern Italy,” loc cit , VIII, no 2 (Summer, 1974), 245– 262, Watraut Feindt and Harvey L Browning, “Return Migration Its Significance in an Industrial Metropolis and an Agricultural Town in Mexico," loc cit VI, no 2 (Summer, 1972), 158-165 35 On the difficulties the Greek Catholic emigre priests had with the Latinrite authorities see, Gerald P Fogarty, “The American Hierarchy and Oriental Rite Catholics, 1890-1907," Records of the American Catholic Historical Society of Philadelphia CXXXV, no 1 (March-June, 1974), 17–28, also, Bohdan P Procko, “The Establishment of the Ruthenian Church in the United States," Pennsylvania History, XLII, no 2 (April, 1975), 137–154 36 On the theme of cultural pluralism facilitating long-term assimilation cf, Joseph P Fitzpatrick, "The Integration of Puerto Ricans," Thought, XXX, no 118 (Autumn, 1955), 402-420 37 Robert F Foerster The Italian Emigration of our Times (Cambridge Harvard University Press, 1919), p 43 38 United States Immigration Commission, Abstracts of Reports vol I, p 97 39 Peter Roberts, “The New Pittsburghers Slavs and Kindred Immigrants in Pittsburgh," Charities and the Commons XXI (2 January, 1909), 535–536 40 A Marxist writer has presented statistics on the tiny land-holdings of Carpatho-Ruthenian peasant in comparison with other groups in 1900, of Maria Mayer, “A XIX szazadvegi karpatukranagrarnepesseg tarsadalmi szerkezetenek statisztikai abrazolasa," ("A Statistical Description of the Social Structure of the Carpatho-Ukrainian Agrarian Population at the End of the Nineteenth century'), Tortenelmi szemle IV, no 3 (1961), 330_346 41 United States Immigration Commission, Abstracts of Reports, vol I, p 99 42 “Kıvandorlasa es visszavandorlasa a Magyar szent Korona orszagainak, 1899-1913,” (“Emigration and Return of Emigres of the Nations of the Holy Hungarian Crown from 1899 to 1913') in Magyar statisztikai kozlemenyek, CXVII, new series (Budapest Anonymous Publishing Society of Pest, 1918), p 36 43 Cf Joseph P Fitzpatrick, “The Importance of Community in the Process of Immigrant Assimilation," International Migration Review, I, no 1 (Fall, 1966), 5-16 44 For a compilation of Carpatho-Ruthenian organizations consult, Lubomyr R Wynar, Encyclopedic Directory of Ethnic Organizations in the United States (Littleton, Colo , Libraries Unlimited, 1975), pp 69-72 45 The respected University of Chicago sociologist Robert Ezra Park noted the functions of immigrant aid societies for strengthening communal life See Robert E Park and Herbert A Miller, Old World Traits Transplanted (New York Harper, 1921), pp 124–132 For a discussion of the issues of cultural assimilation and adjustment see, Yaroslav J Chyz and Read Lewis, "Agencies Organized by Nationality Groups in the United States," The Annals of the American Association of Political and Social Science, CXLII (March, 1949), 157–158 ·78 CARPATHO RUTHENIAN RESOURCES & ASSIMILATION, 1880-1924 46 Margaret F Byington, Homestead The Households of a Mill Town (New York Charities Publication Committee, 1910), pp 160-164, 271-276 47 Ibid , p 162 48 Ibid , p 163–164 49 For information on currently published Carpatho-Ruthenian newspapers consult Lubomyr R Wynar Encyclopedic Directory of Ethnic Newspapers and Periodicals in the United States (Littleton, Colo Libraries Unlimited, 1972), pp 35-38 The Immigration History Research Center of the University of Minnesota is now completing a microfilming project of Carpatho-Ruthenian immigrant serials, "Carpatho-Ruthenian Project Nears Completion" Spectrum, II, no 3 (December, 1976), 8 On Carpatho-Ruthenian periodicals storaged in selected libraries see, Edward Kasinec, “The Carpatho-Ruthenian Immigration in the United States, A Note on Sources in some US Repositories, Queens Slavic Papers, II (1977), forthcoming 50 This paper, now called Greek Catholic Union Messenger, is the organ of the Greek Catholic Union On the role of this society in promoting national consciousness among the American immigrants see, Faul R Magocsi, “The Political Activity of Rusyn-American Immigrants in 1918," East European Quarterly, X, no 3 (Fall, 1976), 345–365 51 On this general theme see, Robert E Park, The Immigrant Press and its Control (New York Harper, 1922), pp 33-40 52 U S Immigration Commission Immigrants in Industries, part 23, vol I, p 150 } 53 Loc cit , XXI 54 A history of the American Carpatho-Ruthenian Church is contained in Walter C Warzeski, Byzantine Rite Rusins in Carpatho-Ruthenia and America (Fittsburgh Byzantine Seminary Press, 1971), x and 332 PP, 55 Robert Clement, “The Life of the Married Eastern Clergy," Eastern Churches Review, II (Spring, 1968), 64 56 Andrew Perejda, “Geographic Settlement l'atterns”, in Renoff and Reynolds, Proceedings, p 44 57 The research of Professor Perejda should do much to illuminate this topic, see, ibid, pp 43–48 58 On Slavic trade union activity in the Penpsylvania anthracite region consult, Victor R Greene, The Slavic Community on Strike Immigrant Labor in Pennsylvania Anthracite (Notre Dame, Ind University of Notre Dame Press, 1968), XVI and 260 pp 59 Oscar Handlin, Race and Nationality in American Life (Garden City, N Y Doubleday Anchor, 1957), pp 74–110 ·5 The Ukrainian Community in Ohio 1885-1976 G KULCHYCKY A Introduction The Ukrainian-Americans are presently celebrating the Centennial of the mass emigration of Ukrainians to the United States From all the accumulated data and new information, however, there is no longer any doubt that the Ukrainian emigration to the United States is much older than 100 years Evidence points to early Ukrainian presence in Virginia, with Captain Smith and Lord Delaware, the Aleutians, Alaska and California ? The coming of Ukrainian immigrants to Ohio is more recent Their arrival here is probably no older than 1880 and probably the first settler was S Motko who came to Youngstown in 1885 from the village of Lupukhiv, Western Ukraine After him came other immigrants from the region of Lisko, Sianık, Sambir, Rava Ruska, Dobromyl, Skalat, Ternopil and other areas of Western Ukraine 2 A sizeable number came also from the Carpathian region Attracted by Jobs and opportunity for advancement, many Ukrainians drifted west and by 1900 began to settle in Akron and Cleveland The first Ukrainians to arrive in the latter were S Palivoda and P Voliansky in 1886 Since that time Cleveland has become the nerve center of over 37 Ukrainian settlements in Ohio 3 ·80 THE UKRAINIAN COMMUNITY IN OHIO 1885-1976 B The Old and New Immigrants The "Old Immigration," as it is called, refers to the mass emigration of Ukrainians between 1876 and 1939 Whether this is the correct nomenclature is still to be debated 4 It is this group of “Old Immigrants" who bore the brunt of the difficulties encountered in a strange new land called America They prepared the ground for the massive “New Immigration" which was to come between 1945 and 1954 The “Old Immigrants’ came to the United States mostly from Western Ukraine which was then under Austria-Hungary For the most part these immigrants were Ukrainian (Byzantine) or Greek Catholics and of poor peasant stock Their emigration was due to economic rather than political reasons Many of the immigrants had no intention of staying in America Their objective was to earn money and return to the Ukraine World War I shattered the hopes of the would be returnees and forced them to establish deeper roots in the American soil Hard workng, enterprising, and determined, the Ukrainian immigrants began to overcome the obstacles that faced them First, the immigrants created fraternal and self help organizations which had the economic well being of its members in mind From these organizations, since most of the members were Ukrainian (Byzantine) Catholic, came the initiative to build Churches In both of these endeavors the Ukrainians encountered internal and external opposition Internally, the Ukrainians were divided among themselves (Ruthenians and Ukrainian Galitsians), the Church hierarchy was in disorder and in the process of being formed within this hierarchy there was a power struggle between Ruthenian and Ukrainian Galitsian priests which eventually led to a split In the purely Ukrainian Churches there was a rapid turnover of prļests and a struggle between them and the parishioners 5 Added to this was the intrusion of Roman Catholic prelates joto purely Ukrainian Church affairs as well as the activity of the Russian Mission which conducted a wide propaganda campaign, which appealed to Ukrainian Russophile elements, and in this way contributed to the split in the Ukrainian Catholic Church 6 Finally, the Depression as well as the growth of the progressive (communist) wing of Ukrainian immigrants further complicated the progress of the "Old Immigrants", ·THE UKRAINIAN COMMUNITY IN OHIO 1885-1976 81 The “Old Immigrants" were able to overcome the challenges Not very well educated, due to long hours of toil, they were not able to master the English language by going to night school Nevertheless, their achievements in a span of a little over 50 years are remarkable They were, first of all, strong enough to overcome the problems facing them and then proceeded to build churches, found fraternal insurance companies, national homes, Ukrainian schools, political, cultural and social organizations, businesses, youth and women organizations, newspapers and printing presses, and much more Through their efforts and financial self sacrifice the Ukrainian immigrants created a “fortress” and base on which a new wave of Ukrainian immigrants could, under new and different circumstances, thrive, expand, and operate The "New Immigrants” or those who came after 1945 had many advantages not enjoyed by the "Old Immigrants" They were better educated, politically more sophisticated, and most important, they did not have to begin their existence from nothing, as was the case of the previous immigrants The Displaced Persons Act passed by Congress in 1948 opened the gates to a new wave of immigrants In the case of the Ukrainians the “New Immigrants" came to America for political rather than economic reasons Different from the “Old Immigrants” this new wave also included persons from Eastern as well as Western Ukraine 7 Not feeling the social pressures experienced by the "Old Immigrants”, the new arrivals retain and are proud to maintain their bilingualism as well as their original names Proud of their nationality and rejecting the “melting-pot" theory they cling to their national traditions and customs Unlike the first emigres they came mostly from large cities and had an easier adjustment period They became citizens faster and their upward mobility, despite their initial language deficiency, was and continues to be substantial It is difficult to ascertain what the number of Ukrainians or American-Ukrainians is in Ohio By 1930, based on the Annual Report of the Commissioner General of Immigration, there were 10,169 Ukrainians in Ohro 8 This number cannot be accepted at face value in that many Ukrainians entering this area were counted as Poles, Austrians.or Russians' In local areas such as Creve- ·82 THE UKRAINIAN COMMUNITY IN OHIO 1885-1976 land and Youngstown information as to numbers is conflicting In Cleveland the Don Levy Report places Ukrainians at 16,500, the work of Dr Z Wynnycky places them at 25,000 in 1961, while Halychin puts them at 26,719 in 1936 9 In Youngstown, Halychin puts the figure at 6,730, P Yasnovsky places the Ukrainian figure at 9,000 in 1936, the area Chamber of Commerce places the figure at 1,899 in 1970, while Atty M Yurchison places the number at 15,000 10 In total, based on interviews and projection of areas of settlement, it would probably be safe to say that there are about 64 to 65 thousand Ukrainians in Ohio 11 12 C Ukrainians and Religion in Ohio 1884 to 1933 was the period of Church building At first the Ukrainians of Ohio had to rely upon the good graces of Roman or Byzantine Catholic priests of non-Ukrainian origin to allow them to say mass or worship in their churches In Cleveland services were begun in 1902 in a trolley car garage In that year the Clevelanders asked Bishop S Ortynsky, first prelate of Ukrainians in America, to organize a Church Shortly thereafter a split occurred and the Ukrainian Carpatho-Ruthenians and Galitsians of Cleveland divided the money between themselves and began building their own churches The Ruthenians began building the Holy Ghost Church and the Galitsians began construction of the Sts Peter and Paul Parish in 1909 The first priest of the latter was Father J Chaplynsky and its first pastor was Father V Dohovycz After 1910 the importance of the Sts Peter and Paul Church grew Subsequent pastors founded an orphanage, later transferred to Philadelphia and bought land for the construction of new churches, a cemetery, and picnic grounds In 1949 the cornerstone for a school was laid in Parma at a cost of $ 300,000 and the St Josaphat Chapel, which became an independent parish in 1959 On the East Side of Cleveland St Mary's Parish was established in 1952 and built in 1956 In 1968 yet another church, St Andrew's was founded in Parma Finally, because of religious disputes with Rome over the calendar, and the creation of a Ukrainian Patriarchate, a quasi-independent Catholic Church of the Ascension was founded in the 1960s By virtue of its population, as well as church building ·THE UKRAINIAN COMMUNITY IN OHIO 1885-1976 83 activity, Cleveland became the centre of Ukrainian religious life. The Ohio Deanery under Msgr D Gresko, also pastor of Sts Peter and Paul, is to be found here In Youngstown the early immigrants attended St Mary's Byzantine Catholic Church before beginning construction of their own in 1909 By 1911 the church was built under Fr Zatserkowny In the 1920s, like most other Ukrainian churches, the Holy Trinity Parish went through a turbulent period of existence which resulted in a split and the creation of St Peter and Paul Ukrainian Orthodox Church In 1933 under Fr I Zabava, also once a pastor of the Holy Ghost Church in Akron, order was restored During the Depression the church had its financial problems but overcame them and shortly bought land in Austintown where a mission and school were established In 1974 St Ann, the former mission, became an independent parish In addition to its church buildings the parishes have picnic grounds, a functioning school where Ukrainian is taught and other properties In Rossford, St Michael's parish was estalished in 1912 and erected only in 1949 The church is small but conducts classes for 25 pupils Presently the pastor is Rev P Guthrie In Akron the Holy Ghost Church was founded and built in 1916 Prior to this the Ukrainians from 1909 attended the Slovak Church where mass was said by a Ukrainian priest from Cleveland In 1912 the Carpatho-Ruthenian Church was erected and many Ukrainians joined it By 1914 they began collecting funds for their own Church which was finally blessed by Bishop C Bohachevsy in 1925 Subsequent problems with finances, growth of a progressive movement which caused a split in the church, and the rapid turnover of pastors led to a weakening of the parish 13 Nevertheless the Church overcame these problems and in 1946 bought lots for the construction of a new Church To strengthen the parish several hundred affidavits were prepared to bring new immigrants to Akron In 1952, a new emigree, Fr I. Durbak became pastor Under him church organizations were reconstituted and a new Church was built in 1961 The Church over the years has also had Ukrainian classes for its young The Canton, Ohio Ukrainian community also has its church which was founded in 1952 and completed in 1954. The pastor ·84 THE UKRAINIAN COMMUNITY IN OHIO 1885-1976 of St Nicholas Parish is Fr W Pellich Together the Catholic churches number eleven, the last five of which were founded after 1948 with the arrival of the “New Immigrants" Most of these churches have their own organizations, schools, choirs, "pyrohy projects” and bingo The Church struggle in the 1920s resulted in the strengthing of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church which was organized in 1918 The members of this Church were mainly former Catholics who for many reasons left the Church 14 There are six Ukrainian Orthodox Churches in Ohio The first, Sts Peter and Paul Parish, was built in Youngstown in 1924 and the second, St Vladimir's, which is 1966 was relocated to Parma, was built in Cleveland in 1926 The latter is a landmark in Parma and is built in the "Kozak Barocco" architectural style with golden domes Other Orthodox Churches in Cleveland are smaller both in size and membership and include St Nicholas, Holy Trinity, and St Andrew Parishes St Mary's Orthodox parish is in Lorain The Orthodox parishes sponsor a Ukrainian Saturday School, "Ridna Shkola”, for their young, they, like the Catholic Churches, have their own choirs, picnic grounds, sisterhoods and other organizations Three of the Orthodox churches were organized after the coming of the "New Immigrants" D Fraternal, Business, Professional, Financial, and Self-Help Organizations Having come to America the "Old Immigrants" settled in areas close to people with whom they could associate and communicate Thus Ukrainians settled in neighborhoods where the dominant population was Slav This tended to cushion the culture shock experienced by the emigrees The next step was to create a financial or economic cushion To protect themselves from death, accidents and maiming the emigrees established the Ukrainian National Association (UNA) in 1894, the Ukrainian Workingmen's Association in 1911, the Association of Ukrainian Catholics in America, “Provedinnia", in 1912 and the Ukrainian National Aids Association of America (UNP) in 1915 All four of these fraternal organizations continue to exist and thrive It is the fraternal organizations that are mainly responsible for founding churches and providing low interest loan for their construction They were ·THE UKRAINIAN COMMUNITY IN OHIO 1885-1976 85 also important in founding Ukrainian National Homes, newspapers, scholarships, and many cultural and political organizations and projects The UNA organized its first branch in Cleveland in 1902 In 1943 this insurance organization had 9 branches in that city with a membership of 2,027 15 Today the number of branches has giown to 14 with a membership of over 5,000 The branches are coordinated by the UNA Regional Council Other fraternal organizations found in Cleveland are seven branches of the Ukrainian Workingmen's Association, five branches of the Providence" Association and five branches of the Ukrainian National Aid Association 16 Youngstown also has similar fraternal organizations, the first of which was Branch 140 of the UNA founded in 1906 Today the UNA in Youngstown has six branches, the National Aid Association has two and “Providence" has one Akron, Ohio like the previous cities maintains two branches of the UNA and one "Providence" branch , Lorain has one branch of the UNA, Rossford has 2 branches of the UNA, Toledo has two branches of the UNA, Canton has one branch of the UNA, one of the National Aid Association and one of Providence, Zanesville and Yorkville each have one branch of the UNA Together the Ukrainian fraternal organizations in Ohio number 53 branches As far as businesses and professions are concerned, the first business to be established in Cleveland was a dairy run by Mr W Momryk in 1903 17 Other businesses included groceries meat markets, beer parlors, etc In 1934 Cleveland had 71 Ukiainian businesses one of which employed 41 workers 18 The professional field grew very rapidly In 1933 a Ukrainian Professional Association of America was created and headed by Cleveland Attorney O Miles As new emigrees came to America Engineering and Medical Societies were founded Ohio membership is 45 and 65 respectively Several doctors from Cleveland became presidents of the national organization All the professions are united into the Cleveland Professional Society which includes as its members 200 of 500 Cleveland professionals Youngstown is the second most important city in Ohio in terms of professions Here also are to be found doctors, law- ·86 THE UKRAINIAN COMMUNITY IN OHIO 1885-1976 yers, professors, and other professionals A long time Chief of Police and later Chief of Detectives of the City was J Terlesky Others include Dr I Dombczevsky director and superintendent of the Mahoning County TB Hospital and Clinic, P Leseganich Director of District 26 of the USWA, JC Melnick, President of the Mahoning County Medical Society and author, Assistant Coroner and now Sheriff of Mahoning County M Yarosh, J Naberezny, Chairman of the Youngstown State University Art Department and many others The recently published work Ukrainians in North America lists 72 persons of note from Ohio These figures do not, however, reflect the true membership of professions in this state 20 In the financial field the Ukrainian Ohians have also been moderately successful In 1915 the first Ukrainian Savings and Loan Association was founded in Cleveland The bank survived the Depression and expanded in the 1960's into N Royalton and Parma In 1967 it merged with the present Cardinal Savings and Loan Association In the 1950s two Ukrainian Credit Unions were formed, the “Selfreliance" and "Osnova" These credit unions have assets in the millions and in addition to giving loans to its members, finance cultural activities, aid invalids and give scholarships to needy students Two other Ukrainian Credit Unions exist in Ohio The first was organized in Youngstown but its center was later transferred to Canton Today Youngstown maintains only a branch The other Credit Union is in Lorain and has assets of over half a million dollars 21 Remembering their own plight the Ukrainian immigrants in Ohio continue to support Ukrainian charitable and self helf organizations. During the 1930s hundreds of thousands of dollars were sent to Ukraine to assist in church and hospital building, invalids, political prisoners and war victims larger city in Ohio had its branches of the United Ukrainian- American Relief Committee (ZUDAK) This committee sends aid in time of emergencies to such close areas as flood victims in Pennsylvania and such distant areas as earthquake victims in Bania Luka in Yugoslavia E Politics and Political Life Since man is basically a political animal, it was a matter of Almost every ·THE UKRAINIAN COMMUNITY IN OHIO 1885-1976 87 time before the Ukrainian immigrants, after tending to their economic well being, would engage in political activity The were not indifferent to the plight of their brethren in the "Old Country" This was evident from the bond diive benefitting the government of the Western Ukrainian National Republic (ZUNR) in the early 1920s, the financial aid given to Ukrainian institutions under the Polish regime, the formation of organizations specifically concerned about the future of Ukraine and attempts to create central organizations that would channel and coordinate Ukrainian activity in the United States for the benefit of Ukraine Examples of the attempt to coordinate activity in Ohio are the creation of the United Ukrainian Organizations in Cleveland in 1928 and the "Samopomich" or "Self Help" in Akron These types of coordinating bodies emerged spontaneously in every city that had a large Ukrainian population It was not until December 2, 1939 at its 8th Congress that the loosely knit "Union of Ukrainian Organizations of America" decided to create a viable body that could speak as one voice for all Ukrainians This was especially necessary since the clouds of war were gathering over the world Such a body was founded in Washington in May of 1940 by 805 delegates representing 168 localities and 2,000 Ukrai- Dian organizations in America 22 Each city now had a branch of the Ukrainian Congress Committee of America, as it was called, which was to be a representative and political body coordinating the activities of all organizations that belonged to it Ohio has seven such branches In the Cleveland branch of this organization there are 40 dues paying member organizations while in Youngstown there are 36 23 The number of politically oriented member organizations reflects the variety of interests among the Ukrainians In reality there are only several ideological persuasions that have dominated the allegiance of the emigres but each one of these ideologies has several sister organizations, i e, youth, women's cultural, etc, which have their own vote but at the same time follow the general ideological line Before the creation of the UCCA each city did pretty much what it felt was the correct line In time a "general line" was adopted thanks to the efforts of such Ukrainian diplomats as L. Cehelsky and Bachynsky who continued to struggle for the by ·88 THE UKRAINIAN COMMUNITY IN OHIO 1885-1976 then occupied Ukiaine Their travels and speeches did much to enlighten the Ukrainians in America and were responsible for generous financial aid first to the ZUNR delegation and its political activities in Paris, and later to the Church and other worthwhile organizations and projects in Ukraine Financial ledger books are replete with examples of aid to Ukraine In Youngstown, for example, the Ukrainians since 1931 have had a Ukrainian Day The money earned at these events, sponsored by the United Ukrainian Organizations, (today UNA) were sent to Ukraine Thus in 1933, during the height of the Depression, they sent $ 40 35, in 1937 of the $ 555 88 made $ 456 88 was sent to Ukraine, in 1938 out of $ 621 73 made $ 457 73 was sent to Ukraine24 During the war years much money was channelled into the war effort in the form of Red Cross contributions, bond buying as as well as Ukrainian national projects in the United States After the war much money was channelled into aid and affidavits for the displaced persons 26 In almost every city of Ohio there existed political organizations such as the Organization for the Liberation of Ukraine (ODWU), the Hetmanate organization (monarchical) and the progressives who united themselves into the Order of Workers' whose centers were labour temples such as the one that still exists in Cleveland The ODWU and Hetmanate organizations were nationalist and had their paramilitary youth, and women's organizations They fought against the progressives and finally were able to prevail thanks to the “New Immigrants' who were able to convince the 'progressives' that things were not as rosy as Soviet propaganda would have them believe27 An example of the hostility among the ideological camps can be seen in the action of a young emigre who during the “Opportunity Fair" in 1964 in Cleveland tore down the Soviet Ukrainian flag from the hands of the progressives and destroyed it This act resulted in the arrest of the young man and the placing of two detectives as a permanent guard of the Soviet flag 28 The Progressive movement was very strong in Cleveland which in its formidable years was its center and published the Worker With the coming of the "New Immigrants” the nationalistic spirit prevailed in organized Ukrainian life Especially active was the Ukrainian Liberation Front and its affiliates Ukrainians ·THE UKRAINIAN COMMUNITY IN OHIO 1835-1976 89 who belong to the UCCA pay their dues to the National Fund" and the UCCA with its branches holds political, mainly patriotic, anti-Communist rallies, commemorate "Captive Nations Week”, the “Bicentennial”, provide speakers for meetings of different types, and initiate projects such as the erection of the T Sheychenko monument in Washington and the L Ukrainka monument in the Curtural Gardens of Cleveland At the Tenth Congress of the UCCA held in New York in 1974, three Ohio branches of the UCCA were lauded for their accomplishments The branches were Cleveland, Youngstown and Canton 29 But the Ukrainians have also become very active in American politics Political Clubs exist in Youngstown, Toledo, Cleveland and other cities The "Old" and "New Immigrants” differ in their political preferences in that the former lean mostly to the Democrats and the latter prefer the Republicans Not satisfied to see their representatives just once every four years during elections, the Ukrainians entered political life in Ohio and have captured such positions as the Mayor of Parma and Middleburgh Heights They took an active part in the Parma charter commission bid, and recently had their candidates for mayor and Congress in the Parma-Cleveland Area Presently there are several candidates running for different positions in Ohio The problem that exists in the area of American politics is that many of the new aggressive young Ukrainian politicians and candidates have run into opposition from old loyal political stalwarts of Ukrainian descent who feel that each candidate should start from the very bottom and work himself up to the top in party hierarchy The younger Ukrainian politicians, however, are impatient as well as aggressive and are therefore winning new adherents F Education and Culture Since the coming of the "Old Immigrants” the question of education has always dominated the center of the stage Many of these who came to America were illiterate, but nevertheless, recognized the importance of education To raise the level of literacy, organizations such as “Prosvita" (Enlightenment) were founded These oiganizations had their own libraries as well as instruction The Church and the deacons also played an immense role in education Evening, Saturday and Sunday Schools taught the Ukrainian language, history and other subjects. With the ·90 THE UKRAINIAN COMMUNITY IN OHIO 1885-1976 coming of the “New Immigrants” a network of schools known as “Ridna Shkola" (native school) was organized in America and Ohio Cleveland has two such schools Youngstown, Akron, Canton and other areas have had such schools but due to a lack of teachers their existence continues to be sporadic in nature These schools over the years have turned out thousands of students At the end of the 1974–75 school year Cleveland graduated 246 students 30 Standards for graduation and instruction are set up by the UCCA Educational Council and adherence to these standards is periodically examined by regional school inspectors The emphasis on higher education in the Ukrainian community is very great Almost every college or university has Ukrainian students Over the years student clubs were organized in such universities as Toledo, Kent, Youngstown, Ohio State and in the Cleveland area which served four universities It is the Cleveland Student Club, “Adam Kotsko", which is responsible for the initiative in 1953 that culminated in the creation of the Ukrainian Student Federation of America (SUSTA) Two presidents of SUSTA came from Cleveland The city is also known for the Thud Congress of SUSTA at which the idea of a permanent “Ukrainian Chair" at an American University was born Moneys were collected for this project (FKU) which finally led to the creation of a Ukrainian Chair at Harvard Cleveland has contributed $ 230,000, Lorin, $ 50,000, Youngstown, $ 21,000, Akron, $ 5,000 31 Smaller Ukrainian settlements have also contributed to the Fund Ukrainians in Ohio have many scholarly organizations Almost every ty of settlement has either a branch or members of the Shevchenko Scientific Society or the Free Ukrainian Academy of Arts and Sciences The Shevchenko Scientific Society of Ohio presently has 60 members 32 Cleveland has a Ukrainian Museum founded in 1952 It is known for its excellent T Shevchenko collection as well as Ukrainian Boy Scout (Plast) Archives Periodically the Museum turns out commemorative stamps and publishes catalogues and materials relating to the Ukrainian press 33 An important centre of Ukrainian learning is Kent State University where the journal The Ukrainian Historian is published University Libraries at Youngstown State, Case Western Reserve, Kent State, John Carroll and Ohio State have ·THE UKRAINIAN COMMUNITY IN OHIO 1885-1976 91 good if not excellent collections of Ukrainica Presently almost every university in Ohio has professors of Ukrainian descent who are organized in the Ukrainian American Association of University Professors Over the years many books have been published in many fields in Ohio by such Ukrainian printing concerns as the Klym Co, West Side and Baturyn companies Ohio excells in the field of culture Perhaps the crowning achievement of the Ukrainians of Ohio was the opening of the Ukrainian Cultural Gardens in Cleveland in 1939 The Gardens are located on Liberty Boulevard on land donated by the Rockefellers in 1925 and contain statues sculped by the renowned Ukrainian sculptor, A Archipenko, one of the founders of cubism The cost of the Ukrainian Gardens from 1935 to 1939 was $ 13,027 34 In 1969 another statue, the work of M Chereshniowsky of Lesia Ukrainka, the poetess, was added to the priceless bronzes in the Garden Proud of their rich heritage, Ukrainians proceeded to organize cultural projects which would identify their nationality The first theater group was founded in 1903 in Cleveland and lasted until 1950 Folk dancing groups were organized under the renowned balletmaster Vasyl Avramenko in 1926 Musical societies, schools and choirs were begun, the two most prominent of which have been the Taras Shevchenko “Homin” Chorus and the “Dnipro" Chorus conducted by the late Jaroslaw Barnych and Eugene Sadowsky respectively The Ukrainian Musical Instutie (UMI) was founded in the 1950's Percussion, Mandolin, and Bandura (the Ukrainian national instrument) ensembles were also organized During 1976 the Ukrainians of Ohio have participated in the American Bicentennial celebrations through their committees Such committees were organized in Cleveland, Youngstown, Akron, Lorain, Canton, and Toledo Two of the cities, Cleveland and Youngstown, besides having gala festivals and concerts dedicated to the 200th Anniversary of American Independence and 100th Anniversary of Ukrainian Settlement in America, had their own national floats Present at the Youngstown celebration was Miss A Ilschenko, Miss World USA, a Ukrainian from Middleburgh Heights, Ohio ·92 THE UKRAINIAN COMMUNITY IN OHIO 1885-1976 G Conclusion The Ukrainian American community of Ohio continues to be a viable, active, growing group that plays a vital role in the overall Ukrainian community of America Even though proud of their ethnic heritage they do not forget their debt to America They are good, hard working, loyal citizens who have over the years given their support as well as their sons for the country of their choosing Valuing liberty they remain a stabilizing factor in the sometimes complex and radical changes that have beset America Together with other ethnic groups, through the electoral process as well as the media, they stand on guard of the liberties that they have obtained and continue to cherish here in America FOOTNOTES 1 L Myshuha, "Over Half a century in the New World,'' Propamiatna Knyha Ukrainskoho Narodnoho Soluzy (Jersey City, New Jersey Published by “Svoboda,” 1944) p 2 See also W Halich's Ukrainians in the United States (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1937) pp 19-22, T Bodnaruks “Slıdamy Andria Ahapiia Honcharenka" and V Savchenko's “Zaporozhtsi v Ameryci to ikh Oboronets o Ahapu Honcharenko” both in Vyzvolny. Sliakh, Vol XIX, No 4 (217), (April, 1966) pp 436 to 436 to 446 2 Dr Luke Myshuha (ed), Propamiatna Knyha Vydana z Nahody Soi oklitnoh? Iuvileiu Ukrainskoho Narodnoho Soluzu (Jersey City N J Published by the UNA, 1936), p 671 3 Dmytro M Shtohryn (ed) Ukrainians in North America, (Champaign, Illinois Association for the Advancement of Ukrainian Studies, 1975) Based on the names included in this work, Ukrainians are piesently living in the following cities of Ohio Cleveland, Newburgh Heights, Cleveland Heights, Lakewood, Bedford, Strongville, Brooklyn, Lakewood, Parma, Seven Hills, Niles, Giraid, Youngtown, Lorain, Akron Barberton, Ravenna, Canton, Rossford, Toledo, Columbus, Cincinnatti, Zanesville, Dayton, Troy, Kent, Campbell, New Richland, Wapaloneta, Macedonia, Findley, Oxford, Greenville, Lima, Yorkville, Jefferson and Mansfield According to W Halich's, Ukrainians in the United States, (Chicago University Press, 1937) p 157, Ukrainians lived or live in Ashtabula, Borton, Belle Valley, Blaine, Byesville, Empire, Fairport Harbor, Kipling, Marblehead, Masury, Mingo Pleasant City, Struthers, and Warren 4 One could divide the Ukrainian emigration to America into five waves 1 17th century to 1876— mostly political ·THE UKRAINIAN COMMUNITY IN OHIO 1885-1976 93 2 1876-1914— first mass emigration mostly economic 3 1918-1939- political-economic Very influential in forming the political outlook of their predecessors 4 1945–1954-second mass emigration, mostly political 5 1954 to present-economic resettled from Poland, Argentina and the Ukrainian SSR 5 V Lesniak (ed ), Golden Anniversary 1915-1965 of the Holy Ghost Ukrainian Catholic Church in Akron Ohio, n p See also 44th Annual Ukrainian Day Program (Youngstown, August 10, 1975), n p 6 Lesniak, ibid , p n p 7 The Ukrainian Orthodox Church in America consisted of former Catholics who were dissatisfied with the politics of Rome and left the Church Most of these Western Ukrainians came from Austria-Hungary After WWII, E Ukrainians arrived in America and were representative of Ukrainian Orthodoxy For the origin of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church in the United States, see Rev Peter Bılon, Ukrainians and Their Church (Johnston, Ра Published by Western Pennsylvanian Regional Branch of the UOL, 1953) n p 8 W Halych, “Rozmischennia Ukrainskoni Imigracii v Zluchenykh Derzhavakh," Propamiatna Knyha, op cit, p 454 9 Don Levy, “Metropolitan Ethnic Population," This information is based on information obtained from the Nationality Services Center in Cleveland See also Z Wynnytsky's, The Cle elanders of Ukrainian Descent (Cleveland The Ukrainian United Organization of Cleveland, Ohio, 1961) np W Halych, Propamiatna, op cit p 455 10 Halychyn, Ibid, p 455 See also Pylyp Iasnovskyi's, Pid Ridnym i Pıd Chuzhym Nebom, (Buenos Aires Published by Julian Serediak, 1961) p 322, Howard C Aley, A Heritage to Share, (Youngstown Published by the Bicentennial Commission of Youngstown and Mahoning County, 1975), Interview with Atty M Yurchison, President of the Youngstown UCCA Branch, (October, 1975) 11 This estimated figure is reached on the basis of talks with community leaders who claim that the Ukrainian population of the larger cities in Ohio is as follows Cleveland, 35,000, Youngstown, 15,000, Akron, 1,000, Parma, 5,000, Rossford-Toledo, 700, Lorain, 500, Canton, 600, Cincinnati, 150 and all the other settlements approximately 50 or more 12 Sliakh (The Way), December 7, 1960 13 Lesniak, op cit, np 14 Bilon, op cit, a p 15 Roman Slobodian, “Tse ne Mertví Chysla Tse Zhyva Syla," Golden Jubilee Almanac of the UNA (Jersey City, N J Published by the UNA, 1946) p 44 n p p 55 ·94 THE UKRAINIAN COMMUNITY IN OHIO 1885-1976 16 George P Kulchycky, “Ukrainians in Greater Cleveland," Ukrainian Festival of Songs and Dances A Bicentennial Salute of the Ukrainian Community of Greater Cleveland (May 23, 1967), n p 17 Wynnytsky, op cit, n p 18 Halich, Ukrainians , op cit, p 66 19 Michael S Pap (ed), “The Ukrainian Community of Cleveland" Ethnic Communities of Cleveland, (Cleveland Institute for Soviet and East European Studies John Carroll University, 1973) P 309 20 Shtohryn, op cit, The total number of Ukrainians from Ohio comes to 72 This figure is incorrect Since the effort of Dr Shtohryn is new it is probable that many noteworthy Ukrainians from Ohio were not included in the publication I know 19 persons personally that should have been included but were not Finally just one organization, the Medical Society, has 65 physicians 21 V Deychakıvsky, Interview of June, 1976 Lorain, Ohio 22 Anon Three Decades of UCCA 1940-1970, (New York, N Y , Published by "Svoboda," 1970), p 1 23 Roster of Ukrainian Organizations in UZO See also 44th Annual Ukrainian Day Program (Youngstown, Ohio, August 10, 1975) n p 24 Anon, Knyha Prykhodiy to Rozkhodiy Ukrainskoho Dnia 1931 do 1955, (Youngstown, Ohio unpublished financial reports pp 6-7, 12 and 13 25 Ibid , pp 18-19 and p 34 26 Ibid , pp 42-43 27 M Nastasivsky, Ukrainska Imigracsiia v Spoluchenykh Derzhavakh, (New York Soiuz Ukrainskykh Robitnychykh Orhanizatsiy 1934) See also A M Shlepakov, Ukrainska Trudova Emigracula v SSHA 1 Kanadı, (Kyiev, Academiia Nauk Ukrainskoi RSR, 1960), p 107 28 George P Kulchycky, Private notes dated 5-24–1964, p 1 29 Three Decades of UCCA , op cit, p 17 30 Based on the unpublished UZO report of July, 1975 to the UCCA in New York Exhibit D “The School of Ukrainian Studies," n p 31 Reports of V Deychakıvsky of Lorain and M Lischak of Youngstown, June, 1976 Both are responsible for fund raising in their respective cities 32 This information is from an unpublished roster of members 33 So far they have turned out 18 such catalogues The last one was published in 1975 34 George P Kulchycky, The Ukrainian Community of Cleveland written in Cleveland in 964 unpublished, no ·6 The Early Russian Feminists and The Struggle for Higher Education for Women RUTH A DUDGEON “Women are created to be slaves all their lives and nothing can be done about it."1 Thus, Ekaterina Zhukovskaia's mother counselled her at the beginning of the 1860's Yet Ekaterina and a number of her contemporaries, as well as a few of her mother's contemporaries - broke with this traditional view in the 1860's and demanded an end to slavery and inequality The purposes of this paper are to define women's struggle for independence and equality in 19th century Russia and to demonstrate the central role played in that struggle by the movement for higher education for women The reform era in Russia generated a number of social and economic pressures to examine the position of women, pressures which were reinforced by Western influences The “woman question" was first delineated in the pages of Sovremennik in the late 1850's by Mikhail Mikhailov, and the discussion was quickly taken up by other journals and by society Educational reform, including co-education was proposed The oppressed condition of women was compared with that of the serfs The position of women within the family was examined The idle, useless life of middle- and upper-class women was condemned, and women were called to productive work and economic independence. As ·96 THE EARLY RUSSIAN FEMINISTS a result of these discussions, a feminist view of women developed, ie, a view of women as oppressed, restricted, and discriminated against as a group This recognition of the existing oppression of women and of their rights as individuals formed the basis for a movement to change their position The most outspoken proponents of the woman question were the nihilists, who attacked all those forces in Russian society such as tradition, law, and authority, which combined to keep women subordinate The nihilists argued the complete equality of the sexes and favored the free exercise of individual will and development of individual abilities Although the nihilist solution to the women question did not lend itself to an organized women's movement because of its individualistic approach and although it gained little support in Russia outside progressive circles because of its association in the public mind with revolution and immorality, it's development was a key step in the liberation of Russian women For nihilism made such an imprint on wider progressive circles that from the early sixties the idea of the equality of men and women was firmly established, at least in theory Nihilism created a psychological atmosphere more favorable to women's activism in the progressive part of Russian society than was generally enjoyed by Western women At the end of the 1850's when discussion of the woman question began, Russian society in general was engaged in a search for personal and group emancipation Under such favorable conditions, women, only a small number of course, — responded quickly to the exhortations to study, to work, to seek personal fulfillment The first women's association was organized in Simbirsk in 1859, and in the same year the first women appeared in the lecture halls of St Petersburg University Within two years, hundreds of women were attending lectures, not only at the University and the Medical-Surgical Academy in St Petersburg but also at the Universities in Kiev and Kharkov Women sought work even outside the traditional fields of teaching and governessing, rejecting the traditional view of limited roles for women Simpler styles of dress and “non-feminine” behavior were adopted by "emancipated women" Moderate feminists emphasized philanthropic and selfs help organizations such as the Society for Cheap Lodgings to ard-poor women and a women's translating ·THE EARLY RUSSIAN FEMINISTS 97 and publishing artel More radical women insisted on a total, immediate, and more personal emancipation-running away from home or entering fictitious marriages when necessary to gain personal freedom, joining communes, asserting a right to sexual freedom, etc Despite the wide range of women's responses, they tended to be largely individual with little organizational form Early efforts to organize women's clubs foundered on government restrictions limiting organizations to educational and philanthropic activities, a ban which continued into the twentieth century Other attempts at organization collapsed from inexperience and lack of agreement among women as well as from a lack of feminist consciousness By the mid-sixties women found it necessary to reassess the direction of their demands under the stress of a number of changing conditions By the late 1860's and early 1870's the main focus of Russian feminists was on access to higher education and professional and white collar employmont These goals were to remain the focus of the movement until the turn of the century when changing political conditions and a change in women themselves made possible a broader feminist movement Why this decades long focus on education and employment ? The answer lies in both the political and social conditions in Russia and the needs of women themselves As reaction against reform gained strength in the mid-sixties, the opposition to the emancipation of women became vocal and it became obvious that the nihilist idea of immediate, total emancipation for women could not be realized for women generally The sexual aspects of liberation combined with the participation of women in student uprisings, the Polish reyolt, and the Karakazov affair led to the denunciation of the women's movement as one of those liberal reforms which was threatening to undermine the stability of society Not until the early twentieth century would the climate again be as favorable to the liberation of women as it had been in the reform era Furthermore, radical thought, which in the 1860's had proclaimed the emancipation of women as one of the most important tasks of society, began to call women to revolution in the name of broader social goals. Women, who as a group had not yet ·98 THE EARLY RUSSIAN FEMINISTS achieved their emancipation, were called upon to give up their special struggle and devote themselves to the total solution of the social question Thus, the women's movement lost its most outspoken base of public support and, at the same time, a considerable number of women who moved away from feminism to political radicalism 4 The withdrawal of the radicals meant that the moderate feminist position went almost unchallenged within the women's movement until the early twentieth century From the beginning, moderate feminists had avoided the more controversial issues, preferring to work within the legal framework of governmental approval thru accommodation and gradual reform Within this context, education was an ideal issue for it was more likely than women's issues to gain public and governmental support Russia needed educated workers and faith in education as the key to rapid progress for Russia was widespread Women sought to capitalize on this by stressing the service aspect of their striving for education and employment rather than the emancipatory But the feminists not only argued that Russia need educated women, they also insisted that women needed education The economic changes resulting from the emancipation of the serfs denied many women of the privileged classes the economic security they had previously enjoyed, and large numbers of them now had to find a way to earn a living But they couldn't work in factories-- they wanted the same kinds of jobs as the men of their class had For professional and white collar employment, education was essential Beyond the economic benefits, education was important to women themselves Education offered a means to self-fulfilment, self-development, and emancipation, and a chance to share in the exciting intellectual and political currents of the day, a chance to prepare themselves for service in the great task of uplifting the Russian masses Other factors also limited the focus of feminist activities A number of the issues raised by feminists in the West were not appropriate to Russia at the time Woman suffrage was not an issue in the absence of male suffrage Russian women already had full property rights and were legally entitled to inherit a specified share of both moveable and landed property. Russian ·THE EARLY RUSSIAN FEMINISTS 99 A 5 law sharply limited divorce, but the legal conditions were the same for both sexes Authority over the children was shared by both parents The socio-economic conditions in Russia precluded a working class or peasant oriented feminist movement Most Russian feminists were from the poorer gentry, the middle bureaucracy and the small professional intelligentsia, and the concerns of the women of these classes dominated the movement Radical women came from these same classes and it is worth noting that a common interest in education served as a point of contact between moderate and radical women throughout the period The educational issue had been among the first to be raised in relation to the woman question. Discussions ranged from reform of secondary education thru the suitability of women for higher education to the value of coeducation at all levels brief outline of the history of higher education for women is provided below since the topic has been generally ignored in all studies of the Russian educational system Reform of secondary education for women began in 1858 with the creation of girls' gymnasiums, ie, day schools open to all classes The number of these schools grew rapidly despite a lack of state support, and by the twentieth century the number of girls exceeded the number of boys studying in the gymnasiums of the Education Ministry However, girls' gymnasiums devoted less time than the boys' gymnasiums to the study of mathematics, natural sciences, and classical languages, thus leaving their graduates less well-prepared for further study and making it possible for officials to continue to argue that women were not adequately prepared for higher education Not until 1916, was the curriculum of the girls' gymnasiums made equivalent to that in the boys' gymnasiums Although women attended university lectures briefly in the early 60's, the new university statutes of 1863 excluded them completely Forced out of the universities, women were left with two alternatives to go abroad to study or to create their own higher educational institutions Study abroad offered greater freedom, more immediate opportunity, and until 1911, the only opportunity for a Russian woman to earn an academic degree The graduation of Russia's first woman doctor, Nadezha Suslova, from Zurich University in 1867 provided an example for women ·100 THE EARLY RUSSIAN FEMINISTS seeking higher education By the summer of 1873, at least 100 Russian women were registered at the University and the Teknikum 6 In subsequent years, Russian women entered other European universities as well The number of Russian women studying abroad fluctuated, depending on internal Russian conditions, but remained only a small percentage of women seeking higher education Inside Russia, women worked on the second alternative In Moscow, St Petersburg, Kiev, and Kharkov in the late 1860's and early 1870's, groups of women demanded access to higher education and organized informal classes with the support of university professors A few women petitioned for admission to various higher educational institutions and a few began, again, to attend lectures in the men's institutions- but unofficially for government policy has not changed An appeal for a women's university was rejected by the government, as were petitions for the creation of women's divisions within the men's universities Minister of Education Dimitri A Tolstoi asserted the women were not prepared for higher education, had no need for it, and were morally and intellectually inferio17 All that women were permitted were preparatory courses to correct the deficiencies in their secondary education, the Alarchinskie in St Petersburg and the Lubianskie in Moscow, both opening in 1869– and public lecture courses, organized first in St Petersburg, the Vladimirskie Courses, and subsequently in several other university cities Organizing efforts, then and later, were limited to university cities by dependence on professors as instructors, but the courses diew support and students from all parts of Russia In the early 1870's, government policy changed, partly due to the need for professionals and partly from a desire to keep women from going abroad to study, where they came in contact with socialist and anarchist movements 8 Ip 1872 the government responded to demands by women for medical training and to the need for better-trained midwives with permission for courses for Learned Midwives under the auspices of the Medical-Surgical Academy Although supposedly designed only to train midwives, the professors, who supported women's efforts to become doctors, provided the same courses and level of instruction as was given to men students, and in 1876, in recognition of this, the courses ·THE EARLY RUSSIAN FEMINISTS 101 were organized and renamed the Women's Medical Courses Twentyfive women doctors from the first graduating class received acclaim for their service in evacuation and field hospitals during the Russo-Turkish War 9 10 Also in 1872 and again in response to women's petitions and state needs in this case for better-trained teachers- two-year experimental higher courses for women were authorized in Moscow under the direction of Moscow University Professor V I Guerrier Finally, in 1876 the government gave approval for the creation of higher courses in all university cities Courses were established in Kazan in 1876 and in Kiev and St Petersburg in 1878 The Lubianskie Preparatory Courses in Moscow were reorganized to become the equivalent of higher courses in mathematics and science but were denied official recognition as higher courses However, permission was not granted for courses in Odessa, Kharkov, and Warsaw, for in 1879 government policy again changed Due to an increase in student political activities and the beginnings of terrorism, a Special Council headed by Minister of State Doma.ns P A Valuev concluded that the opening of additional higher courses for women would be “generally undesirable" 11 In Warsaw, women refused to accept this decision and opened secret, illegal courses which operated for some time before being raided by the police and the organizers arrested Although the organizers were acquitted in court, the courses were not permitted to reopen The hostility to women's courses increased following the assasination of Alexander II in 1881 Minister of Education I D Delianov spear-headed an effort to eliminate the courses by closing admission to them on the pretext of studying their reorganization 13 By this means the government forced the closing of all the women's courses except the Higher Courses for Women in St Petersburg, to which admissions were reopened in 1889 following a direct appeal to the tsar by women and their supporters In Moscow following the closing of the Guerrier and Lubianskie Couises, the Society of Governesses and Women Teachers organized informal four-year Collective Lessons for women, essentially higher courses but without the official trappings and without official requirements and restrictions 14 After the death of Alexander III in 1894, women were more 12 ·102 THE EARLY RUSSIAN FEMINISTS successful in their demands for higher education A Women's Medical Institute opened in St Petersburg in 1897, Higher Courses for Women in Moscow in 1900 (however, the Collective Lesson were closed at the same time), and Women's Pedagogical Institutes in St Petersburg and Odessa in 1903 During this same time a few private courses for women were also permitted to open However, repeated petitions for women's courses from other cities were ignored, rejected out of hand, or subjected to bureaucratic delay Petitions for admission to the universities were also iejected Only with the coming of revolution in 1905 did this situation change Briefly after 1905, women were admitted to the universities and some of the techoical institutes, but admission was again closed to them by the Minister of Education in 1908 However, the demand of women for higher education could not be stifled Within the next decade the universities were again opened to women on a limited basis and more than thirty additional higher educational institutions for women were authorized The program of women's courses expanded to add faculties in law, medicine, natural science, and economics and commerce to the traditional historico-philological and physico-mathematical faculties The first women's agricultural and technological institutes were organized in St Petersburg in 1904 and 1906 respectively While the government permitted these courses to exist, it did little to encourage them In 1911/12 the Ministry of Education spent 7 5 million rubles on higher education, but only 230,000 rubles (3 08 per cent) was spent on women's education and all but 11,600 rubles of that small amount was spent on the Women's Medical Institute 15 It was left to women themselves to raise the money to finance women's education Nor did the government recognize the worth of the education provided by the women's courses Completion of the university course and passing of the state examination admitted men students to the tenth rank in the Russian civil service Women graduates of the higher courses were not admitted to the state examination and were given only the right to teach at the elementary and intermediate levels, a right granted to gymnasium graduates Not until the turn of the century were the right to teach beyond the intermediate level extended to women and the rights of women doctors established on an equal footing with men. The right to ·THE EARLY RUSSIAN FEMINISTS 103 practise law, except in Siberia, was denied to women by an Imperial ukaz issued in 1876 and continued to be denied until 1917 However, in 1911 the government did recognize certain higher courses for women as equivalent to universities, making their graduates eligible for academic degrees and admission to the state examination but not for access to the civil service and chin 36 What we have here, nevertheless, is a success story For women, despite the opposition of the state and much of society, succeeded in establishing a number of institutions that were universities in all but name From a few hundred students in the first courses in 1872/73, the number expanded to an early high of almost 2,500 students in 1881/82, to 6,000 in 1904/06, and to a minimum of 28,500 in 1911/12, which represented approximately 30% of the students in all higher educational institutions 17 By the early twentieth century, women students thru their diligence and academic achievement had gained a grudging acceptance by both state and society of women's right to and capability for higher education Although all the professions except teaching continued to be male-dominated, women had overcome great hostility and resistance to establish themselves as doctors (2,000 in 1908), chemists, statisticians, archaeologists, astronomers--a whole range of professions In so doing they proved that expanding roles for women could be beneficial to society But Russian women had gained something else in the struggle as well They had gained self-confidence, organizational skills, and experience in dealing with the power structure and in handling their own affairs One of the unique characteristics of the higher courses for women was the role of public initiative in their founding and the participation of women, including women students, in their operation in a society where educational initiative traditionally was taken by the state and educational institutions were run by the state bureaucracy Virtually every one of the women's institutions resulted from women's own initiative Women petitioned academic and scientific bodies, state ministers, and the tsar himself in their search for educational and employment opportunities They conducted a variety of fund-raising activities to keep the courses afloat In St Petersburg they even succeeded in building their own facilities complete with an astro- ·104 THE EARLY RUSSIAN FEMINISTS nomical observatory Organizations were created to raise funds for needy students and to find jobs for graduates, The Alarchinskie Courses, the Lubianskie Courses, and the Collective Lessons were run by the students themselves The Vladimirskie, St Petersburg, and Kiev Courses and many of those courses established after 1905 were run by women's organizations— the most important by virtue of size and achievements being the Society to Finance the Higher Courses for Women in St Petersburg The nucleus of that society was the group of women who had raised the question of higher education for women in St Petersburg in 1868, who then proceeded to organize and finance the Vladimirskie Courses, and finally to organize, finance and operate the St Petersburg Higher Courses, and to fight for their existence when they were threatened with extinction in 1880's Members of this organization were in the forefront of efforts in the 1890's and early 1900's to cooperate with the international feminist movement, to establish a variety of women's organizations, and to improve the position of women Government restrictions on organizational activity prevented the development of feminist organizations per se, which in other countries provided moral support and helped to develop a sense of community among women The women who participated in the struggle for higher education, both as students and as organizers, formed the nucleus of the women's movement in nineteenth-century Russia. The organizing activities of the supporters and the corporate activities of women students provided the only institutionalized expression of the movement These organizations provided a modicum of communication among women, kept the movement growing, and kept women's issues before the public during a period of reaction The four decades from the era of reform to the outbreak of revolution duriog which feminists focussed their attention on education should be viewed as both a holding action against regressive pressures and a period of preparation for broader activity While education had not changed the position of women in society as much as had been anticipated by its early proponents-discrimination in employment, low pay, and traditional roles for women continued to be the norm, it did change the perceptions of a number of women The struggle itself did much to raise the consciousness ·THE EARLY RUSSIAN FEMINISTS 105 of those women involved for the denial of educational opportunity was a clear example of discrimination against women as a group, of a view of women as intellectually inferior and limited to family activities But education increased women's self-confidence and increased their demands Educated women were not satisfied with traditional, limited roles The broadening of the women's movement at the turn of the century reflected not only the changed political climate but the growing reservoir of well-educated professional women who sought a broader scope for their activities and those of women in general It is not coincidental that professional women led the struggle for broader women's rights in the twentieth century FOOTNOTES 1 Zhukovskaia, Zapıskı (Leningrad, 1930), p 35 2 Mikhailov's writings on the woman question are collected in Zhenshchiny, ikh vospitanie i znachenie (Iz Sovremennika 1858-1866 gg ) (SPB, 1903) For treatment of the significance of Mikhailov see Richard Stites, “ML Mikhailov and the Emergence of the Woman Question in Russia," Canadian Slavic Studies, III (Summer 1969), 178–199 3 L F Panteleev, Iz vospominanu proshlago (SPB, 1905), pp 133-136, Mikhailov, Zhenshchiny p 81, Razsvet, 1861, no 8, pp 501-505, S Ashevskıl, “Russkoe studenchestvo v epokhu shestidesiatykh godov," Sovremennyi mir July-August 1907, Pt 1, p 21, Russkara shkola, December 1901, Pt 2, p 109 4 For a stimulating analysis of this phenomenon see Barbara Alpern Engel, "From Feminism to Populism A Study of Changing Attitudes of Women of the Russian Intelligentsia 1855–1881," (Ph D dissertation, Columbia University, 1974) 5 The best Russian account is Elena 0 Likhacheva, Materialy dlia istori zhenskago obrazovania v Rossui 2 vols (SPB, 1899, 1901) See also K Shokhol, "K voprosu o razvitu vysshago zhenskago obrazovannia v Rossu," Zhurnal Ministerstva narodnago prosveshchenria XL (August 1911), Pt 4, 153-195, XLIV (March 1913), Pt 4, 1-36, XLVI (July 1913), Pt 4, 1- 58, S Peterburgskie Vysshie Zhenskie Kursy za 25 let (1878–1902) (SPB, 1903), Sophia A Satina, Obrazovanie zhenshchin v dorevoliutsionnor Rossui (New York, 1966), Ruth A Dudgeon, "Women and Higher Education in Russia, 1855–1905," (Ph D dissertation, George Washington University, 1975), 6 Jan Meijer, Knowledge and Revolution The Russian Colony in Zuerich (1870-1873) (Assen, The Netherlands, 1955), pp 25, 208–215 PN Atuan, Peryyı zhensku kalendar, na 1899 god, pp 140-141, gives enrollment figures for Swiss and French universities for several decades, ·106 THE EARLY RUSSIAN FEMINISTS 7 "Po povodu zhe. skago adresa, podannago g Ministru Narodnago Prosveshchenuia v Kharkove,” Zhu nal Ministerstva narodnago prosveshchenila, October 1870, pp 269-274 8 The situation in Zurich created such concern that the government published an ukaz attacking the motives of women studying there and threatening to exclude them from all educational and professional activities in Russia if they continued to study in Zurich Pravitelstevenny i vestnik, 1873, no 120 (21 May) 9 Selections from the report of the Chief Army Medical Inspector are quoted in P N Tarnovskaia, “Zhensku meditsinsku institut i zhenskie vrachebnye kursy Istorichesku ocherk,” Vestnik Evropy August 1903, p 506 10 The Lubianskie Courses, however were treated as higher courses in the 1880's when the government decided to close admission to all the higher courses 11 From the personal papers of Valuev quoted in PA Zaionchkovskil, Krizis samoderzhavila na rubezhe 1870-1880-kh godov (M, 1964), p 119 12 Based on an account by one of the founders, la Shchabinskaia-David, “Zhenskoe dvizhenie v Polshe za poslednija 25 let," in Trudy I-ago vserossuskago zhenskago sezda pri russkom zhenskom obshchestve v s Peterburge 10–18 Dek 1908 (SPB, 1909), pp 852-855 13 This is the conclusion of Professor P A Zaionchkovsku of Moscow University based on a study of archival materials Rossuskoe san.oderzhavie v kontse xix stoletula (M, 1970), p 311 14 There were certain advantages to women in these less formal courses Anyone could enroll an advantage for number of women who had studied at home and did not meet formal entrance requiements Tuition was lower and enrollment much higher Furthermore, no certificate of political loyalty was required A demand for such certification was one reason a number of Russian women continued to study abroad even after Women's Courses were established in Russia 15 Ivan S Kliuzhev, “Voprosy sredniago zhenskago obrazovania v obsuzhendenui ikh v Gosudarstvennoi Dume," Trudy l-ago Vserossuskago Sezda po Obrazovanuiu Zhenshchin organizov Rossisk Ligor Ravnopr Zhenshchin v S Peterburge (Petrograd, 1915), II, 136 16 “Obispetaniakh lits zhenskago pola v svanu kursa vysshikh uchebnykh zavedenu i o poriadke priobretenija imi uchenykh stepenei i svanua uchitel- Ditsy srednikh uchebnykh zavedení," Zhurnal Ministerstva narodnago prosveshchenua, XLI (October 1912), Pt 1, 129–137 17 Neither Russian nor Soviet sources provide sufficient statistics on enrollment in higher educational institutions for women Information has been collected from a number of sources of varying reliability, consequently, these figures should be taken as approximations rather than absolutes The tõtal for 1911/12 was based on 27 institutions and does not include women enrolled in coeducational institutions, in two higher courses for which no statistics are available, and 2- and 3-year specialty courses ·7 Poles In America A Bicentennial View FRANK MOCHA 3 The Bicentennial was, for various ethnic groups in America, including the Polish, a time of stock-taking, of re-assessing their contributions to their adopted country This is not an easy task "Poles in America" or, more precisely, “Polish Contributions to America", is a difficult problem mainly because it is difficult to find the right approach to it Speakers usually have dealt with it by first citing the number of Americans of Polish origin in this country, and then listing the most famous Poles in America, from Pulaski to Muskie, and saying a few words about each of them This is no longer the best way to approach the subject, because it barely scratches the surface of the Polish presence and experience This paper is based on the conclusions reached in a two-term course, "Poles in America A Bicentennial View," taught and co-ordinated by this writer at the School of Continuing Education, New York University, during the academic year 1975/76, where it formed the concluding lecture In a slightly revised version the paper was presented in the “Bicentennial panel at the Eighth National Convention of the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies (AAASS) in St Louis in October of 1976 An expanded and updated version of the paper forms the concluding essay (XXII) of my book, Poles in America Bicentennial Essays, which is now in production The paper, in both its early versions, was primarily addressed to Polish American audiences, and so is the book The author did not feel it desirable to alter his point of view for the purposes of the present article, in the belief that such alterations would cause the article to lose some of its poignancy ·108 POLES IN AMERICA A BICENTENNIAL VIEW in America by concentrating on the obvious, it neglects other, no less, and perhaps even more important contributions. These can now, at this point in our history, be pieced together from a growing number of books and articles devoted to the Polish experience in America The latest bibliography, published by the Director of the Polish Museum of America in Chicago, lists close to 1700 items 1 They include accounts of Polish contributions to America spread over 368 years, from the first Polish settlement in Jamestown, Virginia, through Polish contributions to American history in war and peace, to the present Forthcoming publications, both individual and joint (or institutional), will enrich the existing materials considerably Among the latter are works-in-progress by the Kosciuszko Foundation, the Polish Institute of Arts and Science, the Polish American Historical Association, and the already mentioned Bicentennial Essays 6 While the first three projects represent works with scholarly-popular, sociological, or historical interest, the last includes all three, plus chapters-articles on religion, education, organizational structure, and a special section on Polish contributions in various fields of scholarship and culture, in an attempt to sum up Polish achievements in America The achievements are considerable, but not as overwhelming as the enthusiasm stimulated by the Bicentennial would lead us to believe A little overdosing on the Bicentennial is only to be expected, but we must keep our heads and maintain a sense of proportion It is true that the Poles have had outstanding representatives- even authentic heroes or real geniuses- in almost every walk of life in America In recent years, a Polish American was a serious candidate for the Presidency More recently, two other representatives of Polonia had, and are still having, direct bearing on the highest office in the land one, an outstanding jurist, by serving as a special prosecutor in a celebrated case involving a President then in office, the other, a brilliant political scientist, by advising a Presidential candidate on foreign policy? (Characteristically, one of the men is American-born, the other, Polish-born , the relevancy of this distinction will become clear later in the paper ) It would seem that the Poles are reaching for the highest offices in the land, offices with real access to power, something which the Polish Americans never had in their entire ·POLES IN AMERICA A BICENTENNIAL VIEW 109 history in this country Nothing could be more wrong than such an assumption, since it would indicate that the process of “Making It" was completed for Polish Americans It definitely is not The truth is that the above are highly isolated cases, and bardly harbingers of a massive exalted upward mobility on the part of Polonia The special prosecutor's case, particularly, is more symbolic than real, as pointed out during the Watergate affair by Leopold Tyrmand, in his excellent article in the New York Times on Jaworski and Sirica The rather symbolic nature of Polish contributions was stressed in a different context by a noted Polish American sociologist with reference to Polish representation in other branches of learning and prominence We have only to look at the slım number of Polish Americans in the Senate and in the Congress, and notice their chronic absence on the Supreme Court and in the Cabinet, to realize this truth Holders of these highest offices are traditionally (s)elected or recruited from the legal profession, and here we encounter another shock the infinitesimal ratio of Polish names on the published list of successful candidates in examinations for admittance to the Bar Going further down in search of talent and future potential, we can check the lists of successful scholarship and fellowship winners Here the situation is better, and the ratio of Polish names approximates their ratio in population figures A recent National Merit Scholarship list for New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut, includes five unmistakably Polish names among 134 entries 9 If we assume that there are many Polish Americans whose names have been changed or modified, and thus not readily identifiable as Polish, we can say that Polish Americans are well represented on the lower rungs of the ladder of success The trouble is, their upward climb on the ladder has traditionally been slow The uncertainty about names introduces a whole series of new problems into the already difficult task of evaluating the Polish contributions to America Who is of Polish origin and who isn't, who wants to be considered so and who doesn't? What are the criteria on mixed marriages, and what do we do with the Ukrainians, Jews, Byelorussians, Lithuanians, and others, born and raised in Poland, especially when those representatives of the former Polish minorities are clained by theii own ethnic groups ·110 POLES IN AMERICA A BICENTENNIAL VIEW in America? Suppose these claims begin to work retroactively, as they already do in some cases? I was startled last spring at a conference in New York on Language and Culturelo to hear a young scholar of Polish-Ukrainian origin claim the first settlers in Jamestown, Virginia, as Ukrainian Last summer, in an article in the New York Times about the Museum of American Jewish History in Philadelphia, I found a reference to "Haym Salomon, Broker,"l1 without a single word of explanation that he was Polish, and that he represents a vital part of the Polish American heritage These are problems that can seriously erode the Polish claims in America If we add to this the way the Poles have been taken for granted here, the way, in fact, Poland, and not just the Polish vote, has been used by successive Administrations, as pointed out brilliantly by a young historian recently,12 with all the unfortunate images that this helps to create, we can say that, for some reason, the Polish Americans, as a group, have not been able so far to forge a stronger, more positive image of itself However, a new element has entered the picture The ethnic awakening in America, followed closely by the Bicentennial, have done a great deal to stimulate interest in one's ancestry non-heroic age, when the traditional ways to fame and recognition have lost most of the lustie, to acknowledge one's membership in an ethnic group is a way to be recognized The "Kiss me, I am Polish” buttons are one way of expressing the urge, as described by a young Yale female scholar of Lithuanian origin 13 America is suddenly discovering the Poles, and the Poles are discovering themselves "Closet Poles", so called by the Presidential Adviser on Ethnic Affairs, are coming out of hiding, particularly after every Presidential nomination of a Polish American to a high office, and Poles take justifiable pride at every Polish achievement, be it even by visitors, such as Irena Szewinska, Jacek Wszola, and Wojtek Fibak All the achievements are being faithfully recorded by Polish American historians, from the present all the way back to the beginning of the Polish presence in America which, too, is being re-examined The Polish American Congress is reportedly commissioning a comprehensive Polish American history, at the same time, it is taking steps to protect the Polish image in America, by legal means, if necessary All these and similar efforts may well result in a new era for the In a 14 ·POLES IN AMERICA A BICENTENNIAL VIEW 111 It may Polish Americans, in an America whose national purpose is being reconsidered 15 The third century will be a different century for America, as brilliant editorials are proclaiming and warning, 16 it will be a different century for Polish Americans, too even be a Polish American century, if the Poles succeed in adapting to changes and to the altered demands and realities of the future But until there is clear evidence of this happening, we should, instead of fluctuating between enthusiasm and holy indignation, take a look at the previous two centuries and see whether, besides the well known heroes and leaders, they contain other evidence of Polish contributions to America I will try to approach the subject from a different angle of attack, by first soberly examining the value of certain claims The most common- and at the same time the least verified claim among Polish Americans is one concerning their supposed numerical strength in this country There are many estimates, but none of them seems to have any basis to be conclusive There is, however, one indication on which I base my calculations During the Ker nedy Presidential campaign in 1960, the Kennedys, in an effort to determine the strength of the Polish vote, in order to decide whether to go after it- especially after acquiring a brand-new Polish brother-in-law, Prince Radziwill have gone to the expensive trouble of counting the potential vote Because it was vital to them, we can trust their figures They were published in the New York Times, and showed that the number of Poles in America was then between 9–13 million This was 16 years ago Today, after allowing for a normal increase, the figures should have risen 30% or about 1/3, to be between 12-17 million, or somewhere around 14-15 million It is undoubtedly a large figure, larger than most official figures, including both the US census figures and estimates in Poland, but it is most probably correct Even so, the 14-15 million figure amounts to only slightly more than 6% of the total population of the United States This is not a large percentage, but it roughly corresponds to the percentage of the US population in the world it is even slightly larger, and this should make us THINK We could not even begin, on the basis of comparable population percentages, to compare proportionately Polish contributions to America with American contributions to the world The fact remains that we are living in the most advanced society in the world, and in a society thus advanced it is hard to ·112 POLES IN AMERICA A BICENTENNIAL VILW make a noticeable contribution And yet, America was built by national groups like ours, some larger, some smaller It would be easy and comforting to assume that while the Polish group contributed less than most of the larger groups, such as the German, which claims that one out of every six Americans is of German ancestry,17 it contributed more than the smaller ones Nothing could be further from the truth Let us take the French, for example, considerably smaller group than the Polish Putting any other kind of contribution aside, even those of Kosciuszko and Pulaski cannot equal the French contribution symbolized by Lafayette and Rochambeau, for the simple reason that the latter were backed by the power of France, while the former were individuals acting on their own initiative This example alone, and there are others, shows the fallacy of the numbers game, it also shows the fallacy of relying on heroes and outstanding individuals exclusively when attempting to show a national group's contribution to its adopted country Besides, most of the heroes found themselves on these shores accidentally, as new findings in Poland tell us even about Kosciuszko- and their eyes were always turned towards their homeland, and not toward their adopted country, in which they were only as guests 18 A more valid approach is to try and evaluate the contributions of the masses which came to stay and work To do this, we must concentrate on the 50-year period between 1864–1914, a half century during which Poles were coming to America in meaningful pumbers A great majority of Polish Americans alive today are descendants of this group Thanks to the dedicated work of the growing number of Polish American historians, we know today a great deal about this group, 19 but we probably over-react to their initial difficulties and their supposedly low position on the economic and social ladder It is true that they were, for the most part, farm-workers, coal miners, and, in time of national need, soldiers, but these functions, and the reasons for them, are not always properly understood and analyzed The last function, particularly, is rarely stressed sufficiently In World War I, 10% of the US armed forces was of Polish background, not counting the 23,000 Polish Americans in Haller's army and 17,000 in other Polish units By World War II, according to some statistics, cited and documented in Melchior Wankowicz's book, The Poles and America, 20 17% of the US armed forces was of Polish background, ·POLES IN AMERICA A BICENTENNIAL VIEW 113 This amounts to 1,700,000, an army larger than the one fielded by Poland in 1939 The percentage of Poles at that time in America is estimated to have been 4%, a figure which probably needs to be revised upwards Even so, these figures surely tell us something about the health, energy, and, above all, patriotism of a group capable of sending every fourth member to defend its adopted country (for the entire United States the ratio was 1 in 12) As for the other two functions, the Poles were most heavily represented in them during the Post-Civil War period of reconstruction and growth and afterwards, when America was suddenly and surprisingly catching up with England as the leading economic and industrial power of the world Rather than over-react to the Poles' social position, we should look at them as helping to feed the rapidly growing population, and stocking the furnaces of the steel-mills which were making America solid and powerful A good study showing the part played by Poles in the crucial and dynamic drive by America to world's primacy at the end of the XIX century and beginning of the XX century would be worth more than another book about Kosciuszko or a film about him Such a study would show the present generation that their ancestors and predecessors were not just lowly laborers at the bottom economic ladder, but food producing FARMERS, BUILDERS of industry, and DEFENDERS of America The two World Wars provided the Poles in America with a measure of upward mobility The G I Bill of Rights after World War II particularly was greatly responsible for providing young ex servicemen with opportunities for advancement through education The number of Poles in colleges steadily grew, stimulated by the presence in America of a considerable number of refugeescholars from Poland, who now occupied university positions and took it upon themselves to encourage and help young Polish American students to obtain college and university degree The results of this activity, led mostly by members of the Polish Institute of Arts and Sciences, 21 and supported by Polish American Institutions, such as the Kosciuszko Foundation, 2% are visible now, when the disciples themselves are occupying academic and other prestigious even if not numerous— positions This particular chapter in the history of the Poles in America- concerning the ·114 POLES IN AMERICA A BICENTENNIAL VIEW role of the war-time and post-war emigration-- deserves careful mention, because it, too, has been neglected and yet it represents a vital element in the positive evolution of the Polish Americans, and, as such, a further evidence of Polish contribution to America The latest exodus from Poland, which began in 1939 and still goes on without any signs of slackening, is an historical phenomenon on a world scale History knows few examples of such flights of intelligentsia It can be compared to the flight of the Greeks from endangered Byzantium, the flight which, as we know, helped bring about the Renaissance in the West, it can also be compared to the flight of the French aristocracy before the French Revolution, a flight which raised intellectual standards all over Europe, notably in Russia More to the point, this flight can also be compared to the Russian exodus during and after the Russian Revolution, it is no accident that the Russians earn higher salaries than most other ethnic groups in America Surely there are some obvious lessons to be learned from these examples The Polish exodus was at first dictated by the instinct of selfpreservation, but lately it has acquired the unmistakable signs of a development adding up to the fact that Poland is now able to export talent, no matter under what form this “export" is being accomplished At any rate, the number of Poles who have left Poland since 1939 for the USA is now in the hundreds of thousands These huge talented numbers are increasingly affecting the profile of the Polish American group, and of America itself The impact of this influx is still underestimated, and an objective study of its significance would go a long way towards overcoming the occasional hostilities between the American-born and Polish-born segments of Polonia When mutual acceptance becomes a rule, and we all work hand-in-hand, our progress will be speeded up immeasurably, because our inner resources are sufficient And it is these resources, such as honesty and hard work, for which the Poles are known, and for which they were often ridiculed in the past, that are now needed more than ever in America Let us all put them to work again, and carry our indre vidual duties out well This is the only valid way to success, it is also the best definition of patriotism We owe it to ourselves and to America.

·115 POLES IN AMERICA A BICENTENNIAL VIEW FOOTNOTES 1 Joseph W Zurawski, Polish American History and Culture 4 Classified Bibliography, Polish Museum of America, Chicago, Illinois, 1975 2 Book-length works-in-progress which have come to the attention of this writer include the following Thaddeus L Kowalski's and Joseph Wieczerzak's studies on the “Polish Experience in America,” to be published by Nelson-Hall Publishers of Chicago and Twayne Publishers of Boston, respectively, and Joseph Wytrwal's ambitious, Behold the Polish Americans', which is being published by Endurance Press, Detroit 3, Wieslaw Kuniczak, editor, in co-operation with Eugene Kusielewicz, President of the Kosciuszko Foundation, Poles in America A Pictorial History, to be published by Doubleday, New York In addition, the Kosciuszko Foundation is in the process of producing 16 half-hour motion pictures on the Polish experience in America 4 A part of this publication program of the Polish Institute of Arts and Sciences in America is a collection of chiefly sociological articles, edited by Eugene Kleban and Thaddeus V Gromada, The Polish Americans, included, as a separate section, in The Polish Review Vol XXI, No 3 (pp 1-148), which is the "Bicentennial Issue" of the quarterly 5 Rev M J Madaj, “PAHA The Historical Interpreter of the Polish American Community," Essay XXI in Poles in America Bicentennial Essays (Frank Mocha, editor) This essay-report, written by the Executive Secretary of the Polish American Historical Association, lists several projects and works-in-progress, including a Festschrift for the late Prof, Oskar Halecki, and a collection of essay, Case Studies in Polish American Politics 6 Frank Mocha, Poles in America Bicentennial Essays, a collection of 22 specialized articles covering a wide range of Polish experience and presence in America 7 Zbigniew Brzezinski has since become Presidential Adviser on Foreign Policy and Chairman of National Security Council in President Carter's Cabinet 8 Konstantin Symmons-Symonolewicz, “Polish Contributions to American Scholarship in the Fields of Sociology and Cultural Anthropology (1918- 1976)," Essay XII in Poles in America Bicentennial Essays 9 “National Merit Awards Go To 1,000 More Students," The New York Times, May 3, 1976 10 Northeast Conference on the Teaching of Foreign Languages Language and Culture Heritage and Aorizons Annual Convention held in New York, March 26, 1976 11 Israel Shenker, “Jewish Museum Opening Has A Calomal Theme," The New York Times, July 19, 1976.

·116 POLES IN AMCRICA A BICENTENNIAL VIEW 12 Piotr Wandycz, “Stany Zjednoczone a Polska" (The United States and Poland), Trybuna, London, Nr 23/79, 1976, pp 6–11 Authorized translation (by F Mocha), "The United States and Poland An attempt at Historical Synthesis,” included as Essay VI in Poles in America Bicentennial Essays 13 Elona Marijosius Vaisnys, "A Lithuanian and the Country Gentleman," The New York Times 14 Aloysius Mazewski, President, Polish American Congress and Polish National Alliance, in a paper read in a panel, “Polish Americans at the Bicentennial, Nine Facets of Institutional Relations," at the Midwest Slavic Conference, University of Illinois at Chicago Circle, May 6-8, 1976 15 The National Purpose Reconsidered 1776-1976, a series of lectures at Columbia University in 1976 in honor of the National Bicentennial 16 For example, the July 4, 1976, editorial, “Third Century," in The New York Times 17 Craig R Whitney, “Rockefeller Accepts Tribute in Germany On US Bicentennial," The New York Times, May 6, 1976 ("Vice President Rockefeller, himself of German ancestry, ") 18 A good insight into the attitudes and motivations of the Polish heroes in America can be found in Metchie J B Budka, “Pulaski and Kosciuszko Heroes Extremely Apropos," Essay II in Poles in America Bicentennial Essays and, to a certam extent, also in Maria J E Copson-Niecko, “The Poles in America from 1830's to 1870 Some Reflections on Possibilities of Research," Essay III 19 The most recent study on this subject is Edward Pinkowski's essay, “The Great Influx of Polish Immigrants and the Industries They Entered," Essay IV in Poles in America Bicentennial Essays 20 Melchior Wankowicz, Polacy i Ameryka (The Poles and America), Oficyna Poetow 1 Malarzy na Emigracji w Anglii, p 44 21 Good accounts of the Polish Institute's activities in the United States can be found in two unofficial histories of the Institute Stanislaw Strsetelski, The Polish Institute of Arts and Sciences in America, Origin and Development (New York, 1960), and Damian S Wandycz, Polski Instytut Naukowy w Ameryce, w Trzydziesta Rocznice 1942–1972 (The Polish Institute of Arts and Sciences in America, Thirtieth Anniversary 1942–1972) (New York, 1974) For an account of the Institute's activities on behalf of Polish Americans, see Frank Mocha, “Dzialalnosc Polskiego Instytutu Naukowego w Ameryce w dziedzinie badan nad zbiorowosciami Polonijnymı" (The Activities of the Polish Institute of Arts and Sciences in the Area of Polonia Research) in Stan i potrzeby badan nad zbiorowosaiomi Polonijnymi (The Present State and Further Need of Research on Polonia), Polish Academy of Sciences (Ossolineum, 1976), pp. 438-450, translated by Marion V Winters) and revised and updated by the author as "The Polish % ·POLES IN AMERICA A BICENTENNIAL VIEW 117 Institute of Arts and Sciences in America and Its Contributions to the Study of Polonia The Origins of the Polish American Historical Association (PAHA)", and included as Essay XVIII in Poles in America Bicentennial Essays 22 For a detailed account of the activities of the Kosciuszko Foundation, see Eugene Kusielewicz, “The Kosciuszko Foundation- A Half Century of Progress," Essay XX in Poles in America Bicentennial Essays ·8 Ethnicity and Social Control* MICHAEL V BELOK First of all, let us make clear that minority problems are not peculiar to the United States They are pandemic Every part of the world faces minority problems Whether it be North America, South America, Europe, Africa or Asia, the problem of ethnic groups exists The shift to the term ethnic groups should alert the reader to the close association of minorities and ethnicity in problem situations Although the two terms are not synonymous, they are very closely related in many practical situations Even the term problem is closely related Minorities, ethnicity and problems seem very often to go together, as does conflict If a society is homogeneous, then minorities, ethnicity and conflict of the sort associated with our discussion are nonexistent But this is seldom the case We can start with the basic premise that both minority and ethnic groups are associated with potential conflict and that both are conceived as potentially disintegrative elements in most societies In a society, such as that of the United States, where the very sense of identity and nationhood was a problematic one, the threat of minorities or ethnic groups perceived as alien to the society is even more exacerbated When the United States came into being, it did * A longer version of this paper will appear in the Handbook for Social Control edited by Joseph S. Roucek, Greenwood Press forthcoming ·ETHNICITY AND SOCIAL CONTROL 119 1 not represent a nation in this fullest sense A sense of national identity and pational character had to be created The population was by no means homogenous, a fact we tend to forget Thus the pervasive concern with the meaning of American so much a part of American life is understandable In order to exist, societies must maintain self-sufficiency and order This requires a broad commitment to the values of the society- the common values They are the cement of societal self-sufficiency There does not have to be agreement on all values but, minimally, on a small core of values held by all members of the societal unit For most societies order is of primary importance and the maintenance of the society depends upon it Without this minimal agreement there would be chaos and a breakdown of the system Values are an integrating factor Very often, as far as the dominant group is concerned, the values of minority groups are dysfunctional They see the immigiant or, as in the case of the United States, the native population and the imported group (the blacks) as a threat Blacks and immigrants cannot be done without but they are still a threat to the social cohesiveness of the society Witness the frequent riots characterizing American society, whether it be early black slave riots, Catholics rioting against Protestants, Irish rioting against free blacks in New York City during the Civil War, or the more recent Black riots of the 1960's 2 In times of accelerated social change, people tend to perceive their world as threatening and dangerous This is especially significant to the institutions of the society entrusted with the task of socialization and enculturation The dominant values of American society have been equality and achievement according to Seymour Martin Lipset, and their “ dynamic interaction has been a constant element in data determining American institutions and behavior "3 These institutions attempt to maintain the status quo in order to preserve some semblance of order and stability As the process of industrialization and modernization developed, the values of achievement and equality were especially useful American society moved toward a rationally organized, bureaucratic structure Following Parsons we may speak of the structural components of norms, values, collectivities, and roles. The ·120 ETHNICITY AND SOCIAL CONTROL aspects of the developmental process are inclusion, value generalization, differentiation, and adaptive upgrading Probably the most important socialızıng agency is the school Adults, with some exceptions, are socialized elsewhere It is the school that prepares the individual for adult les It is the school class that prepares the individual to be motivated to perform adult roles and have the technical knowledge and skills necessary to adequately perform these roles Individuals must be socialized so that they adequately perform the roles required by the society and be committed to their performance In other words, they must internalize the behavior expected of them in these social roles as they also learn the necessary roles which society requires to function Here it might be useful to mention some pattern alternatives available such as universalism vs particularism, achievement vs ascription, and specificity vs diffuseness 4 The minority groups often do not share the commitment to the values mentioned above Basically members of traditional societies, they more often than not were oriented toward particularism and ascription rather than universalism and achievement But American society based upon equality and achievement required new learnings and adaptations by the minorities if they wish to become part of the society in the fullest sense Very often they chose not to Not having been socialized to American society and its values the immigrants were strangers They had not been basically socialized Following Gerald Rosenblum, the term “basic socialization" may be introduced Basic socialization means the individual has incorporated the “generalized norms and values characterizing a society" so they can perform the social roles adequately both in the area of skills and attitudes Intermediate socialization is specialized socialization The individual learns the special behavior patterns expected in “differentiated subsystems," such as work settings The individual is an “expedient member” of the society, not a "genuine member” who has been basically socialized With the immigrants this was the pattern for most of the adults The second generation became more "genuine members" of American society Probably, something similar to this is going on in regard to other minorities as they are moving more and more toward something resembling "expedient members” or toward "genuine membership in the larger society ·ETHNICITY AND SOCIAL CONTROL 121 ALTERNATIVE RESPONSES TO MINORITIES Although the minority "problem" has been around since the very beginnings, the response of the dominant American groups has not been uniform or consistent In the beginning, the Indians were to be civilized and made into Christians, but, very soon the response changed and the Indians were considered by many as a “nuisance" and group to be exterminated Others deplored this approach and continued their efforts to convert the tribes to Christianity Some felt exclusion or isolation was the best policy (the reservation policy) and some felt that assimilation was a possibility The various tribes had other ideas Some fought the whites untill exhausted, others tried to conform to the white man's way such as the Cherokee, and, still others tried isolation The immigrants' situation was different He came of his own accord and in some cases did not intend to stay As soon as he made his “fortune”, he would return to his native land In the meantime, he worked hard as long as work was available and fit the pattern we have identified as an "expedient member” of the society, trying all the time to stay clear of flagrantly flouting local mores and laws But gradually his position changed and be found himself either unable to return to his homeland or now committed to staying in the new land At first America welcomed the immigrants After all was not America the “asylum" of the world opening its doors to all 6 And work was usually plentiful, at least menial tasks that the older groups no longer cared to do Also there was plenty of land and the immigrants were often a source of profit to the old American From time to time, the antagonisms between the “new” groups and the "old" flared up in riots and nativist political parties, viewing the foreigners with suspicion, but, for the most part, the various gioups were able to accommodate themselves to each other Thus arose the three basic responses to the minorities (excluding the Indians and the Blacks) First the policy of assimilation or acculturation Under this approach, the minorities would be made into Anglo-Saxons They and their children would become Americans If not "true" Anglo-Saxons, at least, they would learn the dominant ideas of the American culture They would be taught the virtues of cleanliness, hard work as if they needed this), thrift, order and respect for the American ·122 ETHNICITY AND SOCIAL CONTROL Constitution and system of laws Except for some extremists, most Americans were willing to accept the new minorities on these terms All the vehicles of socialization and acculturation would be used the schools, the press, and the factory Not only the children but adults also went to school to learn the American language and be indoctrinated in the American beliefs and values The factory would socialize the adult into the pattern of behaviors appropriate in the work settings The irrational patterns of the peasant past would have to be forgotten Mills and mines did not defer to feast days and religious holidays If the immigrants could not read English, there was the immigrant press that could be manipulated to acculturate the immigrant and help him adapt to the American scene If this did not work, it provided him with a release, a place to air his woes, a vehicle for catharsis American advertisers could be used to subsidize the press and keep editors in line The American immigrant press was also a vehicle to help the immigrant find out who he was Many were peasants and had no real sense of identity They were men of a paiticular locale and only in America did many discover a wider sense of identity In America, their ethnic identifications were often born and they became Italians, Russians, Slovaks, etc? The second response was the “Melting Pot” put forth by many Americans The immigrants would be fused with other Americans to form a new race They would, in the words of Israel Zwangwill, become a "super race" The “Melting Pot" idea was not new Hector St John de Crevecoeur had written of a new man very early on Even Benjamin Rush had written of the "melting of the youth of all states into one mass of citizens "8 The melting pot became a popular image but one that many writers agree failed Some did not want to be melted and they were not racists but simply believers in their own ethnic values and culture They did not want to be homogenized into a uniform American type Those who wished to retain their ethnic identity and, as often was the case, even forge it brought forth the third idea- cultural pluralism Basic to this position was the belief that various ethnic groups could retain much of their culture while still remaining an integral part of American society Ethnic groups had always maintained a certain degree of identity from the earliest ·ETHNICITY AND SOCIAL CONTROL 123 times in colonial America Actually what occurred was a form of segregated pluralism with various immigrant groups concentrated in certain geographical areas the Germans in Pennsylvania, the Dutch in New York, the English in New England and Virginia This pattern continued late into the nineteenth century with regional settlements the rule rather than the exception, but with the coming of the “new” immigrants in the period of 1880 to 1920 significant changes occurred and immigrants began settling in groups all over the country The result was a new pattern that could be characterized as integrated pluralism Various ethnic groups were in close and continual contact with one another Conflicts were inevitable The dominant group in American society found this threatening Although some did not view it with alarm, many did All the familar charges were brought forth The new immigrants threatened the racial integrity of the Anglo-Saxons They were inferior, unclean, criminally inclined, and subversive both politically and in the area of religion Demands for immigrant restrictions were made Literacy tests were advocated, exclusion by state laws was tried, and laws for Asiatic exclusion were successfully passed, and finally, the National Origins Quota Act of 1924 was passed SOME MINORITY GROUPS Many have assumed that the “White Ethnics" have been more-or-less assimilated into the dominant culture and have achieved success commensurate with their individual abilities The evidence is mixed to say the least, The white ethnics refuse to go away They are still labelled by others as “Polacks," “Wops,” “Hunkies," etc They also often seem to perceive themselves in terms of their ethnic identities The Melting Pot has been declared a failure countless times but some still adhere to this notion Assimilation or "Anglo-conformity” still has its adherents But, increasingly, there has been a growing recognition of the persistence of ethnic identification well into the third and fourth generations 10 Whatever the reasons for the recent revival of white ethnicity, nostalgia, search for roots, opportunism, or a reaction to the efforts of the blacks. Indians, and Hispanic Americans, there is no doubt that the movement has made considerable headway in ·124 ETHNICITY AND SOCIAL CONTROL 11 recent years The white ethnics, however, do not appear to be a genuine danger to the societal integration and order Mostly their tactics are those used within the system and considered appropriate Even though Michael Novak and other ethnic leaders have suggested that white ethnic gains have been less than impressive, there is no evidence that the white ethnics are likely to unite in any efforts to upset the status quo Michael Novak can present figures showing that Poles, Italians, Slavs and Greeks are not very well represented on the boards of large corporations but whether this will make a difference in the composition of these boards is another question The fact remains that the white ethnics are taking up many of the tactics used so successfully by Blacks, Chicanos and Indians But, it is also true that these tactics were used by many of the ethnic groups much earlier The Irish were not averse to the use of force and they were especially adept at the use of political power The case of the minorities, ie, the Blacks, Indians and Hispanic Americans, which has interested most sociologists during the past two decades, is a different one First, they are a highly visible group unlike the white ethnic The white ethnic, if he wishes, can opt out of his group by changing his name and adapting the dominant group's bchavior patterns, the visible ethnics cannot Second, the Blacks, Chicanos and Indians are descendants of either conquered or enslaved people, although this is not really true for all these peoples Many Blacks were free and the Chicanos that make up the vast majority of the present American population are immigrants or descendants of immigrants, the bulk of them entering the United States during the same period as the so called "new immigrants" THE VISIBLE MINORITIES Since 1960 one of the impressive features of American life has been the great concern for the disadvantaged segments of our society The disadvantaged, too often, have been the Blacks, Indians, and Hispanic Americans For them the tension between the values of equality and achievement identified by S M Lipset as the dominant values of American life has been acute They are most often the groups who were more or less passed by in the quest for equality and achievement >> ·ETHNICITY AND SOCIAL CONTROL 125 Whether it be Indians, Blacks, Mexican-Americans or Puerto Ricans their socio-economic circumstances are dreadful They live in poverty, have higher infant mortality rates, die sooner, suffer from more illness, live in inadequate dwellings, and have less education For example, American Indians compared to the general population, have only two-thirds as much income, are ten times more likely to be unemployed, have a life expectancy of seven years less, and an infant mortality rate 50 per cent higher Mexican-Americans fare not too much better They face discrimination have higher unemployment, and may live in abject poverty The Puerto Ricans' situation is no better Andrew M Greeley in his book, Ethnicity, presents data that shows the position of Spanish speaking groups has not changed significantly They are still at the bottom 12 The plight of the Blacks is very well known, and the literature is fast approaching unmanageable limits Even a cursory review of the literature indicates that the Blacks are now identified with the big cities The Blacks have been moving into the cities in ever increasing numbers since World War II and the Whites have been in a rapid flight to the suburbs Whites are estimated to be moving out of New York City at the rate of 50,000 annually The figure for Chicago is 15,000, and for Cleveland it is estimated at 3,000 As the Whites retreat, the Blacks move in and the estimate is that one-half of all Blacks will soon live outside the south 18 The familiar problems are all evident- poverty, non-dominant standards of conduct, language differences and verbal problems, different values, cultural conflicts and low social status, resulting in prejudice, poor motivation, and inadequate self images Unemployment is much higher for Blacks than whites, reaching dangerously high levels for young Black males Frequently the mother is the dominant figure and the chief support for the family Living conditions in the ghetto are abominable Noise and violence are continuing problems The Black family of ghetto areas produces more than its share of delinquency, illiteracy, illegitimacy, etc. Most Black families parallel the notional pattern of good behavior and self-improvement, but the pathological end of the Black family spectrum is in desperate need of help There are a variety of conditions responsible but for many .

·126 ETHNICITY AND SOCIAL CONTROL mental part too often it is the absence of a father in the home and the circumstance of a deserted wife living with several children in a ghetto flat Economic conditions, more often than not, play a funda- The father is often unemloyed, and his absence from the home may be to allow the family to receive relief As soon as a man appears in the home, welfare payments come to an end However one may feel about the problem, there is no denying it is a severe one Conflict, delinquency, social disintegration are all part of the situation 14 If achievement and equality are American ideals, the school and education are often considered the keys to realize them What is the situation in regard to education and the minorities? The most comprehensive recent study is that referred to as the “Coleman Report" This study entitled Equality of Educational Opportunity dealt with six racial and ethnic groups Blacks, American Indians, Oriental Americans, Puerto Ricans, Mexican- Americans, and whites other than Mexican-Americans and Puerto Ricans The Coleman report findings are that most American children attend segregated schools and that Black children are the most segregated of the minorities Their schools are often inferior in respect to some facilities related to possible academic success Their homes are less likely to have books and encyclopedias The report summarizes as follows Clear differences are found on these items The average Negro family has fewer children whose mothers graduated from high school his classmates more frequently are members of large rather than small families, they are less often enrolled in college preparatory curricula they have taken a smaller number of courses in English, mathematics, foreign languages, and sciences 15 The situation varies according to regions but this is the basic picture The Black achievement in school is below that of white children based on average scores from the first grade throughout high school The Mexican-American children are similar to the Blacks. They fare poorly when compared to the white group in the first grade the Mexican-Americans are already behind the Indians and the white groups and far behind the Blacks in verbal achievement By the fourth grade the children's median grade point on reading ·ETHNICITY AND SOCIAL CONTROL 127 goals 17 tests were 1 5 grade points below the norm Ortego presents figures as to Mexican-American's educational status that can only be called shocking He points out that in Texas thirty-nine per cent of the Mexican-Americans have less than a fifth grade education, and, that Mexican Americans twenty-five years or older have as little as 4 8 years of schooling His conclusion is that almost half of the Mexican Americans in Texas are functional illiterates 16 CONCLUDING REMARKS The discrepancies, then, between American ideals and practice result in tension reflected in the social order as more and more individuals become conscious of the frustrations inherent in their positions Ethnicity has become a vehicle to use in pushing group demands The Blacks, the Chicanos, and Indians have taken to using violence, politics and the courts to achieve their The Black strategy is instructive First, they used the courts to push their demands for civil rights, then they moved to violence to achieve civil rights and substantive social and economic rights, at the same time using the ideology of cultural pluralism to push their demands for cultural separatism Black became beautiful, white seemed to become ugly Blacks denigrated much of their white culture Conflicts were escalated to dangerous levels and then gradually muted In the meantime, Blacks demanded special consideration for years of maltreatment The values of universalism and achievement were repudiated in favor of particularism and ascription Blacks were entitled to special treatment- in university admissions, in hiring for jobs usually based on merit, and in other areas The question becomes Can cultural pluralism conceived as a form of cultural relativism and ethical relativism be defended in a society holding other values ? Does not this position actually jeopardize the stability of the society or is it possible to realize stability while allowing for considerable change in the society's norms and values 719 Only time will tell 18 FOOTNOTES 1 Michael V Belok, Forming the American Minds Early Schoolbooks and their Compilers, 1783-1873 (Agra, India Satish Book Enterprise, 1973), ·128 ETHNICITY AND SOCIAL CONTROL 2 Joseph S Roucek, "The American Way of Violence The Rise of Black Power," in James Van Patton, et al, editors, Conflict, Permanency, Change, & Education (Agra, India Satish Book Enterprises, 1976), pp 230-251 3 Seymour Martin Lipset, The First New Nation (Garden City, New York Doubleday, 1967), p 115 4 Talcott Parsons, The Social System (Glencoe, Illinois Free Press, 1951), See also his The System of Modern Societies (Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey Prentice Hall, 1971) 5 Gerald Rosenblum, Immigrant Workers (New York Basic Books, 1973), P 67 p 29 6 The term “asylum” is suggestive of hidden meaning and social control See Erving Goffman, Asylums (Garden City, New York Doubleday, 1961) 7 Robert E Park, The Immigrant Press and Its Control (New York Harper, 1922) 8 Andrew M Greeley, Ethnicity in the United States A Preliminary Reconnaissance (New York John Wiley, 1974), p 299 9. Peter I Rose, They and we (New York Random House, 1974), pp 37-60 10 Michael Novak, The Rise of the Unmeltable Ethnics (New York MacMillan, 1971) 11 Andrew M Greeley, That Most Distressful Nation The American Irish (New York Quadrangle Books, 1972) 12 Andrew M Greeley, Ethnicity pp 63-73 The Arizona Republic, December 10, 1976, reports similar data for 1975 13 Although the data is not quite clear this appears to be the case See Ibid, pp 47-51 14 Abraham Kardıner and Lionel Oversay, The Mark of Oppression (New York World, 1951), p 396 15 James S Coleman, et al, Equality of Educational Opportunity (Washington, DC Government Printing Office, 1966, p. 9 16 Ortego, op cit, pp 23-24 17 Arizona Republic (December 19, 1976) Also see Arizona Republic (January 2, 1977) 18 Kevin Phillips, "U S seems to be going minority-crazy," Arizona Republic (December 6, 1976) See also Nathan Glazer and Daniel P Moynihan, Ethnicity Theory and Practice (Cambridge Harvard University Press, 1975) 19 I am indebted to Richard Pratte for the ideas set forth in the last paragraph ·9 Ethnicity and Education. Some Sociological Considerations II AL FANTA* In the companion article to this piecel ethnicity and education was discussed in five contexts The discussion opened with an analysis of ethnicity in the context of popular culture, moved to a section devoted to ethnicity and media and then to a discussion of the new ethnic movement (resurgance) in American culture The fourth section developed a series of insights concerning ethnicity and social marginality and the symbolic nature of social reality represented by ethnicity in American life Lastly, in the closing section of the article ethnicity was developed in an economic context The notion of a developmental economic structure and its relationship to an evolutionary social structure was examined. Ultimately, the essay concluded with a suggestion that "the importance for the contemporary ethnic revival lies in whether or not such concerns can be linked to the continuity of the family in the modern era In this companion piece, which the reader may wish to consider as an extension of the earlier remarks outlined above, *A L Fanta is a writer, critic and teacher He currently teaches at the University of Delaware ·130 ETHNICITY AND EDUCATION ethnicity is discussed from four additional perspectives Initially the notion of resentment, as a socio cultural phenomenon is developed and discussed Often vague and ill defined, neveri heless, resentment forms a substantial part of modern ethnic social life In addition, the article points out that resentment can be seen to have structural and legal aspects which ultimately underpin our larger sense of social policy in American culture The next theme which is developed is the notion of loss as a social theme upon which much of our social reality is constructed In this section it is suggested that the notion of loss is a deep underlying socio-cultural theme which both pushes and guides the development of American social policy Loss of identity, loss of dignity, loss of neighborhood, loss of cultural ritual and a highly ambigious fear of a loss of social status are all viewed in a holistic manner and are related to the notion of ethnicity In this context the ethnic resurgance in America is seen as a contemporary attempt to stem the feeling of loss The third section of the article deals with the search for roots in American culture Using materials stimulated and suggested by Alex Haley in his work Roots, this section seeks to analysize what the popularity of ancestor research means and offers a suggestion as to its social significance Here it is suggested that knowledge of family history, while not necessarily psychologically neutral for the individual does not contain much sociological or cultural import beyond popular culture Rather it is argued that the importance of roots lies in the fact that it provides a rationale for a people The customs, traditions and the mores are only known and transmitted by history The conclusion of the article is a brief afterword dealing with the Southern ethnic metaphor in American culture Southern traditions, customs and history are highlighted and the idea of a defeated culture serving as the self appointed guardians of the conservative American tradition is developed and extended, laying a foundation for remarks about the potential President Carter, as a Southerner, brings to the office of the President In this context, at is suggested that for the Southerner, government is a reflection of our culture and not merely the extension of sacred organizational principles Such a change it is suggested would truly be a lasting and much needed contribution to the American mosaic ·ETHNICITY AND EDUCATION 131 4 RESENTMENT IN AMERICAN CULTURE SOME SELECTED OBSERVATIONS Resentment according to Scheler is the repeated experiencing and reliving of a particular emotional response reaction against someone else '93 As one examines this term and the feelings it generates one can see that is mitigates against both responsive action and creative expression in cultural setting It may be best described as "rancor" or a suppressed wrath, involving feelings, but only feelings, of revenge, hatred, malice, envy, impulse to detract, spitefullness, vindictivness, and vengefulness In examining the term resentment as it relates to ethnicity in American culture the discussion touches first upon the changed nature of of the American political process To a significant extent an aspect of resentment in general and ethnic resentment in particular is caused by the erosion in the modern political process in American life Basically, the established ways and manners and customs of doing things are perceived as not working anymore Indeed, Franz Fanon in his book Black Skin, White Masks, captures the feeling when he observes that “Things are indeed going to hell The government and the civil service are at the mercy of the Jews Our women are at the mercy of the Negroes."5 In American culture for example, the fact that professionals improperly diagnose a wide range of symptoms (human needs) in an ever larger cluster of professions, that malpractice suits flourish and evolve, that there is a loss of craftsmanship in the universe of products, goods and services American culture is famous for producing and manufacturing, and the fact of increasing bureaucratization of hitherto unaffected areas of social life all contribute to a shared feeling of passivity, resignation, ennui and resentment? Though these feelings and reactions are unequal, due largely to the imbalances in political power and are highly varied between different groups, nevertheless American ethnic communities feel this dislocation or alteration in both the political and social landscape Indeed, Martin Plax in an (article entitled, “Toward a Redefinition of Ethnic Politics® states that it is possible for one to ·132 ETHNICITY AND EDUCATION develop a typology of ethnic political attitudes that may be present in any or all ethnic groups about any set of political decisions As he says 99 “This typology of alternative ethnic political preferences is developed from two dimensions 1-the believed impact of political issues on a person's or group's uniqueness in ethnic terms, and 2-the belief in the appropriateness of this impact For Plax the development of the typology suggests that ethnic political behavior is a kind of adaptive behavior The individuals and the group adapt to changes in the political universe More importantly however, in terms of our analysis of resentment the typology points to a manner in which ethnic politics can be examined from the perspective of the subjective status of ethnic identity Thus, both the direction of change and the desirability of change can be the subjects of inquiry A way is open for studying both the people who want change and those who oppose it within the ethnic group When compared to the carlier correlational techniques that have been used in ethnic studies noting the country of origin and constructing a systematic differentiation of reality according to characteristics associated with the land of nativity the promise of substantiating the political construction of ethnic reality is increased However, there are clear occasions where, in terms of structure, the political process does ignore the interests of particular ethnic groups. How and why certain groups are ignored, placated, massaged and manipulated becomes a political question of significant magnitude 10 In this sense perhaps the question of erosion in the modern political process is misplaced because the demands placed on the modern state by contentious and competing groups are perhaps demands that by their very nature cannot be satisfied by contemporary politics 11 In a very real sense these demands themselves have been caused by modern society For example, increasing the number of laws escalates the crime statistics Our legal system removes a sense of justice from the fabric of our lives, and our educational research enterprise generates educational and learning problems In addition, Ivan Illich for one also believes that doctors cause disease 12 Thus the modern ·ETHNICITY AND EDUCATION 133 paradox lies in that what is one individual's own compelling interest, profession, or job may be the bane of another individual's existence and a cause of resentment It should be noted that these, as well as a host of other demands, which are placed upon our contemporary political institutions are not necessarily the same thing in either quality or kind as basic human needs Certainly even a casual familiarity with popular culture, the world of advertising and the medium of television can attest to the fact of the social construction of human needs 13 Certainly to argue that one is talking about human “wants" and not "Needs" begs the question All needs are socially defined and even biological needs are culturally influenced. No one knows this or does this better than American advertisers. However, not even the pursuit of safety and security wrought by the consumer movement or the new 'feelin' good" type of modern advertisements which appeal to our sense of plastic individualism, are a balm for the real social pain of these unmet basic human needs In this context Jacques Ellul in his work Propaganda, 14 pursues the same theme though at a sociological as opposed to a cultural level Ellul notes that the modern state contains a social process of propaganda which creates artificial needs Just as the process of propaganda creates political problems that would never arise by themselves, so, argues Ellul, do these superficial tendencies end up by becoming identified with our deepest needs They become confused with what is most personal and meaningful within us 15 The double bind of modernity, the ingenuineness of the social constructed environment becomes a paradox for the individual 16 As Ellul states. “And just as propaganda acts to create new needs, it also creates the demand for their solutions These tensions are purposely provoked by the propagandist, who holds out their remedy at the same time He is master of both excitation and satisfaction One may even say that if he has provoked a particular tension, it was in order to lead the individual to accept a particular remedy, to demand some suitable action (suitable from the propagandist's viewpoint), and to submit to a system that will alleviate that tension He thus places the individual in a universe of artifically ·134 ETHNICITY AND EDUCATION created political needs, needs that are artificial even if their roots were once completely genuine "17 (emp supp ) In a sense that what transpires as a result of the propaganda process in society, is that the sacrifices demanded by political life keep increasing and affect everybody The energy crisis, netrance requirements in educational institutions and the all too familiar presence of "federal regulations” in our lives are but a few examples It should be noted that rather than resolve these and other issues which increase the sacrifices made by the modern person, the modern state creates an illusion rule by public opinion Polls plus television equals public opinion in modern society Indeed, even the doubtful must admit a new reality has been constructed by this social process Media networks through their programming (an admixture of news, public affairs and commercial ventures) create public opinion 18 The government in such a state will be regarded as a popular one if its actions can be seen as a product of this public opinion The free political expression of this preformed mass opinion is called democracy One should note however, that once opinion can be organized (packaged) and measured (predictable in both immediate intensity and longitudinal effectiveness) it can be controlled 19 As a result of the potential for the control of public opinion (the horrors of Watergate and containment once again) soon the distinctions between the social reality of opinions and social action merge and become confused For example, the failure of schooling can be seen as an act of will a more or less well developed world view, which is then programmatically reinforced In addıtion, many readers would not be uncomfortable with the notion that most contemporary social problems are not caused by “individuals", but are the result generated by the structural arrangements in modern society To return to our central theme however, it goes without saying that it becomes a simple matter to translate this opinion into social action Programs, for the benefit of either the masses of the elites or to construct a rationale, develop a code for the systematic exclusion of certain specific cultural groups In any context it must be noted that the operation of the programmatic exercise becomes the function of managerial technique and increasingly calls upon the arcane knowledge or experts ·ETHNICITY AND EDUCATION 135 At this juncture one should mention the rather obvious gap between programmatic solutions to politically generated problems and basic human needs 20 The former is abstract, artificial, and a function of bureaucraticized modern society, while the latter is concrete, real and a function of human culture 21 As Ellul says “Modern man deeply craves friendship confidence, close personal relaltionships But he is plunged into a world of competition, hostility, and anonymity He needs to meet some-one whom he can trust completely, for whom he can feel pure friendship, and to whom he can mean something in return "22 Thus rule by public opinion means nothing other than the further rationalization of social life 28 Since people crave friend. ship, trust, loyalty, these entities must become suspicious in a world which programs for fairness and objectivity Fairness, objectivity and more to the point the popular notion of equality are all modern concepts They are programmatic, legalistic, measurable and enforceable However, no matter how popular singles clubs become, friendship, trust and loyalty do not appear to be amenable to packaging 24 They are transcendent notions which can be compared historically As such they are qualitative and organic Thus while rule by public opinion may seduce the politically innocent, it turns out upon anaylsis to be an illusion because social action is at all times the forerunner of opinion in the modern society Social action forms the opinions 25 Youth, old people, women's activists, minorities and ethnics are all engaged in social action immediately focusing upon specific issues, but in a larger sense seeking to change and direct the opinions of those in society Depending on a number of highly varied circumstances which are not germane to the essay, social action in the modern society is ultimately reduced to legalisms One of two alternatives prevails Legal sanctions can be invoked or legislation can be produced as a result of the actions taken 26 In either case the questions Ellul raised previously about our basic needs are either ignored or else becomes a legal issue The reduction of all social action to legalism of one from or another forms a very important part of resentment in the modern era 27 This is true in a procedural sense, what the courts in fact do, how they function, and in a substantive sense, what they ·136 ETHNICITY AND EDUCATION command shall be done However, before an analysis of resentment in the context of these two social processes is developed let us briefly note the jurisprudential implications of the legalization of American society In American culture there are two broad views of the law and the legal process. There is a positivist view of adjudication and a utilitarian view of the law The first argues that the law of a given community is to be identified with a specific set of rules The judge applies these legal rules from previous cases or from statutes to the facts before him Writing about legal positivism, Marshall Cohen observes that “These rules of law determine which behavior will be punished and coerced by public power, they must be distinguished from other social rules, especially from moral rules, which are not enforced by public power In modern democratic societies the mark of legality will normally be that the rule was enacted by some competent institution "28 The shortcoming of this positivist view of the law is that there 18 obviously something more to the law than the presence or absence of a rule Are there not Principles deeply embedded in our culture which underpin and guide the development of the law? Are there not cases heard which are unique and do not fit a specie fic rule, where judges have to search for principles upon which to base their decision ? The classic example which comes to mind is the case of the young man who murders his parents Legally, by the rules, he is entitled to inherit their estate, but courts at the beginning invoked the principle of unjust enrichment, in this case by the commission of a crime, to prevent such inheritance from transpiring Here a legal rule was overruled in favor of a larger principle of justice On the other hand, the utilitarian view is a view of what the law ought to be Its philosophy seeks to devise new rules that will serve the general welfare of society The notion of the "greatest good" for the "greatest number" guides the judicial outlook of social utility The basic postulate is that legal institutions should exclusively serve the general welfare of society The criticism of this view lies in the fact that in seeking to achieve the "greatest good", individual moral rights can be trampled Thus where legal positivism provided an inadequate theory of legal ·ETHNICITY AND EDUCATION 137 rights, so utilitarianism provides an inadequate theory of moral rights In this context Ronald Dworkin urges a distinction of some importance when he says that the public does not have a general right to have the law enforced For to concede such a right in his eyes would undermine the claim that we as people possess moral rights against the government In other words, if the laws are enforced we become defined as to who we are (our identities) by the totality of rules generated by our modern rule making institutions Nothing else other than the evolution of this rationalized process or rule making would exist for the modern individual Here it should be noted that for some ethnic groups, the Jews in particular, the moral nature of people and the law were combined to produce a sense of community The result produced both a historically transcendent people and the evolution of a mo al position in the world According to Dworkin however, our fundamental moral right is the right to be treated as an equal It is this right that the Equal Protection clause of the Constitution protects However, the right to be treated as an equal and the right to equal treatment are different notions which are often confused in our culture precisely to this controversy, this confusion in education and its relationship to resentment that the essay now turns RESENTMENT THE MINORITY ADMISSION PROGRAMS A number of significant court cases have been filed seeking to clarify or take issue with the policies developed by educational institutions related to the problem of increasing minority participation in educational and professional programs A review of some to these decisions will measure both the nature of the current controversies in affirmative action and will generate thoughts on what there decisions mean for us in the educational community and their relationship to resentment in contemporary society A BRIEF HISTORICAL REVIEW Since the late 1960's, colleges and universities and more partie cularly their professional schools have made a concerted effort to identify minority students and to admit those students into their educational programs Indeed, Anthony Lewis in a recent article entitled, “A White Enclave', 30 raises several interesting points concerning the special admissions programs in our nation's profe- It is ·138 ETHNICITY AND EDUCATION 9:33 ssional schools Lewis cites the example of the Law School of the University of California where 60 minority students accepted under a special admissions program join a total incoming student class of 290 "Every one of the 60 would have been admitted without any special consideration fifteen years ago But today, only one or two would make it without the special program "31 The reason for those astonishing figures, Lewis continues, "is the pressure that has built up for admission to professional schools "32 In 1960, for example, the Berkeley Law School had just 708 applicants Any. one with a B average in college could get in Now, as Lewis notes, “There are about 3,500 applicants a year and the average scores of those admitted has gone up In 1976 the 160 approved law schools in the United States had 8,703 minority students The Deans were asked how many minority students they would have if they were not allowed to use race as a special criterion in their admissions procedures Lewis states, "About half of the Deans responded, and they said the figure would be only one or two per school the same drop forecast in California "34 Thus, the issue of special admission programs appears to be linked with the substantial presence of minority students in many of our educational programs However, according to a report entiled “Minorities in Medicine From Receptive Passivity to Positive Action 1966–1976" authored by Dr Charles Odegaard former president of the University of Washington at Seattle "A five fold increase in the enrollment of medical students from minority groups in the United States over the last decade has not produced enrollments matching the percentage of these minority groups in the present population "35 and an article entitled “Medical Schools Urged to Intensify Recruitment of Minority Students” notes that “In 1970 the Association of American Medical Colleges in Washington said that it was setting a goal of 12 percent minority student enrollment by the 1975-76 academic year The study also found that 85 percent of the minority students graduated from medical school and that surprisingly the majority hal selected careers in internal medicine, pediatrics, or family medicine 9536 ·ETHNICITY AND EDUCATION 139 Nationally, the matter of special admission programs for minority students came to the attention of members of the educational community in the case of De Funis y Odegaard, in 1974 37 Though the United States Supreme Court "Side-stepped” the merits of the issue because Mario DeFunis had been admitted to law school and had graduated just before the court heard the case, the disent by Mr Justice Douglas is instructive In urging the court to consider the case on its merits, Douglas strongly suggested that the court would eventually have to face the question of special preference given to members of minority groups Indeed, language of the dissent has proven prophetic Recently the California Supreme Court in the case of Bakke v Regents of the University of California38 addressed the question of special admission directly As stated in the majority opinion written by Justice Mosk the case raised the question of "whether a special admission program which benefits disadvantaged minority students who apply for admission to the medical school of the University of California at Davis offends the constitutional rights of better qualified applicants denied admission because they are not identified with a minority THB ADMISSION PROCESS IN THE BAKKE CASE The details regarding the separate admission standard are important because they ultimately bear upon the question of whether the educational institution has demonstrated that the special admission program is necessary to serve a compelling governmental interest and whether the objectives of the program cannot reasonably be achieved by alternative means The general admission requirements for the Medical school for the University of California at Davis for all prospective students include the Medical College Admission Test (MCAT) revealing competencies in verbal, quantitative, general information and scientific categories, the candidate's extracurricular and community activities, as well as history of work experience, perº sonal comments of the applicant, and two letters of recommendation "39 In 1973, application form inquired whether the applicant desired to be considered by a special committe which passed upon the applications of persons from economically and educationally disadvantaged backgrounds The following year, a revised form ·140 ETHNICITY AND EDUCATION was adopted and instead of the question relating to disadvantage, the applicant was asked whether she or he "describes herself or himself as "white/caucasian" or as a member of some identifiable racial or ethnic group and whether she or he wished to be considered an applicant from a minority group Between 1971 and 1974 both white and minority applıcanis applied for the special program The selection of students for admission was conducted by two separate committees The regular admission committee consisted of a volunteer group divided equally between faculty and students and selected by the Dean of the Medical school The special admission committee, which evaluated the applications of disadvantaged applicants only, consisted of students who were all members of minority groups and faculty of the Medical school who were predominantly, but not entirely, members of minorities Applications from those not classified as disadvantaged (including applications from minorities who did not quality as disadvantaged) were screened through the regular admission process The evaluation of the two groups was made indepentdenty, so that applicants considered by the special committee were rated only against one another and not against those considered in the regular admission process All students admitted under the special program since its inception in 1969 have been members of minority groups The major purposes of the special admissions program were to promote diversity among the student body and the profession and to inciease the number of doctors practicing in the minority community As one school official said. “The special admission program was designed to afford preferential treatment to persons who are from disadvantaged backgrounds that test scores and grades of minority applicants do not necessarily reflect their capabilities because their low scores might be attributable to the fact that they were required to work during the school year or that they lacked the reinforcement and support which white middle-class students typically derive from their families, and without such a program, few minorities would qualify for admission to the University "540 In the end however, the question, stripped of policy statements, or rationalịzations was the use of ruce as a category upou ·ETHNICITY AND EDUCATION 141 "942 which educational admissions policy was based As the Court said, “It is plain that the special admission program denjes admission to some white applicants solely because of their race "41 The OPINION OF THE CALIFORNIA SUPREME COURT Historically classification by race is subject to strict scrutiny by the courts and unless the classification serves a compelling governmental interest which cannot be served by other means the classification based on race will be voided This was the test announced Bakke case and the court found the school's argument to the contrary unconvincing The Court said "The two major aims of the University are to integrate the student body and to improve medical care for minorities In our view, the University has not established that a program which discriminates against white applicants because of their race is necessary to achieve either of these goals Further on the court said "In short, the standards for admission employed by the University are not constitutionally infirm except to the extent they are utilized in a racially discriminatory manner Disadvantaged applicants of all races must be eligible for sympathetic consideration and no applicant may be rejected because of his race » 43 (emp supp) The court did not accept the University's argument drawing an analogy between its special admission program and decisions which have upheld the right of minorities to preference in einployment under Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act The court noted that in all of these cases the courts have found the defendantemployer had practiced discrimination in the past and that the preferential treatment of minorities was necessary to giant them the opportunity for equality Unless a finding of practiced discrimination (something the schools would not want to officially admit) is made, this argument does not apply Thus the court held in Bakke that the use of grades and the MCAT in evaluating prospective students was not discrimination in fact against minorities The opinion of the California Supreme Court noted with some detail the hisorical arguments passionately detailing the 44 ·142 ETHNICITY AND EDUCATION 45 66 exploitation and discrimination by the prevailing majority population Impressive though the history and statistics were, and sensitive to the argument that a self-perpetuting group” would remain at the bottom levels of American society, the court nevertheless found forceful reasons against preferential admissions based solely on race Such a program while benefiting an individual was seen as devisve in terms of relations between the races Race as a category upon which to base social policy was seen by the court as counterproductive As the court said" Rewards and penalties, achievements and failures, are likely to be considered in a racial context through the school years and beyond "46 Several other significant items in the descision should be reviewed Once the court found that Bakke had proved that the school had discriminated against him it still had to decide what relief he was entitled to receive The University urged that just because Bakke proved he was discriminatd against because of his race does not entitle him to admission to the school and that furthermore, Bakk must prove he would have been admitted had there been no special admissions program Bakke argued that burden of proof shifted to the University and that they had to prove he would not have been accepted or else admit him to the school In agreeing with Bakke the court held when Bakke established that the University had discriminated against him because of his race, the burden of proof shifted to University Accordingly the case was returned to the trial court with instructions to hold a hearing on this matter and the court instructed the University to go forward with proof to the effect that Bakke would not have been admitted to school. In reaching its conclusion the court observed that "No reason appears why the victim rather than the perpetrator of the illegal act should bear the burden of proof "47 In a slightly different context one might well ask who has the burden of proof in establishing minority status Is that the plaintiff's burden, or does the decision reside with the school authorities? Recently the Colorado Supreme Court took a case under advisement directly on this point. It is considering an appeal ·ETHNICITY AND EDUCATION 143 from a student of Italian-American extraction who claims that he was illegally excluded from the University of Colorado's special admission program for law students The case is quickly distinguishable from Bakke because here no claim is made that the student was denied regular admission because of the existence of a special admission program for minorities Instead, the case directly raises the question, whether an educationally and culturally "disadvantaged" white student has a constitutional right to be considered for admission under the special's special admission program While no claim is made that the law school admission program is unconstitutional, it directly raises the question of the constituency for such programs The suit does however, charge that the program was administered unlawfully because it failed to include the plaintiff, Mr DiLeo among students from certain "identifiable groups" In his suit against the University he claims that his exclusion was based on racial grounds and thus violates his constitutional rights In an article entitled "Italian American Applauds' Intent of University's Special Admissions", Robert L Jacobson says that “The object of Mr DiLeo's suit is the Colorado law school's special academic assistance program Established in 1968, it is described by the school as a program designed to identify prospective law students who appear to have the intellectual ability to graduate from this law school but would not otherwise be elgible for admission under normal standards and who are members of identifiable groups which have not had adequate educational and cultural opportunities available to them and which are seriously underrepresented in the legal profession', For DiLeo the issue is clear, the special admission program is unfair in that as established by the University, it excludes students who fit the category of need for special treatment in admissions except for race As the brief says because it creates in effect an irrebuttable presumption that if you are a member of one of three select minority groups, you are presumed to be handicapped, whereas if you are not a member of these select groups you are presumed to be socially superior and not in need of the same special acadenic assistance.49 *748 ·144 ETHNICITY AND EDUCATION In the DiLeo case there is a related dispute concerning the law school's criterion that students admitted under its special admis. sions program be members of groups that are "seriously underrepresented in the legal profession" According to the article, attorneys for the University plan to take the position that Mr DiLeo's ethnic group, the Italian Americans, are not such a underrepresented group The attorney for Mr DiLeo expressed that he would not feel confident with having to prove on Mr DiLeo's behalf that they are In this context Mr DiLeo says that the law school originally listed his application for the special program under the mistaken assumption' that his surname was Spanish To Mr DiLeo this incident shows in the most embarassing way” how unfair and poorly the special admissions program is administered 50 What is significant for our purposes about these two cases is not the teasing glance they afford of the modern educational management techniques in admissions (an issue for some to be sure) but rather that special treatment for a select few, officially sanctioned by the school engenders a resentment among all others not so considered Before proceeding further with our remarks concerning the notion of resentment in American culture a few concluding remarks about a different aspect of resentment in education should be made, this time from the focus of minorities Here our focus is not upon the process of selection, but rather on the schooling process itself As David Williams has observed the “Feelings of resentment therefore involve distinct power relationships, in which subordinate groups or classes may hope for the weakening of the values of the powerful who direct their values against the weak Those who are consistently on the receiving end of moral judgments and powerfully valueladen decisions consistently experience a 're-feeling of a specific clash with someone else's value qualities, in which process of 're-feeling the reactionary emotion usually increases with time "50 The realization that this process of resentment is a culturally conditioned one, that knowledge in our society, is based on control rather than on essence or spirituality is of little comfort to those who are persistently controlled by others Nowhere in American ·ETHNICITY AND EDUCATION 145 51 culture is this control by others perhaps more obvious than in our school systems The research of John Ogbu is directly relevant on this point Ogbu raises the question, why do minority children living in cities fail in school? In his research he systematiclly documents how, in the area studied, the children are encouraged to fail and taught that effort does not bring to them the same rewards that it brings to middle class children He takes specific issue with the three classic reasons, the conventional wisdom, for why children fail in school, cultural deprivation inferiority of schools and genetic inferiority of ethnic groups especially blacks Instead Ogbu points to two historical explanations, urbanization and subordination As he says “In school blacks responded by reducing their efforts in school tasks to the level of rewards they expected as future adults This mode of adaptation results in a high proportion of school failure For blacks the school failure adaptation reduces the pain of working as hard or harder than do whites for fewer rewards : 52 Clearly then the subordination of the students, both as individuals and as members of a group is one aspect of the resentment process in schooling but there also exists a larger social process which is established As Ogbu notes "The schools administrators, counselors, teachers, pupils, and so on are merely playing the roles that the community (dominated by the ideas and policies of the dominant group) assigns them "53 Thus resentment and the process of adaptation in this example is a product of our school systems As with the effects of propaganda upon our basic needs, this process also confuses the indi. vidual and obscures the relationship of those resentful feelings with their true locus in the social structure Too often the locus of the resentment lies in the fabric of the social process itself and the exhortation to social action only contributes to the resentment For example, the findings produced by Ogbu's research suggest that the social action in education would lead to something similar to affirmative action programs, special admissions or would eventuate in the establishment of educational quotas for minorities- ·146 ETHNICITY AND EDUCATION themselves, as has been suggested, processes perpetuating, perhaps even increasing, resentment At this juncture it should be noted that there are a myriad of other aspects of education and the schooling process which generate resentment Resentment spawned the term paper companies that supply student academic needs in the form of written papers and project assignments for the educational professionals the publish or perish” paradigm creates resentment and suspicion among faculty colleagues In addition, and more importantly there is also an aspect of resentment which actually underpins the curriculum of the educational institutions and upon which courses are offered or excluded 84 Sheila K Johnson in writing about the difficulties encountered in establishing a course called “The Culture and History of the Jewish People portrays the structural resentment in the contemporary callegate setting Here the focus is ethnic-ethnic rescntment and the political dimensions are narrowed and specific turning down the offer of the caorse the ethnic studies department said That a course in Jewish studies was not needed because several members of the department already dealt with the Jewish exploitation of Third World minorities in their courses and in addition the position of the department was that since the Jewish people were not an oppressed minority in the United States that they should not be the subject of a formal course of instruction The dean of instruction even interpreted the requirement of Ethnic Studies to relate wholly to Third World People (i e Afro Americans, Asian Americans, Indians and Latin-Mexican Americans) As Johnson says Those who want to restrict ethnic studies to "Third World People' generally cite Executive Order 11246 which mandated affirmative action in the federal government in hiring on behalf of black, American Indian, Spanish-surnamed, and Oriental Americans 56 955 Thus in pointing out the relationship between larger aspects of social policy, in this case affirmative action and how it effects what is studied in school, Johnson raises questions which go to the heart of our understanding and recognition of ethnic groups ·ETHNICITY AND EDUCATION 147 In this vein the research of Lavender and Forsyth is revealing. The authors systematically examined the study of minority groups in American culture They methodically searched all the leading sociological journals and found indications that the sociological examination of ethnic and minority groups have dealt overwhelmingly with the examination of black Americans to the exclusion of other ethnic groups In noting the effects of this finding the authors observe that "In view of the sinall number of articles concerned with these ethnic groups, it is no wonder that so little is known about ethnic-ethnic, ethnic-black and and ethnic-dominant Society relations '57 Resentment then can act as a filter in school It can screen in or out knowledge, students, information about ethnic groups and it can also construct ethnic realities (courses) in the school The school and its social and intellectual policies, its social reality constructs, and the control over the voices of the professions who examine ethnic phenomena become crucial in understanding American ethnic life Crucial to this understanding of school relauonships is an understanding of resentment in American culture For as Williams so correctly advises “To take resentment out of education, we must concomitantly seek to remove it from every surface in our social lives "58 RESENTMENT IN AMERICAN CULTURE In a very real sense the Bakke and DiLeo cases, the observations of Ogbu, Williams and Johnson can all be seen as part of contemporary American culture They are not separate distinct happenings, but rather form a part of a larger cultural whole Our culture has always subscribed to the illusion that we are a classless society, one based upon individual merit, initiative and talent As a culture we have never thought in terms of classes and for that matter until only recently have we thought in terms of cultural groups The real reason the special privileges and exclusive nature of admission programs for minorities causes resentment is not because a "special class" is being established but rather because such programs puncture the illusions of classlessness, and our cherished myth of individualism For those without group affiliation, or with weak group ties, a feeling of political impotency can be seen to underpin this feeling of resentment ·148 ETHNICITY AND EDUCATION Moreover, considering the increasing importance of credentials for job placement in a static economy one can fairly expect then, both a growth in individual resentment, and a similar expansion in educational legalisms Endless arguments over tests, the meaning of their scores, admission programs, curricular matters, and controversies over the relationship of a course of study to the practice of a profession are likely to transpire expansion of educational legalisms will create a kind of intellectual displacement, a dislocation within individuals The original cause of resentment will be displaced with a resentment induced by the growing cluster of regulations, rules, and laws attached to the schooling process The specific event and its meaning will have been consumed by the social process, a social process increasingly resented by those who share or seek to share in the social ritual of education as well as those who manage the schools Returning to our earlier question regarding the functioning of the judicial process in American culture Martin Tolchin contends that “The extension of judicial authority into executive and legislative areas has evolved in the last 15 years largely as a result of class action suits that flowed from the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the decisions of the Warren Court, notably Brown v Board of Education in 1954 "59 and makes the salient observation that the “Courts have taken over the operation of jails in St Louis, Baltimore, New Orleans, Toledo, New York City, Boston, Jacksonville, Knoxville and Lubbock and Harris counties in Taxas They run prisons in Alabama, Mississippi and Arkansas, state hospitals in Alabama, Louisiana and Mississippi and a school district in Boston "80 The point to be made here is that the climate of resentment tends to focus upon the courts and their intervention institutions and not upon the failures of the political process In the sense of an inability to live up to principle, our political process has collapsed when this judicial intervention occurs Indeed, one insightful politician noted that Federal intervention gets local officials off the hook Are taxes raised? Don't blame the legislators, blame the courts Are priorities changed? Governors and mayors say they are not at fault '62 ·ETHNICITY AND EDUCATION 149 Thus the public resistance, the resentment at interference is reflected privately by the politicians What is really a fail ure of individual nerve, a failure of political will becomes a failed promise to the community Rather than resent this failure, the community resents the court structure which seeks to have the political construction of reality measured against principle What was once a political process for argument, debate and problem resolution becomes inverted It develops into a bureaucratic, risk-free, self-serving political organization It is not the fear of government by judicial oligarchy which is so deeply troubling, but rather the present absence of alternatives in our political system All roads lead to the courts and the legal structure 62 It is the lack of political commitment by various branches of government which is the issue The resentment on the part of the public is not directed to this lack of commitment, or for that matter to their own lack of resolve, but rather to the social process of “repair" caused by the absence of the political commitment , ie court intervention When moral standards, values and commitment are absent from a culture, or in a neo-pragmatic sense, are deemed surplussage to the techniques of modern politics , then the "objective reality” of quantified rules, regulations, procedures and laws become the only alternatives open to the social order for its maintenance and continuation In addition, it should be mentioned that the foreclosure of commitment in the political process in guaranteeing the rights to all groups in the society has forced ethnic and minority groups into the court system to seek their political (read moral) rights in a wide range of cases 68 Thus even if one views the court system in a passive role, the modern political process forces issues and problems onto the judicial docket Increasingly litigious minded groups demand the use of the legal structure as a forum for grievances and a position from which to politicize issues 64 That the fact of having to initiate a legal proceeding induces additional resentment is obvious if for no other reason than the commencement of litigation is an open recognition of one's exclusion from the prevailing political process RESENTMENT IN THE COMMUNITY Two VIEWS Bearing directly on this point is the case of the United Jewish Organizations of Williamsburg Inc et al y Carey et al 65 In this ·150 ETHNICITY AND EDUCATION a As a group case the petitioners argued that the New York Legislature, in seeking to comply with the Voting Rights Act66 as construed by the Attorney General, violated the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution by deliberately revising a reapportionment plan along racial lines They argued that the redistricting plans of the New York Legislature violated their constitutional righis in that the Hassidic community in Williamsburg, a cohesive and identifiable group of orthodox Jews, was split in half, into two districts whose racial composition would be about 65% black each, by the proposed redistricting plan It was the resultant dilution of this political power which was contested by the plaintiffs 67 An ethnic group was seeking a forum to sanction (to translate) its concepts of holistic identity into political reality 68 they argued they had had their rights abridged The United States Supreme Court disagreed. In holding the act of the New York Legislature constitutional the court declared that "It is apparent from the fact of the Act, from its legislative history, and from our cases that the Act was itself broadly remedial in the sense that it was 'designed by Congiess to banish the blight of racial discrimination in voting South Carolina v Katzenbach, 383 U S 308 (1966) "69 Indeed in Gaffney v Cummings, 70 the court recognized that redistricting plans would be vulnerable if “racial or political groups have been fenced out of the political process and their voting strength invidiously minimized "1 While in the case of Beer y U.S,72 the court pointed out it considerd the question of what criteria a legislative reapportionment plan must satisfy under the Voting Rights Act to demonstrate that the plan does not have the "effect of denying or abridging the right to vote on account of race " As the court said “Beer established that the Voting Rights Act does not permit the implementation of a reapportionment that would lead to a retrogression in the position of racial minorities with res pect to their effective exercise of the electoral franchise "78 For the court, this test was satisfied where the reapportionment increased the percentage of districts where members of racial minorities protected by the Act were in the majority As the court stated in the instant case under review ·ETHNICITY AND EDUCATION 151 6 “Implicit in Beer and City of Richmond, then, is the proposition that the Constitution does not prevent a State subject to the Voting Rights Act, from deliberately creating or preserving black majorities in particular districts in order to ensure than its reapportionment plan complies with section five."74 In noting that in the case under consideration that it was true that the New York Legislature del iberately increased the nonwhite majorities in certain districts in order to enhance the opportunity for election of nonwhite representatives the Court said that "Nevertheless, there was no fencing out of the white population from participation in the political processes of the county, and the plan did not minimize or unfairly cancel out white voting strength" (emp supp ) 75 and further on the court concluded that We think it also permissible for a State, employing sound redistricting principles such as compactness and population equality, to attempt to prevent racial minorities from being repeatedly outvoted by creating districts that will afford fair representation to the members of those racial groups who are sufficiently numerous and whose residential patterns afford the opportunity of creati ng districts in which they will be in the majority In conclusion, the deliberate increase of minority representation at the expense of ethnic enclaves can be seen as a contributing factor in ethnic cultural resentment In another significant legal decision bearing on the notions of resentment, community and neighborhood the United States Supreme Court dealt yet another blow to identifiable ethnic and minority groups This time however, the issue was not a particular group desiring to remain together as a group in the exercise of their franchise, but rather the a bility of a suburban area to exclude members of a minority by use and manipulation of their zoning regulations The case of Village of Arlington Heights et al v Metropolitan Housing Development Corporation et al 77, involved a dispute over a suburban zoning variance for low cost integrated housing Arlington Heights is a suburb of Chicago and the Metropolitan Housing Development Corporation, a non profit developer, con- > 976 ·152 ETHNICITY AND EDUCATION tracted to purchase a tract within the boundaries of the Village of Arlington Heights in order to build racially integrated low and moderate income housing The contract for the purchase of the land was contingent upon securing rezoning as well as federal housing assistance MHDC applied to the Village for the necessary rezoning from a single-family to a multiple family classification At a number of commission meetings, all open to the public, both sides touched upon the fact that the project would probably be racially integrated Multi-family dwelling zoning and apartments had been constructed by the Village primarily as a buffer between single family dwellings and the commercial zone of the Village The request for the zoning change was denied and the controversy wound through the court structure to the United States Supreme Court. The United States Supreme Court in sustaining the actions of the Village's zoning commission against constitutional attack said that even though the lower courts found that the "buffer policy" had been applied unevenly in the past that nevertheless, this "evidence does not necessitate a finding that Arlington Heights administered this policy in a discriminatory manner"78 In its opinion the court stated clearly that solely because the actions of officials have racially disproportionate impacts, they will not necessarily be held to be unconstitutional In reaching the decision the court all but ended the test of disproportionate effects, ie does the social policy unfairly effect one group, in favor of a new evidentary standard Now those groups who are "controlled" or find themselves in subordinate positions have to prove the existence of motive, of discriminatory purpose, behind the social policies which effect their group in an unfair manner In the words of the court "Disproportionate impact is not irrelevant, but it is not the sole touchstone of an invidious racial discrimination "79 In defining the test for discrimination and exclusion of minorities the court stated that motive must be established for the court to intervene the individual must have proof of motive to discriminate In the court's words “When there is a proof that a discriminatory purpose has been a motivating factor in the decision, this judicial deference is no longer justified ”80 ·ETHNICITY AND EDUCATION 153 but that in the instant case, “The respondents proceeded on the erroneous theory that the Village's refusal to rezone carried a racially discriminatory effect and was, without more, unconstitutional "81 In the eyes of the court the respondents simply failed to carry their burden of proving that discriminatory purpose or intent was a motivating factor in the Village's decision not to alter its zoning regulations All of these lawsuits are structural representations of resentment in contemporary American society On the one hand they are a leaction against the modern social structure, while on the other, they are also a product of that same social structuie That a community, any community, let alone an ethnic or minority community, can arise against these artificial strictures and structures of schooling and contemporary urban ecology is an act of will. Moreover, whether the vitality of ethnic and minority groups can transcend this pettiness, jealousy and resentment remains an open question To survive through history however, means more than losing resent ment , it means dealing with a sense of loss Loss As A SOCIAL THEME IN AMERICA IMPLICATIONS FOR ETHNIC GROUPS There is a strong element underpinning and influencing social policy in America which is based upon compensation for a sense of loss felt by American citizens Individuals who experienced this sense of loss, a by-product of modernity, may ultimately find themselves in sympathy with the motives and aims of the active ethnic and minority groups in society and yet at the same time deeply resentful of these groups The sense of loss can be occasioned by those who have left their past behind, a mere function of the moment of history, and who seek both meaning and satisfaction in their lives in other, more modern, individuated ways For these persons the sense of loss means that the social group of their origins has ceased to have either significant social or cultural importance In this sense these individuals are resentful of those who cling to, use and manipulate the group reference politically, ideologically and culturally 82 While they ultimately may be in agreement with the demands of ethnic and minotity groups, for these individuals however, the ·154 ETHNICITY AND EDUCATION relevant social policy is a policy that deals with their feelings of loss and not with group based political arrangements fostering the groups' advance into the mainstream of American social and political lite These individuals want to be "treated" for this feeling of loss they have experienced and they want social policies developed to compensate them structurally for this often ill defined feeling Indeed David K Cohen in an article entitled "Loss as a Theme in Social Policy" states that “If social policy has been shaped by contention over the extent of social democracy, it also has been the product of a mad rush to repair the traumas of becoming modern If conflict over the extent of equality has been one major theme in the evolution of social policy, another has been the recurrent desire to recapture a community which seemed about to disappear "83 For Cohen this sense of loss produced efforts to invent institutions, among them the school, which would and could replace the failing communities As he says the feeling of loss Evoked a belief that primary institutions families, churches and commnuities had lost their ability to pass a common culture along, and this became a powerful inspiration for the development of public education '84 After depicting briefly the horrors of urban 19th century city life, the squalor of the immigrants, the poverty and family disintegration Cohen states that ideas about just how schools would work were fairly uniform “Most traditionalists thought of them as a redeeming environment reformers hoped that schools would separate the deviant and deficient young from their inadequate surroundings filling them with better sentiments and creating a new system of common morals All agreed, though, that the point of public schooling was to create those collective sentiments and values which they feared were eroding. Schools would do intentionally and consciously what lost communities had once done reflexively and instinctively ”85 Thus the early notions about schooling, no matter how much they varied, were underpinned with notions that they would recreate social cohesiveness by refashioning personal values, sentiments & ·ETHNICITY AND EDUCATION 155 1988 989 and ideas about social reality 86 How familiar this sounds in an age where value clarification movements and back to the basics thrusts are currently popular educational themes 87 However, as Cohen observes this social undertaking in the schools created a colossal paradox As he says “As a result, in seeking to preserve traditional values, they turned naturally to the rational design of new institutions and to the conscious construction of social morality and that “A second consequence was to weave a strange ambivalence into social policy for education the wounds of modernization made public schools necessary, yet schools would be modernizing agencies It is this ambivalence in modern schooling that creates many of the educational problems It is an argument that the schools cannot "win", because the nature of the controversy which lies at the heart of the debate about schooling is caused by different perceptions about school Groups, depending upon where they are in the modernizing process (ie differentially located on a modernization continuum), may have quite different social themes underpinning their views regarding the function of the modern school While the school may seek to follow a fairly uniform policy there is bound to be conflict because the pre-modern (ascribed) status of certain groups and the post modern (achieved) status of other individuals construct different social realities for school Each position would «ee the school as providing quite different ranges of social and intellectual services for the students In the end perhaps the vaunted universalism of any bureau. cracy, the school included, has difficulty when pluralistic demands are placed upon it by its clients Sadly, all too often the reaction is to search for and develop a uniform policy that pleases no one and which all resent and to deal harshly with those who are different In expanding our focus on the notion of loss as a central theme in shaping both the vision Americans have about what is wrong with our culture and in guiding our efforts at correction educators should be attentive to the words of Raymond Williams In an article entitled "Developments in the Sociology of Culture", in which he urges the systematic study of culture, Williams observes that ·156 ETHNICITY AND EDUCATION "The older concern, in cultural analysis, with a very wide and general area of cultural contributions, has in part been shifted, because the culture has shifted, to a very important if very limited area, in which a new formation is evident briefly, the institutional technology of higher education, in which several forms of cultural theory have become, within a privileged Situation, privileged practices "90 For David Williams, writing on education, this form of cultural analysis is characterized by the fact that "Institutions are not overwhelmingly supportive of research which is concentrated outside process product or purposiverational logic Negligible public funding is available for studies in education as well as in the social sciences, which do not permit themselves to become extraordinary of eclectic positivism "91 It would appear then that these categories and methods of cultural analysis are created by modernization, by the level, avallability, and structure of technology in modern society They are the results of, and are the products of the division of labor and the operation of the economic structure of American society As such these tools of cultural analysis are unevenly distributed and in reality can be viewed as the products of the operation of a distinct ideological view of social relationships Ultimately the contest over these pathways of knowledge and the social construction of cultural realities is where the pluralism of our values and traditions as a culture are tested In this context, Raymond Williams urges that it is important to understand that tradition is an important concept for the sociological examination of culture Tradition he says: Is the study of intellectual formations, classically, groups and movements of cultural contributors, which have a significantly variable and often oblique relation to formal institutions "92 and that "Tradition is an important and relatively undeveloped sociological concept, secondly that work of this kind, as it is now usually done, involves active consideration of the relations between specific traditions and particular works and practices, and these are of great theoretical interest in a wider field 1998 ·ETHNICITY AND EDUCATION 157 New vistas are thus open if one avails themselves of the opportunities for the sociological examination of culture as sketched by Williams In a world where telephone calls compensate us with ersatz social bonds of intimacy , where workmans' compensation, social security and health insurance relieve us for our loss of community ; where the aged and sick are isolated, exiled until cured or dead, the study of tradition is mandated To outgrow our infatuation with social causality and to escape the inherent madness of narrow policy studies would be both a sign of intellectual maturity and structural significance Such an intellectual movement could be distinguished by a lack of any previous ideological system It could offer in some sense a groping for a universal explanation for social loss we all share That fact alone would given tradition a place in the history of sociological concepts At the very least the examination would enable scholars as policy makers to deal with the two alternatives regarding the sense of loss in a new manner Fresh insights could be applied first to the notion that the sense of loss persists because objective social and economic changes have obliterated the old order Secondly, tradition as a unit of study could moderate the view that the task of modern society is not to reconstruct the past, but to create therapeutic institution which will help us work loss through and accept change It is to the theme of tradition, more particularly the search for roots in American culture that our analysis now turns THE DREAM OF AUTHENTICITY THE SEARCH FOR ROOTS IN AMERICA The imagination of a world in which people are freed from political persecution and religious dogma had its origins in the late eighteenth century It is the work of inspired reason , the gleaming product of the Enlightenment and it is made all the more real by the American Revolution Since the nineteenth century however, at least in the Western world, freedom has increasingly found its voice, first through literature, and then in scientific enterprise While the record of our century, the twentieth, is incomplete a few noteworthy social themes have emerged First, literature has become fragmented and privitized At best it has been removed to the innocuous status of cultural surplussage- ·158 ETHNICITY AND EDUCATION amusement, escape, entertainment from the real world While science and the development of technology have conquered the cultural descendants of the hosts who developed them However this may be, and it is always an enjoyable risk to talk broadly, nevertheless ultimately the authority of the imagination has its basis in the belief that it can transform the world, perhaps even realize what is truly the essence of the human experience To achieve the former, a people must forget history, to accomplish the later however, history offers only a possibility, but it is the only possibility Self consciousness and reason are both historical products, not scientific ones In the end they provide the only injunction against the accelerated pathos of errors which characterize the contemporary era The most positive aspect of history, and by implication, the Search for roots, lies in the fact that it provides a rationale for a people The customs, traditions and the mores are only known and transmitted by history The historical identity, the moral, political, and spiritual meaning of a group of people can be seen as contained in the metaphor of Roots The experience of a people and their relationship to other people fashions an alternative to the adversary nature of the modern world. If Alex Haley's book Roots can make the black a historical being, then he as an author will have an honored and lasting place in American history Blackness is roots, a rooted sensitivity about life, and as such it is open to all criticisms that have ever been lodged generally about any creative work It is inaccurate, poorly researched, borrowed material (hand me down's) disorganized, poorly written, too commercialized, and in the end, not history at all Moreover, to fault Haley on the drama of Roots is to ignore the major lessons of history History is drama , a historical drama which changes and evolves just as do other human creations To avoid the dramatic motif of history in favor of the security of facts is to modernize the discipline and to change it in the process. It removes history itself from its roots 94 In the sense of Roots, history is the narrative, the story, the human hand rendering an account of the events at his or her command What one often needs in order to acquire a better understanding of our society is not more facts Facts in isolation are not very enlightening Rather one needs to understand the facts one already has as part of the total dynamic process. Accumulating more information whether factual or ·ETHNICITY AND EDUCATION 159 theoretical, will not necessarily help one to understand society. Instead, one needs to look at society in a new way, 95 and it is here that the parrative becomes crucial For example, in a society which has always equated manners with moral, and not just visualized them as manners, the historial presence of the black as American takes on a whole new light. In America social behavior is the index of a deeper nexus of contractual agreement Manners (read morals) are the hidden assumptions which make social life possible at all in America Thus, a breach of etiquette, or simply not knowing the manners for the occasion (uneducated) something more serious than a breach is tantamount to an attack upon the fabric of society and upon the bonds of the commonweal 96 This is precisely the threat that blacks pose When they "integrate" with the white world, the white world's response is that things have begun to come apart, or that thev, the blacks, "just don't know any better” Thus any breach of etiquette or violation of the code of manners interferes with social intercourse and raises the potential of a legal conflict To say that blacks do not know how to behave is to level a deeper charge, one that is not unfamiliar and hardly innocuous In a word, blacks constitute the heterogeneous element, the class of outsiders, in American culture They will be outsiders until they develop a history, until they discover their roots By discovering one's roots however one does not mean a minority culture of angry parvenus who seek entry into the public institutions and private foundations of American Culture True, ultimately this is what the special enrollment programs will mean be they in the private commercial sector (tokenism) or in the public sphere To accept quotas is a view of the blacks as parvenus Its meaning is only a few with manners, or most assuredly only those select few with the potential to develop manners The details of interviews, screenings and searches is simply an elongated test to assure those searching for a candidate that black is not cultural but only visual Thus, the same escape from roots is open to the black just as it was open to all other ethnic groups only with a difference an explicit quota Another objection to quotas and special admissions in American culture in this context is that as structural arrangements 4 ·160 ETHNICITY AND EDUCATION in society these social mechanisms underpin the, "We have no more racial problems" attitude which has oozed from American culture in the 1970's The new attitude is caused by a major shift in American thought about race and minorities For some, not all to be sure, the presence of affirmative action and quotas ends the issue Racial discrimination as a problem has been incorporated into modern social management As such it has become a "task" which is heung "worked on" by administrators and policy planners For otheis not familiar with these policies racism has evolved It has become something new , a passion without fear When fear leaves racism, whatever the highly varied reasons are in our culture, our question should be what does the absence of fear contribute to the power relationships held together so tenuously in society? Since all social constructs have a permeability, how does the evolutionary nature of racism affect these relationships? Has, for example, human manipulation moved to a new, yet undefined level of abstraction ? Moreover, does to be black mean yet another denial of an exterior reality to the black social construction of reality? If perhaps the reality of an integrated world has failed, then the construction of alternate realities becomes an issue for those persons who are black , and the historical metaphor, as has been suggested, becomes a rich treasure in this regard At any rate, those individuals who can learn the mappers and mores of American society (read, write and articulate in standard English) the vangard blacks serve simultaneously to uplift and drag forward those who cannot, the "laggards” of the inner city tribal brotherhood and become the articulate voices of black culture. They are often black culture's most prized figures and they may also be viewed as its most complete victims Critics and racists might shout that they have created a reality with the borrowed trappings of Western civilization, that what they create is inevitably second hand and by definition second best Without the slightest intent of racism, that this is untrue can be seen in both music and in professional sports, two areas both reasonably open to black participation in American social life In each instance culture permeates the event There is a difference in black music, its tonal structure, its lyrics, its cadence With regard to sports, professional basketball clearly establishes the cultural ·ETIINICITY AND EDUCATION 161 97 difference that black participation brings to the game It has become a black game, with individual player moves unthinkable in coaching circles twenty years ago Ultimately however the argument must be that tribalism, the sub-culture “bondedness” of the blacks obstructs, interferes, or at the very least acts as a brake on the modernization process Blacks in America are in a persetual state of pre-modernity The differential arrangements of rewards in society, ordered by an intricate webwork of insulting discriminations assure that blacks will always be one step behind all significant aspects of American society For example, if blacks graduate from high school in signifi. cant numbers, which they are now beginning to do, then the “degree does not mean anything", and the test for meaning moves to other non-degree areas such as work experience or travel If blacks are admitted to public recreation areas, white go elsewhere, to newer resort areas to relax A last example, culled from an almost infinite number, is when blacks move into a white neighborhood, whites overwhelmingly, although there are some outstanding exceptions, move to newer neighborhood with "better" social services Before proceeding further it should be pointed out that in American culture, modernization simply means a move from affective relationships to ones of neutrality Objectivity enters social relations and a movement from diffuseness to that of narrowed, exact precision occurs Status changes in the modernization pro- It moves from ascription to something based upon achievem ment and at the same time society moves from particularism to universalism All of these movements in American culture are necessary for a culture as representative of differentiation, problem solving (the infinite intellectual puzzles of social policy) and which permits enormous spheres of objectivity in social relations "Let's leave it up to the experts", thus becomes the motiff of modern social life What must be recognized is that this process, only sketched here, cuts ancient tribal ties and obliterates identities At the same time however, a cultural attack on the series of processes described above, constitutes in the eyes of non-minorities a regressive thrust in the development of American culture That this is true is cercess ·162 ETHNICITY AND EDUCATION tainly suggested by the view of the hippies held by most Americans They were dirty, threatened the manners and customs of society and ruptured firmly held notions of social decorum To survive in American society as a group people, a culture, Must we raise at this juncture the question of ideology ? Does black culture need an ideology ? This is not to argue for the truth content of a "packaged" ideology, but simply to lodge the question and to suggest that a fruitful manner in which to conduct the inquiry might be to view ideologies of black Americans as attempts to meet some of the very criteria attributed to the modernization process. Booker T Washington, Marcus Garvey, more recently the Black Muslums and the Black Panther Party can all be viewed as black attempts to come to terms with the modernization process in a cultural perspective On the other hand, the Urban League, the NAACP and CORE, at least in its initial phases, can be seen as accepting the modernization process and struggling to join in the fruits of its rewards Black history it is suggested in the context of Roots, then can be seen as more than a search for identity It can be seen in the context of black resistance to civility, to manners and the abstractions of modern American social life The pursuit of historical truth is not empirical but metaphorical Historical truth for the black American is his or her essence Black history is the story of an essence of a people Since democratization in America was first established as the tribunal of each) person's conscience and later became modernized and institutionalized to become coterminus with political rights, the historical story can only be suggested here One of our observations must be that since essence, the conscious being of people, exists independently of political rights (which all blacks do not at present have), the historical record should reflect this essence and not the litany of struggle over the civil and political rights The former is unique, it is art in all forms, while the latter is, however well done, ultimately the plaintive wail of the outsider who has been captured by the lure of the modernization process The only fault with this position, and it is a fair criticism but one for which there is an answer, would be that ethnicity, in this context blackness, has itself become modernized It has ceased to ·ETHNICITY AND EDUCATION 163 be ascribed status and has become rather, an achieved status Ethnicity and blackness have become something one's works at One studies the history, discovers the essence of one group, learns terms, methods and ways of creating elaborate social rituals Culture becomes something actively pursued, created and produced. As such with this specific end in sight, it can be argued that it becomes nothing other than an artificial counterpart to that it seeks to avoid, the sterile banality of modernized social life In addition as a contemporary social metaphor Roots and the search for family identity can be seen in the context of popular culture As Thomas A Johnson states “With the production of Roots the show that attracted the largest audience in the history of the medium,. the naming of children for its main characters has emerged as one of the most interesting aspects of this phenomenon "98 Other popular off shoots of the interest spurred by Roots include significant increases in interest in travel to Africa, the West Indies, and a marked interest in studies of black Africa in general and of slavery in particular 99 Indeed in the context of education, Jose Morese, Random House's marketing manager for colleges said “Roots courses have been sold to 150 institutions and the interest is burgeoning "100 In addition, famıly heritage programs are popular in high schools, and blacks as well as other minority and ethnic groups are searching for their long lost past However, in school programs or not, for some groups the search for roots is difficult if not impossible Indeed as Barbara Gamrekian notes" "For some blacks, the past is lost forever obliterated by migrations, loss of name, and the oppression of slavery But for others, it has been possible to reconstruct the past that had been forcibly denied them "101 However, Professor Elizabeth Clark-Lewis notes that “Up until 10 years ago it was not easy for blacks to seek their past The very places where one had to go to do the research were off limits "102 These and other difficulties can pose problems in working with ·164 ETHNICITY AND EDUCATION records especially in smaller communites But as Jamesa Wlker a research specialist at the National Archieves poignantly observes : “Although this is the age of enlightenment, blacks may run into some resistance on public records If that happens one should invoke one's rights under the Freedom of Information Act."103 The great What constitutes a family history is not only genetic housekeeping, but also social action It is the lack of social action in “countermodern” movement exemplified by famıly ancestor searches which make it fail as a moral alternative families in the past and more recently in American culture, for example the Rockefellers and the du Ponts, were acknowledged for their social position based on their accomplishments Over time, each generation was engaged in significant social action Today for those of less fortunate background, the illusion that the common man "ranks with the du Ponts because he can trace his family history pack eight or ten generations becomes a balm for his current lack of both social mobility and historical depth However, it would appear that along with the popularity of ancestor research, the movement among adopted people to determine their genetic parents would lend credence to the argument that there is more to social life as constructed and perceived than the simple cannons of behavioral psychology and the arrangements of environmental priorities orchestrated by callow politicians, "for our benefit ” Individuals feel that they are unique They feel that to some extent their groups are unique and that this uniqueness forms and fashions in a large part their notion of theinselves Could it be that the other directed person will become the genetic directed person ? Our will science discover something yet undreamed in human affairs, the cultural gene ? 'To be real however, roots must be social, ethical and political We are all from families, but some families carry the fabric of bistory within their breasts and each new generation suckles It is these roots, these larger cultural roots, which bear the most interesting promise for analysis Thus if it is true that the inheritance of the American blacks represents much of the country's moral wealth, then Alex Haley has inherited the obligation to tell what he knows to be the truth Otherwise he will squander his precious assets and talents between the commercials of modern ·ETHNICITY AND EDUCATION 165 * television programming If however, Roots encourages black history, the telling of the story, then it will truly be a legacy to the future generations It will be both a past in a popular sense, and more importantly a bridge to the past With the presence of the drama of black history guiding those in the present, black culture will assemble and reassemble itself in counterpoint to American society It will have the potential to be a continual moral alternative for those who with courage will select from its fruits and a loathsome object of scorn for those who cannot come to terms with either their own fears or cultural difference In terms of cultural inheritance however I think the potential the work generates for further historical research by blacks about themselves lies in an answer to the following question How did whites get blacks to chase after and round up other blacks and cart them to the ships for eventual lives of bondage as slaves? If this slave selling mentality can be viewed as false consciousness, perhaps initially induced by contact with modernity (the slave traders), then our concerns as scholars as well as those of black Americans should be to develop a contemporary test anchored in history for this false consciousness More importantly, since history is never a dated medium, our question becomes , what is the evolutionary nature of this form of false consciousness ? What are its contemporary statements ? Who, for example, are the blacks today who are "selling out” their brothers and sisters? What are their reasons for doing so ? How can one recognize these unfolding patterns of contemporary culturıcıde ? Now that black America is entering the political arena these questions become crucial in a cultural sense This is true because politics has changed in America Instead of efforts to redress social, economic and political inequalities (politics as usual) all voters are now offered only vague notions of upward mobility These almost psychic visions are nothing other than restatements of the rugged individualism theme in American life or else a varient of a new ascetic socialism that is entering American political affairs In discussing the social action dimension of the new politics Arthur I Blaustein suggests that it is an illusion As he says “The 'new activism' is one that is actively committed to passivity, a state of mind which refuses to undertake the ·166 ETHNICITY AND EDUCATION slightest personal inconvenience to intercede on behalf of those in our society who are suffering the most "104 To understand what new dimensions of political life may evolve, let alone ascertain whether or not those changes auger well or bode ill for ethnic and minority groups, one would have to engage in more in depth analysis than is possible within the structure of this essay However, a few remarks about American politics are relevant at least as an afterword if seen within the ethnic context and if seen as tentative sketches about the future AN AFTERWORD THE SOUTHERNER AS ETHNIC COMMUNITY REDISCOVERED? The Southern tradition is quite unlike the American tradition and nowhere is this difference made more clear in succinct, albeit blunt terms than by the President of the Confederacy Speaking in Jackson Mississippi during a triumphant western tour during the second year of the Civil War (December-January 1862-1863), Jefferson Davis addressed himself to the conflict between the North and the South After a particularly bitter tirade about the Northern Leaders, President Davis pointed out the difference between North and South in saying that . “Wher it ever to be proposed again to enter into a Union with such a people, I could no more consent to do it than to trust myself in a den of thieves There is indeed a difference between the two peoples Let no man hug the delusion that there can be renewed association between them Our enemies are a traditionless and homeless race" (emp supp ) 205 In the eyes of Davis and many southern compatriots the North represented a historical society opposed to their cultural traditions The Northerner was rootless, bereft of community and uncompassionate in their incivility. In a word, the effects of modernization, experienced first by the North, was viewed by the South in a negative manner Indeed, modernization was viewed as a direct threat to southern culture, its institutions and its patterns of social intercourse So grave was the threat, so complete the rupture, that war resulted 106 The South, as "aggressor" led an anti-modern rebellion 107 As Shelby Foote notes in summarizing the alternatives open to the South on the eve of the Civil War ·ETHNICITY AND EDUCATION 167 “The choice, then, lay between honor and degradation. There could be no middle ground Southerners saw themselves as the guardians of the American Tradition, which included the right to revolt, and therefore they launched a Conservative revolution "][8 What is crucial is not a recapitulation of southern history but rather historical reflection , insight than can lead one to interpret the meaning politically, socially and culturally of a contemporary southern President. The argument concisely stated is that if one can read the southern metaphor in our contemporary culture, one may be able to determine alternatives to ethnic resent. ment, the sense of loss in American culture mindless modernization as well as gain key insights into our changing political process Of singular importance in this regard is the contemporary American President, Jimmy Carter President Carter represents an ethnic region, the South As he represents a defeated culture a culture based upon rejected principles (the quaint rules, customs, and codes of conduct associated with southern living), and a culture which still feels defensive about these constellations of consciousness The southern culture is a culture that risked notions of dignity in personal terms on the battlefield and whose dreams of the future became a shattered reality As C Vann Woodward notes : "The shattering of this dream and the harsh education that followed has not made the South the home of a race of philosophers Nor does it seem to have made Southerners any wiser than their fellow countrymen But it has provided them with a different point of view from which they might, if they will, judge and understand their own history and American history, and from which to view the ironic plight of Modern America " 109 (emp supp ) The southern tradition is a tradition which has tended to deal in illusions It has substituted myths about the past The cavalier legend, the Plantation legend of antebellum grace and elegance, and the social redeemers who prevailed over the carpetbaggers all form a part of the southern social construction of historical Teality These themes combined with the fact that they had time to sink in, to become part of the ongoing life fabric of society, because the South only recently has been going through the econo- ·168 ETHNICITY AND EDUCATION mic expansion, reorganization and modernization that the North and East completed long long ago afford rich opportunities for the southerner in political affairs 110 Indeed Woodward poses the question in the form of a challenge when he asks “Would a hard-won immunity from the myths and illusions of Southern sectionalism provide some immunity to the illusions and myths of American nationalism ???111 In this context one might inquire whether or not the same urge to conformity that operates upon ethnic or national minorities to persuade them to reject their roots, their native heritage does not also operate to a degree upon the Southerner as well ? Or, changing the focus from the individual perspective to one of structural considerations, has the vaunted American success story been only mai ginal to the Southern experience? ? Whatever focus one selects, individual effects and idiosyncratic reactions or structural and economic conditions in society the assumption of a stable system of symbols and meaning shared by members of a culture is called into question The process of examination can foster a break with the past or forge new historical links As Woodward optimistically observes “In their unique historic experience as Americans the Southerners should not only be able to find the basis for continuity of their heritage but also make contributions that balance and compliment the experience of the rest of the nation 112 Departing from the notion of conformity in American social life and returning to the idea of Southern uniqueness a defeated culture our inquiry must now determine what alternatives remain open for the contemporary Southerner Succinctly, being from a defeated culture presents certain clear options for the individual. 1- The past can be relived and one can engage m pretenses, illusions and myths about the contemporary world, 2-One can articulate and construct a social reality which screens out most of the surrounding world as effectively as possible Underpinned by traditions (the southern politicians approaching their politics in Washington DC as a region) this can be effective when reinforced with schooling, legend, media and family structure, and 3-One can learn deeply from the historical experience, and have the self confidence to realize that traditions are only valuable if they lead to the evolution of a culture and a shared sense of mutual identity, As Berpard Mehl states ;

·ETHNICI CY AND EDUCATION 169 66. "113 We can take our history for granted and hide behind superficial masks or else search out those aspects of the past which make us US Since we can never find out what we really are, the historical quest is never completed The quest is an adventure in discovering our eternal presence The eternal presence, change through d versity, can be maintained if self and cultural confidence are not threatened This quiet confidence, the solidness of small town America, Plains, Georgia is what President Carter, read at his best, lends to the current American spirit A rooted person can be humble, forgiving and can talk in a refreshing pragmatic manner Arrogance, double talk, and enemies lists are alien creations for a person self assured and possessed with a sense of history and the security of cultural roots The danger, if indeed there is one, is that these admirable characteristics might become something less than content They could be illusions , images of the modern world In popular terms Carter could represent the first in a line of nostalgia politicians This judgment might well be inescapable without structural changes in American society Alterations in the distributive processes in American society as well as the definition and structure of work and the creative openings for cultural play will have to be forthcoming or the ethnic distinctiveness will become surplussage to the techniques of modern management However, the extended period of Southern history, characterized by the slow evolution of a series of wrong choices the pretence of static relationships between the races, a code of formalism which became a genuine attempt to quash and control social evolution and the implicit presence of racism in every significant aspect of social life has both characterized the South and prevented positions of national leadership and management from coming to her sons and daughters The civil rights coupled with changes in attitudes once thought immovable have however, the potential to create a political reality which can be differentiated from the dominant arranged reality in American social life In Southern terms, government is an organic thing It is something more than a mechanistic creation It is something more than a vehicle for the disbursement of political spoils or the operation of power for the Southerner, government is a reflection of our culture. Government can tell us in cultural terms who we ·170 ETHNICITY AND EDUCATION all are and what we mean by our shared social experiences The quality and movement to personalize the government and at the same time making it efficient, workable and adaptable whether through innovative legislation or executive leadership in reorganization and restructuring will be the Southern ethnic contribution to American politics The potential to see government in cultural terms, as a product of cultural relationships and not as the operation of sacred organizational principles would truly be a lasting and much needed contribution to the American mosaic Whether the potential can be realized is an open question, but one toward which the themes discussed in this essay have ultimately been directed FOOTNOTES 1 See, Fanta, AL,"Ethnicity and Education Some Sociological Considerations" in Ser, Race, Ethnicity and Education Michael V Belok and Ralph Shoub editors Anu Prakashan, Meerut, India 1976 p 333-367 2 Ibid, p 335 3 Scheler, Max, Ressentiment, translated by William W Holdheim New York Schocken Books 1972 p 39 4 This is Scheler's listing of the characteristics of resentment 5 See, Jacques Ellul's work, The Political Illusion, Alfred A Knopf, New York 1967 See esp Ch IV, V 6 Fannon, Frantz , Black Skin, White Masks Translated by Charles Lam Markmann Grove Press Inc New York 1967 p 157 7 Fiske, Edward B “Schools, Like Doctors, Being Charged with ‘Malpractice The New York Times March 9, 1977 p 42 8 Plax, Martin , "Toward a Redefinition of Ethnic Politics" Ethnicity Vol 3 No 1 1976 p 19-33 9 Ibid, p 29 10 The importance of this issue is now being recognized in American politics with the disclosures of how the various intelligence agencies abused their charters and interfered with the civil rights of American citizens during the 1960's 11 I purposely use the word satisfied The issues, after a fashion, are resol. ved , but the individual is left unsatisfied by the very process of resolution See generally, JP Nettl, Political Mobilization Basic Books, New York 1967 12 Illich, Ivan , Medical Nemesys The Expropriation of Health Pantheon Books, New York 1976 ·ETHNICITY AND EDUCATION 171 9 13 See, Edgar Z Friedenberg, The Disposal of Liberty and Other Industrial Wastes Doubleday & Company New York 1975 14 Altheide David L Creating Reality Hou TV Nens Distorts Events Sage Publications Beverly Hills, Ca 1976 15 Ellul, Jacques , Propaganda The Formation of Men's Attitudes Vintage Books New York 1965 16 Peter Berger mentions this in the sense of a “carry-over" where aspects of modernization are transported onto other areas of social life See, Berger, Peter, Brigitte Berger and Hansfried Kellner The Homeless Mind Modernization and Consciousness Random House New York 1973 See, esp p 154-55 17 As to the confusion of realm which exist within the individual, see PD Ouspensky, The Psychology of Man s Possible Evolution Vintage Books New York 1974 18 Ellul, op cit n. 15 at p 177 19 Altheide, op cit n 14 See esp ch 7 20 Ellul, op cit Ellus says “To put it differently the objects of propaganda tend to become totalitarian because propaganda itself is totalı tarian This is exactly what I said when I spoke of the necessity to turn democracy into a myth” at p 245. 21 Reinhold, Robert , "Poll Links Sense of Powerlessness, Not Disillusionment, to Low Vote " The New York Times November 16, 1976 p 1 22 Ellul, op cit p 175 23 See, Roszak, Theodore, The Making of the Counter-Culture Reflections on the Technocratic Society and its Youthful Opposition, Anchor Books Garden City, New York 1969 24 Berger, et al op cit 16 See, pp 216, 226-27 25 On this notion see, Herbert Marcuse, One Dimensional Man Beacon Press, Boston 1964 26 Here I merely mean to separate the social process for purposes of analysis Legislation can also invoke legal sanctions as well as a sense of direct benefits to individuals 27 Friedenberg, op cit 13 pp 9-17 Marshall Cohen "He'd Rather Have Rights The New York Review of Books Vol XXIV, No 8 May 26, 1977 p 37 29 Dworkin, Ronald , Taking Rights Seriously Harvard University Press Cambridge 1977 30 Lewis, Anthony , "A White Enclave ?" The New York Times February 17, 1977, p 37 31 Ibid p 37 32 Ibid 33 Ibid 34 Ibid 35 Altman, Lawrence K, "Medical Schools Urged to Intensify Recruitment of Minority Students” The New York Times May 10, 1977, p 10 28 ·172 ETHNICITY AND EDUCATION 36 Ibid p 10 37 416 U S 312, (1974) 38 18 C 3d 34, (1976) 39 Mimeo copy of the opinion, at p 2-3 40 Ibid p 5 41 Ibid p 6 42 Ibid p 10 43 Ibid p 11 44 Ibid p 14 45 Ibid p 14 46 Ibid p 14 47 Ibid p 15 48 Jacobson, Robert L , "Italian-American Applauds' Jatent of Univer. sity's Special Admissions The Chronicle of Higher Education Vol XIV No 4, March 21, 1977 p 6 49 Ibid, p 7 50 Ibid p 7 How, for example, one determines minority status can become a play on roots For example, does the surname of the father prevail over that of the mother? Or does the student have a choice in terms of ethnic identification ? 50 a Williams, David C, “Ressentiment and Schooling' Educational Theory, Vol 26, No 1 (Winter 1976) P 75 51 Ogbu, John, "The Next Generation An Ethnography of Education In An Urban Neighborhood Academic Press New York 1974 52 Ibid p 137 53 Ibid p 137 54 Putting students through the curriculum of the modern school more often than not includes courses which are specifically designed to "cool out" specific groups of students At the University level these courses which present difficulty for the students are most often found at the freshman introductory course level and they are designed to reduce and weed out those students who cannot master the course of study 55 Johnson, Sheila K “Ethnics in Academe' The New Republic Vol 175, No 25 December 18, 1976, p 8-9 56 Ibid p 8 57 Abraham D Lavender and John M Forsynth, "The Sociological study of Minority Groups As Reflected By Leading Sociological Journals Ethnicity Vol 3 No 4 (1976) p 394 58 Williams, op cit p. 80 59 Tolchin, Martin , "Intervention By Courts Arrouses Deepening Disputes The New York Times April 24, 1977 p 1, 50, at 50 60 Ibid p 1 > ·ETHNICITY AND EDUCATION 173 61 On the changed nature of modern politics generally see, Ellul, Jacques , The Political Illusions Alfred Knopt New York 1967 62 Rodgers, Harrell R and Charles S Bullock , Law and Social Change Civil Rights Laws and Their Consequences McGraw-Hill New York 1972, provides an excellent discussion of this process Sec especially Chapter 9 63 Ibid p 69–139 64 Ibid p 227 65 United Jewish Organizations of Williamsburg Inc et al y Carey et al 429 US (1977) No 75-104 45 L W 4224 66 42 USCA Sec 1973 (c) 67 Op Cit p 4223 Petitioners also said they were assigned to oting districts solely because of their race and that this violated the Fifteenth Amendment to the Constitution Under the previous voting plan the Hasıdıc community of Williamsburg was located entirely in one assembly district (61% nonwhite) and one senate district (37% nonwhite) The petitioners argued the new plan "would dillute the value of each plaintiff's franchise by halving its effectiveness' solely for the purpose of achieving a racial quota and therefore in violation of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution In this context, the lower court said that So long as a districting, even though based on racial considerations is in conformity with the unchallenged directive of and has the approval of the Attorney General of the United States under this act, at least absent a clear showing that the resultant legislative reapportionment is unfairly prejudicial to white or nonwhite, that-that districting is not subject to challenge (510 F 2d at 525) 68 See, Berger, et al op cit n 16 At p 168 69 Op cit 65, at 4224 See also South Carolina v Katzenbach, 383 U S 308 (1966) 70 Gaffney v Cummings, 412 U S 735, at 741 71 Ibid p 741 72 Beer v U S, 425 U S 130 (1976) 73 Ibid p 141 74 United Jewish Organizations of Williamsburg Inc et al , op cit n 65, at p 4226 75 Ibid at p 4227 76 Ibid at p 4227 77 Village of Arlington Heights et al v Metropolitan Housing Development Corp et al 429 US , No 75-616, (1977) 78 Ibid at p 16 79 Washington v Davis, 426 US 229, at p 242 80 Op cit p 12-13 81 Ibid at p 15 ·174 ETHNICITY AND EDUCATION >> 82 In this context, see, Sullivan Ronald “Plan to Build Ritual Bath in Teaneck Stirs Dispute Among Suburb's lews" The New York Times September 29, 1975 p 33 As Sullivan states “Many Jews don t even know what a mikvah is The fact that we want to have one represents a resurgence of an Orthodox faith commitment that many Jews here have forsaken and they do not want to be reminded of that In some ways it's a sense of embarrassment for them (emp supp) 83 Cohen, David K “Loss as a Theme in Social Policy Harvard Edit cation Review Vol 46, No 4 November 1976, p 553, at p 574 84 Ibid at p 554 85 Ibid at p 557 86 As Cohen says "Traditional reformers saw solidarity as a product of order, whereas democrats thought solidarity should result from greater equality Community was central in both traditions of thought, but the perspectives were remarkably different 'at p 559 87 See, Daniel Bell, “The Public Household Public Interest No 37, Fall 1974 p 29-67 88 Cohen, op cit n 83, at p 559 89, Ibid p 559 90 Wiliams, Raymond, "Developments in the Sociology of Culture" Sociology Vol 10, No 4 September, 1976 p 497-506 at p 502 91 Williams, op cit n 50a at p 77 92 Williams, op cit n 90 at p 499 93 Ihid at p 500 94 Fanta, AL “Some Troubling Thoughts About Cliometrics Journal of Thought Vol 11, No 3 July, 1976 p 218-226 95 Williams, op cit n 90 96 For an interesting exploration of this thesis see, John Murry Cuddihy, The Ordeal of Civility Freud, Marx, Levi-Strauss, and the Jewish Struggle with Modernity New York Basic Books, 1974 97 Rodgers and Bullock, op cit n 62 98 Johnson, Thomas A "Harlem Baby Named Kunta Kinte, for "Roots Hero" The New York Times March 19, 1977 p 36 99 Ibid p 36 100 Jbid p 26 101 Gamarekian, Barbara, “Blacks Searching For the Long-Lost Past The New York Times February 21, 1977, p 28 102 Ibid p 28 103 Ibid p 28 104 Blaustein, Arthur I , "California Still Dreaming A Citizenry With Its Collective Head in the Sand," Harper's Vol 254, N) 1525 June, 1977 p 19, at p 21

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175
105 Foote, Shelby The Civil War A Narrative , Fredericksburg to Meri
dian Random House, New York 1963 p 14
106 Nevins, Allan Ordeal of The Union Fruits of Manifest Destiny 1847-
1852 Charles Scribner s Sons, New York 1947
107 Foote, Shelby The Civil War A Nanative Fort Sumter to Perryville
Random House, New York 1958 See especially Chapter I
108 Ibid at p 65
109 Woodward, C Vann The Burden of Southern History Vintage Books,
New York 1960 p 1 5
110 Ibid Ch 1
111 Ibid p 13
112 Ibid p 16
113 Mehl, Bernard, Classic Educational Ideas From Sumeria to Amenca
Charles E Merrill, Columbus Ohio 1972 p 8