For hundreds of thousands of immigrants, coming to Massachusetts has meant exchanging one community for another in multiple ways that are often overlooked. Whether home was originally an Irish tenant farm or the slave quarters of a Southern plantation or an Eastern European ghetto, whether its mention evoked warm memories or nightmares, immigration has required adopting a new identity consonant with new circumstances. Men who considered themselves Milanese moved to Boston's North End and became Italian Americans; women who identified themselves with County Cork turned into Irish Americans when Worcester became their hometown. The identities that immigrants adopted demarcated the outlines of their new communities.This collection of essays explores some of the communities that Massachusetts immigrants created for themselves in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Contributions investigate how individual immigrant settlements came about and how groups interacted with one another as well as how newcomers were received. The essays also assess how immigration affected those who experienced it, the men and women who gave up the rhythms of their birthplaces in favor of the pulsing beat of their adopted homeland. Because the Bay State was a primary destination for immigrants during the social reorganization caused by industrial and urban development, the volume offers important case studies, with national significance, of how newcomers and natives adjusted to each other and reshaped the boundaries of American communities. The collection explores the common aspects of community creation and development that linked their various ethnic experiences-Irish, French Canadian, Jewish, Italian, Swedish, and African American.

Frameworks for Immigrant Inclusion

Civic Dimensions of Immigration, Naturalization, and Pluralism in Massachusetts, 1870-1965

REED UEDA

That the people of Massachusetts should strive to constitute themselves as an ideal community had been a public creed since the founding of the Bay Colony. As industrialization attracted immigrants and enlarged cities, the search for an ideal community remained no less vigorous. The quest turned along pathways for discovering how the new, urban, immigrant enclaves could become full members of the local and national community. Massachusetts immigrants and natives embarked upon a course of mutual discovery that would provide lessons to the rest of the country on how to make intergroup relations work in the new immigrant America.

After the American Revolution, the commonwealth sought rigorous standards for membership in the local political and civic community. With the onset of mass immigration from Ireland and the far reaches of Europe in the course of the nineteenth century, questions arose over how successfully the newcomers would become American citizens and adopt an American national identity. Indeed, the Know-Nothing Party of the early 1850s pushed for tougher naturalization requirements for immigrants, although it ultimately failed to achieve these measures. In the post-Civil War era, policymakers in Massachusetts approached these questions along pathways that led them into opposed camps of restrictionists and assimilationists.

Massachusetts advocates of immigration restriction such as Henry Cabot Lodge and Prescott F. Hall called for submission to a naturalistic and predetermined collective destiny. From their viewpoint, people were so tied to their heritage that ultimately only ancestry and cultural essentialism mattered for national identity. They did not believe that a citizenship based on active reason of the common person was always possible where immigrants were concerned. The ascriptive deficiencies of immigrants limited their participation in a voluntary community defined by the rational exercise of consent and choice. Nonetheless, in the face of these restrictionists, who urged programs and public philosophies excluding immigrants and setting them apart, an influential and multigenerational network of Massachusetts opinionmakers advocated inclusionary frameworks of liberal nationalism and civic pluralism.

Liberal nationalist ideology defined a societal position for immigrants "above" ethnic origins that sprang from the possibility of assimilation under the aegis of unitary and voluntary citizenship. Under its terms, immigration informed American nationhood, as the assimilation of ethnic minorities became a core process of nation building. The United States, explained one nineteenth-century congressman, was "destined to expand by assimilating." By receiving new inhabitants, America offered to newcomers the possibility of assimilation by a civic inclusion that elevated those who had been "misgoverned" and "oppressed." Theodore Roosevelt expressed this assimilative, transformative concept when he endorsed a homogeneous national identity for immigrants and inveighed against "hyphenated Americanism." He announced an unequivocal faith in the civic capacity of immigrants to become American, saying if an immigrant is "heartily and singly loyal to this republic, then no matter where he was born, he is just as good an American as anyone else."

Adherents to the civic traditions of American liberal nationalism like Theodore Roosevelt assumed the possibility of creating an American national identity on the basis of a politics of reason. Rooted in Enlightenment rationalist philosophy and expounded by Thomas Jefferson, this premise conceived of the United States as an idea, "an idea to which everyone could be assimilated for the very reason that it was a universal idea," according to the historian of nationalist ideology, Hans Kohn. As a country formed out of popular ideological allegiance, the United States could become a "universal nation" that was "valid for the whole of mankind."

The Civic Boundaries of Immigration Policy

The problem of maintaining American citizenship while accepting immigrants reached a crisis over the admission of immigrants from China, and Massachusetts public leaders took a strong interest in the national debate over the eligibility of the Chinese in particular. Although the Chinese population in Massachusetts was very small compared to the situation in California and the far west, Massachusetts leaders saw the issue as crystalizing the relationship of American citizenship to immigration, a question that had absorbed the Know-Nothing Party of Massachusetts before the Civil War, and which promised to arise with renewed vigor as new waves of immigration arrived.

The Massachusetts congressional delegation produced some of the country's most influential spokesmen for liberal nationalist principles in immigration policy, and these delegates made some of their finest philosophical arguments for these principles in the congressional debates on Chinese immigration. Sen. Charles Sumner, who once championed the abolition of slavery, submitted an amendment to a naturalization bill before the U.S. Senate in 1870 intended to provide the right of naturalization to Chinese immigrants. This measure took aim at the original Congressional statute of 1790, which set a uniform rule for naturalization and stipulated that an applicant must be a "free white person." In his sponsoring statement, Sumner invoked the founding touchstone of civic universalism, the Declaration of Independence. "It is `all men' and not a race or color," instructed Sumner, "that are placed under the protection of the Declaration, and such was the voice of our fathers on the fourth day of July, 1776." Despite his eloquent pleas, the Senate rejected his motion to include the Chinese in the new naturalization statute that made black immigrants eligible for American citizenship. A decade later, the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882 that barred Chinese laborers made explicit the prohibition against naturalized citizenship for Chinese immigrants.

In 1886, U.S. Sen. George Frisbie Hoar of Massachusetts rose in the Senate to attack the discriminatory criteria used to exclude immigrants from China. Hoar denounced the exclusion of the Chinese on the basis of their racial identity as a violation of the principle of individual qualities. In 1902, Hoar reiterated this point as the Senate renewed Chinese exclusion. Assailing the tactic of "striking at any class of human beings merely because of race" without regard to "personal and individual worth," Hoar affirmed that "all nationalities contain persons entitled to be recognized everywhere they go on the face of the earth as the equals of every other man."

During World War II, Rep. John McCormack of Massachusetts tapped the liberal nationalist tradition, once invoked by Charles Sumner and George Frisbie Hoar, in his support of the repeal of Chinese exclusion. In the congressional debates over this issue, he argued that opening the gates of the country to Chinese immigrants would provide "a denial of the false doctrine of racism and a reiteration of the American principles of equality of opportunity for life, liberty, and happiness for all mankind." McCormack portrayed the Chinese as heroic freedom fighters against the Japanese invaders of China. Moreover, he argued that in their armed resistance the Chinese people had shown their incipient Americanism:

China is more to America than an ally. She is our friend, united in

her sentiment of friendship for the people of the United States. Our

constitution has been her governmental inspiration. Her children

quote with pride our constitutional guarantees of liberty and equality.

They are taught to believe that America believes that all men are

created equal, with rights and privileges which the State did not

create, but which the State is bound to safeguard and protect. The

Stars and Stripes to the Children of China is the flag of a generous

nation protecting human rights from tyrannical intolerance.

Much to Representative McCormack's satisfaction, Congress abolished Chinese exclusion in 1943. But this step was mainly taken out of urgent realpolitik, the instrumental usage of immigration policy to strengthen the wartime alliance with China, not McCormack's idealistic principles. Nevertheless, McCormack's words signified a turning point in congressional treatment of the Chinese immigration issue, arguing for admission of the Chinese not just according to constitutional principle, but also because of their demonstrated civic capacity.

From the era of Reconstruction, prominent federal legislators from Massachusetts supported the admission of Chinese immigrants by arguing that American nationality was based on an individual's allegiance to the institutions of democracy, not on ancestry. These legislators grounded their advocacy in liberal nationalist values that prescribed the treatment of Chinese immigrants as potential American citizens. Their principled logic formed the central and indispensable tactical mechanism in the long congressional campaign to establish the rights of the Chinese to admission to and naturalization in the United States.

With the official recognition of the civic assimilability of Chinese immigrants, the United States took a major step toward liberalizing the immigration and naturalization system, starting a trend to make it fully consistent with founding constitutional principles. One key member of the Massachusetts congressional delegation in the postwar years, John F. Kennedy, had a leading role in spearheading this drive. Active in immigration policymaking during his terms as a U.S. representative and senator from Massachusetts, Kennedy came to regard restrictionist policy as an anachronism, satisfying neither a national nor an international purpose. As president, Kennedy called for a reformed immigration policy that recognized the equal capacity of all immigrants for American citizenship, a goal finally achieved in 1965 with the passage of the Hart-Celler immigration act.

Naturalization as a Civic Sphere of Assimilation

In the era of immigration restriction, federal policy barred from entry laborers from China and other Asian countries and also classed all permanently resident foreign-born Asians as "aliens ineligible for citizenship." In other words, federal naturalization policy separated Asian immigrants from the national community as a permanent class of aliens. Conversely, it operated toward European and other immigrants to overcome rather than reinforce ethnic status differences.

Judicial decisions, interpreting the statutory requirement that an applicant for citizenship be a "free white person," held that aliens from southern and eastern Europe and the Middle East were racially qualified for naturalization. Jews, Armenians, Turks, and Arabs were judged to be "white" with respect to the right of naturalization. In re Halladjian (1909) marked this course of naturalization policy. In this case, the United States Attorney's office in Boston sought a ruling to deny naturalization to a group of Armenian applicants on the grounds that they were Asiatics who were racially ineligible. The federal district judge in Boston, however, found otherwise and upheld their right to apply for citizenship. Louis Marshall and Max Kohler, who represented the American Jewish Committee, acted as amici curiae to affirm that "white" was an all-inclusive term denoting the eligibility for naturalized citizenship of all persons not designated as members of any other distinct racial category.

Although naturalization policies fell under the domain of the federal government, its ramifications for a state with high levels of immigration such as Massachusetts were too important to leave unattended by local officials. It was necessary for the state government of Massachusetts to address the problem of how immigrant aliens would become American citizens. The Massachusetts Commission on Immigration, empaneled to investigate the local impact of immigration, gathered information on the naturalization of immigrants. The Massachusetts Department of Education monitored how adult immigrants prepared themselves for the naturalization exam by studying English, civics, and American history in special night classes.

The homogeneous sphere of civic identity entered through the naturalization process provided an individual with the rights, opportunities, and duties that paved the way to assimilationist experiences. In this way, naturalization policy softened the dividing line between "old" immigrants and "new" immigrants from Europe, which figured prominently in admissions policy, and it created a common ground of shared civic identity and civic activity. As a social process, naturalization became a voluntary mass movement sensitively reflecting the changing ethnic structure of the alien population in the United States and transforming the social foundations of American nationality and citizenship.

Besides securing allegiance, naturalization was a means of securing the residential and civil status of immigrants in the United States, both as individuals and as family members. Immigrants established an absolute right to residency when naturalized, and their immediate relatives received enhanced immigration and naturalization rights. The minor children of naturalized male immigrants became derivative citizens and so did their wives until 1922. After 1924, spouses and minor children of naturalized immigrants who lived in the home country enjoyed the right to admission to the United States without limitation by restrictionist nationality quotas. For many Italian immigrant laborers, for example, who had spouses or minor children in homeland communities whom they wished to bring to the United States, this right for family reunification made naturalization highly desirable. Furthermore, before a spouse and children joined him, any naturalized immigrant could return for long visitations, assured, because he was a citizen, that he would be able to return to America without fear of exclusion. In the drawn-out process of "chain" migration, naturalized citizenship helped immigrants to maintain their family ties and reunite with family members.

By deciding to naturalize, an immigrant made the crucial move toward building a permanent public identity in the United States. In a 1913 letter to the Massachusetts Commission on Immigration, a Polish immigrant appealed for assistance to help him improve his situation. In his view, achieving naturalized citizenship was intertwined with the pursuit of economic opportunity, learning English, and embracing an official American identity. He described the necessity to escape from an ethnic enclave that cut off contact with "american people."

Continues...

Excerpted from FACES of COMMUNITY Copyright © 2003 by Massachusetts Historical Society
Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.