Politics in the Lifeboat: Immigrants and the American Democratic Order by John C Harles

Author:John C Harles [Harles, John C]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Ethnic Studies, Social Science, Political Science, General
ISBN: 9781000235623
Google: RK2bDwAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 49387738
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2019-06-04T00:00:00+00:00

Political Radicalism, Labor Militancy, and Civic Corruption

Before the argument of the present chapter can be concluded, a further matter requires attention. Scholars of the American political experience have often pointed to foreign-born support for unorthodox political movements, including the more aggressive varieties of trade unionism and involvement in the operation of the urban machine, as empirical evidence of immigration’s political disruptiveness. Owing to the decline of the institutions in question, immigrants of the recent past are unlikely to be indicted on similar grounds. Yet this alleged propensity for radicalism and civic impropriety is of more than simply historical interest as it suggests the manner in which immigrants, lacking sufficient understanding of democracy American-style, may promote political instability. In the interest of defending the lifeboat thesis against a potential line of criticism, a response is warranted.

Certainly the connection between immigrants and radicalism is not completely unfounded. If by radicalism is meant any political movement out of the liberal American mainstream, then any number of immigrant groups might be called “radical.” Taking commitment to unconventional principle to the logical end, some of these groups concluded that the survival of their ideals required institutional separation from the American political system. The distinguished historian of immigration, Carl Wittke, counted seventy-eight such immigrant utopias in America by 1868, all organizing themselves according to “communistic” social and economic principles. The bulk of these societies had explicitly religious persuasions—the Ephrata community of Pennsylvania or the Amana group in Iowa, for instance. But some were more directly devoted to political and economic theories, most famously Robert Owen’s socialist experiment in New Harmony, Indiana. New Harmony was not unique, however: German Marxist societies were established in Minnesota and Missouri; Norwegian communists took up residence in Green Bay, Wisconsin; an English socialist colony was established in Tennessee; and Fourierite communities were founded in Kalamazoo, Michigan, and Brook Farm, Massachusetts.118

Yet because of their limited number and even more limited success, separationalist communities are generally not at issue among individuais concerned with immigrant radicalism; rather those immigrants who have sought to change the American political system by participating in it are the focus of concern. Evidence of this form of immigrant activism is readily available. But left unqualified, the association between immigrants and radical politics is highly misleading. Although well represented in the radical ranks, the majority of immigrants have been far from radical. In national as well as municipal elections the overwhelming tendency has been for immigrant-stock voters to support the mainstream Democratic or Republican parties.119 Thus populism, feeding on the agrarian discontent of the late nineteenth century, found few members or sympathizers among immigrant farmers,120 the nativist tinge of the movement (among other things, the Populist party wished to prohibit alien landownership) serving to dissuade.121 At best, its appeal was to the children of the immigrant generation, a reaction against their fathers’ political cautiousness, and even here the tangible consequence was the formation of moderate parties essentially confined to state politics—the farmer-labor coalitions of the upper Midwest, for instance. Nor

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