I remember reading once that most countries derive their social cohesion from community, from a sense of shared values and a common way of life. This may or may not involve racial solidarity although having the same language is certainly important. America has never been able to rely on either of these things. Today experts predict that Spanish may be as important as English in 30 years time. As for immigration, it is universal of course: France has Algerians, Germany has Turks; Russia has dozens of minorities. But in each of these cases, the incomers were grafted onto a big native population and in that way the dominant culture was preserved in a modified form.
America was special because it only had a small native population in the first place and that was soon utterly swamped by incomers. America today is largely the sum of its immigrant groups –a cliché because it is true. The only differences are between the oldest immigrants (Afro‐Americans and those of English/Scottish/Welsh stock) and the more recently arrived ones, like Vietnamese. Yet seeing the Statue of Liberty or landing at LAX does not make you American. Many of the first generation immigrants retained the culture of their origins to the day they died, only making limited concessions to the new world. But the host culture began to perform it magic alchemy on the second generation – albeit with plenty of stresses and strains. The old language was soon forgotten. The sons and daughters of the pioneer immigrants became regular “guys” (a word which seems to be epicene today). In time they began to speak with a drawl, and the drawl was English, to drink Coors and drive a “Chevy” – although preferably not at the same time.
Now for a corrective. First, it is worth remembering that not all immigrants stayed the course. Some could not stand it and went back home. For them the whole enterprise became a “round trip to America” as one author has called it. Bankston deals with this briefly in the article, “Return migration”. Second, they often encountered levels of hardship, prejudice and even brutality which belied the promises on the steamship posters – hence the huddling together for protection in tight neighbourhood groups. They say that single streets on the Lower East Side corresponded to the individual towns in Europe from which the inhabitants had come. Third, if these pioneers were dirt poor when they boarded the ship at Genoa or Hamburg or Riga, that is how many of them remained after a lifetime in America. They died with their citizenship papers in a tin trunk and a smattering of English but with very little more. The dreams were for their children.
One thing is for sure: that first generation of immigrants never forgot where they came from. It is a familiar story – the journey over, the queues at “Ellis Island”, the teeming lower East side, the San Francisco Chinatown. Today the publishing industry helps us all to remember it and books on immigration are legion: without straining a nerve I can name several similar books to Bankston's all of which are in print as I write: the Encyclopedia of American Immigration (Ciment, 2001), Encyclopedia of North American Immigration (Powell, 2005), and Dictionary of American Immigration History (Cordasco, 1990). Going off at a tangent, we have the Harvard Encyclopedia of American Ethnic Groups (Thernstrom, 1980). So the question arises: does this present set from Salem have a place in the market?
Bankston and his associates have assembled over 600 articles for this book. There are no documents. The title does not say that they are historical, but most of them are. If readers want the accent to be on contemporary material, society, economy and politics, they would be better off with Ciment's four volume set (above). Bankston offers us a varied diet of persons, places, laws and treaties; they are topped off with articles on the various national source groups, from Africans to Yugoslavs, and all kinds of social and economic problems, each with an immigration slant. These have been presented in an attractive and easily digestible form. Then they have added to the mix some pictures, statistical tables and further reading. The authors even make a useful comment on each recommended book.
To make it more palatable they have included some student aids. The guts and gizzard of each article are served up first in a short section called Significance. This summarizes the entry in about ten lines. Then, every few pages there are Profile Boxes. These boxes tabulate a set of key facts on (say) an immigrant group or a government program or the main clauses of a piece of immigration law. The overall effect is very readable and rather interesting. The language is plain English and it is jargon‐free. But do not expect too much detail or discussion. This is a book for 12th graders and college undergraduates. It is not a full‐dress, academic treatment of its subject.
We get a true flavour of the contents from the following mixture of articles taken from volume one. For this purpose I will use only the letter C: the Cable Act of 1922, which denied automatic citizenship to an immigrant woman upon marrying a naturalised man; Cambodian Immigrants, around 200,000 of them now, living in California and New York; Canals (as building sites for German and Irish labourers); Cheung Sum Shee v. Nagle (1925) which affirmed the immigration rights of foreign citizens as guaranteed by treaty; Chinese Laundries; and the Clotilde, the last slave ship to bring its human “cargo” from West Africa to the southern states, 1859. This snapshot gives us a law, a group, a mode of transportation, a court case, a business and a ship.
The best thing about this book is its easy‐reading style and general accessibility. Wherever the book falls open, there is plenty to interest you. Moreover, some of the pictures are real grabbers, no less moving from having been seen a thousand times. Example: an Italian mother and her children sitting round in a tenement block all sewing like mad for two dollars a week whilst the father tramped the streets looking for work. For them the American dream remained just that. Another photograph shows a pushcart peddler: there he stands on a street corner, the neighbourhood full of street urchins and overflowing bins. He is selling clams for a few cents a time. Everything is shabby – his dress, the cart, the customers, the street. Did this unknown vendor become the “clam king” of the city or did he die in debt, still owing on the pushcart?
The article where that shot appears (the “Economic consequences of immigration”) is typical of the useful but short entries in which the book abounds. The text is not a romance as you can see from the following points. America became a haven for immigrants because businessmen needed the labour; existing well‐established communities did not always welcome them (No Irish Need Apply!); conditions of work were often appalling, vide the Triangle Shirtwaist fire of 1911; the 1920s were full of suspicion and hostility and the door was slammed shut; today the USA needs a fresh influx of labour to augment the working population and to maintain the baby‐boomers who are about to retire (Alan Greenspan, US Senate, 2003). This is sober, clear‐headed writing.
The book ends with eight appendices. They vary in usefulness. The section Biographies of Notable Immigrants is admittedly only a “sampling” and lists just 90 such persons. But frankly, I cannot see the point of it. The general bibliography is also brief although, bearing in mind the intended audience of the book, it is quite serviceable. (Most of the further reading is cited at the end of each article). But the lists of Supreme Court rulings and Immigration statutes seem to me very worthwhile. There is also a timeline, glossary and a filmography – that last one is an original touch. What a rich vein of ideas these immigrants have been for the Dream Factory: The Godfather, Hester Street, I Remember Mama – it is all good stuff.
To answer my original question (does this book have a place in the market?), I would answer “Yes it does”. Carl Bankston, who is a sociology professor at Tulane, has followed the Salem formula with great success. The Encyclopedia of American Immigration is a book which beginners can use without having to suffer the heavy language and dense typography of more academic tomes. Great care has been taken to help the readers find their way around the work: there is a plain list of articles, another list (categorized), and four different indices.
The book consists of three sizeable quarto volumes, around 400 pages each – a total of 1,200 in all. (Salem's own site says 1,000 pages but that is incorrect). They are easy to handle and feel comfortable to hold. The book is bound in signatures, (stitched not glued) and the covers are laminated with a picture on the front (the Statue of Liberty of course). The text is set in double columns and the print is clear. Buyers are given an “activation number” to access the book online.
