The Mediating Nation: Late American Realism, Globalization, and the Progressive State

CHAPTER FOUR: Migration Systems and Literary Production: The Global Routes of Abraham Cahan and Knut Hamsun

127 c h a p t e r f o u r Migration Systems and Literary Production The Global Routes of Abraham Cahan and Knut Hamsun A lfred Stieglitz’s The Steerage, taken in 1907 and first published in 1911, has become one of the most iconic images from the age of mass migration to the United States at the turn of the twentieth century. In recent years, Stieglitz’s photograph has graced the cover of the second volume of the third edition of The Heath Anthology of American Literature (1998), thereby underscoring its editors’ long-standing commitment to expanding the canon of American literature by including, among other neglected texts, immigrant writings. The iconicity of The Steerage is somewhat ironic, however, because Stieglitz was traveling eastward from New York to Germany when he took the photograph and thus captured steerage passengers returning to Europe rather than arriving in the United States.1 Even those commentators who have been aware of this context have sometimes been unable to keep from reading more traditional immigrant experiences , including their own, into Stieglitz’s photograph. Alfred Kazin, who included The Steerage as the frontispiece to A Walker in the City (1951), wonders about the people in the image at length in his autobiographical New York Jew (1978), particularly “the figure of a young woman standing with her back to me”: “I dimly knew that Stieglitz had taken the photograph going to Europe. The figures . . . were returning, but no matter. . . . She is my mother—in that picture and for that year” (original emphasis).2 Other commentators interested in exactly why these travelers were returning to Europe have hypothesized that Stieglitz’s subjects were hopeful immigrants who had been rejected by U.S. immigration authorities at Ellis Island for financial, health, or political reasons.3 What is striking about these responses to The Steerage is the degree to which they reinforce the notion of settling in the United States as the only possible objective of the figures in the photograph. This sort of logic demands either that Stieglitz’s subjects be reincorporated vicariously into Alfred Stieglitz’s The Steerage, 1907 (small-format photogravure). Private collection; courtesy of Christie’s Images and the Bridgeman Art Library. Abraham Cahan and Knut Hamsun 129 American history through the success stories of Kazin and others or that their forcible exclusion by the state be acknowledged and thereby partially redressed. Such interpretations tend to obscure a third possibility—one that places much more emphasis on the agency of the immigrants themselves but simultaneously destabilizes the accepted narrative of immigration . Although Stieglitz biographer Richard Whelan allows for the possibility that the people captured in the photograph may have been the victims of increasingly strict anti-immigration policies, he suggests that “most were probably ‘birds of passage,’ skilled artisans who worked in the construction trades and more or less commuted between Europe and America in twoyear cycles.”4 In other words, the immigrants who appear in The Steerage may have chosen to return to Europe after having accomplished whatever goals had brought them temporarily to the United States in the first place, possibly with the intention of migrating to America again at a later time. The status of these so-called birds of passage or “sojourners” and the wider networks that enabled the phenomenon of return migration may rank among the most important yet neglected dimensions of U.S. immigration history. If the numbers compiled by the Office [later Bureau] of Immigration are correct, then the rate of return migration was extremely high during the years that mark the peak of European migration to North America. Between 1908, when the government began recording the number of emigrants leaving the United States, through 1913, an estimated 5,490,877 immigrants entered and an estimated 1,760,429 emigrants exited the country, making the rate of return roughly 32 percent.5 This statistic is corroborated by historians who have studied return migration of specific nationalities. The estimated rate of return migration ranged from about 20 percent for the Scandinavian countries to as much as 50 percent for Italy.6 On one hand, these numbers suggest that a much broader understanding of turn-of-the-century cosmopolitanism than what we tend to assume is in order. If working-class migrants were capable of traversing oceans on multiple occasions, then they certainly could lay as much of a claim to the title “cosmopolitan...