2019-2020 – UAntwerpen – CHUKUS – F. Albers
Terms from ‘American Civilisation: An Introduction’ (Glossary)
These terms (from the blue squares at the end of each chapter) are important and will come on the exam
Chapter 3: The people
Northern colonies
o To escape religious oppression in ENG, the Pilgrims, a small group of radical separatists
from the Church of ENG, founded the first of the Northern colonies in 1620 at Plymouth,
Massachusetts; Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1630 (Puritans) swallowed up Plymouth
spawned the colony of Connecticut
o Flourishing through agriculture & forestry, the New ENG colonies also became the
shippers & merchants for all of British America; large hostile New ENG
Middle colonies
o The founding of the middle colonies (New York, New Jersey & Pennsylvania) was
distinctive. The earliest European communities here were Dutch & Swedish outposts of
the fur trade that almost accidentally grew into colonies. New Netherlands, along the
Hudson river & New York Bay, & New Sweden, along the Delaware river, recruited
soldiers, farmers, craftsmen, clergymen & their families to meet the needs of the fur
traders who bought pelts from the natives. New Sweden lasted from 1638 to 1655, when
the Dutch annexed it.
o More tolerant & diverse
o German immigrants, the largest non-English speaking group in the colonies, believed their
descendants had to learn German if their religion & culture were to survive. For mutual
support, they concentrated their settlements. In the middle colonies, German families
lived so closely together in some areas that others found it hard to settle among them.
Stage migration
o If nearby cities offered work, emigration rates were lower. But the population surplus from
the countryside was so large that huge numbers of people left anyway. Stage migration
(moving first to the city and, after some years, from there to a foreign country) became
common. Following changes in the Atlantic labour market, people moved to where the
jobs were.
Nativism
o White & Protestant, Scandinavians had language problems that made them seem slow to
comprehend, & at times they were ridiculed for their homeland ways. Nativism (the dislike
of people and things foreign) plagued many “old” immigrants, in spite of their apparent
similarity to native-born Americans. Germans were partly stereotyped as Prussian
marionettes or Bavarian louts, criticised for clannishness & became the targets of
temperance movements that attacked their habit of drinking in beer halls after church on
Sundays. Anglo-Americans excluded German Jews from education & professions &
shunned them in many social circles. The Irish suffered many forms of discrimination.
Many Americans stereotyped them as dirty, violent drunks. The most serious opposition
they faced came from anti-Catholic bigots, who burned convents & churches as early as
the 1830s. Anti-foreign agitation reached its first peak in the 1850s. Along with anti-
Catholicism, this nativism focused on popular versions of ideas made famous by Alexis de
Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, which claimed that the basic social & political
character of the US came to New ENG from the mother country. The Know Nothing or
American Party believed that not only the Irish, with their alleged loyalty to the Pope in
Rome, but also all non-British immigrants, threatened this precious heritage, and so they
proposed tripling the time needed to gain US citizenship & restricting immigrants’ voting
rights. Internal divisions & the coming of the Civil War defused this nativist movement.
Another arose in the 1860s in the West & achieved its goal, the Chinese Exclusion Act,
which ended Chinese immigration in 1882. Racism & the fear of unemployment & lower
wages motivated the labour organisations that led the campaign.
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o Large foreign-born settlements have given rise to contemporary forms of racism &
nativism.
Sojourners, birds of passage
o By the late 1800s, falling train and steamship ticket prices (often prepaid by relatives in
America) & cheap travel permitted people to see immigration as a short-term strategy,
and many new immigrants were sojourners, “birds of passage”, who stayed only long
enough to save money to buy land or a small business in the old country.
The Melting Pot
o It was with mixed rural New York settlements of northwest Europeans in mind that St.
Jean de Crévecoeur, an immigrant farmer from France, first stated in 1782 the idea that in
America “individuals of all nations are melted into a new race of man”. The only people
who mixed in his vision, however, were northwest Europeans, & he required that the
people in this first version of the melting pot had to turn their backs on their homeland
cultures.
o In 1908, Israel Zangwill’s play The Melting Pot popularised the idea that diverse
groups in the US would eventually fuse many races and cultures through intermarriage
and become a new people; to many native-born reformers, that was a radical version that
they could not accept; to them the metaphor meant that the immigrants should conform
to Anglo-American culture, for their own good; nativists of the time could not imagine a
greater calamity than such a melting pot “mongrelisation” of the white race
Cultural pluralism
o The view that the nature of the nation was & should be a composite of many national
backgrounds, races & cultures; pluralistic view continues to face opposition; in 2016,
Donald Trump made his promise to build a Great Southern Wall against immigrants a
major part of his presidential campaign; resistance to pluralism comes from several
quarters: from those opposed to the presence of an estimated 11 million undocumented
immigrants, those who believe the country is becoming “Latinised” & that newcomers
should leave their homeland cultures behind, from people who feel that newcomers take
“our” jobs, & those convinced that the latest wave of immigration necessitates a focus on
cohesion; metaphors of a “melting pot”, a “salad” or a “stew”
o An opposing, progressive view was that the US should be an example of what Horace
Kallen called “cultural pluralism”, the belief in diverse cultures united by loyalty to the
same political and civic ideals
Ellis Island
o In 1892, the federal gvt. opened Ellis Island, the famous screening depot for immigrants in
New York Bay (1892-1954); in the registration room, gvt. officials decided on the eligibility
of immigrants to enter the US; immigrants had to identify themselves, name their
sponsors in the US, pass a physical examination, & pay a head tax
National Origins Quota Act of 1924
o The Quota Act of 1924 introduced new concepts that continue to set the rules for
immigration today; law restricts entry to the country; it still defines immigrants as
legal/illegal aliens, according to the numerical limits set for each sending country & how
people cross US borders; to be a legal alien, each person must present documents such
as a visa or a “green card” when (re-)entering the US
o It reduced European nationality quotas to 2%. More important, it moved the census for
counting the foreign-born of each group back to 1890, when only small numbers of “new”
immigrants were in the US, so that their quotas became much smaller.
o The 1924 Act introduced a new concept, national origins quotas:
National origins quotas
o The national origins quotas went into effect in 1929. This Anglo-American definition of the
national identity was the framework for immigration until 1965. Until 1965, the decision of
whether people were legal or illegal depended on their “national origins” as a part of the
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“native” or “immigrant stock” that had accumulated in the US population by 1920. The
gvt. set a quota of visas for each country according to how large that national background
had grown to be, but the American residents counted to set the quotas included only
Whites. In effect, the act cut the quotas for all European nations but the UK by one-half to
two-thirds.
Bracero programme (1942 – 1964)
o The Second World War & the Cold War caused several contrasting shifts in policy. The gvt.
imported e.g. temporary farm labour from Mexico under the “bracero programme” due to
wartime labour shortages.
o Mexican labourers were welcome again during World War II. In 1942, the US & Mexico
reached an agreement that legalised their temporary status in the US. This bracero
programme recruited 4.5 million Mexicans, mostly in farm work, as guest workers before
it ended in 1964. The agreement’s text guaranteed the braceros’ civil rights and working
conditions, but fell so far short in Texas that Mexico refused to send more of its citizens
there. The programme expanded during the Korean War (1950-53) and in the mid-1950s
in response to growing needs for cheap, non-union labour.
Brain drain
o The McCarran-Walter Act started the so-called “brain-drain” to the US by reserving the
first 50% of visas for each country for people with needed skills, thus creating a brain-
drain because skilled people were leaving other countries to go to the US
Immigration Act of 1965
o Provided a new approach to replace the McCarran-Walter Act, but it also had unforeseen
consequences. It replaced national origins quotas with hemispheric limits to annual
immigration. To emphasise equal treatment, all nations in the eastern hemisphere had
the same limit of 20,000 immigrants annually. A system of preferences set principles for
selecting immigrants. Family reunification, the most important principle, reserved nearly
three-quarters of immigrant visas for relatives of American citizens or resident aliens.
Spouses, minor children & parents were admitted outside the limits. Grown children as
well as brothers & sisters were given special preferences. The second principle continued
the “brain-drain” by reserving 20% of visas for skilled people. Refugees received the
remaining visas. Legislation made the national limit & preference system global in the
1970s.
o Illegal immigration may undermine the 1965 law that gives all nationalities an equal
chance for immigrant visas.
Diversity lotteries
o The limits on authorised immigration to the US are very liberal, e.g. 55,000 people get
their “green card” as legal immigrants through the diversity lottery, which distributes
visas among nationalities that have not immigrated in large numbers recently
Hispanics
o For its own convenience, the federal gvt. invented the word “Hispanics” to put in a single
category all the Central and South American Spanish-speaking cultures arriving in the US
in the fourth wave; a handy label for official statistics, the word has come to mean illegal
immigrants in the popular mind because of the large number of immigrants unlawfully
crossing the border with Mexico until the later 1990s; it thus contributes to prejudice
against hugely diverse Latino populations; about 52 percent of “illegals” are Mexicans
o By mid-2012, Asian Americans had replaced Hispanics as the largest and most rapidly
growing racial group in the country; US-Mexico border wall: during his victorious
campaign for the presidency in 2016, Trump found strong popular appeal in his promise
to build a “great wall” to keep out Latino immigrants; by 2016, opposition to Latinos &
Muslims grew for a combination of additional reasons: Latinos had grown to be a larger
minority group than African Americans; brown skinned & culturally distinct, both groups
appeared to gain increased economic, political & cultural influence, especially in the
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