Oscar Handlin's Disgrace
The Uprooted: The Epic Story of the Great Migrations that Made the American People
Oscar Handlin, 1951
Oscar Handlin won the Pulitzer Prize for declaring the “history of immigration is a history of alienation and its consequences” But he never mentioned anyone in particular, leading readers and reviewers to praise his “sociological” style. “I have not found it in the nature of this work to give its pages the usual historical documentation,” he said. Freed from any obligation to support his generalizations with the experiences much less the real voices of real people, Handlin indulged himself in making up pretend voices. Literally! He painted a picture of superstitious, ignorant peasants who were too thick to understand the new society they found in America. They huddled together in ghettos until they were told by their social betters that they must become American. And then they discovered the depth of their alienation: they would never belong and they could never go home.
It’s an unreal tale of heartbreak and woe. “The mighty collapse [of] the peasant heart of Europe...left without homes millions of helpless, bewildered people” Handlin said. These peasant immigrants belonged to a pre-modern, pre-commercial, and definitely pre-industrial world in Handlin’s account. So it made sense that they were naively religious, believed in fairies, and felt attuned to the “rhythms of nature”. Their village communities had given structure and meaning to their lives; they were adrift the moment they left. The horror of the passage weeded out the weakest and hardened the rest. Once in America, peasants who had known only the land were unable to escape the cities and find a place in the countryside. Instead, they became unskilled workers on canal, then railroad, and then highway crews.
“Often,” Handlin said, “they would try to understand. They would think about it in the pauses of their work, speculate sometimes as their minds wandered, tired, at the close of a long day.” It’s as if he was talking about an alien species -- and perhaps from his perspective, he was. The incredible condescension and sheer distance between the historian and his subjects is remarkable, in a book still regarded by many as a classic text. Handlin consistently denied the immigrants agency. They were orphan birds forced from their “nests” and unable to return; “and if they failed to reach the soil which had once been so much a part of their being, it was only because the town had somehow trapped them.”
There were some interesting facts sprinkled into the melodrama, that suggested the skeleton of a more accurate and more interesting story. “A single year in the 1830’s saw seventeen vessels founder on the run from Liverpool to Quebec alone,” Handlin said. That’s alarming. And in 1847, he said, “eighty-four ships were held at Grosse Isle below Quebec...ten thousand died.” Unfortunately, he continued this passage not with facts, but with an italicized but unattributed statement written in slang, to sound like it was a first-person account: “I have seen them lyin on the beach, crawlin on the mud, and dyin like fish out of water.” Given what comes later, I suspect this came from Handlin’s own fevered imagination.
Two of the most problematic elements of The Uprooted for me were Handlin’s discussions of why the immigrants didn’t move out of the cities to country for which they yearned, and his musings on their sexual difficulties. “Reluctance to pitch on the cheapest frontier lands,” he said, was based on “the expensive compulsion to settle on farms already brought under cultivation by others,” rather than on the inopportune timing of their arrival relative to the availability of accessible land. Isolated farms, where “neighbors lived two or three miles off,” also discouraged village-oriented peasants, Handlin claimed. But this was a very late, high plains style of farming; for much of the period he was discussing it would not have applied. And Handlin completely mischaracterized truck farming close to urban centers; turning it into a sad affair where “Would-be agriculturalists...found used-up bits of ground...[and] took up the sterile, neglected acres.” The fact that they were successful, earned a living, and provided perishable foods to city-people while re-establishing their relationship with the land, goes almost unnoticed in Handlin’s gloomy account.
On the sexual front -- I’m not even going to go there, except to say that it was unnecessary, it was a blatantly condescending caricature, and since there are no attributions it was apparently another figment of Handlin’s prurient, fevered imagination. “Better sleep out on the fire escape, Joe.” REALLY? This was a Pulitzer-winning history. The Uprooted is a disgrace and it ruined Oscar Handlin for me.