There are several immigrant groups whose national identities begin with fleeing oppression in the Old World for freedom in the New. The story I learned in Hebrew school is that Jewish immigrants left Russia to find religious freedom in the United States. Most people don't dwell on American history enough to think about what drove the actual decision to leave, and in the case of Russian Jews, it was that anti-Semitic laws and pogroms were making it difficult to live in Russia as a Jew, not to practice Judaism. It's a fine distinction but one that is easily lost.
My grandfather's family came to America because they couldn't make a living in Russia any more. My great-grandfather was a socialist, as were thousands of other immigrants. The Hebrew Schools that their great-grandchildren go to are rooted in Zionism, not Socialism, so we get a certain image of the past that may not be truthful to everyone.
The Irish are another group of immigrants that have a national story of government persecution and religious discrimination. A good way to divide immigrants to America is to separate those groups which included many people who eventually return to the home country from those groups that never looked back. I think this parallels the ideal of freedom as opposed to economic opportunity.
I dare someone to try to apply this to the Elian Gonzales case.
On a related note, Boston's Museum of Immigration, now sadly closed for lack of funding, was called Dreams of Freedom. I suppose that sounded more promising than Dreams of a Washing Machine.
Posted by Mark at March 16, 2004 09:14 PMIt is interesting, the distinctions between what we're taught as groups and what we know of individual experience.
I grew up knowing that our family ended up in America because their lives depended on moving to a place where they wouldn't be persecuted as Jews. The earliest of my immigrant ancestors came from Russia hoping to make enough money to bring over his wife and kids, but their entire village was massacred shortly afterwards in a pogrom. The other side of my family comes from Germany and those who stayed there were killed there. America's religious freedoms weren't just an abstract question of ideology; they were a very concrete and clear-cut reason to immigrate.
Like a lot of Jews, my folks came over in the late 19th and early 20th centuries with fairly passionate (and somewhat utopian) socialist ideals. They were strongly motivated to want to change the system. Political dreams of freedom were very much a part of their experience as immigrants.
But, you know, that's just them.
In response to what Susan wrote below: there's plenty of dumbing-down and simplistic dogma about the country's identity. In grade school I was handed the idea that we're all basically cultural descendants of our plucky forefathers, the Pilgrims. This remains a pretty pervasive myth/model of America, even though the realities of how people got here are drastically different throughout the population.
I mean, this is one of the unusual things about America, because of the way everyone comes so recently from different places and circumstances: unlike in most countries, there is no long prevailing story of "our" history. It's a history of fragmented variety, and that makes it difficult to form a cohesive identity of what it means to be an American. Especially when so much of our real history involves behavior that would have us all at each other's throats if we thought about it too much. People may be aware of their own stories, but they still want to identify as part of a larger Story. When they reach for an idea of the American immigrant, I think many will subconsciously go with the Pilgrims as a prototype, regardless of how that differs from their own experience.
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