It’s a few days since I finished Thomas Kessner’s The Golden Door: Italian and Jewish Immigrant Mobility in New York City 1880-1915 so I hope I can still do the book justice. I usually try to write reviews soon after I’m done reading.
The book is a few (three) decades old now, and it’s hard to tell whether it provides evidence to support what are commonly held truths about turn of the century immigration, or whether it held to popularize those truths: immigrants from urban environments (Jews) adjusted to the American economy more quickly than rural immigrants (Italians), the Italians followed the example of the Irish while the Jewish experience was patterned on the German (now known as ethnic succession), the importance of literacy and education, and so on.
Its use of statistical evidence seems to have been groundbreaking in the 70s, atleast according to the reviews and given the fact that Kessner seems to feel obliged to defend his methodology. It’s also funny to see the fact that he used computers used as evidence of his cutting-edge-ness.
Kessner’s goal seems to be to “test” the Horatio Alger narrative of the immigrant success story, using what he calls in his conclusion “materialistic” standards. (Alger was a popular author of moralistic dime novels about how poor boys achieve success through persevereance and hard work). I think this is key to why the book was considered radical in the late 70s: this was an early critique of a mythology that was in essence still in the process of being created. The problem with the linear narrative of success is that it is too linear: Kessner demonstrates than in reality the immigrant experience was much more complex, and that measuring success (mobility) is not that simple.
On a different note, the book seems particularly important to me today, given the debate on immigration and more significantly on integration. Many of the “politically correct” opponents of immigration today, who pretend that there opposition stems from the new immigrants’ resistance to integration, rather than their own thinly veiled racism (Huntington), should be reading Kessner’s book. “New immigrants” (now old) from Italy and Eastern Europe were integrated first economically, and then culturally. We should then be looking for the economic, rather than the cultural, obstacles to the integration of the new new immigrants.
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July 11, 2008 at 4:49 pm
[...] Original post by Self-appointed critic of absolutely everything! [...]