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Traditions of Inquiry In the last decade, the immigrant letter has enjoyed a resurgence of attention among researchers, especially among social historians and scholars interested in popular literature. This has not always been the case. The marginality of the immigrant letter, especially within social history, until very recently stands in sharp contrast to its central position in both History and Sociology throughout the first half of the twentieth century. The immigrant letter was then generally regarded as the document that could provide the basis for reconstruction of both the sociological and the historical disciplines. In a foundational work of American sociology, The Polish Peasant in Europe and America (1918– 1920), William I. Thomas and Florian Znaniecki utilized letters to and from immigrants in the United States at the center of a work that was intended to move American sociology toward more scientific theorizing rooted in empirical research.1 Voted by social scientists in 1938 the most influential work in American sociology in the years since World War I, The Polish Peasant is now recognized as providing intellectual foundations for most of the central nonbehaviorist, phenomenological trends in the discipline—life history, symbolic interactionism, ethnomethodology , and personality theory.2 Less influential in the formation of disciplines, but ultimately more influential in thinking about the immigrant letter, were those works of early- and mid-twentieth-century American social history that saw the immigrant letter as the basis for a new American history. As early as the 1920s, the immigration historians George Stephenson, Marcus Lee Hansen, and Theodore Blegen were proposing that the immigrant letter be used to create a more inclusive, democratic history of the United States that might replace the traditional master narrative created by scholars, journalists, educators, and politicians, with its elite, AngloSaxon , male perspective.3 From Norway, where he had gone to collect immigrant letters, Theodore Blegen announced in 1929 the intention to 1 33 create, as he said, an American history conceived from “the bottom up.”4 (Stephenson and Hansen made similar research trips in search of immigrant letters.) With its egalitarian, pluralist aims, the narrative these historians proposed became a project of the New Social History, which emerged in the 1960s and quickly gained prominence in the United States, Canada, Western Europe, and Australia. The desire to give voice to ordinary people of the past also had considerable influence on the development of the collection format as the leading approach to understanding and presenting immigrant letters. Neither populist nor social scientific orientations were successful in creating a tradition of systematic inquiry that might guide analysts to realize the full potential of immigrant personal correspondence as a documentary resource. Both traditions of inquiry made the immigrant letter a servant of other disciplinary and ideological projects that failed to realize the potential of the immigrant letter to assist us in understanding the lives of immigrants. But the methodological and conceptual issues that arise out of the examination of both traditions of inquiry are instructive in efforts to come to terms with interpretive dilemmas that seem inherent in any effort to use personal letters for analytical purposes. The Polish Peasant is rich with first-person sources. These include a full-length immigrant autobiography and a number of letter-series written over a significant length of time to and from Poland, which allow us a degree of familiarity with the letter-writers that we cannot attain from isolated, individual letters. But, as several generations of sociologists have come to agree, the potential of these materials to assist us in un-derstanding the lives and mental worlds of immigrants is never realized . Indeed, a vast gap exists between the interesting, casual insights on individual letter-series and the highly schematized renderings of their significance in the concluding “Methodological Note,” which the authors conceived as the work’s principal contribution to the development of sociology.5 Thomas and Znaniecki had warned their readers that, the specificity of its title aside, The Polish Peasant is not a study of the Polish emigration and diaspora, but instead “an exemplification of a standpoint and method.”6 The study was intended to provide directions for sociology, as it embarked on a systematic analysis of America’s emergent urban-industrial social order. To understand the aspirations, failures, and contributions of this massive work, it is first necessary to be aware of the competing and 34 | Traditions of Inquiry [52.14.253.170] Project MUSE (2024-04-19 19...

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