The Making of Multicultural America
Catholic group seeking to settle in a fiercely Protestant society, the Irish became victims of nativist hostility. They came about the same time as the Chinese, but they had a distinct advantage: the Naturalization Law of 1790 had reserved citizenship for “whites” only. Consequently, the Irish became citizens, and, as vot-ers, they pursued an “ethnic” strategy. They elected Irish to city councils and mayorships, and their elect-ed officials made certain that Irish builders were given construction contracts and that Irish men were hired as firemen and policemen. By 1900, the Irish were entering the middle class. Fleeing pogroms in Russia, Jews were driven from what John Cuddihy described as the “Middle Ages into the Anglo-American world of the goyim ‘beyond the pale.— In America, they settled in the Lower East Side, a beehive of tenements and garment factories that exploited an army of Jewish women. To many Jews, America represented the Promised Land. This vi-sion energized them to rise from “greenhorns” into middle-class Americans. Stressing the importance of education, they pooled family resources; the earnings of the daughters working in the sweatshops helped to support the education of their brothers in institutions like New York City College and Harvard. But as Jewish immigrants and their children were entering the main-stream, they found themselves facing the rise of Hitler and the horror of the ultimate pogrom. Safe in Amer-ica, they asked themselves: What is our responsibility as Jews to Hitler’s victims? What should we do to break America’s “deafening silence” over the Holo-caust? Demanding that America do everything it could to rescue people destined for the death camps, Jewish.
