Forwarded on behalf of
Joe Gahagan
University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee




------- Forwarded message follows -------
For the past month and extending into two weeks in March, the city of
Milwaukee's International Arts Festival has been sponsoring events
featuring Irish culture. These events have been limited to professional
arts groups and have included some diverse offerings, from world premieres
of operas based on plays by Brian Friel (Ballymore, composed by Richard
Wargo, based on the play "Lovers") and Oscar Wilde (Picture of Dorian
Gray) to plays, a film fleadh, etc.

The best thing I've seen during this festival though, is a one-woman play
by Belfast actress/writer Maggie Cronin entitled "A Most Notorious Woman"
based on the life of Granuaile (Joyce's Grace O'Malice). If anyone on the
list has a chance to see a performance of this play, do so. It is an
incredible feat of artistic energy and performance.

The other event I'd like to plug is a reading by Kerry poet (and cousin)
Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill this Saturday, 2/27 at the Woodland Pattern Book
Center (414 263 5001) at 8:00 pm. For anyone in the upper midwest who
might be interested in attending, I suggest calling ahead, as there are a
limited number of seats available.

There is also a festival 800 number for the other events (1-800-273-FEST).

Joe Gahagan
University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee

H-NET BOOK REVIEW
Published by H-SHGAPE[at]h-net.msu.edu (February, 1999)

Roger Daniels. _Not Like Us: Immigrants and Minorities in
America, 1890-1924_. American Ways Series. Chicago Ivan R.
Dee, 1997. xi + 179 pp. Note on Sources and index. $22.50
(cloth), ISBN 1-56663-165-3; $12.95 (paper), ISBN 1-56663-166-1.

Reviewed by Brian Gratton , Arizona State
University

Us, as we were

Strange beards, strange hats, strange noses. Folk streaming along a
gangplank in the photograph on this book's front cover would fill a nervous
nativist's notebook with fearful predictions. Professor E. H. Johnson had
just such a fright in 1888 at Castle Garden, watching a "far greater peril
to us than the Irish." Yes, it was "the Hungarians, and the Italians, and
the Poles" (p. 19). This is the fabulous era Daniels examines in his
short review of immigration, race, and ethnicity. Millions of the oddest
people in the world came to the United States between 1890 and 1924, most
without the slightest intention of staying, and hence with little interest
in looking, acting, or behaving like "Americans." Millions of others,
stranger still by the color of their skin, were barred from entry by racial
exclusion laws. These precedents provided the model upon which those on
that gangplank could be stopped--the infamous immigration restriction laws
of the 1920s, with their frantic racial taxonomy.

Stopping these immigrants had the wholly unexpected consequence of
prompting migratory streams of Mexicans and blacks into the very regions
vacated by eastern and southern Europeans (W. J. Collins, "When the tide
turned: Immigration and the delay of the Great Black Migration," _Journal
of Economic History_, September 1997). The result was a period of
immigration, migration, and remigration so intense that it funded the only
successful nativist movement in our history, and, at the same time, created
a multi-ethnic United States in which immigrants' grandchildren debate
whether the latest immigrants deserve a piece of the pie.

Daniels, one of the deans of immigration history, brings his considerable
powers to bear on these issues in a way that will please some readers,
while not satisfying others. His basic intents are modest: to provide a
readable, short examination of major themes in immigration and minority
history for a general audience. There are no footnotes, although general
references can be found for sections and specific citations for quotations.
He advances few novel arguments, relying instead on the foundations of
immigration history established over the last three decades. He does
assert the indivisibility of immigration and racial/ethnic history, a
position now taken by the renamed Immigration and Ethnic History Society
and increasingly the norm of practitioners in the field.

Using this template, Daniels effectively uses Chinese exclusion, "the hinge
on which all American immigration policy turned" (p. 17), as a prologue to
the whole racially-charged era. He concludes with an optimistic view of
the positive effects of New Deal policy and the Second World War's economic
impact. In the five chapters between these bookends, he treats American
Indians and blacks at considerable length, linking their experiences to
Progressive reform and its limitations and tying nativism to a general
climate of hostility to those whose ethnic or racial characteristics
weren't quite right. The argument follows a conventional liberal approach
to the evolution of policy toward immigrants and minorities, which
celebrates their agency but focuses most of its attention on their
victimization.

The latter posture at times blinds us to the incredible successes of the
period, especially in the improvement of standard of living for most
natives and immigrants. Urbanization, industrialization, and roller coaster
economic cycles took their toll, but, more often, they paid dividends.
Immigrants' jobs may have been brutal and poorly paid by our standards, but
they were a godsend by the standards of the time. That's why immigrants
came here, worked like the very devil, and put up with ill tempered Yankees
and bad American cuisine. Viewing the period back through the lens of the
1924 National Origins Law, as liberal historians are wont to do, blurs the
rather extraordinary capacity of the United States to absorb such disparate
peoples. When I teach immigration history, I have my students read Philip
Gourevitch's, _We wish to inform you that tomorrow we will be killed with
our families_ (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York: 1998), so as to gain a
little international perspective on what ethnic strife can descend to.
Indeed, the exclusion of Mexicans from the 1924 restrictions, and the
migration of blacks to the north as a direct result of immigration
exclusion, tested the framework of the United States in a still more
intense way. That framework failed and it succeeded, as Daniels's
concluding chapter attests.

Any book on this period reveals again the heart of immigration scholarship:
the issue of assimilation. No one working in this tough sod can avoid the
clumps: labor unions' discrimination against immigrants and steadfast
opposition to open doors, blacks' hostility to immigrants, immigrant
hostility to blacks, Mexican Americans' uneasiness about Mexican
immigration, the outright prejudices of the scholars and political leaders
we usually admire, the desire of many immigrants to become American, the
democratic processes that led to exclusion and state coercion. Daniels's
decision to integrate race and ethnicity into this story is useful, but it
will not satisfy multiculturalists, the subalterns of postmodernism. Only
a few references to whiteness and off-whiteness mar an otherwise pleasing
narrative. There is no demand that assimilation be utterly rejected as an
appropriate model for nation building (on the latter, see Gary Gerstle,
Donna Gabaccia, and David A. Hollinger in the _Journal of American
History_, September 1997). Daniels hopes for a society in which all members
have equal rights; the history he has written shows that "the commitment to
equality has both waxed and waned" (p. 160).

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