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Chapter 2 EDWARD STEINER: ALL IS (NOT) RACE? The Italian is very fertile in inventing excuses for the purpose of evading the law, and his ethical standard in that direction is extremely low. —Edward Steiner, On the Trail of the Immigrant, 1906 The Italians were from the South of Italy and had lost the romance of their native land but not the fragrance of the garlic. —Edward Steiner, On the Trail of the Immigrant, 1906 At about the same time that Jacob Riis was becoming an elder statesman in the urban reform movement and Henry James was probing the immigrants ’ coloring of the American scene, a lesser known academic/journalist was spending vacations trailing and documenting European migrants to and from the New World. Edward Steiner’s research took him through Ellis Island, where James was chilled to the soul. Steiner reported some of his experiences in The Outlook, and then published his On the Trail of the Immigrant in 1906, one year before the first American edition of James’s The American Scene. Steiner’s book details the immigrant’s story from his arrival in America (“At the Gate”) through his immersion in New York’s ethnic ghettos (“On the Day of Atonement”) to his acculturation into American life (“In an Evening School, New York”). Steiner deals exclusively with the Slav, the Jew, the Italian, and, to a lesser extent, the Greek and the 61 62 IMAGINING ITALIANS Hungarian, all of whom he classifies under the rubrics the “new immigrant” and the “new American.” Steiner examines these various immigrant groups both in their native lands and in America. The chapters on the Italians are specifically titled “The Italian at Home” and “The Italian in America,” as if those designations represented two entirely different categories of being. Like James and Riis and many other Americans, Steiner sees the Italian in Italy as one thing, but that same Italian in America as something quite different. Steiner’s conceptions of the Italian at home and abroad are a jumble of lingering romantic notions about Italy in conflict with prevailing racial discourses and less attractive ideas about Italian character, many of which echo Riis. The Italians of On the Trail of the Immigrant come across as a confusing, conflicted, contradictory lot, who reflect the confused, conflicted, contradictory —if deeply sympathetic—thinking of social liberals/progressives such as Edward Steiner and a section of the American population. Steiner, in his efforts to deconstruct the prevailing racial (and often racist) discourse, very often gets caught up in that very discourse of racial differences that Riis had only begun to explore. There is no doubt that Steiner was a committed proponent of the Social Gospel who wrote and worked tirelessly on behalf of the new immigrants, and yet we see him engaging in some of the same language of racial distinctions employed by those he sought to critique. Whereas Riis dealt with immigrants as part of the larger problem of urban poverty, as members of an “other half” that also included blacks and some native-born whites, Steiner focuses on immigrants as immigrants. In his chapter, “The New American and the New Problem,” Steiner makes clear what was less forcefully articulated by Riis: By the turn of the century immigrants from southern and eastern Europe were definitely being seen as a different order of being. And these new immigrants were thought to be testing American ideas about assimilation in ways different from previous immigrant groups, including the supposedly intractable Irish. “The miracle of assimilation wrought upon the older type of immigration, gives to many of us, at least the hope, that the Slavs, Jews, Italians, Hungarians and Greeks will blend into our life as easily as did the Germans, the Scandinavians and the Irish,” Steiner writes, glossing over the difficult experience of the Irish and their efforts to make themselves “white” in the mid-1800s. “The new immigrant, or the new American, as I call him, is however in many respects, more of an alien than that older class which was related to the native stock by race, speech, or religious ties.”1 This notion of the “new immigrant” was firmly entrenched in the American mind by the turn of the century, having developed during what John Higham calls “the Nationalist Nineties.” During this decade, some Americans began targeting “the new immigration as a unique entity, constituting in its difference from other foreign groups the essence of the...

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