To The Editor:
Dr. Saveth’s article on “The Immigrant in American History,” published in the August COMMENTARY, is like a breath of fresh air in a stifling room. This broader consideration of the subject has long been needed, and Dr. Saveth has laid solid groundwork for handling it with some relation to facts, as distinguished from filio-piety. I hope he will go on with such writing. Of course, a lot of historians will be disturbed by the idea of re-thinking their work, but never mind that.
Charles A. Beard
P.S. I see here in this village the problem in miniature, for “we” are old-stock English, Irish, Poles, Negroes, Italians, Jews, Greeks, and maybe Turks too. I can see the “leaven,” whatever that is, at work before my eyes. Oh! I forgot, a few “Portugees.”
New Milford, Connecticut
_____________
To The Editor:
In substance I agree with Edward N. Saveth’s article on “The Immigrant in American History,” which appeared in the August COMMENTARY. Especially I share his feeling about Louis Adamic. But it is, I think, also well to remember that Louis Adamic expresses a sentiment which is by no means dead in post-immigrant communities, and that the disposition to call attention to eminent individuals is natural and inveterate. I think, too, that Dr. Saveth overestimates Oscar Handlin’s paper, which is external and misses the trends toward effective political intelligence that appear spontaneously in immigrant communities. The fact is that one needs, in order to understand the dynamics of events, the disposition of a sympathetic novelist and the equipment of a cultural anthropologist.
I think Dr. Saveth’s paper would have been helped if he had been able to speak about “filio-pietists” in terms of an empathy of the passion which drives them rather than the mere condemnation of their inadequacy. The changed climate of opinion in the social sciences of course envelopes the writing of history, too, and our present historic valuations are concurrent with the new atmospheres.
This does not mean that I don’t think he is doing a very useful job in a neglected field, but I want to see him doing a better one. More power to him.
Horace M. Kallen
New School for Social Research
New York City