When in (the) America(n century), do as the Americans do
How immigrant societies endure: considering the US & France
Part 2 of 2. Related: Part 1, You can’t beat us if you join us
The new republic of faith
In 1776, 1,300 years after the Western Roman Empire’s fall, a faction of North American colonists declared independence from Britain. Upon victory, the new Americans strung together 13 colonies and their possessions extending westward to the Mississippi into a vast republic. This state was a product of its times, shaped by the Enlightenment and English customs. But the founders were classically educated. James Madison, Thomas Jefferson and John Adams all knew Latin, and were all inspired by republican Roman values. This is clear in the existence of an American Senate and the separation of powers. Awareness of the Roman past bled into popular elite culture. The first President, George Washington, was called the “American Cincinnatus,” after the Roman dictator who upon being called up in his dotage to bring order to the affairs of state, did so in 16 days, and promptly retired back to his farm.
Like Rome, the nascent American state was vast, imperial in scale. In 1810, after the Louisiana purchase, the US encompassed 1.7 million square miles. The Roman Empire at its peak, under Trajan, was 1.9 million square miles. But while the Empire counted some 60-70 million citizens and subjects, the 1810 US Census records 7.2 million Americans. In standard economic theory land, capital and humans are the three factors of production that determine output, and America clearly needed vastly more citizens to maximize its potential. In the Declaration of Independence, Britain’s check on immigration to the colonies is specifically enumerated as a grievance:
He has endeavoured to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither, and raising the conditions of new Appropriations of Lands.
To occupy the vast land Americans had large families. In the early 19th century, the average American woman bore seven children. Some regions, like New England, had been settled early and generations of high birth rates had already yielded large populations; 30,000 New Englanders in 1640 were 750,000 by 1770, almost completely absent any immigration. After the American Republic’s expansion westward, these New Englanders would spill over into upstate New York and the Great Lakes region as well as the Upper Midwest, spawning a “Yankee Empire.”
But natural increase was not enough. American Presidents like Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson favored immigration because they felt it was necessary to settle the western territories; surplus population on the eastern seaboard was not sufficient. As President, Jefferson signed a revision of the Naturalization Act of 1798, where a 14-year residency requirement was reduced to five (which remains the wait-time for immigrants today). But, he did not change the requirement that for naturalization one must be a “free white person.” This criterion goes back to the Naturalization Act of 1790, reflecting the emerging racial hierarchy in the young republic, where enslavement of Africans and wars with Native Americans were coupled with white Anglo-Americans’ sense of innate superiority.
That racial element of early American identity is well known; less visible to us today is the tacit Protestantism that pervaded the culture and fed ubiquitous anti-Catholicism. One of the rebels’ other grievances against Britain was the Quebec Act, which allowed for toleration of Catholicism in Canada. John Jay wrote on behalf of the Continental Congress: “Nor can we suppress our astonishment that a British Parliament should ever consent to establish in that country [Quebec] a religion [Catholicism] that has deluged your island in blood, and dispersed impiety, bigotry, persecution, murder, and rebellion through every part of the world.” This objection even entered the Declaration of Independence in a coded manner, where Jefferson observes that the British Crown had abolished “the free System of English Laws in a neighboring Province,” those “English Laws” being restrictions on the freedom of religion for Catholics.
Pure demographics determined the early Republic’s Protestantism. The white population in the 1790 census was overwhelmingly British; English, Welsh and Scottish. The Irish in America were mostly Presbyterian Scots-Irish, while the large German minority usually hailed from the Protestant kingdom of Hanover. Though many of the founders, like Jefferson, a deist, and Adams, a Unitarian, were religiously heterodox, they took Protestantism for granted as the young nation’s baseline. This began to change in the 1840’s, when millions of Irish Catholics and German Catholics began to arrive in the US. In reaction, the Know-Nothing Party, also known as the American Party, quickly rose to be the northern US’ second largest political power for a brief period in the 1850’s on an anti-immigration plank that explicitly sought to protect the primacy of America’s Anglo-Protestant culture.
It is notable here that religion, rather than ethnicity, was the primary dimension of conflict. Germans from Protestant backgrounds assimilated quickly into American society. Carl Schurz, a freethinker brought up Lutheran, was elected a Missouri senator in 1868, only having arrived in the US from Prussia in 1852. The Lutheran churches of America began as immigrant churches, whether German or Scandinavian, but Lutheranism quickly became an uncontroversial component of American denominationalism. Catholicism was not assimilable in the same fashion; it did not view itself as a church among churches.
In the 19th century, Roman Catholicism had not made peace with liberalism and democracy. When large numbers of Catholics arrived in the US, the Church’s initial impulse was to come to an understanding with the American political establishment that recognized the distinctive and unique characteristics of its flock, and allowed them some independence from the Protestant majority. The precedent here would be the concordats between the Church and European sovereign states, establishing the rights and responsibilities of the Church in relation to the state. During the 19th century, Catholics had a valid perception that American institutions and the elites were implicitly aligned with Protestantism, and thus against them. In 1859, a Massachusetts Catholic schoolboy was beaten for refusing to read from the King James Bible. The parochial school system arose as an expression of separatism and a rejection of American public schools’ normative Protestantism. And for many decades the Catholic hierarchy attempted to obtain public subsidies, arguing that this was a reasonable accommodation of their religious rights. Horace Mann, father of American education and evangelist for public schools, was deeply suspicious of these sectarian schools. He believed secular public schools could instill American values and further the project of assimilation. Religious riots in the US beginning in the 1830’s, peaking in the 1850’s, and continuing into the 1870’s, illustrate that anti-Catholic sentiment in the US was not just philosophical, but manifested in violence that split communities down the middle all across the nation.
But today in the US Catholicism is an uncontroversial part of American culture. What happened? Basically, the vast majority of American Catholics have realigned their religious views in step with American Protestants. Religious demographer Ryan Burge reports that only 1% of Catholics in the US agree with all three key positions of the Church on abortion, capital punishment and physician assisted suicide (80% support abortion in at least cases of rape and incest, more than 60% support the death penalty and 70% support physician-assisted suicide). Around 1900, a movement within the US’s Catholic hierarchy termed Americanism arose to harmonize Catholicism with democratic liberalism. Although it was officially suppressed as heresy, the 20th century would see the progressive Americanization of everyday Catholics, and their assimilation and integration into the religious fabric of the US as members of just another garden variety denomination.
The late 1800’s in Germany saw a conflict between the state and the Roman Catholic Church, the Kulturkampf, or “Cultural Struggle.” Despite the passage of numerous laws restricting Church powers, the Kulturkampf ultimately failed and even backfired, spawning Catholic political movements that are ancestral to Christian Democrats in modern Germany. The US never had an explicit Kulturkampf, but in the implicit struggle between Catholicism and the broader culture, Catholicism mostly lost. The American Catholic may accede nominally to the propositions of their church, but in the main, their practice of their faith is today very similar to their Protestant neighbors.
Something very similar happened among American Jews, though with less resistance. Since the mid-19th century American Judaism’s dominant movement has been the Reform tradition. Pioneered in Germany, Reform Judaism remained and remains marginal across Europe, but flourished in the US. While most Jews who left traditional adherence in Europe became entirely secular, retaining a religious confession remained a necessary precondition to respectability in the American context. Reform Judaism, with its minimal emphases on religious law, ritual and ethnicity, aligned well with American denominationalism and the assumption that religion was a matter of private adherence and belief, rather than a public performance reinforcing a separate ethnic identity.
American’s track record of assimilating Catholics and Jews in the 1800’s set the precedent for the success of the 20th-century “melting pot” model, first popularized by Israel Zangwill’s play of the same name in 1908. Public concern surged in the US during this period about the arrival of massive numbers of immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe, specifically because they were seen to be so fundamentally different from the Northwest European majority. One reaction was the 1924 Immigration Act, which limited migration from much of the world. The 40 years between this date and the passage of the 1965 Immigration Act saw historically low levels of migration, but crucially also the full integration into white American identity of the ethnics descended from the Ellis-Island Era immigrants of the turn of the century. By 1968, it was uncontroversial that Richard Nixon’s nominee for the Vice Presidency, Spiro Agnew, should be the son of a Greek immigrant, albeit one raised in his mother’s Episcopalian faith.
Like Rome, America combines flexibility and constancy. The Republic’s constitution is the oldest currently still in effect. With the exception of the tragedy of the Civil War, America's liberal democratic institutions have remained extremely robust over nearly 250 years. As with the progression of Roman Emperors, the typical makeup of US Presidents has changed as well. Barack H. Obama was of course mold-shatteringly atypical, being a black American with a Kenyan father. But unlike Obama, the scion of New England Yankees on his mother’s side, Donald Trump has no ancestors who arrived in the US before the Ellis Island period. In the early 1900’s, the WASP elite of the Northeast, exemplified by men like President Theodore Roosvelt, worried about the rise of hyphenated Americans. But within five decades America elected its first Catholic President, John F. Kennedy, who despite being a classical hyphenated American (all four of his grandparents were the children of Irish immigrants), was fully assimilated into elite WASP culture, a Harvard graduate whose accent and manner signaled his rarefied New England upbringing.
Though the 19th century saw a period when the arrival of large numbers of Catholics worried America’s political class, in the end America did not change to suit Roman Catholicism, Roman Catholicism changed to suit America. Similarly, in due course, the vast numbers of Southern European Catholics and Eastern European Jews who arrived around 1900 assimilated to American norms and values, enriching American literature, music, intellectual life and cuisine and pushing society’s bounds of religious pluralism a little further. But not in the end fundamentally altering American values.
A vast nation with incredible opportunities, since its founding, the American republic’s geographic gifts have spared it ever facing the threat of newcomers dispossessing the natives or overthrowing the established order. But smaller nations in many other ways similar to the US have not always enjoyed the same enriching immigration experience, instead seeing nations within nations arise because of the quantity of newcomers and foundational incompatibilities between their culture and the host society. France today faces that scenario with a subset of its population of Francophone North African Muslims.