Peoples Meeting Everywhere
Where Peoples Meet: Ethnic And Racial Frontiers.
by Everett C. Hughes and Helen M. Hughes.
The Free Press. 204 pp. $3.50.
Hardly an American college worthy of the name graduates a student today who has not become familiar with at least the term of “racial relations.” Even the engineering schools, heretofore notorious for their long resistance to humanizing the technologist, expose undergraduates to Richard Wright and Ruth Benedict.
Thirty and forty years ago ethnologists, economists, political scientists, and sociologists were also race-conscious, but in quite a different sense. They then wrote in a manner such as to question whether non-Anglo-Saxons belonged to the human race. The National Origins Plan of 1924 was, in part, the end product of their writings. In the past decade the pendulum has swung to the other side, as social scientists extol the virtues of “minorities” and discredit the prejudices of the majority. Mr. and Mrs. Hughes and a handful of others stand for a new orientation. They care neither to damn non-Anglo-Saxons, as did Henry Pratt Fairchild, nor to damn Anglo-Saxons, as does Carey McWilliams. Rather they hope that the study of how different peoples meet and form relations with one another will reveal the processes by which cultures carry on. The godfather in this respect for sociologists is Robert E. Park. The Hugheses acknowledge the influence of Park in their book. An old hand in the field, Everett Hughes has followed through on Park’s germinal idea, and has a record of solid research in French Canadian life and Negroes in industry. Apart from five of his essays appended to the volume, Where Peoples Meet is the joint product of husband and wife. They avoid the ponderous jabberwocky of their profession to write clearly, cleanly, and without pretension. Indeed, they are capable of chiding sociologists who take “refuge in an invented lingo,” and of wondering what anthropologists will do once the illiterates they write about learn to read what has been written about them.
The Hugheses expect scholars to combat prejudice. However, they believe that sociologists who collect sweat specimens of Negroes and whites in order to prove that Negroes smell as sweetly as whites only prove that sociology is silly. Further, they consider it unscientific to deny the existence of “discernible and significant differences” between ethnic groups. The denial is also dangerous, the Hugheses warn: first because it suggests the validity of racial discrimination for groups that are different; and second because most Americans feel that ethnic groups are not alike and will therefore conclude that “the whole propaganda for tolerance [is] a fake intended to obfuscate them.”
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The central thesis of what are really independent essays is that one cannot examine ethnic relations from “an ethnocentric point of view,” that is, neither from the point of view of a single group nor from that of the United States. The scholar must get away from the idea of uniqueness. A corollary of this is that ethnic and racial groups belong to social science even when they are not subject to prejudice and second-class citizenship. The Hugheses are as much concerned with the Boers as the Blacks in South Africa; with the Dutch as the Indonesians in Indonesia; the Spanish as the Indians in Mexico; the whites as the Negroes in America. They call attention to the need to examine the “situation” or “cultural frontier,” the area where different peoples of a community meet. Such examination will shed light on the processes of adjustment and accommodation of whole cultures, and of peoples who have moved, or who are moving, or who have been affected by peoples on the move in the past four hundred years.
Two chapters, commendable for accurate condensation and comprehension, survey ethnic frontiers—both past and present—on a global basis. In America there was first the frontier between invading Europeans and native Indians. Then followed frontiers between Europeans, that of English and Germans in Pennsylvania, of Latins and British on the Gulf Coast, of Scandinavians and New Englanders west of the Mississippi, and many other sorts today in polyethnic America. From the beginning there has been the frontier between black and white. South of the United States we find a frontier of Spaniards and Indians, while in the islands of the Caribbean there is the one of Europeans, colored, Negroes, and natives.
The point of taking the globe as the setting is that we find scores of interesting questions. The Hugheses note that there is little anti-Semitism in Brazil, and would like to know the difference between the Jewish-Gentile frontier in that country and in the United States. How does the white American and the British civil servant rank respectively the Negro doctor and the Hindu lawyer: low in terms of color or high in terms of profession? And how do the two professional men of color rank themselves in the presence of whites? We find that the Jewish middleman in Eastern Europe, despised by both aristocrat and peasant, was not really unique. In the East Indies, the Chinese trader stands precariously between the European upper strata and the natives, as does the Indian shopkeeper between the Boer and the black in South Africa. One would like, the Hugheses imply, to know whether the Polish steelworkers in the Rhineland differ from the ones who have settled in the Midwest. The Hugheses wonder if there are parallels to the French Canadians, whose villages continue unchanged because their rebels and surplus sons are swallowed up by the English Canadian and New England Yankee cultures.
We learn that religion in America rests on an ethnic base. The British support the Baptist, Congregationalist, Episcopal, Presbyterian, and Unitarian churches; the Scandinavians and Germans the Lutheran church; the Irish, Lithuanians, Poles, Italians, and others the Catholic church; the Jews the Jewish synagogue. Despite claims of universality, the Catholic church recognizes differences among its adherents as regards language, liturgy, and saints. The authors record that South Americans find Catholic services in the United States to be more like Presbyterian services than the Catholic worship, for example, in Rio de Janeiro. Catholic auxiliaries, furthermore, reveal the desire of Catholic women to slough off immigrant and lower-class antecedents and to be like middle-class Protestants. One would like to know, like which Protestants? The Hugheses might also have noted that among Lutherans the native-born also want to be like others. In the case of the Jews, reforms in liturgy and theology show the same desire to adjust to America. In New England, the model was the Unitarian church. And there is the interesting process, not mentioned by the Hugheses, whereby the cultural frontier among Jews, Catholics, and Protestants has contributed to a new conception of God. In the name of toleration, the religious of all faiths today believe that God will save everyone who is good—as Father Feeney of Boston has learned to his misfortune.
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The Hugheses acknowledge that they are only on the frontier of racial and ethnic study, and await researchers to break ground and plow the wilderness. Everett Hughes’ essay on marginality and status, which calls for monographs on the “possible” ways that highly placed members of low-ranking groups react to the dominant group, alone contains enough suggestions to engage scholars for years. It is to be hoped, and the authors seem to share this hope, that the researchers will not become prisoners of a priori categories; too often anthropologists and sociologists have merely searched to document what they thought to be true before they ventured into the field. The source material is of a richness and variety such as to expect that new categories, and therefore new wisdom, will emerge.
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