Turning turner on his head? The significance of immigration in twentieth-century American Western history

New Mexico Historical Review

Volumn 77, Issue 1, 2002, Pages 57-88

  Barkan, Elliott Robert ^a  

^a Immigration and Ethnic History Society

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EID: 61049250247     PISSN: 00286206     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
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References (132)

1. The "amnesia" quote is from Moses Rischin, "Beyond the Great Divide: Immigration and the Last Frontier," Journal of American History 55 (June 1968): 44.
2. Also, Clyde A. Milner II, "Introduction: America, Only More So," in Oxford History of the American West, ed. Clyde A. Milner II, Carol A. O'Connor, and Martha A. Sandweiss (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 3.
3. Gerald D. Nash, Creating the West: Historical Interpretations, 1890-1990 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1991), 7, 64.
4. Frederick C. Luebke, "Ethnic Minority Groups in the American West," in Historians and the American West, ed. Michael P. Malone (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1983), 358;
5. Frederick C. Luebke, ed., introduction to European Immigrants in the American West (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1998), vii;
6. and Frederick C. Luebke, "Turnerism, Social History, and the Historiography of European Ethnic Groups in the United States," in Germans in the New World: Essays in the History of Immigration, ed. Frederick C. Luebke (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990), 139-43.
7. The latter essay was based on his 1983 historiographical review in Malone's collection. Another piece by Luebke is related to this historiography but is less explicit on the Turner theme and focuses on the Great Plains, which, as will be noted, in this essay is not defined as part of the West. See Frederick C. Luebke, introduction to Ethnicity on the Great Plains, ed. Frederick C. Luebke (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1980), xvii-xxxii.
8. The Lotchin quote is from Roger W. Lotchin, "The Impending Urban Past: An Essay on the Twentieth-Century West," in Researching Western History: Topics in the Twentieth Century, ed. Gerald D. Nash and Richard W. Etulain (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1997), 62.
9. Ricardo Romo, "Mexican Americans in the New West," in The Twentieth-Century West: Historical Interpretations, ed. Gerald D. Nash and Richard W. Etulain (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1989), 126-27;
10. Carlos A. Schwantes, "Wage Earners and Wealth Makers," in Oxford History of the American West, ed. Clyde A. Milner II, Carol A. O'Connor, and Martha A. Sandweiss (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 440;
11. and Luebke, introduction to European Immigrants, vii.
12. There was a succession of working groups, particularly in California's first cotton fields, but, in the final analysis, Schwantes noted, "Mexicans and Mexican Americans constituted the largest racial or ethnic minority among the workers of the West, although at various times Asians - Chinese, Japanese, and Filipinos - were numerous in certain industries." Schwantes, "Wage Earners," 440.
13. Marcus Lee Hansen, The Immigrant in American History, ed. Arthur M. Schlesinger (New York: Harper and Row, 1940), 65.
14. Earl Pomeroy, The Pacific Slope: A History of California, Oregon, Washington, Idaho, Utah, and Nevada (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1965), 262-89.
15. Rischin, "Beyond the Great Divide," 52;
16. and Moses Rischin, "Immigration, Migration, and Minorities in California: A Reassessment," Pacific Historical Review 41 (February 1972): 74.
17. Nash, Creating the West, 145
18. Clark Spence, "Western Mining," in Historians and the American West, ed. Michael P. Malone (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1983), 109.
19. See Richard W. Etulain, ed., The American West in the Twentieth Century: A Bibliography (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1994)
20. and Florence R. J. Goulesque, comp., "Europeans in the American West Since 1800: A Bibliography," Occasional Paper, no. 6 (Albuquerque: Center for the American West, University of New Mexico, 1995).
21. Roger Nichols, ed., introduction to American Frontier and Western Issues, (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1986), 2, 5;
22. and Carlton Qualey, "Ethnic Groups and the Frontier," ibid., 207.
23. Walter Nugent, "The Peopling of the West Since 1890," in The Twentieth-Century West: Historical Interpretations, ed. Gerald D. Nash and Richard W. Etulain (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1989), 46, 48, 61, 65-66;
24. Gerald D. Nash, "Epilogue: Sharpening the Image," in The Twentieth-Century West: Historical Inter-pretations, ed. Gerald D. Nash and Richard W. Etulain (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1989), 408;
25. and Gerald D. Nash and Richard W. Etulain, eds., Researching Western History: Topics in the Twentieth Century (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1997). See also note 26 in this article.
26. Of course, this observation is not meant to exclude those Native Americans, African Americans, and native-born white Americans of third and later generations who labored beside them, but, beginning in the 1890s (and earlier in agriculture), employers shifted toward intentionally initiated efforts to undercut organized labor by hiring southern and eastern Europeans, Asians, and then Mexicans (including women) to replace native-born and northern European workers, who either moved up or out. See W. Thomas White, "Race, Ethnicity, and Gender in the Railroad Work Force: The Case of the Far Northwest, 1883-1918," Western Historical Quarterly 14 (July 1985): 265-83.
27. Quotations are from Carl Abbott, The Metropolitan Frontier: Cities in the Modern American West (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1993), 88.
28. Luebke, "Turnerism," 140, 143;
29. and Richard White, "Trashing the Trails," in Trails: Toward a New Western History, ed. Patricia Nelson Limerick, Clyde A. Milner II, and Charles E. Rankin (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1991), 36.
30. U.S. Senate, Reports of the Immigration Commission, vol. 3, Statistical Review of Immigration, 1819-1910, 61st Cong., 2d sess. (1911; reprint, New York: Arno Press, 1970), 289-92.
31. U.S. Bureau of the Census, Thirteenth Census of the United States Taken in the Year 1910, vols. 2 and 3, Population (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1913), table 1 for each state;
32. U.S. Bureau of the Census, Fifteenth Census of the United States: 1930, Population, vol. 2, General Report: Statistics By Subjects (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1933), table 15, p. 93;
33. and Bureau of the Census, Abstract of the Fifteenth Census of the United States (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1933), tables 2, 5, pp. 900-1.
34. Department of Justice, 1964 Annual Report: Immigration and Naturalization Service (Washington, D.C.: GPO), table 12;
35. 1973 Annual Report, table 12;
36. 1977 Annual Report, table 12;
37. 1979 Annual Report, table 12;
38. 1982 Statistical Yearbook of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, table IMM 5.2;
39. 1987 Statistical Report, table 17;
40. 1996 Statistical Report, table 18;
41. and 1998 Statistical Report, table 17.
42. U.S. Census Office, Twelfth Census of the United States Taken in the Year 1900, vol. 2, Population, part 2 (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1902), table 83, p. 173;
43. U.S. Bureau of the Census, General Social and Economic Characteristics, vol. 1 of 1970 Census of Population. United States Summary (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1973), table 143, p. 472;
44. and U.S. Bureau of the Census, The Foreign Born Population of the United States: 1990, CPH-L-98 (Washington, D.C.: Ethnic and Hispanic Branch, Population Division, U.S. Bureau of the Census, n.d.), table 9, p. 13;
45. U.S. Bureau of the Census, Current Population Survey: Profile of the Foreign Born Population in the United States: 1997, PPL 115 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Bureau of the Census, 1999), table 41A;
46. and Walter Nugent, Into the West: The Story of Its People (New York: Knopf, 1999), 316-30, 353-62.
47. In 1900, the foreign-born were 13.84 percent of the West's population, falling to 6.1 percent in 1960. It then rose to 14.84 percent in 1997. Several authors have discussed the ethnic diversity of the West. See Richard White, "It's Your Misfortune and None of My Own": A History of the American West (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1991);
48. Nugent, Into the West;
49. Abbott, The Metropolitan Frontier;
50. Sally Miller, "California Immigrants: Case Studies in Continuity and Change in Societal and Familial Roles," Journal of the West 22 (July 1993): 25-33;
51. Sally Miller, "Changing Faces of the Central Valley: The Ethnic Presence," California History 74 (Summer 1995): 174-89;
52. and D. Michael Quinn, "Religion in the American West," in Under An Open Sky: Rethinking America's Westem Past, ed. William Cronon, George Miles, and Jay Gitlin (New York: W. W. Norton, 1992), 145-66.
53. Walter Nugent, "Where is the American West?" Montana, the Magazine of Western History 42 (Spring 1992): 2-23
54. reprinted as "Where is the American West?: Report on a Survey," in Major Problems in the History of the West, ed. Clyde A. Milner II, Anne Butler, and David Rich Lewis (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1997), 15-32.
55. I distilled these points from a number of major works. First, consider those authors with a different approach, especially Richard White and Walter Nugent; also, Carlos A. Schwantes, ed., The Pacific Northwest: An Interpretive History, rev. ed. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1996).
56. Several other works are especially valuable: Abbott, The Metropolitan Frontier;
57. White, "It's Your Misfortune";
58. Patricia Nelson Limerick, The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West (New York: W. W. Norton, 1987);
59. Michael P. Malone and Richard W. Etulain, The American West: A Twentieth-Century History (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989);
60. Gerald D. Nash and Richard W. Etulain, eds., The Twentieth-Century West: Historical Interpretations (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1989);
61. Patricia Nelson Limerick, Clyde A. Milner II, and Charles E. Rankin, eds., Trails: Toward a New Western History (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1991);
62. William Cronon, George Miles, and Jay Gitlin, eds., Under An Open Sky: Rethinking America's Western Past (New York: W. W. Norton, 1992);
63. Clyde A. Milner II, Carol A. O'Connor, and Martha A. Sandweiss, eds., The Oxford History of the American West (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994);
64. Richard W. Etulain, Reimagining the Modern American West: A Century of Fiction, History, and Art (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1996);
65. David Wrobel and Michael C. Steiner, eds., Many Wests: Place, Culture, and Regional Identity (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1997);
66. Valerie J. Matsumoto and Blake Allmendinger, eds., Over the Edge: Remapping the American West (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999);
67. and Richard W. Etulain, ed., Does the Frontier Experience Make America Exceptional? (Boston: Bedford/ St. Martin's Press, 1999).
68. Also quite useful are: Richard White's pamphlet for the American Historical Association, "Western History," in The New American History, rev. ed., ed. Susan Porter Benson (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1997);
69. and Patricia Nelson Limerick, "Turnerians All: The Dream of a Helpful History in an Intelligible World," American Historical Review 100 (June 1995): 697-716.
70. The dilemma of effectively encompassing the "West" can be seen quite dramatically in John Mack Faragher's recent second edition of Robert V. Hine, The American West (Boston: Little, Brown, and Co., 1973)
71. now entitled The American West: A New Interpretive History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000).
72. Faragher defined the West as "not only a modern region somewhere beyond the Mississippi but also the process of getting there . . . , for every part of the country was once a frontier, every region was once a West." Consequently, the treatment of nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century minorities includes some Europeans, as well as African Americans, Chinese, Japanese, Mexicans, and Native Americans, but all the Europeans were in the Midwest and none in the Pacific Coastal West or Northwest. The final chapter mentions the entire new wave of immigrants in basically three sentences and, outside Los Angeles, nearly omits the rest of the West, Alaska, and Hawai'i. The waves of recent newcomers remain essentially invisible. See Faragher and Hine, The American West, 11, 355, 358-60, 383-87, 390-400, 543-55.
73. The quotations are from White, "Western History," 4 and
74. Carol A. O'Connor, "A Region of Cities," in Oxford History of the American West, ed. Clyde A. Milner II, Carol A. O'Connor, and Martha A. Sandweiss (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 554-55;
75. and Nugent, "Where is the American West?" 19-20.
76. Victoria Wyatt, "Alaska and Hawai'i," in Oxford History of the American West, ed. Clyde A. Milner II, Carol A. O'Connor, and Martha A. Sandweiss (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 565;
77. Moses Rischin, "Immigration, Migration, and Minorities," 83;
78. John S. Whitehead, "Hawaii: The First and Last Far West," in Major Problems in the History of the West, ed. Clyde A. Milner II, Anne Butler, and David Rich Lewis (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1997), 182-93;
79. and John S. Whitehead, "Noncontiguous Wests: Alaska and Hawaii," in Many Wests: Place, Culture, and Regional Identity, ed. David Wrobel and Michael C. Steiner (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1997), 315-41.
80. In Nugent's survey, 23 percent of his sample included Alaska in the West (fifty-three persons), but only 9 percent (twenty-three persons) felt the same about Hawai'i. Nugent, "Where is the American West?" 21.
81. and Elliott R. Barkan, "The Forgotten Port of Entry: Honolulu, America's Western Portal to the East" (paper presented at the Pacific Coast Branch meeting of the American Historical Association, Honolulu, Hawai'i, August 1986).
82. Elliot R. Barkan, "New Origins, New Homelands: Immigration to Selected Sunbelt Cities Since 1965," in Searching for the Sunbelt, ed. Raymond Mohl (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1991), 124-48.
83. Nugent, Into the West, 7, 337. Although only 3.8 percent of these fourteen states' foreign-born population lived in these six interior states in 1990 and only 8.2 percent of all immigrants to the West (1955 to 1998) intended to reside there (or were already there), earlier in the century (1899 to 1910), 1925 percent of immigrants heading west were planning to go to these six states, and 17.3 percent of the West's foreign-born population resided there in 1920.
84. A watershed moment in these demographic revolutions was December 1943, when the Chinese were given a nominal immigration quota and the right to be naturalized. That policy shift marked the beginning of the repeal of the ban on both Asian immigration and citizenship for Asian immigrants. Without this change Asians could not have benefited from the immigration reforms of 1965, which emphasized family reunification for American citizens. Their speed in taking advantage of this new opportunity revolutionized American immigration. See, for example, Elliott R. Barkan, "Whom Shall We Integrate?: A Comparative Analysis of Immigration and Naturalization Trends of Asians Before and After the 1965 Immigration Act (1951-1978)," Journal of American Ethnic History 3 (Fall 1983): 29-56.
85. Donald Worster, "New West, True West: Interpreting the Region's History," in Does the Frontier Experience Make America Exceptional? ed. Richard Etulain (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's Press, 1999), 94-95;
86. and Donald Worster, "Beyond the Agrarian Myth," in Trails: Toward a New Western History, ed. Patricia Nelson Limerick, Clyde A. Milner II, and Charles E. Rankin (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1991), 16-18.
87. Gerald D. Nash, The American West Transformed: The Impact of World War II (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985), 40;
88. John D. Haeger, "Economic Development of the American West," in American Frontier and Western Issues, ed. Roger Nichols (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1986), 27-50;
89. James Whitaker, "Agriculture and Livestock Production," in American Frontier and Western Issues, ed. Roger Nichols (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1986), 51-67;
90. Mark Wyman, "Mining Frontiers," in American Frontier and Western Issues, ed. Roger Nichols (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1986), 76;
91. Glenda Riley, "Twentieth-Century Western Women: Research Issues and Possibilities," in Researching Western History: Topics in the Twentieth Century, ed. Gerald D. Nash and Richard W. Etulain (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1997), 120-21;
92. Gerald D. Nash and Richard W. Etulain, eds., introduction to Researching Western History: Topics in the Twentieth Century (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1997), 14-15;
93. Roger Lotchin, "The Impending Urban Western Past," 61-64 passim;
94. Richard W. Etulain, "Research Opportunities in Twentieth-Century Western Cultural History," in Researching Western History: Topics in the Twentieth Century, ed. Gerald D. Nash and Richard W. Etulain (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1997), 156, 160;
95. Robert W. Cherny, "Research Opportunities in Twentieth-Century Western History: Politics," in Researching Western History: Topics in the Twentieth Century, ed. Gerald D. Nash and Richard W. Etulain (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1997), 93;
96. Gene M. Gressley, "Research in a Theater in the Round," in Researching Western History: Topics in the Twentieth Century, ed. Gerald D. Nash and Richard W. Etulain (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1997), 201.
97. Nugent contends: "Although Poles, eastern European Jews, Irish, and Scandinavians still peopled California and the rest of the West, the ethnic divisions of the early twentieth century had functionally disappeared after three or four generations of intermarriage. . . . In the context of Asians and Latinos, themselves very diverse, European ethnicities had mostly melted in the West." See his Into the West, 361. Do the Fresno Armenians know that? Or the Russian Jews in Santa Monica and San Francisco? Or the many thousands of Germans in Washington State, Oregon, Texas, Arizona, and even New Mexico? The Bosnians and Serbs who arrived in California during the 1990s?
98. Gerald Thompson, "Another Look at Frontier vs Western Historiography," in Does the Frontier Experience Make America Exceptional? ed. Richard W. Etulain (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's Press, 1999), 118;
99. and White, "Trashing the Trails," 39.
100. Limerick, The Legacy of Conquest, 260;
101. and Patricia Nelson Limerick, "Layer Upon Layer of Memory in the American West," Chronicle of Higher Education, 3 March 2000, Opinion and Arts Section, p. 5.
102. Sarah Deutsch, George J. Sánchez, and Gary Y. Okihiro "Contemporary Peoples/ Contested Places," in The Oxford History of the American West, ed. Clyde A. Milner II, Carol A. O'Connor, and Martha A. Sandweiss (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 639-69 passim.
103. Limerick is quoted in Whitehead, "Noncontiguous Wests," 337. California Department of Finance, Demographic Research Unit, Census 2000, PL94-171, table 4: "Population by Race/Ethnicity." All non-Hispanic whites, Hispanic whites, and white mixed-race persons together equaled 63.45 percent of California's population. www.dof.ca.gov/html/demograp/table4.xls (20 February 2002).
104. Neil Foley, The White Scourge: Mexicans, Blacks, and Poor Whites in Texas Cotton Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), chap. 3;
105. David Montejano, Anglos and Mexicans in the Making of Texas, 1836-1986 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1987), chap. 7;
106. and Hine and Faragher, The American West, 424-25.
107. Regarding the Alaska cannery situation, see Chris Friday, "Competing Communities at Work: Asian Americans, European Americans, and Native Alaskans in the Pacific Northwest, 1938-1947," in Over the Edge: Remapping the American West, ed. Valerie J. Matsumoto and Blake Allmendinger (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 307-28
108. and Chris Friday, Organizing Asian American Labor: The Pacific Coast Canned Salmon Industry, 1870-1942 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1994).
109. On Hawai'i, see Dennis Ogawa, Kodomo no tame ni: For the Sake of the Children: The Japanese American Experience in Hawaii (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1978);
110. Yukiko Kimura, Issei: Japanese Immigrants in Hawaii (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1988);
111. Ronald Takaki, Strangers from a Different Shore: A History of Asian Americans (Boston: Little, Brown, 1989), chaps. 2 and 4, in particular;
112. Lawrence Fuchs, Hawaii Pono: A Social History (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1961);
113. and Miriam Sharma, "Labor Migration and Class Formation Among the Filipinos in Hawaii, 1906-1946," in Labor Migration Under Capitalism: Asian Workers in the United States Before World War II, ed. Lucie Cheng and Edna Bonacich (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 579-615.
114. Albert Camarillo, Chicanos in a Changing Society: From Mexican Pueblos to American Barrios in Santa Barbara and Southern California, 1848-1930 (1979; reprinted with a new preface, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996), 4-5;
115. White deftly explores interethnic competition, conflict, and violence - but only for the early twentieth century - in "It's Your Misfortune," chap. 13.
116. Malone and Etulain, The American West, 8;
117. and Michael Malone, "Beyond the Last Frontier: Toward a New Approach to Western American History," in Trails: Toward a New Western History, ed. Patricia Nelson Limerick, Clyde A. Milner II, and Charles E. Rankin (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1991), 155.
118. Roger Lotchin put it quite directly with respect to "Anglo" and "whites": "Given the assumption that the Anglos were and are the molders of western destiny," Jews, Italians, Scots, Germans, Basques, and others would find that label "amusing" and "the implication of omnipresence laughable." Lotchin, "The Impending Urban Past," 61. An important new work that examines with great success the labor and community patterns among unskilled Greeks, Italians, and Mexicans in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, including the central role of padrones, the workers' involvement with unions - most notably the Western Federation of Miners -their relations with Japanese coworkers, and the issue of their Americanization and acquisition of "whiteness" is Gunther Peck's Reinventing Free Labor: Padrones and Immigrant Workers in the North American West, 1880-1930 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000). See, in particular, chaps. 5-6 and the Epilogue.
119. Sarah Deutsch, "Landscape of Enclaves: Race Relations in the West," in Under An Open Sky: Rethinking America's Western Past, ed. William Cronon, George Miles, and Jay Gitlin (New York: W. W. Norton, 1992), 120;
120. and Elliott R. Barkan, "Return of the Nativists? Public Opinion in Good Times and Bad: California and the New Immigration in the 1980s and 1990s," (paper presented at the European Social Sciences History meeting, 12 April 2000, Amsterdam, The Netherlands).
121. Worster, "New West, True West," 98;
122. Camarillo, Chicanos in a Changing Society, 93, 100, 136, 143, 155, 211, 228.
123. Miller, "Changing Faces of the Central Valley," 175;
124. and Sally Miller, quoted by Glenna Matthews in "Forging a Cosmopolitan Civic Culture: The Regional Identity of San Francisco and Northern California," in Many Wests: Place, Culture, and Regional Identity, ed. David Wrobel and Michael C. Steiner (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1997), 222.
125. Janet E. Rasmussen, New Land, New Lives: Scandinavian Immigrants to the Pacific Northwest (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1993), 172-73;
126. Schwantes, The Pacific Northwest, 193, 202;
127. and Montejano, Anglos and Mexicans, 187, 193, 178, 196.
128. Carl Abbott, "The Federal Presence," in Oxford History of the American West, ed. Clyde A. Milner II, Carol A. O'Connor, and Martha A. Sandweiss (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 493;
129. and Deutsch, "Landscape of Enclaves," 128.
130. Elliott R. Barkan, Asian and Pacific Islander Migration to the United States: A Model of New Global Patterns (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1992), 31-32, 39-40.
131. The Norris statement is quoted by Pomeroy in The Pacific Slope, 262.
132. Lotchin, "The Impending Urban Past," 61.