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Immigrants came to the United States from Russia and the Soviet Union in several waves during the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Evading the Russian draft, 5,000 pacifist sectarians emigrated to California between 1904 and 1912. A much larger surge of approximately 90,000, composed mainly of poor Jewish agriculturalists, fleeing pogroms and famine in Tsarist Russia, fled between 1890 and 1910 and particularly after the Russian Revolution of 1905. They settled mostly in large northeastern cities and in nearby industrial settlements. Many Russians were involved in socialist political parties before 1920, and the Red scare particularly targeted the Russian American community in search of revolutionaries. Thousands of arrests ensued. The stereotyping of Russians as communists, anarchists, or otherwise un-American blossomed in this period.
Another large immigration flowed out of Soviet Russia in the years following the Bolshevik Revolution of November 1917 and subsequent Civil War (1918–21). These people were mostly deeply anti-Soviet former members of the nobility, merchants, academics and members of the professions. The majority settled in European capitals such as Prague, Berlin and Paris, but approximately 20,000 continued on to the United States. Many of them ended up in American universities, establishing some of the first courses in Russian language, literature, culture and history in the United States.
Post-Second World War refugees comprised the second post-revolutionary wave. A mish-mash of national and social groups, they settled in many cities, often after lengthy stays in displaced-persons camps in Europe and South America. After a period of pride among Russian Americans during the Second World War alliance between the US and the Soviet Union, the McCarthyism of the late 1940s and 1950s again encouraged many Russians to keep a low profile.
The third wave of immigrants from the Soviet Union mainly comprised Jews who were allowed to join family members in Israel and the United States. About 300,000 Jews left the USSR between 1970 and 1989, most of them going to Israel. Jewish immigration was subject to the vicissitudes of Cold War antagonisms and was interrupted periodically.
After the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, for example, Jewish immigration was temporarily suspended. In 1977, approximately 500,000 first-generation Russian immigrants and their descendants were living in the United States, though that figure has since jumped higher.
The latest wave of immigration is ongoing and very large, beginning after the collapse of the Soviet communist government in 1991 and intensifying with the subsequent economic and political instability in Russia. Tens of thousands of people of all ethnicities have left the territory of the former Soviet Union and settled in the United States. They have settled primarily in Southern California, Baltimore, MD, Philadelphia, PA, New York City, NY and Boston, MA. Many were highly educated in the USSR and have applied their skills in several areas of American life, including academics, engineering, music and theater, and the computer industry Russians face stereotyping by a mass media fascinated with notions of immigrant illegality. A new villain has appeared in films and television—the leather-jacketed and ruthless Russian Mafioso, involved in gun-running, prostitution and illegal gambling.
Extensive reports of pervasive organized crime in post-Soviet Russia have reinforced this stereotype.
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Immigrants from Ireland and their descendants. The Irish who came to America from the seventeenth to the early nineteenth centuries were Presbyterian Scotch-Irish from Ulster, the northern province of Northern Ireland, who later wished to be distinguished from the mostly Catholic, rural and poor immigrants who, because of the great famines in Ireland in the late 1840s, began the first wave of mass immigration to the US. In the hundred years after 1820, almost 5 million Irish entered America. In the 1840s, the Irish made up 45 percent of immigrants to America. While the numbers of new arrivals have declined since, they have continued to be an important thread in the American tapestry Some estimates have 40 million Americans claiming Irish ancestry While the majority of Scotch-Irish settled in the Middle Atlantic states, the Irish Americans who hailed from the southern parts of Ireland settled throughout the US in both rural and urban communities. Initially discriminated against in the nineteenth century because of their religion and culture, in an era where many employers displayed signs of “No Irish Need Apply” by the twentieth century the Irish had assimilated into the American mainstream. In the cities many Irishmen found employment in the construction trade and in the civil service, principally in the police and fire departments, where their literacy and fluency in English gave them an advantage over other immigrant groups, while many Irish women worked as servants and seamstresses for the growing urban middle class. Found in every American community, the Irish have become particularly associated with the politics, culture, religion and economy of New York City, Chicago, IL, Boston, MA, Philadelphia, PA and San Francisco, CA, which along with most major American cities have sported at least one “Irishtown.” These cities continue to hold parades on St. Patrick’s Day (March 17) to celebrate Irish American accomplishments and identity.
Irish Americans are mostly followers of the Roman Catholic faith, and they have helped to sustain that church in America since their arrival. Patronage systems among the Irish in politics had an impact on party organizations in every major city where many of the Irish working class supported the Democratic Party. The Irish have made remarkable contributions to all forms of elite and popular American culture. In contemporary America, the Irish have made great achievements in politics (the Kennedys, Tip O’Neill, Paul O’Dwyer, Richard J. Daley, Eugene McCarthy), cinema (John Ford, James Cagney Grace Kelly, Spencer Tracy), religion (Francis Cardinal Spellman, John Cardinal O’Connor), drama (Eugene O’Neill, winner of the Nobel prize), literature (F. Scott Fitzgerald, Mary McCarthy, James T. Farrell) and journalism (Jimmy Breslin, Pete Hamill). Since the 1980s there has been a resurgence in immigration from Ireland, inspiring a revival in interest in traditional Irish culture, best represented in the success of the staged musical Riverdance.
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Immigrants from Poland have developed a strong ethnic community, which they commonly refer to as Polonia, serving both the interests of the immigrants and endeavoring to contribute to the emergence of an independent Poland.
The first Poles to arrive in the United States in large numbers were the political exiles from the 1848 revolutions. In the 1880s they were joined by many economic emigrants from occupied Poland pulled by the lure of jobs in America’s burgeoning cities. These immigrants concentrated in major industrial centers, primarily in the Midwest (Buffalo, NY, Chicago, IL, Detroit, MI, Milwaukee, WI, Cleveland, OH and Pittsburgh, PA) and the Northeast (New York City, NY, Philadelphia, PA, and Boston). Polonia emerged in these cities around the Roman Catholic Churches and the flourishing newspapers. Polish Jews tended to be identified by religion, replicating divisions in their homeland. Poles were also strongly committed to labor and socialist movements (stemming from their revolutionary activity earlier in the century), and New York’s Polish Socialist Alliance in America published Rabotnik Polski (Polish Worker).
As was the case for many other ethnic groups, legislation in the 1920s virtually cut off fresh immigrants just as the independent nation emerged. But, the Polish community started to grow once again in the 1940s. With the Nazi invasion of Poland in 1939 many refugees (mainly Catholic) ended up coming to the United States. This trend accelerated after the Second World War, when the Truman administration used the Displaced Persons Act of 1948 to allow Poles fleeing Soviet occupation to enter the US. Between 1945 and 1954 as many as 178,000 Poles arrived in the country, and 75,000 more followed prior to the easing of immigration restrictions in 1965.
Many of these new arrivals were either intellectuals or professionals. Having grown up in an independent Poland and wishing to protect Polish culture, they often came into conflict with the blue-collar leaders of Polonia. Such friction occurred at a time also when many second- and third-generation Polish Americans were beginning to leave the areas of Polish concentration and move to the suburbs. A simultaneous revival of cultural practices and communal organizations in the city occurred within the residual community that remained behind, so that when the 1960s rejection of suburban lifestyles and the celebration of ethnicity occurred, the Polish American culture was still vibrant.
This strong sense of ethnic identity was drawn on by novelists like W.S. Kimiczak in The 1,000 Hour Day (1966) and the better-known, albeit controversial, Jerzy Kosinski.
By 1969, census estimates placed the Polish American community at about 4 million people, though many Poles felt that this was a significant under count and that the number was above 6 million. With its size and its concentration in particular metropolitan areas, the community wielded considerable political influence. Since the Roosevelt era, Poles had been aligned with the Democratic Party, especially in local elections (emphasizing the Democrats’ appeal to workingclass and Catholic immigrants). After the war, Poles tended to change their national vote according to American foreign policy and the handling of the Soviet Union. Truman lost Polish American voters to Dwight Eisenhower, who made various promises about winning back territory from the USSR.
John F. Kennedy, as the first Catholic president and a hawk in foreign policy was able to recapture them; while the failure of the Polish candidate Edmund Muskie to win the Democratic nomination in 1972 persuaded many Polish Americans to vote for Nixon (an irony since it was later shown that Nixon’s dirty tricks had helped to destroy Muskie’s candidacy). But Polish Americans also fit within the Nixon image of the “Silent Majority” working-class ethnics on whom the Republicans hoped to build their new post-civil-rights constituency And, while nine out of ten Poles had voted for Roosevelt, during the Reagan years only about half were voting Democratic.
Besides Muskie, a senator for Maine, several other Polish Americans have been prominent in politics. John Dingell has been the Chairperson of the Energy and Commerce Committee; Leon Jaworski, led the Watergate investigation; and Zbigniew Brzezinski, a Cold War immigrant, was Jimmy Carter’s hawkish National Security advisor. The success of such individuals has gone a long way to counteracting the negative stereotypes associated with Polish Americans. “Polish jokes” have been a staple in comedy houses and the networks’ sitcoms, long after Irish and black jokes have been considered in bad taste. In “All in the Family” (CBS, 1971–9), for example, Archie Bunker mercilessly ridiculed his son-in-law, Michael Stivik, allowing the show to expose many of the issues associated with stereotyping and, since Michael was clearly much smarter than Archie, to contest them as well.
Since the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet bloc, immigration from Poland has continued at variable rates. Return migration and support for the new state have also been more common, especially with the revival of the Polish economy.
Industry:Culture
Immigrants to American cities were often confined to ghettos outside fashionable residential and commercial neighborhoods, through which they established cohesive albeit defensive communities. Since the nineteenth century, names of variable dignity from “Chinatown” or “Little Italy” to “Niggertown” have embodied the dual faces of American assimilation—being in America but not quite belonging. In other areas, more neutral names demarcate complex and dynamic areas—Italian, Jewish and Latino immigrants to New York City, NY’s Lower East Side or the multiple populations of Harlem. Moreover, while these enclaves could be seen as havens and creative elements in the melting-pot, history cannot ignore the poor housing, exploitative labor, neglected services and outside rejection, including physical attacks, that kept immigrants in ghettos.
Suburban opportunities after the Second World War offered escapes for assimilated generations of white enclave residents, while the civil-rights movement and urban renewal in the 1960s sought to eradicate the worst abuses of segregation and the poverty associated with it. Yet, racism continued to block opportunities for some, while after 1965, new immigrants poured into cheap, available housing. The elderly left behind by families and progress, have also posed special problems of security and services.
Some urban enclaves have found new life in the 1990s metropolises as service centers for dispersed populations and foci for ethnic-chic restaurants and shopping. New names, food and faces also reflect the presence of new immigrant populations making it in America—Miami’s Little Havana/ Calle Ocho, multi-ethnic Central American and African restaurants and residents of Washington’s Adams-Morgan, or “Little Saigon” in nearby northern Virginia. Class is a critical element in ethnic and racial development and attitudes “Chinatowns” have become tourist sites in ways that inner-city black or Hispanic neighborhoods have not.
In Sunbelt cities, new enclaves have emerged along suburban highways rather than in older center cities, claiming an alternative locus of cheaper space for stores and residences. Near Los Angeles, CA, meanwhile, suburban cities like Monterey Park and Alhambra have become the first Chinese-majority cities in the nation. Even Chinatown in Manhattan, New York faces competition from new immigrants in outer boroughs like Queens and Brooklyn.
Ethnic enclaves have offered transitional spaces for newly arrived families, and maintain traditions, associations and monuments of the past for future generations. Legal and medical services, media (newspapers and videos), foodstuffs and restaurants, and religious centers all provide continuing linkages in community (within definitions of ethnicity acceptable to American diversity). Festivals, movies (whether Godfather II (1974) or Joy Luck Club (1993)), museums, web-sites and touristoriented services also convert former ghettos into images of American success, despite the popula tions that may still be packed into cramped apartments or sweatshops on upper floors.
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Immigration from Germany to America began in the seventeenth century as radical religious groups such as the Mennonites and Anabaptists fled from religious persecution at home to the relative tolerance of the American colonies. By 1776 Benjamin Franklin estimated that 150,000 German speakers lived in America. Many of them settled in the rural farming districts of Maryland, New York and Pennsylvania, while others went west to the then frontier district in Ohio. In the nineteenth century war, political problems and economic problems in Germany and the AustroHungarian empire led to a peak period of German immigration between 1815 and 1870; nearly 4 million German speakers came to the US during this period. Thereafter German immigration declined somewhat, to be replaced by large migrant flows from Eastern Europe. There was another wave of immigration following the First World War, and another following the Second World War and the partition of Germany; 150,000 Germans came to the US in 1950 alone. This latter group was a mixture of displaced persons, refugees from East Germany and war brides of American soldiers.
Unlike the later Eastern European arrivals, who sought work and wages, most of the German immigrants were interested in acquiring land. In the early nineteenth century they settled in the Midwest, particularly in Ohio, in and around cities such as Cincinnati, OH and Milwaukee, WI (today nearly half the population of these cities is of German descent). These German communities remained highly homogeneous; during the American Civil War, regiments raised from among the “Dutch” (as they were known) often had to have staff interpreters as neither officers nor men could speak English. Even today many of the Ohio communities are bilingual in German and English. Later arrivals moved further west, homesteading in Kansas, Nebraska, Wisconsin and the Dakotas. It has been estimated that by 1900, one-quarter of all German immigrants were engaged in farming.
German Americans have a long history of association and political involvement.
Before the First World War, the German American Central Alliance focused mainly on domestic issues concerning German speakers, but it also pressed for US neutrality in the war. Earlier, German Americans such as Emma Goldman had also been active in socialist and anarchist movements. Between the wars, other strong German cultural movements emerged, some of which were suspected of supporting the Hitler regime in Germany In fact, though, almost all German Americans supported the war effort and German American men served overseas in large numbers.
Today some 55 million Americans claim German descent, more than any other ethnic group. German Americans have been prominent in every walk of life. German contributions to American culture have been immense, even if they are no longer recognized as distinctly German. Great German American figures include Albert Einstein and Samuel Pulitzer; more controversial ones include Werner von Braun, the rocket scientist who was spirited out of Germany at the end of the war to mastermind the US space program, having previously built rockets for the Nazis. On another level, the American brewing industry was founded by German immigrants (mostly from the AustroHungarian empire). All across America in the summertime, people gather at picnics and barbeques to drink beer and eat hamburgers and hot dogs made with frankfurters, implicitly acknowledging how German culture has become embedded in that of America.
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Impeachment is the ultimate power that Congress has over those in the federal judiciary and executive branch whom members of Congress believe are abusing their offices.
Although it was a key element in the Constitution’s balance of powers, Congress has only moved to impeach seventeen men (no women yet), seldom removing them from office. The process begins in the Judiciary Committee in the House of Representatives, which holds hearings on each particular case. If a majority of the committee believes there is enough evidence to go forward, it takes the case to the House for debate and a vote. Then, if a majority of representatives in the House agree, which constitutes the impeachment, the House managers present the case before the Senate. The senators (presided over by the chief justice of the Supreme Court) act as jurors in the case—a two-thirds majority being required for conviction.
Only two presidents have been impeached, Andrew Johnson in 1868 and Bill Clinton in 1999, though a vote of the congressional committee to impeach Richard Nixon, because he “prevented, obstructed, and impeded the administration of justice” in relation to Watergate, led to his resignation in 1974. In the Johnson and Clinton cases, the charges were brought by politicians who fundamentally disagreed with the presidents over major political and social issues. In the earlier instance, radical Republicans wanted a more vigorous assault on racial injustices in the South, while in the recent case the family-values right wing of a vastly different Republican Party endeavored to turn Clinton’s sexual philandering into the sort of “crimes and misdemeanors” required to remove a president.
But impeachment proceedings in American history have almost always been about struggle over competing values. Like elections, most congressional impeachment proceedings have been stridently political affairs, arising not randomly throughout American history, but at critical junctures when ideological struggle has been especially intense. While such proceedings concentrate attention on the actions of particular individuals, they have arisen at moments of uncertainty and transition in American culture. Personality and politics have been deeply entwined throughout American history.
This was the case in 1868 amidst the struggle over the aims of Reconstruction; in the early 1970s, at a time of intense struggle over the Vietnam War and domestic policies; and again in the late 1990s. In each case, impeachment proceedings had serious implications for political party realignment.
In their aftermath, the most important impeachment proceedings in American history have directly affected the balance of ideological groups within major political parties. In the recent case, the Republican Party, at every turn in Clinton’s impeachment proceedings, sided with its most determined conservative wing. Beyond the issue of Clinton’s conduct, this group had engaged in a crusade against both Clintons for several years. While the mass media often focused on the personal attacks, basic differences on public policies undergirded the conservative crusade. The House managers gambled that more media attention would turn public opinion against Clinton, and that, if Monica Lewinsky testified about her affair with Clinton, they would be able to reveal the president’s alleged untruths. This gamble did not pay off; public opinion remained steadfastly in favor of bringing the “embarrassment” to a speedy end. The salaciousness of the information revealed in the hearings and trial turned the public against the messengers rather than the accused. Some of the tensions arising out of this failure carried over into the struggle over the Republican presidential nomination and the campaign for the 2000 election. While the more moderate wing of the party wished to turn attention away from the role it played in the impeachment process and has quickly aligned itself behind George W. Bush (making his primary campaign coffers among the largest ever), the radicals, led by men like Patrick Buchanan and Gary Bauer, continued to focus on Clinton (Buchanan going so far as to suggest that were he to be elected president the first thing he would do is read Clinton his rights).
In the aftermath of earlier impeachment efforts, political movements to alter the political landscape gained ground, feeding off disaffection in the country Other factors were important in each movement, but disillusionment with the state of American politics was significant in each case. Recently disillusionment with the state of politics has intensified. The Jesse Ventura election in Minnesota is an interesting manifestation of such sentiment, and perhaps suggests that one consequence of the impeachment process may be the growing success of a third-party movement.
The role of the media in covering the House and Senate proceedings was also intriguing. As a result of its impeachment coverage, CNN emerged into a prominence on domestic coverage equal to its leadership in covering the Gulf War. Assumptions that ratings would be low led to surprisingly modest coverage by most networks. CNN’s closest rival was National Public Radio, the former providing the most detailed coverage and the latter providing extensive commentary. FOX and MSNBC decidedly tilted to the right during the proceedings. The web-site adjuncts to these outlets (and the major search engines) offered the public a new phenomenon: the ability to catch up and explore aspects of the process in varying levels of detail via the Internet.
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In 1962 Michael Harrington published The Other America, arguing that one-fifth of Americans lived in substandard housing, suffered from malnutrition and received inadequate medical care. Harrington’s shocking revelations influenced many in America, including Lyndon Johnson, a man of humble beginnings with whom the problem of poverty resonated deeply The sudden death of President John Kennedy in 1963 moved many in the government, first among them the new President Johnson, to fulfill the goals Kennedy had targeted, one of which was the creation of a War on Poverty.
The War on Poverty had its roots in the New Deal of the 1930s. In terms of enlarging the powers of the federal government, the two reform movements were equally ambitious. But unlike the 1930s, the early 1960s was an era of unprecedented prosperity in America, which emboldened Johnson and others all the more to believe that poverty could be erased from the American landscape.
At the same time, many researchers began to talk about a “culture of poverty” in America, arguing that poverty tended to strike certain groups more than others, and to be handed down through generations. That is, nonwhites, the elderly those with less education, and female-headed households were much more likely to be affected by poverty and to pass down this condition to future generations. How to break this cycle was a much more difficult question.
The ambitions of the War on Poverty included Medicare, a national health-insurance program initially created in 1964 for the elderly and then expanded to include recipients of welfare. In addition, the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 gave aid to underfunded public schools, while the Higher Education Act of the same year allocated funds for needy college and university students. Johnson’s administration also created the Department of Housing and Urban Development.
But the War on Poverty involved individuals at the grassroots level as well as the highest levels of the government. In this regard, Johnson’s vision was premised on the belief that the poor needed to be involved in the programs that were to affect them if those programs were to succeed. In this spirit, the Johnson administration created the Office of Economic Opportunity in 1964. First headed by R. Sargent Shriver, John Kennedy’s brother-in-law, the OEO administered a budget of $800 million to a variety of programs geared to community development and job training.
Some of the more notable programs of the War on Poverty included: legal services for the poor; Volunteers in Service to America (VISTA), a form of domestic Peace Corps, training the young as teachers to be sent to underprivileged school districts; the Job Corps, which attempted to train those who had dropped out of formal education; and Project Head Start, initiated to provide preschool education for poor children. Some of these programs, such as Head Start and Food Stamps, are still current, but for the most part the War on Poverty had a minimal impact. Many have argued that the programs fell victim to the Vietnam War’s voracious appetite for funding, while others have charged that the entire enterprise was little more than a superficial attempt to mend a system with deep structural problems.
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In 1962, forty American college students gathered in Michigan to discuss some of the gravest problems facing the nation, and in this meeting Students for a Democratic Society was born. SDS confronted the nation’s presence abroad, especially in Vietnam, challenged racial discrimination at home and asked serious questions about the nation’s commitment to participatory democracy. Among its most significant contributions was leading the free-speech movement. Significantly, members of SDS and the “New Left” were raised in an era of relative affluence; having experienced neither depression nor war, they were in many ways liberated to focus on issues both on college campuses and in the larger society.
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In 1970 the US National Guard opened fire on student antiwar protesters at Kent State University in Ohio, killing four and wounding eleven others. The incident shocked the nation and galvanized student-led opposition to US military aggression in Vietnam and Cambodia. A wave of demonstrations erupted around the country in response, wreaking havoc on college campuses and increasing pressure on President Nixon to soften his stance on US intervention in Southeast Asia. The incident was one of many during the politically turbulent 1960s and 1970s that contributed to young people’s alienation from the political process.
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In 1973 the American Indian Movement (AIM) occupied the town of Wounded Knee, South Dakota, the site of the massacre of Sioux Indians in 1890. The American Indian activists wanted to draw attention to the impoverished social conditions on Native American reservations. In response, FBI agents (fresh from their battles with Black Panthers) stormed the town killing an activist. These events were portrayed in the docudrama Incident at Oglala—The Leonard Peltier Story (1992). The conflict marked a new, more militant phase in the resistance to oppression among American Indians.
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