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created new ones, such as ethnic clubs and parochial
schools. The diversity of immigrant experiences was reflected
in the Harvard Encyclopedia of American Ethnic Groups(1980),
edited by Handlin and Stephen Thernstrom. In 2010 Ira Berlin
argued that African Americans who made their way north
after the Civil War were also “immigrants,” but of a type
entirely distinct from all other immigrant groups. This
emphasis on the distinctiveness of each immigrant group
had prompted Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. (1992) to bemoan his
profession’s role in the “disuniting of America.” By stressing
our ethnic differences, we too readily forget that we remain
citizens of a single nation.
In short, each of the children in “Uncle Sam’s” wagon expe-
rienced life differently; but they were in for the ride together.Source: Oscar Handlin,The Uprooted(1951); John Bodnar, The Transplanted
(1985); Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., The Disuniting of America(1992); Ira Berlin, The
Making of African America (2010).I
n this 1909 photograph, immigrant children at Ellis Island
hold American flags as they share a ride in an “Uncle Sam”
wagon. Did they and their parents readily adjust to life in the
United States?
In 1951 historian Oscar Handlin thought not. He
asserted that immigrants were “uprooted” from the lives
they had known and “replanted” in “strange ground,
among strangers, where strange manners prevailed.” Many
were shattered by the experience, which accounted for
rampant crime, ruptured families, and social disorder in
tenement districts.
But subsequent studies found that many immigrants
adapted well. John Bodnar (1985) pointedly described immi-
grants as “transplanted” rather than “uprooted.” When chal-
lenged by new situations, they “forged a culture, a
constellation of behavioral and thought patterns which
would offer them explanations, order, and a prescription for
how to live with their lives.” Sometimes they modified tradi-
tional institutions to serve new purposes; sometimes they
DEBATING THE PAST
Did Immigrants Assimilate?