Beyond "voting with their feet": Toward a conceptual history of "America" in European migrant sending communities, 1860S to 1914

Journal of Social History

Volumn 40, Issue 3, 2007, Pages 557-575

  Friedman, Max Paul ^a,b  

^a FLORIDA STATE UNIVERSITY   (United States)

^b Department of History ^*  (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 34247180158     PISSN: 00224529     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/jsh.2007.0043     Document Type: Review

References (156)

1. Daniel Pipes, "Hating America's Success," New York Sun, 12 October 2004.
2. Victor Davis Hanson, "Goodbye to Europe?" Commentary 114:3 (October 2002).
3. Paul Hollander, ed., Understanding Anti-Americanism: Its Origins and Impact at Home and Abroad (New York, 2004), jacket copy.
4. Roger Daniels, Coming to America: A History of Immigration and Ethnicity in American Life, 2nd ed. (New York, 2002), 17-18, 43-44.
5. George E. Pozzetta, ed., Emigration & Immigration: The Old World Confronts the New, vol. 2 (New York, 1991), viii.
6. Wolfgang J. Helbich, "Alle Menschen sind dort gleich ..." Die deutsche Amerika-Auswanderung im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert (Düsseldorf, 1988), 38.
7. For the fates of individual political refugees, see also Elke Wolgast, "Demokratische Gegeneliten in der ameirkanischen Emigration: Politisch motivierte Auswanderung aus Deutschland nach 1819, 1832/33, 1849 und 1878," in Manfred Berg and Philipp Gassert, eds., Deutschland und die USA in der Internationalen Geschichte des 20. Jahrhunderts (Stuttgart, 2004), 195-217.
8. Jon Gjerde, "'Here in America There Is Neither King nor Tyrant': European Encounters with Race, 'Freedom,' and their European Pasts," Journal of the Early Republic 19 (1999): 673-90.
9. Jan Lucassen and Leo Lucassen, Migration, Migration History, History: Old Paradigms and New Perspectives (Bern, 1997), 9;
10. Leslie Page Moch, Moving Europeans: Migration in Western Europe since 1650 (Bloomington, 1992) 6.
11. Annual averages cited in Moch, Moving Europeans, 149.
12. J.D. Gould, "European and Inter-Continental Emigration. The Road Back Home: Return Migration from the United States," Journal of European Economic History 9 (Spring 1980): 57.
13. For an introduction to the complicated issue of return migration, see Mark Wyman, Round-Trip to America: The Immigrants Return to Europe, 1880-1930 (Ithaca, NY, 1993), including the discussions of data on pp. 10-14.
14. About a third of Poles also returned, according to Ewa Morawska, "Labor Migrations of Poles in the Atlantic World Economy, 1880-1914," in Dirk Hoerder and Leslie Page Moch, eds., European Migrants: Global and Local Perspectives (Boston, 1996), 170-210.
15. See also Francesco Cerase, "Expectations and reality: A Case Study of Return Migration from the United States to Southern Italy," International Migration Review 8 (1974): 245-62;
16. idem, "Nostalgia or Disenchantment: Considerations on Return Migration," in Silvano M. Tomasi and Madeline H. Engel, eds., The Italian Experience in the United States (New York, 1970), 217-39;
17. Dino Cinel, The National Integration of Italian Return Migration, 1870-1929 (New York, 1991);
18. Klaus J. Bade, Auswanderer - Wanderarbeiter - Gastarbeiter: Bevölkerung, Arbeitsmarkt und Wanderung in Deutschland im späten 19. und frühen 20. Jahrhundert (Ostfildern, 1984);
19. Karen Schniedewind, Begrenzter Aufenthalt im Land der unbegrenzten Möglichkeiten: Bremer Rückwanderer aus Amerika 1850-1914 (Stuttgart, 1994).
20. Wyman, Round-Trip to America, 7, 207.
21. Patrizia Audenino, "The Paths of the Trade: Italian Stonemasons in the United States," in Emigration & Immigration: The Old World Confronts the New, ed. George E. Pozzetta (New York, 1991), 31-47.
22. Cinel, National Integration, 100.
23. Cinel, National Integration, 96.
24. Theodore Saloutos, "Causes and Patterns of Greek Emigration to the United States," in Emigration & Immigration: The Old World Confronts the New, ed. George E. Pozzetta (New York, 1991), 526-83, writes similarly that "The bulk of the Greeks originally came with the thought of working for a few years, amassing savings, discharging obligations, providing for the marriage of their sisters, and returning to Greece to lead economically more secure lives. The decision to remain in the United States permanently came as an afterthought" (582).
25. See also his They Remember America: The Story of the Repatriated Greek-Americans (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1956).
26. Juliana Puskás finds that Hungarian "emigrants left determined to return home after having accumulated certain savings." Puskás, Ties that Bind, Ties that Divide: 100 Years of Hungarian Experience in the United States (New York, 2000), 83.
27. Walter Nugent, Crossings: The Great Transatlantic Migrations, 1870-1914 (Bloomington, 1992);
28. Rudolph J. Vecoli and Suzanne M. Sinke, eds., A Century of European Migrations, 1830-1930 (Champaign, 1991).
29. Benjamin P. Murdzek, Emigration in Polish Social-Political Thought, 1870-1914 (New York, 1977).
30. Samuel L. Baily, Immigrants in the Lands of Promise: Italians in Buenos Aires and New York City, 1870-1914 (Ithaca, N.Y., 1999), 56. Moreover, during all phases of the period 1876-1976, more Italians moved to other parts of Europe than to North America. Ibid., 24.
31. Baily, Immigrants, 57.
32. John Bodnar, Remaking America: Public Memory, Commemoration, and Patriotism in the Twentieth Century (Princeton, 1992).
33. The exception is the Irish during the famine of the 1840s.
34. Kuznets, "Immigration of Russian Jews," 336-7.
35. Especially once Great Britain, another attractive destination for Jews, restricted entry to them by tightening the Aliens Act in 1905.
36. Moch, Moving Europeans, 150.
37. Nonetheless, Jews did choose to return to Europe in surprisingly large numbers during the peak years of Jewish migration. Jonathan D. Sarna debunks what he rightly calls "The Myth of No Return: Jewish Return Migration to Eastern Europe, 1881-1914," in Colin Holmes, ed., Migration in European History (Cheltenham, 1996), 2:454-66.
38. Sarna cites the Jewish Messenger's 1888 observation of "dispirited people who are as eager to leave the country as a few years or months ago they were so hopeful in reaching it," and he uses census figures to estimate a return rate of 15-20% for Russian Jews (many of them aided by the United Hebrew Charities). Jewish return migrants cited the difficulties of adjusting to industrial working conditions or the challenge of observing religious laws in "a Godless land." Sarna, "Myth of No Return," 464.
39. For Orthodox Jewish estrangement from America see also Sarna's translation of Moses Weinberger's description of Jews in New York, People Walk on their Heads (New York, 1982).
40. In some European contexts, such as on the Iberian peninsula, references to "America" meant the Western Hemisphere south of the U.S. border. In others, "America" might refer to the United States and Canada. Before the nineteenth century, it often meant the entire New World. This essay is concerned especially with images of the United States, commonly referred to as "America" in most European migrant sending communities during the period of greatest immigration from the 1840s to World War I.
41. Gary Gerstle, "Liberty, Coercion, and the Making of Americans," Journal of American History 84:2 (September 1997): 524-58.
42. Charles Tilly, "Migration in Modern European History," in William H. McNeill and Ruth S. Adams, eds., Human Migration: Patterns and Policies (Bloomington, 1978), 48-72;
43. John Bodnar, The Transplanted: A History of Immigrants in Urban America (Bloomington, 1985);
44. Jon Gjerde, The Minds of the West: Ethnocultural Evolution in the Rural Middle West, 1830-1917 (Chapel Hill, 1997).
45. David A. Gerber, "Forming A Transnational Narrative: New Perspectives on European Migrations to the United States," The History Teacher 35:1 (2001): 61-77.
46. See also idem, Authors of Their Lives: The Personal Correspondence of British Immigrants to North America in the Nineteenth Century (New York, 2005);
47. Wolfgang Helbich and Walter D. Kamphoefner, Deutsche im amerikanischen Bürgerkrieg. Brief von Front und Farm 1861-1865 (Paderborn, 2002);
48. Wolfgang Helbich, Walter D. Kamphoefner, and Ulrike Sommer, eds., Briefe aus Amerika. Deutsche Auswanderer schreiben aus der Neuen Welt 1830-1930 (Munich, 1988),
49. and consider the significance of the change in the title of the American translation, News from the Land of Freedom: German Immigrants Write Home (Ithaca, N.Y., 1991);
50. Dirk Hoerder and Horst Rössler, eds., Distant Magnets: Expectations and Realities in the Immigrant Experience (New York, 1993);
51. Herbert J. Brinks, ed., Dutch American Voices: Letters from The United States, 1850-1930 (Ithaca, 1995);
52. Kerby A. Miller, Arnold Schrier, Bruce D. Boling, and David N. Doyle, Irish Immigrants in the Land of Canaan: Letters and Memoirs from Colonial and Revolutionary America, 1675-1815 (New York, 2003);
53. David Fitzpatrick, ed., Oceans of Consolation: Personal Accounts of Irish Migration to Australia (Ithaca, 1994).
54. The Augsburger Allgemeine Zeitung reported that as early as 1850, writers in the United States were sending more than 100,000 letters a month to correspondents in Europe. Margot Hamm, Michael Henker und Evamaria Brockhoff, eds., Good Bye Bayern - Grüß Gott America - Auswanderung aus Bayem nach Amerika seit 1683 (Darmstadt, 2004).
55. Peter Mesenhöller, "Der Auswandererbrief: Bedingungen und Typik schriftlicher Kommunikation im Auswanderungsprozeß," in Der große Aufbruch. Studien zur Amerikaauswanderung, ed. Peter Assion (Marburg, 1985), 111-24;
56. Linda Reeder, Widows in White: Migration and the Transformation of Rural Italian Women, Sicily, 1880-1920 (Toronto, 2003);
57. Puskás, Ties that Bind, 50. On the forms and functions of personal letters in immigration
58. see David Fitzpatrick, "Correspondence: Ceremonies of Communication," in idem, Oceans of Consolation, 467-502.
59. Gjerde, " 'Here in America,'" 680-81.
60. Marianne Debouzy, ed., In the Shadow of the Statue of Liberty: Immigrants, Workers, and Citizens in the American Republic, 1880-1920 (Urbana, 1992, orig. 1988).
61. For an overview of different approaches, see David A. Gerber, "The Immigrant Letter between Positivism and Populism: The Uses of Immigrant Personal Correspondence in Twentieth Century American Scholarship," Journal of American Ethnic History 16 (1997): 3-34.
62. C. Vann Woodward, The Old World's New World (New York, 1991), xv.
63. Ernst Fraenkel, ed., America im Spiegel des deutschen politischen Denkens. Ausserungen deutscher Staatsmänner und Staatsdenker über Staat und Gesellschaft in den Vereinigten Staaten von Amerika (Cologne, 1959), 108, 111-13, 220-3.
64. Woodward, The Old World's New World, 100.
65. Dan Diner, America in the eyes of the Germans: an essay on anti-Americanism, English language ed. (Princeton, 1996), 38, 23-4.
66. For other studies of published writings, see Woodward, The Old World's New World;
67. Manfred Durzak, Das Amerika-Bild in der deutschen Gegenwartsliteratur. Historische Voraussetzungen und aktuelle Beispiele (Stuttgart, 1979);
68. Franz M. Joseph, ed., As Others See Us: The United States through Foreign Eyes (Princeton, 1959);
69. Egbert Klautke, Unbegrenzte Möglichkeiten: " Amerikanisierung" in Deutschland und Frankreich (1900-1933) (Stuttgart, 2003);
70. Werner Kremp, In Deutschland liegt unser Amerika. Das sozialdemokratische Amerikabild von den Anfängen der SPD bis zur Weimarer Republik (Munster, 1993);
71. Andrei S. Markovits, Amerika, dich haßt sich's besser. Antiamerikanismus und Antisemitismus in Europa (Hamburg, 2004);
72. Ulrich Ott, Amerika ist anders. Studien zum Amerika-Bild in deutschen Reiseberichten des 20. Jahrhunderts (Frankfurt am Main, 1991);
73. Jacques Portes, Fascination and Misgivings: The United States in French Opinion, 1870-1914, trans. Elborg Forster (New York, 2000);
74. Philippe Roger, L'ennemi américain. Généalogie de i'antiaméricanisme français (Paris, 2002).
75. Many acknowledge a debt to Antonello Gerbi, The Dispute of the New World: The History of a Polemic, 1750-1900 (Pittsburgh, 1973 [orig. Milan 1955]).
76. Melvin Richter, The History of Political and Social Concepts: A Critical Introduction (New York, 1995).
77. For a brief overview see Mark Bevir, "Begriffsgeschichte," History and Theory 39, no. 2 (May 2000): 273-84.
78. Bevir and other critics of Pocock and Skinner have argued that their focus on the contextual meaning of language deprives authors or speakers of agency, as if such studies assume that people can never say what they mean. But both scholars acknowledge that contextual analysis is not supposed to indicate authorial intention; Richter, for one, believes the schools are compatible. See the roundtable discussion of Mark Bevir, The Logic of the History of Ideas (Cambridge, 1999)
79. in Rethinking History: The Journal of Theory and Practice 4:3 (2000);
80. Richter, History of Political and Social Concepts, 5;
81. Quentin Skinner, "Rhetoric and Conceptual Change," Finnish Yearbook of Political Thought 3 (1999): 60-73.
82. Michel Vovelle, Ideologies and Mentalities, trs. Eamon O'Flaherty (Chicago, 1990);
83. Roger Chartier, Cultural History: Between Practices and Representations (Ithaca, N.Y., 1988).
84. Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe: Historisches Lexikon zur politisch-sozialer Sprache in Deutschland, ed. Otto Brunner, Werner Conze, and Reinhardt Koselleck. 8 vols. (Stuttgart, 1972-1997).
85. Rolf Reichardt and Eberhard Schmitt, eds., Handbuch politisch-sozialer Grundbegriffe in Frankreich 1680-1920, 20 vols. (Munich, 1985-2000), I: 65.
86. Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe does not include an entry for "America." Reichardt's project, more grounded in cultural history sources, will include a future entry on "England and America." Reichardt and Schmitt, Handbuch, entry index.
87. Heinz Engels, Sudetendeutsches Wörterbuch (Munich, 1988).
88. Friedrich Maurer and Rudolf Mulch, Südhessisches Wörterbuch (Marburg, 1965).
89. Engels, Sudetendeutsches Wörterbuch.
90. Richard Wossidlo and Hermann Teuchert, Mecklenburgisches Wörterbuch, vol. l (Neumünster, 1942).
91. Max Pfister, LEI. Lessico etimologico italiano (Wiesbaden, 1987).
92. Wossidlo and Teuchert, Mecklenburgisches Wörterbuch.
93. Wossidlo and Teuchert, Mecklenburgisches Wörterbuch.
94. Engels, Sudetendeutsches Wörterbuch; Luxemburger Wörterbuch (Luxemburg, 1950), 23.
95. Luxemburger Wörterbuch.
96. Wossidlo and Teuchert, Mecklenburgisches Wörterbuch.
97. Walther Ziesemer, Preußisches Wörterbuch (Hildesheim, 1975), 132.
98. In the port city of Hamburg, through which many emigrants passed, Amerika wisen, to show America, was slang for exposing one's genitals. Hans Kuhn and Ulrich Pretzel, eds., Hamburgisches Wörterbuch (Neumünster, 1985), 96.
99. Ernst Christmann and Julius Krämer, Pfälzisches Wörterbuch (Wiesbaden, 1965), 200.
100. Pfister, LEI. See also Salvatore Battaglia, Grande dizionario della lingua italiana (Torino, 1961), 389.
101. Diccionario de la lengua española, 20th ed. (Madrid, 1992), 89;
102. Julio Casares, ed., Diccionario histórico de la lengua española (Madrid, 1992), 818.
103. Pfister, LEI.
104. Chasperr Pult et al., eds., Dicziunari rumantsch grischun (Cuoira, 1939-1946).
105. Ion Gjerde, "Response," Journal of American Ethnic History 18:4 (Summer 1999): 152-6.
106. Maurer and Mulch, Südhessisches Wörterbuch. Similarly in Hesse's largest city, der hat in Frankfurt sei Amerika gefunne, he found his America in Frankfurt. Wolfgang Brückner, Frankfurter Wörterbuch (Frankfurt am Main, 1971), 163.
107. Wossidlo and Teuchert, Mecklenburgisches Wörterbuch.
108. Simin Palay, Dictionnaire du béarnais et du gascon modernes (Paris, 1961), 34.
109. Frédéric Mistral, Lou tresor dóu felibrige, ou dictionnaire provençal-français (Raphèleles-Arles, 1979), 85.
110. Louis Gauchat, Jules Jeanjaquet et al., Glossaire des patois de la suisse romande (Neuchâtel, 1924-1933), 344.
111. Ernst Christmann and Julius Krämer, Pfälzisches Wörterbuch (Wiesbaden, 1965), 200.
112. Eberhard Kranzmayer, Wörterbuch der bairischen Mundarten in Osterreich (Wien, 1970), 177.
113. This was true in Zernez-Brail, Trun, Sumvitg, Mustér, Grüsch, and Haldenstein, as well as in Vorarlberg and in Italy in the Valle Lomellina. Pult et al., Dicziunari rumantsch, 236.
114. Reeder, Widows in White, 78.
115. Lutz Röhrich, "Auswandererschicksal im Lied," in Der große Aufbruch. Studien zur Amerikaauswanderung, ed. Peter Assion (Marburg, 1985), 71-108, 74.
116. Röhrich, "Auswandererschicksal im Lied," 91.
117. Röhrich, "Auswandererschicksal im Lied," 104.
118. Lyrics written by Johannes Hauck (1806-1880), a shoemaker's son who worked as the town barber in Gompertshausen, in Heinz Sperschneider, ed., Wälder, Felder, Bergeshöhn. Eine Anthologie Thüringer Mundartdichtung (Leipzig, 1968), 91-3. Translation mine.
119. Röhrich, "Auswandererschicksal im Lied," 87.
120. Hermann Pleij, Der Traum vom Schlaraffenland. Mittelalterliche Fantasien vom volIkommenen Leben (Frankfurt am Main, 2000). Pleij suggests the proliferation of such tales in Western Europe from the seventeenth century onward was in part a response to the growing number of hyperbolic travel reports. Pleij, 296.
121. See also Werner Wunderlich, "Das Schlaraffenland in der deutschen Sprache und Literatur. Bibliographischer Uberblick und Forschungsstand," Fabula 27 (1986): 54-75;
122. Dieter Richter, Schlaraffenland. Geschichte einer populären Phantasie (Cologne, 1984).
123. There are references to Cocagne as early as the thirteenth century in France; the word is thought to be derived from the Latin coquina, kitchen. See Pleij, Der Traum vom Schlaraffenland, 40-52.
124. Peter Assion, "Schlaraffenland schriftlich und mundlich. Zur Wiederkehr von Märchenmotiven in der Auswanderungsdiskussion des 19. Jahrhunderts," in Lutz Röhrich and Erika Lindig, eds., Volksdichtung zwischen Mündlichkeit und Schriftlichkeit (Tübingen, 1989), 109-23.
125. Sperschneider, Wälder, Felder, Bergeshöhn, 91.
126. Adele C. Friedman, "Love, Sex, and Marriage in Traditional French Society: The Documentary Evidence of Folksongs," The French Review 52, no. 2 (1978): 243, 242.
127. Béla Gunda, "America in Hungarian Folk Tradition," The Journal of American Folklore 83, no. 330 ( 1970): 406-416. Gunda provides translations but not the original Hungarian texts.
128. Puskás, Ties that Bind, 84.
129. Gunda, "America in Hungarian Folk Tradition."
130. Gjerde, "Response," 155.
131. Donna Gabaccia, ed., Seeking Common Ground: Multidisciplinary Studies of Immigrant Women in the United States (Westport, 1992);
132. Christiane Harzig et al., Peasant Maids -City Women: From the European Countryside to Urban America (Ithaca, N.Y., 1997).
133. Suzanne M. Sinke, Dutch Immigrant Women in the United States, 1880-1920 (Champaign, 2002).
134. Donna Gabaccia, "Women of the Mass Migrations: From Minority to Majority, 1820-1930," in Hoerder and Moch, European Migrants, 90-114.
135. Reeder, Widows in White, 65-6. Sicilian doctors sometimes blamed the emigration of a husband or son for contributing to insanity among women left behind.
136. See also Vito Teti, "Noti sui comportamenti delle donne sole degli 'americani' durante la prima emigrazione in Calabria," Studi emigrazione 24:87 (1987): 13-46.
137. Gunda, "America in Hungarian Folk Tradition."
138. Gunda, "America in Hungarian Folk Tradition."
139. Reeder, Widows in White, 68-9. For critiques in Mexican corridos of the way the United States changed emigrants' attitudes toward wealth and women's behavior, as well as the loneliness inherent in the emigration experience,
140. see the texts collected in Maria Herrera-Sobek, Northward Bound: The Mexican Immigrant Experience in Ballad and Song (Bloomington, 1993).
141. Gunda, "America in Hungarian Folk Tradition."
142. Gunda, "America in Hungarian Folk Tradition."
143. Siegmund A. Wolf, Wörterbuch des Rotwelschen (Mannheim, 1956), 33, 114.
144. Alain Rey, ed., Le grand Robert de la langue française, 2nd ed. (Paris, 2001); Pfister, LEI.
145. Pfister, LEI.
146. Gunda, "America in Hungarian Folk Tradition."
147. Luxemburger Wörterbuch; Pfister, LEI.
148. Pfister, LEI.
149. It could also be a boast that is not credible. Battaglia, Grande dizionario.
150. Cinel, National Integration, 119.
151. Friedrich Kluge et al., Badisches Wörterbuch (Lahr, 1925-1940).
152. Wossidlo and Teuchert, Mecklenburgisches Wörterbuch.
153. Pfister, LEI.
154. Tullio de Mauro, ed., Grande dizionario italiano dell'uso (Torino, 1999). Such expressions depicting returnees as snobbish are at odds with the observations of immigration historians of the democratic conduct of returnees who had experienced the United States as a society with relatively few class or caste distinctions. Both kinds of behavior, of course, upset the social order.
155. See, for example, Reeder, Widows in White, and Puskás, Ties that Bind.
156. Bodnar, Remaking America, 14.