Are Hispanics The New Italians? There Are Some Things In Common…

I have begun a series of posts on ethnic change in America, as viewed through my eight subject cities on Pennsylvania’s lower Schuylkill River.  Last month I wrote about the unpleasant national reaction to immigrants—primarily Italians—after the First World War, when our government attempted to structure the racial and ethnic makeup of the nation to favor the descendants of northern and western European immigrants.  My point was how immigrants judged too far from the mainstream—primarily, but by no means exclusively, Italians—generated a regressive and nativist reaction that swept through Congress.  

Today, a similar pattern is discernable, and there is support for an even more sweeping resolution of “the immigration problem” than was contained in the Acts of the 1920s.   This time the xenophobia is directed against Hispanics, with Italians not missing from those who feel this way.  This is the overarching story, and we are still in the middle of the second part, but there are other interesting parallels.  This time I pick up the national thread, and then compare the two periods of increased immigration in the lower Schuylkill valley, looking for what is different, and for what is much the same.

After almost closing the door to immigrants, America spent the next few decades learning to celebrate not so much its immigrant past but the concept of “assimilation,” i.e., the melding together of disparate ethnic strains into something called “an American.”  This took place largely during the mid-20^th century, that period to which we look back with so much longing (I’m talking about after WWII, of course).  This was “The American Half-Century,” when we dominated the world’s economy.  We prospered by making things and selling them to other countries, recording the greatest period of economic progress in our nation’s history. 

What is underappreciated is that this period was actually an outlier in American history.  There were no waves of immigrants arriving on our shores.  They came, certainly, but not in anywhere like the numbers of before, and they tended to be better off, both in education and wealth.  But by the last decades of the century, things had changed again.  A new immigrant wave began to draw notice, this time not by people who arrived by ship, but those who walked.  As the half-century began to draw to a close, one of the signs of its closure was renewed concern about immigration.  This concern was manifest among “white America.”  Fortunately, “white” by that time largely included Italians.  Seizing the opportunity, these descendants of immigrants joined in turning the weapons and the phrases once used against themselves towards the new arrivals, Hispanics.

That’s pretty much where we are today.  It’s a limbo of sorts, as the ultimate question of “legality” remains to be settled.  Whether Congress produces the 21^st century version of its previous regressive and racist policy, or pursues a different course, remains to be seen.  In the meanwhile, what can we, while in the midst of this new wave of immigrants, learn from the previous wave?  So much has changed; can the two really be compared?  Hispanics have settled in the lower Schuylkill valley; data about how many and where they settled provide some interesting comparisons of this current wave to the previous one.

We are trying to read numbers, but which ones to use, and from what source?  We are slightly more than halfway between national Censuses, which makes our official numbers—as of 2010—somewhat out of date.  Websites offer more recent data, but its veracity should remain suspect, at all times.  Keeping that in mind, I did some online research on the racial and ethnic makeup of the river towns.  I employed city-data.com for this.  It is one of several companies that market information to prospective home buyers.  I chose it largely because it offers structurally identical sites on each of the river towns.  It is thus likely that these different sites employ the same methodology in acquiring and presenting their data.  This eliminates any conscious (or unconscious) effort on my part to manipulate the data by comparing different methodologies.  I can thus use this data for comparison purposes.  I otherwise make no claims as to its accuracy.

The data is offered in both raw numbers and percentages.  This is important, because we are analyzing population change among towns of greatly varying population.  Norristown’s 2013 population of 35,407 was more than twice as large as Phoenixville, and almost twenty-eight times as large as West Conshohocken.  Its African-American population is almost twice the size of that of the other seven river towns combined.  In such cases, percentages work better than totals for the larger picture, although the totals must be periodically inserted to keep things in perspective.   

City-data.com’s structure allows only comparison between 2000 and 2013.  It would be nice to have more recent data than 2013, but using 2000 gives us thirteen years of perspective, so we’ll work with what has happened to the Hispanic presence in the river towns between 2000 and 2013.  How does this new wave reflect previous waves of immigrants?  How is it different?  It’s much too early for a historian to draw conclusions to those questions, but not too early to offer some initial theses, points that deserve further study.  I’m going to focus both on what has changed and what hasn’t.

In the broadest sense, that of time, the comparison between Italians and Hispanics holds up.  The great wave of Italians came during the last century of the 19^th century and the first decade of the 20^th.  The great wave of Hispanics has—so far—spanned much the same transition period between the 20^th and 21^st centuries. During the 1970s, the illegal immigrant population of the U.S. was estimated to be 1.1 million.  Illegal immigration during the 1980s more than doubled, rising to 1.3 million.  That number jumped even further during the 1990s to almost 6 million, and during that decade Mexico became the largest national source.  The numbers continued to rise during the 2000s, and Hispanics solidified their primary place among them after the post-9/11 reaction that tightened security of our air and sea borders. 

These are significant parallels in timing, but they are also quite likely coincidental.  We should also not forget that Italians were but the latest major arrivals in a long period of substantial immigration while Hispanics largely stand alone in our current comparative period.  History does not repeat itself; patterns do.

The movement of Hispanics into the lower Schuylkill Valley is also demonstrating another characteristic in common with the Italians: the smaller towns are receiving not just fewer people, but fewer by percentage.  When we are talking about immigrants who settled in towns, rather than those in agriculture, it is clear that the smallest towns offered the fewest opportunities to new immigrants, then and now.  Opportunity here is defined as both economic—jobs available—and social—less community opposition.  This means that along with fewer jobs, a town with a small population could offer more unified resistance to newcomers.  The three smallest towns on the lower Schuylkill—West Conshohocken, Spring City and Royersford—largely resisted the many ethnicities of the 19th/20^th century migration wave, and appear to be doing the same thing today.

The 2013 population numbers online demonstrate that the smaller the town, the lower the percentage of Hispanics, but demonstrate something else also.  To appreciate this, we must remember that the river towns break into two groups by population; the lower five and the upper three.  In 2013, Conshohocken, with 7,780 people, was the most populous town of the lower five, but had less than half the population of the next most populous town, Phoenixville, which posted 16,440 in the same year.

The five smallest towns possessed the lowest percentages of Hispanics, but there was no break in the number of Hispanics proportionate to that of the overall populations of either Phoenixville or Pottstown, the next two most populous towns.  Here are the river towns, ranked by percentage of Hispanics, followed by their overall populations, in 2013:

Town                                          % of Hispanics                       Total Population

Spring City:                                   2.3%                                                3,359 

Conshohocken:                            3.5%                                               7,870

Royersford:                                  4.2%                                                4,784

West Conshohocken:                 4.5%                                                1,273

Bridgeport                                   4.7%                                                 4,580

Pottstown:                                   5.3%                                               22,665

Phoenixville:                               7.9%                                               16,440
Norristown:                               26.3%                                             35,407 

That’s a pretty slow percentage rise, until you get to Norristown.   

I will get get to Norristown in next month’s post.  I’m going to close this time by pointing out another way in which the current influx of Hispanics follows traditional patterns.  Conshohocken, despite having the largest population of the lower five, ranks second on the fewest-Hispanics scale.  This is a current demonstration of one of the most traditional truths about immigrants:  Throughout history, with very few exceptions, immigrants have arrived in their new lands with little money.  If you are looking for where they settled, you can pretty much bet it wasn’t the richer part of town.  Today’s version of that principle in the lower Schuylkill valley focuses on towns rather than neighborhoods, and no town among my subject eight is doing better than Conshohocken.  Property values—and rents—are sky high.  West Conshohocken comes close (particularly on a per-capita basis), adding to the reasons for its low percentage of Hispanics.

In discussing the similarities between the arrival of the Italians and the Hispanics, Norristown deserves a post all its own.  See you next month. 

Hispanics Are The New Italians. History Says That May Not Be A Good Thing.

The towns on Pennsylvania’s lower Schuylkill River were built by successive waves of immigrants, and no group settled in greater numbers than the Italians.  Today we celebrate their success in achieving the American Dream.  We have largely forgotten that their arrival triggered a national reaction, an expression of America’s “other side,” a combination of racism and ethnocentricity.  Today we are seeing a resurgence of that reactionary attitude, against the newest large wave of immigrants, Hispanics.  In what can only be described as bitter irony, many of those hostile to these new people are themselves the proud descendants of the people that triggered that same reaction upon their arrival in this country.

The 1920s saw a major turning point in U.S. immigration history, and Italian immigrants—and people’s opinions about them—were central to what happened.  As busy as Ellis Island had been in the late 1800s, the early years of the 20^th century saw an even greater surge of immigrants.  Between 1905 and the outbreak of the First World War, some ten million people arrived on our shores.  1907 was the peak year, with over 1 million people arriving, primarily at New York.  The migrations of the previous century had brought people different from our English forefathers to these shores, but these new 20^th century immigrants even more different, too different for many people.  Many of these were the people from southern Italy.  This fact would have a lasting impact on the American view of race and ethnicity. 

The First World War brought this massive movement of people to a complete stop, of course.  At war’s end, the number of desperate people in Europe who would have welcomed a chance to come to America was very much larger than it had been, and immigration began to rise again.  America, however, was in a very different mood by the 1920s.  Italians and the other “Industrial Immigrants” had arrived in a time of great economic expansion, when industries desperately sought new workers.  By 1920, a postwar recession had people worrying about new immigrants taking away jobs.

This was just one part of an era, America’s attempt to return to “normalcy.”  The Progressive Era was an increasingly distant memory as America elected as president Warren Harding, a man whose sole qualification for the job was that he looked “presidential.”  The early 1920s then saw a reexamination of several traditional American policies, with immigration prominent among them.  The shameful result was the first attempt to structure America by race.

By the 1920s, while every new ethnic group could claim to have faced discrimination, Italians were being viewed with the most suspicion.  As best-selling author Bill Bryson, in his study of the Sacco and Vanzetti case, caught the mood of the time: “Wherever problems arose, Italians seemed to be at the heart of things.  The widespread perception of Italians was that if they weren’t Fascists or Bolsheviks, they were anarchists or Communists, and if they weren’t those, they were involved in organized crime.”  He quotes a New York Times article as saying that it was “perhaps hopeless to think of civilizing [Italians] or keeping them in order, except by the arm of the law.”  A University of Wisconsin sociologist (in a statement quite evocative of today) insisted that the crime rate had fallen in Italy only “because all the criminals are here.”  Such widespread allocation of blame had previously been reserved for Jews, and they continued to suffer from it, but the huge number of Italians made them far more obvious targets. 

This negative attitude against Italians was in no way unique; it actually followed the traditional American pattern.  Americans have always rated their component peoples on a positive-to-negative scale.  Ethnicity and Religion help to place the markers between peoples, but the prime determinant is skin color; the lighter you are the better. That’s why, by 1920, the huge numbers that had arrived from the south of Italy provoked such concern.  A few tall, blonde Lombards were one thing, but boatloads of those dark, swarthy Sicilians were quite another.  

Congress decided to take action, and created The House Committee on Immigration and Naturalization to take a look at the situation.  The Committee appointed as its expert advisor a man named Harry H. Laughlin, perhaps the most racially extreme supporter of what is politely known as “negative eugenics,” which in Laughlin’s case meant to “purify the breeding stock of the race at all costs.”  He meant the Caucasian race, of course, rather narrowly defined.  He offered to a rapt audience of Congressmen “evidence“ that ranked the comparative quality or degeneracy of various ethnic groups, and Italians did not fare well. 

Fortified by these “facts,” the Committee promptly wrote what became the Emergency Quota Act upon its passage in 1921.  Note the word “Emergency”; Laughlin had done his work well.  The Act was the first attempt to restrict immigration on a national basis (the West Coast had already been legislating against Chinese and Japanese immigrants).  This was unprecedented, but the method was even more radical: restrict immigrants by nationality.  Its overall purpose was clearly reactionary.  The Act was the first attempt to freeze the components of the American people according to a selected numerical relationship among them.  It restricted a country’s immigrants to 3% of the number of residents from that country living here in 1910.   Under this formula, the countries of northern and western Europe were allowed considerably more new immigrants to the U.S.

With emergency measures taken, Congress took a longer look at the numbers and did not like what they saw.  They took further action by passing the Immigration Act of 1924, which itself encompassed the National Origins Act and the Asian Exclusion Act.  This Act lowered the percentage of a country’s citizens allowed into the U.S. to 2%, but more significantly, made this number according to the 1890 Census.  This was a deliberate move against Italians (although not against them alone), most of whom had arrived after that year.  It was also effective.  Immigration from Italy during the early 1920s, already much lessened by the 1921 Act, was cut a further 90%.  It is estimated that between 1900 and 1910, some 200,000 Italians immigrated the U.S. annually.  Following the 1924 Act, that number dropped to about 4,000.  Storing up trouble for the future, the Act also helped to plant the concept of “illegal immigrant” in the American mind.

The Acts of the 1920s also contained some provisions—and one omission—that resonate today: it greatly restricted the immigration of Africans, and banned both Arabs and Asians outright.  It did not, however, set any limits on immigrants from Latin America.  These attempts to preserve the nation’s racial and ethnic balance effectively capped entry across our eastern and western borders but neglected our southern border. 

This provides a delicious irony to the subsequent history of immigration to our country in the 20^th Century.  This protection of our seacoasts worked pretty well, even though a more liberal approach crept in with the extensive reworking of the entire immigration quota system in 1954.  That “maintain the existing ethnic balance” thing largely continued, if a great deal more subtly.  Or so people thought.  We managed to at least keep down the numbers that might have crossed the oceans, but not those who could walk.

So now here we are, not quite one hundred years after our national attempt at maintaining a nation dominated by its residents from northern and western Europe, and it was all pretty much a waste of time. A new ethnicity—Hispanics—has arrived in large numbers, despite all the legislative and enforcement measures enacted to prevent just such a thing from happening.  Oh, and Asians have developed a substantial presence also.

This raises a question: could Hispanics today—and perceptions of them—be playing a role similar to that of the Italians back then?  If so, then the irony of Italian-Americans being prominent in the voices being raised against this new immigrant group should be appreciated.  This is a relevant question everywhere, but particularly relevant to the still-stagnant towns along the lower Schuylkill River, which need the type of stimulus historically provided by the successive waves of immigrants.

Among these, the immigration issue is most important to the largest of these towns, Norristown, Pa.  More Italians settled there than anywhere else in the lower Delaware Valley, by far, and almost all of them were from the southernmost part of Italy, Sicily.  As fate would have it, their town now has the largest number of Hispanics, by far.  The more things change...

The purpose of this essay was not to minimize the maltreatment suffered by other ethnicities during their entrance into American society, particularly Jews, for whom such a reception had long historical traditions.  It is simply to point out that the recent immigration to the U.S. by Hispanics, primarily Mexicans—and the reaction to it—adheres broadly to a pattern we’ve seen before, at least so far.  It’s the next step in that pattern that is disturbing, because it is so uncertain, and history might sort of repeat itself, because some people certainly are.

That’s why I’m devoting this next series of posts to immigration, its past significance to the Schuylkill River towns and its important future.  There are lessons to be learned here, so that history does not follow the same pattern it did back in the 1920s, when Italians were the newest—and most suspect—presence in our urban communities.

Why Is DeKalb Street One Way? A Brief Lesson About History…And Change

A recurrent theme in my writing is that things change, and change is the only constant in history.  Yet the works of man, from our institutions and governmental structures to our roads tend to remain, long after the conditions that gave birth to them have changed, often fundamentally.  This time I am going to talk about roads; specifically DeKalb Street, in Norristown, Pa.  That’s because Norristown is on the cusp of a renewal, and there are some old things remaining that should change in order to help that revival.  The layout of DeKalb Street is one of them.  It’s in the works, actually, but it has been “in the works” for some time now, and deserves more attention.

An April Times Herald article discussed the long-pending plan to make DeKalb Street two-way, and found a consensus among those it spoke to.  This fact alone makes it both unusual and newsworthy (this is Norristown, after all), but that should not obscure the subject itself.  Everyone agreed that making DeKalb Street two-way would be a good thing, and they are correct.  One respondent remarked that “The designers of this one-way street are dumb,” and commented on the danger the street presented.  He is quite correct about the danger, and there are several more reasons that DeKalb Street should be two-way, but the designers of the street were not dumb.  They were competent men attempting to solve a problem that existed a long time ago.  But that was then; this is now, and things have changed.  They have, in fact, changed fundamentally.  But comprehending just how total that change has been is going to require some imagination from those of you of young to moderate years, particularly if you live in the general area.

First, I should point out that DeKalb Street had been a two-way street at its initial layout, and second, its intersection with Main Street marked the core of downtown since the opening of the DeKalb Street Bridge.  Here is where imagination comes in, because you need to picture the sidewalks at this intersection—in all four directions—bustling with customers on their way to an array of stores open and lit, beckoning them within.  One of my all-time favorite interviewees, the late Mary Early, quoted her mother as often saying to her, “I’d love to live at Main and DeKalb; everything happens at Main and DeKalb.”  She was referring to the Depression times, by the way, so you can imagine what it was like after the end of the Second World War and rationing, for people anxious to forget the previous decade or so.  Downtown Main Street began to enjoy good times once again.

But the period after the end of the war brought some things to Norristown that quickly began to be a major problem.  They weren’t new by any means, but now they came in overwhelming numbers.  “They” were automobiles and trucks.  Not too many compared to today, but far more than downtown, and Main and DeKalb in particular, could handle.  Both streets had been laid out long before the advent of automobiles, and there was simply no room for expansion.

Here’s where the second piece of imagination comes in, exactly the opposite of the first.  I first asked you to picture something that isn’t here—a crowded, prosperous downtown—now I need you to erase your mental image of what is there: all those big highways.  The Pennsylvania Turnpike was on its way, and would arrive in the bucolic farmland of King of Prussia in late 1950, but none of the others existed.  The Schuylkill Expressway was on its way to meet the Turnpike, but none of the Interstate highways existed, because the program had not been created yet. 

The area’s two major roads were U.S. “Shield” highways, Route 422 and Route 202, and they were the problem.  That’s because in Norristown, Route 422 was Main Street and Route 202 was DeKalb Street.  That made the core of downtown Norristown a major crossroads, and not just a regional one, but also a national one.  Route 422 had always been a largely local route into and out of Philadelphia, but Route 202 was different.  It was the only parallel competition for Route 1 between New York City and points south, and the only feasible route for those living west of the coastline and Philadelphia.  The idea of vacationers bound for Florida—or NYC—passing through downtown Norristown may be hard to envision, but I told you this required some imagination.  Thus, by the late 1940s, the local residents, eager to resume their traditional shopping in downtown Norristown, found themselves delayed, if not blocked outright, by cars and trucks on DeKalb Street, which were only passing through, often to major distances a long way away.

Cars were by far the most common, but trucks offered problems of their own, mostly related to their size and weight.  While researching What Killed Downtown? Norristown, Pennsylvania, From Main Street to the Malls, I greatly enjoyed listening to Hank Cisco relate the story of the police truck weighing station at DeKalb and Lafayette.  The truck drivers hated it, calling it “Little Russia.”

Norristown had a traffic congestion problem even before the Turnpike arrived, and given that King of Prussia was to be the termination of this major highway, all its traffic had to go somewhere.  Norristown feared that much of it would head north for New York along Route 202, and thus right through the Borough on DeKalb Street.

Unfortunately, in trying to deal with this problem, Norristown was caught in a bureaucratic net.  The Borough did not have final authority over either of its two main streets.  Although technically national highways, both routes were actually the responsibility of the Commonwealth, for both funding and implementation.  Main Street figured in these calculations also, but I will confine the narrative to DeKalb Street.  Main Street also become one-way (at a different date), but reverted several years later.    

Highway engineers thus faced what was becoming an all-too frequent decision in this time of unprecedented growth:  who gets priority on the streets, local residents or those passing through?  By September, 1948, the answer was clear.  Both DeKalb and Swede Streets were to be converted to one-way.  Burgess William March declared his disagreement, saying “We in town should get first consideration; too much thought is being given to the traveler from Florida to Maine.  Let us give the residents first thought.”

Borough Council did its best to placate the Commonwealth, and attempted to expedite traffic by keeping DeKalb Street two-way, but banning street parking along its downtown stretch.  Council rescinded the effort in December, 1948, except for the period between 3 and 6 PM, when the meters would be bagged.  The no parking experiment had brought about no improvement in traffic flow, and local businesses were unanimous in opposing the loss of parking spots.   

The Commonwealth was not going to be gainsaid.  In October, 1951, Borough Council, reluctantly but unanimously, voted on a traffic plan for both north/south and east/west traffic through Norristown.  DeKalb and would be one way northbound between Lafayette and Johnson Highway, while Markley Street would be one-way southbound along the same stretch.  After several legal requirements were met, DeKalb and Markley Streets became one-way on November 17, 1952.

Giving priority to passers-through on DeKalb Street over the town’s residents didn’t kill downtown, but it didn’t help, either.  Still, as I said above, things have changed.  To keep DeKalb Street one-way would be dumb.  Pedestrian safety is a major consideration, but there are broader ones.  There are more nuanced and erudite ways of expressing this, but here’s a simple one: if you are trying to revive your downtown, you shouldn’t have one of your two major roads only take you away from downtown for 90 percent of its distance.  New attractions are beginning to appear in Norristown, and all roads should lead there, DeKalb Street most definitely among them.

This issue deserves more attention than it is getting.  The April Times Herald article that recorded the consensus of opinion also noted that the process had begun earlier, but echoed the old refrain that "Two public meetings in 2010 were sparsely attended by residents..."  Making DeKalb Street two-way again is a necessary part of the plan for reviving Norristown.  As this may be the only Norristown subject about which there is unanimity of opinion, the public should be pushing this.