Off to Philadelphia
The Uprooted from the Old World to the New. By Oscar Handlin. (C. Watts. I 5s.) The Cultural Migration : The European Scholar ht America. By Franz L. Neumann, Henri Peyre, Erwin Panofsky, Wolfgang Kohler and Paul Tillich. Introduction by W. Rex Crawford. (University of Pennsylvania. Press 24s.) Always the Young Strangers. By Carl Sandburg. (Cape. 25s. net.) THE greatest folk migration of which we have adequate records is that which poured millions of Europeans into the United States in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and one of the great, neglected, negative events of this century has been the drying up, by law and a change in social conditions, of that flood that.is now barely a trickle. This mass migration was one of the great formative events of the recent past; its consequences are still with us. But despite a vast bulk of writing about it, it is still little understood, is treated mainly as a pure economic event when it is not a theme for nationalist embroidery.
The three books listed here do, in varying degrees, make the move- ment more intelligible. One of them, Professor Handlin's bold essay in imaginative reconstruction, does more than that;it enables us to feel with the immigrants, to understand the greatness of the ordeal to which they were subjected. It is time that this was under- stood, for American historiography has concentrated on the suffbrings and dangers of the first settlers, leaving it to be assumed that, com- pared with the Pilgrim Fathers and the rest, the nineteenth-century immigrants had it easy. They hadn't. They crossed in danger of death by fire, by drowning, by plagues. They came into a world not much less strange than the empty America of the first settlers. And they brought with them a much less adequate moral and intel- lectual equipment than had the early settlers of New England. They came, as Professor Handlin insists again and again, from a world dissolving around them to a world that they had not made and in which they were bound to be lost, bewildered, unhappy unless they clung together in some self-made ghetto which preserved for them some of the known landmarks of home. Few could expect to adjust themselves completely and only in their children could the promise of "America the Golden" be fulfilled, and that, too often, at the cost of an unbridgeable gulf between parents and children.
The uprooted peasants of the dissolving society of eastern Europe, the bewildered Jews fleeing pogrom and privation, the newly mobile children of the industrial revolution in Western Europe, all took their bundles on their shoulders and were off to Philadelphia or Paterson or Providence or Provo. Behind them they left a legend; a legend of distress; a more attractive legend of success. The "Uncle from America" became part of the folklore of the European village; generation after generation, the blood transfusion went on. All of this has been told in monographs, in more human documents, in long and formal narratives, in jargon-packed sociological studies. Dr. Handlin does not attempt to replace or rival these books. What he, with great boldness and success, attempts to do, is to make us feel what this migration infant in terms of human affection,, suffering, hopes deceived, normal patterns of expectation upset. And his book is the essential background for the other two.
One of the other two, the study of The Cultural Migration, is disap- pointing. Five European scholars, now settled in America, tell us what the transfer has meant for them as scholars and what the American environment has done for their subject of study. We get an assessment of the fach as well as of the Fachmann in the new environment, and it is an interesting assessment. But the range of subjects, personalities, predicaments is not wide enough to make the lectures adequate for a very important theme. An important group of cultural migrants is ignored almost entirely, the British university teachers who settle in America in larger numbers than is suggested here. They escape some problems (the basic language difficulty for one); they encounter others; the risk of too easy and superficial assimilation to American ways, or the other danger of stubborn "Britishness." What, for example, is the impact of the numerous Protestant divines from the British Isles who moved and move into America? That would have made a useful pendant to Professor Tillich's study of the American theological environment seen from a continental point of view. The reflections on the status of the academic profession in America, of the bias of American universities and cultural life are worth having but, on the whole, this book is too slight for its theme. With the first volume of Carl Sandburg's autobiography we are in another world. For his parents managed to keep a Swedish world alive in late nineteenth-century Illinois. The church, the language, the strangeness of the American world forted the Sandburg parents to preserve more of Sweden than made for successful adjustment. It was the children who made the adjustment, took over Lincoln as a folk hero, Chicago as a world capital. Much of Professor Handlin's thesis is present, implicitly, in Mr. Sandburg's story. It is representative ; it tells the short and simple annals of the immigrant poor but, of course, it is not simply that, because we see, behind the schoolboy being Americanised, the poet to be. But Mr. Sandburg's narrative makes one wonder whether Professor Handlin has not painted the picture a little too darkly or, rather, whether the sense of being uprooted, of losing sight of a known system of landmarks was not part of the break-down of the old order in Europe as well as of its failure to appear in America: The straight journey from the deserted village to the unknown America was not the only journey possible. A great part of the immigrants from the British Isles had been apprenticed to the new order in Leeds' or Glasgow before they took off for Philadelphia. They knew the world of mines, of factories, of railroads, even of politics and unions, in a way impossible to peasants from Calabria or Cracow. This was the background of John L. Lewis and Phil Murray. Millions, of course, did make the jump straight from the village to America, but that was not universally so and the immigrant from western Europe was better adjusted to the United States than the immigrant from the East and South. Even Connemara was a better training for the new world and the new life than was Sicily. "America was promises," as a modern poet put it. Not all of them were kept, but some were, and the results are around us now in the G.I.s who have thrice come to restore the balance of an old world that their ancestors left with mingled anguish and hope. \ D. W. BROGAN
Previous page
