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Chapter Three MORE SLOVENIAN AND MORE AMERICAN How the Hyphen Unites ON A cold, misty April 19, 1875, President Ulysses S. Grant and key members of his cabinet joined the centennial celebration of the beginning ofthe American Revolution at Concord and Lexington , Massachusetts, where they listened to speeches made by illustrious Anglo-Americans, among them Ralph Waldo Emerson, Julia Ward Howe, James Russell Lowell, and John GreenleafWhittier. It was a high moment for the Anglo-American leadership ofMassachusetts, who were reminded by Thomas Merriam Stetson, the master of ceremonies of the festive day in Lexington, that the fallen heroes of Lexington and Concord all had English names. Speaking ofthe martyrs ofthe Revolution, Stetson called their courageous stand against the larger British force "the flower and consummation of principles that were long ripening in the clear-sighted, liberty-loving, Anglo-Saxon mind."l The Anglo-Americans, especially in New England, thought of themselves as charter members of the republic. Americans from other backgrounds were relative newcomers, and persons of color, despite the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments, still were treated essentially as outsiders, and within a few years after the centennial their position as outsiders would be more sharply defined. With the end of Reconstruction, blacks in the South were relegated to the position of a subjugated, segregated rural proletariat. Chinese laborers were excluded from immigrating to the United States in 1882, and the Dawes Act was passed in 1887 in an attempt to assimilate Native Americans (Indians) by breaking up tribal lands. By the time of the centennial in 1875, however, probably most AngloAmericans accepted the necessity ofimmigration from northern and western Europe. Employers greedily sought white immigrant labor, and the Republican party platforms of1864 and 1868 made explicit the connection between capital expansion and the venerable myth of asylum by asserting that "foreign immigration, which in the past has added so much to the wealth, development ofresources, and increase ofpower to this nationthe asylum of the oppressed of all nations-should be fostered and encouraged by a just policy."2 Immigrants from Germany kept coming in HOW THE HYPHEN UNITES 55 large numbers (718,182 between 1871 and 1880, totaling more than onequarter ofall immigrants and a third ofthose from Europe), and Germanspeaking enclaves existed all over the Midwest, but their arrival did not often raise the sharp anxieties that Benjamin Franklin and other AngloAmericans had expressed in the mid-eighteenth century when they said such immigrants might "Germanize us." Immigration from Ireland, while substantial (+36,871 in the 1870S), had been halved in the twenty-year period between 1861 and 1880 from the previous twenty years, and the percentage of Irish compared with other immigrants had gone down steadily since the 1850S.3 The Irish still aroused hostility even though mine operators, railroad owners, small manufacturers, and a growing number of Americans in commerce and the professions had grown used to having them fill a variety of unskilled and semiskilled jobs. They were more threatening to Anglo-Americans than Germans or Scandinavians not just because they were Catholic (a substantial number of Germans were Catholic, too) but also because, poor and unskilled, they crowded into the cities of the Northeast, where their presence was linked to alcoholism and other diseases , and to crime. Northern Europe accounted for 90 percent of all immigration in the 1860s and 80 percent in the 1870S, but as the numbers from Ireland went down, those from Scandinavia went up, almost doubling between 1871 and 1880 over the previous decade. Scandinavians were overwhelmingly Protestant, and a large number, like the Germans, moved to the Midwest, where almost everyone came from somewhere else. Their arrival met relatively little opposition; even though they spoke their ancestral languages at home and sometimes in school, they entered the political life of their communities and, as did the Germans, established ethnic associations in the American pattern of voluntary ethnic pluralism. Immigration.from Southern and Eastern Europe With continued confinement of free blacks to the coercive, segregated labor system of the South and with continued exclusion of Chinese laborers from immigration, the leaders ofAmerican industry and commerce in the North looked to European immigrants to keep the cost of labor low. Immigrant labor was cheap for many reasons. A high proportion were young, single men who brought no children for the state to educate. As noncitizens, they were subject to deportation for at least five years, and, lacking language skills in most cases, they also lacked mobility. Native -born workers...

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