#109, November 29, 2006

The Meaner Sort

At the end of a presentation at the University of International Business and Economics in Beijing recently, a member of the American Studies faculty asked me about Samuel P. Huntington’s article entitled, “The Hispanic Challenge.” During my lecture, I had been talking about issues of American identity and had focused a great deal on the impact of immigration on identity formation, and the faculty member wanted to know my opinion of the work, and Huntington’s suggestion that Hispanic immigration was qualitatively different from other immigration to the United States and posed an almost insurmountable problem for American society and political institutions.

The answer to the question was that I fundamentally disagree with Huntington’s analysis. In my response I mentioned that the fears about the problems arising from the growth of the Hispanic population were not new to the history of immigration. As I said to this faculty member, much of what Huntington had said about the Hispanics was merely an echo of what had been said about other immigrant groups – the Irish in the 1840s, the Chinese in the 1870s and 1880s, the Italians and Eastern Europeans in the 1890s, and the Japanese in the first part of the twentieth century. These groups, however, had become part of the so-called American mainstream, or, at the very least, they had demonstrated that they represented no threat to American society.

I had written about this in my e-book Histrionyx, in the piece entitled “Genuine Americans”. It can be found here:

http://loki.stockton.edu/~greggr/front_cover.htm (in Gallery One: Impressionism).

The quote from Woodrow Wilson in this essay is particularly noteworthy in this regard – not least because Wilson would have been the intellectual from the 1890s and 1900s closest to Huntington in his sensibilities – someone who thinks in global terms, but with a noticeable Anglo-American prejudice. Writing about 1880s immigration, Wilson had written [Woodrow Wilson, A History of the American People (NY: Harper & Bros., 1902), pp. 212-3]:

Immigrants poured steadily in as before, but with an alteration of stock which students of affairs marked with uneasiness. Throughout the century men of the sturdy stocks of the north of Europe had made up the main strain of foreign blood which was every year added to the vital working force of the country, or men from the Latin-Gallic stocks of France and northern Italy; but now there came multitudes of men of the lowest class from the south of Italy and men of the meaner sort out of Hungary and Poland, men out of the ranks where there was neither skill nor energy nor any initiative of quick intelligence; and they came in numbers which increased from year to year, as if the countries of the south of Europe were disburdening themselves of the more sordid and hapless elements of their population, the men whose standards of life and of work were such as American workmen had never dreamed of hitherto.

This “meaner sort” of people ended up being integrated into the American mainstream, and the newer immigrants then became the “problem.” Micaela di Leonardo provided an excellent retort to this kind of thinking [“Boyz on the Hood,” in The Nation, (August 17/24, 1992) p.181]:

I'm a veteran of the appalling racist literature of the 1960s and 1970s, which speculated about whether my ethnic population, given its pathological families and bad values, would ever be able to achieve intellectually and professionally. Now, after decades of government subsidization of white ethnic mobility, all is forgiven and forgotten. We wops are considered assimilated into the larger white population, and nobody even bothers to disaggregate our SAT scores.

There is also an excellent response to Huntington’s article in the New Republic, entitled “Hash of Civilizations” and written by Daniel W. Drezner. It is well worth reading and can be found here:

http://www.tnr.com/doc.mhtml?i=scholar&s=drezner030304