Country of Exiles (26 page)
Authors: William R. Leach
62.
For percentages of Hispanics and Asians, see Jeffrey S. Passel and Barry Edmonston,
Immigration and Race: Recent Trends in Immigration in the U.S
. (Washington, D.C.: Urban Institute, 1992), table 8; and National Research Council,
The New Americans
(Washington, D.C.: National Academy Press, 1997), pp. 37, 113–23. Immigrants did not disperse as they did, for the most part, in earlier waves, although many small towns experienced heavy inflows; for a small sampling of documents, see “East Meets West in the Heart of Texas,”
BusinessWeek
, November 13, 1995, 18E–2; David L. Wheeler, “Sociologists Watch as the Heartland Adjusts to a Wave of Immigrants,”
The Chronicle of Higher Education
, June 27, 1997, B2; and
The Index to Immigration Hot Spots
(Washington, D.C.: Center for Immigration Studies, 1996).
63.
The best study to document this effect is William H. Frey’s “Interstate Migration and Immigration for Whites and Minorities, 1985–90: The Emergence of Multi-ethnic States” (Populations Studies Center, University of Michigan, October 1993); for his update, confirming the same trend, see William Frey, “The Diversity Myth,”
American Demographics
, June 1998, 39–43.
64.
Lawrence Mishel, Jared Bernstein, and John Schmitt,
The State of Working America 1998–99
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press,
1999), prepared by the Economic Policy Institute, Washington, D.C., pp. 120, 182. On the negative impact of mass migration on the wages of unskilled workers and on equality generally, both in our time and around 1910, see Hutton and Williamson,
The Age of Mass Migration
, pp. 231–36, 248–52.
65.
See the following discussions of dual citizenship: “Immigrants’ Pressing Drive for Dual Nationality,”
Migration World
25, no. 1/2 (1997), 12; Peter H. Shuck, “Dual Citizens, Good Americans,”
WSJ
, March 18, 1998, A22; “Dual Citizenship is Double-Edged Sword,”
ibid.
, March 25, 1998; “Torn Between Nations, Mexican-Americans Can Have Both,”
NYT
, April 14, 1998, A12; and “Pledging Allegiance to Two Flags,”
Washington Post
, June 6, 1998, 14.
66.
Quoted in Lukas,
Big Trouble
, p. 479.
67.
“The New Immigrant Experience,”
NYT
, July 22, 1998, A18, editorial. For another
Times
celebration of New York City, see “Many Nations, One Big Party,”
ibid.
, August 14, 1998, E1.
68.
On the poorer immigrants as the principal victims (along with poor, unskilled native-born Americans), see James P. Smith and Barry Edmonston, eds.,
The New Americans: Economic, Demographic, and Fiscal Effects of Immigration
(Washington, D.C.: National Academy Press, 1997).
69.
According to Benjamin Barber, political scientist at Rutgers University, the only Americans who have a right to call America “a place” are the Indians; “the rest of us came from somewhere else.” See “National Conversation,” C-Span, September 2, 1995.
70.
The United States, historian Hans Kohn, expert on nationalism, wrote in 1957, “is the embodiment of an idea” or a “structure of ideas about freedom, equality, and self-government.” “To be an American is not … a matter of blood,” observed novelist Robert Penn Warren, but “a matter of an idea—and history is the image of that idea.” Penn Warren is quoted in Michael Lind,
The Next American Nation
(New York: Free Press, 1995), p. 221; Hans Kohn is quoted in Russell A. Kazal, “Revisiting Assimilation: The Rise, Fall, and Reappraisal of a Concept in American Ethnic History,”
American Historical Review
100:2 (April 1995), 460. The classic statement of this argument is Louis Hartz,
The Liberal Tradition
.
71.
Bauer, speech before “Toward Tradition,” a conference convened
by Jewish-Americans for Tradition, Washington, D.C., September 22, 1997; Newt Gingrich,
To Renew America
(New York, Harper Collins, 1995), p. 30; Dole speech, C-Span, May 26, 1996. Bauer was paraphrasing a quotation from Winston Churchill. For similar arguments, see Seymour Martin Lipset,
American Exceptionalism
(New York: W. W. Norton, 1996), p. 31; Maurizio Viroli (professor of political science at Princeton University),
For Love of Country: An Essay on Patriotism and Nationalism
(London: Clarendon Press, 1995), pp. 8–13, 164–85; Arthur Schlesinger,
Disuniting of America
(New York: W. W. Norton, 1992); and Roger M. Smith,
Civic Ideals: Conflicting Visions of Citizenship in U.S. History
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997).
72.
Quoted by Jacob M. Schlesinger, “U.S. Economy Shows Foreign Nations Ways to Grow Much Faster,”
WSJ
, June 19, 1997, 1. This interview took place in the context of a meeting in Denver where Clinton explained to visiting European leaders why the American economy, given its “labor flexibility” and “entrepreneurial risk-oriented spirit,” was so superior to the economies of other nations.
73.
Quoted in David Hollinger,
Postethnic America
(New York: Basic Books, 1995), p. 141.
74.
Lewis H. Lapham, “Who and What Is American?”
Harper’s
, January 1992, 46.
75.
Janet Wolff,
Resident Alien
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), p. 148.
76.
Bharati Mukherjee, “Beyond Multiculturalism: Surviving the Nineties,” in Ishmael Reed, ed.,
MultiAmerica
(New York: Viking, 1997), p. 454.
77.
Isaiah Berlin,
Against the Current
(New York: Viking, 1980), p. 352.
78.
Royce,
The Philosophy of Loyalty
, pp. 115–16. The full quote is:
Now, in our country we do not want any muted hatred of sections. But we do want a hearty growth of provincial ideals. And we want this growth just for the sake of the growth of a more general and effective patriotism. We want the ideals of the various provinces of our country to be enriched and made definite, and then to be strongly represented in the government of the nation. For, I insist, it is not the sect, it is not the
labor-union, it is not the political partisan organization, but it is the widely developed provincial loyalty which is the best mediator between the narrower interests of the individual and the larger patriotism of our nation.
79.
Wallace Stegner,
Where the Bluebird Sings to the Lemonade Springs
(New York: Penguin Books, 1993), p. 72; Wendell Berry,
Sex, Economy, Freedom, and Community
(New York: Pantheon Books, 1993), p. 22.
80.
Fei Xiaotong, a Chinese anthropologist who studied in the United States during World War II, praised Americans but lamented their indifference to the past, to place and memory. He was lonely all the while he lived in America during the forties. “American children,” he wrote in 1944,
hear no stories about ghosts. They spend a dime in the drugstore to buy a Superman comic book.… Superman represents actual capabilities or future potential, while ghosts symbolize belief in and reverence for the accumulated past.… How could ghosts gain a foothold in American cities? People move about like the tide, unable to form permanent ties with places, still less with other people.… In a world without ghosts, life is free and easy. American eyes can gaze straight ahead. But still I think they lack something and I do not envy their lives.
On Xiaotong, see R. David Arkush and Leo O. Lee, eds.,
Land Without Ghosts: Chinese Impressions of America from the Mid-Nineteenth Century to the Present
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), pp. 171–81.
INTERMODAL HIGHWAYS AND GATEWAYS, VISIBLE AND INVISIBLE
1.
Eno Transportation Foundation,
Transportation in America. A Statistical Analysis of Transportation in the United States
, supplement to the 15th ed. (Landsdowne, Va.: Eno Transportation Foundation, 1998), p. 7. For truck lengths over a ten-year period, see Gerhardt Muller,
Intermodal Freight Transportation
(Landsdowne, Va.: Eno Transportation Foundation Inc., 1995, 3rd ed.), p. 70; and U.S. Federal Highway Administration,
Federal Size Regulations for Commercial
Motor Vehicles
(Washington, D.C.: 1997), pp. 4–5. On maximum lengths in Arkansas in 1994 for tractor semi-trailers, see U.S. Department of Transportation,
1997 Comprehensive Truck Size and Weight Study
, vol. 2, Issues and Background, Draft (Washington, D.C.: June 1997), tables II-3 and II-17.
2.
Karl Polanyi,
The Great Transformation
(Boston: Beacon Press, 1968), p. 18. For more recent discussions of this period, see William H. McNeill,
The Rise of the West
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963, 1990), pp. 726–92; Samuel Huntington,
Clash of Civilizations
(New York: Touchstone Press, 1997), p. 51; Paul Krugman,
Pop Internationalism
(Cambridge: MIT Press, 1995), and Barry Eichengreen,
Globalizing Capital: A History of the International Monetary System
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), p. 4. Polanyi never argued, however, that a totally free market reigned in the nineteenth century or, for that matter, has ever reigned. For a similar position, see Eric Hobsbawm,
The Age of Extremes: A History of the World, 1914–1991
(New York: Pantheon Books, 1994), pp. 573–74.
3.
Quoted in William Leach,
Land of Desire
(New York: Vintage, 1994), p. 356.
4.
Roads have long been viewed as radical interventions, usually connecting cities (although today they connect suburb to suburb more than they do city to city or suburb to city). See Robert Redfield,
The Primitive World and Its Transformations
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1953), p. 56:
It is the city that makes world-wide and conspicuous the self-conscious struggle to maintain a traditional ethos, as it is the city, in the first place, that traditional morality is attacked and broken down. The conflict on the religious or ethical level between city and country, urbanite and peasant, sophisticated mind and simple villager or tribesman, is an ancient and familiar theme.… In the Maya village of Chan Kom, to which my mind ever reverts in these connections, my good friend, a certain thoughtful villager, saw with dismay the coming of the highway that would bring the evils of the city to the peasant community his own leadership had built. Recoiling from the consequences he had not foreseen of an urbanization for which he had put forth great effort, he
began to view the city as a source of moral evil. “With the road will come drunkenness, idleness, vice,” he said.
5.
I would like to thank Mary Furner for pointing this out to me. We greatly need a new history of transportation, but see, for a recent informative and general history, James E. Vance, Jr.,
Capturing the Horizon: The Historical Geography of Transportation Since the Sixteenth Century
(Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990). See also, for America in particular, George Rogers Taylor,
The Transportation Revolution, 1815–1836
(New York, Rinehart, 1951); John Lauritz Larson, “ ‘Bind the Republic Together’: The National Union and the Struggle for a System of Internal Improvement,”
Journal of American History
74 (Sept. 1987), 363–87; Alfred D. Chandler, Jr.,
The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1977), esp. pp. 79–203; and Muller,
Intermodal Freight Transportation
, pp. 7–14.
6.
John Brinckerhoff Jackson,
Discovering the Vernacular Landscape
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984), pp. 24–25. I have borrowed the distinction between “centrifugal” and “centripetal” roads from Jackson. Others, too, have adopted these distinctions; see especially Phil Patton,
Open Roads: A Celebration of the American Highway
(New York: Simon and Schuster, 1986).
7.
Historian James Flink has argued that “the goal was to reorder society to accommodate increased automobile use and ownership, and therefore increased automobile production.” See James J. Flink,
The Automobile Age
(Cambridge: MIT Press, 1993), pp. 368–73; for similar analyses, see David James St. Clair, “Entrepreneurship and the American Automobile Industry” (unpublished diss., University of Utah, 1979), pp. 167–68; and Henry Moon,
The Interstate Highway System
(Washington, D.C.: Association of American Geographers, 1994), pp. 1–21. For a different perspective, see Phil Patton,
Open Roads;
Tom Lewis,
Divided Highways
(New York: Viking, 1997); and, more recently, Fred Barnes, “In Praise of Highways,”
Weekly Standard
, April 27, 1998, 15–18. All three writers argue against the notion—held by Flink and others—that “the Road Gang” (or the “auto oligopoly,” plus gas and oil industries) played the major role in fostering the growth of the highways.
8.
Robert D. Yaro and Tony Hiss,
A Region at Risk: The Third
Regional Plan for the New York–New Jersey–Connecticut Metropolitan Area
(New York: Island Press, 1996), p. 29.
9.
James H. Johnson (CEO of the Standish Group International, Inc., a specialist in electronic commerce), “Realities of the Virtual Enterprise,” an unpaginated advertisement,
BusinessWeek
, December 4, 1995.
10.
Wall Street Journal
(henceforth
WSJ)
, April 30, 1998, B4; Gus Welty,
Railway Age
, September 1996.
11.
U.S. Department of Transportation and the Bureau of Transportation Statistics,
National Transportation Statistics 1997
(Washington, D.C.: 1997), pp. 6, 24, 33, 209. Interestingly, too, the number of private airports has
increased
from 10,461 in 1985 to 12,809 in 1995, while the number of public airports has
declined
from 5,858 in 1985 to 5,415 ten years later.