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LITR 5731 Seminar in Multicultural Literature: American Immigrant: model assignments 2010
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research post 1
Charles Colson
16 June 2010
Development of a Dominant Culture
It seems counterintuitive that the dominant culture
of the United States should go “unmarked” as our instructor has posited, yet we
rarely take time to remark upon or analyze the ubiquitous.
The fact that the majority of colonial immigrants
originated in Great Britain provides a ready explanation for the social and
political origins of our English-speaking culture, but my previous study of
North American colonial history reinforced the assert ion that the immigrants
were far from homogeneous.
Intrigued by the claims of the narrator in Dr.
White’s “hillbilly video,” I was reminded of
Albion’s Seed, a cultural history by
David Hackett Fischer.
Since the author’s arguments were somewhat
controversial when it first appeared, I wondered if anyone else had traced the
cultural characteristics of those non-assimilating immigrants from their
origins.
More to the point, what exactly were the contributions of
the Scots-Irish to our current dominant culture?
Searching the UHCL library’s catalog yielded several
monographs, only one of which was available in hardcopy on short notice.
Albion’s
Seed: Four British Folkways in America, is an example of what was (in 1989)
a new approach to writing history, combining story-telling and problem-solving,
borrowing from other disciplines to be both interpretative and empirical.
Fischer defines folkways as cultural artifacts,
highly persistent but never static, identifying them with a number of
qualitative and quantitative indicators.
He
traces not only house building methods, dialects, foodstuff frequencies, and
religious affiliations, but “conceptions of order, power, and freedom which
became the cornerstones of a voluntary society in British America” (6).
The library’s digital holdings provided my other sources in
the form of electronic books and an article from a subscription database.
These are more “traditional” in their approach to
primary documents, though they have been influenced by the trend toward what
Fischer calls a “braided narrative.”
Grady
Whiney, in his Cracker Culture: Celtic
Ways in the Old South, emphasizes the importance of contemporary accounts.
He draws upon travel narratives, diaries, personal
correspondence, and period histories from both sides of the Atlantic to
illustrate a marked correspondence between English views of the Scots, Irish,
and Welsh and New Englanders’ views of Southerners in colonial and antebellum
America. The
editors of Irish Immigrants in the Land
of Canaan: Letters and Memoirs from Colonial and Revolutionary America,
1675-1815 use the surviving writings of a few to represent the stories of
larger groups of immigrants, arranging them in chapters as “Farmers and
Planters,” “Craftsmen, Laborers, and Servants,” “Merchants, Shopkeepers, and
Peddlers,” and “Clergymen and Schoolmasters.”
Kerby Miller
et al. examine the causes and processes of immigration as well as the Irish
participation in politics and war by providing a mix of commentary and editorial
explanation, though their approach seems to draw more on literary theory than
history or anthropological methods.
Paul
M. Pressly’s article, "Scottish Merchants and the Shaping of Colonial Georgia,"
uses a mix of secondary sources and primary documents (wills, newspapers,
business inventories, indenture agreements, and council minutes) to tell the
immigrant narrative of a select group of Scots who arrived in colonial Georgia
after 1750.
Between 1629 and 1775, Fischer explains, the present United
States was settled by at least four large waves of British immigrants,
originating from and settling in different geographic areas.
The exodus of English Puritans from East Anglia to
Massachusetts from 1629 to 1641 was followed by distressed cavaliers and
indentured servants leaving the south of England for Virginia between 1642 and
1675.
The Quakers migrated from the north Midlands to the
Delaware region in the years 1675 to 1725.
The flight of the Scots-Irish from the borderlands
of North Britain to the backcountry of America took place from 1717 to 1775.
Fischer summarizes the characteristics of four
regional cultures and describes them as being mutually at odds with one another,
only uniting in the face of British attempts to rein in their autonomy.
Opposition to the American Revolution, Fischer
holds, came principally from “marginal” cultures: imperial elites, the polyglot
society of lower New York, the Highland Scots of North Carolina, and African
slaves “inclined against their Whiggish masters” (828).
Among such groups were the Scottish merchants of colonial Georgia that Pressly describes. “They provided the enslaved labor that spurred economic growth, imported British goods that tied Georgia to the commercial revolution, made rice exports the focal point for supporting the credits granted by London, took away from Charleston leadership in the Indian trade, and developed a costly new technology for rice plantations along the Savannah River” (n.p.). Their immigrant success story came to an end when, during the Revolution, they declared their loyalty to the imperial system that nourished them. Pressly concludes that their elimination from political life and subsequent exodus “left a gaping hole in the economic and social life of the new state” (n.p.).
Connections between cultures on both sides of the Atlantic appear in Irish Immigrants in the Land of Canaan as well. The ethnic, religious, and social diversity of the individuals whose correspondence Miller et al. examine is remarkable, but the cumulative effect leads them to contend that “there were close affinities between Irish and American economic and political developments, that contemporary Irish migration to the New World both reflected and accelerated those developments, and that out of them emerged modern ‘Irish’ (and ‘Scotch-Irish’) ethnic and political identities on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean” (8). Irish immigrants are not only describing their environments and experiences (colored by their own expectations, emotions and prejudices), they are constructing “selves” for the edification of their correspondents. Since the “news” in these letters—reassuring kinsmen of continued affection, persuading relatives to join them, admonishing descendants to emulate alleged virtues or successes—would travel beyond their parents’ hearths, the editors explain, such testaments became public (political) as well as private “performances” (9). These individual documents are useful for exploring the dynamics of ethnic identity in the form of eighteenth-century “Irishness” rather than regional cultural identity.
McWhiney’s Cracker
Culture, on the other hand, while making much of the observed similarities
between Celtic culture in Britain and America, is all about regionalism.
He echoes Fischer’s description of reciprocated
scorn between the northern and southern immigrants,
concluding:
Throughout the antebellum
period a wide range of observers generally characterized Southerners as more
hospitable, generous, frank, courteous, spontaneous, lazy, lawless,
militaristic, wasteful, impractical, and reckless than Northerners, who were in
turn more reserved, shrewd, disciplined, gauche, enterprising, acquisitive,
careful, frugal, ambitious, pacific, and practical than Southerners. . . . Many
an observer also recorded that Northerners and Southerners tended to retain
their old ways when they moved westward. (268).
Fischer notes this continuity of folkways in westward
expansion as manifested in the four major dialect regions of American speech
discovered by linguistic geographers during the mid-twentieth century.
Similar patterns, he writes, also appeared in
“material culture, vernacular architecture, [naming] customs, folklore and many
other indicators,” describing a historical process by which four regional
cultures expanded throughout the United States (834).
After perusing these sources, it seems evident that the
Scots-Irish have certainly made a contribution to the dominant culture of
America.
While my reading has given me a more nuanced understanding
of the variety and complexity of immigrant narratives within that culture, I am
still curious about its “unmarked” nature.
My
next research post might seek to understand why it is that those who contribute
to this dominant culture are not more cognizant of their participation or how
the hegemony of white, English-speaking American culture has been maintained in
the face of multiethnic, multilingual immigration and whether it can long
endure.
Works Cited
