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Stirring the American Melting Pot: Middle Eastern Immigration, the Progressives, and the Legal Construction of Whiteness, 1880-1

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Stirring the American Melting Pot: Middle Eastern Immigration, the Progressives, and the Legal Construction of Whiteness, 1880-1 Florida State University Libraries Electronic Theses, Treatises and Dissertations The Graduate School 2013 Stirring the American Melting Pot: Middle Eastern Immigration, the Progressives and the Legal Construction of Whiteness, 1880-1924 Richard Soash Follow this and additional works at the FSU Digital Library. For more information, please contact [email protected] THE FLORIDA STATE UNIVERSITY COLLEGE OF ARTS AND SCIENCES STIRRING THE AMERICAN MELTING POT: MIDDLE EASTERN IMMIGRATION, THE PROGRESSIVES AND THE LEGAL CONSTRUCTION OF WHITENESS, 1880-1924 By RICHARD SOASH A Thesis submitted to the Department of History in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts Degree Awarded: Spring Semester, 2013 Richard Soash defended this thesis on March 7, 2013. The members of the supervisory committee were: Jennifer Koslow Professor Directing Thesis Suzanne Sinke Committee Member Peter Garretson Committee Member The Graduate School has verified and approved the above-named committee members, and certifies that the thesis has been approved in accordance with university requirements. ii To my Grandparents: Evan & Verena Soash Richard & Patricia Fluck iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I am extremely thankful for both the academic and financial support that Florida State University has provided for me in the past two years. I would also like to express my gratitude to the FSU History Department for giving me the opportunity to pursue my graduate education here. My academic advisor and committee members – Dr. Koslow, Dr. Sinke, and Dr. Garretson – have been wonderful teachers and mentors during my time in the Master’s Program; I greatly appreciate their patience, humor, and knowledge, both inside and outside of the classroom. I am also indebted to my family – Don, Ellen, and Lauren Soash – for their love and unwavering support in this process. I owe them more than I could ever repay. Finally, I would like to thank my peers in the history program, particularly Jonathan Shipe and Amy Drewel, for their friendship amidst the every-day – and sometimes not so every-day – experiences of graduate school. This thesis would not have come together without the support of everyone mentioned here. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Abstract .......................................................................................................................................... iv 1. INTRODUCTION ...................................................................................................................1 1.1 Historiography - Whiteness Studies and the Progressive-Immigrant Relationship .......2 1.2 Secondary Sources on Middle Eastern Immigration ....................................................5 2. FILLING THE POT, 1880-1900 .............................................................................................9 2.1 Coming to the Pot ..........................................................................................................9 2.2 Race, Citizenship, and the Chinese Precedent .............................................................15 2.3 Life in the United States, Pre-1900 ..............................................................................17 2.4 “Sanctified Arab Tramps”: American Views in the Late Nineteenth Century ............24 3. STRAINING THE POT, 1900-1914 .....................................................................................27 3.1 Classifying Progressivism ............................................................................................28 3.2 “Its Value Will Become Apparent With Scrutiny” ......................................................30 3.3 The Racial Prerequisite Cases ......................................................................................42 4. PUTTING A LID ON IT, 1914-1924 ....................................................................................46 4.1 The Lights Go Down ...................................................................................................46 4.2 “About that of Walnut”: Smith, Shahid, and Dow.......................................................49 4.3 The Asiatic Barred Zone ..............................................................................................56 4.4 Basha and Cartozian: The Final Court Cases ..............................................................59 4.5 The 1921 and 1924 Quota Acts ...................................................................................61 4.6 Conclusions ..................................................................................................................62 REFERENCES ..............................................................................................................................64 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH .........................................................................................................71 v ABSTRACT When an immigrant came to early twentieth-century America, his or her ability to naturalize was dependent on the artificial color designation assigned to his or her group. Armenian and Syrian-Lebanese immigrants, however, entered the country as the ultimate “in- between people.” They were situated geographically between Europe and Asia and racially between Caucasian and Mongolian, “white” and “yellow.” The two groups were unique in that, at the dawn of the Progressive Era, they could have conceivably been placed into either category. This thesis argues that the socioeconomic biases of the people in power at the time, in this case Progressive Era policy-makers, played a large role in determining the “whiteness” of Armenian and Syrian-Lebanese immigrants. vi CHAPTER ONE INTRODUCTION While students of history remember 1619 as the year when the first African slaves disembarked onto the soil of colonial America, few realize that a Middle Eastern immigrant predated them to Jamestown. The rather straightforwardly named Martin the Armenian appeared as early as 1618 in the records of the Virginia Company of London, working as a servant for George Yeardley, the governor of the Virginia colony.1 Martin, made a freeman by Yeardley, traveled back to London in 1622 and vanished from company records after 1624.2 In an achievement in and of itself, Martin survived four years of Colonial Jamestown life, whereas his nineteenth-century equivalent, a twenty-seven year old named Antonious al-Bishallany who was the first Syrian-Lebanese immigrant to the United States, died in New York in 1856 after spending just two years in the country.3 Martin the Armenian and Antonious al-Bishallany represented the first drops in the wave of Middle Eastern immigrants that would arrive in the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth-century. By 1924, three centuries after Martin left America, the total number of Armenians in the country had increased from one person to nearly one hundred thousand, second only in total number among Middle Eastern immigrants to the two hundred thousand Syrian- Lebanese.4 The influx of these groups coincided with the Progressive Era in the United States, setting up a convoluted situation in which officials struggled to “color-code” immigrants who were not fully white, black, yellow, European, African, or Asian. This Thesis explores the artificial racial assignments applied to Middle Eastern immigrants, arguing that ultimately the designations revealed far more about the socio-economic biases and prejudices of the era’s policy-makers, rather than “inherent” racial traits of the immigrants themselves. 1 M. Vartan Malcolm, The Armenians in America (Boston: The Pilgrim Press, 1919), 52-55; Robert Mirak, Torn Between Two Lands: Armenians in America, 1890 to World War I (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983), 35. 2 The Virginia colony did bring in a “George the Armenian” in the 1650s to help with silk production. Despite the similarity in names, one doubts that George bore any relation to Martin. See Mirak, Torn Between Two Lands, 35. 3 May Ahdab-Yehia, “The Lebanese Maronites, Patterns of Continuity and Change” in Arabs in the New World: Studies on Arab-American Communities, ed. Sameer Y. Abraham and Nadeel Abraham (Detroit: Wayne State University Center for Urban Studies, 1983), 152. 4 Robert Mirak, “The Armenians in America,” in The Armenian People from Ancient to Modern Times, Volume II, ed. Richard G. Hovannisian (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1997), 390. For estimates of the numbers of Syrian- Lebanese during a similar timeframe, see Alixa Naff, Becoming American, The Early Arab Immigrant Experience (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1985), 108. 1 1.1 Historiography - Whiteness Studies and the Progressive-Immigrant Relationship Of the two historiographical genres from which this Thesis draws, “whiteness studies” represents the only one with a formal designation. Primarily a subtopic within the field of U.S. immigration history, whiteness studies emphasizes the constructed nature of racially-based color designations, be they imposed by politics or society. Sawsan Abdulrahim, writing for a broader social science audience in Race and Arab Americans Before and After 9/11, provides an excellent, succinct explanation of the field: In recent years, however, there has been a proliferation of a new genre of race writings specifically concerned with white racial identity formation. This work, referred to as ‘whiteness studies’ or ‘critical studies of whiteness,’ argues that, like other racial categories, ‘whiteness’ is constructed, dynamic, and context-specific; it is negotiated by individuals and
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