This is great. The idea immigrants in the late 19th century assimilated perfectly is so funny to me. My great grandma never learned a word of English and just spoke polish to the day she died
thank you!! it's so ahistorical but also so, so in keeping with the great american tradition of pretending that the immigrants of a generation or two ago were both perfect *and* welcomed, unlike today's bad immigrants, lol
My grandfather arrived in Galveston, not New York, with the Russian name I use for my handle, and exchanged it for the monosyllable Bloom on the kindly advice of the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, German Jews according to family tradition who were worried about being disgraced by their wild relatives from beyond the Pale in Bessarabia and Ukraine. I've watched friends in the Chinese community give their kids English names like "Ophelia" and "Filbert". Freddie's family kept its foreign name because it sounds pleasingly aristocratic (though in fact it means "The Peasant") and utterly white.
this is super interesting! do you know how quickly after arriving they changed their surname? i'm really fascinated by the role HIAS played in early 20th century migration -- i read somewhere that they were basically the first immigration defense lawyers!
loved this, puts things in the proper perspective, deflates all the myths and b.s. around the history of immigration to the States
and about one pernicious myth, that lazy (or ignorant?) immigration officers at Ellis Island were changing surnames names (or their spelling) willy nilly, this ignores the simple facts that not only were surnames were relatively recent development in western history, in terms of any stability or common usage (e.g., people and their families were traditionally identified by their occupation, as in ‘John the stonemason’ or their village, as in ‘John of Kinvarra’), eventually historically stable surnames were also often evolving into many variations in immigrants’ countries and cultures of origin — take my surname, Whalen: my family, on both my mother‘s and father’s sides, is almost totally Irish, and in Ireland ‘Whalen’ is a fairly common surname, but it is more often spelled ‘Whelan’; the slightly different spelling for my father’s adopted family (he was born a Carroll but after his mother died giving birth to him his own father, already facing raising two little girls alone, another Irish family, the Whalens, in his Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood offered to take him) is certainly not the result of a switch at Ellis Island, where some early 20th Century immigration officer imagined that if sounded like ‘whale’ it just had to be spelled that way lol (you can find many families spelling it that way in Ireland, for generations now); moreover, the ‘Whelan/Whalen’ surname is itself an anglicisation of the Irish surname Ó Faoláin, but it is definitely not the only one, as we have Felan, Faelan, Hyland, and Phelan/O’Phelan (just some of the more common amongst many!), and most important, these other surnames are still found across Ireland (although ‘Whelan/Whalen’ is apparently more frequent in Waterford and Kilkenny); so, enough with ‘they changed the name and/or its spelling at Ellis Island’ b.s.
I think you make deBoer look uninformed for another reason implied by the name change thing:
If they weren't forced to change their names, but many did so willingly... Doesn't that literally prove that they wanted to accelerate their own assimilation?
"insist they [immigrants] follow minimum wage law." Wtf is deBoer talking about here, as if people working for minimum wage have any say in the matter
no, no, you don't understand! when workers are exploited by management, that's a stunning failure of solidarity on part of the workers!
accidentally makes the case for blanket amnesty by the president like Reagan did. Lets get them into the system!
This is great. The idea immigrants in the late 19th century assimilated perfectly is so funny to me. My great grandma never learned a word of English and just spoke polish to the day she died
thank you!! it's so ahistorical but also so, so in keeping with the great american tradition of pretending that the immigrants of a generation or two ago were both perfect *and* welcomed, unlike today's bad immigrants, lol
My grandfather arrived in Galveston, not New York, with the Russian name I use for my handle, and exchanged it for the monosyllable Bloom on the kindly advice of the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, German Jews according to family tradition who were worried about being disgraced by their wild relatives from beyond the Pale in Bessarabia and Ukraine. I've watched friends in the Chinese community give their kids English names like "Ophelia" and "Filbert". Freddie's family kept its foreign name because it sounds pleasingly aristocratic (though in fact it means "The Peasant") and utterly white.
this is super interesting! do you know how quickly after arriving they changed their surname? i'm really fascinated by the role HIAS played in early 20th century migration -- i read somewhere that they were basically the first immigration defense lawyers!
No, sadly, most of the story is lost.
This was so smart and beautifully written!
thank you!
loved this, puts things in the proper perspective, deflates all the myths and b.s. around the history of immigration to the States
and about one pernicious myth, that lazy (or ignorant?) immigration officers at Ellis Island were changing surnames names (or their spelling) willy nilly, this ignores the simple facts that not only were surnames were relatively recent development in western history, in terms of any stability or common usage (e.g., people and their families were traditionally identified by their occupation, as in ‘John the stonemason’ or their village, as in ‘John of Kinvarra’), eventually historically stable surnames were also often evolving into many variations in immigrants’ countries and cultures of origin — take my surname, Whalen: my family, on both my mother‘s and father’s sides, is almost totally Irish, and in Ireland ‘Whalen’ is a fairly common surname, but it is more often spelled ‘Whelan’; the slightly different spelling for my father’s adopted family (he was born a Carroll but after his mother died giving birth to him his own father, already facing raising two little girls alone, another Irish family, the Whalens, in his Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood offered to take him) is certainly not the result of a switch at Ellis Island, where some early 20th Century immigration officer imagined that if sounded like ‘whale’ it just had to be spelled that way lol (you can find many families spelling it that way in Ireland, for generations now); moreover, the ‘Whelan/Whalen’ surname is itself an anglicisation of the Irish surname Ó Faoláin, but it is definitely not the only one, as we have Felan, Faelan, Hyland, and Phelan/O’Phelan (just some of the more common amongst many!), and most important, these other surnames are still found across Ireland (although ‘Whelan/Whalen’ is apparently more frequent in Waterford and Kilkenny); so, enough with ‘they changed the name and/or its spelling at Ellis Island’ b.s.
I think you make deBoer look uninformed for another reason implied by the name change thing:
If they weren't forced to change their names, but many did so willingly... Doesn't that literally prove that they wanted to accelerate their own assimilation?