Day of Empire

by Amy Chua

  Without the millions flooding in from Britain, Ireland, Germany, Scandinavia, and later Italy and eastern Europe, America's continental expansion would have been impossible. Irish immigrants built the Erie and Ohio canals (sometimes getting paid partly in whiskey), then went on to build railroads from Buffalo to Akron to Omaha to San Francisco. Scandinavian immigrants almost single-handedly settled the American Northwest, felling dense forests with the “Swedish fiddle” (a lumberjack's saw) and transporting timber to market by “Norwegian steam” (raw muscle power).13

  Germans settled mainly in the North and West, but also in Texas, Louisiana, and Virginia. In the Civil War, more than 175,000 German immigrants fought for the Union, often under German officers and cheered on by their own German marching bands. Before and after the battle of Fort Sumter, German troops played a crucial role in keeping Missouri in Union hands. Without German and other immigrants, the United States could never have fielded the armies that seized California, Texas, and the American Southwest from Mexico, staved off France's advances in Central America, and defeated Spain in Cuba and the Philippines, allowing America to become the preeminent power of the Western Hemisphere by the end of the nineteenth century.

  Neither could America have become one of the world's leading agricultural and industrial producers in the nineteenth century without a steady influx of immigrant labor. As nonimmigrant Americans pushed westward, poorer newcomers from Europe populated urban centers and filled the ranks of unskilled labor. Irishmen made up half of the country's miners in the 1860s and 1870s. Buffalo's steel mills were worked largely by Poles, Rochester's textile mills by Italians, and the meatpacking houses of Cedar Rapids and Omaha overwhelmingly by Czechs. By 1910, when the United States led the world in heavy-industry manufacturing output, the majority of America's mass production workers were immigrants. In the country's twenty largest manufacturing and mining sectors, two-thirds of the men and about half the women were recent arrivals.

  As late as 1920, immigration from Europe continued almost unrestricted. The total numbers were breathtaking. In 1900 alone some two million people crossed the Atlantic to find a new home in the United States. Between 1820 and 1914, more than thirty million people poured into the United States—the largest human migration in the history of the world.14

  Americans did not always embrace the newcomers. On the contrary, the nineteenth century was punctuated by bursts of venomous popular xenophobia and “nativism.” Anti-Catholic riots were especially intense in the 1830s and 1840s. In 1856, the so-called Know-Nothings formed a political party and ran a candidate for president on an anti-Catholic platform, specifically targeting German and Irish immigrants. Although their bid for the presidency failed, the Know-Nothings won dozens of victories in local elections, particularly in New England and the South.

  But within a generation or two, the vast majority of European immigrants were brought into the fold of American society. They were allowed not only to worship according to their own religions but also to make their fortunes and rise to political power. By the 1860s, Roman Catholics represented the largest single religious grouping in the country and Know-Nothingism was defunct. The patriotism shown by hundreds of thousands of immigrants who fought for the Union in the Civil War—many of them just learning English—went a long way toward dampening antiforeign sentiment. Indeed, during the Civil War Congress actively encouraged immigration. The Homestead Law it enacted in 1862 granted “one hundred sixty acres of government land to any settler, native or foreign, who, declaring his intention of becoming a citizen, undertook to live on the land for five years and to make the necessary improvements. “15

  Democracy and demographics worked in favor of immigrants too. By the mid-nineteenth century, the “ethnic” vote had become a force to be reckoned with, at least in cities with high immigrant concentrations. Thus, despite some employers’ “No Irish Need Apply” signs, through sheer voting power the Irish were able to gain access to the highest levels of urban political machinery, controlling city hall and the police force alike in Boston, Chicago, and New York.

  The tolerance of the party bosses toward immigrants was above all strategic. Boss Tweed of New York started off politically as a nativist, yet eventually spent the rest of his career courting immigrants, if only because he had no choice. In exchange for votes, he provided immigrants with jobs, loans, and services. Similarly, John Powers became Chicago's most powerful boss between 1896 and 1921 by “taking care” of his Irish, German, Scandinavian, Italian, Jewish, and Slavic constituencies. In addition to providing employment and community facilities, Powers attended every variety of ethnic wedding, picnic, or parade. His skill at “working” funerals for political gain earned him the nickname “The Mourner.”

  The corruption practiced by the new machine bosses was staggering. Bribery, extortion, and vote buying were routine practices. In New York City, Boss Tweed's Tammany Hall embezzled as much as $200 million between 1865 and 1871 alone. In 1898, the Chicago newspaper L'Italia quoted John Powers as saying, “I can buy the Italian vote with a glass of beer and a compliment” and “It is known that two years ago I bought the Italian vote for fifty cents each; well this year I will buy it for twenty-five cents each.” But however sordid, the politics of the urban machine had positive aspects as well. In a pre-New Deal era, the ward bosses often provided desperately needed social services. More fundamentally, the symbiotic relationship between the bosses and immigrants served to integrate and lift previously excluded ethnic groups, particularly the Irish and Italians.16

  The triumphal story of America's westward expansion was also of course a story of Native American contraction; the immigrants’ gain was the natives’ loss. As Americans marched west, they did not follow the formula of strategic tolerance and incorporation that the ancient Persians, Romans, or Mongols had pursued with their conquered peoples. Unfortunately for America's natives, the United States was in a unique position for an expanding, conquering power. It had another source of population growth, offering greater numbers and technologically superior skills. Americans, it seemed, had no use for a well-honed arrowhead. Such is the brutal reality of selective, strategic tolerance. Even as the United States welcomed the huddled masses of Europe, the indigenous tribes of America were decimated, cordoned off, and displaced.

  Natives were not the only ones excluded from the benefits of America's strategic tolerance. Women could not vote and were almost totally excluded from positions of economic or political power (although the United States suffered no relative disadvantage, because women were similarly excluded elsewhere). In the Western states toward the end of the century, Chinese immigrants were subject to bigotry, discrimination, and physical attacks. Most glaringly, the United States did not abolish slavery until 1865, thirty years after Great Britain, and even after its postwar Reconstruction, the United States remained a deeply racist society.

  Nevertheless, nineteenth-century American society had three crucial features that made it wide open to people of remarkably diverse backgrounds. Its religious pluralism was so freewheeling that it not only permitted newcomers to worship as they pleased but continually sparked brand-new faiths. (By the twentieth century, the United States boasted at least five “homegrown” religions with major followings: Christian Science, Mormonism, Seventh-Day Adventism, Jehovah's Witnesses, and Pentecostalism.) Its democratic system of government was capable, both despite and because of its corruption, of giving newcomers some actual political influence, at least at the local level. And its rollicking free market sucked up labor, rewarded mechanical skill, and provided undreamt-of opportunities to the enterprising. Other nineteenth-century nations might offer bits or pieces of these three advantages; none had all three to the same extent as America.

  Thus the United States became far and away the world's leading destination for newcomers. Between 1871 and 1911, some twenty million immigrants arrived in the United States. Over the same time frame, Argentina and Brazil together received six million immigrants, Austr
alia and New Zealand 2.5 million, and Canada fewer than two million.17

  THE TRANSFORMATION FROM REGIONAL

  TO GLOBAL POWER

  At the approach of the twentieth century, for all its explosive economic growth and territorial expansion, the United States was still only a regional power. Militarily, it was a pygmy compared to the great powers of Europe. Its navy in the 1880s ranked twelfth in the world by number of ships, outclassed even by Sweden. Its army was “insignificant compared with that of even a middle-sized European country like Serbia or Bulgaria.” Although its armed forces were sufficient to defend its borders and maintain dominance in the Caribbean and the Americas, the United States in 1900 barely registered as a significant power on the global scene.18

  Within just a few decades, all of this would change. World War I gave the United States its first taste of global power. The American intervention in 1917 shifted the balance in favor of the Allies and, according to President Woodrow Wilson, thrust on the United States the role of showing “the nations of the world how they shall walk in the paths of liberty.”

  But the United States was not yet ready to follow Wilson's vision. Instead of projecting its power outward, the United States took an “isolationist” turn, with the Senate refusing to ratify the treaty for the League of Nations that Wilson had poured his heart into creating.19 At the same time, the nationalist passions inflamed by the war triggered a surge of xenophobia and nativism. In 1917, 1921, and 1924, Congress passed a series of immigration acts radically changing U.S. policy.

  For the first time, these laws imposed numerical limits on immigration. More fundamentally, they created a national-origin quota system with an undeniable ethnic and racial bias.

  The goal of the 1924 act, in the words of Congressman Albert Johnson, its principal author, was the achievement of a “homogeneous citizenry,” putting an end to the “indiscriminate acceptance of all races.” Johnson railed against the “dilution” of America's “cherished institutions” by “a stream of alien blood,” specifically warning against “filthy, un-American” and “unassimilable” Jews. Accordingly, the number of immigrants allowed from a given country under the 1924 quotas was based on the number of natives from that country living in the United States in 1890. The result was a severe restriction on the admission of southern and eastern Europeans, not to mention an almost complete ban on Asians, Africans, and other nonwhites.

  The Great Depression gave nativist politicians further opportunity to scapegoat the “hordes of penniless Europeans”—“mongrels” and “illiterates,” many of them “dangerous radicals”—who were “lining up to come to America.” President Hoover called for a tightening of immigration restrictions. Between 1931 and 1935, the United States experienced negative net immigration for the first time ever.

  As World War II began, the first reaction of many Americans was to keep the United States out of the war—and to keep foreigners out of the United States. In 1939, in the wake of the Kristallnacht pogrom in Nazi Germany, a few members of Congress drafted a bill to admit 20,000 Jewish refugee children to the United States in excess of the normal German quota. Nativist organizations vehemently fought the bill, a majority of Americans opposed it, and it never came up for a vote in either house. Laura Delano, President Roosevelt's cousin and the wife of the commissioner of immigration, famously warned that “20,000 charming children would all too soon grow into 20,000 ugly adults.”

  The negative immigration rates of the 1930s proved short-lived and completely exceptional in U.S. history. Ironically, the anti-immigration attitudes of the interwar years may have been a boon to the tens of millions of newcomers who had already arrived. The massive influx of Europe's “poorest and least fortunate”—almost a million Italians, Poles, Russians, Finns, Jews, Germans, Czechs, and Hungarians annually between 1900 and 1914—had created enormous social strains in America.20 The relatively closed-door interwar years provided a respite, allowing these immigrant communities to be absorbed and assimilated. This was a lucky thing, because so many of the sons of these new Americans would be called on to fight and die in the war that relaunched America, this time irrevocably, onto the world stage.

  If World War I left the great European powers considerably weakened, World War II dealt the decisive blow. The world that emerged in 1945 was no longer Europe-centered. When the carnage and rubble were cleared, the United States stood as a world superpower, with the shattered nations of Europe dependent on its might and wealth.

  Horrific in so many ways, the war triggered an unprecedented economic boom in the United States. Shaking off the Great Depression, U.S. industry between 1940 and 1944 exploded, expanding at a higher rate than ever before or since. By the war's end, the United States was the world's greatest exporter of goods and accounted for more than half of the world's total manufacturing output. It had gold reserves of $20 billion (roughly two-thirds of the world's total) and boasted a higher standard of living and per capita productivity than any other country. Under the Marshall Plan, the United States provided Europe with $13 billion, helping to get the ravaged economies of West Germany, Italy, and France back on their feet.

  At the same time, the United States became the preeminent military power of the Western world. By the war's end, America had mobilized an astonishing 12.5 million service personnel. Its naval forces, with 1,200 warships and a devastating submarine fleet, had replaced the British Royal Navy as the world's most powerful. Its bombers commanded the air, with a thousand long-range B-29s that had obliterated Japanese cities. Most fatefully, the United States alone had the atomic bomb, which had turned Nagasaki and Hiroshima into infernos unlike anything the world had ever seen.

  Tolerance played a critical role in every dimension of the United States’ rise to superpower status. Again, the sheer manpower advantage possessed by the United States resulted directly from the country's open immigration policies before 1920. In 1816, America's population was just 8.5 million, compared to Russia's 51.2 million. By 1950, the United States’ population was more than 150 million, while Russia's was around 109 million. Even more crucially, immigrants were also directly responsible for the revolutionary technological breakthroughs that catapulted the United States to military preeminence.21

  In 1930s Europe, Nazi intolerance caused the loss of incalculable scientific talent. The list of brilliant physicists and mathematicians who fled Hitler is astounding, including Edward Teller, known as the “father of the hydrogen bomb;” the aeronautical genius Theodore von Karman; John von Neumann, a child prodigy and the cocreator of game theory; Lise Meitner, after whom Element 109, meitnerium, is named; Leo Szilard, conceiver of the nuclear chain reaction; Enrico Fermi, builder of the first experimental nuclear reactor; the Nobel Prize-winning physicists Hans Bethe and Eugene Wigner; Niels Bohr; and of course Albert Einstein. With the exception of Meitner and Bohr, every one of these scientists emigrated to the United States.

  The immigration to the United States of these refugee scientists, most of whom were Jewish, represented the single greatest “influx of ability of which there is any record.” Up until the 1930s, Germany and Hungary were home to some of the world's leading physicists. Practically overnight, their departure turned America into “the world's dominant force in pure science.” Einstein, whose property was confiscated by the Nazis in 1933, explained that he would “only live in a land where there reigns political freedom, tolerance and equality of all citizens before the law.”22

  Jews were hardly equal citizens in the United States in 1945. Formal quotas and informal social discrimination kept Jews largely out of the top universities and highest government posts until at least the 1960s. But relative tolerance is what matters, and by comparison to the other options, the United States was for Einstein and so many of his fellow brilliant scientists a new Jerusalem. It was their work that led to the development of the atomic and hydrogen bombs, giving America the world's first nuclear weapons. Perhaps never in world history has an infusion of immigrant talent so immediate
ly translated into a scientific advance and military advantage of such planet-altering magnitude.

  Within a few years, however, the United States was no longer the world's sole atomic power. To the east of Europe had risen another colossus, the Soviet Union, whose rivalry with the United States would be the defining geopolitical reality of the ensuing decades.

  Interestingly, as the Cold War began, it was not at all clear which of the two superpowers was the more tolerant. While the United States certainly offered more religious freedom, its commitment to ideological openness was undermined by the McCarthy witch hunts of the 1950s. Moreover, in some parts of the country, racial apartheid was practiced under the name of Jim Crow. By contrast, the U.S.S.R. did not respect religious or ideological freedom but proudly proclaimed its racial and ethnic universalism.

  The territory taken over by the Bolsheviks in 1917 included a complex array of ethnic, national, and tribal minorities. In their rise to power, the Bolsheviks harnessed the discontent of Russia's ethnic minorities, promising them “equality” and “the genuine right to self-determination.” The first ail-Union Census of 1927 identified 172 separate “nationalities” in the Soviet Union, although (through various political and ethnographic manipulations) by 1939 this number had been whittled down to just 57. At least in principle, Soviet “nationalities” policy was supposed to promote non-Russian cultures and languages, to give “all the nations” within the Union considerable autonomy, and to allow the best and brightest non-Russians to participate and rise in the Soviet system. On the international front, the U.S.S.R. invited delegates from Cuba, China, and African nations to Moscow in order to strengthen ties within the Communist bloc. At the same time, Soviet propaganda reported constantly on American blacks’ “semi-slave” status and the “frequency of terroristic acts against negroes,” including “the bestial mobbing of four negroes by a band of 20-25 whites” in Monroe, Georgia, in 1946.”