6
The restoration of the Jews and the Americanization of the world did in fact take place in the twentieth century, but the fulfillment of these hopes was not as satisfying as Americans had once dreamed. The twentieth century didn’t just see the restoration of a Jewish state in Palestine; it also saw the most murderous outbreak of mass antisemitism in the thousands of years of Jewish existence.
It would have been simpler if either the hopes of the optimists or the fears of the pessimists had come true. Instead, the world of the twentieth century was one in which human progress exceeded the wildest hopes of past centuries—even as the century brought forth horrors that outstripped the worst nightmares of the past. Stalin’s Soviet Union, Mao’s China, Hitler’s Germany took cruelty and the ruthless exercise of power to depths no previous era had seen. The wars of the twentieth century saw a marriage of technical skill and moral depravity beyond anything the world had known. Yet at the same time, the spread of democratic ideals, the miracles of modern medicine, and the wonders of industrial production allowed an unprecedented number of people around the world to live in a freedom and affluence that no human beings had ever known. In the United States during the Cold War, fewer parents than ever in history had to worry that their children would die from hunger or disease, but every parent had to worry about thermonuclear war.
If the first century of American independence was the century in which the prospect of the end of the world moved from the realm of myth into the realm of politics, America’s second century saw the possibility of both apocalypse and utopia move from the realm of imagination to the realm of fact. What America’s third century will bring we are only beginning to discover, but we already live in a world whose dangers and opportunities both surpass anything the human species has ever seen.
This change in the human condition is so familiar a part of our lives that we must struggle to remind ourselves both how unusual our circumstances have become, and how disruptive our ancestors found the transition from the relatively orderly and optimistic world of, say, the mid-nineteenth century through all the turbulence that has happened since. But we cannot understand American history, or any world history at all, without some grasp of the uniquely complex and startling concatenation of change that brought us to our current precarious perch.
For Americans, the transition from the simple and confident worldview of the pre–Civil War era to our current state first took the form of a rapidly deepening but largely unwelcome relationship with the people and the politics of the three great empires that between them controlled Eastern Europe, much of Central Europe, and most of what we now think of as the Middle East. The Ottoman Empire, the Russian Empire, and the Austrian Empire (the Austro-Hungarian Dual Monarchy after 1867) had not figured largely in American life before 1880, but as the imperial zone moved closer to the catastrophic wars and revolutions of the twentieth century, developments there played a steadily greater role in American life. A stream of migrants changed the ethnic and cultural composition of the United States in ways that many of the Founders would have found incomprehensible, while the conflicts that broke out as the empires declined ultimately gave birth to the two world wars of the twentieth century and transformed America’s relationship with the world.
If the crisis in the imperial zone was a harrowing ordeal for the United States, it was transformational and catastrophic for the Jews. More than 90 percent of the world’s Jews lived in the three empires when the upheavals began, and the destruction of the old order plunged the Jewish people into its greatest crisis since the emperor Hadrian devastated Judea in 135. The Holocaust was the crowning disaster of an age of disasters. The Zionist movement emerged from and was shaped by a social implosion on an unprecedented scale.
Neither the American people, the Jews of the imperial zone, nor anybody else had any idea what lay ahead of them in 1880. Just as the young Herzl believed that the economic and technological progress of the nineteenth century heralded a brighter future for Europe’s Jews, many Americans looked at the progress of liberal democracy, the Industrial Revolution, and capitalist economic development across Europe and predicted a future of democracy and peace: the end of history seemed to be at hand.
The international situation seemed to be improving in the 1870s and 1880s. Germany’s liberal future seemed assured; Wilhelm I’s son and heir, the future Kaiser Frederick III, was married to a daughter of Queen Victoria and espoused liberal principles. At a time of antisemitic rioting in Prussia, the crown prince attended a synagogue service in full dress uniform and ensured that his attendance at a university lecture on the evils of antisemitism was publicized.[1] Beyond Germany, the forces of freedom faced tougher challenges. But even in the East, light was beginning to dawn. Russia’s reforming Tsar Alexander II had emancipated the serfs, relaxed censorship, and by 1880 was mulling plans to call a Russian parliament.[2] The Ottoman Empire was in the midst of badly needed reforms. Beginning in 1830, the so-called Tanzimat Era saw the introduction of legal, administrative, educational, and economic reforms intended to modernize and revitalize the empire. Christians and Jews were given legal standing equal to that of Muslims, and in 1876 an Ottoman constitution was adopted that converted the sultan into a constitutional monarch who shared power with an elected assembly.
Sadly, history still had some tricks up its sleeve. In Germany the liberal Kaiser Frederick III died of cancer after a reign of only ninety-nine days. His successor was the illiberal Wilhelm II, under whose erratic leadership German history lurched onto the path that would bring it and the world to catastrophe. In the Ottoman Empire, Sultan Abdulhamid II quickly overthrew the elected assembly, abrogated the constitution, and resumed his role as absolute monarch.[3] In what became known as the Austro-Hungarian Dual Monarchy after 1867, conservative elements in both the Austrian and Hungarian parts of the empire did their best to limit the nationalist movements that threatened to tear the monarchy apart. And in Russia, Alexander III, who came to power after his liberal, reforming father was assassinated, was even more antiliberal than Wilhelm II. Within days, riots against Jews spread across Russia; the police stood by as dozens of Jews were murdered and some twenty thousand were made homeless. Under Alexander III, antisemitism became official government policy. The May Laws limited Jewish participation in the professions and imposed restrictions on where they could live.[4] “But we must never forget that the Jews crucified our Lord and shed His precious blood,” wrote the tsar to officials who proposed a relaxation in anti-Jewish policies.[5] Jews were seen as a “bacillus,” a germ poisoning the pure Russian nation.
The hate that Alexander III unleashed in Russia permanently changed America’s relationship to the Jewish people. More than two million Jews from the Russian Empire and Eastern Europe would emigrate to the United States between 1881 and the end of mass immigration in 1924.[6] The large majority of American Jews today are descended from this wave of emigration. Before 1881 the United States was essentially a spectator nation where Jewish issues were concerned; by the time the Russian immigration was over, the United States was home to one of the world’s largest Jewish communities.
The resurgence of despotic rule and its alliance with antisemitism were only a small part of the deepening crisis that embraced the vast expanse of land that stretched from Warsaw to Vladivostok, and south through the Balkans to include most of what today we think of as the Middle East. As recently as 1870 there were only four states (the Russian, Austrian, and Ottoman empires plus Greece) in what we can think of as the imperial zone. The Russian Empire stretched well into modern Poland, and in addition to Russia itself its European territories included Finland, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Belarus, Ukraine, Azerbaijan, Georgia, and much of Moldova. The Austro-Hungarian monarchy, successor state to the Holy Roman Empire of old, included not only modern Austria and Hungary, but also the Czech Republic, Slovakia, much of southern and western Poland, Croatia, Slovenia, and Romania. In Europe, the Ottoman Empire still controlled much of the Balkan Peninsula. Its African territory—where its grip was steadily weakening—nominally included Libya, Tunisia, Egypt, and Sudan. In Asia, the Ottomans controlled modern Syria, Lebanon, Israel and the Palestinian territories, Jordan, Iraq, and much of the Arabian Peninsula including the sacred cities of Mecca and Medina now controlled by Saudi Arabia.
It was in this part of the world that the shape of the twentieth century would be decided, and the tragedies that convulsed the region, killing close to 100 million people in military and political violence, and driving tens of millions from their homes, still haunt our lives today.
From the standpoint of educated middle-class American opinion, nothing could have been more surprising than the eruption of violence across so much of the world. Then as now, Americans liked to believe that all good things work together: that economic development promotes political democracy, that political democracy promotes tolerance and inclusion, and that all this progress leads to a more peaceful world. That liberal American faith may yet prove to be justified in the long run—I for one hope very much that it does—but the history of the decades following the assassination of Alexander II seemed to tell another story. Historians will long debate the causes of the great catastrophe that overtook the imperial zone, but a few big trends seem to stand out.
One of the most important differences between Western Europe and the imperial zone was the contrast between the relative linguistic and cultural uniformity of the nations of Western Europe and the complex, interwoven ethnic tapestry of the empires. Countries like France, Sweden, Britain, and Germany had their linguistic and ethnic diversity and sometimes, as in the bitter relationship between Ireland and the rest of the United Kingdom, national identity was a major political factor. But over more than a thousand years the lands of the imperial zone had developed an ethnic, religious, and cultural mix that was far more intricate and intimate than anything found in the West.
The Austro-Hungarian province of Transylvania, for example, was a mix of Romanians, Hungarians, Germans, Jews, and the Roma tribes often called gypsies.[7] The city of Constantinople included Turks, Kurds, Armenians, Greeks, Jews, Albanians, and Arabs. Vienna, another sprawling capital of a multiethnic empire, was almost as diverse.
The rich mix of ethnicities and religions across the imperial zone had deep roots. For generations the imperial powers in the eastern Mediterranean had facilitated and even promoted ethnic mixing and migration. Greek, German, Italian, Arab, Turkish, Crusader, and Russian leaders had planted colonies of their fellow-believers in newly acquired territories. Arab, German, Jewish, Genoese, and Venetian merchants had built long-established mercantile settlements on key trading routes.
When Americans think about ethnic diversity, they often have the image of the melting pot in mind. As generations go by, there is more intermarriage among groups and cultural differences diminish as members of all groups integrate more fully into a new and common identity. This is not what the imperial zone was about. The empires were more of a bouillabaisse than a melting pot; the different ingredients in the pot might swap flavors, but each preserved a distinct identity. Hungarians and Croats, to take just one of dozens of examples, could live together for hundreds of years without merging into a new and larger national group.
Today, this part of the world is mostly divided into nation-states. The Slovaks live in Slovakia and the Czechs in the Czech Republic and so on. In 1881 things were not so clear-cut; a transition was under way from the standards of an earlier time when ethnic groups did not yet always think of themselves as distinct nations who wanted or needed a distinct national home. For many people in this part of the world, ethnic groups and religious communities had been and to some extent still were more like castes in India than nations in the modern sense. That is, people from many different religious and cultural backgrounds lived together—sort of. The communities were quite distinct and intermarriage was rare.
Economically and politically, different communities had different roles. The peasants who labored on the farms might speak one language and have their own religion. The nobility frequently had a different language from the peasants—like the French-speaking Normans in medieval England. Often they had a different religion as well; Muslim, Turkish-speaking nobles lorded it over Orthodox peasants who spoke various Slavic languages in the southern Balkans, and Roman Catholic German- and Magyar-speaking nobles ruled Romanian Orthodox peasants farther north. Different ethnic and religious groups specialized in different trades and occupations in the cities and towns, and the ethnic mix found in cities and towns was often quite different from the makeup of the population in the surrounding countryside.
Under a system of government dating back to Greco-Roman times and before, the mixed ethnic and religious communities of this part of the world were often at least semiautonomous when it came to the regulation of their own cultural affairs. Orthodox, Protestant, Catholic, Muslim, and Jewish religious leaders oversaw questions like marriage and inheritance law among their coreligionists. Particularly in the Ottoman lands, but also elsewhere, each religious community maintained its own system of institutions and courts. The powers of these communal institutions were very real. Being cast out of an ethno-religious community was a kind of civic death; the system promoted cohesion within the religious groups of the region—and perpetuated their separation from each other. As a result, it was not uncommon to have people living in the same street who spoke different languages at home, followed different professions, practiced different religions, ate different foods, dressed in different clothes, paid different levels of tax to different authorities, and lived under different legal systems.
Jewish life in Europe and the Middle East was shaped by the political and social organization under which the vast majority of the world’s Jews had lived since Roman and pre-Islamic times. Conditions varied immensely through space and time. Often an unpopular and besieged minority, Jews were periodically exposed to mob violence or organized persecution. Commercial and political restrictions, special taxation, campaigns for forced conversion, extortion by political authorities: Jews faced them all from time to time in every part of the imperial zone. If Jews in one city, duchy, or country faced harsh conditions, life went on normally in other places, and the sloth and venality of local officials often meant that harsh orders from the top were never quite fulfilled.
Jewish communities and families were scattered across the imperial zone. In two cities—Salonika, known today as Thessaloniki in modern Greece, and Jerusalem[8]—Jews made up a majority for at least part of the nineteenth century. More usually, however, they were one among many minorities in bustling urban centers. In parts of modern Poland and the Baltic republics, as well as in Baghdad, they were a substantial minority; one fourth of the residents of Baghdad in 1900 were Jewish.[9] In other places they were a smaller but still significant minority—about 4 percent of the population in Alexandria, about the same share as in Constantinople.[10]
These Jews differed tremendously among themselves, both on matters of Jewish legal doctrine and in matters of culture and practice. Some spoke Arabic and, in cities including Alexandria and Baghdad, lived in Jewish communities that were proudly conscious of thousands of years of history. Some still spoke Ladino, a language that developed in Spain under the centuries of Islamic rule and that persisted among the descendants of Spanish Jews for centuries after their expulsion. Many spoke Yiddish, a language grown out of the encounter between Hebrew and German with Russian and Polish words thrown in; in Germany, increasing numbers of Jews scorned this language of the ghetto as they embraced German culture. Others spoke the languages of the peoples around them: Polish, Russian, Turkish, Arabic, Bulgarian, Magyar, and many more.
As the Industrial Revolution spread south and east from its heartland in Britain, the Low Countries, and northern France, it put the imposing but brittle states of the imperial zone under stress. By the 1880s, the Industrial Revolution was reshaping the world, upending political arrangements within countries and transforming the global balance of power. Countries that were good at implementing the Industrial Revolution and managing its consequences rapidly grew in wealth, power, and prestige; countries that were slow to adopt the new ways or had difficulty with the social and political changes the new system required fell behind, and often fell victim to colonial powers who were quicker to master the new instruments of power.
The approach of modernity challenged the political order of the empires in complicated ways. Before modern times, governments in the imperial zone had been absolute in theory, but weak on the ground. Local officials hundreds or thousands of miles away enjoyed a great deal of practical autonomy. Signing a decree in Vienna or Moscow did not always result in anything happening in the provinces. Officials frequently were bribed by powerful local interests to ignore inconvenient policies. This was all part of an unwritten system of checks and balances that over the generations had limited the power of absolute rulers and allowed the very disparate communities and regions of these great empires to accommodate to the imperial system in different ways.
By the late nineteenth century, this no longer worked. The economic and technological revolutions both enabled and required the development of new and much more powerful and rational states. The telegraph and the railroad gave central authorities new possibilities to monitor and control the behavior of their far-flung subordinates. New forms of bureaucratic organization, while still very far from perfect, vastly enhanced the powers of the state.
To make capitalism work and to survive in an industrial era, governments had to be able to implement and administer uniform codes of law across their territories. Complex but necessary enterprises like railroads demanded legal and administrative uniformity and predictability in ways that changed the way government worked. Foreign investors insisted on consistent administration of centrally drafted laws. In the new era of mass technological warfare unleashed by Napoleon, the military forces required to defend the empires needed to be larger than ever before, requiring higher levels of tax and disrupting traditional forms of military and social organization.
The newly powerful and ambitious governments had a much greater impact on society, so people who previously had paid little attention to politics were suddenly and passionately interested in the policies of the state. Now that the government had an army of bureaucrats and officials to enforce its decrees, people cared much more about what those decrees commanded. But they also cared about who staffed the bureaucracies and what language they used. Why, asked the sons of both peasants and merchants, should they be conscripted into an army to defend an emperor who spoke a different language, practiced a different religion, and was clearly concerned to maintain a special, hegemonic power for his ethnic and religious brethren in the empire they were being forced to defend?
Ethnicity and religion started to matter more, and the old cautious peace among the region’s plethora of ethnic and religious groups started to fray. The titanic forces of the Industrial Revolution were pulling society apart: the rich and the poor, industrialists and farmers, workers and bosses all had very different ideas about the ongoing transformation of the social fabric. Yet the challenges of modern life required a strong state and a united public. What force could bind peasants and intellectuals, workers and bosses, into enough of a unit to maintain political cohesion?
The lessons of West European history seemed clear. France and Britain, to say nothing of Bismarck’s new Germany, were more or less nation-states. These were the success stories of the day. The embrace of the multiethnic empires became stifling. Many of the zone’s inhabitants—Czechs, Serbs, Armenians, Ukrainians, Poles—felt they could do better for themselves if they were not held back by the ramshackle, ineffective imperial powers. The development of printing and distribution technology made it increasingly possible to publish newspapers and books in the once neglected “peasant” languages. New publics took shape, bound together by ties of language, history, and, often, grievance, and a bloody era of identity politics dawned on the imperial zone.
The problem with nationalism turned out to be that national movements did not agree on the brave new world they were trying to build. Everybody could find a golden age buried somewhere in the glorious past, and everybody wanted to rebuild it. Enthusiastic historians chronicled the past greatness of their peoples, producing maps that showed the vast historic extent of their homelands. Hungarians spoke of the “lands of the Crown of St. Stephen.” Arabs were beginning to reflect on the glories of the Arab caliphates before the Ottoman Turks subjugated the last independent Arab states four hundred years earlier. Czechs hearkened back to the days when Bohemia was an independent kingdom and a force to be reckoned with. Poles dreamed with increased intensity of their lost independence and thought fondly of the days when Poland stretched almost to the Black Sea. Greeks dreamed of a rebuilt Byzantine Empire with its capital at Constantinople. Everybody in the imperial zone, it sometimes seemed, had a map, maps that didn’t match. Greater Serbia included parts of Greater Albania; Greater Hungary included much of Greater Romania; Greater Armenia and Greater Greece both claimed large sections of what is now Turkey.
Ethnic groups often staked claims based on history. Kosovo might not have many Serbs in it now, but it was the heartland of “historic Serbia” and many Serb nationalists could not imagine a future without the province’s “return” to the motherland. Kiev might be populated with Ukrainians today, but it was the birthplace of Russian culture. In many cases, a sense of historical grievance was closely connected to these historical claims. Just as Irish nationalists regarded the seventeenth-century settlements of Protestants in the north as illegitimate because they were imposed by an occupying power, so many Balkan nationalists saw the Turks and other Muslims among them as the unwanted consequences of an Ottoman conquest that was illegitimate and immoral in the first place. Nationalism quickly became identified with the idea of reversing historical wrongs, and that was often seen as justifying or even mandating the removal of long-established populations who inhabited the “wrong” place.
The rise of ethnic nationalism was about more than maps. It was about the creation of new bonds of solidarity between educated and privileged city dwellers and the peasant masses. Before the age of nationalism, a rich Prague merchant with, say, Czech blood in his veins might feel more closely connected to German, Hungarian, and even Jewish merchants than to the Czech-speaking peasants in the fields. Such a merchant was likely to speak German at home, send his children to German-language schools, and look to the Habsburg authorities in Vienna for political leadership. Frederick the Great had spoken French better than German. Tolstoy’s Russian aristocrats sometimes bragged about their bad Russian in flawless French. “I speak Spanish to God, Italian to women, French to men, and German to my horse,” Holy Roman emperor Charles V is supposed to have said. It was a mark of wealth and breeding to have a cosmopolitan outlook and to scorn the rude jargon of the lowborn peasants.
The nationalists brought a new and compelling moral vision into these fractured societies: they taught the moral duty of caring for one’s own. The Czech merchant ought to care about the Czech peasant, and ought to teach literacy in the Czech language to the peasant’s children. People who shared the same language and the same blood, it was said, shared a common destiny and a common set of interests; they ought to care for one another. Nationalist movements and nationalist feeling went hand in hand with the establishment of early social safety nets. Politicians like Karl Lueger, the antisemitic populist mayor of Vienna whose rise to power helped to make Herzl a Zionist, combined a hatred of out-groups and immigrants with a call for solidarity and support for the poorer members of their favored national group.
This was, in many cases, a program that combined the virtues of democracy and social justice. Where Czechs were the majority, Czechs should rule, and Czechs should be able to choose the form of government that suited them best. At the same time, the privileged and learned Czechs ought to dedicate themselves to legislative programs and social activity that would elevate the poor Czech farmers and urban workers. To most people in Europe and America who thought of themselves as progressive, this seemed preeminently rational and just. The rise of nationalism was seen as part and parcel of the spread of the Enlightenment. Europe’s brotherhood of peoples would weave a wonderful tapestry of diversity and mutual respect.
Linguistic revivals were an important part of the nationalist surge. Local languages and dialects lacked modern, scientific, and technical vocabularies. When nationalist intellectuals sought to revive these languages and turn them into instruments of communication fit for modern society, they often turned to ancient liturgical languages for a more elaborate grammar and vocabulary even as they “purified” their grammar and purged the spoken dialect of foreign loan words.
In the Ottoman Empire and the newly independent Balkan countries, western missionaries, many of them American, promoted the development of the new languages and encouraged the education of a new generation of nationalist intellectuals trained to use them. Partly in order to promote the study of the Bible, missionaries worked to establish printing presses and distribution services for publications in Armenian, Arabic, Turkish, Bulgarian, and other languages. Missionaries supported the translation of scientific and other works into these languages, and mission schools instructed children in languages that began to compete with the imperial languages of the Ottoman, Russian, and Habsburg administrations. Missionary-run American colleges in Constantinople, Beirut, and Cairo became centers of nationalist thought and activism, sometimes leading to clashes between the professors and the imperial governments.[11]
Nationalism and its ally democracy attacked the foundations of the power system in the imperial zone. Tsars, emperors, and sultans could have no place in a world of independent nation-states. Increasingly, the statesmen and rulers of the eastern empires saw mortal threats in the new ideas sweeping through their realms.
They were not wrong. Nationalism often tended to become more virulent and extreme as time went by. What began as a relatively innocent and peaceful desire for group solidarity and self-determination could turn fanatical and dark. From asserting the value of one’s own religious and cultural traditions to seeing the Other as an evil and dangerous rival is a short step—especially as political and economic competition between ethnic groups sharpened in the increasingly unstable political conditions of the foundering imperial zone. Religious fanaticism and murderous ethnic chauvinism steadily gained ground among different groups in the years after 1881. After World War I the fascist movements and above all the Nazi Party would show the whole world just how poisonous and deadly these ideas could become. But ethnic cleansing and genocidal episodes had already become part of life in much of the imperial zone by 1920. Some of these episodes, like the Armenian genocide of 1915–16, are well-known; others, like the Circassian genocide in the 1860s and the mass killings of Bulgarians in the 1870s, are known mostly to historical specialists and to the descendants of the peoples involved. But by the early 1920s, massacres and ethnic cleansings associated with rival nationalisms had become almost commonplace in the disintegrating imperial zone.
Worse Was to Come
The old systems of the East confronted another powerful ideological challenge besides nationalism. All of the eastern empires depended on religion to assure their legitimacy. In even the most “modern” of them, Bismarck’s Germany, the Hohenzollern monarchy saw itself as the protector of European Protestantism and Bismarck led a bitter battle against the influence of the Catholic Church (the so-called Kulturkampf). The Austrian Habsburgs posed as the upholders of Roman Catholic orthodoxy. The Romanovs in Moscow considered themselves the heirs of the Greek Orthodox rulers of Byzantium. The Ottoman sultan considered himself the Caliph of Islam, the divinely blessed ruler of the Islamic world and the political heir to the Prophet Muhammad.
The legacy of the French Revolution—anticlerical, republican, anti-traditionalist—was poison to all the empires. That all men were equal, that all should vote, that no religion should enjoy a special relationship to the state—these ideas were as revolutionary in some parts of the imperial zone in 1875 as they had been in Paris in 1789. Yet it seemed evident to more and more intellectuals and students—the people without whom no state could function in an age of expanding bureaucracy—that these “revolutionary” ideas were simple common sense. The brightest members of the rising generation were becoming increasingly skeptical of the very foundations of the empires they were expected to serve. The rise of a new and even more radical form of Enlightenment ideology—socialism—only heightened the threat to the existing order.
There was more. In the late nineteenth century, the western powers, grown arrogant and ambitious with their new wealth, shifted the focus of their geopolitical competition to a region that had been something of a strategic backwater in recent centuries. For millennia, trade between the Far East and the western world had passed through the territory that in the nineteenth century was controlled by the Ottomans and (in Central Asia) by the Russians. The age of European exploration and expansion had been driven by the desire to find alternative sea routes for the eastern trade. That quest succeeded, as voyagers like Vasco da Gama found ways to sail directly from Western Europe to the Far East. The West’s focus on the Indian Ocean dealt the Islamic world an economic blow from which in many ways it has yet to recover. At the same time, however, the West’s focus on the Indian Ocean and the Cape of Good Hope as the key avenues of eastern trade meant that outside powers were less interested in controlling the eastern Mediterranean and the lands around it.
That began to change as first the prospect and then the reality of the Suez Canal shifted the location of the major trade routes between Europe and Asia. The eastern Mediterranean was now the fastest and most important route not only between Great Britain and its vast domain in India, but between the West generally and Asia. Just as the completion of the Panama Canal fixed American attention on the Caribbean and Central America, leading to decades of meddling and intervention, the completion of the Suez Canal turned everything from the Black Sea to the Red Sea into a major theater of international great power rivalry. Britain, Russia, France, Germany, and Austria all sought to build influence in the neighborhood of the Suez Canal, and from southern Russia through the Balkans, into modern Turkey, Cyprus, Egypt, and Crete, the imperial rivalries began to feed into and embitter the ethnic and religious conflicts brewing across the region. Reeling from the impact of nationalism, struggling to manage the forces of the Industrial Revolution, the empires of the East were increasingly confronted with the power of the West. The emerging nationalist movements began to turn to these outside powers for protection and support; the eastern governments were increasingly forced to seek the friendship and support of the West on their own.
As the imperial zone and the eastern Mediterranean moved to the center of world politics, this competition led the Turkish and Islamic populations of the Ottoman Empire increasingly to resent Christian meddling in imperial affairs. Torn between resentment of Christian arrogance and the need for the financial and diplomatic support of the western powers, the Ottoman government gradually lost power and legitimacy as observers on all sides grew disgusted with what they saw as its vacillation and deceit. In 1878 the British took the island of Cyprus from the enfeebled Ottoman sultan and although they would wait until World War I to declare a formal protectorate, by 1882 the British were in full control of Egypt.
At the same time, geopolitical rivalries were taking a dangerous turn further west. The establishment of the German Empire in 1871 challenged the European balance of power. The creation of a powerful German state in the heart of Europe set a process of counterbalancing in motion that ultimately led to the division of Europe into the two alliance blocs that fought World War I. As the competition intensified, events in far-off Balkan or Middle Eastern locations suddenly had the potential to set off dangerous great power crises. In the end, the assassination of an Austrian archduke by a Serb ultranationalist set off World War I, but long before Franz Ferdinand’s death diplomats everywhere understood that the tiny, bitter nationalist rivalries in the East had the power to plunge all of Europe into war. Given that the nationalist movements of the region understood that genocide and ethnic cleansing faced their peoples in the event of military defeat, the intensity of the nationalist struggles continually grew. Hungarians, Romanians, Bulgarians, Macedonians, Albanians, Circassians, Armenians, Chechens, Georgians, Germans, Croats, Slovenes, Turks, Serbs, and Greeks: these peoples and their neighbors knew that they all lived on the slopes of an active volcano.
The volcano has not yet gone dormant; the wars of ethnic survival continue to break out. The Yugoslav Wars of the 1990s, and the Syrian, Kurdish, and Ukrainian conflicts of the following decades demonstrate that the old dynamics are still there.
In 1880 Americans were generally optimistic about the future of nationalism and of the imperial zone. Over the next generation they learned how wrong they had been. But there was another difference. In 1880, Americans thought of the imperial zone as a remote, exotic part of the world that had little ability to affect American lives. Again, they learned to think differently. Not only did what started as a Balkan quarrel between Serbia and Austria-Hungary metastasize into a world war that drew the United States into the cauldron, but the unrest and economic dislocations in the region launched a massive wave of migration toward the United States, a wave of migration whose effects are still being felt today, and whose political and cultural consequences became the hottest issue in American politics in the opening decades of the twentieth century.
The Great Wave and the American Crisis
This wave of migration between 1880 and 1924 altered the face of America forever. In 1880 the population of the United States had just passed 50 million; between 1880 and 1920, 23.5 million new immigrants would arrive.[12] In 1890, the percentage of foreign-born Americans reached 14.8 percent, the highest level since colonial times.[13] In individual cities and neighborhoods, this could be felt much more acutely: in Chicago in 1900, 34.6 percent of the population was foreign-born, and 77.4 percent was either foreign-born or had parents who were.[14] Other cities saw similar changes. As political scientist Michael C. LeMay writes, “By 1920…the new immigrant groups comprised 44 percent of New York’s total population, 41 percent of Cleveland’s, 39 percent of Newark’s, and 24 percent of Boston’s, Buffalo’s, Detroit’s, Philadelphia’s, and Pittsburgh’s.”[15] Within individual parts of cities, such as the Lower East Side of New York, the transformation was even more overwhelming.
But it wasn’t just scale that made the Great Wave so momentous. Before the 1880s, new American immigrants tended to come from the same places as eighteenth- and even seventeenth-century immigrants had done. The British Isles and German-speaking Europe had provided the bulk of America’s free immigrants during Benjamin Franklin’s time; this was still the case as late as the Civil War. This changed dramatically with the Great Wave. Russia, Austria-Hungary, and Italy overtook Germany and Britain as sources of immigration, even as immigrants from the Ottoman, Chinese, and Japanese empires clamored for entrance. The percentage of immigrants to the U.S. who came from Southern or Eastern Europe jumped from 7.1 percent in the 1870s, to 18.3 percent in the 1880s, 52.8 percent in the 1890s, and finally peaked at 71.9 percent in the 1901–10 decade. Conversely, while as late as 1870 the percentage of newcomers from Northern and Western Europe (including the traditional feeder nations of Ireland, Germany, and Scandinavia) made up over 80 percent of immigrants, by 1901–10 only about 20 percent of immigrants came from the “traditional” sources.[16]
This translated into a massive increase in Italian, Polish, and southeast European immigrants: as historian Howard M. Sachar wrote, the number of Polish, Ruthenian, Slovak, Croatian, and Serbian immigrants “rose from 17,000 in 1880, to 114,000 in 1900, to 338,000 in 1907. The emigration of southern Italians swelled from 12,000 in 1880 to 52,000 in 1890 to 100,000 in 1900—to 200,000 in 1910!”[17]
Jews did not dominate the immigrant wave: of the 23.5 million arrivals, approximately 2.25 million or just under 9 percent were Jewish.[18] But Jewish immigration was conspicuous. In its peak years, Jews constituted the largest single group of migrants, and the impact of the new immigrants on the small pre-existing American Jewish population was immense. As one scholar of Jewish immigration to the United States describes the situation, “The influx of several millions of additional Jews totally altered the demographic and cultural profile of American Jewry. Of the 4,200,000 Jews who lived in the United States in 1928, 3,000,000 were of East European origin. American Jewry had been re-European-ized. Also, for the first time in their history they became a rather conspicuous minority. While the general population increased 112 percent between 1881 and 1920, the Jewish population increased by 1,200 percent.”[19]
The speed, size, and cultural diversity of the Great Wave were not the only challenges the migration surge posed to American society. The millions of immigrants who entered the United States after 1880 entered a country whose economic and intellectual foundations were being shaken to the core. For hundreds of years the prospect of open, inviting farmland to the west had provided a safety valve for social pressures in American cities and towns: dissatisfied urbanites could always go west and farm. At the same time, since workers always had that option, employers were forced to keep wages high enough to keep their workers reasonably happy. The Homestead Act of 1862 enshrined the right to land ownership by offering 160 acres of land to anyone who settled on it,[20] but as the frontier pushed westward, the farmland became less productive and more marginal. Recognizing this, Congress passed the Enlarged Homestead Act of 1909 that doubled the acreage allotment to 320; the Stock-Raising Homestead Act of 1916 doubled that again to a full square mile (640 acres).[21] Yet in the windswept Dakota plains, the arid deserts of the Southwest, and the barren high country of the Rocky Mountains, even farms of this size often struggled to survive. Droughts and blizzards made farming in the Dakotas and the High Plains a much more challenging proposition than in Iowa and Missouri. Even the United States, it appeared, did not have an infinite supply of good farmland.
Beyond the problems of struggling pioneers on hardscrabble marginal farms, small farmers everywhere faced mounting difficulties. In its initial phases the Industrial Revolution had been a huge boon to family farms. Railroads allowed crops to get to global markets; new tools like sod-busting plows and mechanical reapers came on line; the rise of an industrial, urban working class meant millions of customers both in the U.S. and abroad who needed to buy the surplus production of the nation’s farmers. But the same improvements in transportation and agricultural technique that opened up the Middle West and the Plains states to commercial farming also operated abroad: new lands in Argentina, Canada, Ukraine, Australia, and New Zealand also opened up. Improvements in agricultural machinery and fertilizer raised yields per acre but increased the amount of investment that profitable farming required. Small farmers found it harder and harder to earn a good living from the land.
With the frontier closing, farmers going out of business, and a high birth rate, American agriculture could no longer offer opportunities for most of the rising generation. The same decades that saw the Great Wave of foreign migration to American cities also saw a large internal migration; for the first time, Americans were moving from the wide-open spaces to the cities. As late as the time of the 1880 census, 71 percent of Americans lived in rural areas. By 1920, 51 percent of the population lived in cities.[22]
These developments raised basic questions about the American future. Battening on cheap labor and the magnificent opportunities for industrialists and financiers in an era of rapid technological progress, a new class of super-rich Americans rose to prominence. For the first time in American history, many people grew concerned about the well-being of the coming generation. Populist and socialist political movements began to appear, and many people started to worry about whether America’s democratic system and egalitarian culture could survive the transition from a mostly rural and agricultural society built around independent small farmers to a mostly urban and industrial society where the mass of the people were wage-earning workers.
Rural and agricultural America might be endangered and declining, but its voting power—magnified by the large representation of farm states in the Senate—could not be ignored. Many of the early progressive reforms, like legislation to regulate railroad freight rates, were intended to protect the interests of small farmers against the financial interests behind railroads and other large corporations. The farmers sensed, rightly, that the rise of the cities would lead to a shift in political power and that rural interests, already endangered by the changing economic fortunes of an industrializing society, would be further weakened and marginalized as urban power grew.
That many of the inhabitants of the great cities were immigrants from faraway countries with religious and cultural traditions that many Americans found alien and threatening only added to the tension around migration. In this environment, outbreaks of nativism and xenophobia were only too likely to emerge, and emerge they did. Though they suffered nowhere near to the same degree as Black Americans, immigrants were sporadically targets of the lynching era; the largest mass lynching in American history occurred in 1891 in New Orleans, when a mob of thousands murdered eleven Italians for their alleged role in the recent assassination of the chief of police.[23]
By 1903, the United States was facing the same rate of inflow (800,000–1.2 million per year) into a country of roughly the same population that Germany would experience from the Middle East and Africa in 2015. The reaction against immigration grew into a serious political force and in some cases became violent.
In the spring of 1913, the night watchman of National Pencil Company in Atlanta, Georgia, discovered the beaten and strangled body of thirteen-year-old Mary Phagan, and despite evidence to the contrary, the crime was quickly pinned on the manager, Leo Frank, a Jew. For two years, Frank’s trial, appeal, retrial, and commutation roiled Georgia and brought forth some of the worst antisemitism and anti-immigrant sentiment (even though Frank was native-born) yet seen in the South. This culminated in August 1915 with Frank’s high-profile lynching, signaling that for some Georgians at least the Jews had been added to the list of “Others” who were outside the full protection of the law in the Jim Crow South.
Two months after the Frank lynching, William J. Simmons refounded the Ku Klux Klan. The old Klan had been largely crushed by federal counterterrorism actions during Reconstruction. The new Klan reinvented itself as an anti-Catholic and antisemitic organization as well as an anti-Black one and surged to new heights of popularity as it battled what it saw as alien influences corrupting and undermining traditional American life.
Over the next decade, the Klan exploded out of its old southern heartland to become a significant force in the Middle West and beyond. The peak of its political power came in 1924, when the Klan came in force to the Democratic National Convention in New York City to block the nomination of the Catholic governor of New York, Al Smith, for the presidency.[24]
World War I and the Bolshevik Revolution brought a heightened concern about dangerous radicals entering the country as immigrants. The Palmer Raids of 1919 and 1920, authorized by the Woodrow Wilson administration, targeted suspected anarchist and Bolshevik radicals, mostly immigrant Italians and Jews. Despite determined resistance from the U.S. Department of Labor (which then had jurisdiction over deportation cases and where lawyers and bureaucrats saw Palmer as overreacting), more than five hundred immigrants were deported.
To many Americans, the country seemed to be living through a terrible nightmare. Instead of the prosperity, stability, and freedom of the United States flowing out into the world to transform it, the poverty, terror, and tyranny of the imperial zone seemed to be invading the United States. The Great Wave and the Great War had transformed the United States and its place in the world. It remained to be seen how Americans would handle the new challenges that were coming their way.