The Long Way Home
An American Journey from Ellis Island to the Great War
David Laskin

Welcome to Our Community

Tuesday, September 29th, 2009

Welcome to my website and my very first blog – not just the first on this site but anywhere. Yes, I’ve been writing books, articles, letters, emails, and such for decades – but my blogging life is literally seconds old. In fact, to get in the spirit of it, I’m writing this (or at least the first draft) in the picturesquely grungy Ugly Mug coffee shop in Seattle’s University District, cheek by jowl with my fellow readers, writers, and no doubt bloggers. Loud distracting music, interesting distracting youth, windows too smudged and small to offer more than a sliver of the scudding clouds I usually gaze at while searching for le mot juste. Strange. So please bear with me as I struggle to slip comfortably into this unfamiliar genre.

As you’ve noticed if you’re reading this, I’m calling this section of my web site “community.” The reason is fairly straightforward: I’m hoping to make this a place where people who feel a connection to the stories and issues in my book can “meet,” visit, comment, express opinions, share pride or grief or memories, and above all tell their own stories. You’ll note the “Submit Your Story” button at the right. If you’re so inspired, click there and add your own blog entry. Perhaps you have an ancestor who served in the First World War? Maybe you’re an immigrant or from a recent immigrant family and you feel moved to talk about your own experiences or compare yourself to the Ellis Island generation featured in my book? If you are on active service in the Armed Forces, if you’re a Great War buff, if you want to discuss your heritage, if you have a story related to the military, immigration, assimilation, this is your chance. I’ll be reading and posting your stories as they come in. And once I post them here, others will have a chance to comment. That’s the idea anyway.

So far, as I sit here in the Ugly Mug unintentionally eavesdropping on a loud conversation behind me, I’m a community of one. So this blogging thing feels very much like talking to myself in the mirror. Nonetheless, I can dream. And my dream is a community of many who have a stake in the issues raised by my book.

To that end, I’d like to toss out a few thoughts inspired by a recent essay in the New York Times Book Review. Writing in the August 16, 2009 issue, Harvard sociologist Orlando Patterson compares the experiences of the current waves of mostly Asian and Latino immigrants to the those of the immigrant generation I write about in The Long Way Home, still, but just barely, the largest group of immigrants in US history. Patterson notes that “Until recently, the conventional wisdom among social scientists was that the adjustment of recent immigrants to America would be fundamentally different from that of the European immigrants of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It has been claimed that they are from different ‘races’ and are entering a harsher postindustrial American with fewer opportunities for mobility, and also that the ease of communication and travel to their homelands discourages assimilation.”

But in fact, Patterson points out, today’s immigrants are assimilating even faster than the Ellis Island generation of immigrants. Children of today’s immigrants nearly all speak English as their first language and consider themselves “as American in their attitudes and behavior as their native counterparts.” The one group that has not joined this great leap into assimilation is black Americans, whether native born or immigrant, who continue to live in “hyper-segregated” communities and in far deeper poverty than any other group. Race, not ethnicity, turns out to be the one stubborn lump in the melting pot that will not, cannot break down.

But race, Patterson suggests in what struck me as the most thought-provoking part of the essay, is a far more fluid category than we suppose – especially the race of new arrivals. He puts it so eloquently that I’ll simply quote: “The assumption that the current wave should find adjustment harder because they come from different ‘races’ rests on a hopeless misconception. At the time of their arrival, Jews, Italians and other Eastern and Southern Europeans – and even the Catholic Irish – were viewed by native whites as belonging to very different (and inferior) races. In fact, they did not assimilate because they were white; they become ‘white’ because they assimilated.”

This brilliant insight puts me in mind of a story I tell in the book about Rocco Pierro, an immigrant from the far south of Italy, who was invited to meet the aging father of a white native-born co-worker. The old guy looked Rocco up and down with a wide, surprised gaze and finally murmured, “What do you know? I thought all Italians were black.” The Pierro family still talks about it.

Patterson is right. When Rocco’s son Tony, who came over from Italy as a teenager, was drafted in 1917 and shipped out to France with the All American Division a few months later, he became “white” in a hurry. Nothing accelerates or intensifies assimilation faster than war. As Tennessee marksman and Great War hero Alvin York wrote of the Italian, Polish, Jewish and Greek immigrants he served with in the All American Division, “They were my buddies. I jes learned to love them.”

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