American history and the changing meaning of assimilation

American History and the Changing Meaning of Assimilation [with Comments and Response]Author(s): Olivier Zunz, John Bodnar and Stephan ThernstromSource: Journal of American Ethnic History, Vol. 4, No. 2 (Spring, 1985), pp. 53-84Published by: University of Illinois Press on behalf of the Immigration & Ethnic History SocietyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/27500379 .

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FORUM

American History and the Changing Meaning of Assimilation

OLIVIER ZUNZ

IMMIGRANTS, their children, and members of minority groups feel the

pressures of assimilation. At times, they conform to what they perceive is

the norm; at other times, they resist it. No matter their attitude, the ten

sion of assimilation is always with them. Harold J. Abramson's and

Philip Gleason's recent surveys in the Harvard Encyclopedia of American

Ethnic Groups treat assimilation in the context of broad sociological theories.1 Rather than attempting to add to their comprehensive essays, this essay will discuss assimilation from the seemingly narrower perspec tive of recent American social history. Although American social histo

rians have studied ethnicity in great detail, they have not yet applied their

full resources to an examination of assimilation. This position paper will

try to explain why this is the case. To do so, it will concentrate on the

theoretical positions taken by social historians in the last twenty years, not

on their methodology or their analyses.

RECENT SOCIAL HISTORY

The neglect of assimilation by the current generation of social historians

is remarkable since the concept was central to the school of immigration

history which had flourished in the 1940s and 1950s. Characteristically Oscar Handlin subtitled his Boston s Immigrants "A Study in Accultura

tion."2 Finding the key to assimilation unified a generation of scholars

who were intrigued that American social unity could have been achieved

from such diversity and saw conflict as generated by "maladjustment." At the same time, the so-called "consensus" historians and other intel

lectuals of the postwar era deliberately broke with progressive history to

emphasize the unique character of the American experience. Social history, however, took on a new and significant turn in the

1960s and early 1970s. Those historians who came to the fore in the

mid-60s found the American social system less cohesive than their pre decessors. Disturbed that the general prosperity which they witnessed was

not capable of extinguishing poverty, they attempted to show the limits of

American exceptionalism by detailing the varying degrees of success

different social groups had in translating their opportunities into actual



54 Journal of American Ethnic History / Spring 1985

gains. They assessed the receptivity of the social system in each case and

pointed to many obstacles to mobility that impaired people's chances in

life. In the process, social history became concerned primarily with issues

of social justice rather than with processes like assimilation, which can be

described as "the vision of an increasingly unified society."3 The profu sion of studies naturally led to uncertainty and dissension among mobility historians. The belief that mobility is an illusion undermines the percep tion of America as a "land of opportunity." Rather, the persistent pres ence of minorities is a reminder of the rigidities and inequalities of the so

cial system. Conversely, the belief that mobility is possible, that with rea

sonable social and economic gains people modify their alien behavior

while prejudice against them diminishes and society finds its balance,

reaffirms the image of a unified America. Stephan Thernstrom, at differ

ent times, embraced both beliefs. At first, although underscoring a mod

est achievement and optimism among workers at Newburyport, he criti

cized the majority view that nineteenth-century economic, technological, and environmental change produced a wide array of opportunities and

benefitted the majority of individuals, but he later revised his position. He

concluded in The Other Bostonians (1973) that opportunities for ad

vancement offset the disadvantages that immigrants may have suffered.

The availability of these opportunities significantly impeded "the for

mation of class-based protest movements that sought fundamental altera

tions in the economic system."4 Michael Katz immediately offered the

sobering, although overdrawn objection that mobility merely gave the il

lusion of advancement.5 Interpretations of Horatio Alger's stories stress

ing not the reality of upward mobility but rather luck and the fear of

downward mobility, also emphasized the instability of the nineteenth

century social system.6 Taken as a whole, therefore, the debate over mo

bility has helped us reach a balanced view of social reality, free from the

oversimplifications of the rags-to-riches myth.

Mobility studies have had other implications as well. Mobility histo

rians, perhaps unconsciously or unwittingly, reconciled the progressive and consensus schools of history. In their debates, they located the poten tial for conflict in the history of ethnic, social, and racial entities. But be

cause minorities were continually integrated into the majority, this con

flict rarely materialized. By positing an ever-present social mobility as the

mechanism of social change, they suggested that the two older views of

America were not contradictory. Mobility was at once an assimilation de

vice and a safety valve. But this interpretation, although attractive, leaves

basic questions unresolved. Did mobility operate effectively at all times



Forum 55

and in all places? Is mobility a constant agent of social change? Is the

dynamic of American society an endless repetition of the same unvarying transformation?

By the mid-70s, the debate shifted but these questions were still unan

swered. Hartmut Kaelble accurately remarked that mobility ceased to

interest American social historians when it lost its radical appeal; that is, when studies revealed that ordinary Americans experienced periods of

significant upward mobility more often than frustration in their occupa tional careers.7 Social historians had now refined techniques of collective

biography. In the 70s, under the impetus of the ethnic revival, they suc

cessfully demonstrated the strengths and adaptability of groups which had

been traditionally considered alienated from society. They revealed that

the immigrant derived dignity from his position in his own world and not

through the efforts of the social worker, the friendly visitor, or the

naturalizing judge. The graduation ceremony of the Ford English school during World War

I, where workers were learning their "new" language, illustrates the

older, popular, and mythical view of the metamorphosis of the immigrant worker into an American:

On the stage was represented an immigrant ship. In front of it was a huge

melting pot. Down the gang plank came the members of the class dressed

in their national garbs and carrying luggage such as they carried when they landed in this country. Down they poured into the Ford melting pot and

disappeared. Then the teachers began to stir the contents of the pot with

long ladles. Presently the pot began to boil over and out came the men

dressed in their best American clothes and waving American flags.8

Work in social history has significantly revised such a colorful descrip

tion, making available to us a larger body of evidence than that which had

been considered by historians of mobility patterns. Social historians have taught us to view individuals as more than mere

participants in social and cultural change. We are beginning to understand

assimilation as a complex interactive process in which immigrants are not

merely unwitting beneficiaries of a growing set of opportunities. Recent

interpretations have insisted that immigrants were instigators, not passive

recipients, of change. Assimilation, it is argued, is not a shift from mi

nority to majority status, but a collaborative process which involves the

whole population. Thus, all become actors, the anonymous workers as

well as the industrial leaders. As Michael Katz describes him, Wilson

Benson, an immigrant to Hamilton, who moved back and forth from Ire

land to Scotland before migrating to North America, living in sixteen




different places and working at thirty different occupations, does not

emerge as a hero?this is too grand a word?but as someone who coped

successfully with the real (and new) world.9 Although his success was

modest, his story is typical of that of thousands of other migrants. In the

end, Benson surmounted his trials to gain stability and respectability. In

my book on Detroit, I tried to convey a sense of the commitment and re

sourcefulness displayed by Polish home owners who mortgaged the new

cottages built with their own hands to finance the construction of commu

nity churches.10 David Montgomery also demonstrated this point in his

last book, which he devoted to the theme of "workers' control."11 He

views the search for autonomy on the shop floor as part of the larger effort

individuals make to control their own destiny. Immigrants insisted on

maintaining certain standards of respectability. As Kenneth Kusmer re

ports in his study of tramps in America, nineteenth-century tramps and

bums?riding from one train yard to another?were often native-white

Americans.12 Seen in context of these findings, assimilation is somewhat

of a misnomer, an abstraction which reflects only fitfully a pluralist and

fluid reality.

Building on the work of anthropologists, social historians have also

shown that ethnicity may be a quality which owes as much to the circum

stances of settlement in a new country as it does to the culture imported from the old country. Horace Kallen's classic observation?"an Irishman

is always an Irishman, a Jew always a Jew. Irishman or Jew is born; citi

zen, lawyer, or church-member is made"13?does not apply if the culture

of Jewish and Irish immigrants arose, at least in part, from distinctly American conditions. Anthropologists Sidney Mintz and Richard Price

support this view in their discussion of slave societies. They argue, for

example, that the notion of an "African heritage" is subject to qualifica tion. They explain that "the series of institutions that emerged in any

early slave population may be viewed as a sort of framework by means of

which cultural materials could be employed, standardized, and trans

formed into new traditions. Thus whether we have in mind the way slaves

fell in love and created familial groupings, or the way they gathered in

regular groupings to worship, the content of such behavior can be viewed

as an aspect of the social relationships." They assert that the historian's

task is to delineate "the processes by which those cultural materials that

were retained could contribute to the institution-building the slaves

undertook to inform their condition with coherence, meaning and some

measure of autonomy."14 Building on such conceptualizations, social

historians like John Bodnar, Josef Barton and Tamara Hareven have



Forum 57

shown the extent to which family and community relationships?what Bodnar calls "the cultural content of the immigrant working class"?

were not "simply infused into American society from abroad but [were]

largely generated by the complex process of industrialization itself."15

Recently, Dino Cinel explained the movement back and forth across the

Atlantic of Italians as an integral part of the immigrants' struggle toward a

compromise between tradition and innovation.16 The strategies which en

abled partly imported subcultures to grow and live semiautonomously in a

new country helped cushion conflicts, perhaps as much as the relative

openness of the social system. Similar processes of cultural transfer and

innovation have been found to characterize the social and cultural foun

dations of black communities in northern cities. Scholars, free from no

tions of a "tangle of pathology," have demonstrated community achievement in face of the almost insurmountable handicap of racism.17

Not only have social historians shed new light on the origins of ethni

city, they have also documented the many faces of ethnicity in different

places in the country, the variety of circumstances encountered by the

groups, and the changes that affected their destiny. The proliferation of

these findings makes it increasingly difficult to talk authoritatively about

ethnicity without immediately adjusting one's statements for local condi

tions and circumstances. It seems clear, for example, that immigrants had

more opportunities?and hence could develop a more complex social

structure?in western cities where they often were the first settlers. The

Germans in Milwaukee were able to participate in the construction of the

city itself. In 1858, as Kathleen Conzen had discovered, the German

settlers of Milwaukee with some justice proclaimed: "Have we not

cleared the forest, drained the swamp, filled the hollow, levelled the hill,

dragged the first log to the first cabin, carried the first stone to the first

courthouse, set the first type, peddled the first wares?"18 Under these

conditions, German autonomy flourished and intraethnic mobility was

encouraged. But in Boston at the same time, where the Yankees restricted

the Irish role in the community, the social order was more rigid.19 These various advances make it difficult to return to the assimilationist

view inherent in the majority of the mobility studies, but there are also

limitations inherent in the view stressed more recently of a pluralistic

America, fragmented into an endless number of autonomous com

munities. A plausible solution to this dilemma is to view these two

perspectives as complementary, not contradictory. Enclaves exist, but

they are only temporary, and thus ethnicity is best understood within a

framework of generations. This answer, while certainly containing much




truth, is nonetheless incomplete. As I read the various current debates,

however, I sense that social historians are not utilizing effectively their

expanding knowledge of ethnicity to understand assimilation. The current

discussion of the relationship between class and ethnicity suggests that we

may, in fact, be moving away from understanding assimilation, a process which will continue to elude us unless we examine it in the context of so

cial change.

CLASS AND ETHNICITY

Historians engaged in the debate over the role of class in American soci

ety advocate the merits of several different approaches, all of which limit

the analysis of assimilation because they treat ethnicity as a secondary

category. No doubt, defining class is one of the most difficult conceptual tasks facing the social historian. Marx himself left the topic of social clas

ses open in the unfinished chapter of the Capital.20 British labor historian

E.P. Thompson made a very strong case that the proper usage of class is

as a historical category, as a social process which evolves over time. As

he put it "class is defined by men as they live their own history, and, in

the end, this is its only definition." Or more explicitly, he remarked, "class eventuates as men and women live their productive relations, and

as they experience their determinate situations, within the 'ensemble' of

the social relations, with their inherited culture and expectations."21 But he derived from this position an assumption which has sent Ameri

can social historians?eager to counteract an all too conservative socio

logical establishment?off on the wrong track. For Thompson, class is in

separable from the notion of class struggle. He maintains that it is in dis

covering the need for class struggle that class consciousness emerges. His

years of reflection on English history have led him to conclude that "the

wrong assumption is that classes exist and that they struggle because they exist; instead they come into existence out of that struggle."22 As a con

sequence, Thompson denies any value to literal quantitative measurement

(the number of wage-earners; the number of white collar workers, and so

on). And he reserves the word "class" for a Klasse f?r sich (class for it

self), discarding out of hand a Klasse an sich (class in itself).23 Other Marxist scholars do recognize the value of measurement but set

intriguing limits to its proper use, as is evident from a recent exchange of

ideas in the American Historical Review between Edward Pessen, Michael Katz and Robert Wiebe.24 The issues discussed go beyond those

found in most mobility studies, which usually entail only the recognition of inequality in a land of promise and an evaluation of its extent, and



Forum 59

center on the more complex problem of devising categories for social

analysis. Katz, supported here by Wiebe, takes the position that there

should be a strong differentiation between stratification, which he consid

ers an essentially descriptive tool, and class, a category he reserves for the

two great classes of the nineteenth century, the business-class and the

working-class. This conceptual distinction differentiates the means used

to describe a social structure in fine detail?stratification?from those

used to analyze its dynamic?class. Pessen, on the other hand, treats class

and stratification interchangeably, and in the tradition of American

sociology, places people on a scale of measurement according to a

"crystallization" model. "Class", then, loses its potential as a historical

force, becoming a mere collection of attributes which reflects particular levels of inequality.

The emphasis which underlies this exchange, on class as a sociological and mental category understood only in the context of experience, is a

welcome refinement of Thompson's "cultural marxism." Stratification

(for lack of a better name), however, has the potential to play a more sig nificant role than we would gather from this debate. It has deep roots and

precise functions in history. Counting wage-earners, white-collar em

ployees, and others allows the historian to take stock of both changes in

numbers and in categories.25 The rapid change of the United States in the

nineteenth century saw with it the emergence of classes that did not exist

before. Struggle was only a part of their experience. To take a well

known example, the struggle that the women of Lowell waged against their employers was an indicator of the disjunctive thought patterns that

characterized their lives; they attempted to preserve their conscious Re

publican heritage and to react against their proletarianization. Conscious

ness, however, emerged from the totality of their experience, not just the

struggle.26 As classes emerge, or are redefined by shifting constituencies

and large-scale processes of change, they take on new forms. Labeling the variety of groups, ranking and ordering them according to multiple criteria is in effect to study a process of change. Seen is this light, stratifi

cation is not mere description, but more properly, the identification of

new categories.

Like the study of class, the study of ethnicity recognizes the dynamics of change and also involves the classification of individuals into catego ries. And as in class, over time some groups grow while others decline.

The sometimes parallel histories of social and ethnic groups have led

many historians to confuse class and ethnicity and treat these two catego ries interchangeably. According to the assimilationist vision offered by




these historians, the relationship between class and ethnicity is simple.

Although traces of ethnicity may be long lasting, ethnicity is essentially a

temporary attribute, best understood in the context of the first generation. Since most immigrants entered this country at the bottom of the social

ladder, ethnicity is identified as a working-class attribute. The conse

quences of the types of assimilation sociologist Milton Gordon distin

guished (cultural then structural) become apparent as workers/immigrants

(or their children) improve their lot and are integrated into the larger soci

ety.27 In other models, assimilation also entails diffusion of the ethnic

group into the wider religious group, a pattern diagnosed as the "triple

melting pot" in the 1940s by sociologists who saw religion gaining as

cendency over ethnicity as a category of importance in American life.28

These sociologists based their findings on increasing intermarriage not

simply between different ethnic groups but rather within larger religious communities.

In contrast to this smooth interweaving of class and ethnicity, other

historians, especially labor historians have touched on the conflicting hierarchies of class and ethnicity, but only as part of another effort. Labor

historians, for instance, have studied ethnic subcultures in American so

ciety as part of an attempt to shed light on more pressing issues such as

the source of class consciousness (as it emerged from German radicalism,

for example) as well as the reaction to capitalistic exploitation (ethnicity

provided an alternative to unionism). Thus Herbert Gutman finds the

roots of class consciousness in the ethnic commitments of the Gilded

Age.29 Other historians see a more complex, integral relationship between

these conflicting hierarchies; for example, John Jentz points to ethnicity as the source of class consciousness in his study of Chicago bakers.

"Without the [German] neighborhood base and the control of the neigh borhood bread bakeries, there would have been no journeymen bakers'

union in Chicago in the Gilded age." But as he also points out building "a strong interethnic city-wide union movement" which would require that "the baker unionists. . . move out of the neighborhood," was a

"feat" only sporadically achieved.30 Generally, however, these histo

rians find that ethnicity is only a secondary attribute. Some of them have

even dismissed ethnicity in favor of class as the only valid analytical cate

gory. Alan Dawley in his study of Lynn shoemakers, a book on the for

mation of the American working class, mentions the Irish only in pas

sing.31 And Michael Katz, in his most recent analysis of the social struc

ture of Hamilton and Buffalo, presents a series of equations to show that

ethnicity played a minor role in people's attitudes.32 After elaborately de



Forum 61

fining the concept of class, he argues that ethnicity had little relationship to economic characteristics such as wealth when "occupation and prop

erty are kept constant." Katz is able to make this case because he never

gives ethnicity its due. He treats it as a simple, uniform reflection of na

tionality and religion, not as a complex attribute worthy of careful defini

tion.

The tendency to downplay ethnicity can be found in urban history as

well. Theodore Hershberg and his associates, in their study of nine

teenth-century Philadelphia, formulated an ecological model, placing the

primary emphasis, not on cultural areas as the Chicago sociologists did, but on work sites. They argued that "industry," not ethnicity dominated

the spatial arrangements of the nineteenth-century city. Hershberg's

study, valuable as it is on many other points, does not conclusively dis

prove the theory that the nineteenth-century American city was divided

primarily along ethnic lines.33 Ethnicity is not found to be an important factor because the project concentrated on the material parameters of

urban life rather than on cultural indicators. Dismissing ethnicity or sub

serving it to class analysis therefore impairs the serious treatment of as

similation in much recent social history. Another danger is to subsume ethnicity, not to class but to power. A

society is of course governed by a set of power relations. Some make de

cisions, and others abide by those decisions. Some influence the outcome

of debates, and other do not. The reticence social historians have dis

played when addressing political issues?a reticence which stems from

their disillusionment with narrative political history, as well as an empha sis on the material parameters of life derived from a generation of Marxist

historians?has brought sharp and welcome criticism from all camps in

cluding Marxists. In Fruits of Merchant Capital, Eugene Genovese and

Elizabeth Fox-Genovese have remarked: "as admirable as much of the

recent social history has been and as valuable as much of the description

of the life of the lower classes may eventually prove, the subject as a

whole is steadily sinking into a neo-antiquarian swamp presided over by liberal ideologues, the burden of whose political argument, notwith

standing the usual pretense of not having a political argument, rests on an

evasion of class confrontation."34

Indeed, history of the immigrant working class has become increas

ingly cultural in direction. American social/labor historians, addressing the problems of labor history have often concentrated on the "particular

experiences" of working groups or even individuals, have stressed con

sciousness, culture, ways of life, without determining the connections




between the groups studied and others.35 These social or labor historians

are interested in politics but only in a limited sense. Their "radically de

institutionalized understanding of politics, in which the possible sources

of working-class oppositional impulse are displaced from the recognized media of political parties and trade unions into a variety of non-institu

tional settings, embracing behaviour previously regarded as 'non-politi

cal'?e.g. crime, street violence, riots, industrial sabotage, mental ill

ness, etc." is representative of what Geoff Eley and Keith Nield call "the

post-Thompson florescence of social history."36 This movement away from the traditional sphere of politics was reinforced by a renewed influ

ence of ethnography on history. In a parallel but unrelated trend, political historians themselves con

tributed to the depoliticization of social history. The ethnocultural school

of electoral analysis represents a movement away from traditional poli tics. To be sure, political historians analyzed the very stuff of politics,

elections, but the outcome, they told us, was not determined by political

parties, economic issues or specific political battles, but by cultural and

religious affiliations. Voting reflected a clash of religious values "be

tween those dubbed pietists or evangelicals and those dubbed liturgicals and ritualists."37 Thus, much of what is meant by "the new political

history" is a shift away from class and economic issues as well as the po litical logic of elections toward a cultural explanation of American poli tics.

In view of these developments, the Genoveses are right to assert that

social historians have certainly not provided a comprehensive account of

the role various social, ethnic, or socioethnic groups have played in the

distribution of power. But the Genoveses' call for the study of the politi cal antagonisms between rulers and ruled ignores much recent work in so

cial history and, again, does not leave room for the role of ethnicity in

power relationships. Recent studies have, for example, re focused our at

tention on elites and especially the ways in which elite groups interacted

with other power groups in the society. We now understand, for example, the relationship between Harvard educated Mugwumps and Irish machine

politicians in Boston, as well as the conditions which enabled New York

Swallowtails to influence the Tammany machine.38 Social history con

cerns itself with politics. By showing that members of the lower classes

were not passive recipients of social change but had "lives of their own,"

social historians also showed that these people assumed responsibility for

political decisions and set the limits within which they could effectively

operate. For example, Ira Katznelson, recently summarizing many



Forum 63

studies in urban and immigration history, offered perceptive observations

on the consequences of the separation between home and work in Ameri

can society, a society in which political parties build networks of loyalties in ethnic neighborhoods while labor unions perform the same task in the

work place. "What needs to be explained," Katznelson notes, "is not

the absence of class in American politics but its limitation to the arena of

work."39

TOWARD SOCIAL CHANGE

The lessons to be gained from the debate over ethnicity, class, and power are clear. Different schools interpret the past according to their theoretical

perspectives and weigh factors accordingly. Social theory has an inescap able influence on historical interpretation as do political commitments.

But a broad understanding of assimilation demands that we do not let so

cial theory or political commitments exclusively guide our understanding of the balance of class, ethnicity, and power. Social theory is only a tool

to understand social change and should not become a blinder. Yet too

often, social historians have downplayed the role of ethnicity in American

life. I would argue that we can more effectively penetrate the process of

assimilation in American society by defining those large-scale factors that

cut across lines of ethnic, economic, or political loyalty to influence peo

ple's lives. For assimilation is not a constant but varies according to the

interplay of outside conditions.

I have attempted to understand the effect of social change on assimila

tion in my study of the industrialization of Detroit.401 would like to take

the opportunity of this forum to reflect on my conclusions in light of this

discussion and revise some ideas on this topic that I proposed there.41

What I saw in Detroit is that assimilation in American society was af

fected by a shift from a dual to a single opportunity structure, a shift

partly due to the industrialization of the city, and most visible around

World War I. I explained that the dual opportunity structure?reinforced

by intraethnic family and associational life?was characteristic of the

nineteenth century and was visible in the labor markets, in the organiza tion of the neighborhoods, in the acquisition of property, and was condu

cive to a form of ethnic semi autonomy.

My emphasis on ethnic entrepreneurship is hardly new; it is

documented in classic immigrant novels, in the immigrant press, in

numerous public documents on the organization of work; other historians

have also studied the workings of ethnic businesses.42 What struck me,

however, is that ethnic enclaves were freer to grow in the midst of the




larger society in the nineteenth century than in the twentieth, and that

strong intraethnic group channels for upward economic mobility were

established within them. As a result, nineteenth-century immigrants en

countered a greater variety of opportunities than their twentieth-century

counterparts. A German white-collar worker of Detroit or Milwaukee

might work in a downtown Anglo-Saxon bank and experience a distinct

demarcation between home and work. But as often, he would work in a

German-owned firm, and his life?including the language he most often

spoke, the press he read, the food he ate, and the builder who constructed

his home?was German. Certainly, in late nineteenth-century Detroit, the

German community, whose members could rise to fill many levels of the

social structure, was fully articulated and autonomous. With many skills, the Germans worked for large industrial concerns or established them

selves as independent craftsmen, often employing a few men of their

own. In many cities, ethnic groups dominated particular industries, not

only as general laborers but also as manufacturers and wholesalers. Those

members of the immigrant communities who were employed in white

collar occupations did not have to enter the Anglo-Saxon world. Their

rise could be contained within a social system based on complex inter

group relationships. Two qualifications are in order here. First, a pattern of ethnic semiautonomy does not imply consensus or the absence of con

flict within communities. Secondly, the dual opportunity structure which

characterized the nineteenth century, was only typical of large ethnic en

claves. And even within these large groups, those few who climbed to the

top could elect not to remain within the group. The important point, how

ever, is that they could elect to do so. In addition, communities often

created channels for the political expression of mobility and indepen dence.43 In short, the ambiguities of a dual opportunity structure were

more influential than either the assimilationist or autonomous tendencies

which it encompassed. That two structures of daily life coexisted was

more important than the existence of any one of them.

This duality disappeared as ethnic autonomy receded. By World War I,

ethnicity was well under way to becoming a working-class attribute. To

put it differently, sociologists have described many times the ways in

which middle-class members of an ethnic group left the area of first set

tlement, but they have never said (to my knowledge) that this process be

came general sometime between 1910 and 1925. The transition from one

socio-spatial system, the ethnic neighborhood, to another, the working class neighborhood organized around big factories?probably clearer for

Detroit, which grew very rapidly than for other cities of the industrial

belt?is indicative of the transformation which marked the American



Forum 65

metropolis during this period. This significant change can aid us in under

standing the assimilation pressures of modern America.

America in 1910 or 1920 was very different from the land which wel

comed the old immigrants in 1850. The difficulty which the new immi

grant experienced was not simply a matter of geographic origin or liter

acy, but reflected the new, more restrictive environment they encoun

tered. A poverty-stricken German of the 1850s was not better educated

than a poverty-striken Hungarian of the 1920s. But he had access to eco

nomic opportunities within his own group. By the time an Italian or Slav

joined his fellow immigrants to work for Carnegie or Ford, many such

opportunities had disappeared. In Detroit, in Pittsburgh, and in almost every major city that has been

studied, a cohesive Anglo-Saxon elite gained control of the emerging

corporate giants in the early twentieth century.44 The changing scale of

activities and the different forms of control exercised by this proprietary

group greatly affected the relationship between class and ethnicity. A

large shoe factory in Lynn in 1850 might employ two hundred workers, a

railroad shop in Cleveland in 1900 perhaps three thousand, but by 1914

Ford's Highland Park factory alone employed almost fourteen thousand.

Many avenues of mobility previously available within the semiautono

mous ethnic group were now controlled by owners outside the group. The

resulting homogenization of American society is a process still little

understood despite its consequences for many social and psychological traits in modern American life.

To be sure, immigrants were not all neatly channelled within a single

opportunity structure. Some industries remained in control of ethnic

groups. But the immigrant industrialist felt greater pressures to assimilate

than ever before. The creation of the movie industry in Los Angeles, which was almost entirely controlled by Jews of modest background, is

an interesting case of the assimilation of ethnic entrepreneurs. Lary May

argues that the element of "Yiddish folk culture," which encouraged

"celebrations," including "music, singing, dancing, and. . . drinking"; which offered a conception of women as "sexual beings," despite a

taboo on premarital sex; and which promoted indulgence and "extrava

gance" in contrast to Protestant belief in frugality, allowed them to

realize the immense possibilities of the new industry. The first movie

magnates initially relied primarily on intraethnic forms of borrowing as

ethnic financiers were more willing to take the risk than others. These

men soon broke away, however, from their ethnic support, because suc

cess in the mass market required secularization. Many married gentiles and "each of these producers made films and statements filled with pat




riotism."45 Although their perspective as members of a minority enabled

then to diagnose the needs of a majority, they were forced to move out

side the ethnic community, away from the first neighborhood nickelo

deons where they started, in order to secure their gains. The experience of these businessmen implies a significant change in

the relationship between class and ethnicity, a change brought about by the transformations of social relations, by a changing economy, and by the growing uniformity of American culture. In the nineteenth century, the imbrication of class and ethnicity was less complete. It was marked by a diversity of experiences and a greater degree of autonomy for members

of ethnic groups than in the twentieth when channels of upward mobility are more closely, more obviously related to a single opportunity struc

ture.46

My analysis of social change in Detroit, however, has its significant limitations. Some critics have argued that I have downplayed evidence of

class consciousness in the nineteenth century; others that I have ignored the persisting strength of ethnicity in the 1920s and beyond. They may be

right. My own criticism is that I left my analysis of this new organiza tional synthesis incomplete. I looked at Detroit's social scene "from the

bottom up," and I looked at it "from the top down." But I was unable to

look at it, if I may say, "out from the middle." Unfortunately, I am not

alone in neglecting this perspective. In our hurry to enshrine workers as

heroes and to condemn robber barons as villains, we social historians

have forgotten the powerful influences of the middle-classes. Yet the key to immigrant assimilation in this period might very well lie, not only in

abstract changes imposed from industrialists' offices, or in the many per

sisting forms of ethnic autonomy, but in the formation of what we now

call the middle-class.

I hasten to add that I am using the phrase middle-class here loosely. I

am not attempting to define it; I am not even thinking of it as an analytical

category. But I believe an examination which focuses on the activities of

those filling the middle range of the social structure rather than of those

occupying extreme positions will give us a different view of assimilation.

At present there is a gap between the study of industrial elites, which we

begin to know well, and the study of the working-class. A few recent

books have described middle-class attitudes in Jacksonian America, en

gendering much controversy over the meaning of the phrase middle-class

for this early period.47 But there is almost nothing written about the

middle-class in the industrialization period. Michael Katz and his col

laborators make clear that their two-class model applies to "the mid



Forum 67

nineteenth century, prior to the feminization of office work, the elabora

tion of very many organizational bureaucracies, or the widespread exis

tence of department stores and supermarkets." Katz describes the social

structure of the mid-nineteenth century at a unique and short-lived turning

point, after artisans had lost their autonomy and before white-collar

workers had grown in numbers. For the later period, he concedes the dif

ficulty of "interpreting the class position of the great army of white-collar

workers and salaried professionals who first appear in the late 19th cen

tury. . .. Here, bureaucracy takes the place of the factory as the paradig matic form of organization."48 Until recently historians could only work

backward from sociological classics on white-collar work written in the

1950s and 1960s, when the big corporation had already come of age. Other studies focusing on middle-class attitudes during the industrializa

tion period were severely criticized. For instance, before the rise of social

history, Robert Wiebe suggested that the severe social crisis of the 1880s

and 1890s stemmed from the breakdown of local and regional systems of

power and status and the ambition of the middle-class to fulfill its destiny

through bureaucratic means. As he put it, "men and women [were]

building a new structure of loyalties to replace the decaying system of

19th-century communities."49 At the time, Wiebe's hypothesis was at

tacked on the grounds that a highly mobile society could not be frag mented into isolated units in the first place. The criticism was misdi

rected. We have developed a more sophisticated grasp of the mechanisms

of population movements, and we know now that a highly mobile society can also maintain rigid structures. Despite this new awareness, Wiebe's

main point has remained unverified in social history. After two decades of

research mostly devoted to the working-class, we still know virtually

nothing about how the new bureaucratic order affected middle-class life.

Because we thought we knew so much about a middle-class ideology

(through sermons, speeches at business banquets, marriage literature,

educational pamphlets), we have neglected to ask whether the new tempo of life affected the lives and the ideology of the middle-class, and then

spread to other segments of society.

Merely filling a gap in our current knowledge of social history will not

of itself help us to understand assimilation. We must identify subgroups within the middle-class most clearly associated with social change and

determine their influence on other groups. Hopefully, such a study of lin

kages among members of the society will produce a new vision of as

similation, a vision free both from the assumption of internal consent and

self-willed changes and from the ideas of coercion and manipulation.




Some historians have already charted the way. For the late nineteenth and

early twentieth centuries, Alfred Chandler rendered a great service to so

cial history when he redirected business history, caught in subjective, sterile disputes which pitted "wealth" versus "commonwealth," to is

sues of structure.50 In the broad organizational revolution which he de

scribes, big business not only took over the production of most goods and

services and changed the tempo of life, it also provided most public ser

vices, including all forms of communications. The immense work of

carrying out this innovative task fell in the hands of a new army of sal

aried personnel. Railroad executives, middle-level managers, salesmen, clerical workers of both sexes, white-collar federal employees played a

role in promoting a new work culture and with it, social change. This

group grew in number very rapidly. In 1903 Pierre du Pont, as treasurer

of Du Pont, had twenty-five employees working under him; less than a

year later, after reorganizing the company, his own office in Wilmington

supervised over two hundred employees. Most corporations followed the

same pattern of growth. Everywhere in the country, salesmen held meet

ings and received directives from headquarters, while only a few years

earlier, products were distributed by independent agents. At Du Pont, salesmen were told: "Don't forget you are a part of the organization just as much as the bass drum is a part of the orchestra?likewise, don't forget that bass drum solos are rather monotonous"; or "Before you go out to

tell people you represent this firm look yourself over and see whether you do or not."51 The sales meetings ended with patriotic songs and promo tional couplets:

Town and Country, Vitrolac, Antoxide!

These are known both far and wide!

All Paint dealers from coast to coast

Know these paints of which we boast!52

Chandler documented the organizational change underway. If he is

correct, the new middle-class managers were important agents of social

change during the industrialization process. These people carried the or

ganizational revolution into many sectors of society several decades be

fore "Taylorism" and scientific management formally imposed it on mil

lions of workers. Our understanding of assimilation, therefore, must in

clude a close study of this group of people, and its relationship in the liv

ing environment to other segments of society. We need now to identify those segments of the middle-class most clearly involved in social

change. In my view, these segments of a new middle-class embodied new

values far removed from both the exclusiveness of the upper-class and the



Forum 69

autonomous tendencies of the immigrant working-classes. The challenge,

then, is to tell the story of how they undertook the job of industrializing the land and possibly homogenized it in the process. We need to discover

how the emergence of a new class of managers translated into life styles

(methods of counting, of buying, of building, of educating) which be

came America's dominant cultural form and which contributed to blend

the different segments of American society. Although industrialization

obviously created enormous social tensions which often erupted in open class conflicts, organizational synthesis imposed a new, more homogene ous social order, capable of integrating people of various ethnic origins.

I developed this example only to stress that our understanding of as

similation needs to parallel that of large-scale social transformations. As

similation is an important concept which can be understood only within

the changing context in which it takes place. By locating the various

agents of change in the social structure, by seeing how they might act as

creators, implementers, and receivers of innovations, by paying greater attention to the process of class formation, in other words by studying so

cial change, we can better understand the meanings of cultural transfers

experienced by immigrants.

NOTES

This paper was read at one of the theme sessions ("Defining our Terms: Assimilation") of the annual meeting of the Organization of American Historians in Los Angeles in April 1984. Some of the material presented here comes from an essay entitled "The Synthesis

of Social Change," a chapter in the forthcoming collection Reliving the Past: The Worlds

of Social History, ed. Olivier Zunz, University of North Carolina Press. I wish to thank

Charles Feigenoff, Robert D. Cross, and Thomas Dublin for their comments on this

paper. 1. Stephan Thernstrom, ed., Harvard Encyclopedia of American Ethnic Groups (Cam

bridge, Mass., 1980); see also John Higham's outstanding essay, "Integrating America:

The Problem of Assimilation in the Nineteenth Century," Journal of American Ethnic

History, 1 (Fall 1981): 7-25.

2. Oscar Handlin, Boston's Immigrants, 1790-1880: A Study in Acculturation (Cam

bridge, Mass., 1941). 3. John Higham, "Current Trends in the Study of Ethnicity in the United States,"

Journal of American Ethnic History, 2 (Fall 1982): 7.

4. Stephan Thernstrom, Poverty and Progress: Social Mobility in a Nineteenth-Cen

tury City (Cambridge, Mass., 1964), pp. 163-165; idem, The Other Bostonians: Poverty and Progress in the American Metropolis, 1880-1970 (Cambridge, Mass., 1973), p. 259; see the recent review essay by Howard Chudacoff, "Success and Security: The Meaning of Social Mobility in America," Reviews in American History (Special issue: "The

Promise of American History, Progress and Prospects"), 10 (December 1982): 101-112.

5. Michael Katz, The People of Hamilton, Canada West: Family and Class in a Mid

Nineteenth-Century City (Cambridge, Mass., 1975).

6. Daniel T. Rodgers, The Work Ethic in Industrial America, 1850-1920 (Chicago,

1978), pp. 140-43; Michael Zuckerman, "The Nursery Tales of Horatio Alger, "Ameri

can Quarterly, 24 (May 1972): 191-209.




7. Hartmut Kaelble, "Foreword by Guest Editor," Journal of Social History, 17

(Spring 1984): 406. 8. Quoted in Jonathan Schwartz, "Henry Ford's Melting Pot," m Ethnic Groups in the

City: Culture, Institutions, and Power, ed. Otto Feinstein (Lexington, Mass., 1972), p. 193.

9. Katz, People of Hamilton, pp. 103-6.

10. Olivier Zunz, The Changing Face of Inequality: Urbanization, Industrial Devel

opment, and Immigrants in Detroit, 1880-1920 (Chicago, 1982), pp. 177-95.

11. David Montgomery, Worker's Control in America: Studies in the History of Work,

Technology, and Labor Struggles (Cambridge, 1979). 12. Kenneth L. Kusmer, "The Underclass: Tramps and Vagrants in Urban America,

1870-1920," unpublished paper, Symposium on Urban Development in the Age of In

dustrialism, Cologne, June 1981.

13. Quoted in John Higham, Send These To Me: Jews and Other Immigrants in Urban

America (New York, 1975), p. 204.

14. Sidney W. Mintz and Richard Price, An Anthropological Approach to the Afro American Past: A Caribbean Perspective (Philadelphia, 1976), p. 21.

15. John Bodnar, "Immigrants, Kinship, and the Rise of Working-Class Realism in

Industrial America," Journal of Social History, 14 (Fall 1980): 59.

16. Dino Cinel, From Italy to San Francisco: The Immigrant Experience (Stanford,

Calif., 1982). 17. See Kenneth L. Kusmer,^ Ghetto Takes Shape: Black Cleveland, 1870-1930 (Ur

bana, 111., 1976); the most powerful argument against the breakdown thesis is in James

Borchert, Alley Life in Washington: Family, Community, Religion, and Folk Life in the

City, 1850-1970 (Urbana, 111., 1980). 18. Kathleen Conzen, Immigrant Milwaukee, 1836-1860 (Cambridge, Mass., 1976),

p. 225.

19.' Thernstrom, Other Bostonians, pp. 131-135; compare with R.A. Burchell, The

San Francisco Irish, 1848-1880 (Berkeley, Calif., 1980). 20. See Pierre Vilar, Une histoire en construction. Approche marxiste et prob

l?matiques conjoncturelles (Paris, 1982), p. 421.

21. E.P. Thompson, "Eighteenth-Century English Society: Class Struggle Without

Class," Social History, 3 (May 1978): 146-50.

22. Ibid.

23. One will find similar observations in Craig Calhoun, The Question of Class Strug

gle: Social Foundations of Popular Radicalism during the Industrial Revolution (Chicago,

1982), p. 19; the influence of Thompson's "cultural marxism" on American scholarship is still increasing. In a session at the Organization of American Historians meeting in Los

Angeles devoted to "class formation," the participants concentrated their analyses on

symbolic manifestations of class consciousness as seen through processions. Not once did

we hear words like "social justice," "mobility," or "opportunity" which were at the

center of the debate only a few years ago. 24. AHR forum on Edward Pessen's "Social Structure and Politics in American His

tory," and rejoinder by Michael Katz and Robert Wiebe American Historical Review, 87

(December 1982): 1290-1341.

25. On the meaning of numeracy, see Patricia Cline Cohen,/! Calculating People: The

Spread of Numeracy in Early America (Chicago, 1982). 26. See Thomas Dublin, Women at Work: The Transformation of Work and Commu

nity in Lowell, Massachusetts, 1826-1860 (New York, 1979). 27. Milton Gordon, Assimilation in American Life: The Role of Race, Religion, and

National Origins (New York, 1964). 28. Ruby Jo Reeves Kennedy, "Single or Triple Melting Pot: Intermarriage Trends in



Forum 71

New Haven, 1870-1940," American Journal of Sociology, 49 (January 1944): 331-39;

Will Herberg, Protestant-Catholic-Jew: An Essay in American Religious Sociology (Gar den City, N.Y., 1955).

29. This is the thrust of Herbert Gutman's opening essay in Work, Culture and Society in Industrializing America, (New York, 1976), pp. 3-78; on this point, see Higham, "Current Trends," pp. 8-10.

30. John B. Jentz, "Bread and Labor: Chicago's German Bakers Organize," Chicago

History, 12 (Summer 1983): 35. 31. Alan Dawley, Class and Community: The Industrial Revolution in Lynn (Cam

bridge, Mass., 1976).

32. Michael B. Katz, Michael J. Doucet, and Mark Stern, The Social Organization of

Early Industrial Capitalism (Cambridge, Mass., 1982).

33. Theodore Hershberg, ed., Philadelphia: Work, Space, Family, and Group Experi ence in the Nineteenth Century (New York, 1981); see also Sam Bass Warner, Jr., and

Colin B. Burke, "Cultural Change and the Ghetto," Journal of Contemporary History, 4

(October 1969): 182; and Howard P. Chudacoff, "A New Look at Ethnic Neighborhoods: Residential Dispersion and the Concept of Visibility in a Medium-Sized City," Journal of American History, 60 (June 1973): 79-93.

34. Elizabeth Fox-Genovese and Eugene D. Genovese, Fruits of Merchant Capital

Slavery and Bourgeois Property in the Rise and Expansion of Capitalism (New York,

1983), p. 201.

35. Like Gutman's biographies of Richard L. Davis or Joseph Patrick McDonnell, see

his Work, Culture, and Society, pp. 121-208, 261-292.

36. Geoff Ele y and Keith Nield, "Why Does Social History Ignore Politics?" Social

History, 5 (May 1980): 267. 37. Allan J. Lichtman, Prejudice and the Old Politics: The Presidential Election of

1928 (Chapel Hill, 1979), pp. 17-18. 38. Geoffrey Blodgett, "Yankee Leadership in a Divided City: Boston, 1860-1910,"

Journal of Urban History, 8 (August 1982): 371-96; David Hammack, Power and Soci

ety: Greater New York at the Turn of the Century (New York, 1982). On the need to con

nect social and political history, see Paul F. Bourke and Donald A. De Bats, "Identifiable

Voting in Nineteenth-Century America: Toward a Comparison of Britain and the United

States Before the Secret Ballot," Perspectives in American History, 11 (1977-1978):

259-288; idem, "Individuals and Aggregates: A Note on Historical Data and Assump

tions," Social Science History, 4 (Spring 1980): 229-250.

39. Ira Katznelson, City Trenches: Urban Politics and the Patterning of Class in the

United States (New York, 1981), p. 16.

40. Social change is a term with multiple related meanings. As used here, I mean it to

refer to the modification of customary relationships, to the synthesis that, transcending

existing social, economic, and political divisions, creates new norms, new behaviors, and

new modes of thought. See the important distinction made by Henri Mendras and Michel

Fors? between "changement de la soci?t?" and "changement dans la soci?t?," in Le

changement social (Paris, 1983), p. 9.

41. Zunz, Changing Face.

42. Middle-class members of ethnie communities have been studied by many histo

rians: See the recent synthetic essay by Kenneth L. Kusmer, "Ethnicity and Business En

terprise: A Comment" m Making it in America: The Role of Ethnicity in Education, Busi

ness Enterprise, and Work Choices, ed. M. Mark Stolarik and Murray Friedman (for

thcoming, Bucknell University Press) and the methodological essay by David A. Gerber,

"Ethnics, Enterprise, and Middle Class Formations: Using the Dun and Bradstreet Col

lection for Research in Ethnic History," Immigration History Newsletter, 12 (May 1980):

1-7. On Jews, see Moses Rischin, The Promised City: New York Jews, 1870-1914 (Cam




bridge, Mass., 1962), p. 95-111; on Poles, see Caroline Golab, Immigrant Destinations

(Philadelphia, 1977), pp. 141-148, and most recently John J. Bukowczyk, "The Trans

formation of Working-Class Ethnicity: Corporate Control, Americanization, and the

Polish Immigrant Middle Class in Bayonne, New Jersey 1915-1925," Labor History, 25

(Winter 1984): 53-82; on Japanese immigrants, Edna Bonacich and John Modell, The Ec

onomic Basis of Ethnic Solidarity: Small Business in the Japanese American Community

(Berkeley, Calif. 1980).

43. Katznelson, City Trenches, pp. 70-71.

44. For a sense of regional variations, see Frederic Copie Jaher, The Urban Establish

ment: Upper Strata in Boston, New York, Charleston, Chicago, and Los Angeles (Urbana,

111., 1982).

45. Lary May, Screening Out The Past: The Birth of Mass Culture and the Motion

Picture Industry (New York, 1980), pp. 172-75.

46. The type of relationship between class and ethnicity which characterizes Spanish

speaking groups is an open problem. New research will show whether these newcomers

will experience a repetition of the nineteenth century pattern or whether their experience will be directly subsumed into the twentieth century pattern.

47. See the aggressive review of Mary Ryan's Cradle of the Middle Class by Robert

Gross in the American Historical Review, 88 (June 1983): 752-53.

48. Katz, AHR forum, p. 1334.

49. Robert Wiebe, The Search for Order, 1877-1920 (New York, 1967), p. 129.

50. Alfred D. Chandler, The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American

Business (Cambridge, Mass., 1977). 51. Program of the Ninth Annual Banquet; Sales Convention and Dinner; E. I. Du Pont

Cellulose Products Department. 5 January 1922. Hagley Museum and Library. 52. Sales Convention. Du Pont/Harrison's Inc. Banquet. 16 August 1917. Hagley

Museum and Library.



FORUM

Comment: John Bodnar

Olivier Zunz has written an incisive paper on the question of assimila

tion in American society and one which raises important questions about

the entire subject. Zunz realistically attempted to discuss assimilation in

the context of American social history rather than enter the thicket of

sociological theory and correctly assumed that the topic has been largely

ignored in recent historical scholarship. His efforts, furthermore, to

ground any discussion of assimilation in particular historical time periods and social structures can only be applauded. Assimilation clearly could

not have been the same experience for all people at all times.

Zunz locates the origins of social change in large scale, economic

forces such as industrialization which transcended simple class conflict.

Seeking to look at historical and social change as broadly as possible and

yet remain linked to historic time and place, he views assimilation as es

sentially a movement from a predominantly ethnic world to one which

was primarily shaped by class. Influenced by his excellent study of De

troit, he links assimilation to existing opportunity structures; changing structures meant changing patterns of assimilation. In Detroit the trans

formation proceeded from small production units and ethnic residential

and work clusters to sprawling production facilities which nurtured class

based spatial arrangements by 1920.

In an interesting discussion, Zunz finds the origins of this social and

economic transformation in the upper levels of society. Industrialists,

moved to maximize efficiency and production, built larger workplaces and transformed urban space. Middle-class managers were enlisted to

carry out the plans of industrialists and investors and actually accelerated

the entire process. The result of all this change was a restructuring of the

American opportunity structure which, according to Zunz, made it in

creasingly difficult for immigrants to adjust after 1900. Unlike many of

their nineteenth-century counterparts, newer immigrants could not enter

ethnic economies, work for employers with similar backgrounds and set

tle in neighborhoods populated largely by those with similar languages, cultures and origins.

Clearly the assimilation of immigrants cannot be discussed without re

ference to specific social and economic structures. It is not at all certain,

however, that the model structure posited by Zunz for industrial America




in the nineteenth century is a valid one. The notion of relatively

homogeneous, ethnic economies in the nineteenth century is doubtful.

Certainly Germans in nineteenth-century Detroit or Milwaukee could

often sustain autonomous communities to a considerable extent but evi

dence from the Philadelphia Social History Project suggests that such a

pattern did not always exist.1 Indeed, the majority of nineteenth-century urban immigrants were probably not settling into ethnic economies. Large numbers of immigrants prior to 1900 were recruited directly because of

their skills such as tinsmiths, puddlers/or engineers to work for American

employers. Many newcomers such as the Irish scattered throughout the

economy pursuing higher wages or industries such as textiles which

tended to hire women and children so that numerous members of a house

hold could be employed.2 In short, the portrait of a dual opportunity structure?ethnic and native?is overdrawn.

If the ethnic dominance of the nineteenth century is somewhat over

stated, the same can be said for Zunz's portrait of the twentieth century. Without wishing to minimize his assertion that it was largely class based,

an abundant supply of evidence exists to suggest that ethnic economic ties

persisted with vigor after widespread industrialization. Newer immigrants

may have had a more difficult time in entering the American opportunity structure as Zunz claims, but such an assertion is difficult to prove in the

face of thousands of ethnic and kinship clusters throughout the American

economy. Jewish garment workers, Italian construction workers, and

Japanese grocers all stand as vivid testimony to the vitality of ethnic eco

nomic connections. Some reason actually exists to conclude that the re

verse of Zunz's model is true; ethnic networks were actually intensified

by the multiplication of less skilled jobs generated by the emergence of

the factory system.3

Beyond descriptions of changing structures offered by Zunz, however,

the heart of his argument about assimilation appears to reside in his loca

tion of the source of social change and by implication his description of

the agents of assimilation. Essentially immigrants or ordinary people play

only minimal roles in a drama which is orchestrated largely by the actions

of elites or industrial entrepreneurs in this case or their foot-soldiers or

middle-class managers who implement their visions. As elites change the

shape of the economy, newcomers adjust, fall into place, and eventually assimilate. Ultimately this scenario compels Zunz to minimize class con

flict and somewhat reify industrialization and assimilation even though he

seeks to link them to concrete historical times and events. But the impetus for efficiency and expanded production capacity did not simply spring



Forum 75

from the desires of elites but also from their need to capture the workplace from immigrant workers who were often defiant and intractable. Immi

grant worker actions and class conflict were clearly part of the stimulus

for structural change, and social change did not flow neatly downward.

Structural transformation and assimilation were not caused entirely by such conflict but probably would not have taken the particular form they did without it.4

More importantly, neither middle-class managers nor other agents of

assimilation could act unencumbered by ideological competitors. If im

migrants were exposed to a chorus of assimilation in the larger society

preaching education, hard work, and adaptation, they also heard voices of

dissent. Socialists were pervasive in attacking the prerogatives of em

ployers in both the larger society and within immigrant communities.

Ethnic leaders, furthermore, called for the retention of ''traditional"

thought and behavior and for attention to homeland issues and religious concerns. The point is that assimilation is not described best as a process of co-option of ordinary people by social superiors but as a process of si

multaneous accommodation and resistance. Consequently, the issue of

power and conflict cannot be separated from the question of assimilation.

Industrial elites might have been able to stimulate a good deal of social

change but the mentality and behavior of newcomers would not quickly follow suit. The immigrant mind and the workplace remained contested

terrain before and after widespread industrialization. Indeed the growing intrusion of the state into the lives of immigrants and other ordinary peo

ple through expanded educational, welfare, and labor activities in the

1930s and 1940s may have been necessary in part because the simple transformation of opportunity structures may have been insufficient to

achieve the degree of total assimilation and amenability to industrial life

that elites had hoped it would and Zunz thought it had.5

Finally, although Zunz acknowledges that "a pattern of ethnic semi

autonomy does not imply consensus or the absence of conflict within

[immigrant] communities," his treatment of these communities

minimized their influence on the assimilative process. The key point here

is that these aggregations of newcomers even in Detroit were real but se

verely fragmented. Competing leaders, ideologies, and classes charac

terized the "insular" world of ethnic groups and insured that they could

not retard assimilation, although they helped direct it along class lines.

Group fragmentation and, therefore, assimilation, furthermore, origi nated in the homeland. As capitalism intruded into particular regions in

the form of cheap manufactured goods and foodstuffs and the spread of




commercial agriculture, it usually dislocated craftsmen and independent farmers first and then a mass of small holders or landless laborers. Inevi

tably, the immigrant streams which created the ethnic communities repli cated old world class divisions.6 The upshot of all this was that "middle

class" newcomers, with greater amounts of financial and intellectual

capital, moved into American society with somewhat greater ease and

seldom returned. The mass of poorer newcomers found conditions consid

erably more difficult, often returned home, and exhibited more resistance

to the wholesale embracement of the new order. While the entire process

was, of course, never quite that simple, the structure of ethnic com

munities would lend a class dimension to the assimilative process in both

the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.7 This dimension existed regardless of what stage the American opportunity structure was in and was a vari

able in the assimilative process not developed in Zunz's discussion. Such

a process implied, moreover, that assimilation was also shaped partially

by the premigration experience.

NOTES

1. See Theodore Hershberg, ed., Philadelphia: Work, Space, Family, and Group Ex

perience in the Nineteenth Century (New York, 1981). 2. Hasia Diner, Erin's Daughters in America (Baltimore, 1983). 3. See John Modell, The Economics and Politics of Racial Accommodation (Urbana,

111., 1977); James R. Barrett, "Work and Community in the Jungle: Chicago's Packing House Workers, 1894-1922" (Ph.D. diss., University of Pittsburgh, 1981), pp. 176-93;

Tamara K. Hareven, Family Time and Industrial Time (Cambridge, 1982), pp. 85-124.

4. See Fernand Braudel, The Structures of Everyday Life (New York, 1982), pp. 28,

51-70; Norman Birnbaum, "The Crisis in Marxist Sociology," m Radical Sociology, eds.

J. David Colfax and Jack L. Roach (New York, 1971), pp. 109-22; Henry Glassie, Pas

sing the Time in Ballymenone: Culture and History of an Ulster Community (Philadelphia,

1982). 5. See John Bodnar, The Transplanted: A History of Immigrants in Urban America

(Bloomington, Ind., 1985), chapters 2 and 7.

6. See Mack Walker, Germany and the Emigration, 1876-1885 (Cambridge, Mass.,

1964), pp. 167-73. W. Rusinski, "The Role of the Peasantry of Poznan in the Formation

of the Non-Agricultural Labor Market," East European Quarterly, 3 (1970): 138-41; Walter Kamphoefner, "Transplanted Westfalians: Persistence and Transformation of So

cioeconomic and Cultural Patterns in Northwest German Migration to Missouri," (Ph.D.

diss., University of Missouri, 1978), pp. 32-84.

7. For a rich discussion of group stratification see Stanley Nadel, "Kleindeutschland:

New York City's Germans, 1845-1880 (Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 1981), pp. 171-72.



FORUM

Comment: Stephan Thernstrom

Olivier Zunz's essay is a stimulating contribution to the continuing de

bate over the balance between the many and the one in American history. Before commenting on any of his specific arguments, I wish to raise the

broad issue of what frame of reference is to be employed in investigations of the problem of assimilation. Whether one is most impressed by the

overwhelming power of integrative and assimilative forces in the Ameri

can past or by the persistent ethnic diversity of the population of the

United States depends upon the baseline against which the results are

measured. Most discussions of the issue have been framed in the

hackneyed terms of the "melting pot" versus "pluralism." These alter

native models are too vaguely specified to be of any real use in assessing the significance of empirical data. Just how much occupational mobility, residential dispersion, and exogamy did the Italians of Schenectady in the

Progressive Era have to display in order to confirm the melting pot hy

pothesis? How little to convince us that Horace Kallen was a more inci

sive observer than Israel Zangwill? I suggest that we can best appreciate the significance of assimilation in

American history by taking as our standard of reference other multiethnic

societies around the globe. It has been demonstrated, for example, that

the Irish, Italian, Jewish, Puerto Rican, and black communities of New

York City each have certain distinctive features.1 But how illuminating is

it, though, to conclude from this that "the point about the melting pot is

that it never really happened." The denial that the melting pot "really

happened" in this instance presumably means that assimilation did not

proceed as rapidly and completely as national folklore would have it. That

may be so, but the proposition is of limited interest. A broader and more

interesting question to ask is whether the boundaries between ethnic

groups in New York have been as sharp and relations among them as in

flamed as those dividing the French and English in Canada, Flemings and

Walloons in Belgium, Protestants and Catholics in Ulster, Armenians,

Estonians, Georgians, Ukrainians and others in the U.S.S.R., or the sev

eral dozen ethnic groups of contemporary India.2 Lebanon, an ethnically unmelted society if there ever was one, offers an instructive comparison with the United States. As John Keegan remarks in a penetrating recent

essay, Americans are "peculiarly ill-suited to understand" Lebanon be




cause that unhappy country is an ethnically fragmented society in a way that the United States simply is not. Although no nation in history has ac

cepted such a diverse array of newcomers in such massive numbers,

Keegan is correct in saying that

the supreme triumph of the American people is to have created the largest homogeneous cultural unit on earth. Neither Russia nor China, comparable

though each is in extent and population, can claim that the official language of the state is understood from border to border or that the values that ob tain among the governing and intellectual class of the capital are the raw

material of public life in the remotest province.3

That statement seems to me the central truth about the process of as

similation in the American past (and present) and stands out starkly when

we transcend the parochial terms in which the debate has customarily been formulated and abandon the straw man of the instant melting pot. Of

course ethnic diversity has long been a vital fact of life in America. It

could hardly fail to have been, given the arrival of more than fifty million

immigrants on these shores. What is surprising?indeed, rather amaz

ing?in global perspective is not the diversity but rather the speed and

thoroughness with which these groups blended together and became ab

sorbed in a common national culture. This achievement, what Keegan calls "the American miracle," has too often been forgotten, perhaps be

cause it has been taken for granted that the degree of ethnic melting ob

servable in the American case is altogether natural and inevitable and not

at all worth remarking on. Some acquaintance with the often bitter and

bloody history of ethnic group relations in other societies, some grasp of

the extent to which various peoples elsewhere commonly married others

of their own "kind," clustered together residentially and occupationally, and continued to speak in a mother tongue different from that of the ruling

group, will quickly dispel this illusion.4

To say that all the world is not the United States is not, of course, to say that all the world except the United States is Lebanon or Ulster. Obvi

ously there are other societies?Australia and Argentina, for example? that have also received large numbers of immigrants and have integrated them into the national culture fairly quickly and smoothly. My aim is not

to urge the case for American exceptionalism but rather for more sophisti cated comparative study of intergroup relations and the assimilation pro cess in different times and places. Such inquiries will provide the most

useful baseline against which to gauge the character and meaning of as

similation in American history. Let me now turn to Zunz's intriguing hypothesis that a major shift in



Forum 79

patterns of assimilation and social mobility took place in Detroit, and pre

sumably elsewhere, early in this country. In the nineteenth century, in his

picture, a "dual"?really a multiple?occupational structure prevailed. There was much opportunity for intragroup social mobility and relatively little assimilation. The twentieth century, by contrast, is characterized by

declining social mobility and increased assimilation; class replaces ethni

city as the primary social division.

It is plausible that this was the case in Detroit, but I am not entirely convinced. Neither this paper nor Zunz's excellent book provide the kind

of evidence necessary to sustain confident judgments about changes in

mobility opportunities?evidence about individual career patterns. His

case rests upon inferences from cross-sectional data pertaining to aggre

gates at different points in time. Such generalizations entail something akin to the ecological fallacy, and must be approached quite skeptically.5

We cannot speak with much confidence about the opportunities available

to the members of Group X between time 1 and time 2 on the basis of data

revealing their situation at time 1 and time 2 if many of those present at

time 2 were not there at time 1 and many who were there at time 1 de

parted before time 2. Observed changes in the status of the group may be

due more to the selectivity of in and outmigration than to the mobility of

the persisting minority. One can also wonder about the choice of Detroit's

Germans as the paradigm case of mobility within an ethnic subculture.

How many other immigrant groups achieved the critical mass the Ger

mans did in Detroit? Was not the German migration quite unusual in in

cluding so many newcomers with capital and artisanal and entrepreneurial skills? Does the contrasting status of the Germans of 1880 and the Hun

garians of 1920 really reflect shifts in the opportunity structure of the city

during that span of years, as suggested here, or does it stem from the dif

ferent characteristics the members of the two groups arrived with? Nor am

I sure, on the basis of the evidence on hand, that the assimilation of the

new immigrants of the twentieth century was notably more rapid than that

of their nineteenth-century predecessors. The decade following the out

break of the Great War certainly saw heightened pressures for "100 per cent Americanism," but we cannot assume that nativist policies actually had the desired effect. No indexes of assimilation are provided to analyze the question systematically.

Even if the author's conclusions about the great transformation he sees

in Detroit can be sustained, finally we must ask to what extent his find

ings can be generalized to other American communities. The coming of

the auto age gave Detroit a remarkably bottom-heavy occupational struc

ture, with a much greater preponderance of unskilled and semiskilled jobs




than was normal in the period. It was a proletarian city with little room at

the top, or in the middle. In this respect Detroit may have been fairly

typical of other metropolitan centers that developed on an industrial rather

than a commercial base?Pittsburgh, Cleveland, and Milwaukee, for ex

ample?but not of many other places.6 The trends Zunz describes did not

manifest themselves at all in Boston, for example, a city whose economy had a quite different shape. It was rather premature of me, a decade ago, to skip lightly from "the Boston case" to "the American pattern."7 So

too we should be cautious now about deriving overly grand conclusions

about opportunity and assimilation in American history on the basis of

this provocative local study.

NOTES

1. Nathan Glazer and Daniel P. Moynihan, Beyond the Melting Pot (Cambridge,

Mass., 1963). 2. John Porter, "Ethnic Pluralism in Canadian Perspective," William Petersen, "On

the Subnations of Western Europe," Richard Pipes, "Reflections on the Nationality Problems in the Soviet Union," and Jyotirindra Das Gupta, "Ethnicity, Language De

mands, and National Development in India," in Ethnicity: Theory and Experience, eds.

Nathan Glazer and Daniel P. Moynihan (Cambridge, Mass., 1975). For further insight into the Indian case, see Myron Weiner, Sons of the Soil: Migration and Ethnic Conflict in

India (Princeton, 1978), and Myron Weiner and Mary F. Katzenstein, India's Preferential Policies: Migration, the Middle Classes, and Ethnic Inequality (Chicago, 1981).

3. John Keegan, "Shedding Light on Lebanon," The Atlantic, 253 (April 1984): 46.

4. Although current Soviet doctrine holds that "the nationalities question, as it was left

us by the exploiting system, has been settled successfully, finally, and irreversibly," a

comparison of levels of ethnic assimilation in the U.S.S.R. and the United States by such

measures as educational and occupational achievement, language shift, and intermarriage rates reveals glaring contrasts. By American standards, the absorption of ethnic minorities

in the Soviet Union has barely begun. Cf. Brian Silver, "Levels of Sociocultural Devel

opment among Soviet Nationalities: A Partial Test of the Equalization Hypothesis," American Political Science Review, 68 (December 1974): 1618-1637; Brian Silver,

"Ethnic Intermarriage and Ethnic Consciousness among Soviet Nationalities," Soviet

Studies, 30 (January 1978): 107-116; lu. V. Arutiunian, "The Social Structure of Soviet

Nations," V.l. Kozlov, "Ethnically Mixed Marriage in the U.S.S.R. as a Factor of De

velopment and a Form of Manifestation of Ethnic Processes," and V.A. Tishkov, "Bilin

gualism in Ethnic Processes," unpublished papers for the American-Soviet Symposium on Contemporary Ethnic Processes, April 1984 with Stanley Lieberson and Timothy

Curry, "Language Shift in the United States: Some Demographic Clues," International

Migration Review, 5 (Spring 1971): 125-139; E.P. Hutchinson, Immigrants and Their

Children, 1850-1950 (New York, 1956); Richard Bernard, The Melting Pot and the

Altar: Marital Assimilation in Early Twentieth-Century Wisconsin (Minneapolis, 1980);

and Richard Alba, "The Twilight of Ethnicity among American Catholics of European

Ancestry," Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 454 (March

1981): 86-97.

5. Stephan Thernstrom, Poverty and Progress: Social Mobility in a Nineteenth-Cen

tury City (Cambridge, Mass., 1964), pp. 237-238; idem, The Other Bostonians: Poverty and Progress in the American Metropolis, 1880-1970 (Cambridge, Mass., 1973), pp.

116, 126.



Forum 81

6. Beverly Duncan and Stanley Lieberson, Metropolis and Region in Transition (Be

verly Hills, Calif., 1970). 7. Thernstrom, The Other Bostonians, ch. 9.



FORUM

Response: Olivier Zunz

It is remarkable that the two critics of my paper should have chosen to

discuss opposite patterns of social relations in American society, one of

separateness and the other of integration. Bodnar, with his emphasis on

conflict, speaks for what has been called in this Journal "hard

pluralism"1 while Thernstrom views assimilation in the context of the

melting pot which he considers from a large comparative framework. The

impression conveyed by a reading of these two comments is that I inhabit

a sort of middle ground. Rather, I attempt to look at assimilation from a

different angle, not to reconcile opposing categories. Instead of restating

my position, I will try to clarify it in the light of the criticism raised by Professors Bodnar and Thernstrom.

John Bodnar, by stressing that all historical factors are constant, is true

to his pluralistic vision of American society. In that view, it is impossible that ethnicity be more important than class at one time and less important at another (note that Bodnar ignores my attempt to distinguish class as a

sociological category from class consciousness). In his view ethnic and

class affiliations are mere manifestations of coexisting loyalties which

must ineluctably be present at all times, and can easily replace one

another. I certainly do not want to deny the complexity of social relations.

I readily see that human behavior has multiple meanings. My emphasis,

however, is on explaining social change. In historical context, some fac

tors come to be more important than others, tilt the balance of conflicting

tendencies, and in the end create a new one. The historian should explain such shifts and point to the direction of change. Bodnar instead suggests

substituting the stability of relations for my emphasis on transformation.

Bodnar repeatedly argues that I view social change as essentially com

ing from the top down. He ignores my portrayal of immigrants in indus

trial Detroit as shapers of their own destiny. He summarily dismisses my current attempt to identify other autonomous social groups by condes

cendingly labeling middle-class business managers mere "foot-soldiers"

of elites. Instead, impressed as I am by Gramscian theory of hegemony, I

am searching for connections and intermediaries between parts of society. I am questioning here the validity both of the assumptions of internal Con

sent and those of coercion and manipulation. Bodnar instead brings us

back to the limited and mutually exclusive categories of consensus and

conflict.



Forum 83

I am grateful to Thernstrom for raising the issues of comparison and

measurement, but personally doubtful that an overall index of assimila

tion would be useful. It seems to me that assimilation is far too complex a

process to be reduced to a single measure. If we can quantify some of its

aspects?and I believe we can?it is more efficient to select a variety of

discrete areas (such as residential segregation, intermarriage, fertility,

consumption) and study their cumulative effects rather than attempting to

combine these effects into an all encompassing measure.

Would a longitudinal study of individual mobility help me to prove or

to disprove my argument regarding the shift from a dual (intra and inter

ethnic) opportunity structure to a single opportunity structure (and not a

decline in mobility in the twentieth century as Thernstrom sees it)? Al

though such a study would be quite interesting in itself, it would be

tangential to my more significant point that the conditions of life in De

troit, and hence the process of assimilation, have been profoundly altered

by the growing dominance of corporate capitalism. Individual mobility

studies, because of their very unit of analysis?the individual?are not

designed to detect the impact of structural changes on careers. For exam

ple, mobility historians have often confused upward mobility with the

growth of the white-collar sector; or they have overestimated immigrant

gains by not incorporating native suburban populations in their samples.2 I certainly did not mean to extend the Detroit case to America, although

I admire Thernstrom's last chapter in The Other Bostonians. The point was not to apply these exact findings to other areas. Instead, I believe that

historians who grapple with assimilation should consider context more

thoroughly. As they do, we will understand better the diversity of experi

ences, and we will revise and sharpen the "hackneyed" models of

pluralism and the melting pot. The most intriguing part of Thernstrom's comment is his call for

macrocomparisons between societies, comparisons supported by indexes

at the local level. It is a grand idea, and yet, some intermediate level be

tween global societies and measurable small scale factors must be

supplied to connect the two. How can we provide controls for all these

statistical comparisons? If comparisons are needed to appreciate better the

extent of American assimilation, they can be also terribly misleading. The

example of Lebanon which Thernstrom chooses, while it has some didac

tic power, does not stand. How could we compare American society to a

country like Lebanon which has been occupied and partitioned by foreign

powers since time immemorial? In the twentieth century alone, Lebanon

has been successively under Turkish and French domination; its internal

affairs since 1948 have also been disrupted by Western and Israeli forces




and by the flow of Palestinian refugees. I wonder whether, in this trou

bled part of the world, Maronites, Shiites and Sunnites ever thought of

themselves as part of one society, multiethnic, melted, unmelted or

otherwise. Under these circumstances, I doubt the value of a comparison of such countries to the United States where the idea of national identity has always been prominent. Historians of nonwestern countries are in fact

increasingly questioning the notion of society which we, in American

history, take for granted. It appears more and more clearly that state and

society are simply not equivalent terms.3

To be sure, an understanding of assimilation requires going beyond the

limits inherent in discussions of the traditional concepts of pluralism and

the melting pot. The study of social change in a specific population and in

a workable comparative framework should help us redefine assimilation

and understand better the multilayered reality behind it.

NOTES

1. John Higham, "Current Trends in the Study of Ethnicity in the United States,"

Journal of American Ethnic History, 2 (Fall 1982): 8,9. 2. See my review of Thernstrom's The Other Bostonians in Annales ESC, 32

(Janvier-F?vrier 1977): 169-172.

3. See David W. Cohen's chapter on Africa and William B. Taylor's chapter on Latin

America in Reliving the Past: The Worlds of Social History, ed. Olivier Zunz (Chapel

Hill, N.C., forthcoming).



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