Immigration and the Moral Criticism of American History: The Vision of Oscar Handlin

IMMIGRATION AND THE MORAL CRITICISM OF AMERICAN HISTORY: THE VISION OF OSCAR HANDLIN Reed Ueda Oscar Handlin, the leading American social historian in the early Cold War era, envisioned immigration as the key to America's national and world historical destiny.1 For Handlin, the history of American immigration was the source of universal insights about the possibilities for co-existence under the conditions of freedom that could illuminate a pathway in a problematic modern world. America as the quintessential immigrant nation was the quintessential modern nation, and as such its national destiny had much to say about human destiny. In order to extract the meaning of America the immigrant nation, Handlin approached the past as a moral critic. He did not hold to the extreme historicist and objectivist ideal. As Peter Novick has pointed out, Handlin described himself as "a historian who searched the record of the past for clues to the problems of the present" and as one "seeking by looking backward, some meaning for the present ... aid[ing] all those who seek such meanings to shape their vision of the future." Through an analysis of the lived experience of American immigrants, he formulated a consistent set of judgments about social conduct and the ethical import of historical change. From Handlin's point of view, the total record of the immigrant past yielded a complex moral imperative, a paradigm reflecting the value of individual and group achievement. 2 Oscar Handlin belonged to the generation of American historians emerging after the Great Depression and World War II who sought to understand the institutions that distinguished American democracy and made it triumphant. Many of his contemporaries searched history for a broad, distinctively American agreement on values and institutions that served as sustenance in the gloom of the Cold War. As such they earned the appellation of "consensus historians."3 Oscar Handlin was fundamentally different from these historians. John Higham, a trenchant critic of American historiography, regarded Handlin as one of the "students of conflict," for whom it remained "to 184 Reed Ueda formulate into new patterns the friction within American life." "Considering the crucial importance assigned to mobility in this version of American history," remarked Higham, "it is hardly surprising that one of the influential exponents [Oscar Handlin] is also the leading authority on immigration."4 Notwithstanding his sensitivity to conflict and change, Handlin, too, was concerned that historians locate underlying commonalities and transcend the parochial partisanship so prominent among the previous generation of progressive historians. Thus like Louis Hartz, Daniel J. Boorstin, Richard Hofstadter and David M. Potter, Handlin was drawn to shared experience and the values derived therefrom by the American people. In this vein, Oscar Handlin elaborated two themes originally crafted in the skilled hands of Marcus Lee Hansen, the pioneering immigration historian of the previous generation. For Handlin these themes anchored a national community and enabled uprooted people to know each other as Americans. The first was the process of settlement that united different and separated groups. The second was the heroic striving of ordinary people to better their lives by facing change adventurously. 5 For Handlin, these twin themes could not be understood apart from their relation to individual moral choices that he inspected (often in an existentialist tone) in Boston's Immigrants, The Uprooted, 11zeAmerican People in the Twentieth Century, The Dimensions of Liberty, The Americans, Facing Life, and Trnth in History. To grasp the transformation of these twin themes in Handlin's writings, it is necessary to take into account the shadowy zone connecting his historiography and his personal experience. Handlin himself has reflected on the shaping influence of his life, the "subtle links" that "join subjective to objective elements in the practice of the historian's craft."6 He was born in New York City in 1915, the son of Russian Je\\ish immigrants who struggled in a working-class world of transient residency and employment. In an interview he recalled, "I moved about a great deal, and went to many different schools. It wasn't until my teens that we settled down. As it was, I went to three different high schools. I was born in Brooklyn, and also lived in...