Handlin Case

YES: Oscar Handlin asserts that immigrants to the United States in the late nineteenth century were alienated from the cultural traditions of the homeland they had left as well as those of their adopted country.

NO: Mark Wyman argues that as many as four million immigrants to the United States between 1880 and 1930 viewed their trip as temporary and remained tied psychologically to their homeland to which they returned once they had accumulated enough wealth to enable them to improve their status back home.

Even though strong arguments were made I agree with Handlin and his argument that immigrants were uprooted. I agree with him mainly because I myself am an immigrant and have experienced being one first hand. Handlin mentioned when immigrants first come to the United States they are marked as poor which is a social flaw that is indigenous to the New World. Immigrants that came to the United States often have to conform to the western world ways and so on. Immigrants were uprooted because there is never a definite that they will return to their home country. Immigrants usually come to America to find a better life for themselves and their family which is possible. There is never a guarantee that they will return to their homeland because life in the United States is better for making money and living.

The Ku Klux Klan also took part in the assimilation of immigrants. Immigrants were pressured for their separateness and it begun to disturb them. As soon as the conception of Americanization had acquired the connotation of conformity with existing patterns, the whole way of group life of the newcomers was question. Conformity became something that was natural because of life on the West. There had been a time when society had recognized no distinction among citizens but that between native and the foreign-born. That distinction carried no imputation of superiority or inferiority. Now there were attempts to distinguish among the natives between those who really belonged and those who did not, to separate out those who were born in the United Sates but those immigrant parentages cut them off from the truly indigenous people.

Immigrants maintained traditions from their homeland but at the same time adopted new traditions from the Americas. Yet the road of conformity was also barred to them. There were matters in which they wished to be like others, undistinguished from anyone else, but they never hit upon the means of becoming so. There was no pride in the surname, in which Europe had been little used, and many a new arrival was willing enough to make a change. What they did know was that they had not succeeded, that they had not established themselves to the extent that they could expect to be treated as if they belonged where they were. They had thus completed their alienation from the culture to which they had come, as from which they had left.

Both authors had very convincing arguments. Handlin's main