From All Points: America's Immigrant West, 1870s-1952
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From All Points: America's Immigrant West, 1870s-1952
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Overview
At a time when immigration policy is the subject of heated debate, this book makes clear that the true wealth of America is in the diversity of its peoples. By the end of the twentieth century, the American West was home to nearly half of America’s immigrant population, including Asians and Armenians, Germans and Greeks, Mexicans, Italians, Swedes, Basques, and others. This book tells their rich and complex story—of adaptation and isolation, maintaining and mixing traditions, and an ongoing ebb and flow of movement, assimilation, and replenishment. These immigrants and their children built communities, added to the region’s culture, and contended with discrimination and the lure of Americanization. The mark of the outsider, the alien, the nonwhite passed from group to group, even as the complexion of the region changed. The region welcomed, then excluded, immigrants, in restless waves of need and nativism that continue to this day.
“Written in the fashion of Oscar Handlin, this study makes a convincing case that immigration history comprises an essential part of the history of the American West, and that appreciation of the former and the roles played by myriad alien arrivals is essential for understanding the latter. . . . Barkan . . . combines vignettes based on immigrant reminiscences with keen analysis to explore four related themes: various groups’ arrivals, their economic influences, their effects on public policy, and their adaptation and assimilation. The resulting narrative is readable and informative. . . . Recommended.” —Choice
“A remarkable synthesis of the West as a region of immigrants. It tells the story of how vital immigrants were to economic growth and modernization. This will be the prime reference for 21st century scholars of immigration and ethnicity in the American West.” —Annals of Wyoming, Spring 2010
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780253027962 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Indiana University Press |
| Publication date: | 12/22/2021 |
| Series: | American West in the Twentieth Century |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 649 |
| File size: | 9 MB |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
About the Author
Elliott Robert Barkan is Professor Emeritus of History and Ethnic Studies at California State University. He is author of Our Multicultural Heritage: A Guide to America's Principal Ethnic Groups and And Still They Come: The Immigrant in American Society, 1920s–1990s. He lives in Corona, California.
Read an Excerpt
From All Points
America's Immigrant West, 1870sâ"1952
By Elliott Robert Barkan
Indiana University Press
Copyright © 2007 Elliott Robert BarkanAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-253-02796-2
CHAPTER 1
Immigrant Stories from the West
In 1873 Olav and Anne Ormbrek left their dairy farm in Høydalsmo, Norway, and migrated with their two sons to Odin, Minnesota. There, Anne gave birth to a third son, and soon, in pioneer fashion, the family of five was on its way to Seattle in a covered wagon. Olav acquired a farm near Ballard (just northwest of today's downtown Seattle) and built his house and barn Norwegian style. About 14 years later their nephew, Gunnleik Ormbrek, who was at that time 19 or 20, migrated directly to his uncle's farm. He subsequently acquired American citizenship, changing his name to Gilbert because his cousin's name was also Gunnleik Ormbrek. By that time teenage Kari Fosberg had migrated from Norway to her uncle's farm in Washington's Central Valley (Kitsap County). She and Gilbert met and wed in 1896. Five years later they acquired a 40-acre farm in Woodinville, where Gilbert also worked as a sawyer in logging camps and lumber mills. By that time Anne was occupied raising their ten children.
Meanwhile, Olav and Anne's son Gunnleik, who had a dairy farm near his parents, married a woman from his Norwegian community; their son and grandson would continue to operate that farm. Gunnleik's brother Kjetil, however, disliked farming, moved south to Lewis County, wed a non-Norwegian, and also raised a family of ten children. The youngest brother, Eslek, wed a Norwegian woman but also shunned farming and went into the insurance business. Despite the occupational changes and the changes in some traditions, others certainly endured. Gilbert was active in the Norwegian Male Chorus of Seattle and played the Hardanger violin, as did his uncle and cousin Kjetil. Olav and his family helped establish the Bothell First Lutheran Church, while Eslek became a high-ranking Mason and was elected to the Bothell City Council.
For the Ormbreks, migration had multiple outcomes. The family settled in the West, but its members did not follow common paths. For those wishing to move away from the tradition of working the land, numerous opportunities offered an array of available options — some known, some previously unknown to those immigrants. Within this one family we see step migration (via Minnesota) and direct migration; marriage within the group and outside it; continuation with farming and the move into wholly different occupations; little said about homeland ties but various efforts to preserve elements of ethnicity. On several levels there is a story of continuity and change.
In 1872, the 29-year-old Anna Freudenthal married Isadore Elkan Solomon (known as I. E.) in Inowroclaw, Prussia, and they left the next day for Towanda, Pennsylvania, where I. E. began a livery service. After four years of slow business and the birth of three children, Anna persuaded her husband to relocate to the Arizona Territory, where her cousins, Henry and Charles Lesinsky, were already in business as owners of the Longfellow Copper Mine. Along the Gila River, in eastern Arizona, I. E. started a charcoal business to supply the nearby Longfellow Mine. Living in a deteriorating adobe home, with no furniture or stove for months and with no domestic help, Anna struggled. Eventually, she ran the family store they started, raised a family that soon included six children, and, around this nucleus, helped establish the community of Solomonville, which subsequently became the seat of Graham County. Faced now with a continuous stream of friends, visitors, people coming for county business, and travelers going between Tucson and El Paso, Anna opened a hotel in 1880, which she supervised while continuing to operate the store. Aided by Chinese and Mexican help, she made the Solomon Hotel famous, in time supplying it with foods from their own orchard and ranch. By 1907, the marriage of their daughter was a major social event of the region.
Clearly, men alone did not build the West. Gender roles were modified, and men and women shared the risks. Mixed ethnic workforces were evident early on and in the humblest of enterprises, but while the composition of the labor force continued to change, hierarchies of workers persisted. In the comparatively unstructured West, opportunities abounded for those of modest means but with ambition and drive — where racial and ethnic barriers were not insurmountable. Many of those whose paths were not obstructed would then use their success as a stepping-stone to participation in the broader community and to even greater prominence.
Yoryis Zisimopoulos was born in Klepá, Roumeli, in central Greece, in the mid-1880s. His father, Yiannis, a self-taught lawyer, struggled to feed his family. Yoryis learned the shoemaker's trade, but the people of Klepá were too poor to buy his products. He headed for Alexandria, Egypt, in search of a job, sailing with "hundreds of Greeks, Arabs, a few blacks, East Indians, Turks, and Persians [who] were on their way to America." Unsuccessful in Alexandria, Yoryis persuaded his father to borrow the equivalent of $23, and Yoryis departed for America in the fall of 1907. He began his American saga (unknowingly) as a strikebreaker in Pawtucket, Rhode Island. He soon quit, found a Greek coffeehouse in New York frequented by Roumeliot (people from his homeland region), and got a lead on a job in Oklahoma City, alongside Cretans digging vile-smelling sewer trenches. He soon moved on to Pueblo, Colorado, which "swarmed with Greeks." There, he briey worked for the Colorado Fuel and Iron Company until molten steel fell on some men, instantly killing them. Immediately, Italians, Greeks, and Slavs were waiting to take their places.
After seeking in vain for work in Leadville, Colorado, he made his way to Salt Lake City and looked up Leonidas Skliris, a cunning labor agent known as the "Czar of the Greeks." But Skliris hired men mainly from his village, then from near Sparta, then Spartans, and, after them, villagers from his Greek agents' home communities. Relatives first, then relatives of relatives. Roumeliots did not qualify; Skliris hired non-Peloponnesians only if he needed strikebreakers. Yoryis, by now calling himself George Zeese, next found a job on a railroad section gang in Nebraska, alongside an Arab gang. Standing up to a Greek boss who was a bully, George became the boss of his group and for the next six years organized section gangs for various railroads, particularly in Idaho, where "thousands" of Greeks in Pocatello were seeking work. From Portola, California, to Gary, Indiana, and back to Rock Springs, Wyoming, up to Montana, and over to Idaho, George continually migrated in search of work. Then, tired of the struggle and ashamed of having sent home only $1,600 during the prior six years, George took up homesteading in Idaho, growing wheat. By this time, Emilia Papachristou, who had migrated from Greece to Salt Lake City, decided to move up to Pocatello. She was soon introduced to George, and on the first day they met he proposed and she accepted. They wed in May 1915.
Soon, a decade had elapsed since George's arrival in America. He had had 15 jobs, and even the homestead had been pulled out from under him. George now took his growing family to Helper, Utah, to try his luck running coffeehouses and cigar stores. In 1924 he and an educated young Greek acquired a grocery that proved to be the first of eleven Success Markets in Utah. George Zeese, impoverished immigrant from Klepá, Greece, eventually had a new six-room house and a growing business. He was invited to be a bank director and attended Republican Party conventions in Utah.
Like others described here, George's life was a remarkable blend of ethnic retention and cultural adaptation, of limited ties to his family in Greece and ultimately a significant measure of integration. Fortitude and ingenuity, net works and ethnic bonds, persistence and luck, a spouse who was an able partner, and still more persistence — all were invaluable assets that such migrants as Zeese relied upon for long-term success. Newcomers to the West seized opportunities and, where not evident, they often created opportunities.
Chin Lung would agree. He came to the United States in 1882 and became a successful merchant in Stockton, California, principally by developing enormously successful agricultural operations in the Sacramento Delta region. In 1888, he returned to China and married Leong Kum Kew (married name Leong Shee). After adjusting his status to that of merchant, as required by the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, he was able to sponsor Leong to migrate in 1893.
The following year she gave birth to Chin Suey Kum. Over the next decade, while Chin Lung worked in the Sacramento Delta area, Leong lived in San Francisco, raising two girls and three boys. But she found America "inconvenient, alienating, and harried." Unhappy, she at last convinced Chin to take the family back to China in 1904. There, Leong Shee changed from bound to natural feet, converted to Christianity, learned to read and write, and lived out her days in comfort. Chin chose to remain in America and made periodic trips home, siring two more sons. Eventually, all five sons returned to the United States with Chin, but the two daughters remained in China. Indeed, while back in China, Chin Lung married off their first daughter, Chin Suey Kum, to an herb doctor, Jew Yee Yuet. However, by marrying a foreigner ineligible for U.S. citizenship, Suey Kum lost her own U.S. birthright citizenship. She and her husband remained in China and had seven children; the eldest, Jew Law Ying, was born in 1915.
Leong's granddaughter, Jew Law Ying, could not claim derivative U.S. citizenship since her American-born mother had lost her own. She could gain admission only if she herself were the wife of a U.S. citizen or a Chinese merchant. In 1937, wanting to come to America and escape the war in China, Jew agreed to an arranged marriage with a Chinese immigrant living in California whose legal status was that of a second-generation Chinese American. The complexities of the Chinese immigration dilemma at that time are well revealed in the overlay of names that follows. When applying for entry into the United States in 1941, Jew indicated the she was married to Yung Hin Sen, born in 1903, the merchant son of Yung Ung and Won Shee. Actually, Yung Hin Sen was really Tom Yip Jing, born in 1905 to Tom Fat Kwong (who had himself been smuggled in from Mexico in 1911) and Lee Shee. Yung Hin Sen had been admitted in 1921 as the (paper) son of Yung Ung and Won Shee. He now posed as a merchant by paying $1,000 (borrowed from relatives) to invest in an import company so that this poor gardener could pose as a salesman and partner of the firm, obtain an affidavit to that effect signed by two whites, and thereby "legitimately" bring in his wife. Husband and wife were each asked about 100 questions by inspectors before Jew Law Ying was admitted with her daughter in April 1941. Faced with the reality of her new situation, she was about to begin her own struggles.
By this time, Jew's grandfather, Chin Lung, had returned to China (1932) and was living with Leong Shee in Macao, where he had invested in numerous businesses, rental properties, and land. He died there in 1942; Leong Shee would live there 20 years more. Neither got to see their great-granddaughter, Tom Bak Fong, born in 1946 to Jew Law Yung and Yung Hin Sen (the name Tom was based on her father's real family name). The child grew up to become a historian and prominent author specializing in Chinese American women's history, Judy Yung (the name Yung was based on the family's "paper" name). As Judy Yung would later observe, many Chinese women like her great-grandmother and mother "did not find immigration a liberating experience." But they proved to be "the glue that held the family together," teaching their daughters "to be women warriors."
If women were able to demonstrate the same durable qualities as such men as George Zeese, they could also respond as negatively to the new society as did so many male migrants, choosing to look to their homeland transnationally rather than to the new host society. But this, as with other choices, could prove permanently divisive. This account emphasizes that there was no one pattern and no one outcome — even at the individual family level. It also dramatizes one of the major themes running through the story of immigration into the West: men and women frequently went to great lengths and great deceits in order to enter the United States, and as the edifice of immigration and naturalization law and enforcement grew more complex and obstructive, prospective immigrants and citizens faced numerous hurdles. This was especially true for the Chinese because they were the first to be targeted for exclusion, setting precedents that would affect millions of newcomers thereafter. Many Chinese and others persisted and overcame a multitude of obstacles; still others abandoned their efforts, either not seeking admission (at any rate, not pursuing legal admission) or not applying for citizenship. Many chose not to remain in America. The Chin Lung family odyssey reminds us that a serious, racist component warped laws and policies well before 1900. In that respect, for decades there would be considerable continuity and only limited change.
These four vignettes highlight step migration and chain migration, networks and novel community building, cultural persistence and cultural change, endogamous ties and inter-marriage. We see women as well as men playing powerful decision-making, leadership, and economic roles, all the while raising families, adapting to new cultures, and serving as community builders. In most situations we find elements of both cultural continuity and change. Rarely could the immigrant community actually replicate all the components and securities of its traditional society. For some, there was the intense, ongoing transnational attachment to homeland and to families left behind. For others, there was a limited, periodic, translocal involvement; and for still others, a gradual disengagement from the land of their origins.
The story of Leong Shee, her daughter, and her granddaughter demonstrates that immigration was not always an unmixed blessing, and that all newcomers did not hang on and endure in the new land. Many sought refuge or the customary comforts of their homeland. For them, the price of resettlement was too high — or it was a price they never intended to pay. On the one hand, most others, like the Ormbreks, Zeeses, and Solomons, eventually did overcome displacement and marginalization (or their children did). On the other hand, the Chinese regarded the exclusion legislation (1882–1904) as racist laws that compelled them to resort to elaborate strategies of evasion, deception, covert entries, and a complicated array of "paper" names. Whatever the rationale, the responses often involved a form of illegal immigration. In its many variations, such undocumented migration would progressively become one of the major issues in the history of immigration into the twentieth-century West.
CHAPTER 2The Draw of the Late-Nineteenth-Century West
It is the dynamic and quite remarkable series of transitions during this period that set the stage for the twentieth-century West. At the heart of these transitions were the following developments:
The end of the wars with Native Americans in the Southwest, together with the subordination, segregation, and disempowerment of many long-present Mexican and Mexican American communities, especially in Texas, Arizona, New Mexico, and California;
The federal reclamation programs (e.g., the 1902 Newlands Reclamation Act) and the continued growth of large agricultural and (on Hawai'i) plantation enterprises, along with 1.4 million homestead applications in the years 1862–1900;
The expansion of major mining operations, in particular for coal and copper and then oil;
The development, or growth, of many industries and businesses, such as fishing, canneries, packinghouses, sugar refineries, logging and mills, construction, and urban electric transportation systems (with many more soon to follow);
The major surges to the mainland by northern European immigrants along with greater numbers from southern and eastern Europe, Japan, and then Mexico (and several Asian groups to Hawai'i) — accompanying the western resettlement of large contingents of native-born white and black Americans;
Sufficient urban growth by 1880 to push the West's urban population past the national figure of 22.6 percent, followed by the proliferation of new communities during the 1880s and 1890s and thereafter;
The completion of a web of transcontinental and regional railroads as well as coastal and international shipping companies, linking pools of labor with urban and extractive enterprises, and all of them with local, national, and international markets;
The enactment between 1875 and 1903 of precedent-setting laws and court decisions establishing or con¤rming federal control of immigration and naturalization; and
The revival of nativist hostilities and fears and, periodically, their violent expression directed against the Chinese and then against other Asians.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from From All Points by Elliott Robert Barkan. Copyright © 2007 Elliott Robert Barkan. Excerpted by permission of Indiana University Press.
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Table of Contents
Preface
Acknowledgments
Note on Translation and Transliteration
Introduction: Defining Themes—The West, Westerners, and Whiteness
Prelude: Western Immigrant Experiences
Part 1. Laying the Groundwork: Immigrants and Immigration Laws, Old and New, 1870s - 1903
1. Immigrant Stories from the West
2. The Draw of the Late-Nineteenth-Century West
3. Where in the West Were They?
4. Targets of Racism: Chinese and Others on the Mainland and Hawaii
5. The Scandinavians and Step Migration
6. The German Presence
7. Proximity of Homeland: The Mexicans
8. In the Year 1903
9. Foreshadowing Twentieth-Century Patterns
Part 2. Opening and Closing Doors, 1903 - 1923
10. Immigrant Stories and the West in the 1900s
11. Who Came?
12. The Dillingham Commission and the West
13. The Continuing Evolution of Immigration and Naturalization Issues and Policies (Asians)
14. Miners, Merchants, and Entrepreneurs: Europeans Compete with Europeans (Greeks and Others)
15. Land, Labor, and Immigrant Communities: Hawaii and the Mainland (Asians, Portuguese, Armenians, and Scandinavians)
16. Newcomers, Old and New (Italians, Basques, French, and Mexicans)
17. The First World War and Americanization
18. State and Federal Laws and Decisions, 1917 - 1920
19. The Early 1920s: Threshold of Momentous Changes
Part 3. "Give me a bug, please": Restriction and Repatriation, Accommodation and Americanization, 1923 - 1941
20. A World of Peoples: The 1920s and 1930s
21. Demographic Trends: A Changing West and Changing Westerners
22. Institutionalizing the Quota System: 1924
23. Divided Yet Interlinked: The Rural West
24. Filipinos: The Newer Immigrant Wave Bridging the Rural and Urban West
25. Divided Yet Interlinked: The Urban West in the Interwar Years
26. Urban Landscapes and Ethnic Encounters
27. From "Reoccupation" to Repatriation: Mexicans in the Southwest between the Wars
28. Darker Turns during the Interwar Years: Workers and Refugees
29. Aliens and Race Issues on the Eve of the Second World War
30. Interwar or Interlude? Twilight and Dawn in the West
Part 4. America's Dilemma: Races, Refugees, and Reforms in an Age of World War and Cold War, 1942 - 1952
31. Voices from America on the Eve of War
32. War: Against All Those of Japanese Descent
33. The Second World War's Other Enemy Aliens: Italians and Germans
34. The Homefront in Wartime: Preface to an Era of Change
35. Wartime and Postwar Agricultural Issues: Land, Labor, Growers, and Unions
36. Immigrants and Ethnics in the Postwar Years
37. The Cold War Heats Up: The Politics of Immigration, 1950 - 1952
38. Dora and the Harbinger of Coming Events
39. Looking Back on America's Immigrant West
Appendix
Notes
Select Bibliography
Index
What People are Saying About This
This richly detailed history of immigrants in the 20th-century American West rewards the reader with close attention to individual voices of immigrants. Encyclopedic in coverage, loaded with personal stories of real people, this book is unparalleled in its coverage. Finally the West becomes a full part of American immigration history.
This richly detailed history of immigrants in the 20th-century American West rewards the reader with close attention to individual voices of immigrants. Encyclopedic in coverage, loaded with personal stories of real people, this book is unparalleled in its coverage. Finally the West becomes a full part of American immigration history.