Diner, Gjerde and Takaki Looking

¶ … Diner, Gjerde and Takaki

Looking at the documents in Gjerde, Chapter 10, and the article by Stephen Meyer on the "Americanization Program" at the Ford Company, compare and contrast how Progressive Era Americans from different backgrounds defined what being an American actually should entail. Which definition seems to be the most beneficial to the country, and for what reasons?

The period to immediately follow the Industrial Revolution would be one of meteoric growth for the American economy. As immigrants from all over Europe flooded into its major urban centers, production boomed simultaneous to the upward mobility of these immigrant classes. Increasingly, the ambitions of the laborer -- immigrants and the children of immigrants -- would correspond with those of the mainstream America. Namely, channels for labor would quite often become paths for a homogenization of cultural orientation and of personal economic disposition. The coalescence to assimilation would be prefigured by greater opportunity for advancement as presented by such industrial giants as the Ford Motor Company.

As the Meyer article demonstrates, the process of 'Americanization' would be facilitated by the material ambitions that frequently accompanies American cultural identity throughout history. Accordingly, "the Ford plan had several components. As described by the National Civic Federation, welfare-work or industrial betterment programs of the era involved 'special consideration for physical comfort wherever labor is performed: opportunities for recreation; educational advantages; the providing of suitable sanitary homes. . . .plans for saving and lending money and provisions for insurance and pensions.' In short, welfare work was aimed at improving the culture of industrial workers and their families." (Hookers, 47)

This would largely become a defining feature of becoming an 'American.' Immigrant cultures would find a common ground in the appeal of these comforts. The Ford model would not be conducted for the purposes of cultural charity though. This would instead be a model of positive orientation for the capitalist laborer, who could be said to have been compensated duly for his contribution to the broader economy. It is just that we can make the argument that indeed, this would be a positive pattern through which to define the American as he was coming to be known in the 20th century.

For Ford, the opportunity to promote a higher morale, a greater commitment to work and a connection of production goals to goals of personal advancement was presented as the American Dream but was in reality an extremely savvy way of approaching positive labor orientation. The Ford model would effectively limit worker's dissent and, as a positive byproduct, would create a newly thriving consumer economy amongst those in the labor classes who had previously not possessed the resources to participate in the material spoils of its work.

Without idealizing this period too greatly -- as quite certainly labor exploitation occurred widely and such strategies served to undermine any perceived need for unionized resistance -- it would quite certainly mark a point of inflection for immigrant populations. At this juncture, access to mainstream material goods and cultural conditions began to break down the barriers between different groups, who would increasingly cease to identify with their separate places of origin in favor of a homogenous American identity. This would be essential to promoting the idea -- whether mythological, rhetorical or real -- of a singular American identity comprised of many faces and backgrounds.

2. Why did so many European immigrants return to their home country after immigrating to the United States? Compare their reasons, and discuss what they imply for conditions in American society at the time.

In spite of the presented connection between labor and advancement, exploitation and ethnic hostility persisted to define American culture in important economic capacities. For so many groups that were easily identifiable by ethnically distinct appearances, accents and traditions, the experience was one of isolation and discrimination. To many Europeans who had come to America in order to escape what they perceived as intolerable conditions, the squalid overpopulation of America's urban slums represented all the same tragedies as life in their native countries compounded by a sense of cultural exclusion.

This is the experience that Diner notes for so many Irish immigrants, who were particularly easily identified and target with cultural abuses such that their experience was one of deeper hardship and greater peril. Likewise, individuals of this ethnic origin would be all the more likely to return home where at least the conditions faced in America would be alleviated by cultural comfort and familiarity. Diner recounts that "not untypical was the case of actor James O'Neill, the father of dramatist Eugene O'Neill. The son never forgot the tragedy of how his father, a Famine emigrant, refused to adjust to life in America and abandoned his wife and eight children to return to Ireland. His mother spent the rest of her years 'slaving as a charwoman, the family always was ill-fed and poorly clad.'" (Diner, 59-60)

The implications of this experience present something of a complete picture of American society during this time, which truly presented immigrants with the most unwelcoming of experiences. The notion of advancement for one's progeny and for future generations by way of the broader opportunity alleged to be possible in America would quickly be supplanted by harsh realities relating to American ethnic perspective. As the text by Takaki reports, "Race has functions as a metaphor necessary to the construction of Americanness: in the creation of our national identity, 'American' has been defined as 'white.'" (Takaki, 2) This is a logic which extends to those of distinct ethnic or national identity such as the European groups that would create the lowest socioeconomic class in something of an ethnically defined caste system.

For groups such as the Irish, this would denote an experience of terrible exploitation that became increasingly less appealing to many of such immigrants as promises of opportunity proved greatly exaggerated. As Diner reports, "between 1884 and 1890 in New York, Irish men led all the groups in the number of victims of on-the-job mishaps. Irish men took jobs no one else would take, as in the cutlery industry of the Connecticut Valley, where one axe manufacturer noted, 'there have been so many deaths among the grinders that no Yankee would grind, and the Irish were so awkward and stupid that we did not get the quantity needed even by having extra men working at night.'" (Diner, 60)

Simultaneously, the reality of this experience and the derogatory explanation offered by the source quoted suggests something of the social realities in American that might have driven members of various European immigrant groups to return to their countries of origin. America would prove a dangerous and unflinchingly cruel place to those of ethnic distinction, a reality that would not be made clear to Europeans until their arrival to its industrial centers.

3. What were the changes in family roles that happened in immigrant families in the new American urban environment? Were these changes on the whole positive or negative for the affected individuals and their families, and for American society at large?

Immigrant families would find their lives fully dominated by the implications of the bleak labor outlook for so many first generation arrivals. This is to say that the life of the man in an immigrant family would become exclusively one of labor orientation and toil. The absence of labor protection for such groups and the tendency to exploit immigrants in search of work by subjecting them to harsh and dangerous conditions meant that men worked long hours in terrible conditions where they risked exhaustion, illness and death for meager compensation.

At the other end of the spectrum, this rendered the woman as mother and sustainer of the household. Often living in deeply impoverished conditions in overcrowded ethnic slums, the immigrant women of America would be forced to harden considerably in order to face the challenges of keeping healthy, feeding and raising children in such an environment. To an extent, the matriarch of the household would function in these capacities lone, both in the regard that their husbands were subject to labor demands far too heavy to allow them a significant household presence or role and in the regard that many women were often left to these conditions alone.

As Diner remarks, alluding to the intense dangerous of immigrant labor conditions and the tendency of groups such as the Irish to eschew life insurance preparations, "an Irish widow with children became a prime candidate for charity, and the most pathetic descriptions, the most harrowing scenes of Irish-American poverty, involved the indigent widow, surrounded by hungry children, with no visible means of support. The ranks of the almshouse women swelled with Irish widows as did the workhouses, the prisons, and the charitable homes set up by religious orders." (Diner, 60-61) Though reflective of the tragic conditions for so many immigrant families, this pattern would also pave the way for the eventual progress of women in American society. Emerging from elements of America's labor patriarchy, so many women would be forced into expanded roles and greater individual expectations that had ever been necessitated in Europe. These years would come to define the modern American woman as a counterpoint to her sheltered Victorian counterpart.

4. Looking at the number of immigrants by region of the world from 1925 to 1981 and 1982 to 2005, as noted in the 2005 Yearbook of Immigration Statistics, and at the number of asylees and refugees arrived and granted asylum, and deported aliens. From which regions and countries in the world do most recent new Americans come from, and in what proportion? Quantify the changes? What political and social reasons could be the reason for such changes? What impact might these changes in immigrant origins have on American society and culture?

The first waves of immigration to sweep through the United States during the 20th century would be European in origin. At a time when much of Europe would be fractured by conflict, poverty and political strife, the United States would appear as an appropriate place to seek shelter. It is thus that so may Italians, Germans, Irishmen, Russians and Poles would come to American during the period between the end of World War I and the end of the Cold War. During this time, Europe would be consumed by fractious territorial disputes, brutal ethnic conflicts and bloody struggles for local, regional and continental power. Relatively isolated from these struggles would be the mainland of the United States. And as we have discussed, many of these groups would be greeted with less than hospitable conditions.

But as most of these groups were of a Caucasian ethnicity, several generations of cultural assimilation have made their differences all but impossible to spot. It is thus that these predominantly white immigrant groups have today assimilated into the mainstream definition of that which is seen as 'American.'

This remains so even as a shift in the ethnic makeup of those arriving in the United States -- initiating in the early 1980s and continuing to present day -- has a significant bearing on the racial proportion of the American population. As Takaki remarks "this emerging demographic diversity has raised fundamental questions bout America's identity and culture. In 1990, Time published a cover story on 'America's Changing Colors.' 'Someday soon,' the magazine announced, 'white Americans will become a minority group.' How soon? By 2056, most Americans will trace their descent to 'Africa, Asia, the Hispanic world, the Pacific Islands, Arabia -- almost anywhere but white Europe.'" (Takaki, 2)

This helps to quantify a condition in which the perception of that which it means to be 'American' must increasingly be adjusted. One of the major reasons for the transition in immigration patterns is the process of globalization which in recent decades has attempted to draw those nations of the 'developing' world into a single global economy. As a result, nations in Latin America, Asia and the Middle East are increasingly playing a major role in the global economic scheme. This is opening the door to the United States for those arriving in search of specific market opportunities such as the countless Indian immigrants arriving with specialized technology training; for those arriving as part of the formulation of a growing labor class such as those leaving Mexico in search of better wages in the U.S.; and for those escaping political strife in embattled regions of the world such as the Middle Easterners and Africans making their homes in America.

5. Describe efforts by Blacks and other Americans to challenge both the legal and customary forms of segregation and discrimination in the United States after 1945, and the process of dismantling legal segregation and discrimination by 1967. Discuss whether the United States, at the federal and state level, have abolished segregation without the need to win the Cold War?

The Civil Rights movement would be the most important revolution in American cultural identity since the resolution of the Civil War. This is primarily because it addressed one of the most persistent questions in arriving at a true and factual American identity. The recurrent theme in our discussion concerning American identity as a function of white racial dominance would finally be legally eroded by the effectiveness of the Civil Rights movement in ultimately achieving Constitutional validation. It is thus that a movement largely led by America's most deeply oppressed group would force the hand of a government long resistant to change.

By using organized and peaceful protest to stand up for its entitlement to be acknowledged as American, the black community demanded that America recognize its own hypocrisy. The definition of America as this narrowly defined racial majority was no longer relevant. To the point, though the movement would be strengthened by its alliance with the anti-war movement in Vietnam -- paving the way for suggestions that the Cold War ultimately superceded America's interest in segregation -- the Civil Rights movement would be an inexorable march toward progress. The definition of 'minority' groups bears an inherent contradiction, as the number of black Americans who took to the streets during the Civil Rights movement amply suggests. Certainly, their resistance would be in numbers to great to continue the modes of oppression used to restrain them. The outcome would also be the redefining of that which it means to be an American and bearing a cross for the future struggle of so many American cultural subsets.