The Making of Multicultural America

Takaki’s updated ‘Different Mirror’

Editor’s note: A message of the 2008 presidential election was that the time has come for a more inclusive and hence more accurate history of America as a nation peopled by the world. Ron Takaki’s updated edition of A Different Mirror: A History of Multicultural America speaks to this democratic demand.

In America’s expanding industrial economy, workers were often swept into ethnic antagonisms. Irish immigrants found themselves viewed as ignorant and inferior, and were forced to occupy the bottom rungs of employment.  In the North, Irish competed with blacks for jobs as waiters and longshoremen.  Many of the Irish newcomers shouted: “Down with the Nagurs!” “Let them go back to Africa, where they belong.” Born in America, blacks complained: “These impoverished and destitute beings, transported from the trans-Atlantic shores are crowding themselves into every place of business and labor, and driving the poor colored American citizen out.”

Despite antagonisms, minorities also shared much in common: labor experiences, hopeful dreams, and above all, values.

Dynamically tied together in a complex interregional economy, workers found themselves in a robust industrial labyrinth of farms, factories, railroads, and mines stretching from Canada to Mexico and from the Atlantic to the Pacific.  In the South, African Americans were cultivating cotton, which was shipped to New England, where “Irish factory girls” were operating machines in the textile mills, while Jewish women were sewing clothes in the garment factories of the Lower East Side. In California, Chinese and Japanese immigrants were growing an agricultural garden to feed an industrializing urban society. By 1900, the U.S. was manufacturing more goods than England and France combined.

Shared class exploitation often led workers to struggle together. In 1870, Chinese immigrant laborers were transported to Massachusetts as scabs to break an Irish immigrant strike; in response, the Irish tried to organize a Chinese lodge of the Knights of St. Crispin, an Irish labor union. In 1903, Mexican and Japanese farm laborers went on strike together in California: their union officers had names like Yamaguchi and Lizarras, and strike meetings were conducted in Spanish and Japanese.  The Mexican strikers declared that they were standing in solidarity with their “Japanese brothers.” A Japanese immigrant conveyed in poetry the feeling of class connectedness across racial boundaries:

People harvesting
Work together unaware
Of  racial problems.

Regardless of their different complexions and origins, immigrants embraced similar hopeful dreams. In Ireland, people received letters from friends in the U.S. that glowingly described stories of riches growing like grass and the boundlessness of a country where there were no oppressive English landlords.  “My dear Father,” wrote an Irish immigrant woman from New York in 1850, “Any man or woman without a family would be fools that would not venture and come to this plentiful Country where no man or woman ever hungered.”  A witness in China reported the excitement generated by the news of the gold rush:  “Letters from Chinese in San Francisco and further in the country have been circulated through all this part of the province. The accounts of the successful adventurers who have returned would, had the inhabitants possessed the means of paying their way across, have gone far to depopulate considerable towns.” Facing high taxes and difficulties making ends meet, Japanese farmers were enticed eastward.  Excitedly they exclaimed:

Day of spacious dreams!
I sailed for America,
Overblown with hope.

In Russia, the cry “To America!” roared like “wild-fire” in Jewish communities. In the shtetls, a song floated in the air:

As the Russians mercilessly
Took revenge on us,
There is a land, America,
Where everyone lives free.

For Mexican immigrants crossing the border in the early 20th century, El Norte became the stuff of fantasies:

If only you could see how nice
the United States is;
that is why the Mexicans
are crazy about it.

Beyond their shared labor experiences and dreams, the diverse American people discovered a tie that binds — the Declaration of Independence, with equality as a principle for everyone, regardless of race or religion. Moreover, they were prepared to fight and even die for this “self-evident truth” in two of the nation’s most horrendous conflicts — the Civil War and World War II.

Ron Takaki is a professor of Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. His book, A Different Mirror, has sold over a half-million copies. The revised edition was recently published by Back Bay Books.