How To Become An American: A History Of Immigra...
Today, Angel Island State Park administers the remaining buildings of the Island's original West Garrison post, which date back to the 1860s, and the East Garrison (Fort McDowell). The U.S. Immigration Station Barracks Museum administers what remains of the station. Visitors to the museum are able to explore the grounds of Angel Island's U.S. Immigration Station. Guided tours of the detention barracks are available, which include exhibits highlighting historic photographs, artifacts, and a re-creation of immigrant living quarters and interrogation rooms. Tours of the detention barracks also provide visitors with the opportunity to view the hundreds of poems carved into the wooden walls of the barracks. Ayala Cove, the Island's main point of entry and former location of the U.S. Quarantine Station, houses the Park Headquarters and the main Visitor Center. Angel Island's history encourages all visitors to appreciate the great lengths many immigrants took in order to live in, or become citizens of, the United States.The U.S. Immigration Station, Angel Island, a National Historic Landmark, is located in Angel Island State Park, on Angel Island in the San Francisco Bay, CA. Additional information is available on the Angel Island Immigration Station Foundation website.Discover more history and culture by visiting the World War II in San Francisco Bay Area travel itinerary.A project through the Save America's Treasures Grant Program, which helps preserve nationally significant historic properties and collections, funded work to restore the Angel Island Immigration Station in 2000. Restoration work included rehabiliation of the building and poems carved into walls of the station.
How to Become an American: A History of Immigra...
It's really been a consistent strand in American immigration history that families are the vehicle for integrating Americans into American society, and helping immigrants be productive members of American society. It's not enough to come to this country with a diploma. It's not enough to come with a particular skill set. You have to have people help you become part of American society. And many of the "immigrant success stories" we have are people who came with relatively few resources, or not necessarily stereotypically high education levels, but [succeeded] because there was a family standing behind them.
The story of Roman Catholicism in the nineteenth century IS the story of immigration. Untilabout 1845, the Roman Catholic population of the United States was a small minority of mostlyEnglish Catholics, who were often quite socially accomplished. But when several years ofdevastating potato famine led millions of Irish Catholics to flee to the United States in the mid 1840s, the face of American Catholicism began to change drastically and permanently. In thespace of fifty years, the Catholic population in the United States suddenly transformed from atight-knit group of landowning, educated aristocrats into an incredibly diverse mass of urbanand rural immigrants who came from many different countries, spoke different languages, helddifferent social statuses, and emphasized different parts of their Catholic heritage. Many members of other faiths—Jews, Protestants, and even some Muslims, Hindus andBuddhists—arrived in the successive waves of massive immigration to the United States betweenthe 1840s and 1920s. But Catholics from various countries were the most numerous—and themost noticed. In 1850 Catholics made up only five percent of the total U.S. population. By1906, they made up seventeen percent of the total population (14 million out of 82 millionpeople)—and constituted the single largest religious denomination in the country. When your students hear the enormity of the demographic and religious shift caused byimmigration, they will start to understand why so many American citizens became uneasy aboutthe so-called "Catholic hordes." Change is always difficult, and this was a huge change. Whydid things change? Why did so many Catholics come to the United States at this time? Why didthe country take them? To answer these questions, you might paint for your students a scene ortwo of the broad Western-hemisphere trend towards economic and social "modernization." Thenewly centralized states of Europe and the New World were promoting capital investment inurban industries that disturbed ancient customs of farming, craft labor, and land inheritance. Anew managerial "middle class" of clerks and bureaucrats was prospering in the cities, butthousands of peasants were displaced from their land and labor by new farming techniques. TheCatholic citizens of Italy, Poland, parts of Germany, and the Eastern European kingdoms ofwhat are now Slovakia and the Czech Repuclic began to cast their eyes towards America. The country had a growing world reputation for democratic ideals and work opportunity. For these peoples, aswell as for French Canadian Catholics to the north of the United States and Mexican Catholics tothe south, the chance for a new life free of poverty and oppression was too good to pass up. Millions of sons, fathers, and later whole families left behind their former lives and possessionsand boarded crowded ships sailing for New York.America, for its part, docked ship after ship at Ellis Island for both idealistic and practicalreasons. It was the American ideal to welcome the foreigner; all the country's founding groupsand many of its leading citizens had been, after all, immigrants. The motto on the Statue ofLiberty, "Give Me Your Tired, Your Poor," exemplified the strong tie between immigration andfreedom in the national imagination. But more practically speaking, America's new industriesand booming frontier towns demanded large quantities of cheap labor. So immigration was abenefit to both sides—at least in theory. Guiding Student DiscussionBut theory doesn't always translate into the feelings and experiences of real people in realsituations. Immigration was supposed to be beneficial to the immigrant and to the country, but italso unleashed many fears, insecurities, and troubles on both sides. It might be a good idea tobrainstorm with your students about the positive and negative FEELINGS that both natives andimmigrants could have experienced at the time. Let the students imagine and talk about what itmight have felt like for the immigrants, who didn't know "the ropes" or in many cases thelanguage. Let them also imagine what it might have felt like for those already living inAmerica, who saw their cities change so quickly: suddenly there was a Catholic church in everyneighborhood. Immigration is, of course, still very much a part of the American reality andpublic debate. Some of your students may be Catholic themselves and may be surprised to hearof the former low status of the "assimilated" religion they know. Some of your students mayknow of immigration from firsthand experience, being immigrants or children of immigrantsthemselves. Others may know about immigration from news reports or experiences withneighbors. Don't hesitate to make the connections between the realities and perceptions ofCatholicism and immigration then and now. Their experience of the present realities can helpthem understand the past, and vice versa. Then, refocus the discussion to make the point that in the nineteenth century, the immigrants'RELIGION, Catholicism, became a focal point for these feelings about immigration on both sides. The immigrants held onto Catholicism for spiritual comfort and group identity. The olderAmericans blamed Catholicism for the immigrants' "foreign ways." Both sides usedCatholicism as a way of resisting the other. How did the immigrants express their feelingsthrough their faith? How did Protestant Americans use Catholicism as a "substitute" forimmigration issues?After several years in America, many Catholic immigrants became sorely disillusioned. "American Dreams" of rich farmland and easy money evaporated in the run-down, neglectedquarters of big cities and died during long hours working lowpaying, backbreaking jobs. Yetsooner or later, many families managed to improve their economic situations, through luck,ingenuity, hard work, and—they strongly believed—help from God, the saints, and the Church.For it was the Catholic Church, more than any other organization, that made a concerted effort towelcome the new Catholic immigrants. Catholic citizens helped them find jobs and homes; sisters (nuns) taught their children English in Catholic schools; priests tried to protect theirpolitical interests and shield them from a sometimes hostile Protestant environment; the localchurch held religious festivals and social events. It is important to stress that for the immigrants,the neighborhood Catholic church was not just a church; it was the focal point of a wholecommunity, a whole way of life. Even if the relationship between the Church and Catholicimmigrants was often far from perfect, local parishes provided millions of heartbroken,homesick immigrant men and women the familiar comforts of ritual and belief that gave theirworld meaning. Students should know what parts of Catholic ritual and belief set it apart from ProtestantChristianity, although it should also be emphasized that there is much more continuity thandifference between the two forms of Christianity. Catholic tradition had held for centuriesthat the institutional Church, with its highly organized hierarchy topped by the pope in Rome,was the sole source of spiritual nurture, divine authority, and final salvation;
that thesacraments—religious rituals like the Mass and confession—were the main means of humancontact with the divine; and
that the saints—who, like Mary, the mother of Jesus, were holypeople held up as examples by the Church—could be called upon in prayer to "intercede" forCatholics with the Father and the Son.
The reformers of the Protestant Reformation objectedvehemently to these emphases, insisting instead onless hierarchy in church structure,
theBible rather than sacraments as the source of revelation from God, and
Jesus himself as theonly necessary intercessor with God the Father.
For four centuries Catholics and Protestants hadwaged real and polemical wars against each other about these and other issues that calcified theirmutually antagonistic positions. In the context of nineteenth-century America, where Bible-believing, evangelical Protestants constituted the clear majority, the Catholic minority faith, withits elaborate rituals and statues of the saints, seemed to most people very strange, even "wrong." Of course, for Catholics these were natural and familiar ways to express their faith in God. There was nothing strange about them at all. In fact, they thought Protestants were strange and"wrong." To Protestants, the immigrants' religion was cause for great consternation. Protestants pridedthemselves on living in a country founded as a Protestant "light unto the world," as the Puritansput it. They felt threatened that America might soon become a "Catholic" country; they worriedthat the Catholic religion, with its hierarchies and traditions, had made the immigrants unsuitablefor democratic and individualistic America. They even mused whether the Catholics werecoming in droves in order to colonize America for the pope! The churches could try to protectthe immigrants, but they could do little to counter the prejudice Catholic immigrants faced in"mainstream" America every day. Neighbors called Catholics names, employers refused topromote them, landlords rented them their worst apartments, newspapers blamed them for risingcrime rates, and banks refused them loans. A popular national organization, the AmericanProtective Association, was founded specifically to promote anti-Catholicism and otherprejudices. All this because Catholics believed a different Christianity than Protestants? Partly no, andpartly yes. On the one hand, anti-Catholicism wasn't all about Catholicism; it was partly aboutclass, too. Many people of the upper classes didn't particularly pay attention to Catholics' religion, but assumed that because the immigrants were poor, foreign, and different, that meantthey were also dirty, dangerous, and lazy. Many people of the lower classes assumed theimmigrants represented competition for jobs, homes, and social prestige that rightly belonged tothem. On the other hand, anti-Catholic prejudice was about religion. For Catholics did become good American citizens—winning political races, organizing labor unions, opening businesses, and founding schools and hospitals. But no matter how hard Catholics strived to prove theywere good, upstanding, patriotic American citizens, some Protestants would never accept them,simply because they were Catholic. This instance of naked prejudice may be a hard thing forstudents concerned about "equality" and "tolerance" to hear. Others may feel more sympathetictowards the Protestants' religious conviction. Again, pointing out the continuities with present-day instances of prejudice would only help to illuminate both.Given the social stigma of being Catholic, students might naturally wonder why most Catholicpeople who came to this country remained Catholic. There are several reasons, all of whichspeak to the very teen-accessible issue of "identity"—how people have it, create it, or change it. One reason Catholics stayed Catholic is that they truly believed that Catholicism was the "right"religion, and converting to Protestantism was simply not an option. Another is that Catholicismwas an "alternative," "different" religion in America at the time, and some Catholics wore that"differentness" as a badge of pride or a marker of identity in an unfamiliar environment. Finally, some stayed out of habit and culture. They were Catholics in the Old World, thereforethey were Catholics in the New, and that was that. The American public's resistance to immigration culminated in a series of immigrationrestriction laws passed in the early 1920s that placed quotas on the numbers of people allowed fromeach foreign country. Quotas for Catholic countries were set so low that Catholic immigrationvirtually halted by 1924. Historians DebateIn some ways, the Catholic immigrants of the nineteenth century faced as much conflict withintheir churches as without. The debate raged between Church leaders about the best strategy todeal with the immigrants—"Americanize" them as quickly as possible, or encourage them toretain their own national language and faith customs as long as they could. The proponents ofthe first view, called "Americanists," tended to be theological liberals and social progressiveswho were quite optimistic, in the spirit of the "Gilded Age," about the compatibility betweenAmerica and the Catholic religion. The advocates of the second view, considered"conservatives," tended to be traditionalists who regarded America's infatuation with the newtechnology, "materialism," and social reform as a dangerous context for preserving the troubledimmigrants' faith. Often the immigrants themselves had their own opinions in the matter, butwere caught between warring bishops. Over the long term, both the Americanists and theconservatives "won": the pope pronounced in favor of the conservatives in 1891, but as newgenerations were born, of course, Catholics became quite "Americanized" as aspects of the OldWorld devotional culture and theology were gradually left behind and shades of a new, moreindividualistic and democratic Catholicism appeared. Scholars of American Catholic history have universally considered immigration by far the mostdynamic force in the nineteenth-century American Church, but they continue to debate the issueof "Americanization." The magisterial histories of American Catholicism written successivelyby John Gilmary Shea, Peter Guilday, and John Tracy Ellis from the 1890s to the 1950sconsidered "Americanization" a good thing and countered popular perceptions of Catholics'unfitness for America with numerous examples of American Catholic achievement. More recenthistories by Jay Dolan and Patrick Carey (1990s) reconsider the merits of "Americanization" inlight of contemporary discussions of "Catholic difference" and "multiculturalism." Their work suggests that traditional immigrant Catholicism contributed to changing the definition of"America" from a nation of Anglo-Saxon Protestants to a culture of diversified regions andpeoples. They also carefully distinguish between religious styles, political leanings, and socialstatus associated with different ethnic groups within Catholicism; for example, the IrishCatholic political machines in New York were much different than German Catholic sodalities inthe Midwest, though both kinds of groups grew out of the immigrant Catholic experience. Other historians have pointed out that concepts like "Americanization" and "assimilation"assume there was a coherent "American" population, when in fact immigration itself wasovershadowed and interimplicated with the great social debates over slavery and, after the CivilWar, the so-called "Negro problem"—issues whose very existence proves that a homogeneous"American" population could not be taken for granted (Jenny Franchot, Roads to Rome). Newly-ordained African-American priestsNew Orleans, Louisiana, 1934Library of CongressOtherstudies have taken up the history of African Americans who were themselves Catholics; this minority within a minority persevered with little attention from their Church throughout theperiod of European immigration (Stephen Ochs, Cyprian Davis). Some historians have found the "differences" between Catholics and Protestants in this period overplayed; both groups, forexample, were implicated in a broad cultural concern to establish a "domestic" religion alongside church attendance that emphasized religious commodities in the home and family prayer (Colleen Mcdannell, Ann Taves). Still other historians have painted in great detail the complex social worlds of the immigrant neighborhoods, raising the question whether ordinaryimmigrant Catholics really noticed or cared about the "mainstream" Protestant world much at all (Robert Orsi). 041b061a72