May 2, 2006
The Immigration Tradition Posted by John Steele Gordon at 12:00 PM EST In the 1930s Franklin Roosevelt, addressing a meeting of the Daughters of the American Revolution, famously greeted the assembled ladies—one imagines them drawn by Helen Hokinson—as “my fellow immigrants.” FDR, of course, was of quite as “old stock” as anyone in the audience that day. While eight American presidents (the Adamses, Zachary Taylor, Ulysses Grant, James Garfield, FDR, and the Bushes) have descents from Mayflower passengers, only FDR, Taylor, and the Bushes have more than one each. Taylor has two, George H. W. Bush three, and his son four. FDR has no fewer than six. Roosevelt’s point—besides needling his audience, which was unlikely to vote for him anyway—was that while some Americans have ancestors who got here earlier than others, we are all descended from immigrants, and very, very few of those immigrants were prosperous on arrival. The prosperous, after all, are usually content with the status quo. Many immigrants in the colonial era paid for their passage by selling their labor for a number of years as indentured servants. Others arrived one jump ahead of the sheriff. And some were one jump behind, having been transported for felony. (A major reason for the establishment of a colony in Australia in 1788 was to provide the British government with a new dumping ground for felons, the former American colonies being no longer available for that purpose.) If Americans are famous for our get up and go, that cannot be unconnected with the fact that we all descend from people who got up and came. Whether it was on a leaky, perpetually damp, terribly crowded little cockleshell of a ship like the Mayflower or in steerage in a turn-of-the-twentieth-century passenger ship, our ancestors decided to take control of their lives by taking a tremendous gamble: They gave up all they had ever known and loved in hopes of making a better life in the New World. Even the slaves, who of course had no choice in the matter, survived an ordeal that is quite beyond modern comprehension and passed that strength on to their descendants. Obviously enough immigrants prospered to entice their relatives to come too in ever greater numbers, as the Atlantic migration is one of the great movements of people in human history. When the hand-loom industry collapsed in Scotland with the introduction of power looms in the 1840s, many families were in desperate straits. One got a letter from a sister who had emigrated to Pittsburgh saying, “This country’s far better for the working man than the old one, & there is room to spare, notwithstanding the thousands that flock to her borders.” That settled it, and the family packed up and came to America. One son of that family, named Andrew Carnegie, prospered beyond the wildest dreams of avarice. But millions of others did better than they could ever have hoped to do at home. That is why I wonder about the figures cited by Ellen Feldman of the percentage of late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century immigrants who “gave up” and returned home. I don’t doubt that they returned home, only that that many “gave up,” having been defeated by the struggle to survive in America. How many of those returnees, for instance, didn’t give up but instead retired to the old country, having accumulated a nest egg sufficient to allow them to do so with more comfort than they could have enjoyed had they stayed, or because their descendants who remained in America funded their retirement in the land of their birth? Also, many immigrants came to this country, got settled, and then returned to their countries of origin only long enough to gather their families, sell any property they may have had, and then leave permanently for the United States. I would be interested to know if the figures cited by Ellen Feldman (from David Kennedy’s excellent Freedom from Fear) are simply a count of immigrants who, for whatever reason, departed for their countries of origin, or are actually the percentage of immigrants who said, in effect, “The hell with this; I’m going home.” I have no idea.
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