Florida State University Libraries
Electronic Theses, Treatises and Dissertations
The Graduate School
2013
Stirring the American Melting Pot: Middle
Eastern Immigration, the Progressives
and the Legal Construction of Whiteness,
1880-1924
Richard Soash
Follow this and additional works at the FSU Digital Library. For more information, please contact [email protected]
THE FLORIDA STATE UNIVERSITY
COLLEGE OF ARTS AND SCIENCES
STIRRING THE AMERICAN MELTING POT:
MIDDLE EASTERN IMMIGRATION, THE PROGRESSIVES AND
THE LEGAL CONSTRUCTION OF WHITENESS, 1880-1924
By
RICHARD SOASH
A Thesis submitted to the
Department of History
in partial fulfillment of the
requirements for the degree of
Master of Arts
Degree Awarded:
Spring Semester, 2013
Richard Soash defended this thesis on March 7, 2013.
The members of the supervisory committee were:
Jennifer Koslow
Professor Directing Thesis
Suzanne Sinke
Committee Member
Peter Garretson
Committee Member
The Graduate School has verified and approved the above-named committee members, and
certifies that the thesis has been approved in accordance with university requirements.
ii
To my Grandparents:
Evan & Verena Soash
Richard & Patricia Fluck
iii
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I am extremely thankful for both the academic and financial support that Florida State
University has provided for me in the past two years. I would also like to express my gratitude
to the FSU History Department for giving me the opportunity to pursue my graduate education
here. My academic advisor and committee members – Dr. Koslow, Dr. Sinke, and Dr. Garretson
– have been wonderful teachers and mentors during my time in the Master’s Program; I greatly
appreciate their patience, humor, and knowledge, both inside and outside of the classroom. I am
also indebted to my family – Don, Ellen, and Lauren Soash – for their love and unwavering
support in this process. I owe them more than I could ever repay. Finally, I would like to thank
my peers in the history program, particularly Jonathan Shipe and Amy Drewel, for their
friendship amidst the every-day – and sometimes not so every-day – experiences of graduate
school. This thesis would not have come together without the support of everyone mentioned
here.
iv
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Abstract .......................................................................................................................................... iv
1.
INTRODUCTION ...................................................................................................................1
1.1
1.2
2.
FILLING THE POT, 1880-1900 .............................................................................................9
2.1
2.2
2.3
2.4
3.
Coming to the Pot ..........................................................................................................9
Race, Citizenship, and the Chinese Precedent .............................................................15
Life in the United States, Pre-1900 ..............................................................................17
“Sanctified Arab Tramps”: American Views in the Late Nineteenth Century ............24
STRAINING THE POT, 1900-1914 .....................................................................................27
3.1
3.2
3.3
4.
Historiography - Whiteness Studies and the Progressive-Immigrant Relationship .......2
Secondary Sources on Middle Eastern Immigration ....................................................5
Classifying Progressivism ............................................................................................28
“Its Value Will Become Apparent With Scrutiny” ......................................................30
The Racial Prerequisite Cases ......................................................................................42
PUTTING A LID ON IT, 1914-1924....................................................................................46
4.1
4.2
4.3
4.4
4.5
4.6
The Lights Go Down ...................................................................................................46
“About that of Walnut”: Smith, Shahid, and Dow.......................................................49
The Asiatic Barred Zone ..............................................................................................56
Basha and Cartozian: The Final Court Cases ..............................................................59
The 1921 and 1924 Quota Acts ...................................................................................61
Conclusions ..................................................................................................................62
REFERENCES ..............................................................................................................................64
BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH .........................................................................................................71
v
ABSTRACT
When an immigrant came to early twentieth-century America, his or her ability to
naturalize was dependent on the artificial color designation assigned to his or her group.
Armenian and Syrian-Lebanese immigrants, however, entered the country as the ultimate “inbetween people.” They were situated geographically between Europe and Asia and racially
between Caucasian and Mongolian, “white” and “yellow.” The two groups were unique in that,
at the dawn of the Progressive Era, they could have conceivably been placed into either category.
This thesis argues that the socioeconomic biases of the people in power at the time, in this case
Progressive Era policy-makers, played a large role in determining the “whiteness” of Armenian
and Syrian-Lebanese immigrants.
vi
CHAPTER ONE
INTRODUCTION
While students of history remember 1619 as the year when the first African slaves
disembarked onto the soil of colonial America, few realize that a Middle Eastern immigrant
predated them to Jamestown. The rather straightforwardly named Martin the Armenian appeared
as early as 1618 in the records of the Virginia Company of London, working as a servant for
George Yeardley, the governor of the Virginia colony.1 Martin, made a freeman by Yeardley,
traveled back to London in 1622 and vanished from company records after 1624.2 In an
achievement in and of itself, Martin survived four years of Colonial Jamestown life, whereas his
nineteenth-century equivalent, a twenty-seven year old named Antonious al-Bishallany who was
the first Syrian-Lebanese immigrant to the United States, died in New York in 1856 after
spending just two years in the country.3
Martin the Armenian and Antonious al-Bishallany represented the first drops in the wave
of Middle Eastern immigrants that would arrive in the United States in the late nineteenth and
early twentieth-century. By 1924, three centuries after Martin left America, the total number of
Armenians in the country had increased from one person to nearly one hundred thousand, second
only in total number among Middle Eastern immigrants to the two hundred thousand SyrianLebanese.4 The influx of these groups coincided with the Progressive Era in the United States,
setting up a convoluted situation in which officials struggled to “color-code” immigrants who
were not fully white, black, yellow, European, African, or Asian. This Thesis explores the
artificial racial assignments applied to Middle Eastern immigrants, arguing that ultimately the
designations revealed far more about the socio-economic biases and prejudices of the era’s
policy-makers, rather than “inherent” racial traits of the immigrants themselves.
1
M. Vartan Malcolm, The Armenians in America (Boston: The Pilgrim Press, 1919), 52-55; Robert Mirak, Torn
Between Two Lands: Armenians in America, 1890 to World War I (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983), 35.
2
The Virginia colony did bring in a “George the Armenian” in the 1650s to help with silk production. Despite the
similarity in names, one doubts that George bore any relation to Martin. See Mirak, Torn Between Two Lands, 35.
3
May Ahdab-Yehia, “The Lebanese Maronites, Patterns of Continuity and Change” in Arabs in the New World:
Studies on Arab-American Communities, ed. Sameer Y. Abraham and Nadeel Abraham (Detroit: Wayne State
University Center for Urban Studies, 1983), 152.
4
Robert Mirak, “The Armenians in America,” in The Armenian People from Ancient to Modern Times, Volume II,
ed. Richard G. Hovannisian (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1997), 390. For estimates of the numbers of SyrianLebanese during a similar timeframe, see Alixa Naff, Becoming American, The Early Arab Immigrant Experience
(Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1985), 108.
1
1.1 Historiography - Whiteness Studies and the Progressive-Immigrant Relationship
Of the two historiographical genres from which this Thesis draws, “whiteness studies”
represents the only one with a formal designation. Primarily a subtopic within the field of U.S.
immigration history, whiteness studies emphasizes the constructed nature of racially-based color
designations, be they imposed by politics or society. Sawsan Abdulrahim, writing for a broader
social science audience in Race and Arab Americans Before and After 9/11, provides an
excellent, succinct explanation of the field:
In recent years, however, there has been a proliferation of a new genre of race writings
specifically concerned with white racial identity formation. This work, referred to as
‘whiteness studies’ or ‘critical studies of whiteness,’ argues that, like other racial
categories, ‘whiteness’ is constructed, dynamic, and context-specific; it is negotiated by
individuals and collectives as both an identity and a social position (Doane and BonillaSilva 2003; Rasmussen et al. 2001).5
She also notes the important detail that whiteness represents a deliberate exclusion of certain
groups just as much as an affirmative inclusion of others.6 Abdulrahim’s article provides a useful
example of whiteness scholarship on Middle Eastern immigrants, but her piece, revolving around
immigrant groups whose major arrival occurred in the 1960s, falls far outside of this paper’s
relevant timeframe.
Two primary styles seem to exist for those writing on whiteness. The first category, into
which Abdulrahim’s piece falls, focuses on a specific ethnic group and its inclusion or exclusion
in the supposed white race. Such works include Noel Ignatiev’s How the Irish Became White,
Karen Brodkin’s How Jews Became White Folks and What that Says about Race in America, and
Thomas Guglielmos’ White on Arrival: Italians, Race, Color, and Power in Chicago, 18901945.7 Whiteness scholars have published little to no work, however, where their primary focus
rests on early Middle Eastern immigrant groups.8
Sawsan Abdulrahim, “‘Whiteness’ and the Arab Immigrant Experience,” in Race and Arab Americans Before and
After 9/11; From Invisible Citizens to Visible Subjects, ed. Amaney Jamal and Nadine Naber (Syracuse, NY:
Syracuse University Press, 2008), 133.
6
Ibid.
7
Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White (New York: Routledge, 1995); Karen Brodkin’s How Jews Became
White Folks and What that Says about Race in America (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press 1994); Thomas
Guglielmo, White on Arrival: Italians, Race, Color, and Power in Chicago, 1890-1945 (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2003).
8
The exception is Gualtieri’s Between Arab and White, a work which this piece will explore in much more depth
later on in the paper. Gualitieri’s monograph, while excellent in itself and a fundamental source for my research,
focuses exclusively on the Syrian-Lebanese and the judicial rather than the legislative debates over Middle
5
2
Some whiteness historians employ a second, broader style in their work. Eschewing a
focus on specific immigrant groups, scholars like David Roediger, Matthew Frye Jacobson, Ian
Haney Lopez, Richard Delgado, and Jean Sefancic instead describe the precepts and
characteristics that whiteness entails.9 The authors make the case that the conceptualizations of
otherness, “in-betweenness,” and racial hierarchies represent central facets of whiteness.10
Jacobson and Lopez, in particular, also emphasize the inherency of status and privilege within
the concept of “being white.”11 In her explanation of whiteness studies to a readership of
anthropologists and social scientists, Abdulrahim emphasizes many of the same points. “An
integral component of ‘whiteness’ studies,” she writes, “has been to document the historical
process through which different European immigrant groups at the turn of the twentieth century
gained white racial status. This work demonstrates that white racial consciousness was
constructed through a highly contested process with the participation of immigrants who were
deemed to be ‘in-between’ or ‘not-yet-white.”12 The works of these men and women tend to be
more theoretical than that of the “single-ethnicity” type of whiteness scholars.
Whiteness studies emphasizes the “constructed” nature and “contested process” of
becoming white, but the immigrants themselves represent only half of those doing the
constructing and the contesting. While many of today’s historians avoid top-down approaches to
history, a critical part of whiteness studies involves answering the question as to who in power
helped create the artificial racial designations. Since the first wave of Middle Eastern immigrants
reached its apex in the early twentieth century, firmly in the middle of America’s Progressive
Era, it is not surprising that progressive legislators, judges, and administration officials played a
central role in determining questionable groups’ whiteness and setting the standards for
naturalization. To understand Progressive Era immigration policy, it stands to reason that one
must understand the progressives, their socio-economic biases and prejudices, and their attitudes
Easterners’ whiteness. See Sarah M.A. Gualtieri, Between Arab and White; Race and Ethnicity in the Early Syrian
American Diaspora (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009).
9
See, in particular, David Roediger, Working Towards Whiteness; How America’s Immigrants Became White-The
Strange Journey from Ellis Island to the Suburbs (Cambridge: Basic Books, 2005); Matthew Frye Jacobson,
Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 1998); Ian Haney López, White By Law; The Legal Construction of Race, 10 th Anniversary Edition (NY: New
York University Press, 2006); Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic, Critical Race Theory, An Introduction. New
York: New York University Press, 2001.
10
Delgado and Stefancic, 56-57; Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness, 12-13; López, White By Law, 108.
11
Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color, 95; López, White By Law, xvi.
12
Abdulrahim, “‘Whiteness’ and the Arab Immigrant Experience,” 133-134.
3
towards immigration. Such an approach fits well with the broader trends of the field of whiteness
studies, where historians have begun to place more of an emphasis on the legal aspects of
whiteness.
Fortunately, as to the progressives themselves, there exists a large body of research already
on the era’s policy-makers and their connection with immigrants, or for lack of a better term, the
progressive-immigrant relationship. Writing in the 1950s, Richard Hofstadter was the first
historian of note to explore this topic. Despite its flaws, Hofstadter’s 1955 Age of Reform
remains arguably one of the most important early works on progressivism.13 Hofstadter
essentially argued that the progressive reformers were white, “old-middle class,” well-educated,
protestant men of status who found their prestige upended by the “urban bosses and industrial
titans” of the Gilded Age.14 The progressive reformers and the newly arrived immigrants could
never understand each other, according to Hofstadter. The European immigrants in the great
Northeastern cities found the progressives’ notions of good government reforms to be abstract
and intangible at best, against their self-interest at worst. The progressives, in turn, viewed the
wave of European immigrants as crucial cogs in both the inner-city political machines and the
industrial monopolies−the two entities that the reformers hated most out of all of the abuses of
the Gilded Age.15
Eventually, historians began to closely examine the progressive response to individual ethnic and
immigrant groups, at least more so than they had in the past. Some of the best historiographical
examples of this trend include Robert F. Zeidel’s work on European groups in Immigrants,
Progressives, and Exclusion Politics; The Dillingham Commission, 1900-1927, James S. Pula’s
article on the Poles entitled “The Progressives, the Immigrant, and the Workplace: Defining
Public Perceptions, 1900-1914,” David W. Southern’s work on Blacks in The Progressive Era
and Race; Reaction and Reform, 1900-1907, Roger Daniels’s The Politics of Prejudice, The
Anti-Japanese Movement in California and the Struggle for Japanese Exclusion, and Erika Lee’s
At America's Gates: Chinese Immigration during the Exclusion Era, 1882-1943.16 As of yet, no
Columbia University historian Alan Brinkley, for example, describes The Age of Reform as “the most influential
book ever published on the history of twentieth century America.” Alan Brinkley, “Richard Hofstadter’s The Age of
Reform, A Reconsideration,” Reviews in American History 13, Vol 3 (Sep. 1985): 462.
14
Ibid., 469-470.
15
Richard Hofstadter, The Age of Reform (NY: Random House, 1965), 175-186.
16
Robert F. Zeidel, Immigrants, Progressives, and Exclusion Politics; The Dillingham Commission, 1900-1927
(Dekalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2004); James S. Pula, “The Progressives, the Immigrant, and the
Workplace: Defining Public Perceptions, 1900-1914,” Polish American Studies, 52 (Autumn, 1995): 57-69; David
13
4
author has explored the relationship between progressives and Middle Eastern immigrants,
leaving a historiographical gap to be filled.
1.2 Secondary Sources on Middle Eastern Immigration
While scholars have yet to explore the relationship between progressives and Middle
Eastern immigrants, no shortage of scholarship exists on Middle Eastern immigration to the
United States during the Progressive Era. This section of the paper makes note of the major
works on turn-of-the-century Middle Eastern immigrants, even that of the parentheticalreferencing, social-science leaning, ethnic-studies typology. Both anthropological ethnic studies
pieces and typical immigration histories focusing on specific groups like the Armenians or the
Syrian-Lebanese proved useful to my thesis. Though neither type overlapped much with
whiteness studies or the literature on progressives, such scholarship often examined a group’s
occupational, political, or religious leanings, their rate of assimilation, or some other relevant
piece of information, which in turn helps explain what the policy-makers “saw” when they
investigated and categorized these immigrant groups as white.
Isolating the scholarship by individual immigrant group likely represents the simplest
way to chronicle the prodigious literature on early twentieth-century Middle Eastern immigrants.
In terms of sheer numbers, the Syrian-Lebanese constituted the largest immigrant population in
America, followed closely by the Armenians, and distantly by various Muslim groups. The
amount of scholarship on each turn-of-the century group seems to correspond to their relative
size as a turn-of-the-century population in the United States; accordingly, much exists on the
Syrian-Lebanese, some on the Armenians, and little on Muslim immigrants.
In regards to the turn-of-the-century Syrian-Lebanese, there exists at least three
monographs, five anthologies, and one article that have proven relevant to my research and
appear regularly in the thesis itself. The monographs include Akram Fouad Khater’s Inventing
Home; Emigration, Gender, and the Middle Class in Lebanon, 1870-1920, Alixa Naff’s
Becoming American: The Early Arab Immigrant Experience, and Sarah M. A. Gualitieri’s
W. Southern, The Progressive Era and Race; Reaction and Reform, 1900-1907 (Wheeling, IL: Harlan Davidson,
Inc., 2005); Erika Lee, At America's Gates: Chinese Immigration during the Exclusion Era, 1882-1943 (Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 2003); Roger Daniels, The Politics of Prejudice, the Anti-Japanese Movement in
California and the Struggle for Japanese Exclusion (Berkeley: The University of California Press, 1977).
5
Between Arab and White: Race and Ethnicity in the Early Syrian American Diaspora.17 Khater’s
monograph is the only one of the three to focus on return migration and its profound effects on
the home country. Naff’s work is notable for its use of oral history interviews conducted with
surviving first and second generation immigrants in the 1960s and 1970s; her pioneering work
also proves important for her arguments on the assimilative power of peddling. Gualtieri’s book
arguably represents the most important of the three monographs for this Thesis because it
unquestionably falls in the whiteness studies genre. Her work provides an excellent survey of the
verdicts rendered on the Syrian-Lebanese’s whiteness by Progressive Era judges. Of all the
sources mentioned in this paper, Gualtieri’s piece comes closest to my own research; however,
her work differs from mine in that it happens to lack both a comparative focus and any mention
of the progressives themselves.
At least five relevant anthologies on the Syrian-Lebanese exist.18 Written in the 1970s,
1980s, and 1990s, all but one use some version of the word “Arab” in the title instead of
“Lebanese” or “Syrian-Lebanese.” No simple, universal designation for this group of immigrants
exists. Before the 1920s, immigrants from Mt. Lebanon referred to themselves either by sect
(Maronite, Melkite, Druze, etc.) or as Syrian because they left the villayet (Ottoman province) of
Syria. Despite the existence of a Mount Lebanon, the entity of Lebanon did not come into use
until after the French established the mandate of “Greater Lebanon” in 1920. Even though
Christians from Mt. Lebanon constituted the bulk of all “Syrian” immigration to the United
States, it would be misleading to describe this people as Lebanese, when, in the timeframe in
question, no one described them as such. This paper utilizes the term “Syrian-Lebanese,” since
not all “Syrian” immigrants were Lebanese, but (prior to the 1920s) all Lebanese immigrants
were “Syrian.” Alixa Naff and Sarah M.A. Gualtieri employ the term “Syrians,” while Khater
uses “Lebanese” as a descriptor. Khater also frequently utilizes the Arab words fellahin and ahali
(which loosely translate to “peasants”) as descriptors for the migrants.19 Between 1900 and 1920
17
Akram Fouad Khater, Inventing Home; Emigration, Gender, and the Middle Class in Lebanon, 1870-1920
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001.
18
Albert Hourani and Nadim Shehadi, ed., The Lebanese in the World: A Century of Emigration (The Centre for
Lebanese Studies, 1992); Michael W. Suleiman ed., Arabs in America; Building a New Future (Philadelphia:
Temple University Press, 1999); Ernest McCarus, ed. The Development of Arab-American Identity (Ann Arbor: the
University of Michigan Press, 1994); Sameer Y. Abraham and Nadeel Abraham, ed., Arabs in the New World;
Studies on Arab American Communities (Detroit: Wayne State University Cneter for Urban Studies, 1983); Amaney
Jamal and Nadine Naber eds. Race and Arab Americans Before and After 9/11; From Invisible Citizens to Visible
Subjects (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2008).
19
Khater, Inventing Home, 20-25.
6
the United States government just used the broad term Syrian, while American newspapers
referred to the Syrian-Lebanese as Syrian, Arab, or by sect.
The term Arab simply refers to Arabic-speaking people. In Progressive Era America, the
Syrian-Lebanese represented the only prominent ethnic group which spoke Arabic, so Arab
became a term synonymous with the group itself. The majority of the Syrian-Lebanese
immigrants were of the Maronite, Melkite, and Eastern Orthodox sects, which contradicts the
assumption that being Arab was or is synonymous with being Muslim. Today the term Arab can
refer to the Shia, Sunnis, Lebanese, Palestinians, Algerians, Egyptians, Morrocans, Berbers,
Chaldeans, Maronites, Melkites, Copts, Afghanis, and a host of smaller groups of peoples. The
majority of the aforementioned anthologies use the term Arab instead of Lebanese, likely for two
different reasons. First, using the term Arab avoids the Syrian/Lebanese/Syrian-Lebanese
terminology issue. Second, using Arab instead of Syrian-Lebanese allows these anthologies to
also include scholarship on the second wave of Middle Eastern immigrants to the United States
during the 1960s, who were primarily Arabic-speaking Muslims from outside the confines of
modern Lebanon. It is in these anthologies that scholarship on small, miscellaneous immigrant
groups can occasionally be found, for instance, Mary C. Sengstock’s work on Detroit’s 1910s
and 1920s Iraqi-Chaldean population.20 Naff’s work on the Syrian-Lebanese appears in three of
the five anthologies.
Like the Syrian-Lebanese literature, some scholarship exists for twentieth century
Armenian immigrants to America, though it has a tendency to get lost in all the debates over
genocide and U.S. foreign policy toward Turkey during and after World War I. Two monographs
and an article on the 1925 Cartozian whiteness case are especially useful for my own research.21
Mirak’s Torn Between Two Lands; Armenians in America, 1890 to World War I represents the
seminal work on Armenian immigration to the Progressive Era United States. Anny Balakian’s
Armenian-Americans; From Being to Feeling Armenian draws heavily from Mirak’s monograph
and is significantly more anthropological in nature; however, her work fills in some of the gap
between Mirak’s cutoff point of World War I and this thesis’ closing date of 1924.
Mary C. Sengstock, “Detroit’s Iraqi-Chaldeans: A Conflicting Conception of Identity,” in Arabs in the New World
ed. Sameer Y. Abraham and Nabeel Abraham (Detroit: Wayne State University, 1983): 135-146.
21
Anny Balakian, Armenian-Americans; From Being To Feeling Armenian (New Brunswick: Transition Publishers,
1993); Earlene Carver, “On the Boundary of White: The Cartozian Naturalization Case and the Armenians 19231925,” Journal of American Ethnic History 28 (Winter 2009): 30-56.
20
7
None of the above authors, however, draw any kind of definitive connection between the
Middle Eastern immigrants and progressivism. Khater and Naff each briefly refer to middleclass reformers, but leave out any explicit reference to progressives.22 Gualtieri does an
excellent job sorting through the opinions of both the courts and common-man, but she places
little to no focus on Congress or progressivism itself. Meanwhile on the other end of the
spectrum, scholars like Robert Zeidel, John Higham, Morton Keller, Arthur Link, Roger Daniels,
John D. Buenker, Pula and Hofstadter tie together progressivism and Congress’ efforts to
implement various forms of immigration restriction; however, middle-eastern immigrants draw
scant attention.23 This thesis builds on such previous scholarship by directly connecting Middle
Eastern immigrants to progressivism, especially at the Congressional level, in order to provide
new insights towards each.
To briefly reiterate, this thesis combines disparate but notable genres: whiteness studies,
scholarship on the progressive-immigrant relationship, and literature on specific Middle Eastern
immigrant groups. Whiteness studies can be broken up into two styles − one in which the authors
focus on the disputed whiteness of a particular group, the other in which the authors try to
analyze the broad precepts of whiteness outside of the context of one ethnicity. Similarly, the
literature on the progressive-minority relationship spans everything from Hofstadter’s nongroup-specific 1955 work to James Pula’s 1995 article on Polish immigrants and the
progressives. Finally, the thesis utilizes the existing literature on turn of the century Middle
Eastern immigrants to glean valuable information about the various groups’ social, economic,
religious, political, and assimilative tendencies. Ideally, this combination of historiographical
approaches allows for the creation of a sound but novel Master’s Thesis.
22
Khater, Inventing Home, 71-72; Naff, Becoming American, 121-122.
Zeidel, Immigrants, Progressives, and Exclusion Politics; The Dillingham Commission, 1900-1927 (Dekalb:
Northern Illinois University Press, 2004) 3, 145-146; John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American
Nativism, 1860-1925, 8 ed. (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press: 2008), 116-122, 174-193; Morton Keller,
Regulating a New Society: Public Policy and Social Change in America, 1900-1933 (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 1994) 219-250; Arthur S. Link, “What happened to the Progressive Movement in the 1920’s?” The
American Historical Association 4 (Jul. 1959): 838; John D. Buenker, Urban Liberalism and Progressive Reform
(NY: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1978), 195-198, 201-202; James S. Pula, “American Immigration and the
Dillingham Commission,” Polish American Studies 27 (Spring 1980): 57-69; Roger Daniels, Not Like Us:
Immigrants and Minorities in America, 1890-1924 (Chicago, Ivan R. Dee Inc., 1997), 58-76; Hofstadter, The Age of
Reform, 175-186.
23
8
CHAPTER TWO
FILLING THE POT, 1880-1900
“Ind il-qidri tidri … when you come to the pot,” the Lebanese proverb goes, “you shall
know the difference.”24 The saying essentially means that an item’s “value will become apparent
with scrutiny.”25 During the Progressive Era, both Middle Eastern sojourners and “native-born”
reformers waded into America’s melting pot to try to gauge the worth of immigration to the
United States. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, over two hundred thousand
Syrian-Lebanese, Armenians, and other Middle Eastern groups came to America in the pursuit of
a better life, but they represented just a small portion of the millions of immigrants pouring into
the pot from the reaches of Europe, Asia, Latin America, Africa and the Middle East.26 Even if
the Syrian-Lebanese constituted a fraction of the total migration to the U.S., the immigrants
made up a very significant portion of the populace of Mount Lebanon itself.
2.1 Coming to the Pot
Historians estimate that approximately one third of Mount Lebanon’s population
immigrated to the West in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.27 Most scholars of
the Syrian-Lebanese Diaspora agreed that the migrants left in pursuit of better economic
opportunities rather than being “pushed” out by Turkish persecution.28 The majority of those
immigrating came from the ranks of the fellahin, or Lebanese peasantry.29 Typically illiterate,
the average Syrian-Lebanese man worked as a famer, his family’s honor dependent upon his
ability to provide for them through the land. A small number of men worked in the burgeoning,
French-owned silk industry, but most Syrian-Lebanese males tried to avoid factory-work. Such
Richard B. Parker, “Lebanese Proverbs” The Journal of American Folklore 71 (April-June 1958): 107.
Ibid. Parker’s exact phraseology to describe the moral: “you shall know the value of something when you come
to use it; its value will become apparent with scrutiny.”
26
Naff, Becoming American, 2.
27
Khater, Inventing Home, 8. Another scholar, Charles Issawi, writes that some districts saw half their original
population leave the country. Charles Issawi, “The Historical Background of Lebanese Immigration, 1800-1914” in
The Lebanese in the World: A Century of Immigration, ed. Albert Hourani and Nadim Shehadi (Oxford: The Centre
for Lebanese Studies in Association with I.B. Tauris and Co Ltd, 1992), 31.
28
Gaultieri, Between Arab and White, 50; Khater, Inventing Home, 49-54; Naff, Becoming American, 83, 86-88;
Darcy A. Zabel, Introduction of Arabs in America: Interdisciplinary Essays on the Arab Diaspora, ed. Darcy A.
Zabel (New York, Peter Lang Publishing Incorporated, 2006), 5-6.
29
Khater, Inventing Home, 1-2.
24
25
9
an occupation indicated that the individual did not own his own property and therefore possessed
neither honor nor a steady source of income.30 Instead, the French used Syrian-Lebanese women
to populate their factories; by the 1880s there were twelve unmarried women working in the
industry for every one male.31 As Khater writes, “any shame that was associated with women’s
work in factories was counteracted by the fact that income from that work allowed men to
continue their ‘honorable’ work in the fields.”32 The gender divide in the silk factories would
play a significant role when the Syrian-Lebanese arrived in America; having made the deliberate
choice to avoid the French factories, few of the immigrants chose to work in American ones.33
Oftentimes, the immigrants left not to escape their traditional occupations as farmers, but
to make money and return to Lebanon to better invest in property.34 In the past, Egypt and North
Africa had served as the traditional destinations when Syrian-Lebanese immigrants looked to
escape political or religious turbulence, but in the 1880s and 1890s the Western hemisphere
beckoned. 35 Only a few hundred adventurers had traveled to the United States prior to 1880s,
but in the last two decades of the nineteenth century, America’s rich reputation proved alluring to
the fellahin of Mt. Lebanon, where overpopulation had made land scarce and the primary
industry was in decline due to a wide-spread Phylloxera infestation in the area’s vineyards. The
situation in the larger villayet of Syria was even worse, particularly for farmers beset by “pests,
inadequate rainfall, Bedouin depredation, [and] foreign competition.”36
Of the Syrian-Lebanese migrating, the majority came from Christian sects, especially in
the 1880s.37 The two Catholic groups, Maronites and Melkites, were largest in number, followed
closely by those of the Eastern Orthodox faith.38 In the 1890s, a number of Syria’s other
30
Ibid., 31.
Ibid., 32.
32
Ibid., 37.
33
Ibid., 75.
34
After spending years or even decades away from Lebanon, some of the immigrants chose to return home while
others simply brought their family members to the U.S. Naff, Becoming American, 82, 85-86; Khater, Inventing
Home, 110-112.
35
Naff, Becoming American, 89.
36
Micahel W. Suleiman, “Introduction: The Arab Immigrant Experience,” in Arabs in America; Building a New
Future, ed. by Micahel W. Suleiman (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1999), 2; Najib E. Saliba,
“Immigration from Syria” in Arabs in the New World: Studies on Arab-American Communities, ed. Sameer Y.
Abraham and Nabeel Abraham (Detroit: Wayne State University Center for Urban Studies, 1983), 33.
37
Naff, Becoming American, 2
38
For a discussion of the religious differences between the different Christian Syrian-Lebanese sects, see Yvonne
Yazbeck Haddad, “Maintaining the Faith of the Fathers: Dilemmas of Religious Identity in the Christian and
Muslim Arab-American Communities” in The Development of Arab-American identity, ed. Ernest McCarus (Ann
Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1994), 66-73 and Phillip M. Kayal, “Arab Christians in the United
31
10
religious groups – Shias, Sunnis, and Druze, and Alawis – also migrated as favorable reports
came back from earlier immigrants, though of the Muslim migrant population, the Druze and the
Shia were most prevalent.39 Historians estimate that, of the Syrian immigrants coming to
America at the turn of the century, Muslims constituted fewer than ten percent of the immigrant
population.40 Younger Syrian-Lebanese men represented the “vanguard” of the immigration,
while ninety to ninety five percent of the immigrants came from Mt. Lebanon itself.41 To
finance the journey over, the adventurers would often gather up their savings, take out loans, or
mortgage or lease their lands.42 Once they gathered the funds to leave, the immigrants had to
circumvent Ottoman patrolmen under instruction to prevent the empire’s minority populations
from leaving.43 Consequently, the Syrian-Lebanese often factored in money for bribery as part
of their investment in the trip to America.44
The situation was far more complex for the other prominent Middle Eastern group
leaving the Ottoman Empire for the United States. The relationship between the Turks and the
Armenian population was fraught with a tension to which the Syrian-Lebanese circumstances
could not compare. The events typically referred to today as the Hamidian Massacres (18941896), the Adana Massacre (1909), and the Armenian Genocide (1915) had their own unique
effects upon immigration, which this paper deals with in turn.45 In the 1880s, however,
Armenian immigrants did not have the same emotional and national scars that their successors
would bear.
In mid-nineteenth Century Turkey, significant numbers of Armenians could be found in
each economic class. The wealthiest typically lived in Istanbul or Smyrna and worked as top-tier
States,” in Arabs in the New World; Studies on Arab-American Communities, ed. Sameer Y. Abraham and Nebeel
Abraham (Detroit: Wayne State University Center for Urban Studies, 1983), 46-55.
39
Naff, Becoming American, 12; Haddad, “Maintaining the Faith of the Fathers, 73; Yvonne Yazbeck Haddad,
“Arab Muslims and Islamic Institutions in America: Adoption and Reform,” in Arabs in the New World; Studies on
Arab-American Communities, ed. Sameer Y. Abraham and Nebeel Abraham (Detroit: Wayne State University
Center for Urban Studies, 1983), 66.
40
Naff, Becoming American, 2, 111-112; Phillip M. Kayal, “Religion in the Christian Syrian-American
Community,” in The Development of Arab-American identity, ed. Ernest McCarus (Ann Arbor: The University of
Michigan Press, 1994), 112.
41
Naff, Becoming American, 112.
42
Ibid., 88-89.
43
Khater, Inventing Home, 54.
44
Naff, Becoming American, 80-81.
45
This thesis is a vehicle to discuss the issues and classifications of whiteness, not the issues and classifications of
genocide. For multiple points of view on the contextualization of the term, see The Specter of Genocide: Mass
Murder in Historical Perspective, ed. Robert Gellately and Ben Kiernan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2003).
11
businessmen or amira, a class made up of financers and moneylenders.46 “[P]rofessional people,
businessmen, and government officials” comprised the second-most prestigious occupational
category. The large urban centers also contained a large number of craftsmen, who exerted
considerable influence in the smithing, weaving, printing, watch-making, architecture, and
restaurant industries.47 Finally, the day laborers, who worked as porters, water carriers, and
peddlers, constituted the lowest urban class.48 In the interior of the Empire, the Armenians
divided between small tradesmen and farmers, though both groups were extremely poor. The
small artisans in the towns were relatively skilled but “not prosperous except by the standards of
rural Turkey; contemporary Westerners considered them on the edge of poverty.” The rest of the
Armenian peasant class worked on village farms, deficient in resources and governmental
protection.49 Villagers represented approximately eighty-five percent of provincial Turkey.50
Unlike the Syrian-Lebanese, distinct stages exist for mid and late-nineteenth century
Armenian immigration. The stages result from the fact that notable, though very small, numbers
of Armenians journeyed over to the United States as early as the 1830s. The first began in 1834,
hallmarked by the migration of “students and clergymen” who wanted to pursue their education
in America.51 The first group numbered not in the hundreds or thousands, but in the scores.52
Then, in the 1860s and 1870s, businessmen of the “middling sort” began to arrive in America,
“emigrat[ing] through contacts with American missionaries.”53 The third stage began “in the
period after the 1870s … a rural exodus of the poorer laboring and artisan class.”54 When this
chapter refers to Armenian immigration, it is in regards to the third stage of migration.
Much of the immigration primarily originated from the province of Kharpert, where
American missionaries maintained a strong influence.55 The provinces of Erzerum, Sivas, and
Bitlis also experienced a notable exodus. Mirak approximates that around fifteen hundred
migrants, over eighty-five percent of which were male, left for America in the 1880s.56 Prior to
46
Mirak, Torn Between Two Lands, 8-9.
Ibid., 10.
48
Ibid.
49
Ibid., 15-17.
50
Ibid., 15.
51
Ibid., 36-38
52
Balakian, Armenian-Americans, 9.
53
Mirak, Torn Between Two Lands, 39.
54
Ibid., 36.
55
Ibid., 40-41.
56
Mirak, Torn Between Two Lands, 42; Balakian, Armenian-Americans, 9.
47
12
the extreme violence of the Hamidian Massacres of the mid 1890s, the Armenians’ motivation to
immigrate was similar to that of the Syrian-Lebanese. America looked particularly appealing to
the Armenians, who faced high levels of taxation in the midst of food shortages, crop failures,
and a bad economy.57 Armenian immigrants had a much more difficult time getting out of the
Ottoman Empire than did their Syrian-Lebanese counterparts. For one thing, they generally had
to traverse far greater distances to reach the coasts; for another, the Ottoman government leveled
certain travel restrictions specifically against them. In the late 1880s and early 1890s, authorities
in Istanbul “interdicted all movement of Armenians … to America by curtailing the issuance of
teskeres (travel permits to the coast)” while immigrants caught smuggled “on board European
vessels were arrested, imprisoned, and beaten.”58
Once they had left the Ottoman Empire, the next obstacle both the Armenians and
Syrian-Lebanese travelers faced involved the steamship companies and the predations of the
professional immigrant industry. Naff writes that “it was not uncommon for naïve villagers, at
the mercy of unscrupulous steamship agents and travel brokers, to find themselves deposited in
Canadian, Mexican, South American, and even Australian ports believing they had arrived at
‘Nay York,’ or ‘Amrika.’”59 Immigrants who found themselves in that rather unforeseen
circumstance seem to have simply made the best they could out of a bad situation. Forced to
improvise, the unlucky immigrants bonded together, “formed a nucleus of attraction, and
dutifully sent remittances home,” just as they would have done had they been in Brooklyn rather
than Brisbane or Bogotá.60 Part of the issue stemmed from the immigrants’ conceptualization of
the term “Amerika,” which, for many, referred not to a specific country across the Atlantic but a
broad, idealized location. Some, for example, equated New York with the whole of the United
States, Brazil with all of South America, and Amerika as a general, undefined land of
opportunity somewhere across the oceans.61
As the immigrants journeyed to legitimate and illegitimate Amerikas alike, they
discovered that docking points on land held just as many problems for them as did the high seas.
57
Mirak, Torn Between Two Lands, 40.
Ibid., 46.
59
Alixa Naff, “Lebanese Immigration into the United States: 1880 to the Present,” in The Lebanese in the World: A
Century of Immigration, ed. Albert Hourani and Nadim Shehadi (Oxford: The Centre for Lebanese Studies in
Association with I.B. Tauris and Co Ltd, 1992), 145.
60
Naff, Becoming American, 97.
61
Oswaldo M.S. Truzzi, “The Right Place at the Right Time, Syrians and Lebanese in Brazil and the United States,
a Comparative Approach,” Journal of American Ethnic History, 16 (Winter 1997): 5-6.
58
13
When the ships temporarily docked at European ports, the Middle Eastern immigrants’
vulnerability peaked, for “without knowledge of European languages, currency, immigration
regulations at the port of debarkation, and ships’ schedules, the immigrants were completely at
the mercy of the agents and hotelkeepers.”62 Seeing an opportunity for both social and economic
profit, eventually more of the immigrants themselves opened up businesses and hotels in various
ports along the Mediterranean, thereby forming their own network of immigration.63
The final hurdle for the Middle Eastern immigrants involved getting past the inspectors at
Castle Garden (and later at Ellis Island).64 In the fall of 1889, the New York Times published a
spate of articles on groups of “Syrians” waiting for official approval to enter the country.65 Of
the three separate groups of arrivals mentioned, officials allowed two to proceed onwards; the
Times wrote about the third group that “[i]t is doubtful if the collector allows these people to
land, as their poverty and nomadic intentions seem likely to reduce them to the condition of
paupers.”66 In the Times stories, the Syrian-Lebanese numbered anywhere from twenty-five to
forty-eight individuals, whom the paper portrayed as ignorant, illiterate, frugal, and “darkskinned.”67 Once officials had let the immigrants off the ships, they were often further detained
at the immigration stations as inspectors decided what to do with the new arrivals.68 One such
Syrian-Lebanese group was barely off the boat before the New York Times began poking fun at
their lack of understanding of America:
It happens that a very large lithograph representing the head of Col. Robert G. Ingersoll
[who was well-known in the nineteenth century as an agnostic] used as the advertising
card of a certain brand of cigars hangs in a conspicuous position on one of the walls of
[Castle] Garden. The serene and saintly visage and the apparently shaven crown of the
man represented in this picture struck the Syrians as evidently those of some new
American saint; and they thought, probably, the patron of the place. With the greatest
solemnity and reverence, therefore, they crossed themselves and devoutly murmured
62
Naff, Becoming American, 98.
For more on the “immigration industry,” see Naff, Becoming American, 92-101.
64
Ibid., 104-105.
65
“Forty Two Syrians Detained,” New York Times, August 23, 1889; “Syirans Allowed To Land,” New York Times,
September 1, 1889; “Joyful Syrians,” New York Times, September 6, 1889.
66
Ibid.
67
Ibid.
68
For more on the immigrants’ experience at the immigration stations during the Progressive Era, see Alan M.
Kraut, Silent Travelers; Germs, Genes, and the “Immigration Menace” (Baltimore: The John Hopkins University
Press, 1994), 50-77. The Syrian-Lebanese were primarily targeted for trachoma, which inspectors looked for using
sanitized button-hooks. See Silent Travelers, 61-62.
63
14
prayers before it …. It was with the greatest difficulty that they could be convinced that
Col. Ingersoll had not as yet been canonized.69
Once cleared through the immigration stations, the nineteenth-century Armenians and SyrianLebanese had at long last reached their “Amerika.” Walking past officials in the midst of
labeling them as from “Turkey in Asia,” the migrants set foot in the new land, one that held
special legal and social contempt for Asian immigration.
2.2 Race, Citizenship, and the Chinese Precedent
Back in the mid-1800s, the small number of Armenian and Syrian-Lebanese immigrants
in the United States were, as far as the melting pot went, just drops trickling down the sides of
the stew bowl compared to groups like the Irish and the Chinese. While nativists loathed the
Irish, they were from a European background and practiced a religion that xenophobes had at
least heard of before. The Chinese, on the other hand, seemed like an entirely different breed to
most “native” citizens. They were long-haired, non-European, non-English-speaking, and nonChristian. In short, the Chinese were unlike any of the voluntary migrants that Americans had
ever seen before, and to their minds, a completely different racial group, which they alternatively
referred to as “Asian” or “yellow.”70
The race issue was of particular importance in the 1860s, when, following the Civil War,
Congress debated the best way to grant citizenship to the recently freed black slaves. The
relevant statute at the time was the Naturalization Act of 1790, which allowed citizenship only to
“free white persons.”71 The early Congress had wanted to prevent Native Americans and
African slaves from naturalizing, so they used the term white in order to preclude the people
understood at the time to be of the “red” and “black” races.72 By the 1860s, the times had
changed, and liberal Northerners in Congress wanted former slaves eligible to vote. Senator
Charles Sumner, a radical Republican from Massachusetts, preferred the requirement of being
white struck out completely, thus allowing Africans to obtain their citizenship without tripping
the color requirement.73 Sumner, however, was overruled, for doing so would potentially open
“Saint Ingersoll,” New York Times, August 26, 1889.
Daniels, Not Like Us, 7-8; 26-29, 31
71
Ibid., 9.
72
Daniels, Not Like Us, 9; Bill Ong Hing, Making and Remaking Asian America through Immigration Policy, 18501990 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993), 23.
73
Daniels, Not Like Us, 8.
69
70
15
the door to naturalizing certain other races of “color,” specifically Chinese immigrants.74 Thus,
in 1870, Congress simply added “persons of African nativity” alongside the “free white person”
clause, which allowed blacks citizenship while keeping the supposedly “yellow” race excluded. 75
As a consequence of the anti-Chinese hostility, any group seeking naturalization would have to
gain it not just by establishing that they were of good moral character, but by proving that they
were members of the white or black race.
For anti-immigrant nativists, the Naturalization Act of 1870 was not enough. In the
1880s, just as Armenian and Syrian-Lebanese immigration had begun to come to America in
noticeable numbers, Congress passed the Exclusion Act, which explicitly barred the Chinese
from citizenship and prohibited their laborers from entering the country.76 Historian Erika Lee
makes clear just how critical the 1882 law was for immigration as a whole:
It is my argument, however, that Chinese exclusion also introduced a ‘gatekeping’
ideology, politics, law, and culture that transformed the ways in which Americans viewed
and thought about race, immigration, and the United States’ identity as a nation of
immigration. It legalized and reinforced the need to restrict, exclude, and deport
‘undesirable’ and excludable immigrants. It established Chinese immigrants –
categorized by their race, class, and gender relations as the ultimate category of
undesirable immigrants – as the models by which to measure the desirability (and
‘whiteness’) of other immigrant groups.77
Until the 1900s, the Chinese would be the only ethnic group specifically barred from entry into
America, which was an ominous sign for other Asian immigrants coming to the country. Just as
nativists once compared the Irish to a people (African Americans) that society accepted to be
“inferior,” so too did late eighteenth century xenophobes use the Chinese as a tool to push other
immigrant groups down the racial hierarchy. In one of the more remarkable of these instances,
the Massachusetts’ Commissioner of Labor Statistics declared that “the Canadian French are the
Chinese of the Eastern States …. They are a horde of Industrial Invaders.”78 If officials could
somehow connect the French Canadians, of all people, to the Chinese, then particular danger
existed for the racially-ambiguous Middle Eastern immigrants, most of whom were technically
from the Asian continent and fell within the census category of “Turkey in Asia.”
74
López, White By Law, 42-43.
Ibid.
76
Lee, At America’s Gates, 2.
77
Erika Lee, “The Chinese Exlcusion Example: Race, Immigration, and American Gatekeeping,” Journal of
American Ethnic History, 21 (Spring 2002): 37.
78
Carroll D. Wright, quoted in Daniels, Not Like Us, 39.
75
16
2.3 Life in the United States Pre-1900
When the Armenians first arrived in the United States, most were too destitute to
immediately begin a business or buy farmland. Consequently, the immigrants typically started
out in the manufacturing industry, forming tiny ethnic enclaves in the Northeastern factory and
mill towns.79 Most Armenians left the factories as soon as they could afford to do so in order to
pursue whatever opportunities – typically farming or owning a small store – that seemed feasible
at the time. According to Mirak, “many of the businessmen had no earlier experience in the
specific trade they followed in the United States,” but they “opened these stores because the
work in them was less physically demanding and more remunerative than factory labor.” One
story involves a grocer who had worked in a Massachusetts shoe factory for six years. He
admitted that he could not tell the difference between “‘corned beef [and] roast beef,’ but
because he detested factory work, he started in the grocery business.”80
A sizable number of the Armenians managed to find their occupational niche in the
farmlands of Fresno, California. The first Armenian immigrant, Hagop Seropian, arrived in the
San Joaquin Valley in 1881, enjoying an area that reminded him of “the Armenian heartlands.”
Seropian and his younger brothers started a successful venture in a “variety and grocery store”
and by 1883 they convinced a group of their compatriots from Marsovan to go over at once.81 In
the mid-1890s the immigrant population numbered in the hundreds. Unlike the Marsovan group,
most of the those who came to San Joaquin did not travel directly to the valley, instead the trip to
Fresno served as “a second uprooting.”82 By doing so, the Armenians proved unlike many of the
area’s other immigrant groups, for they came in with both their families and a degree of capital. 83
They put their limited funds to quick use in the drive to acquire property: “Once they arrived in
Fresno, the Armenian farmers quickly invested in vineyards and took large risks in doing so.
They outbid each other and the more aggressive of the Japanese by sinking their entire savings –
and incurring large debts – to secure the most profitable land available.”84 Those who came
without savings to invest tended to work on the farms or the fig and raisin packinghouses, “often
79
Mirak, Torn Between Two Lands, 93.
Ibid.
81
Ibid., 112.
82
Ibid.
83
Ibid., 113.
84
Ibid., 114.
80
17
labor[ing] for fellow Armenians.”85 The immigrants put most of their money towards building a
secure economic foundation for their lives; therefore, they lived extremely frugally and their
houses tended to be in disrepair. As the Armenian saying went, “no house can produce a farm,
but a good farm can produce a house.”86
Beyond the establishment of the Fresno community, the 1890s proved significant for the
Armenians in other ways. By the start of the decade, individual migrants were bringing over
other villagers through chain migration:
First, a young male family member would be smuggled out of Turkey to America. Upon
arriving, he would write his family of his intentions to bring them over too, and within
weeks or months he would begin to send back bank orders or American Express checks
to Turkey for his family’s savings. His letters would provide information about the New
World, routes to travel, the preferred ship lines. In a year, the young immigrant would
send a prepaid ticket for his brother, sister, or wife, and after whole families discussed the
event, poured over the strange looking documents, and said their farewells, another
Armenian would set off en route to America.87
Total immigration for the years of 1891 and 1892 alone surpassed the number of Armenians who
had entered the decade before.88 In the early 1890s the revolutionary Hnchags held increasing
numbers of protests in Erzerum, the Ottoman capital, and other major cities. The upheaval
caused by their actions and Sultan Abdul Hamid II counter-reprisals resulted in increased levels
of migration, particularly to Russia.89 The danger of the early parts of the decade could not
compare, however, to the violence of the period between 1894 through 1896. Mirak writes that
in the process of combating a Hnchagist uprising in the mountainous areas of Sasun, the Turkish
army killed thousands of Armenian villagers in the area. The bloodshed spread across the rest of
Turkey, culminating, according to one Armenian historian, in “two hundred thousand” deaths,
with “approximately one hundred thousand killed by direct massacre and the rest dying of
disease and famine.”90 Sixty thousand escaped to Russia, twelve thousand to America, and
thousands more to the closer locales of Bulgaria, Greece, and Egypt.91
85
Ibid. 115-116.
Ibid. 117.
87
Ibid. 51.
88
Ibid., 45.
89
Ibid., 45-46.
90
Peter Balakian, The Burning Tigris: The Armenian Genocide and America’s Response (New York: HarperCollins,
2003), 5.
91
Mirak, Torn Between Two Lands, 46-47; Balakian, Armenian Americans, 9-10.
86
18
The life of an immigrant in an unfamiliar country was never easy, but thankfully for the
Syrians-Lebanese, they did not enter America under as trying circumstances as the Armenians
endured. Once they finally cleared the immigration stations, their first order of business
involved a stop at the “Syrian Colony” in New York City, where the “pioneer generation” of
migrants had first established themselves along Washington Street.92 The secondary literature is
largely and frustratingly quiet on how New York City’s “Little Syria” came to be, though
primary literature offers a few more details. The New York Times stated in 1890 that that the
Syrian-Lebanese “first began coming to this country ten to twelve years ago,” suggesting that the
community developed throughout the 1880s.93 An 1891 piece placed the population at “about
800 Syrians … equally divided between the Maronites and the Syro-Greeks.”94 The “SyroGreeks” likely referred to the Melkites, who differed from their fellow Catholic Maronites on the
basis as to which language, “Greek” or “ancient-Syriac,” they conducted their rites.95 According
to the article, both sects originally worshipped at the same church under a “Rev. Father
Abrahams, a priest of the Syro-Greek rite.” As the Maronites increased in number they
petitioned for their own clergyman, and in 1890 the Catholic church sent a “Rev. Father Peter” to
New York from Mount Lebanon itself.96
Beyond the New York Times, the reports of an 1898 Congressional Commission also
serve as a useful primary source on the origins of the settlement. The commission’s reports
stated that “the Syrian in New York has housed himself in the tenements of the old First Ward,
from which he has disposed an undesirable Irish population, the remnant of which tortures him.
The tenements in this quarter are, as a rule, old and in bad condition, nor does a Syrian
occupancy improve them from a sanitary standpoint.”97 Surprisingly, many of the SyrianLebanese slowly gained ownership of the tenements themselves. One American woman’s
testimony about the advice given to her by her husband’s Syrian-Lebanese grandmother provides
clues as to the determination in which the early settlers acquired property. The grandmother, a
widowed first generation immigrant in America, told her extended family to do as she had:
92
Khater, Inventing Home, 74; Naff, Becoming American, 2.
“Sanctified Arab Tramps; Wretched Maronite Beggars Infecting this Country,” New York Times, May 25, 1890.
94
“Syrians of the Maronite Rite,” New York Times, January 19, 1891.
95
Ibid.
96
Ibid.
97
United States Industrial Commission, “Reports of the Industrial Commission on Immigration Including
Testimony, with Review and Digest, and Special Reports on Education, Vol XV,” Reports of the Industrial
Commission (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1901), 444.
93
19
When we first met, after Jim and I were married, she called me into her bedroom, and the
first thing she said was, ‘You know, Jimmy give you twenty dollars a week for the house.
You put five dollar’ –and she pointed to the pocket of her apron– ‘you put five dollar
away, but you do not tell Jimmy, you do not tell. You save it up, you buy a tenement.
You save up some more, you buy another tenement.’98
As the granddaughter-in-law noted, this ‘“was an indication to me of how she had painfully,
painstakingly acquired her property as was able to take care of all her children.”’99 Living
frugally and saving judiciously, the Syrian-Lebanese eventually began to accumulate ownership
in the colony, and in the late 1890s the Times began writing about immigrant-owned shops,
restaurants, and housing.100
Little Syria was an especially important stop for new Syrian-Lebanese immigrants. At
the colony they could look for family and friends, recuperate after the stressful journey, and
eventually stock up on goods in preparation for their first peddling trips.101 Peddling played a
crucial role in the Lebanese experience, as it both exposed the Syrian-Lebanese to the Americans
and the Americans to the Syrian-Lebanese. According to Naff, over ninety percent of the
Lebanese arrived in America with the express purpose in mind of peddling goods.102 Long
distance pack peddling held specific attractions for the Lebanese, for it allowed them a high
degree of autonomy, a chance to explore the new country and, most importantly, it was highly
profitable.103
Pack peddling, at its most basic level, entailed travelling, often on foot, across the country
to sell small household items door to door in America’s towns and cities. In the late 1880s and
1890s, freshly-arrived Syrian-Lebanese immigrant could receive a pack of peddling goods, on
credit, from suppliers in the New York City colony. The peddlers took advantage with
America’s fascination with Orientalism, selling exotic trinkets supposedly from the Levant at
inflated prices. The Lebanese soon figured out that it would prove even more profitable to
expand to household goods, as long as such items could fit into a travelling case. Consequently,
Evelyn Shakir, “Syrian-Lebanese Women Tell Their Story,” Frontiers, A Journal of Women Studies 7 (1983): 10.
Ibid.
100
E. Lyell Earle, “Foreign Types of New York Life.” New York Times, August 28, 1898; Cromwell Childe, “New
York’s Syrian Quarter,” New York Times, August 20, 1899; “The Syrian Colony of New York and Its
Characteristics,” New York Times, May 25, 1902; “Sights and Characters of New York’s ‘Little Syria,’” New York
Times, March 29, 1903.
101
Naff, Becoming American, 133-135, Khater, Inventing Home, 74.
Naff, Becoming American, 90.
103
Naff, “Lebanese Immigration into the United States,” 147; Khater, Inventing Home, 74.
98
99
20
the merchandise started out as whatever “rosaries, jewelry, and notions that would fit into a small
case,” but quickly “expanded into suitcases filled with a wide range of dry goods from bed linens
to lace – almost anything that an isolated farmers wife or housebound city dweller might want to
buy.”104
By living extremely frugally on the road and selling the cheaply-manufactured goods at
two or three times the price for which they were originally bought, peddling earned the SyrianLebanese “a measure of wealth,” at least by the standards of most nineteenth-century
immigrants. However, peddlers had to deal with hostile policemen, learn the nuances of
American customs, and beg for shelter in storerooms and stables to avoid freezing
temperatures.105 The language barrier also proved a problem in many different circumstances; as
one Syrian-Lebanese ruefully asked, “how do you tell a dog to go away if it doesn’t understand
Arabic?”106 Another peddler made no sales in a particular town and asked his brother why the
people kept telling him to “go away, small box.” Since the Arabic language did not have a sound
for the letter “p,” the young man was horrified to learn that the townspeople had told him to go
away because the area was experiencing a small pox outbreak.107 As the small pox story helps
illustrate, peddling in the nineteenth century sometimes brought about problems far more serious
than angry dogs or irate farmers. It was not unheard of for the long distance pack peddlers to
disappear out on the road, murdered by thieves or dispatched by illness.108
The Syrian-Lebanese, however, were determined to make money in their Amerika, and
peddling, however dangerous, was the most attractive way to do so. Per individual, the weekly
income from peddling averaged between thirty to fifty dollars.109 According to Naff, a long
distance pack peddler could make an average of approximately $1,000 a year while the typical
American laborer averaged $650.110 Such profits allowed many of the Syrian-Lebanese to return
to Mount Lebanon, secure in the wealth and status they had attained. In one such story, a farmer
named Khattar had spent decades working the land back in Mount Lebanon when a rival came
Alixa Naff, “Arabs in America: A Historical Overview” in Arabs in the New World: Studies on Arab-American
Communities, ed. Sameer Y. Abraham and Nabeel Abraham (Detroit: Wayne State University Center for Urban
Studies, 1983), 16.
105
Khater, Inventing Home, 76-78.
106
Alixa Naff, “Becoming American: The Early Arab Immirant Experience” in The Development of Arab-American
Identity, ed. Ernest McCarus (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1994), 30.
107
Ibid., 187-188.
108
Ibid., 185-187.
109
Ibid., 194.
110
Naff, “Lebanese Immigration into the United States,” 147.
104
21
back home from the United States. Sadly for Khattar, he lost his fiancée, Zumarrud, to the
immigrant. Zumarrud eloped with the affluent returnee, whom she knew possessed wealth
because of the fine “cocoo clock” he had brought back from the states.111 The rival’s return
should not have been surprising, for the goal of most of the Syrian-Lebanese had always been to
turn a profit on their immigration investment and come back to Syria with newfound prestige and
financial security. The immigrants referred to themselves as al-Nizaleh, meaning “guests” or
“travelers”; as Suleiman writes, the Syrian-Lebanese maintained a “sojourner” mentality about
their time in the United States.112
Eventually Khattar made a resolution. Having lost his fiancé to a clock, he decided there
was no reason for him to eke out a living in Mount Lebanon, so he too, would immigrate to the
United States.113 His story illustrates one of the central ironies about the Syrian-Lebanese
migration. They had travelled to America as temporary visitors, determined to make a profit and
return home. Peddling was surprisingly profitable, however, so the return of earlier sojourners
often prompted more immigration. The numbers escalated even further once the initial
immigrants realized they could make even higher profits if they recruited a wife or additional
family to join them in their trade.114 In this way, return migration turned to chain migration as
women, children, and a steady stream of entrepreneurial, non-married immigrants made the
journey over.
The women and children, in turn, proved themselves as successful peddlers, engendering
more sympathy from their buyers than most of their male counterparts could.115 Approximately
seventy-five to eighty percent of the Syrian-Lebanese women in nineteenth-century America
worked as peddlers.116 The women “could more easily gain access into homes than men … and
were more trusted by their customers, thus developing lasting clienteles which, in many cases,
grew into friendships.”117 As Naff notes,
The earnings of wives, mothers, daughters, and sisters, their sacrifices and labor …
enabled the family to improve and accelerate economic and social positions …. Their
collective earnings helped convey the impression of success enjoyed by Syrians during
111
Khater, Inventing Home, 62.
Michael Suleiman, “Arab-Americans and the Political Process,” in The Development of Arab-American Identity
ed. Ernest M. McCarus (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994), 38.
113
Khater, Inventing Home, 63.
114
Khater, Inventing Home, 63; Naff, Becoming American, 90.
115
Naff, Becoming American, 175.
116
Ibid., 178.
117
Ibid., 177.
112
22
the peddling era and later. Because of them, more capital was accumulated, more small
businesses started, more independence gained, more money sent to the homeland, and
more fares remitted to bring relatives to the United States.118
One hopes that Khattar eventually found such a helpful spouse, or at the very least purchased his
own “cocoo” clock.
In the period between 1895 and 1900, pack-peddling reached its height.119 The peddlers
fanned out across the nation, “flitting” as one source described it, “from the White Mountains to
Palm Beach, from Mackinac Island to Hot Springs, as the season varies.”120
In time, the immigrants formed individual communities as “bases” to help sustain their trade.121
They tended to group themselves by their religious leanings, at least when space allowed. For
example, Naff writes that in Worcester, Massachusetts, the Maronites resided on Shewsbury
Street while the Melkites lived half a mile away on Wall Street. The case of the settlement in
Peoria, Illinois, is particularly interesting. The Greek-rite Melkites and the Eastern Orthodox
Christians congregated together, living away from the larger Maronite population despite the fact
that all three groups came from the same Syrian-Lebanese village of Itoo.122
As far as the overall immigrant population concerned, it is particularly difficult to
estimate the total number of Syrian-Lebanese in the United States in the nineteenth century. Not
only does the problem of return migration and deaths complicate the question, but the U.S.
Government’s classification system, centered around nationality, makes quantifying the SyrianLebanese exceptionally difficult. Until 1899, the immigrants fell under the umbrella of “Turkey
in Asia” as did every other population south of Istanbul under Ottoman control. One cannot
even make a general statement about Middle Eastern immigration using this metric, since
officials grouped some Jewish and Greek migrants into the category as well.123
118
Ibid., 178-179.
Ibid., 12.
120
United States Industrial Commission, “Reports of the Industrial Commission on Immigration,” 442.
121
Ernest McCarus, Introduction of The Development of Arab-American Identity, ed. Ernest McCarus (Ann Arbor:
The University of Michigan Press, 1994), 2.
122
Naff, Becoming American, 204.
123
Najib E. Saliba, “Emigration from Syria” in Arabs in the New World: Studies on Arab-American Communities,
ed. Sameer Y. Abraham and Nabeel Abraham (Detroit: Wayne State University Center for Urban Studies, 1983), 35;
Mirak, Torn Between Two Lands, 38.
119
23
2.4 “Sanctified Arab Tramps”: American Views in the Late Nineteenth Century
Though the migrants could be found in most of the states and territories, the “Syrian
Colony” in New York City remained the unofficial capital, so to speak, of the LebaneseAmericans.124 The New York settlement held great importance, not just as the social and
economic hub of the Lebanese, but because, according to Gualtieri, it “generated the earliest
American representations of a Middle Eastern immigrant community.”125 A major source of
those “representations” originated from the New York Times, which generally looked upon the
Syrian-Lebanese with a mixture of curiosity and contempt.
On May 25, 1890, the New York Times published a caustic article entitled “Sanctified
Arab Tramps.”126 The article’s subtitle, “Wretched Maronite Beggars Infecting this Country,”
was no less scathing.127 “The Maronites,” the piece stated, first arrived in “this country ten or
twelve years ago in the garb of mendicants, for which profession they have ever since shown a
preference.”128 The Times emphasized the differences between the Maronites and traditional
Catholics, and then charged that the Syrian-Lebanese Christians deliberately misinterpreted the
scripture to excuse their disreputable trading customs. As in the headline, the writer tied the
Maronites’ religion and profession together to create a damning portrait of otherness:
During Christ’s public life for three years, they say, He did not work for himself, and
taught that man should not worry about the morrow, and He subsisted on the gifts of
kind-hearted people and prayed. What doctrine could be more welcome to people
naturally indolent and not endowed by nature with any breadth of intellect? Prayer to
them, consisting of repetitions of certain formulas and crossings, was easy. To live as a
parasite on others in this world and then to enjoy eternal bliss among the angels in heaven
for living such a life below was preferable to the Mohammeden doctrine that the way to
paradise lies under the shadow of swords. And so the Maronite takes kindly to this
doctrine, as a frog takes to a pond.129
Nativists usually compared immigrant groups to the Chinese to bring them down the racial
hierarchy; the article stated the Maronites resembled the Chinese “in clannishness and outlandish
manners,” but went a step further and explicitly placed “these people” below Chinese
immigrants. According to the New York Times, the Maronites were “inferior” to the Chinese and
Naff., “Lebanese Immigration into the United States,” 146-147.
Gualtieri, Between Arab and White , 47.
126
“Sanctified Arab Tramps,” New York Times, May 25, 1890.
127
Ibid.
128
Ibid.
129
Ibid.
124
125
24
Italians, who at least “possess a certain amount of self respect, and are willing to work honestly
and work hard for a living.” The author also drew attention to the other Syrian-Lebanese
religious sects, “Druzes,” “Mohammedans,” and “Greeks,” that, unlike the “whining Maronite,”
had “a sense of self-respect and independence.” 130
Over the next few years, the Times used less astringent language to describe the SyrianLebanese, though the articles maintained a consistently condescending, patronizing tone overall.
In a long 1898 piece on the immigrant colonies in New York City, the writer merely insulted
Little Syria’s food, writing that “a meal at one of these [restaurants] is an ordeal few Americans
care to undergo …. The dishes are all seasoned so highly and are so rich in oils and fats that our
plain American digestive apparatus loudly rebels against them.”131 A Times author in 1902
stated that colony’s coffee, “which you expect to be good, is apt to be weird, with a pale, wan
look, as [if] it were the ghost of coffee past,” and similarly dismissed the bread, comparing it to
“a rather tender piece of leather.”132 In 1903, another New York Times journalist spoke highly
about the coffee as “hot, strong, and sweet,” but less kindly about the women, writing that “[t]he
freshness and beauty of the Syrian girls are notable while they are still in their teens, but they are
apt to age rapidly.”133 New York’s Armenian population, significantly smaller in number than
the Syrian-Lebanese, received far less attention from the Times. One article from 1895
emphasized the stereotype that the immigrants possessed keen business acumen, while another
piece from 1899 had little to say about the Armenians, other than to call them, along with
Syrians and Turks, “Orientals.”134
Vitriol towards the immigrants was hardly limited to New York; largely because of the
Syrian-Lebanese pack peddler, the word Arab became synonymous, nationwide, with “tramp.”135
In the late nineteenth century, the political class offered little to no help to the immigrants either.
Historian Michael Suleiman writes that “[i]n the economic field, Arabs were sometimes seen as
parasites, because they allegedly did not engage in any productive industry, merely being
130
Ibid.
E. Lyell Earle, “Foreign Types of New York Life.” New York Times, August 28, 1898.
132
“The Syrian Colony of New York and Its Characteristics,” New York Times, May 25, 1902.
133
“Sights and Characters of New York’s ‘Little Syria,’” New York Times, March 29, 1903.
134
“Our Armenian Neighbors,” New York Times, December 1, 1895; Cromwell Childe, “New York’s Syrian
Quarter,” New York Times, August 20, 1889.
135
Gualtieri, Between Arab and White, 4.
131
25
involved in trade.”136 The reports of the United States Industrial Commission provide a useful
example of such sentiments. In 1898, the commission began investigating the country’s
manufacturing industries and ended up with negative conclusions about Middle Eastern
immigrants. In its report, the Commission labeled the Syrian-Lebanese as “unstable,” “too
versatile,” and “constitutionally indolent,” echoing many of the same attitudes displayed in the
earlier “Sanctified Arab Tramp,” article.137 The Industrial Commission, which began its report at
the tail-end of the Gilded Age, found the average pack-peddling, factory-avoiding SyrianLebanese traveler reprehensible since he “tends to restrict his energies to the nomadic and
parasitic pursuits rather than those truly useful to the community.”138 Armenian immigrants
received similar treatment from the Commission’s experts. For instance, Commissioner Herman
Stump testified that the Armenians, along with “Assyrians, Arabs, Turks, [and] Greeks” were
“here to peddle goods, black boots, and often to beg.”139
Part of the significance of the adverse reactions from the New York Times and the
Industrial Commission lie in that they help provide a baseline attitude about the two most notable
Middle Eastern immigrant groups at the dawn of the Progressive Era. In late nineteenth-century
America, hostility and disdain girded opinion-makers’ viewpoint of the immigrants. The
political and media classes either attacked the newcomers outright for their religious and
occupational orientations or portrayed them as exotic foreigners with questionable tastes in
coffee. Previous scholars have not answered how, given the negativity surrounding the
Armenians and Syrian-Lebanese in the nineteenth century, policy-makers came to see the
immigrants as more European than Asian, as potential citizens rather than inassimilable aliens,
and even as part of the “Caucasian Race.” The answer lies, to a large degree, in the socioeconomic biases of those in power during the first decades of the twentieth century.
Suleiman, “Introduction: The Arab Immigrant Experience,” in Arabs in America; Building a New Future, ed.
Michael W. Suleiman (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1999), 6.
137
United States Industrial Commission, “Reports of the Industrial Commission on Immigration,” 442.
138
Ibid.
139
Ibid., LXXX.
136
26
CHAPTER THREE
STRAINING THE MELTING POT, 1900-1914
“Ind il-qidri tidri … When you come to the pot, you shall know the difference.”140 The saying’s
meaning that an item’s “value will become apparent with scrutiny” applies just as much to the
progressives who scrutinized the Melting Pot as it does to the Middle Easterners who immigrated
to it.141 One hallmark of the Progressive Era is that policy-makers, be they in the courts or
congressional commissions, were determined to pick apart, sift, sort, and classify the ingredients
of the pot they viewed as in danger of overflowing. The Armenians and the Syrian-Lebanese
were, almost by definition, antithetical to easy designations and created unique problems for the
progressives as they tried to place each group in neat, racialized categories. Matthew Frye
Jacobson, James Barrett, and David Roediger all employ the term “in-between people” to discuss
the whiteness of European groups.142 Syrian-Lebenese and Armenian immigrants, however,
were the ultimate “in-between people”: not quite Asian, not quite African, not quite European.
They were not quite yellow; they were not quite black, and certainly, in the words of Helen
Hatab Samhan, “not quite white.”143 The high degree of ambiguity is absolutely critical and
because the immigrants could have conceivably been placed in any of the racial groups, the
situation provides a unique lens through which to look back at the socio-economic biases of
Progressive Era policy-makers.
Chapters three (1900-1914) and four (1914-1924) examine how policy-makers viewed
Middle Easterners in the context of the 1909-1911 Dillingham Commission, the 1917 Asiatic
Barred Zone, the 1921 and 1924 Restriction Acts, and the “Racial Prerequisite” court cases In re
Najour, In re Halladjian, In re Mudarri, Ex parte Shahid, Ex parte Dow, In re Dow, Dow v.
United States, and United States v. Cartozian. This thesis argues that the verdicts made on
Syrian-Lebanese and Armenian whiteness in these instances reflect the biases of Progressive Era
officials, particularly those who considered themselves progressives. However, because the
definitions and classifications of the reform movement vary so much from historian to historian,
Richard B. Parker, “Lebanese Proverbs,” The Journal of American Folklore 71 (April-June 1958): 107.
Ibid.
142
James R. Barret and David Roediger, “In-between Peoples: Race, Nationality and the ‘New Immigrant’ Working
Class.” Journal of American Ethnic History 16 (Spring, 1997): 3-54.
143
Helen Hatab Samhan, “Not Quite White: Race Classification and the Arab-American Experience,” in Arabs in
American: Building a New Future, ed. Michael W. Suleiman (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1999).
140
141
27
it is important to contextualize the taxonomy of progressivism before moving on to the taxonomy
of whiteness.144
3.1 Classifying Progressivism
As mentioned earlier in the thesis’s introductory chapter, Hofstadter’s Age of Reform
provided the most influential early work on the nature of the progressive movement. George
Mowry’s The California Progressives joined Hofstadter’s work in providing the classic version
as to what “manner of men” constituted Progressivism.145 Mowry, in his examination of the
leadership of California’s reform element, found the typical progressive to be young, highly
educated, protestant, of “old American stock” with a familial heritage from New England or the
Midwest. The average progressive was “well fixed,” “a fortunate son of the upper middle class,”
and tended towards professions in law, real estate, journalism, medicine, and of course,
politics.146
Hofstadter’s interpretation echoed Mowry’s: the financial and political leadership of the
movement originated from individuals of “local eminence,” “the men of the mugwump type –
the old gentry, the merchants of long standing, the small manufacturers, the established
professional men, the civic leaders of an earlier era.”147 The last critical aspect to Hofstadter’s
classic interpretation involved the progressives' motivation, specifically that they wanted to
reclaim the status and prestige that the Gilded Age industrial and political machines - had
usurped from them.
By the 1960s and 1970s, the Hofstadter-Mowry view of the progressives drew criticism
from other historians. One critique involved the problem that their generalizations were not
specific to reformers instead reflects the broad attributes of those active in politics in the 1890s
and 1900s.148 Other historians like Robert Wiebe, Samuel P. Hays, Gabriel Kolko, and John D.
Buenker, and David Thelen notably disputed Hofstadter’s status-revolution, arguing that a
different type of men generated or controlled the impulse for reform. Hays and Kolko made the
case that progressives were upper-class businessmen manipulating the system, Wiebe argued that
Credit for the idea of a “taxonomy of whiteness” goes to López, White By Law, 2.
George E. Mowry, The California Progressives (New York: Quadrangle/The New York Times Book Co., 1976),
86-104.
146
Ibid., 86-88.
147
Hofstadter, The Age of Reform, 135, 137.
148
John A. Thompson, Reformers and War: American Progressive Publicists and the First World War (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1987), 27.
144
145
28
the progressives represented the new, emerging middle class rather than Hofstadter’s “old
middle-class,” and Buenker contended the urban political machines provided a critical and
overlooked contribution to certain reforms.149
Yet of these scholars, Wiebe and Buenker provide the ideas most applicable to this study.
Wiebe’s importance stems from his influential thesis, which has remained in good historical
repute to this day, that progressives were obsessed with the ideals of order, classification, and
efficiency.150 Buenker’s relevancy to this Master’s Thesis lies in his division of political reform
into two strains, the patrician and the popular.151 The former impulse distrusted the people and
relied on experts to make decisions in their name, the latter truly worked to give the masses more
power. Wiebe and Buenker’s theories can be applied to the Immigration Commission and the
Syrian-Lebanese and Armenian perquisite cases, though, like any definition of Progressivism,
they only extend so far before they become strained.
Other historians simply try to take reform issue by issue, declaring this goal or that policy
to be progressive. For example, in the case of immigration restriction, historian Morton Keller
called it “in many ways … a paradigmatic progressive cause.”152 President Woodrow Wilson’s
biographer, Arthur S. Link, stated that the 1920s quota system was an “old progressive goal,”
noting the irony that just because measures like prohibition and immigration restriction “were
potentially or actively regressive does not mean that they were not progressive.” “On the
contrary,” Link stated, such policies “superbly illustrated the repressive tendencies that inhered
in progressivism….”153 At different times, historians have described the Immigration
Commission and the restriction legislation of 1907, 1917, and 1924 as “progressive”
measures.154
Brinkley, “Richard Hofstadter’s The Age of Reform, A Reconsideration,” 469-472; Daniel T. Rodgers, “In Search
of Progressivism,” Reviews in American History 10 (Dec., 1982): 118
150
Robert H. Wiebe, The Search for Order, 1877-1920 (NY: Hill and Wang, 1967); Rodgers, “In Search of
Progressivism,” 117.
151
Buenker, Urban Liberalism and Progressive Reform, 119-122.
152
Keller, Regulating a New Society, 223.
153
Link, “What happened to the Progressive Movement in the 1920’s?” 847-848.
154
Keller, Regulating a New Society, 225; Zeidel, Immigrants, Progressives, and Exclusion Politics 3-4, 129-130;
Pula, “The Progressives, the Immigrant, and the Workplace,” 57-59, 63; Link, “What happened to the Progressive
Movement in the 1920’s?”: 847-848.
149
29
3.2 “Its Value Will Become Apparent with Scrutiny”
On May 21, 1911, the New York Times published a lengthy article entitled “The Races
that Go into the American Melting Pot.” Its subtitle informed readers that “For the First Time
the Government Tries to Find Out Not What Nations But What Races Are Pouring Into
America.” 155 The paper was referring to the reports of the U.S. immigration Commission (also
known to history as the Dillingham Commission), which provides one of the best venues with
which to examine the Progressive Era response to Middle Eastern immigration. At least two
scholars of the era have deemed the commission “Progressive.”156 Originally created in 1907 as
a way to postpone a congressional vote on the implementation of a literacy test for incoming
immigrants, the commission was tasked by President Theodore Roosevelt to make a ‘“full
inquiry, examination, and investigation … into the subject of immigration.’”157 The commission,
which was made up of three congressmen, three senators, and three specialists appointed by the
President, spent four years and almost a million dollars studying what it called “new
immigration” into the United States.
Part of what made the Immigration Commission so unique was their intention to examine
migration through a racial rather than national lens. Whereas the twentieth century racial system
was artificial and constructed, the nineteenth-century classifications by nationality was just
uninformative and vague. Under the old system, an immigrant from the Austro-Hungarian
Empire might self-identify with one of a dozen peoples residing anywhere from Bosnia to
Czechoslovakia, from the Tyrol to Hungary to Poland, but the government would still have
classified the individual as Austrian. The changes – such as labeling people from Mount
Lebanon as “Syrian” or “Armenian” rather than immigrants from “Turkey in Asia” – had begun
in advance of the 1900 census, but the concrete work of implementing a malleable science like
ethnology took time.
In their investigation of the racial sources of immigration, the commissioners found what
they already instinctively believed to be true: some of the ingredients in the melting pot were
better or worse than others. The Syrian-Lebanese and Armenians, however, managed to pass the
“The Races that Go Into the American Melting Pot,” The New York Times, May 21, 1911.
The scholars referred to include Robert F. Zeidel and James S. Pula. See Zeidel, Immigrants, Progressives, and
Exclusion Politics, 3, 145-146 and Pula, “American Immigration and the Dillingham Commission,” 7. Additional
scholars argue that immigration restriction itself represented a progressive goal – see Link, “What happened to the
Progressive Movement in the 1920’s?”, 847-848 and Keller, Regulating a New Society, 223.
157
James S. Pula, “American Immigration and the Dillingham Commission,” 7-8; Zeidel, Immigrants, Progressives,
and Exclusion Politics, 3.
155
156
30
commission’s taste test. The Immigration Commission affirmed that the two groups were of
European rather than Asian “stock” in a couple different ways. The most explicit involved the
fifth of the forty-two volumes the commission published, entitled The Dictionary of Races. This
compendium on race examined over six hundred entries, the definitions for which ranged from
seven tortured pages about “Croats” to the three word description for “Bedouin” (“a wandering
Arab.”)158 The Dictionary of Races was written by the Commission’s “resident anthologist” Dr.
Daniel Folkmar and reviewed by other commissioners and some outside authorities, such as
Franz Boaz.159 Folkmar was a prominent academic in Europe and the United States who had
first-hand experience in the field of demeaning “Asiatic” racial groups from his time serving as
“Anthropologist and Lieutenant governor” of the Philippine Civil Service.160
Folkmar likely came to work for the Immigration Commission through his connections
with Jeremiah Jenks, one of Roosevelt’s appointees who “was a true progressive” and embodied
“the Progressive Era’s academically trained and highly trusted expert.”161 Jenks worked
alongside Charles P. Neill, another of the President’s appointees, a political economist and a
second generation Irish-Catholic. Niell served in the Department of Commerce and Labor and
worked closely with Roosevelt on efforts to investigate health conditions in the meatpacking
industry as well as labor abuse of women and children in the South. Others on the Commission
with Progressive leanings included New Jersey Representative Benjamin F. Howell, who fought
against political machines and the boss-immigrant complex, Representative William S. Bennett,
a humanistic progressive reformer, South Carolina Senator Asbury Latimer, a “Tillmanite” who
“often took up … progressive causes,” and, following Latimer’s death, Senator Leroy Percy, a
Progressive from Mississippi.162
The progressives’ need to classify and clarify was on full display with the Dictionary of
Races. It was intended, according to the volume’s foreword, “for the student of immigration[,]
for the one who wants in convenient form an approximately correct statement of immigrant races
United States Immigration Commission, “Dictionary of Races or Peoples,” Reports of the Immigration
Commission (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1911), 1, 21, 43-49.
159
Joel Perlmann, “Views of European Races Among the Research Staff of the US Immigration Commission and
the Census Bureau, Ca. 1910,” (January 13, 2011). Levy Economics Institute Working Paper No. 648.
http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.1739718 (accessed December 3, 2011), 3, 13-16.
160
Ibid., 12.
161
Zeidel, Immigrants, Progressives, and Exclusion Politics, 38.
162
Zediel, Immigrants, Progressives, and Exclusion Politics, 39, 42, 44, 47; Lewis Baker, The Percys of Mississippi:
Politics and Literature in the New South (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univeristy Press, 1983), 48.
158
31
or peoples, their languages, their numbers, and the countries from which they came.”163 The
volume embodied the progressives’ faith in scientific authority, drawing on a “who’s who” of
racial theorists: Daniel Brinton, A.H. Keane, Joseph Deniker, William Ripley, James Pritchard,
Jean Louis Armand de Quatrefages, Max Müller, Robert Latham, Paul Topinard, and Johann
Blumenbach.164 Like the broader reports of the Commission, The Dictionary of Races
emphasized physical anthropology, ethnology, history, linguistics, and culture to make racial
determinations on over 600 terms, from “Abysserian. (see Semitic-Hamitic)” to “Zulu. (see
Negro).”165
The majority of Middle Eastern immigrants generally benefitted from the Commission’s
desire to incorporate ethnology into the determination of race. Of the Middle Eastern
immigrants groups that the Commission found fell within the top forty most populous in the
United States, ethnologists generally put “Syrians” and “Armenians,” but not “Turks,” in the
Caucasian, rather than Asiatic, race. The exact divisions and branches often differed in their
elaborate classification schemes – for instance, one table on Brinton and Keane placed the
Armenian “people” in the Armenic “group” of Aryan “stock” of the Caucasian “race” – but the
ultimate finding as Caucasian remained consistent.166 The Dictionary of Races listed the
Armenians as part of the “Aryan race,” while “Syrians” were “physically … of mixed Syrian,
Arabian, and even Jewish blood. They belong to the Semitic branch (see) of the Caucasian
race….”167 The Dictionary of Races was generous in deeming other Middle Eastern groups as
falling into the various Caucasian divisions of humanity. In the “Mongolian, Mongol, Mongolic
Mongoloid, Asiatic, or Yellow” section, it stated: “Southwestern Asia is practically occupied by
Caucasians, with the exception of the Turkish race in Anatolia. West of the Hindus come their
Aryan kinsmen, the Afghanis, Beluchis, Persians, Armenians, and Kurds, many of whom are
Mohammedan; then come the Semites, including the Jews, Arabs, and Syrians [emphasis
mine].”168 As far as the Middle East went, Berbers, Egyptians, and Copts of “Hamitic” or
“Semitic-Hamitic” origin rounded out the list of the white braches on the Caucasian tree.169
Compared to the Armenian and Syrian sections, the dictionary gave only perfunctory attention to
United States Immigration Commission, “Dictionary of Races or Peoples,” 3.
Ibid., 3,6, 8-10.
165
Ibid., 8, 13-150.
166
Ibid., 5.
167
Ibid., 139.
168
Ibid., 98.
169
Ibid., 21.
163
164
32
defining other Middle Eastern groups since most of the peoples discussed were “not known as
immigrants,” or “of no significance in immigration.”170
The Commission used a second way to affirm the whiteness, or at least to discourage an
Asian association, for the Syrian-Lebanese and Armenian immigrants. Significantly, in its
numerous tables on recent immigration, the Commission placed notes connecting the Lebanese
with the Europeans instead of the “Asiatics.”171 Headings like the following were not
uncommon: “European immigrants, including Syrian, admitted or rejected under … United
States laws in 1908 [emphasis mine].”172 On a table regarding return migration of “European
emigrant aliens,” the Commission’s reports listed Armenians and Syrians amongst Bulgarian,
Croatian, Dalmatian, English, French, German, and other types of European groups.173 Their
association of the Syrian-Lebanese and Armenians with Europeans rather than with Asians was
hardly automatic; the approach of the 1898 Industrial Commission differed on which portion of
the tables and charts to place the Syiran-Lebanese. For example, the Industrial Commission’s
table on immigrant illiteracy listed three typologies: “Eastern Europe,” “Western Europe,” and
“Other Races.” For the Industrial Commission, the proper place for the “Syrians” was alongside
the Chinese and Japanese in the “Other Races” category.174
The Immigration Commission’s decision to place them on the European side had
significant repercussions for the Armenian and Syrian-Lebanese immigrants. The explicit label
of Caucasian rather than Mongolian represented the difference between a positive step towards
citizenship rather than a leap backwards in the highly radicalized environment of early twentieth
century United States. At the time, the immigrants were aware of the importance Americans
placed on race and color and that it was “better” to “be” white rather than yellow or black. Using
the hindsight of history, it also seems likely that had the Immigration Commission not deemed
the Syrian-Lebanese and Armenians Asian, they might have lost more of the racial prerequisite
court cases, some of which cited the Commission’s findings as evidence of the Middle
Easterners’ whiteness. A strong possibility exists that they also would have fallen in the Asiatic
170
Ibid.
See United States Immigration Commission, “Abstracts of Reports of the Immigration Commission with
Conclusions and Recommendations and Views of the Minority, Volume One,” Reports of the Immigration
Commission (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1911), 612.
172
Ibid., 624.
173
Ibid., 180.
174
United States Industrial Commission, “Reports of the Industrial Commission on Immigration Including
Testimony, with Review and Digest, and Special Reports on Education,”, 284.
171
33
Barred Zone established by the 1917 Immigration Act, which drew heavily off the Commission’s
final recommendations for limiting undesirable immigration. The Commissioners singled out the
Chinese for exclusion, the Japanese and Koreans for continued restrictions, and “East Indian
laborers” to be newly prohibited.175 The Armenians and Syrian-Lebanese went unmentioned.
So why was the Immigration Commission’s reaction to the Armenians and SyrianLebanese more positive than negative? This thesis asserts that the Progressive’s socio-economic
prejudices, especially in the areas of religion, class, culture, and politics, played a large role in
the making of their Whiteness. It is necessary, however, to note that the construction as
Caucasian is relative, for there existed degrees of desirability for White and European migrants.
The commission popularized the difference in racial fitness between old European immigration
and new European immigration. Progressive Era officials trusted, and even actively sought after,
old immigrants, those coming from Western Europe and Scandinavia. America in the 1900s and
1910s viewed the “new” immigrants, those from Eastern and Southern Europe whose numbers
dramatically increased in the 1880s, as “inferior” to the old ones, but the government did not bar
them from entry like the Chinese or consider ineligible to citizenship like most Asian groups.176
Hence, when the “able progressive Democrat” Senator Furnifold M. Simmons called “Syrians,”
along with the “new” immigrant groups of Poles, Hungarians, and Italians, the “scum and riffraff
of Europe,” it represented a less damning attack than if he had joined them together with the
Chinese and Japanese as the scum and riffraff of Asia.177
Early twentieth-century Whiteness represents a question of degrees, and in regards to the
Immigration Commission, the most accurate statement would be that they treated the Armenians
and Syrian-Lebanese more positively than negatively and as more European than Asian.
Religion represents one of the socio-economic areas that illustrates this dynamic well. During
the Progressive Era, Catholics and Orthodox Christians constituted the vast majority of
immigration from Armenia and Syria. Their faiths distanced them from Asian migrants but
United States Immigration Commission, “Abstracts of Reports of the Immigration Commission with Conclusions
and Recommendations and Views of the Minority, Volume One,” 47.
176
For a summary of the differentiation between “old” and “new” immigration from a progressive perspective, see
Dora B. Haines, “Congress and the Immigration Problem,” The Searchlight/Spotlight 8 (Oct. 1923): 16-18 or the
Dictionary of Races’ definition of Caucasian in United States Immigration Commission, “Dictionary of Races or
Peoples,” 32.
177
Furnifold M. Simmons, “Speech of Hon. F.M. Simmons, of North Carolina, in the Senate of the United States,
Wednesday, May 23, 1906” (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1906). The quote describing Simmons as a
Progressive Democrat comes from “Your Government at Washington,” The Searchlight/Spotlight, 8 (Oct. 1923), 10.
175
34
simultaneously placed them most in tandem with the Catholic and Orthodox southern and eastern
Europeans rather than the Ango-Saxon Protestants groups who constituted the “old” immigrants.
According to Hofstadter and Mowry, the typical progressive was Christian, usually from
one of the Protestant denominations prominent in the Northeast. If the Commission had specific
hostility towards the Middle Easterners’ Catholicism, that animosity was outweighed by the
historical importance the region held for Christianity. The Immigration Commission explicitly
connected the Syrian-Lebanese and Armenians’ religion with being Caucasian:
Most often distinguished from Arabs by their religion, Syrian immigrants generally being
Christians, although many of their kinsmen in Syria are Mohammedan. The influence of
American Missionaries and schools in Syria explains in part why our immigration from
that country is of Syrians rather than of Arabs. Physically the modern Syrians are of
mixed Syrian, Arabian, and even Jewish blood. They belong to the Semitic branch (see)
of the Caucasian race, thus widely differing from their rulers, the Turks (see), who are in
origin Mongolian.178
They then further cemented the Syrian-Lebanese’s connection to Christianity by dragging the
Bible into the Dictionary of Races. “Chaldee, Chaldaic, and Syro-Chaldaic,” the commission
stated, “are other names applied to the form of this language which was spoken by Christ and his
disciples.”179 As to the other prominent Middle Eastern immigrant group, The Dictionary of
Races noted that “in religion the Armenians differed from all the above named peoples [Turks,
Kurds, and Persians] excepting the Syrians in that they are Christian. They boast a church as old
as that of Rome.”180 The Japanese, in contrast, fell into the “Sibiric branch” of the Mongolian
race. After all, “Shintoism, a mixture of nature and ancestor worship, and Buddhism are the
prevailing religions,” and it is “well understood that Christianity makes very slow progress.”181
By ethnology and religion, the reports situated the Syrians and Armenians as more European
than Asian, Caucasian rather than Mongolian.
Beyond the religious dimension, the Middle Eastern immigrants in the United States
appealed to the commission’s biases in other ways. The Immigration Commission listed in their
abstracts and in their final conclusions the specific socio-economic attributes that they found
positive. Throughout the Progressive Era, reformers placed a premium on immigrants’ ability to
assimilate. Progressive presidents like Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson spoke out
United States Immigration Commission. “Dictionary of Races or Peoples,”, 139.
Ibid.
180
Ibid., 16.
181
Ibid., 85-86.
178
179
35
against “hyphenates” and in favor of “one hundred percent” Americanism, even before the
nationalistic fervor engendered by World War One. The commission shared this progressive
passion, and concluded in their final reports that those who “would least readily be assimilated”
were among the people who ought to be excluded the most. Their version of assimilation had
various educational, social, and occupational and class dimensions, but interestingly, both
primary and secondary sources agree that in many ways the early twentieth-century Armenian
and Syrian-Lebanese immigrants either met or exceeded those standards.
For example, the Immigration Commission placed a strong emphasis on education as a
means to becoming a fit American citizen. In the eyes of the commission, illiteracy indicated
unintelligence and served it as one of the defining features separating “new” immigrants from the
“old.”182 Consequently, they argued in favor of a literacy test in order to enter the country and
investigated the metrics of school attendance and the ability to read and speak English for each
group. At first glance, the Syrian-Lebanese were at a disadvantage in this regard, for they
entered the country largely as illiterate in English and often in Arabic. However, as Naff notes,
peddling gave the immigrants a huge advantage over learning English compared to other
groups.183 Peddling both allowed them to interact and learn from their American customers on a
daily basis and observe the nuances of their new country. It also forced them to learn English,
for the Syrian-Lebanese peddler’s linguistic knowledge could make the difference between a
farmer shooting him or letting him stay on the property for the night. Naff emphasizes the
benefits in more material terms: “[Peddling] forced them to learn English quickly because
learning English was critical to their success; and success, driven by the age-old native
competition for family honor and status, was, in the final analysis, the engine that drove Syrians
toward their goal in the United States.”184 The title of Naff’s monograph, Becoming American, is
in reference to the assimilative power of peddling and she asserts that “until a comparable body
of data is assembled to the contrary, peddling must be held to be the major factor in explaining
the relatively rapid assimilation of Arabic speaking immigrants before World War I.”185
While Naff does not reference the Immigration Commission’s findings, the reports
support her argument, especially in regards to the Syrian-Lebanese ability as a group to learn the
United States Immigration Commission, “Abstracts of Reports of the Immigration Commission with Conclusions
and Recommendations and Views of the Minority, Volume One,” 14.
183
Naff, Becoming American, 4.
184
Naff, The Early Arab Immigrant Experience, 29.
185
Naff, Becoming American, 1.
182
36
language. The commission looked at 1,429 French, German, Northern Italians, Southern
Italians, Lithuanians, Poles, and Syrians and found that, of those immigrants who had spent less
than five years in the United States, the Syrians fell second to only the Germans in the
percentage of those who could speak English, coming in at 60.2 percent. The next highest were
the French, who ranked at 35.1 percent. Of the Syrian-Lebanese who had spent five to nine years
in the country, 74.8 percent could speak English, and of those in the United States for over ten
years, 86.4 were fluent. In these last two categories the Syrian-Lebanese ranked third, behind the
“old” European immigrants but ahead of the Lithuanians, Poles, and Italians. 186
The Commission then divided the immigrants by gender and employment status and
found a similar result. Looking at the percentage of “foreign-born employees” in manufacturing
industries who speak English,” the Commission found that of 330 female Syrian-Lebanese
immigrants aged fourteen or over at the time of entry into the United States, 29.2 percent spoke
English. The average for all women in this category was 22.3 percent, which included the
French, Finns, French Canadians, Germans, Greeks, “Hebrews,” Italians, Lithuanians, Poles, and
Russians in addition to “Syrians.” As far as Syrian-Lebanese men in this category, fifty percent
of the 428 could speak the language, compared to the 47.6 percent on average.187 When the
commission rated those speaking English but removed employment in the manufacturing
industry as a requirement (thus likely including more peddlers and store-owners), the fluency
rate for the Middle Easterners went even higher. With immigrants “six years of age or over
within households studied who could speak English,” approximately eighty percent of the males
and fifty-five percent of the females possessed fluency. By this metric, only German immigrants
topped the Syrian-Lebanese, who again came in ahead of both French and the “new” immigrant
groups. 188
The Armenians, meanwhile, were among the most literate of the “new” immigrant
groups. The commission found that in the cotton goods industry of the “North Atlantic states,”
of the 103 Armenian immigrants surveyed, 94.2 percent could read while 92.2 percent could
both read and write. That percentage placed the Armenians at a literacy rate comparable to the
United States Immigration Commission. “Immigrants in Industry; Part 4: Woolen and Wursted Goods
Manufacturing.” Reports of the Immigration Commission (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1911), 736.
187
Ibid., 737.
188
Ibid., 734.
186
37
“old” immigrants and far above the “new” immigrant groups.189 These statistics represent more
than numbers on a table; the commission often noted when a race was especially high or low.
“Among the races of recent immigration,” they wrote, “the Armenians, with 104 reporting, lead
in literacy with 94.2 per cent.”190 The Armenians actively sought out public education; the
Immigration Commission’s report on the Fresno population stated that the Armenians were less
likely than the “Mexicans, Italians, Portuguese, and German Russians … to leave school early in
order to begin work or because of deficiencies due to irregular attendance.”191 Again, the
secondary literature, this time in the form of Mirak’s Torn Between Two Lands, corresponds with
the Immigration Commission’s findings. As the author writes,
The Armenians, heirs to the nineteenth-century awakening in turkey, boasted the highest
literacy rate of all the ‘new immigrants streaming to America between 1880 and World
War I; for them education and advancement were natural corollaries. Tbrots kna vor
mart ellas (go to school to be a man) was a common immigrant injunction.”192
It is likely that the high literacy rates were also a product of the factors causing the Armenians to
leave Turkey in the first place, for unlike the Syrian-Lebanese, oppression pushed out the literate
and illiterate alike.
In addition to literacy and education, the social aspects of immigration mattered a great
deal to the commissioners. They spoke out against the preponderance of single male immigrants,
which they said discouraged assimilation. They often expressed disdain for immigrants who, in
their eyes, were living in or even contributed to poor housing conditions. Finally, they scorned
return migration; apparently the only thing worse than immigrants who came to America and
stayed were the immigrants who made money and left. “The old immigration came to be a part
of the country,” the Commission argued, “while the new, in large measure, comes with the
intention of profiting, in a pecuniary way, by the superior advantages of the new world and then
returning to the old country.”193
While such hostility would seem to bode poorly for the Syrian-Lebanese, the nature of
their immigration had undergone a change in the 1900s. Syrian-Lebanese peddling reached its
United States Immigration Commission, “Immigrants in Industry; Part 3: Cotton Goods Manufacturing in the
North Atlantic States.” Reports of the Immigration Commission (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1911),
143.
190
Ibid., 146.
191
Mirak, Torn Between Two Lands, 272.
192
Ibid.
193
United States Immigration Commission, “Abstracts of Reports of the Immigration Commission with Conclusions
and Recommendations and Views of the Minority, Volume One,” 14.
189
38
peak between 1895 and 1900 and then began to decline as the immigrants began to purchase land
and start their own small businesses. The profits and assimilative nature of peddling helped the
immigrants move up the social latter, thus “contribut[ing] to its own obsolescence.”194 At the
turn of the century, the immigrants began establishing permanent communities, starting families
and businesses in America rather than fighting for land in Lebanon.195 The New York Times
twice observed, once in 1902 and again in 1903, that a large number of the Syrian-Lebanese
were leaving the tenements for the more prosperous areas of Brooklyn.196 Meanwhile, in the
report it published in 1911, the commissioners described the immigrant community in Lawrence,
Massachusetts:
The greater part of the colony came in the past ten years …. There are a number of
families and about a fourth of the population consists of children under sixteen years of
age. The reports and savings of the first Syrian immigrants formed the incentive needed
to bring their fellow countrymen …. The Syrian population has permanent employment,
and only a score or so of the race left the city during the panic year of 1907.197
The commission went on to state that unless conditions should improve considerably in the
Ottoman Empire, “there is a tendency on the part of Syrians to remain permanently in this
country.”198 As far as the Armenians went, considering the turmoil that awaited them if they
returned back to Turkey, it is not surprising that the Immigration Commission found that they
were among the groups “showing the smallest degree of return migration.”199 They found the
average departing rate for Europeans at thirty-two for every one hundred immigrants, whereas
the Armenians and Syrian-Lebanese left at a rate of eleven and twenty-eight per hundred,
respectively.200
By 1914, peddling had become almost “obsolete” for the Syrian-Lebanese. Naff writes
that they used the occupation as an economic “bridge” with which to cross from one occupation
to another.201 Once they could afford to do so, more and more of the immigrants traded life on
194
Naff, Becoming American, 100.
For a more detailed account of how the Syrian-Lebanese put down their American roots in the first decade of the
twentieth century see Naff, Becoming American, 199-204.
196
“The Syrian Colony of New York and Its Characteristics,” New York Times, May 25, 1902; “Sights and
Characters of New York’s ‘Little Syria,’” New York Times, March 29, 1903.
197
United States Immigration Commission, “Abstracts of Reports of the Immigration Commission with Conclusions
and Recommendations and Views of the Minority, Volume One,” 514.
198
Ibid., 514-515.
199
Ibid., 181.
200
Ibid., 182.
201
Naff, Becoming American, 100.
195
39
the road for life running a small goods store.202 One contemporary publication detailed the
change:
In America they are often peddlers first. Afterwards some become leaders in the silk,
fine white goods and rug trade. A number of kimono and lace factories are owned by
them. They have also made good in the candy and grocery business. Many are skilled
silk weavers … [T]hey have shunned the hard muscular work such as construction and
mining. Some are professional men; a few are farmers; in short, there are some in nearly
every vocation. 203
Most of the immigrants avoided the factories and the few who worked there often abruptly left as
soon as they had accumulated enough capital to do so. Both Naff and the 1898 Industrial
Commission noted how the Syrian-Lebanese typically eschewed factory work in favor of
peddling or shop-keeping.204 To quote the New York Times, the Syrian-Lebanese immigrant “is a
born trader, and seldom does anything else for a living. A few of them are now entering silk
mills, but they have not good staying power.”205 Ironically, the same tendency that caused the
nineteenth-century Industrial Commission to dismiss the Lebanese as “unstable,” “nomadic,” and
“too versatile,” may have made the Progressive Era Immigration Commission appreciate the
migrants more.
Essentially, the progressives absolutely detested anything or anyone that enabled the
abuses of factory life. They spoke out against both the monopolistic corporations themselves
and the “new” immigrants who provided them with exploitable labor, charging that the
immigrants’ willingness to toil in squalor invited low wages and poor working conditions.206
Senator Simmons, the same politician who described the Syrians as “European scum,” provides a
strong example of such a viewpoint. In a 1906 speech, he specifically laid the blame for
America’s problems with immigration at the feet of big business:
I do not believe that anybody is interested in bringing this ignorant horde here except the
great corporations, who want cheap labor, and oftentimes are indifferent as to where they
get it …. [T]he competition which follows their coming is a competition which tends to
reduce the scale of American wages and the standard of American living.207
202
Naff, Becoming American, 12; Naff, Lebanese Immigration into the United States, 147-148.
Thomas Burgess, Foreigners or Friends, A Handbook; The Churchman’s Approach to the Foreign-Born and
their Children (New York: Department of Missions and Church Extension, 1921), 149.
204
Naff , Becoming American,179, 229.
205
“The Syrian Colony of New York and Its Characteristics,” New York Times, May 25, 1902.
206
Hofstadter, The Age of Reform, 179.
207
Simmons, “Speech of Hon. F.M. Simmons, of North Carolina, in the Senate of the United States, Wednesday,
May 23, 1906.”
203
40
The Immigration Commission’s concerns bore a strong resemblance to those of Simmons:
[T]he entrance into the operating forces of American industry of such large numbers of
wage-earners of the races of Southern and Eastern Europe … has exposed the original
employees to unsafe and insanitary [sic] working conditions, and has led to or continued
the imposition of conditions of employment which the Americans and older immigrants
have considered unsatisfactory and in many cases unbearable …. lead[ing] to the
voluntary or involuntary displacement of certain occupations and industries.208
Due to the average new immigrant’s “tractability” and “low standards,” the Commission blamed
him for the excessively long work day, unsafe and unsanitary conditions, and the monopolized
evil of company stores and houses. They even blamed the new immigrants for making the old
immigrants feel insecure about themselves: “another factor, mainly psychological in nature …
has been operative in the displacement of native Americans and older immigrant employees. In
all industries and all industrial communities a certain reproach has come to be associated with
native Americans who are engaged in the same occupations as Southern and Eastern
Europeans.”209 In the eyes of reformers, the Syrian-Lebanese may have succeeded simply by not
working in the factories.
The commissioners did, however, have a passion for Jeffersonian-style farm work. They
waxed poetic about the old European migrants who served as “independent farmers,” working to
develop all the land “between the Allegheny Mountains and the Pacific Coast.”210 In its final
recommendations the commission advocated inducing every willing immigrant away from the
“industrial centers” so that “he may secure a permanent residence to the best advantage,
especially where he may invest his savings in farms or engage in agricultural pursuits….”211 By
1910, the Armenian population was spread out across the nation, but the prominent Fresno
settlement embodied the Immigration Commission’s ideal. The commission described the
Armenians’ path to California very similarly to their own prescription for new European
immigrants:
The vast majority migrated to Fresno after spending years in Armenian colonies in the
Eastern industrial centers. However, they sooner or later desired to leave the factory life
which was undermining their physique. Those who moved West were attracted to the
new Armenian colony which enjoyed favorable climate and good opportunities. Many[,]
United States Immigration Commission, “Abstracts of Reports of the Immigration Commission with Conclusions
and Recommendations and Views of the Minority, Volume One,” 501.
209
Ibid.
210
Ibid., 14.
211
Ibid., 46.
208
41
like the Danes, purchased land and at once became independent farmers upon settling in
the new community.212
Even if the community’s success stirred up animosity from the average white farmer competing
with them, the immigrants seemed to have earned the respect of the Commission, as well as of
Chester Harvey Rowell, the progressive politician, the editor of the Fresno Republican, and the
“lonely paladin of the San Joaquin Valley Armenians.”213 Notably, Rowell strongly opposed
most other immigrants like the “objectionable” and “undesirable” peoples from Japan and
Southern Europe; the Armenians were among the few migrants to which he did not object.214
3.3 The Racial Prerequisite Cases
In May of 1624, Martin the Armenian was having a rather frustrating month. He had
spent over four years in the Jamestown colony, earned British citizenship and a parcel of tobacco
for his troubles, and had finally arrived back in England. The customs office at his port,
however, stated he was a foreigner and imposed twice the regular duties on his tobacco. His
citizenship and the tobacco were two of Martin’s most prized possessions, so he appealed the
decision to a British court. The court, led by a “Lord Cavendish,” upheld Martin’s citizenship,
giving “speciall comendacon of Mr. Martin” in connection to “his good likenge to the
Plantation.”215 Martin’s time in the legal system represented the first of many court challenges to
allow Armenian and Syrian-Lebanese the benefits of citizenship. Incidentally, his positive
outcome echoed the largely affirmative verdicts rendered during the two groups’ racial perquisite
cases.
The issue stemmed from the progressives’ desire to crack down on political machines,
specifically their ability to rush immigrants through the naturalization process and send them off
to the polls. Legislation during the second half of Roosevelt’s presidency created a Bureau of
Naturalization within the Department of Commerce and Labor, which produced a directive
listing Armenians and “Syrians” as among those groups who should not be registered.216 Prior to
their action, the immigrants had been eligible to naturalize on the principal that they were
United States Immigration Commission, “Immigrants in Industry; Part 25: Japanese and Other Immigrant Races
in the Pacific Coast and Rocky Mountain States,” 633-634.
213
Mirak, Torn Between Two Lands, 284.
214
Chester Harvey Rowell quoted in Daniels, The Politics of Prejudice, 23-24.
215
Malcolm, The Armenians in America, 51-53.
216
Carver, “On the Boundary of White,” 34.
212
42
qualified until challenged otherwise.217 Naturalization courts began denying the petitions, and
the Syrian-Lebanese sued in order to become citizens. The immigrants had to prove they were
“free whites” to satisfy the 1870 law, something that the Chinese, Japanese, Burmese and Native
Americans had so far tried to do without success.218 Interestingly, Costa Najour, a young Syrian
immigrant petitioning in Atlanta, won his case in 1909, becoming “the first applicant for
citizenship, among all ethnic groups, to successfully litigate his status as a white person in a U.S.
federal court.”219 Costa Najour’s 1909 case represented the immigrants’ first breakthrough.
William Newman, the District Judge, based his findings heavily on the ethnology of Dr. A.H.
Keane’s The World’s Peoples, a recent work from which The Dictionary of Races also drew
inspiration. Newman specifically emphasized race over skin color, which had been a contentious
issue during the case.220 The U.S. attorney had grown frustrated and asked Najour to take off his
shirt to better show the color of his skin. The twenty-two year old started to comply when
Newman put a stop to the proceedings.221
Over the next two years, victories in the next three cases (In re Halladjian, In re Mudarri,
and In re Ellis) followed for the Armenians and Syrian-Lebanese at the District and Circuit Court
levels. When one looks at the rulings granting the Middle Easterners’ citizenship, the rationales
involved bear a strong similarity to that of the Immigration Commission. The Progressive Era
judges emphasized the finding of experts and ethnologists, the immigrants’ Christian religious
heritage, intelligence, literacy, and ability to assimilate in their decisions. The Middle Eastern
immigrants won the 1909 and 1910 cases in locales across the nation, ranging from the West, the
South, and the Northeast. Judge Francis Lowell of the First Circuit Court of Massachusetts, a
Roosevelt appointee, decided both Halladjian (1909) and Mudarri (1910), while Judge John
Wolverton of the District Court of Oregon, another one of Roosevelt’s picks, provided the ruling
on the Ellis case (1910).
Judges Wolverton, Lowell, and Newman all made some mention of recent ethnology.
Wolverton stated the Ellis was “of Semitic stock,” citing Brinton, Keane, and Deniker in
217
Gualtieri, Between Arab and White, 53; In re Halladjian et. al., 174 F. 834 (C.C.D. Mass. 1909).
López, White By Law, 203-204.
219
Gualtieri, Between Arab and White, 1.
220
In re Najour, 174 F. 735 (N.D. Ga. 1909).
221
Gualtieri, Between Arab and White, 61.
218
43
support.222 Lowell, though skeptical of the idea of race as a concrete biological term, was more
thorough, and stated that
a casual examination of books on ethnology, standing together on the shelves of a large
library, old and new, weightly [sic] and unimportant, shows complete agreement in the
proposition that Armenians are to be classified as white or Caucasian, rather than as
Mongolian or yellow. Figuier, Brace, Keane, Pickering, Brinton, Hutchinson, Jeffries,
Pritchett, and Retzel, authors taken quite at random, all reach the same conclusion. This
is true of Blumenbach, an influential author of the eighteenth century, and of Quatrefages
and Huxley about a century later.223
Judge Lowell further tied the Armenians to Europe in two ways. The first involved skin color;
the judge noted that Halladjian and his fellow petitioners could “pass undistinguished in Western
Europe,” and in fact, “their complexion was lighter than that of many south Italians and
Portuguese.”224
The judges also made reference to the groups’ educational, occupational, and assimilative
standing. Lowell connected all three when he asked rhetorically whether the Armenians “may
‘become Westernized?’” Lowell emphatically answered in the affirmative, referencing
Armenians business dealings, their “modern education at Robert College and other American
schools in the East,” and the fact that they were immigrating to the “civilization of Great Britain
and of the United States” as reasons why the migrants would prove able to assimilate.225 Judge
Wolverton noted how the individual Syrian-Lebanese applicant before him possessed strong
morals, was “sober and industrious,” “speaks and writes the English language,” and “possesses,
without question, all the essential qualifications to entitle him to naturalization, besides being a
good and highly respected citizen on the community in which he lives.”226
Finally, religion played a strong role in the judges’ ultimate decisions. The immigrants
“effectively used their membership in the Christian fold to make religious and civilization
arguments in favor of their whiteness.”227 Wolverton noted that Ellis was a Maronite, “reared a
Catholic,” and currently held to the faith.228 Lowell went far further in his ruling, tying together
222
In re Eillis, 179 F. 1002 (D. Or. 1910).
In re Halladjian et. al., 174 F. 834 (C.C.D. Mass. 1909).
224
Ibid.
225
Ibid.
226
In re Eillis, 179 F. 1002 (D. Or. 1910).
227
Gualtieri, Between Arab and White, 3.
228
In re Eillis, 179 F. 1002 (D. Or. 1910).
223
44
history, religion, and intellectual achievement into a ringing endorsement of the Middle
Easterners’ heritage:
If the statutory classification should be any wise rested upon ‘mental development,’ or
upon ‘ideals, standards, and aspirations,’ as suggested by the United States, a reasonable
modesty may well remind Europeans that the origin of their letters was in Phoenicia, the
origin of much of their art in Egypt, that Asia Minor claimed, at least, the birthplace of
the first great European poet, and the Christian religion, which most Europeans believe to
have influenced their civilization and ideals, was born in Palestine.229
In 1913 and 1914, the Syrians experienced their first set-backs in the racial prerequisite cases.
They lost Ex parte Shahid (1913), Ex parte Dow (1914), and In re Dow (1914), but all three
cases were decided by the same South Carolina district judge, who used his own progressivesounding rational to repeatedly deny the petitioners. Judge Henry Smith proved to be the only
arbitrator to rule against the Armenians or Syrian-Lebanese in the racial prerequisite cases, but
his views will be discussed at length in the fourth and final chapter, which covers the period
between 1914 and the last of the Syrian-Lebanese or Armenian racial prerequisite trials in 1925.
As far as the time between the turn of the century and World War I, the Syrian-Lebanese
and Armenians received affirmation as white from both the courts and the Immigration
Commission, Congress’ primary vehicle for examining the “new” immigrants. While scholars
like Gualtieri and López have done excellent work examining the Syrians’ racial prerequisite
court cases, there has been no work contextualizing the court cases within the nature of early
twentieth century progressive reform, nor in concert with the forty-two volumes of reports issued
by the Immigration Commission. My ultimate conclusion is that, since race and whiteness were
constructed, historians cannot ignore the biases of the people doing the constructing – in this
case, the socio-economic predispositions belong to Progressive Era policy-makers.
Consequently, this thesis incorporates whiteness studies, the separate secondary literature on the
progressives and Middle Eastern immigration, and the primary documents of the decisionmakers responsible for forming the verdicts on the immigrants’ whiteness, to create a unique
blend of historiography that contributes to a broader understanding of each of the fields above.
229
In re Halladjian et. al., 174 F. 834 (C.C.D. Mass. 1909).
45
CHAPTER FOUR
PUTTING A LID ON IT, 1914-1924
In the years between 1880 and 1900, immigrants filled up the so-called American melting
pot, while between 1900 and 1914 the pot was strained, in two very different ways, by the
progressives and the influx of immigrants. In the period between 1914 and 1924, the situation
was very different, as both people and events conspired to place a lid on the melting pot. World
War I “naturally” stopped the flow of immigrants into the country, while Congress restricted
immigration legislatively through the implementation of the 1917 Literacy Test and the Asiatic
Barred Zone, as well as the Quota Acts of the 1920s. Meanwhile the courts began to define
whiteness more and more narrowly, to the detriment of the Japanese, Asian-Indians, and, for a
time, the Syrian-Lebanese. The Armenians and Syrian-Lebanese ultimately kept their whiteness
intact, experiencing both the high and low points of other “new” European groups.
4.1 The Lights Go Down
1914 proved to be a critical year for the various groups of people involved in this study.
The lamps were going out – not just over Europe – but arguably on the Progressive Era itself.230
Several historians of progressivism make the case that the era ended in 1914. Considering this
paper features the progressives and yet extends to 1924, it is necessary to address this issue – and
at this particular place in the thesis – since it directly impact interpretations of legislation like the
1917 Immigration Act and the 1921 and 1924 Quota Acts.
Historians have sharply divided as to whether the war bolstered progressivism or killed it.
The gaping, and obviously contradictory, dichotomy between the ideas makes the historiography
on the subject unexpectedly fascinating. One approach, espoused by Hofstadter and Buenker but
argued most forcibly argued by John Thompson, holds that not only did the war hurt the cause of
reform, it halted the movement and killed the Progressive Era itself. A scholar at the University
of Cambridge, Thompson writes in Reformers and War, American Progressive Publicists and
The original quotation, “the lamps [some sources say lights instead] are going out all over Europe, and I fear they
will not be lit again in our time” comes from Lord Edward Grey in 1914. The idea to use the quotations stems from
Roger Daniels, who cites Grey while making the point that few Americans, immigrants and native-born alike,
understood the significance of the coming war. See Daniels, Not Like Us, 77.
230
46
The First World War that the war “discredited” and “damaged” American Progressivism.231 The
conflict divided the reformers into factions, some isolationists, the rest split between Theodore
Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson’s competing world views, leaving progressivism “fatally
weakened by the divisions created among its supporters by the new issues of foreign policy,
above all the question of intervention.”232
Morton Keller, on the other hand, forcefully makes the case that the First World War
strengthened the progressive movement in the United States. As Keller defines it, progressivism
was a quest for greater social efficiency and control in response to the laizze-faire-style chaos of
the earlier Gilded Age.233 In Regulating a New Society, he argues that First World War served as
“epiphany” for the movement, since “[the war] was at once a revelation as to how people, goods,
and beliefs could be mobilized and organized for an overriding public purpose – the embodiment
of the progressive ideal.”234 Simply put, progressivism revolved around the drive for a more
organized, efficient society. Since a successful war effort required such an environment, in
Keller’s view, World War I and progressivism proved mutually supporting. The war served as a
catalyst for the passage of a number of progressive-tinged legislation that increased taxation,
limited prostitution, curbed freedom of speech, implemented Prohibition and women’s suffrage,
and finally, strengthened the drive to Americanize the nation’s current immigrants and restrict
entry of future ones.235 Michael McGerr, a former President of the Society of Gilded Age and
Progressive Historians and professor from the University of Indiana, holds a similar perspective.
McGerr argues that the Progressive Era extended through the First World War and up to the
1920 Presidential contest, when the election of President Warren Harding of Ohio ushered in a
new decade of conservatism.236
The third, and probably most nuanced, approach to the issue comes from Arthur S. Link,
a Princeton historian, former president of the American Historical Association, and leading
biographer on President Woodrow Wilson. While McGerr places the end of the Progressive Era
at 1920, Link actually extends progressivism further still in the AHA article “What happened to
Thompson, Reformers and War, 1-2.
232
Ibid., 2.
233
Keller, Regulating a New Society, 4.
234
Ibid., 6, 8.
235
Ibid., 93, 123, 135, 226, 241, 302.
236
Michael McGerr, A Fierce Discontent: The Rise and Fall of the Progressive Movement in America, 1870-1920
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 310.
47
the Progressive Movement in the 1920’s?”237 Link explains Wilson’s wartime progressive
legislation as the efforts of a loose-knit, second term coalition possessing overlapping interests.
That coalition, he writes, managed to achieve “railroad regulation, a new child labor act,
amendments for Prohibition and Women’s Suffrage, immigration restriction, and water power
and conservation legislation.”238
When it comes to the post-war period of Wilson’s presidency, Link and McGerr’s views
overlap. Link writes that “Progressivism was certainly on the downgrade if not in decay after
1918” and states that the “Wilsonian coalition [was] wreaked by the election of 1920.”239 His
arguments grow more complicated, or perhaps more sophisticated, when it came to
progressivism and the 1920s. Even though the decade represented “a period made almost unique
by an extraordinary reaction against idealism and reform,” Link argues that the “Progressive
movement was certainly not defunct.” While 1920 marked the year when “the Progressive
coalition was destroyed,” the “components” of the movement remained into the decade.240
Progressives like William Borah, Hiram Johnson, and Robert La Follete continued as respected,
if isolated, Republican voices in the Senate, and Congress, according to Link, passed progressive
legislation like an “advanced farm program,” “the formulation of plans for public power and
regional developments,” and the 1921 and 1924 Immigration Restriction Acts.241 Much of the
discrepancy between Link and the other authors is that the former provides explicit distinctions
between the Progressive Era, Wilson’s second term progressive coalition, and the left-over
elements of the progressive movement. Such nuance ultimately makes Link’s arguments more
convincing than those of other authors who define progressivism largely by a one-and-a-half or
two decade “era.” Using Link’s paradigm, it becomes possible to make the case, as he and other
scholars do, that the immigration acts passed in the late 1910s and early 1920s were
“progressive.”242 The progressives still existed, even if their era arguably did not.
Link, “What happened to the Progressive Movement in the 1920’s?”, 833-851.
Ibid., 838.
239
Ibid., 837.
240
Ibid., 838.
241
Ibid., 844.
242
Link, “What happened to the Progressive Movement in the 1920’s?” 838, 844; Keller, Regulating a New Society,
223; Zeidel, Immigrants, Progressives, and Exclusion Politics, 144-145.
237
238
48
4.2 “About that of Walnut”: Smith, Shahid, and Dow
Back in 1914, the progressives were not the only ones having trouble keeping the lamps
on. The lights were going out on immigration itself, as the war virtually cut off sea travel to and
from America. As World War I sank the possibility of safe overseas travel, the Syrian-Lebanese
and Armenian immigrants already in the United States found a new reason to put down deeper
roots. The Middle Easterners had already begun to settle into U.S. society, buying property,
opening stores, starting families, and sending their children to public schools. The war isolated
them from their original birthplaces, hastening the acculturation process even further. This
stronger assimilative tendency manifested itself in a couple notable ways; as the hostilities
progressed, increasing numbers of the immigrants naturalized and a small but significant number
started to serve in the armed forces.243 The lights also began going down on the Armenians back
in Turkey, who were unaware of the horrors that awaited them in early 1915. When the ensuing
conflict resulted in the utter devastation of so much of what the Armenians held dear in their
homelands, it became even easier for the immigrants in the United States to see the country as a
permanent home. Finally, in 1914 the lights began going off on the Syrian-Lebanese, in that
they experienced their first setbacks to their “race” in the whiteness prerequisite cases.
Just as the advent of war provided the Syrian-Lebanese with new incentives to
Americanize, there simultaneously arose a new hurdle in 1914 to complicate the immigrants’
prior successes in the prerequisite cases. The hurdle was named Henry Augustus Middleton
Smith, whom President Robert Taft had appointed U.S. District Judge for Eastern South Carolina
in 1911. Smith was a native Southerner, born and raised in Charleston, South Carolina, though
that fact alone does not indicate that he was predisposed to find against the petitioners’
whiteness. After all, William Newman of the Northern District of Georgia ruled favorably for
the Syrian-Lebanese in 1909, serving as the first judge in the prerequisite cases to affirm a
groups’ whiteness on the basis of race.244
The first hint of Judge Smith’s antipathy to the Syrian-Lebanese immigrants’ claims to
whiteness came in the 1913 case Ex parte Shahid. Faras Shahid was arguably a poor candidate
for naturalization in general. In an era obsessed with education and literacy, he could not read,
write, or understand English well. As Judge Smith noted, “his answers to the questions whether
243
244
Gualtieri, Between Arab and White, 84-85; Mirak, Torn Between Two Lands, 281.
Gualtieri, Between Arab and White, 1.
49
he is a polygamist or a disbeliever in organized government were in the affirmative, and he could
not be made to understand in English the purport of the questions asked.”245 While Smith
expounded some on the nature of race, he ruled that the “applicant is not one the admission of
whom to citizenship is likely to be for the benefit of the country” and ultimately rejected Shahid
“upon his own personal disqualifications.”246
In 1914 George Dow, another Syrian-Lebanese applicant, came before Smith’s court.
According to Judge Smith, the new petitioner, unlike Shahid, “would apparently from his
intelligence and degree of information of a general character be entitled to naturalization.”247
Yet Smith still ruled against Dow, making Ex parte Dow the first time the Syrian-Lebanese lost a
prerequisite case because of race and whiteness alone. It is extremely interesting that, contrary
to the judge’s assertion, many policy-makers would argue that Dow was not well qualified for
citizenship. As Gualtieri writes, “to questions posed to him about U.S. politics, for example, he
responded that there were about thirty houses of Congress and that the difference between the
government in Turkey and the United States was that he would like to become an American
citizen.”248 This seems to indicate that Judge Smith ignored Dow’s individual qualifications
because he wanted to make a broader ruling against Syrians as a race.
Broad similarities existed between Smith’s rulings in the two cases, which were decided
less than eight months apart from each other. The judge echoed In re Najour by stating that “the
right of the applicant is not to be determined by the question whether or not upon ocular
inspection he may in the opinion of the judge be actually white in color.”249 Yet such precedent
did not stop Smith from describing Dow as “darker than the usual person of white European
descent, and of that tinged or sallow appearance which usually accompanies persons of descent
other than purely European.”250 He called Shahid’s skin tone “about that of walnut, or
somewhat darker than is the usual mulatto of one-half mixed blood between the white and the
negro races,” a particularly insidious definition given the South’s history with African
Americans.251
245
Ex parte Shahid, 205 F. 812 (E.D.S.C. 1913).
Ex parte Shahid, 205 F. 812 (E.D.S.C. 1913); López, White by Law, 73.
247
Ex parte Dow, 211 F. 486 (E.D.S.C. 1914).
248
Gualtieri, Between Arab and White, 67.
249
Ex parte Dow, 211 F. 486 (E.D.S.C. 1914).
250
Ibid.
251
Ex parte Shahid, 205 F. 812 (E.D.S.C. 1913).
246
50
Smith also emphasized their geographical birthplace, in both cases questioning whether
“a Syrian of Asiatic birth and descent” was “entitled” to citizenship.252 His conclusion to that
question was in the negative, since Congress, when they passed the statue in 1790, only knew as
white “the fair complexioned people of European habitancy [sic] and descent.”253 The use of
“congressional intent” as a rational to deny whiteness had many precedents; judges had used it
before in the racial prerequisite cases against the Chinese, Japanese, and Filipinos, but never
against the Syrian-Lebanese.254 In Smith’s eyes, the geographic interpretation of the law lent
itself to another rationale for denying the petitioner whiteness, specifically, “common
knowledge.”255 “If,” he argued, “we give to the term ‘white’ this geographical definition, that it
means European …the statute becomes one judicially speaking plain, understandable by the
multitude as well as by the learned, and not difficult of enforcement.”256
In his rulings, Judge Smith spent significant time attacking the ethnological arguments
that previous judges found persuasive. In Shahid’s case he stated that a dark-skinned individual
was not “entitled to rank as a white person [just] because of a possible or hypothetical infusion of
white blood 30 or 40 centuries old.”257 After he granted a rehearing of the Dow case, Smith
again ruled against Dow, this time expanding on his disdain for scientific rationales of SyrianLebanese whiteness.258 Smith denied that the word Caucasian was synonymous with whiteness,
calling the word Blumenbach’s “ill-chosen classification.” He attacked the “strange intellectual
hocus-pocus” of many of the ethnologists whose studies had previously worked to the
immigrants’ advantage, ultimately concluding that, “if there be no such race as the ‘Caucasian
race,’ and the term Caucasian be incorrect as properly describing the white races, then the whole
argument … falls to the ground.”259
Smith’s elevation of the understandings of the multitude over the understandings of the
scientific “expert” have particular resonance in the world of the progressives. Historian John
252
Ex parte Shahid, 205 F. 812 (E.D.S.C. 1913); Ex parte Dow, 211 F. 486 (E.D.S.C. 1914); Nadine Naber,
“Introduction: Arab Americans and U.S. Racial Formations,” In Race and Arab Americans Before and After 9/11;
From Invisible Citizens to Visible Subjects, ed. Amaney Jamal and Nadine Naber (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse
University Press, 2008), 21.
253
Ex parte Dow, 211 F. 486 (E.D.S.C. 1914).
254
López, White by Law, 63-64, 203-205.
255
Ibid., 72, 77.
256
Ex parte Dow, 211 F. 486 (E.D.S.C. 1914).
257
Ex parte Shahid, 205 F. 812 (E.D.S.C. 1913).
258
In Re Dow, 213 F. 355 (E.D.S.C. 1914).
259
Ibid.
51
Buenker writes that in the 1900s and 1910s, there were “two reasonably distinct strains” of
political progressivism.260 One type involved what he called the patrician sort of progressivism,
the movement “fostered by the upper and middle classes [and] aimed at removing the machinery
of government as far as possible from the great mass of voters.”261 Instead, the patrician strain
“preoccupied itself with structure and purification, [which] ‘resulted in concentrating control in
the hands of experts who would exercise their professional discretion….’”262
The other form,
which is the type Smith’s rulings have so much similarity to, involved the “popular strain,”
whereupon government would be run supposedly by and for “the people.” As Buenker writes,
this version of progressivism “sought to open up the political process still further, broadening the
franchise and allowing popular participation at levels of decision making where it had never
before been permitted.”263 Using the understanding of the average man – López calls it
“common knowledge” as a basis for determining whiteness had appeared sporadically in the
prerequisite cases (for instance in 1878 and 1894), but usage of the rationale spiked after 1910.264
While there are many reasons for employing “common knowledge” grounds in the whiteness
cases (for one, it served as a useful tool for those judges who wanted a reason beyond ethnology
to reject an applicant), the rationale does coincide with one of the main zeitgeists of the
Progressive Era.
Back in Charleston, away from Smith’s musings on what the common man might
believe, the Syrian-Lebanese community prepared to fight the Judge’s decision. While those in
power played a definite role in constructing whiteness, the immigrants themselves were active
participants in the process as well. They had formed associations to raise money and lobby
opinion-makers ahead of important decisions, such as the Najour case in 1909.265 With Smith’s
decision in Ex parte Dow, the Syrian-Lebanese mobilized with new urgency. Scholars like
Gaultieri have thoroughly explored the various efforts the immigrants made to claim membership
in the white race, but their arguments still need to be explored in brief, for they demonstrate the
same religious, scientific, and assimilative arguments that influenced prior Progressive Era
policy-makers.
260
Buenker, Urban Liberalism and Progressive Reform, 119.
Ibid.
262
Ibid., 119-120.
263
Ibid., 119.
264
López, White By Law, 203-206.
265
Gualtieri, Between Arab and White, 58.
261
52
For example, in 1908 H.A. Elkourie, the President of the Syrian Young Men’s society,
sent in a letter to the Birmingham which argued that his race ought to be considered white due to
the historical, civilizational, and religious importance of the region of Syria.266 Phillip Hitti,
another prominent leader in the immigrant community, later argued that physical anthropology
was proof of Syrian-Lebanese whiteness, specifically, their “hair, facial angle, and cephalic
index.”267 Finally, Kalil A. Bishara’s The Origin of the Modern Syrian, published during the
Dow trials, represents one of the most critical works of Syrian-Lebanese agency, especially in
regards to this thesis.268 Bishara’s self-stated mission was to “reply to those who have denied
that the Syrian emigrant is Caucasian and have made him out to be of Mongolian origin,
whereby they have made him ineligible for American citizenship.”269 Published in 1914, the
work was steeped in efforts to appeal to progressive policy-makers. The dedication was
particularly interesting:
TO THE PERSONIFIED “COMMON SENSE” OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE, IN
THE NAME OF THE “SQUARE DEAL” IN BEHALF OF THE SYRIAN
IMMIGRANT, THE AUTHOR CONFIDENTLY DEDICATES THIS HUMBLE
TREATISE.
-
Kalil A. Bishara
The ‘“Common sense’ of the American people” sounds eerily similar to the rationale for Judge
Smith’s rejection of Dow’s whiteness, while “the ‘Square Deal’” was the moniker Theodore
Roosevelt had been using for his progressive reforms. In other words, the arguments for SyrianLebanese whiteness in his “humble treatise” fit squarely within the bounds of progressivism and
the common man, Smith’s arguments be damned.
Civilization, assimilation, and ethnic differentiation served as the primary arguments in
Bishara’s book. Not coincidentally, they were among the same themes that served the
immigrants so well with the “progressive” Immigration Commission and the earlier whiteness
prerequisite cases. Bishara called the modern Syrian “the living picture of Cosmopolitanism,”
“more able to adapt himself to his environment than any other immigrant.” They had
266
Gualtieri, Between Arab and White, 56-57.
Phillip Hitti in Sarah Kanbar, “Rooted in our Homeland: The Construction of Syrian American Identity,” in
American Multicultural Studies: Diversity of Race, Ethnicity, Gender, and Sexuality, ed. Sherrow O. Pinder (Los
Angeles: SAGE Public Inc., 2013), 257.
268
Kalil A. Bishara, The Origin of the Modern Syrian (New York: Al-Hoda Publishing House, 1914).
269
Gualtieri, Between Arab and White, 73.
267
53
“distinguished themselves in all departments of life and human activity.” The Syrians’ “Semitic
race” gave the world “Moses, Soloman, Isaiah, Paul and Muhammad, … the immortal Hannibal,
the greatest military genius of all ages, and Nebuchadnezzar, and Sargon, and Khammurabi; not
to mention any of the great philosophic sages, and the unsurpassed poets.”270 Syria’s
prominence, he wrote, extended beyond the region’s mecca of religious greatness: “[E]ven in the
department of commerce and industry, the Syrian has never been surpassed. If Judea taught the
world to worship the one true God, Phoenicia did teach the world how to make money.” As to
education, Bishara argued that “Athens herself must go back for her philosophy and thinking to
Semitic Chaldea, Egypt, and Syria.”271
In Bishara’s eyes, the Syrian-Lebanese immigrants had descended from civilizational
greatness and could not help but stand above other migrants, even those from Europe. He was
careful to frame this superiority in terms relevant to Progressive Era immigration law. While
“the modern Syrian characteristically is a diligent, peace-loving, law abiding, god fearing
merchant,” Bishara reminded his audience to “not forget that if our country is flooded with
criminals, anarchists, and extreme socialists, these pestilential parasites are coming to our shores,
not from Syria, nor from any part of Asia, but from South Europe.”272 With that statement, the
Syrian-Lebanese came full circle, from being labeled by the New York Times as parasites to
using the same insult on other groups. Though Bishara’s statement initially sounds neutral
towards Asians, it turned out that the author considered them to be less desirable than the SyrianLebanese as well:
‘Asiatics’ in the ‘Asiatic exclusion laws’ was clearly meant to be a synonym of
‘Mongolians’ as applied to the Chinese and Japanese and other people of the far East who
have a peculiar type of civilization of their own so radically different from our Christian
civilization as to make racial amalgamation and national assimilation to all Mongolian
immigrants almost impossible.273
Kalil Bishara had apparently noticed that in early twentieth-century America, denigrating
minorities as non-white was a particularly white thing to do. Phillip Hitti, like Bishara, also
made the case that his group was superior to immigrants from Asia and southern and eastern
270
Bishara, The Origin of the Modern Syrian, 46.
Ibid.
272
Ibid., 41.
273
Ibid., 40.
271
54
Europe, due largely to the Syrian-Lebanese’s “Phoenicianism.”274 Finally, the pronouns that
Bishara used are also illustrative: “our country,” “our shores,” and “our Christian civilization.”
The Syrian-Lebanese clearly knew on which side they wanted to be, but it became
equally clear that Judge Smith did not want them on his part of the color line. Later in 1914,
Smith granted Dow a rehearing at the request of the Syrian-Lebanese community, which he then
used as an opportunity to reaffirm all the ways that the immigrants did not qualify as a race. He
repeated many of the same points he had used in both Ex Parte Shahid and Ex Parte Dow,
speaking against scientific rationales for whiteness and arguing for exclusion on the basis of
geography and congressional intent.275 One novel development did occur. In the appeal, Dow’s
lawyers had put a new twist on the religious claims to whiteness. They argued that since Christ
was technically a Syrian, denying the Syrians’ status as whites was the equivalent of denying the
savior of the world the possibility of achieving American citizenship.276 Smith’s response,
according to López, qualified as “one of the most intriguing moments in prerequisite
jurisprudence.”277 In reply, the judge wrote:
The apostrophic utterance that He cannot be supposed to have clothed His Divinity in the
body of one of a race that an American Congress would not admit to citizenship is purely
emotional and without logical sequence. The test imposed by Congress is not a religious
one. The matter regulated is a purely secular domestic one. The pertinent statement
rather is that a dark complexioned present inhabitant of what formerly was ancient
Phonenicia is not entitled to the inference that he must be of the race commonly known as
the white race in 1790, merely because 2,000 years ago Judea, a country whose
inhabitants have since changed entirely, was the scene of the labor of one who
proclaimed that He had come to save from spiritual destruction all mankind.278
The immigrants should probably have expected his reaction; when the Syrian-Lebanes defense
tried to use a similar argument in Ex parte Shahid about the religious and civilizational richness
of Syria, Smith attacked the reasoning as “emotional” and “unworthy of consideration.”279 Judge
Smith did make clear that despite all of their “emotional” arguments and “deep feeling,” on the
Kanbar, “Rooted in our Homeland,” 259.
López was the first to employ the term “congressional intent” as a term in the prerequisite cases. See White By
Law, 63.
276
Ibid., 74-75.
277
Ibid., 74.
278
In re Dow, 213 F. 355 (E.D.S.C. 1914).
279
Ex parte Shahid, 205 F. 812 (E.D.S.C. 1913).
274
275
55
matter, his rulings provided the immigrants “no justifiable reason for either humiliation or
mortification.”280
Unsurprisingly, the Syrian-Lebanese did not agree. Likely both humiliated and mortified,
Dow appealed to the next level of the judicial system, which, in this case, was the U.S. Fourth
Circuit Court of Appeals. In 1915 he went before Judges Prichard, Knapp, and Woods, who, to
the great relief of the Syrian-Lebanese community, reversed Smith’s ruling.281 Judge Charles
Albert Woods, a Wilson appointee and another native South Carolinian, wrote the court’s
decision. Like previous judges, he placed his faith in the ethnological experts rather than the
common man, citing Pritchard, Pickering, Figujer, Jeffries, Brinton, and Keane. Immediately
after Keane, the last authority on the list of experts was the definition from the Dictionary of
Races, “contained in the Reports of the Immigration Commission.”282 Woods dismissed Smith’s
geographic arguments since the Syrian race was “so closely related to their neighbors on the
European side of the Mediterranean that they should be classed as white.”283 Finally, the court
also worked to undermine Smith’s arguments regarding congressional intent. While Smith’s
rationale was that in 1790 the court could not possibly be aware of the emerging science holding
most Middle Easterners to be Caucasian, Woods found a way to modernize the concept.
According to Woods, even if the Congress of 1790 was not privy to the latest ethnography, such
an august body was certainly aware of the opinions of the experts when they amended the
legislation in 1870, 1873, and 1875.284 Dow v. United States et al. marked the highest point the
whiteness cases would go up the judicial ladder for the Armenians and Syrian-Lebanese, which
in retrospect is fortunate, given what later racial prerequisite cases in 1922 and 1923 revealed
about the attitudes of the Supreme Court.
4.3 The Asiatic Barred Zone
In 1917, the action on the whiteness front shifted back to Congress. Henry Cabot Lodge
and other nativist Congressmen had been trying to pass a literacy test to reduce immigration
since the 1890s. In previous years, Congressional action always seemed to be foiled at the last
minute. In 1907 the legislation was killed in committee by a Republican House speaker with an
280
In re Dow, 213 F. 355 (E.D.S.C. 1914).
Dow v. United States, 226 F. 145 (4th Cir. 1915).
282
Ibid.
283
Ibid.
284
Dow v. United States, 226 F. 145 (4th Cir. 1915).
281
56
appreciation for cheap labor, then in 1913 Taft vetoed the measure out of the fear that the
measure would hurt the business community.285 On the other side of the aisle, Presidents Wilson
and Grover Cleveland, who knew the value of immigrant votes to the Democratic electoral
coalition, were even less amenable to the idea, vetoing the law three times between the two of
them.286 In 1917, however, Congress finally mustered the super-majority of votes to override a
presidential veto, passing a new set of immigration restrictions that included the literacy test,
raised the head tax upon entry, strengthened the country’s deportation policies, and excluded
alcoholics, “vagrants,” and “people of constitutional psychopathic inferiority.”287
The real potential danger for the Armenian and Syrian-Lebanese entailed the part of the
1917 Act commonly known as the Asiatic barred zone. The act prohibited,
unless provided for by existing treaties, persons who are natives of islands not possessed
by the United States adjacent to the Continent of Asia, situated south of the 20th parallel
latitude north, west of the 160th meridian of longitude east from Greenwich, and north of
the 10th parallel of latitude south, or who are natives of any country, province, or
dependency situated on the Continent of Asia west of the 110th meridian of longitude
east from Greenwich and south of the 50th parallel of latitude north, except that portion
of said territory situate between the fiftieth and the sixty-fifth meridians of longitude east
of Greenwich and the twenty-fourth and thirty-eighth parallels north….288
In simpler parlance, the Barred Zone mainly targeted Indian immigration, even though it covered
most of Tibet, Mongolia, China, Southeast Asia, Afghanistan, the islands and archipelagos north
of Australia, and large portions of Russia’s possessions between Pakistan and Kazakhstan. As
far as large, arguably “Asian” immigrant groups went, the borders of the zone did not include
migrants from the Philippines, Japan, Turkey, or Syria. In regards to Filipino immigrants,
Congress exempted them because the territory was under U.S. control, while lawmakers did not
explicitly bar the Japanese because they wanted to maintain the terms of Roosevelt’s 1907
Gentleman’s Agreement. As far as the Armenians and Syrians went, the literature does not
provide an explicit answer as to why they were not included in the barred zone. For example,
while Gualtieri notes “the exclusion of Syria from the Asiatic barred zone helped consolidate”
285
Higham, Strangers in the Land, 128-129, 191.
Higham, Strangers in the Land, 202-203; Daniels, Not Like Us, 80.
287
Higham, Strangers in the Land, 203; Daniels, Not Like Us, 81-82.
288
Joseph W. Ferris, “Syrian Naturalization Question in the United States: Certain Legal Aspects of Our
Naturalization Laws, Part II,” The Syrian World, 2 (1928): 23.
286
57
the immigrants’ claims to whiteness, she never provides an answer to her own question: “[w]hy,
though, had Syria fallen outside the Asiatic barred zone?”289
The explanation potentially points to the progressive policy-makers and the idea that the
Middle Eastern immigrants did not badly irritate their socio-economic biases. For one, Arthur
Link groups the 1917 Immigration Act as among the progressive achievements executed by the
coalition supporting Wilson during the period from 1916 to 1918.290 The other possibility is that
the “progressive” Immigration Commission that had served the Syrian-Lebanese and Armenians
so well in the past came through for the immigrants again, since according to Higham, the 1917
Act was “based originally on recommendations of the United States Immigration
Commission.”291 Either way, progressivism likely played some role in this decision.
The Asiatic barred zone, in turn, then influenced the whiteness cases held after 1917. While
none of the Syrian-Lebanese or Armenian whiteness cases reached the Supreme Court,
immigrants from Japan and India were not as fortunate. The cases of Takao Ozawa v. United
States (1920) and United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind (1923) are particularly interesting, for
both decisions echoed the rationales given in the Middle Easterners’ whiteness cases, while
Thind’s case helped cement the reason why the Syrian-Lebanese never again participated in a
full racial prerequisite case.
Ozawa v. United States was relatively simple. The Supreme Court ruled unanimously
against the Japanese immigrant’s whiteness, arguing that he was not Caucasian in the eyes of
either the ethnological experts or the common man.292 The case of Bhagat Thind, the Indian
immigrant, was far less straightforward. The unanimous decision, made by the same nine
judges, published within a year of Ozawa’s case, and written by the same justice, George
Sutherland, completely repudiated its own reliance upon the findings of science and
ethnology.293 The Supreme Court Justices’ predicament lay in that they used “scientific” and
“common man” rationales to justify their presupposed racial assumptions, but in the case of the
groups from India, ethnologists generally agreed they were of the Aryan branch of the Caucasian
race.294 Consequently, when the Supreme Court looked for rationales to back up what they
289
Gualtieri, Between Arab and White, 77.
Link, “What happened to the Progressive Movement in the 1920’s?” 838.
291
Higham, Strangers in the Land, 203.
292
Ozawa v. United Stgates, 260 U.S. 178 (1922).
293
López, White by Law, 95.
294
Ibid., 88.
290
58
already “knew” to be true, the Justices were forced to abandon science and elevate other
rationales, even though this contradicted Ozawa v. United States.295 Sutherland, completely
ignoring the precedent he had helped maintain three months earlier, now attacked science:
[T]he term ‘race is one which, for the practical purposes of the statute, must be applied to
a group of living persons now possessing in common the requisite characteristics, not to
groups of persons who are supposed to be or really are descended from some remote,
common ancestor …. It may be true that the blond Scandinavian and the brown Hindu have
a common ancestor in the dim reaches of antiquity, but the average man knows perfectly
well that there are unmistakable and profound differences between them today ….
According to Keane, for example [the term Caucasian] includes not only the Hindu, but
some of the Polynesians … [and] the Hamites of Africa, upon the ground of the Caucasic
cast of their features, though in color they range from brown to black. We venture to think
that the average well informed white American would learn with some degree of
astonishment that the race to which he belongs is made up of such heterogeneous
elements.296
Using such a rational, Justice Sutherland sounded rather similar to Judge Smith, probably
uncomfortably similar in the eyes of the Syrian-Lebanese. However, the Supreme Court, in an
effort to find other rationales to replace their previous reliance on science, also cited India’s
inclusion in the Asiatic barred zone as a reason why Thind was not white, “since it is not likely,”
Sutherland argued, “that Congress would be willing to accept as citizens a class of persons whom
it rejects as immigrants.”297
4.4 Basha and Cartozian: The Final Court Cases
Justice Sutherland’s usage of the Asiatic barred zone saved the Syrian-Lebanese, for in
1923 Judge Smith again took the opportunity to deny citizenship to a Syrian-Lebanese applicant.
When F.W. Basha came before him, Smith tried to use the 1917 Immigration Act as a reason to
reject his status as white. Eventually, someone pointed out to the judge that he was projecting
because, contrary to what he may have hoped, the barred zone did not encompass Syria or
Turkey. Consequently, Smith was forced to grant Basha’s petition.298 Basha’s case is not
included on López’s list of the racial prerequisite court cases, nor does a Syrian-Lebanese case
295
Ibid., 89-90, 95.
United States v. Thind, 261 U.S. 204 (1923).
297
United States v. Thind, 261 U.S. 204 (1923); Gualtieri, Between Arab and White, 75.
298
Ferris, “Syrian Naturalization Question in the United States,” 22; Gualtieri, Between Arab and White, 75;
Samhan, Not Quite White,” 217.
296
59
appear on that list after the 1915 decision in their favor in Dow v. United States.299 According to
Gaultieri, after the Basha case, “the Syrian eligibility question never again reached the courts.” 300
While the Syrian-Lebanese had survived the gauntlet of prerequisite cases, the Armenian
immigrant community had to suffer through one last court battle in 1925. The case, for Tatos O.
Cartozian, went before Charles A. Wolverton, the same Oregon district court judge who had
ruled favorably for the Syrian-Lebanese back in 1910. Cartozian’s situation differed from the
earlier Ellis case, in that the government had brought suit against Cartozian to “cancel [the]
defendant’s certificate of naturalization,” whereas in the past the immigrants themselves usually
sued the government because their own petitions for citizenship had been denied in lower-level
courts.301 Nonetheless, Cartozian prevailed, aided along the way by a host of sympathetic
witnesses. Dr. Franz Boaz, a prominent anthropologist who had contributed to the reports of the
Immigration Commission, testified on Cartozian’s behalf.302 The defense team also brought in
men with “Washipish names from local fraternal organizations” to prove to Wolverton that
Armenians met the “common man’s” definition of whiteness.303 In his ruling, Wolverton took
into account both scientific and “common understanding” criterion, ultimately finding that the
Armenians met both standards.304
Two of the themes that influenced the judges have been consistent considerations
throughout the entire saga. The first involved the idea of assimilation, which “it may be
confidently affirmed that the Armenians … readily amalgamate with the European and white
races.”305 The other issue was tied to the concept of religion. Like the Syrian-Lebanese, the
Armenians emphasized their civilizational history, noting that Armenia’s Christianity predated
even Emperor Constantine’s edicts in 313 A.D. They emphasized how they had maintained their
religious identity amidst the growth of Islam in the Middle East. The witnesses for Cartozian
spoke negatively about Muslim peoples like the Kurds and Turks, which helped distance the
Armenians and other groups. Wolverton’s ruling reflected this differentiation, as he stated:
“[a]lthough the Armenian province is within the confines of the Turkish Empire, being in Asia
Minor, the people thereof have always held themselves aloof from the Turks, the Kurds, and
299
López, White by Law, 203-208.
Gualtieri, Between Arab and White, 75.
301
United States v. Cartozian, 6 F. 2d 919 (D. Or. 1925).
302
Carver, “On the Boundary of White,” 45.
303
Ibid.
304
United States v. Cartozian, 6 F. 2d 919 (D. Or. 1925).
305
Ibid.
300
60
allied peoples, principally, it might be said, on account of their religion, though color may have
had something to do with it.”306 He found that the Armenians were white persons “of Alpine
stock, and so remain to the present time, without appreciable blending with the Mongolian or
other kindred races.”307
4.5 The 1921 and 1924 Quota Acts
As much success as the Syrian-Lebanese and Armenian immigrants had achieved through
the legal cases, the Immigration Commission’s findings, and the 1917 barred zone, they were
still an “in-between people.” They were not yellow, but neither were they as white as Nordic
snow. At best, in the eyes of their adopted nation, they were questionable Europeans, part of a
new wave of immigration inferior to the “old” kind of Europeans. The Syrian-Lebanese and
Armenians were still eligible for citizenship, but when Congress moved in the 1920s to restrict
new European immigration, it meant that Congress also moved against the Middle Easterners.
In 1920 Congress passed a bill that assigned a quota for the number of each immigrant
group that could enter the country annually. The quota was equal to three percent of the
population of an immigrant group’s population in the United States at the time of the 1910
census. By the end of his presidency, Wilson was politically isolated and extremely ill, but just
as ideological as he had ever been. When the Quota Act reached him, he used his pocket veto by
refusing to take any action on the bill whatsoever.308 Congress simply waited for the lame-duck
president to leave office, and then passed the Emergency Quota Act of 1921, which the new
conservative Republican President, Warren Harding, promptly signed.309 Progressive and
establishment figures alike supported the act; it cleared the House of Representatives “without a
record vote [and] passed the Senate by 78 to 1.”310 Like other European immigrants, the Middle
Easterners received a quota; for example, just over a thousand Syrian-Lebanese immigrants were
admitted into the country for the fiscal year of 1921.311
Congress renewed the 1921 act annually until 1924, when they passed an even more
stringent piece of legislation. The 1924 Act set the quotas at 2 percent of a group’s population in
306
Ibid.
Ibid.
308
Higham, Strangers in the Land, 311.
309
Ibid.
310
Ibid.
311
The United States Bureau of Immigration, “Annual Report of the Commissioner General of Immigration to the
Secretary of Labor,” (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1921), 5.
307
61
the United States at the time of the 1890 Census and revoked the Gentlemen’s Agreement in
order to exclude all Japanese immigration.312 Changing the census year had a drastic effect on
the total number of immigrants who could enter the country annually. Albert Johnson, the
Republican sponser of the bill in the House of Representatives, estimated that the change would
decrease “the Italian quota from 42,000 to about 4,000, the Polish from 31,000 to 6,000, [and]
the Greek from 3,000 to 100.”313 The Syrian-Lebanese and Armenians saw their quotas reduced
to approximately a hundred individuals per year.314 The 1921 Quota Act screwed the lid on the
melting pot, while the 1924 Act, as Representative Johnson gleefully stated a few years later,
“discredited” the “myth of the melting pot” entirely.315
4.6 Conclusions
“When you come to the pot you shall know its worth,” the old Lebanese proverb went. It
is interesting that, even though the Middle Eastern immigrants and the progressives could be so
closely tied together, their time with the melting pot would prove drastically different. The
Syrian-Lebanese and Armenians came to the pot in the tens of thousands, sojourners looking to
see America’s worth. Many of those immigrants stayed in the pot, acculturating into America’s
“white” middle class. Progressive Era policy-makers, on the other hand, went to the pot to pick
apart its contents, to sift, sort, and classify the ingredients as old or new, white or nonwhite,
desirable or undesirable. Because policy-makers came to the pot, they gave Middle Eastern
immigrants a chance to pass the progressive taste test. The Syrian-Lebanese and Armenians did
so, again and again, with the Immigration Commission, with the Asiatic barred zone, with Ellis
and Dow, Najour and Mudarri, Halladjian and Cartozian.
This saga reveals one of the key tenants of critical whiteness theory, specifically, how
artificial, arbitrary, and constructed race and color can be. Yet for such an insubstantial process,
the consequences for the immigrants themselves proved weighty. Failing to satisfy the
progressives’ socio-economic preferences would have had tragic effects – such as exclusion from
civil life, a heightened likelihood of deportation, new barriers to entering the country itself, and
312
Higham, Strangers in the Land, 323-324.
Ibid., 319.
314
Gualtieri, Between Arab and White, 79; Merrill D. Peterson, "Starving Armenians": America and the Armenian
Genocide, 1915-1930 and After (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2004), 152.
315
Representative Albert Johnson, quoted in Daniels, Not Like Us, 143.
313
62
even less respect in the grueling struggle of American social life – a fact that other groups like
the Japanese or Asian Indians could attest.
The Middle Easterners, coming from a region situated between Europe and Asia, were
literally and figuratively the most “in-between people” of any immigrant group. The fact that
policy-makers could have placed them in either “race” provides a unique opportunity to
scrutinize the prejudices and preferences of those in power, as well as the artificial nature of
race-making itself. Ultimately, many of common themes emerged relating to the progressives’
socio-economic biases, such as each immigrant group’s perceived educational level, class
religion, historical civilization, rate of assimilation, and typical occupation. The immigrants
themselves learned what the policy-makers held to be important, and then found ways to portray
themselves as exemplifying those traits. Even when judges found individual ideas like scientific
evidence, the understanding of the common man, or a group’s civilizational history to be
unpersuasive as a barometer of whiteness, they were still forced to address the issue, showing the
power such concepts held in the era. In the contested process of determining whiteness, both the
people doing the labeling and the groups receiving those labels are important players. When
done with care, each group can be used as a lens through which to examine the other. If either
entity is ignored, however, it limits scholars from gaining the fullest possible picture about the
progressives, the immigrants, and even “whiteness” itself.
63
REFERENCES
Primary Sources:
Bishara, Kalil A. The Origin of the Modern Syrian. New York: Al-Hoda Publishing House,
1914.
Burgess, Thomas. Foreignors or Friends, A Handbook; The Churchman’s Approach to the
Foreign-Born and their Children. New York: Department of Missions and Church
Extension, 1921.
Childe, Cromwell. “New York’s Syrian Quarter.” New York Times. August 20, 1899.
Dow v. United States. 226 F. 145. 4th Cir. 1915.
Earle, E. Lyell. “Foreign Types of New York Life.” New York Times. August 28, 1898.
Ex parte Dow. 211 F. 486. E.D.S.C. 1914.
Ex Parte Shahid. 205 F. 812. E.D.S.C. 1914.
“Forty Two Syrians Detained.” New York Times, August 23, 1889.
Haines, Dora B. “Congress and the Immigration Problem.” The Searchlight/Spotlight, 8 (Oct.
1923): 16-18.
In re Dow. 213 F. 355. E.D.S.C. 1914.
In re Ellis. 179 F. 1002. D. Or. 1910.
In re Halladjian et. al. 174 F. 834. C.C.D. Mass. 1909.
In re Mudarri. 176 F. 465. C.C.D. Mass. 1910.
In re Najour. 174 F. 735. N.D. Ga. 1909.
“Joyful Syrians.” New York Times. September 6, 1889.
“Our Armenian Neighbors.” New York Times. December 1, 1895.
Ozawa v. United States. 260 U.S. 178. 1922.
“Saint Ingersoll,” New York Times, August 26, 1889.
“Sanctified Arab Tramps; Wretched Maronite Beggars Infecting this Country.” New York
Times. May 25, 1890.
64
“Sights and Characters of New York’s ‘Little Syria.’” New York Times. March 29, 1903.
Simmons, Furnifold M. “Speech of Hon. F.M. Simmons, of North Carolina, in the Senate of the
United States, Wednesday, May 23, 1906.” Washington: Government Printing Office,
1906. Open Collections Program at Harvard University: Emigration and Immigration.
Washington: Government Printing Office, 1906.
http://pds.lib.harvard.edu/pds/view/6502012, Accessed April 11, 2012.
“Syrians Allowed To Land.” New York Times. September 1, 1889.
“Syrians of the Maronite Rite.” New York Times. January 19, 1891.
“The Races that Go Into the American Melting Pot.” The New York Times. May 21, 1911.
“The Syrian Colony of New York and Its Characteristics.” New York Times. May 25, 1902.
United States Bureau of Immigration. “Annual Report of the Commissioner General of
Immigration to the Secretary of Labor.” Washington: Government Printing Office, 1921.
United States Immigration Commission. “Abstracts of Reports of the Immigration Commission
with Conclusions and Recommendations and Views of the Minority, Volume One.”
Reports of the Immigration Commission. Washington: Government Printing Office,
1911.
United States Immigration Commission. “Dictionary of Races or Peoples.” Reports of the
Immigration Commission. Washington: Government Printing Office, 1911.
United States Immigration Commission. “Immigrants in Industry; Part 3: Cotton Goods
Manufacturing in the North Atlantic States.” Reports of the Immigration Commission.
Washington: Government Printing Office, 1911.
United States Immigration Commission. “Immigrants in Industry; Part 4: Woolen and Worsted
Goods Manufacturing.” Reports of the Immigration Commission. Washington:
Government Printing Office, 1911.
United States Immigration Commission. “Immigrants in Industry; Part 25: Japanese and Other
Immigrant Races in the Pacific Coast and Rocky Mountain States.” Reports of the
Immigration Commission. Washington: Government Printing Office, 1911.
United States Industrial Commission. “Reports of the Industrial Commission on Immigration
Including Testimony, with Review and Digest, and Special Reports on Education.”
Reports of the Industrial Commission. Washington: Government Printing Office, 1901.
United States v. Cartozian. 6 F. 2d 919. D. Or. 1925.
65
United States v. Thind. 261 U.S. 204. 1923.
Secondary Sources:
Abdulrahim, Sawsan. “‘Whiteness’ and the Arab Immigrant Experience.” In Race and Arab
Americans Before and After 9/11; From Invisible Citizens to Visible Subjects, edited by
Amaney Jamal and Nadine Naber, 131-146. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press,
2008.
Abraham, Sameer Y. and Nadeel Abraham. Arabs in the New World; Studies on Arab American
Communities. Detroit: Wayne State University Cneter for Urban Studies, 1983.
Ahdab-Yehia, May. “The Lebanese Maronites, Patterns of Continuity and Change.” In Arabs in
the New World: Studies on Arab-American Communities, edited by Sameer Y. Abraham
and Nabeel Abraham, 147-162. Detroit: Wayne State University Center for Urban
Studies, 1983.
Amaney, Jamal and Nadine Naber. Race and Arab Americans Before and After 9/11; From
Invisible Citizens to Visible Subjects. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2008.
Baker, Lewis. The Percys of Mississippi: Politics and Literature in the New South. Baton Rouge:
Louisiana State University Press, 1983.
Balakian, Anny. Armenian-Americans; From Being To Feeling Armenian. New Brunswick:
Transition Publishers, 1993.
Balakian, Peter. The Burning Tigris: The Armenian Genocide and America’s Response. New
York: HarperCollins, 2003.
Barret, James R. and David Roediger. “In-between Peoples: Race, Nationality and the ‘New
Immigrant’ Working Class.” Journal of American Ethnic History, 16 (Spring, 1997): 354.
Brinkley, Alan. “Richard Hofstadter’s The Age of Reform, A Reconsideration,” Reviews in
American History 13, Vol 3 (Sep. 1985).
Buenker, John D. Urban Liberalism and Progressive Reform. NY: W.W. Norton & Company,
Inc., 1978.
Carver, Earlene. “On the Boundary of White: The Cartozian Naturalization Case and the
Armenians, 1923-1925.” Journal of American Ethnic History, 28 (Winter 2009): 30-56.
Daniels, Roger. Not Like Us: Immigrants and Minorities in America, 1890-1924. Chicago, Ivan
R. Dee Inc., 1997.
66
---. The Politics of Prejudice: The Anti-Japanese Movement in California and the Struggle for
Japanese Exclusion. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977.
Delgado, Richard and Jean Stefancic. Critical Race Theory, An Introduction. New York: New
York University Press, 2001.
Ferris, Joseph W. “Syrian Naturalization Question in the United States: Certain Legal Aspects of
Our Naturalization Laws, Part II,” The Syrian World, 2 (1928): 18-24.
Gualtieri, Sarah M.A. Between Arab and White; Race and Ethnicity in the Early Syrian
American Diaspora. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009.
Guglielmo, Thomas.White on Arrival: Italians, Race, Color, and Power in Chicago, 1890-1945.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003.
Haddad, Yvonne Yazbeck. “Arab Muslims and Islamic Institutions in America: Adoption and
Reform,” in Arabs in the New World; Studies on Arab-American Communities. Edited by
Sameer Y. Abraham and Nebeel Abraham. Detroit: Wayne State University Center for
Urban Studies, 1983.
---. “Maintaining the Faith of the Fathers: Dilemmas of Religious Identity in the Christian and
Muslim Arab-American Communities” in The Development of Arab-American identity.
Edited by Ernest McCarus. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1994.
Higham, John. Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 1860-1925, 8 ed. New
Brunswick: Rutgers University Press: 2008.
Hing, Bill Ong. Making and Remaking Asian America through Immigration Policy, 1850-1990.
Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993.
Hofstadter, Richard. The Age of Reform. NY: Random House, 1965.
Hourani, Albert and Nadim Shehadi. The Lebanese in the World: A Century of Emigration.
London: The Centre for Lebanese Studies, 1992.
Ignatiev, Noel. How the Irish Became White. New York: Routledge, 1995.
Issawi, Charles. “The Historical Background of Lebanese Emigration, 1800-1914” in The
Lebanese in the World: A Century of Emigration. Edited by Albert Hourani and Nadim
Shehadi. Oxford: The Centre for Lebanese Studies in Association with I.B. Tauris and
Co Ltd, 1992.
Jacobson, Matthew Frye. Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy
of Race. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998.
67
Kanbar, Sarah. “Rooted in our Homeland: The Construction of Syrian American Identity,” in
American Multicultural Studies: Diversity of Race, Ethnicity, Gender, and Sexuality.
Edited by Sherrow O. Pinder. Los Angeles: SAGE Public Inc., 2013.
Kayal, Phillip M. “Arab Christians in the United States,” in Arabs in the New World; Studies on
Arab-American Communities. Edited by Sameer Y. Abraham and Nebeel Abraham.
Detroit: Wayne State University Center for Urban Studies, 1983.
---. “Religion in the Christian Syrian-American Community,” in The Development of ArabAmerican identity. Edited by Ernest McCarus. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan
Press, 1994.
Keller, Morton. Regulating a New Society; Public Policy and Social Change in America, 19001930. Cambridge: Harvard University Press 1994.
Khater, Akram Fouad. Inventing Home: Emigration, Gender and the Middle Class in Lebanon,
1870-1920. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001.
Kraut, Alan M. Silent Travelers; Germs, Genes, and the “Immigration Menace.” Baltimore: The
John Hopkins University Press, 1994.
Lee, Erika. At America's Gates: Chinese Immigration during the Exclusion Era, 1882-1943.
Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003.
---. “The Chinese Exlcusion Example: Race, Immigration, and American Gatekeeping,” Journal
of American Ethnic History, 21 (Spring 2002): 36-62.
Link, Arthur S. “What happened to the Progressive Movement in the 1920s?” The American
Historical Association 64, (July 1959): 833-851.
Lopez, Ian Haney. White By Law; The Legal Construction of Race. New York: New York
University Press, 1996.
Malcolm, M. Vartan. The Armenians in America. Boston: The Pilgrim Press, 1919.
McCarus, Ernest. The Development of Arab-American Identity. Ann Arbor: University of
Michigan Press, 1994.
McGerr, Michael. A Fierce Discontent: The Rise and Fall of the Progressive Movement in
America, 1870-1920. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003.
Mirak, Robert. “The Armenians in America.” In The Armenian People from Ancient to Modern
Times, Volume II, edited by Richard G. Hovannisian, 389-413. New York: St. Martin's
Press, 2004.
---. Torn Between Two Lands: Armenians in America, 1890 to World War I. Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 1983.
68
Mowry, George E. The California Progressives. New York: Quadrangle/The New York Times
Book Co., 1976.
Naber, Nadine. “Introduction: Arab Americans and U.S. Racial Formations” in Race and Arab
Americans Before and After 9/11; From Invisible Citizens to Visible Subjects. Edited by
Amaney Jamal and Nadine Naber. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2008.
Naff, Alixa. “Arabs in America: A Historical Overview” in Arabs in the New World: Studies on
Arab-American Communities. Edited by Sameer Y. Abraham and Nabeel Abraham.
Detroit: Wayne State University Center for Urban Studies, 1983.
---. Becoming American, The Early Arab Immigrant Experience. Carbondale: Southern Illinois
University Press, 1985.
---. “Becoming American: The Early Arab Immigrant Experience,” in The Development of ArabAmerican Identity. Edited by Ernest McCarus. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan
Press, 1994.
---. “Lebanese Immigration into the United States: 1880 to the Present” in The Lebanese in the
World: A Century of Emigration. Edited by Albert Hourani and Nadim Shehadi.
Oxford: The Centre for Lebanese Studies in Association with I.B. Tauris and Co Ltd,
1992.
Parker, Richard B. “Lebanese Proverbs.” The Journal of American Folklore 71 (April-June
1958): 107-114.
Perlmann, Joel. “Views of European Races Among the Research Staff of the US Immigration
Commission and the Census Bureau, Ca. 1910.” Levy Economics Institute Working
Paper No. 648 (Jan. 2011): 1-32, http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.1739718, accessed
December 3, 2011.
Peterson, Merrill D. "Starving Armenians": America and the Armenian Genocide, 1915-1930
and After. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2004.
Pula, James S. “American Immigration and the Dillingham Commission.” Polish American
Studies 27 (Spring 1980): 5-31.
Rodgers, Daniel T. “In Search of Progressivism.” Reviews in American History, 10 (Dec., 1982):
113-132.
Roediger, David. Working Towards Whiteness; How America’s Immigrants Became White: The
Strange Journey from Ellis Island to the Suburbs. Cambridge: Basic Books, 2005.
69
Saliba, Najib E. “Emigration from Syria” in Arabs in the New World: Studies on Arab-American
Communities. Edited by Sameer Y. Abraham and Nabeel Abraham. Detroit: Wayne State
University Center for Urban Studies, 1983.
Samhan, Helen Hatab. “Not Quite White: Race Classification and the Arab-American
Experience,” in Arabs in American: Building a New Future. Edited by Michael W.
Suleiman. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1999.
Shakir, Evylyn, “Syrian-Lebanese Women Tell Their Story,” in Frontiers, A Journal of Women
Studies, 7 (1983): 9-13.
Suleiman, Michael W. “Arab-Americans and the Political Process,” in The Development of
Arab-American Identity. Edited by Ernest M. McCarus. Ann Arbor: University of
Michigan Press, 1994.
---. “Introduction: The Arab Immigrant Experience,” in Arabs in America; Building a New
Future. Edited by Michael W. Suleiman. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1999.
---. “The Arab Community in the United States: A Comparison of Lebanese and Non-Lebanese”
in The Lebanese in the World: A Century of Emigration. Edited by Albert Hourani and
Nadim Shehadi. Oxford: The Centre for Lebanese Studies in Association with I.B.
Tauris and Co Ltd, 1992.
---. Arabs in America; Building a New Future. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1999.
Thompson, John A. Reformers and War: American Progressive Publicists and the First World
War. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987.
Truzzi, Oswaldo M.S. “The Right Place at the Right Time, Syrians and Lebanese in Brazil and
the United States, a Comparative Approach.” Journal of American Ethnic History, 16
(Winter 1997): 3-34.
Wiebe, Robert H. The Search for Order, 1877-1920. NY: Hill and Wang, 1967.
Zabel, Darcy A. Introduction of Arabs in America: Interdisciplinary Essays on the Arab
Diaspora. Edited by Darcy A. Zabel. New York: Peter Lang Publishing Incorporated,
2006.
Zeidel, Robert F. Immigrants, Progressives, and Exclusion Politics; The Dillingham
Commission, 1900-1927. Dekalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2004.
70
BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH
Richard Soash was born in Tampa, Florida in 1989. He graduated Summa Cum Laude
from Florida Southern College in 2011 with Bachelor of Arts degrees in the fields of History and
Political Science. His research interests at Florida State University include the history of Race,
Immigration, Politics, the Progressive Era, Latin America, and the Middle East.
71