What Did Oscar Handlin Mean in the Opening Sentences of The Uprooted?

Once I thought to write a history of immigrants in America. Then I discovered the immigrants were American history.

—Oscar Handlin, The Uprooted (1951)¹

This essay explores whether we really understand what Handlin was saying when he proclaimed that "the immigrants were American history." Historians have tagged these two sentences quoted above a "quip," a "motto," and an "aphorism" and repeated them in a wide variety of contexts and for a variety of purposes. Handlin's words actually constitute a "statement," made to assume a particular but not widely understood position developed from his understanding and appreciation of American modernity. But the words have taken on a protean character and lent themselves to interpretations that mostly misconstrue their original meaning. Whether Handlin was gratified by this source of instant association with a neat turn of phrase or was frustrated that his meaning was seldom gotten correctly, we can no longer know. Handlin died in 2011 at the age of 95, and to the best of my knowledge was never asked directly about the question that is being raised here, even though it is one of considerable consequence for understanding his canonical work. Like most historians, he probably hoped that his text ultimately provided the answers to whatever puzzles or paradoxes he placed within it. In this essay, at times I will speak—sympathetically but not uncritically—for Handlin, an obviously risky method, but one I hope readers will find acceptable to the extent that the author no longer can speak for himself.

That the two famous sentences have become central to his legacy was clear at the time of his death. The Washington Post and the New York Times, whose obituaries constitute our most authoritative public record on recently deceased eminent Americans, both quoted them.² A Google search turns up somewhere between 8,700 and 3.4 million entries for the sentences.³ (In contrast, Frederick Jackson Turner's famous revisionist statement of the Frontier Thesis—"The existence of an area of free land, its continuous recession, and the advance of American settlement westward, explain American development"—which set a radically new course for American history and self-understanding, yields between 2,470 and 20,500 entries.) To be sure, the deeper you go, the more mixed the quality of the results of such a web search, principally because there is a great deal of repetition of entries. But the volume of quotation is still astonishing, and seems to establish the opening sentences of The Uprooted as American historiography's "Four score and seven years ago. . . ."

Web and traditional literature searches alike reveal that a great many people aspire to bask in the reflective glow of Handlin's words. Whether found in a book, a news article, an advertisement for an immigration attorney, a syllabus, a lesson plan, a publisher's announcement of a new book in immigration studies, a conference paper, a journal article, or someone's blog, the use of Handlin's statement fulfills one of a relatively few distinct purposes—purposes sometimes in conflict with one another. Several are critical of Handlin himself, while acknowledging his authority to declaim as he did and acknowledging the interpretive importance of The Uprooted.

By far the greatest use of the quotation is at the beginning of a text to establish the claim that immigration is an abidingly important, maybe the most important, aspect of our past, and, hence, that what one is about to read has claims to the same significance. Close behind are the instances of use that make this point but add that immigration or immigrants have been neglected, misunderstood, or misconceived as forces in history or the present. The latter remarks sometimes make the point that this was the case until Handlin published The Uprooted and began the displacement of the study of high politics, Founding Fathers, and WASP elites in favor of studies emphasizing ordinary people and daily life.⁴

These are banal points that Handlin would have hardly contested, except in two instances. First, while Handlin doubtless believed that immigration was important, the reach...