European American Identity and Literature

Overview

As part of the graduation ceremonies at the Ford Motor Company English school in Detroit during World War I, students climbed to the stage in native dress carrying signs that read Greece, Syria, Italy, and so on. The students entered a giant cardboard cauldron labeled Melting Pot and emerged dressed in coats and ties and carrying their diplomas and small American flags. Assimilation was dramatically complete.

This stage show is symbolic of a much larger (and usually more subtle) process that millions of immigrants to the United States in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries underwent. Between 1820 and 1990, more than 50 million immigrants entered the United States, and three-quarters of them came from Europe. Before 1890, the majority of these immigrants were—in descending order—German, Irish, and English. Between 1890 and 1914, 15 million Europeans arrived in the United States, and most of them came from southern and eastern Europe: Greece, Italy, Hungary, Poland, and Russia. By 1980, individuals of European origin composed the bulk of the United States population (approximately 75 percent) and Europeans continued to make up a significant proportion of the immigrants still arriving in the United States.

In the 1980 census, 50 million Americans reported their ancestry as English, 49 million listed German, and 40 million cited Irish. African Americans numbered 21 million, French 13 million, Italian 12 million, Scottish 10 million, Polish 8 million, Mexican 8 million, American Indian 7 million, and Dutch 6 million.

Such distinctive and overwhelming national identification has often been blurred in American cultural consciousness by the peculiar assimilative process of the United States. Economic and social discrimination, on one hand, pushed immigrants into early and often involuntary assimilation. The dedication of the Statue of Liberty in 1886—where the Jewish American poet Emma Lazarus’ words “Give me . . . your huddled masses yearning to breathe free” are inscribed—was not unanimously endorsed. In the press and on the streets there were attacks on immigrants from southern and eastern Europe. When not changed by Ellis Island officials, the names of many European immigrants often quickly were changed by the immigrants themselves, who as foreigners were greeted with hostility and suspicion but who as Americans were welcome. The Polish Sciborski might become Smith; the Italian Pina, Pine; the Jewish Greenberg, simply Green.

European Americans in the late nineteenth century were drawn by the lure of the American Dream, which promised equal access to wealth and possibility to all. Supporting this dream was the dominant ideological construct of the melting pot, which, like the symbolic cauldron in the Ford Motor Company graduation ceremonies, encouraged immigrants to give up their native heritage and take on a narrower American identity. Behind the melting pot theory was the belief in homogeneity over heterogeneity, assimilation over pluralism. The term itself was first popularized in a play, The Melting-Pot, by the English Jewish writer Israel Zangwill in 1908. As Werner Sollors has noted in Beyond Ethnicity: Consent and Descent in American Culture (1986): “More than any social or political theory, the rhetoric of Zangwill’s play shaped American discourse on immigration and ethnicity, including most notably the language of self-declared opponents of the melting-pot concept.”

Opponents of immigration have a long history in the United States, and the objects of their attacks have kept changing. The first nativist expression was an anti-Catholic sentiment, aimed mainly at the millions of Irish who immigrated after 1820. By the end of the nineteenth century, xenophobic feelings had shifted and were aimed at Slavic, Italian, Greek, and other eastern and southern European immigrants. The height of nativist opposition to immigration came during World War I. The literacy test of 1917 marked the beginning of the end of the open-door immigration policy of the United States (toward Europeans, that is; legislation aimed at stemming immigration from Asia had been in place since the late nineteenth century). Legislation in the 1920s closed the door.

The process of assimilation during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries had a profound effect not only on European American identity but also on the literature and culture that different European American ethnic groups produced. In many cases forced by discrimination, loss of language, loss or change of name, and the ideological impetus of Americanization to give up ethnic roots, many European Americans ended up torn between American and European ethnic identities. If the members of an ethnic culture did not assimilate, they faced the danger of becoming ghettoized, forced into an almost secretive, subcultural status.

Writers in the twentieth century, in common with the cultures they represented, were often afraid to exhibit their ethnic identity. As late as 1969, when Mario Puzo published The Godfather, for example, critics within the Italian American community argued that the work would only confirm the worst stereotypes of Italians in the United States. In another novel of the same year, Philip Roth was condemned by Jewish community leaders for his characters in Portnoy’s Complaint. Ethnic writers were hindered by their own ethnic communities from revealing too much, which made it easier for them to make the sometimes Faustian bargain with the dominant culture to trade their ethnic consciousness for entrance into the literary mainstream.

The dominant culture of the earlier twentieth century was clearly white, Anglo-Saxon, and Protestant, and the ideology of the melting pot reinforced the dominant culture’s hold on the popular mind. All writers should be American, this theory held, and ethnic cultural and literary artifacts were exotic and suspect. One perhaps could go folk-dancing as a cultural curiosity, but European American ethnic identification was discouraged on a number of ideological and institutional levels. The dominant literature and literary culture were Anglo; students in different parts of the country all read the most famous works that had been written in England and New England, but they had little knowledge of works in other languages—including their native languages. High school students from New York City to rural New Mexico, from Seattle to Maine, might know the nineteenth-century English novelist George Eliot’s Silas Marner (1861) by the time they graduated from high school, but nothing of their own ethnic literary heritage. Sociological theory supported the notion that ethnic identification was an insignificant factor in success in American life.

In the 1960s, however, this cultural history changed. Sociologists Nathan Glazer and Daniel Patrick Moynihan, in Beyond the Melting Pot: The Negroes, Puerto Ricans, Jews, Italians, and Irish of New York City (1963), as James A. Banks has written in Teaching Strategies for Ethnic Studies (1991), “presented one of the first theoretical arguments that the melting pot conception . . . was inaccurate and incomplete. They argued that ethnicity in New York was important and that it would continue to be important for both politics and culture.”

Similarly, Catholic political philosopher Michael Novak’s The Rise of the Unmeltable Ethnics: Politics and Culture in the 1970s (1971) helped to fuel the growth of the “new ethnicity” and the new ethnic consciousness in the 1970s, a consciousness that used not the melting pot metaphor but rather metaphors of a patchwork quilt, a salad bowl, or a kaleidoscope to explain the pluralistic nature of ethnicity in the United States. This theoretical underpinning worked to support the massive search that members of many ethnic groups were making for their history. Alex Haley’s Roots: The Saga of an American Family (1976), which traces his ancestors back to Africa (and which became a popular television miniseries), helped to encourage similar rediscoveries in other ethnicities—and not only in those which had experienced the most recent discrimination (African American, Asian American, Latino, and Native American) but also in those European American communities that had supposedly been dominant through the twentieth century but that actually had been downplaying their ethnicity. For although American culture was decidedly European American in essence and influence from its beginnings, the assimilative process often meant that individual European identities—Scandinavian as well as Slavic—were lost. The multicultural movement of the 1970s and 1980s helped to recover and reinvigorate a number of ethnic identities and literatures, and the last quarter of the twentieth century saw the publication of many literary works reflecting the change: ethnic autobiographies, accounts of the search for ethnic roots, studies of ethnic culture and ethnic literatures, and novels and plays about the ethnic experience. The European American experience was at the center of this ethnic renaissance.

European American Identity

Critics and scholars began to talk about ethnic literature only at the end of the period of unrestricted immigration, when the closed doors into the United States threw the assimilative process into a sharper, harsher focus. Probably the keystone work in this regard is Abraham Cahan’s The Rise of David Levinsky, published in 1917. As David M. Fine has written in The City, the Immigrant, and American Fiction, 1880–1920 (1977), the novel

occupies a pivotal position in the history of American literature. It . . . stands at the head of a long line of twentieth-century novels which would portray modern urban America from the eyes of the city’s non-Anglo component. The novel’s ambitious mixture of material success and spiritual failure, its insistence on the high cost of assimilation, and its concern with the identity crisis bred by the Americanization process place it squarely in the forefront of twentieth-century “minority voice” fiction.

The themes that Fine lists permeated all immigrant literature, in nonfiction (essay, autobiography) and in fiction (short story, novel), through the twentieth century. Repeatedly after 1917, European American writers depicted in depth and detail the painful process of assimilation, the pull between native and adoptive cultures, the mixed feelings of insecurity and hope. Where does my identity come from—the protagonists of dozens of plays and novels and autobiographies asked—from which of my two selves? A whole range of replies were given, from full assimilation to marginality, but under the hegemonic hold of melting-pot theory, more often than not the replies were unclear and confused.

In 1916, the critic Randolph Bourne posed the basic problem in his essay “Trans-National America” by citing the failure of the melting pot. “We are all foreign-born or the descendants of foreign-born,” the Anglo-Saxon Bourne argued, and assimilation has clearly failed. “Assimilation, in other words, instead of washing out the memories of Europe made them more and more intensely real.” Bourne’s call for a truly multicultural and pluralistic “trans-national America” would not be heeded for more than half a century.

Mary Antin’s The Promised Land (1912) is a sensitive and touching account of a young Jewish woman’s journey from rural Russia to urban America, and represents one end of the assimilative continuum, since it is an autobiography arguing for total Americanization. Her vivid description of the assimilation process is told through stories like the one of her father accompanying his children to their first day of school—and following his dream: “The boasted freedom of the New World meant to him far more than the right to reside, travel, and work wherever he pleased; it meant the freedom to speak his thoughts, to throw off the shackles of superstition, to test his own fate, unhindered by political or religious tyranny.”

Other autobiographers of the period were less sure of the truth of the American Dream. The Danish-born journalist Jacob Riis, who in How the Other Half Lives (1890) describes the terrible conditions in New York City tenements, narrates the struggles of his own life in The Making of an American (1901) and urged his fellow Danish Americans to remain loyal to Denmark and its traditions. Louis Adamic’s Laughing in the Jungle: The Autobiography of an Immigrant in America (1932) and My America (1938) describe his journey from Slovenia to America, criticize several aspects of American democracy, and conclude that immigrants must take pride in the customs and qualities of their lands of origin. Autobiography has often been a more common and powerful literary genre than fiction, especially for ethnic writers, who could use the form to wrestle with their immigrant history and try to figure out their own identity. Ludwig Lewisohn’s Mid-Channel (1929) and Edward Bok’s The Americanization of Edward Bok (1920), the one German Jewish and the other Dutch, are two other examples of European American autobiography from this period.

Perhaps the most poignant and powerful literary representative of early European immigration was Anzia Yezierska, who traveled from Russian Poland to New York’s Lower East Side. Writing under her European name (rather than Hattie Mayer, the name which she had been given at Ellis Island), she was the only Jewish woman from Eastern Europe of her generation to produce a real body of fiction. Her novels and short stories, including Hungry Hearts (stories, 1920) and Bread Givers (novel, 1925), depict the lives of marginalized Americans, especially immigrant women.

These histories—of immigration and assimilation, of the hope and failure of the American Dream—would be told again and again through the Great Depression of the 1930s, and in spite of the restrictions facing European American writers. Carl Sandburg (a second-generation Swede) produced some of the most powerful poetry about urban America written in the middle of the twentieth century, in addition to writing a multivolume biography of a true American hero, Abraham Lincoln. Sandburg never lost the working-class perspective of his immigrant family. Likewise, William Saroyan produced some of the most poignant descriptions of life in his Fresno, California, Armenian community (The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze, 1934, and My Name Is Aram, 1940), and wrote plays, including The Time of Your Life (1939), and novels, such as The Human Comedy (1943), that capture his genial spirit.

Other European American writers were depicting the struggles of life for immigrants on the margin. Henry Roth in Call It Sleep (1934) follows a young Austrian Jewish immigrant through his harrowing adventures in New York City. Thomas Bell, in Out of This Furnace (1941), a novel of immigrant labor in America, details the hardships that faced his Slovak family in the western Pennsylvania steel mills. The two novels are comparable to a number of other Depression-era works—Roth in his implied criticism of capitalist society, and Bell in his argument that his characters should be able to retain their native heritage.

The immigrant story was told by nonimmigrant writers as well. Upton Sinclair, in The Jungle (1906), depicts the horrendous working conditions his Lithuanian characters and other eastern European immigrants faced in the stockyards of Chicago. Willa Cather, in another classic of American literature, My Ántonia (1918), told the story of a Bohemian family struggling to make a living on the Nebraska prairie. The dying grandmother in Tillie Olsen’s powerful story “Tell Me a Riddle” (1961) was once an orator in the 1905 Russian revolution.

In spite of the melting-pot theory that prevailed through the middle of the twentieth century, in other words, writers continued to tap the rich vein of their ethnic and immigrant roots. Many of the best descriptions of immigrant life—Roth’s and Olsen’s and Lewisohn’s, or Michael Gold’s Jews without Money (1930)—came from Jewish American writers whose sense of community was so strong that they could more easily dip into that heritage. Saul Bellow and Bernard Malamud tapped that source after World War II, and Isaac Bashevis Singer, who was born in Poland and emigrated to the United States in 1935, and Cynthia Ozick also explored it.

Immigration did not cease during the twentieth century for European writers. Polish American writer Jerzy Kosinski, in the secretive style that characterized so much of his life, fled his native Poland for America in an elaborate scheme in the 1950s and wrote about his childhood there during World War II in the vivid novel The Painted Bird (1965). Vladimir Nabokov, who was born in Russia and educated in England, lived and wrote in Germany and France. In 1940, he came to the United States and produced some of his most important novels after that date. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, on the other hand, who emigrated to the United States from the Soviet Union in the 1970s, never matched the literary power he had achieved when he was writing in his native Russia.

Irish American Literature

Irish American literature is one of the oldest and largest collections of writing produced by a European American group. Before the Revolutionary War, the English were the majority of migrants to America. After independence, it was the Irish: Between 1820 and 1930, more than 4.25 million Irish immigrants came to the United States. For their first decades, life was hard, and they faced constant discrimination. The sign “No Irish Need Apply” could be seen on businesses into the twentieth century. The people Henry David Thoreau mentions in Walden (1854) at the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder are Native Americans, black slaves, and the Irish.

In spite of their tremendous difficulties, the Irish produced a cultural legacy in the United States second to none. A number of major nineteenth century writers—Henry James, Edgar Allan Poe, and William Dean Howells among them—had Irish ancestry that played no part in their literature, but dozens of writers used that heritage in their literary work. The first Irish American writer to gain national prominence was Finley Peter Dunne, the turn-of-the-century newspaperman whose fictional Irish bartender Mr. Dooley became the most popular figure in American journalism. Up until World War I, Mr. Dooley commented in Dunne’s columns on every important American political or social event—including immigration: “As a pilgrim father that missed the first boats, I must raise me claryon voice again’ the invasion iv this fair land be th’ paupers an’ arnychists iv effete Europe. Ye bet I must—because I’m here first.” Dunne’s sharp, often fatalistic humor was characteristic of much later Irish American literature.

Several of the major twentieth century American modernists were Irish. F. Scott Fitzgerald boasted of his Irish heritage, and a number of minor Irish American characters figure in his romantic novels and short stories. In Fitzgerald’s unfinished The Last Tycoon (1941) Irish characters play major roles, and Fitzgerald seems in that book to be grappling with his own Irishness. Perhaps the most important playwright of the American stage, Eugene O’Neill, was the son of an Irishman who had come to America after the great potato famine. Some of O’Neill’s masterpieces feature Irish American characters. O’Neill wrote about his family and troubled childhood late in his career in Long Day’s Journey into Night (1956). James T. Farrell, in his Studs Lonigan: A Trilogy (1935) and in the later four novels centering on the character of Danny O’Neill (including My Days of Anger, 1943), describes Irish families struggling on Chicago’s South Side to overcome economic and personal oppression, often holding on to their ethnic and religious prejudices. John O’Hara was much less sympathetic to his Irish characters, and in his novels set in the fictional Gibbsville (resembling his native Pottsville, Pennsylvania), such as the 1934 Appointment in Samarra, the Irish characters are usually outsiders and often contemptible.

Other writers in mid-century continued to add to the Irish American heritage. Betty Smith, who was not Irish herself but who had grown up in the Irish American Williamsburg section of Brooklyn, wrote one of the best novels about the Irish experience in America in A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (1947). Mary McCarthy’s novels occasionally contain Irish characters, and her Memories of a Catholic Girlhood (1957) is a compelling account of growing up in America in the early decades of the twentieth century. The Southerner Flannery O’Connor’s novels and short stories are greatly influenced by her Irish Catholic heritage.

Many Irish American writers, as might be expected, deal with the Irish in the cities. Edwin O’Connor paints a masterful portrait of Boston Irish political bosses in The Last Hurrah (1956), and William Kennedy’s novels about Albany, New York (including Ironweed, 1983) have been critical and commercial successes. Maureen Howard’s Natural History (1992) deals with the Irish power structure in Bridgeport, Connecticut, early in the twentieth century.

Late twentieth and early twenty-first century Irish American writers include the novelists Mary Gordon, J. F. Powers, J. P. Donleavy, and T. Coraghessan Boyle, poets from Frank O’Hara to Tess Gallagher, and journalists from the streetwise Jimmy Breslin, Pete Hamill, and Joe Flaherty to the elegant Brendan Gill of The New Yorker.

Italian American Literature

The largest immigrant groups to arrive in the latter part of the nineteenth century were Southern and eastern Europeans. Between 1820 and 1930, more than 4.5 million Italians arrived in the United States, and, like the Irish Americans, Italian Americans produced a number of writers whose work expressed particular awareness of their background.

Pietro di Donato’s Christ in Concrete (1939) depicts the squalid world of Italian construction workers, and is the classic expression of the Italian American experience. John Fante wrote a number of novels and short stories about the Italian American experience: Wait Until Spring, Bandini (1938) tells of family life in his native Colorado; Ask the Dust (1939) follows the hero, Arturo Bandini, to Los Angeles, and Dago Red (1940) includes a number of family sketches. Jerre Mangione in Monte Allegro (1943) tells of a son who returns to Sicily and feels a mystical sense of being at home. The list of successful and popular Italian American novelists runs from Paul Gallico through Mario Puzo and Evan Hunter to Don DeLillo.

Italian American writers have in fact contributed to every literary genre. Bernard De Voto was one of the most important literary critics in the middle of the twentieth century, and John Ciardi was a preeminent American poet and translator. Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Gregory Corso were leading members of the Beat movement of the 1950s, and contemporary poets include Helen Barolini, Rose Basile Green, Diane DiPrima, and Dana Gioia. Finally, Italian Americans have become prominent journalists. Philip Caputo’s A Rumor of War (1977) is one of the best accounts of the Vietnam War, for example, and Gay Talese has written a number of volumes of note, including Unto the Sons (1992), about the Italian American immigrant experience.

Immigrant literature has often dealt with the American Dream, with its promise as well as with its collapse. More than most literatures, the body of work produced by European American writers has reflected the struggles of assimilation, the loss of identity in that process, and the pain of being split between two cultures. The heroes and heroines of European American literature—David Levinsky, Studs Lonigan, and Arturo Bandini among them—are often filled with self-doubt and search blindly for their identity. In those characters and their struggles, their creators helped to expand the definition and the canon of American literature.

Bibliography

Banks, James A. Teaching Strategies for Ethnic Studies. Newton, Mass.: Allyn & Bacon, 1991.

Bourne, Randolph. The Radical Will: Selected Writings. Edited by Olaf Hansen. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992.

Ferraro, Thomas J. "Italian-American Literature." Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature, July 2017, doi:10.1093/acrefore/9780190201098.013.611. Accessed 23 Sept. 2019.

Fine, David M. The City, the Immigrant, and American Fiction, 1880-1920. Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1977.

Fuchs, Lawrence H. The American Kaleidescope: Race, Ethnicity, and the Civic Culture. Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1990.

Moe, John F. "The Myth of Americanization or the Divided Heart: U.S. Immigration in Literature and Historical Data, 1890-2008." European Journal of American Studies, vol. 6, no. 2, 2011, doi:10.4000/ejas.8935. Accessed 23 Sept. 2019.

Mishra, Pankaj, and Francine Prose. "Are Categories Like Immigrant Fiction and ‘New American’ Fiction Valid or Worthwhile?" The New York Times, 1 July 2014, www.nytimes.com/2014/07/06/books/review/are-categories-like-immigrant-fiction-and-new-american-fiction-valid-or-worthwhile.html. Accessed 23 Sept. 2019.

O'Connell, Shaun. "That Much Credit: Irish-American Identity and Writing." The Massachusetts Review, vol. 44, no. 1/2, 2003, pp. 251–68, www.jstor.org/stable/25091939. Accessed 23 Sept. 2019.

Sollors, Werner. Beyond Ethnicity: Consent and Descent in American Culture. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986.