The uprooted by Handlin Oscar 1915-

Author:Handlin, Oscar, 1915-
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Immigrants, Acculturation
Publisher: Boston : Little, Brown
Published: 1990-03-15T05:00:00+00:00

viduals were drawn, and religion became the focus of communal life. The great variety of conditions in the mill and mining towns set for each its own pattern; the richness of the organizational life fluctuated with the size of the various groups. Everywhere, the forms of associational action were shaped by local conditions because these activities everywhere appeared in response to the specific needs of strangers in an unfamiliar environment.

The men who acquired here new modes of fellowship to replace the old ones destroyed by emigration earned thereby some sense of security against complete isolation. But their efforts, no matter how strenuous, could not forestall changes. The whole of American society was changing. These little immigrant islands within it could not withstand the trend.

Everything in the neighborhood was so nice, they would later say, until the others came. The others brought outlandish ways and unintelligible speech, foreign dress and curious foods, were poor, worked hard, and paid higher rents for inferior quarters. Gradually the older comers saw the new arrivals filter into the district, occupy house after house that became vacant before their advance, until the whole configuration of the place was transformed.

So the tenement regions of the cities became the homes of group after group of immigrants. Through the dark halls and crowded rooms moved the Irish and the Germans, the Italians and the Poles, and all the other wandering peoples, each in turn to make a way of life there. But not permanently; each was in time displaced by its successor.

Movement away from the tenement areas did not immediately destroy the associational life that had proliferated there. Often there was a vigorous continuity. In New York City, for instance, the Germans moved in a straight line northward along the East Side of the island and the Irish did the same on the West Side. Old institutions were transplanted to new

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