Beyond "voting with their feet": toward a conceptual history of "America" in European migrant sending communities, 1860S to 1914.

The old chestnut that most European immigrants "voted with their feet" by fleeing oppressive Old World societies for the political and religious freedom of the United States endures despite the contrary findings of years of migration research. The double metaphor seems irresistible to scholars writing about the image of the United States abroad. "Tens of millions of immigrants have voted with their feet to slough off prior allegiances and join the boisterous experiment that makes 'life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness' its official goal," claims Daniel Pipes. (1) "Immigrants have consistently voted with their feet by flooding our shores," agrees Victor Davis Hanson. (2) Paul Hollander describes anti-American sentiment as an affliction of foreign elites, in stark contrast to "the spectacle of millions of people voting with their feet to become members of this much maligned society." (3) How accurately does the familiar phrase convey the meaning of America in the minds of non-elite Europeans? This article calls the cliche into question in two ways: first, by pointing to some of the main elements of immigration research that complicate the picture of the United States as primarily a haven for freedom-seeking Europeans, and second, by pointing to promising sources that might allow us to develop a richer understanding of the conceptual meanings of "America" in the minds of those who left few written records of their views.

If yearning for freedom as the cause of large-scale nineteenth-century European immigration has become an idee fixe of American exceptionalism, few immigration historians today would subscribe to it. Roger Daniels calls the misconception that most immigrants were escaping persecution "the myth of Plymouth Rock," untrue even of the Puritans themselves, most of whom sought economic betterment in New England. (4) George Pozzetta introduced his major overview of the field, American Immigration and Ethnicity, with the consensus view that "most immigrants entered America in quest of work, and after the 1860s, usually industrial work." (5) Wolfgang Helbich estimates that at least 90 percent of German-speaking immigrants to the United States came for socioeconomic reasons; even of the wave of emigrants who left after the failed liberal revolutions of 1848-9, Helbich observes, "no historian believes any longer that there were more than 3,000 to 4,000" political refugees among them. (6) If many Europeans arriving before the mid-nineteenth century experienced life in the United States as a welcome respite from the servitude and absolutism they left behind, some were uncomfortable with the paradox that the land of the free permitted chattel slavery. (7) Labor, rather than liberty, remained the overriding concern in the decision to move to the United States, especially in the peak immigration years of the industrial era. In place of the freedom paradigm, scholars have come to understand that migration is "a normal and structural element of human societies throughout history," and European movement to the Americas is best understood "in terms of the fundamental structures of European economic life." (8)

By sheer numbers, of course, most Europeans did not decide to leave for the United States or anywhere else. During the long nineteenth century from 1815-1914, for every European who left Europe, nine moved within Europe. From 1861 to 1910, emigrants to the Americas were a tiny percentage of the whole population: from as high as 6.6 out of 1,000 annually from Norway to as low as 0.2 out of 1,000 from France. (9) On a statistical basis, then, it would be more accurate, remaining faithful to the terms of the cliche, to say that most Europeans voted with their sitzfleisch by staying right where they were. Furthermore, the notion of emigrants "voting with their feet" for the United States ignores the high rate of return migration, an outbound mass movement that might lead metaphor enthusiasts to say that the large proportion of European immigrants to the United States who returned to Europe were changing their vote after a closer look. Scholarship, if not exceptionalist mythology, has recognized the centrality of return migration, especially once steamship travel brought down the cost of passage. When the U.S. government began keeping records in 1908, return migration rates were nearly 70 percent for immigrants from the Balkans, 63 percent for Greeks, 58 percent for Italians, 34 percent for Austro-Hungarians, 22 percent for Germans, 12 percent for British. (10) Throughout peak immigration periods, "ships heading eastward filled their steerages with Europeans who had had enough of the Americas or who had saved the amount they planned to save," observes a well-regarded study of return migration. "The United States was not a land where every immigrant came to stay; it was a country seen by many foreigners as a means rather than an end." (11) Most Italians coming to the United States, for example, were sojourners who hoped not to establish new lives but to earn enough money so they could return home and buy land. Their movement represented not a "vote" for freedom--except, after a fashion, for young men escaping compulsory military service--but rather was the extension across the Atlantic of well-established patterns of temporary labor migration. Italian stonemasons might spend several years building dams and tunnels in the United States and then work on the Suez Canal or in Panama before returning home with their earnings. (12) Italian prefects and U.S. consuls in Italy reported that from some areas virtually all emigrants returned after making enough money to achieve their goals. (13) The absence of return migration from popular understandings of the immigration experience might be attributable to the American exceptionalist mythology that, as one scholar caricatured it, "every person who set foot on American soil believed himself so fortunate that returning to the native country was unthinkable." (14)

Moreover, the United States was not unique in its appeal to many migrants at a time when other destinations such as Canada, Argentina, and Brazil also welcomed large numbers. (15) Polish-speaking Galicia was swept by "Brazil fever" in 1892, stirred up by shipping agents and letters from satisfied emigrants, resulting in the departure of 100,000 Poles for that country in a single year. (16) Before 1890, more Italian emigrants chose Buenos Aires than New York, and net immigration of Italians was greater to Argentina than to the United States in the years 1895, 1896, 1904, 1908, and 1912. (17) If emigrants truly "vote with their feet," in those years, Italians were voting for Argentina. (A more sensible conclusion is simply that "if at any given time conditions were better in Buenos Aires, that is where most went. If, on the other hand, they were better in New York, the majority went there.") (18)

The traditional image of freedom-seeking immigrants may have been shaped not only by official mythologizing about Pilgrim forefathers as part of the project of constructing a nationalist ideology, (19) but by the carefully preserved memories of members of ethnic groups who faced special persecution abroad or were engaged in struggles for liberation. Partisans of Irish, Hungarian, or other independence movements long found the United States a haven for their organizing efforts. Jewish immigration may fit the freedom paradigm more closely than other ethnicities. The proportion of emigrants to base population in migrant sending communities was higher for Russian Jews than for almost any other population group in Europe. (20) Not only did they depart in unusually high percentages, but once they arrived they mostly stayed: of all European ethnic and national groups, Jews had the lowest rate of return migration from 1908-1914 (when the U.S. government kept records); during this period the average for all European immigrants was 32 percent, but for Jews it was only 7 percent. And while other European migrants might choose from among a number of potential destinations, 80 percent of Jews from Czarist Russia chose the United States. (21) Here, indeed, was a model case of a persecuted minority facing a hostile majority at home and finding in the United States not only a brighter economic future or a temporary source of earnings but religious tolerance, republican institutions, and the separation of church and state, all of which seemed essential to survival for many Jews in the 1880s and few of which could readily be found elsewhere. (22) Jewish immigration would appear to be a model case in support of American exceptionalism, but for the fact that it was, well, exceptional--"the clearest exception" to the larger pattern, in the words of a standard work on European migration. (23)

When all the "votes" are counted, then--those of the Europeans who came to America, of the far greater number who did not, and of the many who came but did not stay--the poll results look rather different. This fact alone should encourage us to retire the election metaphor. But since no one would deny that the United States was attractive to the some 30 million Europeans who did choose to immigrate, we need a more sober assessment of how that attraction worked and what the idea of "America" represented to ordinary Europeans. (24) If migration scholarship has given us the former, showing the broader socio-economic forces at work in pushing and pulling migrants toward the United States in large numbers, demonstrating empirically that political refugees were atypical, what should replace the American exceptionalist assumption that America's appeal to foreigners lay primarily in its political and religious freedom? In other words, what did America actually mean to most foreigners, if not the land of the free? Gary Gerstle has argued that many immigrants experienced Americanization as coercion in addition to liberation. (25) Scholars have long observed that many immigrants, following patterns of chain migration and cluster settlement, sought above all to replicate their familiar culture and community structures in their new homes, rather than fully embrace the new. (26)

Investigating what ordinary Europeans, those who emigrated and those who did not, thought of when they thought of America poses an evidentiary challenge. The most substantial research in this area has focused on migrants' own written words in the form of personal letters home, what David Gerber calls "probably the largest single archive we possess of the writings of ordinary people." (27) While shipping agents and local governments seeking to redress overpopulation by encouraging emigration promoted images of America as a land of milk and honey, and novels and travel narratives often presented a positive picture that played down the difficulties, such sources were not considered credible by many Europeans. Along with those promoted by dubious commercial and official sources, the ideas associated with America that entered popular consciousness were derived, for the most part, from the testimony of returning migrants or the vast number of letters sent by those who remained in the United States. (28) The impact of these documents went well beyond their individual recipients, since emigrant letters would "pass through a hundred hands" as they were read aloud in taverns or by pastors in church, and as their content was passed on by men and women gathering at public laundries, workshops, marketplaces, and in the streets. (29)

These letters presented a mixed picture, as the idealization of the promised land gave way to a more multifacted and contradictory collection of images shaped by lived experience. The letters show that America was a land that demanded grueling work and challenging cultural adaptation, whose rewards appeared to the immigrants above all as higher income and more plentiful food. Emigrants in the pre-industrial era were often pleasantly surprised to encounter a relative lack of class distinctions and little pressure to show deference to the wealthy, so unlike the hardened caste structures they left behind in Europe. In the letters emigrants often noted that one did not have to doff one's hat to a superior, and that society accommodated various religious practices. Some spoke directly of the United States as a place of freedom, and Europe as a land of despotism and servitude. (30) To the larger waves of immigrants who came in the era of rapid industrial growth and urbanization, the growing chasm between the very rich and the very poor eroded this sense of social equality; at the same time, European workers' experiences, especially the violence associated with the repression of organized labor, eroded the symbolic power of the United States as a land of freedom. (31) While the letters themselves continue to be the focus of intensive research, (32) a supplementary approach could permit us to go beyond these written records to consider the images of America held by the population in migrant sending communities as they absorbed information from those who had gone to the place itself.

For the most part, scholars who write about foreign views of the United States employ an intellectual history approach: they analyze the published writings of well-known authors. As C. Vann Woodward put it, "we are dependent on those opinions that found written form and were preserved. Those not written or preserved, and therefore the opinions of the great majority, are beyond our reach. What remains is necessarily derived from the minority of those literate and articulate Europeans who took the pains to record and preserve their thoughts." (33) Thus we learn that the Enlightenment naturalists the Comte de Buffon and Cornelius De Pauw thought America degenerate and unhealthy, that Heinrich Heine compared it to a prison, that Charles Dickens found the place suffocating, that it was, to European elites, a land without culture or tradition. Many writers commented upon race relations in American society, condemning its racism or, from quite another standpoint, its racial mixing. Not all elite writers were critical. Goethe praised the United States for its freedom from ghosts of the past. Karl Kautsky and Hegel admired its bourgeois democracy, and Tocqueville's mixed assessments showed great respect for his subject. (34) Alexander Herzen believed that Europe held "no other refuge ... than the deck of a vessel making sail for America." (35) These appear, by and large, as dissenting voices among the resentful elite. But when intellectual historians examine foreign views of the United States, the apparently silent masses are said to have "judged America in a different way," as Dan Diner puts it, offering the customary evidence: "Victims of nineteenth century European industrialism opted for America via emigration to the New World." (36) In other words, they voted with their feet.

If the notion of a split between the largely negative views of the elite and the positive embrace of the popular classes is well entrenched, that is in large part because, as Woodward says, the sources available for the study of elite opinions are readily available, while the opinions of peasant and working class populations are much more difficult to establish. Difficult, but perhaps not impossible. For while Woodward and others have uncovered a great deal of interesting writing produced by "literate and articulate" Europeans and published or archived for posterity, these are not the only forms in which thoughts can be conveyed and preserved.

To get closer to an understanding of the meaning of "America" in these communities, we should recognize that, like other terms, it does not have a fixed, unchanging content across time and space, but is contingent on its social context. If the study of language closely tied to social context was developed with a focus on speech-act theory and the rhetorical deployment of terms in politics by scholars such as J.G.A. Pocock and Quentin Skinner, Reinhardt Koselleck and others linked these approaches to the history of mentalites to develop Begriffsgeschichte, the history of concepts. (37) The history of mentalites opened up new possibilities by legitimizing the study of sources other than traditional written records and the products of high culture. (38) It was Ferdinand de Saussure's insight that words, or signifiers, are distinct from concepts, or the signified, so that the same word may be wielded to different ends by different people. Begriffsgeschichte, which combines social history with historical semantics, offers a focused approach within the history of mentalites, emphasizing changing definitions contained in idiomatic expressions, proverbs, folksongs, and comparable repositories of popular meaning. A foundational text of conceptual history, Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe combined the examination of publications and correspondence with analysis of dictionaries, thesauruses, and encyclopedias. (39) While the work remained dependent largely on the published writings of well-known authors, a parallel study of concepts in French history led by Rolf Reichardt seeks to understand words as a product of social forces and a reflection of social change, and therefore includes satires, songs, catechisms, illustrated handbills, as well as dictionaries, encyclopedias, and other lexicological sources. (40)

This approach, challenging as it is to carry out, could prove fruitful for a study of the symbolic meanings of America that entered idiomatic expressions, slang, proverbs, and folksongs in areas with high rates of emigration. Such a study has yet to be undertaken. (41) The analysis of dictionaries of regional dialects, folksongs, and related sources that follows suggests the rich potential of popular-level conceptual history to help us get closer to an idea of what "America" meant in the minds of those who did not write about it. Unwritten belief remains a notoriously difficult and ultimately unknowable subject of inquiry. But we need not begin and end with the perambulatory formula of the exceptionalists, self-appointed election observers judging the results of a poll that never took place. We do not have such a poverty of sources as to have to satisfy ourselves with endlessly reiterating a single, weary cliche.

Rather than symbolizing an idealized land of freedom, the images of America that made their way into popular culture reflected the diversity of the emigrant experience and the way the distant country affected local life. Perhaps the most immediate sense in which America made itself felt to those left behind in the migrant sending communities was, simply, as a place of great remoteness. This could be connotated positively or negatively. Sudeten farmers setting out to work in distant fields might announce, wir fahren nach Amerika, we are traveling to America. (42) In Hesse, the Amerika-feld was the field furthest from the farmhouse. (43) The town of Fritzhausen in the Bohemian Forest was nicknamed Amerika because flooding often left it cut off--literally across the water--from nearby towns. (44) A Mecklenburg farmer plowing an especially deep furrow might draw the remark wist wol nah Amerika, you must be trying to get to America, the way an American child playing in a sandlot might try to dig a hole "all the way to China"--to the furthest place, on the other side of the world. (45) In parts of Italy, andare in America meant to undertake a long journey to a distant town. Venire d'America, on the other hand, meant to fail to understand a simple fact or routine situation-to be as confused as a foreigner who came from a distant land. (46)

The association of America with distance lent itself readily to imaginative metaphor. Dee is all in Kamerika, he is in America, Mecklenburgers might say of someone who is sleeping, or he is nah Amerika for a person sent to jail--quite the contrary of any connotation of freedom. In Rostock, dee hett eenen nah Amerika schickt, he was sent to America, meant he had gone mad. (47) These sayings are not celebratory of the United States; their significance seems to come rather from America's inaccessibility than from any consensus on its value. A keen awareness of the absence of the emigrants produced phrases showing that the departed neighbors or relatives remained prominent in day-to-day consciousness. At sunset, Mecklenburgers watching the sun disappear over the western horizon would observe, nu trecken s' all in Amerika an, they are all pulling it over to themselves in America (48)--an inspired image that suggests an expansive geographical perception among ordinary folk, tinged with envy or wistfulness, one instance of the quotidian rumination on the United States taking place in nineteenth-century European villages. Geh af Amerika! Go to America! an angry West Bohemian might shout, the way an English speaker might tell someone to "go to hell" or "get out of my sight." A parent in Klentnitz lifting a naughty child might threaten willst Du America sehen? do you want to see America? while pouting children in Luxemburg might whine ech gin an Amerika, I'm going to America, as they stomped out of the room. (49) These and other expressions suggest how immediate and present America was as an idea in the minds of ordinary people living in areas with high rates of emigration. Even children sometimes thought of America when they played. In the Sudetenland, wir fahren nach Amerika was a finger game for learning to count. (50) Children in Mecklenburg played a game of marbles they called merikaanisch in which they threw their marbles as far as they could. (51) In Prussia, Amerika was a popular version of hide-and-seek in which the child who must find the others sang 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, wo ist doch mein Schatz geblieben? Ist nicht hier, ist nicht da, ist wohl in Amerika (where can my darling be, not here, not there, must be in America). (52) In the Pfalz region, a children's counting rhyme, Roll, roll, roll, die Poscht is voll, die Poscht fahrt no Ameriga, Mutter, Vater, Kind had the full post (or carriage) taking mother, father, and child off to America. (53)

For adults and children, then, "America" loomed large enough in their thinking to serve as a metaphor for remoteness without needing to be further explained. But that distant land was not necessarily a place to which one yearned to go: in the expressions quoted above it could signify a dreamland, a refuge, but also a netherworld, a site of imprisonment, a place where one's loved ones disappeared. When positively connoted, on the other hand, "America" appears not so much as a land of liberty but overwhelmingly as a land of plenty: abundance was a common meaning of merica in western Lombardy and Trentino, merika in Voghera, america in Rome. "To find one's America" was to strike it rich: trovare l'America throughout much of Italy, catar la Merica in Trentino, truva ra merica in Voghera, or the Sicilian variant attruvari america. In Lombardy's dialect of Latin Anaunico, giatar la Merica, to throw or cast America, meant to "make a fortune without having to emigrate." (54) Similar expressions could be found across Europe, referring chiefly to wealth (as in the many variations on Dollarika) but also to other forms of success or achievement. In Spain, hacer las Americas or hacerse la America meant to get rich, alluding to emigrants who made a living on either American continent, North or South. (55) In Bari, amerga was a state of well-being. (56) In Switzerland the Romansch phrase quel crajav'er d'avair chatto l'America in maridand tel'e tela meant he thought he found Paradise when he married that girl. (57) (The image of America as a land of plenty seems to be a transnational phenomenon: "Chinese immigrants described the United States as gam sann [in Cantonese] or jinshan [in pinyin] which means 'gold mountain' in English." Japanese migrants spoke of beikoku, or rice country.) (58)

Along with the favorable connotation in such locutions, there could be an element of defiance, of pride in choosing not to emigrate, running through expressions such as that from southern Hesse, Er hodd hie Amerika funn, meaning he found America, or grew wealthy, right here. (59) When drinkers in a Wismar tavern called out the toast Hunn'schit Amerika, Koembuttel is min Brut, dogshit for America, a bottle of caraway brandy (a local specialty) is my bride, they were declaring their firm intention not to follow the minority of their neighbors who decided to leave. (60) Someone from Gascony who n'a pas besougn d'ana ta l'Amerique was comfortable enough not to need to go to America; in the same region the proverb las Ameriques que soun pertout, one can make a fortune anywhere, simultaneously acknowledged America's plentitude while insisting on the worthiness of a decision not to emigrate. (61) When in Languedoc a pas besoun d'ana dins l'Americo, he does not need to go to America, was said of a man who was covetous and fiercely competitive, the remark expressed less admiration than disdain of what it apparently took to succeed in the American economic system. (62) Likewise in French-speaking Switzerland, il a l'oeil americain, he has the American eye, meant he is avaricious. (63)

In the emigrant sending communities, one finds a keen awareness of the daily struggle required to survive in American society. Throughout German-speaking Europe one could hear variations of the popular ditty Jetzt ist die Zeit und Stunde da, wir fahren nach America, now the time and hour have come, we're travelling to America. But in some areas with high rates of emigration, locals who had access to information, especially correspondence and the testimony of returnees, changed the lyrics. Alluding to the travails their compatriots faced in the new country, residents of the Pfalz region of the Rhineland sang wir fahren nach Maleerika, a play on das Malheur, misfortune. (64) In Bavarian dialects, too, locals referred to Malehrikha, Malheurica, to invoke the difficulties that many emigrants experienced. (65) In the western Swiss Alps, Romansch speakers used America as a nickname for fields that were worn out or unfertile, influenced by the reports in emigrants' letters of finding such conditions on their own newly purchased lands. (66) An in-depth study of the Sicilian communities Sutera and Milocca found that few residents "believed the myth of an America paved with gold. In Milocca, they recounted how when Columbus returned from his first visit to the Americas he reported that he had found 'flowers without fragrance, foods without flavor, and women without love.'" (67) German folksongs, to be sure, sometimes celebrated America, as in this Swabian reference to freedom written after the failed liberal revolution of 1848:

Denn die Freiheit ist verloren   Since freedom has been lost
in dem ganzen Europa             in all of Europe
Darum, Bruder, lasst uns reisen  So, brother, let us travel
Nach Amerika, la la la ...       To America, la la la (68)

But others echoed the disappointed Sicilians in songs evoking flowers with no scent and birds that cannot sing, as well as more mundane hardships such as the grueling sea voyage, the stinking holds crammed with seasick passengers, and the danger of theft in American ports upon arrival. Some songs warned that the poor should not emigrate, for a warm welcome awaited only those with money and possessions. Many songs conjured up the homesickness of the emigrants, as in the line "I'd give a finger from my hand/to be back again in my fatherland." (69) Whether such sentiments were echoing emigrant testimony or serving to justify a decision to stay at home is impossible to judge. But while some of the pro-America songs were written by emigration agencies and distributed on broadsheets in the hope of drumming up business, (70) those presenting more skeptical pictures seem intended to puncture the inflated claims of what awaited gullible emigrants in the new world, as in these lines from the derisive song "Amerika" attributed to a Thuringian barber, Johannes Hauck:

Un a itlichs Haus is euch a Schluhs  Every house is a palace too
Un guldig ganz un gar;               And golden through and through
Der best Wei laft in jeden Fluhs,    The best wine flows in every stream
Drum rumm wochst Zuckerwaar,         Sugar candy grows all around
Un wie die Faust stenn die Rosie     And big as fists the raisins hang
Un Stauden dart, mer laft nar hie    On bushes there, just walk up to
                                       them.
Umharig fliehn gabratna Taubn        Roasted pigeons fly around
Kerschbrau un schont gefullt!        Cherry-brown, and ready-stuffed!
Ihr Flahsch is euch so weech wie     Their flesh is soft as down
  Flaum
Un wie Pisquit so mild.              And tender as a biscuit.
Sparrt nar die Mauler auf, za senn   Open your mouth, they fly right in,
Sa dinn, bracht net dernach za       You need not run after them.
  genn.

Die Karpfn schwimma dart in Teich    Carps in ponds there swim around
Schon brau gabacken rumm,            Already baked to golden brown
Un Brad, i nu, dos hengt ja gleich   And bread, it's true, it just hangs
                                       down
Dart u den Baamern rum ...           Beneath the trees there ... (71)

Other German-speaking regions produced lyrics with similarly hyperbolic descriptions, such as those picturing an America where "wine flows right into the windows/and the clover grows three cubits high." (72) These images can be traced back to popular sixteenth-century satires of utopia known as Schlaraffenland, a word carrying associations both of laziness and of culinary abundance. (73) Rather than a political utopia, Schlaraffenland, like its counterparts cocagne in French, cockaigne in English, or cuccagna in Italian, is above all a land of plenty, where all of one's physical needs are met, and hunger is easily satisfied--the overriding daily concern in most peasant communities. (74) In nineteenth-century versions, stories of Schlaraffenland, like Hauck's lyrics, sometimes contained explicit references to emigration. At least since the 1830s, Schlaraffenland appeared in discussions of migration to America in German-speaking communities, where the word referred to the naive belief that a wonderland of idleness and easy bounty waited across the sea. (75)

Of course the farmers who sang these words knew how fowl are roasted and how wine and sausages are made. Such alluring images of abundance, while seeming to confirm the conflation of cockaigne with America, can be seen not as evidence of poor Europeans' credulousness but of their skepticism and sense of humor. When the barber Hauck wrote, Sie machen ja ahn Larm dervuh/As wenn dart fung der Himmel uh (They make such a fuss about it/As if heaven itself begins there), (76) he was mocking America fever, not encouraging it.

As a scholar of Provencal folklore wrote of the value of folksongs as a source for cultural history, in contrast to written documents that preserve "the 'view from the top' ... the songs serve as an index to popular feeling." Those songs and the feelings they convey are transmitted by "generations of singers ... because they chose to sing them." (77) For some Hungarian emigrants in Bridgeport, Connecticut, that feeling was one of disillusionment and homesickness:

  America is not my native country,
  I never had a jolly hour there;
  I have wandered a great lot,
  But my heart became all the more bitter.

  My good friends, come here to me,
  Come and see me out to the station;
  There I shall get into the train
  And return to my old homeland! (78)

Other songs turned "America" into "Misery-ca," a land of bad luck. (79) Some Hungarian folksongs clearly reflected not solely the imaginings of those who stayed at home but the attestations of disappointed return migrants, since the songs were flecked with anglicized words from their experience in America, such as complaints against the pitbosz (pit boss), or longing for the okantri (old country). Knowing that America was commonly represented as a paradise, yet vividly aware of the hardships of emigrant life, one singer resolved the contradiction diplomatically:

  Tuesday morning I went on board a ship,
  I return to beautiful Hungary;
  God save America forever,
  But just let me get out of there! (80)

Europeans departing for the United States might be expected to return only after many years or not at all, and so for their relatives bidding farewell to the emigrants, America could be seen as the land that robbed them of their loved ones, as in the Irish custom of calling a departure ceremony an "American wake" (or the Japanese nickname for emigrants, kimin, meaning people who had been discarded). (81) To some extent, America's meaning was also influenced by the gender of the beholder. Women who emigrated, whether as part of family groups or as independent laborers (often in domestic service), responded to some of the same array of material considerations as male migrants, making independent choices. (82) Others actively pursued their own interests by deciding to enter the international marriage market and choosing a destination across the Atlantic. (83) But for those left behind it was a different matter. In southern European countries, labor migration rather than family migration created highly uneven sex ratios among those departing. (84) Sicilian "America widows" who wandered through town crying out the names of their husbands or sons in the United States would hardly have been thinking of that country as a paradise. (85) Nor did Hungarian women who lay on the tracks in front of locomotives to try to prevent a relative from emigrating. (86) Other Hungarian women perhaps found consolation in these lines from a folksong that cast the country as an explicit physical rival:

  Oh you undulating soil of America,
  How many girls have called down curses upon you!
  America, be cursed ... Forever! (87)

The fear that emigration would lead to unfaithfulness or abandonment applied not only to the absent male emigrants but to their wives left behind. "Sicilians believed that prolonged exposure to 'America' undermined traditional values and morals and weakened a man's capacity to act honourably," and they believed it threatened a woman's as well, as revealed in the Sicilian folksongs that "equated the emigrant with a cuckold," or the Calabrian saying that "America brings money, food, and horns." (88)

America could be associated with still more tragic fates, as in a song from the Carpathian mountains about a woman from Ukraine who travels to join her husband in America only to find he has been killed in a mine accident. (89) And since many emigrants wound up living in big cities where they were exposed to urban criminality, America came to be associated with crime: a red-light district in Budapest was known as Chicago; (90) in Berlin, amerikanisch mischen meant cheating at cards by only pretending to shuffle the deck and amerikanische Geschafte or USA-Geschafte meant fraudulent dealings in shoddy goods. (91) Vol a l'americaine in France or truffa all'americana in Italy was an American con, a ploy in which an accomplice pretended to be a wealthy foreigner in order to win the trust of the victim. (92)

These scams were plausible because some of the return migrants had indeed made fortunes in the new world. In the Versilian dialect of Tuscany, a mericano was a repatriate who had made money in America. (93) An area near a Hungarian village where return migrants bought land with their savings was known as Dollarhegy, Dollar Mountain. (94) The figure of the rich relative returning from the United States was enshrined in such expressions as the oncle d'Amerique in France, zio d'America in Italy, and Onkel aus Amerika in Germany. In Luxemburg, the phrase was actually de Mononk aus Amerika, literally "the my-uncle-from-America"; a comparable German dialect phrase was the Amerikaunkel, "the America-uncle" (not "my American uncle"). These were not the emigrant siblings of one's parents but quasi-mythical personifications of the source of unexplainable or unexpected wealth. To the question, How were you able to buy that land? the answer could be, It was the America-uncle. (95)

But not all returnees were welcomed as wealthy benefactors. For one thing, Americans (or Europeans who had lived in America) behaved oddly from the point of view of residents of small conservative communities. In Piedmont and Lombardy, an american was a stranger one should be wary of. (96) To commit an americanata was to behave in a way that was eccentric, bizarre, or in poor taste. (97) Instead of reintegrating themselves into village life, returnees sometimes lived in a new fashion that produced resentment. A villager in Calabria is on record as grumbling that "returnees are the worst parasites I have ever encountered," and Italian prefects complained that the repatriates sowed dissension and conflict, and would not invest in community projects. (98) Some returnees displayed a penchant for social equality and had lost their habits of deference in ways that annoyed local elites. Elsewhere the notion that America made emigrants aloof or snobbish could be embodied physically in local topography, as in Baden's Neustadt where a neighborhood on a high hill was called Amerika, "because the residents looked down upon the others" (99) and was reflected in the pungent Mecklenburg exhortation immer Arschloch hoch, Amerika!, keep your asshole high, America, referring to someone who lived ostentatiously. (100) In Adriatic villages, too, a mirrikene was a person who spent beyond his means, and in southeastern Umbria an amerikanu was a spendthrift. (101) Amerikanesch in Luxemburg could mean extravagant, and an americanata in Italy came to mean any action characterized by grandiosity or exaggeration, as in la sua festa di matrimonio e stata una vera americanata, her wedding was a real Americanism. (102)

Such idioms attest to the existence of a variety of often critical views of "America" held by ordinary Europeans in migrant sending communities, ideas formed by their own experience or informed by the testimony of their compatriots, many more of whom returned from the United States than the American exceptionalist myth has ever acknowledged. Although these expressions were common and enduring enough to be recorded by folklorists and linguists studying regional dialects, it is hard to measure just how widespread such ideas were. A more substantial study aimed at developing a conceptual history of "America" at the popular level that goes beyond written records would have to engage in more systematic regional comparisons, correlating semantic patterns with migration patterns, locating popular idioms in their social strata and accounting for change over time.

That is a tall order. But it may be a worthwhile aim, in order to progress beyond the cliches that remain conventional wisdom partly because they are nourished by the official narratives of American nationalism. As John Bodnar has written, while "official culture" produced by elites and maintained by governments seeks to impose an official memory of the past, "vernacular cultures" can reproduce "views of reality derived from firsthand experience in small-scale communities rather than the 'imagined' communities of a large nation." This brief examination of the popular conceptualization of "America" against a background of migration scholarship may illustrate Bodnar's claim that "vernacular expressions convey what social reality feels like rather than what it should be like." (103) To be sure, the vernacular has no monopoly on truth, and certainly the expressions collected above do not present an objective description of social conditions in the United States, much less amount to an argument for an anti-exceptionalist, dystopic understanding of "America." Nor do they diminish the enormous significance of the political and religious freedom available in the United States to those people for whom it was above all a land where they could escape persecution. But the traces of meaning recorded here should serve as a corrective to exceptionalism's stale platitudes, to bring us closer to a rich history that remains elusive.

Department of History

Tallahassee, FL 32306-2200

ENDNOTES

The author would like to thank Heike Bungert, Roger Daniels, Martin Friedman, Jon Gjerde, Suzanne Sinke, and Katharina Vester for their kind suggestions on drafts of this article, Christopher Griffin for his research assistance, and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation for providing generous research support.

1. Daniel Pipes, "Hating America's Success," New York Sun, 12 October 2004.

2. Victor Davis Hanson, "Goodbye to Europe?" Commentary 114:3 (October 2002).

3. Paul Hollander, ed., Understanding Anti-Americanism: Its Origins and Impact at Home and Abroad (New York, 2004), jacket copy.

4. Roger Daniels, Coming to America: A History of Immigration and Ethnicity in American Life, 2nd ed. (New York, 2002), 17-18, 43-44.

5. George E. Pozzetta, ed., Emigration & Immigration: The Old World Confronts the New, vol. 2 (New York, 1991), viii.

6. Wolfgang J. Helbich, "Alle Menschen sind dort gleich ..." Die deutsche Amerika-Auswanderung im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert (Dusseldorf, 1988), 38. For the fates of individual political refugees, see also Elke Wolgast, "Demokratische Gegeneliten in der ameirkanischen Emigration: Politisch motivierte Auswanderung aus Deutschland nach 1819, 1832/33, 1849 und 1878," in Manfred Berg and Philipp Gassert, eds., Deutschland und die USA in der Internationalen Geschichte des 20. Jahrhunderts (Stuttgart, 2004), 195-217.

7. Jon Gjerde, "'Here in America There Is Neither King nor Tyrant': European Encounters with Race, 'Freedom,' and their European Pasts," Journal of the Early Republic 19 (1999): 673-90.

8. Jan Lucassen and Leo Lucassen, Migration, Migration History, History: Old Paradigms and New Perspectives (Bern, 1997), 9; Leslie Page Moch, Moving Europeans: Migration in Western Europe since 1650 (Bloomington, 1992) 6.

9. Annual averages cited in Moch, Moving Europeans, 149.

10. J.D. Gould, "European and Inter-Continental Emigration. The Road Back Home: Return Migration from the United States," Journal of European Economic History 9 (Spring 1980): 57. For an introduction to the complicated issue of return migration, see Mark Wyman, Round-Trip to America: The Immigrants Return to Europe, 1880-1930 (Ithaca, NY, 1993), including the discussions of data on pp. 10-14. About a third of Poles also returned, according to Ewa Morawska, "Labor Migrations of Poles in the Atlantic World Economy, 1880-1914," in Dirk Hoerder and Leslie Page Moch, eds., European Migrants: Global and Local Perspectives (Boston, 1996), 170-210. See also Francesco Cerase, "Expectations and reality: A Case Study of Return Migration from the United States to Southern Italy," International Migration Review 8 (1974): 245-62; idem, "Nostalgia or Disenchantment: Considerations on Return Migration," in Silvano M. Tomasi and Madeline H. Engel, eds., The Italian Experience in the United States (New York, 1970), 217-39; Dino Cinel, The National Integration of Italian Return Migration, 1870-1929 (New York, 1991); Klaus J. Bade, Auswanderer--Wanderarbeiter--Gastarbeiter: Bevolkerung, Arbeitsmarkt und Wanderung in Deutschland im spaten 19. und fruhen 20. Jahrhundert (Ostfildern, 1984); Karen Schniedewind, Begrenzter Aufenthalt im Land der unbegrenzten Moglichkeiten: Bremer Ruckwanderer aus Amerika 1850-1914 (Stuttgart, 1994).

11. Wyman, Round-Trip to America, 7, 207.

12. Patrizia Audenino, "The Paths of the Trade: Italian Stonemasons in the United States," in Emigration & Immigration: The Old World Confronts the New, ed. George E. Pozzetta (New York, 1991), 31-47.

13. Cinel, National Integration, 100.

14. Cinel, National Integration, 96. Theodore Saloutos, "Causes and Patterns of Greek Emigration to the United States," in Emigration & Immigration: The Old World Confronts the New, ed. George E. Pozzetta (New York, 1991), 526-83, writes similarly that "The bulk of the Greeks originally came with the thought of working for a few years, amassing savings, discharging obligations, providing for the marriage of their sisters, and returning to Greece to lead economically more secure lives. The decision to remain in the United States permanently came as an afterthought" (582). See also his They Remember America: The Story of the Repatriated Greek-Americans (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1956). Juliana Puskas finds that Hungarian "emigrants left determined to return home after having accumulated certain savings." Puskas, Ties that Bind, Ties that Divide: 100 Years of Hungarian Experience in the United States (New York, 2000), 83.

15. Walter Nugent, Crossings: The Great Transatlantic Migrations, 1870-1914 (Bloomington, 1992); Rudolph J. Vecoli and Suzanne M. Sinke, eds., A Century of European Migrations, 1830-1930 (Champaign, 1991).

16. Benjamin P. Murdzek, Emigration in Polish Social-Political Thought, 1870-1914 (New York, 1977).

17. Samuel L. Baily, Immigrants in the Lands of Promise: Italians in Buenos Aires and New York City, 1870-1914 (Ithaca, N.Y., 1999), 56. Moreover, during all phases of the period 1876-1976, more Italians moved to other parts of Europe than to North America. Ibid., 24.

18. Baily, Immigrants, 57.

19. John Bodnar, Remaking America: Public Memory, Commemoration, and Patriotism in the Twentieth Century (Princeton, 1992).

20. The exception is the Irish during the famine of the 1840s.

21. Kuznets, "Immigration of Russian Jews," 336-7.

22. Especially once Great Britain, another attractive destination for Jews, restricted entry to them by tightening the Aliens Act in 1905.

23. Moch, Moving Europeans, 150. Nonetheless, Jews did choose to return to Europe in surprisingly large numbers during the peak years of Jewish migration. Jonathan D. Sarna debunks what he rightly calls "The Myth of No Return: Jewish Return Migration to Eastern Europe, 1881-1914," in Colin Holmes, ed., Migration in European History (Cheltenham, 1996), 2:454-66. Sarna cites the Jewish Messenger's 1888 observation of "dispirited people who are as eager to leave the country as a few years or months ago they were so hopeful in reaching it," and he uses census figures to estimate a return rate of 15-20% for Russian Jews (many of them aided by the United Hebrew Charities). Jewish return migrants cited the difficulties of adjusting to industrial working conditions or the challenge of observing religious laws in "a Godless land." Sarna, "Myth of No Return," 464. For Orthodox Jewish estrangement from America see also Sarna's translation of Moses Weinberger's description of Jews in New York, People Walk on their Heads (New York, 1982).

24. In some European contexts, such as on the Iberian peninsula, references to "America" meant the Western Hemisphere south of the U.S. border. In others, "America" might refer to the United States and Canada. Before the nineteenth century, it often meant the entire New World. This essay is concerned especially with images of the United States, commonly referred to as "America" in most European migrant sending communities during the period of greatest immigration from the 1840s to World War I.

25. Gary Gerstle, "Liberty, Coercion, and the Making of Americans," Journal of American History 84:2 (September 1997): 524-58.

26. Charles Tilly, "Migration in Modern European History," in William H. McNeill and Ruth S. Adams, eds., Human Migration: Patterns and Policies (Bloomington, 1978), 48-72; John Bodnar, The Transplanted: A History of Immigrants in Urban America (Bloomington, 1985); Jon Gjerde, The Minds of the West: Ethnocultural Evolution in the Rural Middle West, 1830-1917 (Chapel Hill, 1997).

27. David A. Gerber, "Forming A Transnational Narrative: New Perspectives on European Migrations to the United States," The History Teacher 35:1 (2001): 61-77. See also idem, Authors of Their Lives: The Personal Correspondence of British Immigrants to North America in the Nineteenth Century (New York, 2005); Wolfgang Helbich and Walter D. Kamphoefner, Deutsche im amerikanischen Burgerkrieg. Brief von Front und Farm 1861-1865 (Paderborn, 2002); Wolfgang Helbich, Walter D. Kamphoefner, and Ulrike Sommer, eds., Briefe aus Amerika. Deutsche Auswanderer schreiben aus der Neuen Welt 1830-1930 (Munich, 1988), and consider the significance of the change in the title of the American translation, News from the Land of Freedom: German Immigrants Write Home (Ithaca, N.Y., 1991); Dirk Hoerder and Horst Rossler, eds., Distant Magnets: Expectations and Realities in the Immigrant Experience (New York, 1993); Herbert J. Brinks, ed., Dutch American Voices: Letters from The United States, 1850-1930 (Ithaca, 1995); Kerby A. Miller, Arnold Schrier, Bruce D. Boling, and David N. Doyle, Irish Immigrants in the Land of Canaan: Letters and Memoirs from Colonial and Revolutionary America, 1675-1815 (New York, 2003); David Fitzpatrick, ed., Oceans of Consolation: Personal Accounts of Irish Migration to Australia (Ithaca, 1994).

28. The Augsburger Allgemeine Zeitung reported that as early as 1850, writers in the United States were sending more than 100,000 letters a month to correspondents in Europe. Margot Hamm, Michael Henker und Evamaria Brockhoff, eds., Good Bye Bayern--Gruss Gott America--Auswanderung aus Bayern nach Amerika seit 1683 (Darmstadt, 2004).

29. Peter Mesenholler, "Der Auswandererbrief: Bedingungen und Typik schriftlicher Kommunikation im Auswanderungsprozess," in Der grosse Aufbruch. Studien zur Amerikaauswanderung, ed. Peter Assion (Marburg, 1985), 111-24; Linda Reeder, Widows in White: Migration and the Transformation of Rural Italian Women, Sicily, 1880-1920 (Toronto, 2003); Puskas, Ties that Bind, 50. On the forms and functions of personal letters in immigration see David Fitzpatrick, "Correspondence: Ceremonies of Communication," in idem, Oceans of Consolation, 467-502.

30. Gjerde, "'Here in America,'" 680-81.

31. Marianne Debouzy, ed., In the Shadow of the Statue of Liberty: Immigrants, Workers, and Citizens in the American Republic, 1880-1920 (Urbana, 1992, orig. 1988).

32. For an overview of different approaches, see David A. Gerber, "The Immigrant Letter between Positivism and Populism: The Uses of Immigrant Personal Correspondence in Twentieth Century American Scholarship," Journal of American Ethnic History 16 (1997): 3-34.

33. C. Vann Woodward, The Old World's New World (New York, 1991), xv.

34. Ernst Fraenkel, ed., America im Spiegel des deutschen politischen Denkens. Ausserungen deutscher Staatsmanner und Staatsdenker uber Staat und Gesellschaft in den Vereinigten Staaten von Amerika (Cologne, 1959), 108, 111-13, 220-3.

35. Woodward, The Old World's New World, 100.

36. Dan Diner, America in the eyes of the Germans: an essay on anti-Americanism, English language ed. (Princeton, 1996), 38, 23-4. For other studies of published writings, see Woodward, The Old World's New World; Manfred Durzak, Das Amerika-Bild in der deutschen Gegenwartsliteratur. Historische Voraussetzungen und aktuelle Beispiele (Stuttgart, 1979); Franz M. Joseph, ed., As Others See Us: The United States through Foreign Eyes (Princeton, 1959); Egbert Klautke, Unbegrenzte Moglichkeiten: "Amerikanisierung" in Deutschland und Frankreich (1900-1933) (Stuttgart, 2003); Werner Kremp, In Deutschland liegt unser Amerika. Das sozialdemokratische Amerikabild von den Anfangen der SPD bis zur Weimarer Republik (Munster, 1993); Andrei S. Markovits, Amerika, dich hasst sich's besser. Antiamerikanismus und Antisemitismus in Europa (Hamburg, 2004); Ulrich Ott, Amerika ist anders. Studien zum Amerika-Bild in deutschen Reiseberichten des 20. Jahrhunderts (Frankfurt am Main, 1991); Jacques Portes, Fascination and Misgivings: The United States in French Opinion, 1870-1914, trans. Elborg Forster (New York, 2000); Philippe Roger, L'ennemi americain. Genealogie de l'antiamericanisme francais (Paris, 2002). Many acknowledge a debt to Antonello Gerbi, The Dispute of the New World: The History of a Polemic, 1750-1900 (Pittsburgh, 1973 [orig. Milan 1955]).

37. Melvin Richter, The History of Political and Social Concepts: A Critical Introduction (New York, 1995). For a brief overview see Mark Bevir, "Begriffsgeschichte," History and Theory 39, no. 2 (May 2000): 273-84. Bevir and other critics of Pocock and Skinner have argued that their focus on the contextual meaning of language deprives authors or speakers of agency, as if such studies assume that people can never say what they mean. But both scholars acknowledge that contextual analysis is not supposed to indicate authorial intention; Richter, for one, believes the schools are compatible. See the roundtable discussion of Mark Bevir, The Logic of the History of Ideas (Cambridge, 1999) in Rethinking History: The Journal of Theory and Practice 4:3 (2000); Richter, History of Political and Social Concepts, 5; Quentin Skinner, "Rhetoric and Conceptual Change," Finnish Yearbook of Political Thought 3 (1999): 60-73.

38. Michel Vovelle, Ideologies and Mentalities, trs. Eamon O'Flaherty (Chicago, 1990); Roger Chartier, Cultural History: Between Practices and Representations (Ithaca, N.Y., 1988).

39. Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe: Historisches Lexikon zur politisch-sozialer Sprache in Deutschland, ed. Otto Brunner, Werner Conze, and Reinhardt Koselleck. 8 vols. (Stuttgart, 1972-1997).

40. Rolf Reichardt and Eberhard Schmitt, eds., Handbuch politisch-sozialer Grundbegriffe in Frankreich 1680-1920, 20 vols. (Munich, 1985-2000), I: 65.

41. Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe does not include an entry for "America." Reichardt's project, more grounded in cultural history sources, will include a future entry on "England and America." Reichardt and Schmitt, Handbuch, entry index.

42. Heinz Engels, Sudetendeutsches Worterbuch (Munich, 1988).

43. Friedrich Maurer and Rudolf Mulch, Sudhessisches Worterbuch (Marburg, 1965).

44. Engels, Sudetendeutsches Worterbuch.

45. Richard Wossidlo and Hermann Teuchert, Mecklenburgisches Worterbuch, vol. 1 (Neumunster, 1942).

46. Max Pfister, LEI. Lessico etimologico italiano (Wiesbaden, 1987).

47. Wossidlo and Teuchert, Mecklenburgisches Worterbuch.

48. Wossidlo and Teuchert, Mecklenburgisches Worterbuch.

49. Engels, Sudetendeutsches Worterbuch; Luxemburger Worterbuch (Luxemburg, 1950), 23.

50. Luxemburger Worterbuch.

51. Wossidlo and Teuchert, Mecklenburgisches Worterbuch.

52. Walther Ziesemer, Preussisches Worterbuch (Hildesheim, 1975), 132. In the port city of Hamburg, through which many emigrants passed, Amerika wisen, to show America, was slang for exposing one's genitals. Hans Kuhn and Ulrich Pretzel, eds., Hamburgisches Worterbuch (Neumunster, 1985), 96.

53. Ernst Christmann and Julius Kramer, Pfalzisches Worterbuch (Wiesbaden, 1965), 200.

54. Pfister, LEI. See also Salvatore Battaglia, Grande dizionario della lingua italiana (Torino, 1961), 389.

55. Diccionario de la lengua espanola, 20th ed. (Madrid, 1992), 89; Julio Casares, ed., Diccionario historico de la lengua espanola (Madrid, 1992), 818.

56. Pfister, LEI.

57. Chasperr Pult et al., eds., Dicziunari rumantsch grischun (Cuoira, 1939-1946).

58. Jon Gjerde, "Response," Journal of American Ethnic History 18:4 (Summer 1999): 152-6.

59. Maurer and Mulch, Sudhessisches Worterbuch. Similarly in Hesse's largest city, der hat in Frankfurt sei Amerika gefunne, he found his America in Frankfurt. Wolfgang Bruckner, Frankfurter Worterbuch (Frankfurt am Main, 1971), 163.

60. Wossidlo and Teuchert, Mecklenburgisches Worterbuch.

61. Simin Palay, Dictionnaire du bearnais et du gascon modernes (Paris, 1961), 34.

62. Frederic Mistral, Lou tresor dou felibrige, ou dictionnaire provencal-francais (Rapheleles-Arles, 1979), 85.

63. Louis Gauchat, Jules Jeanjaquet et al., Glossaire des patois de la suisse romande (Neuchatel, 1924-1933), 344.

64. Ernst Christmann and Julius Kramer, Pfalzisches Worterbuch (Wiesbaden, 1965), 200.

65. Eberhard Kranzmayer, Worterbuch der bairischen Mundarten in Osterreich (Wien, 1970), 177.

66. This was true in Zernez-Brail, Trun, Sumvitg, Muster, Grusch, and Haldenstein, as well as in Vorarlberg and in Italy in the Valle Lomellina. Pult et al., Dicziunari rumantsch, 236.

67. Reeder, Widows in White, 78.

68. Lutz Rohrich, "Auswandererschicksal im Lied," in Der grosse Aufbruch. Studien zur Amerikaauswanderung, ed. Peter Assion (Marburg, 1985), 71-108, 74.

69. Rohrich, "Auswandererschicksal im Lied," 91.

70. Rohrich, "Auswandererschicksal im Lied," 104.

71. Lyrics written by Johannes Hauck (1806-1880), a shoemaker's son who worked as the town barber in Gompertshausen, in Heinz Sperschneider, ed., Walder, Felder, Bergeshohn. Eine Anthologie Thuringer Mundartdichtung (Leipzig, 1968), 91-3. Translation mine.

72. Rohrich, "Auswandererschicksal im Lied," 87.

73. Hermann Pleij, Der Traum vom Schlaraffenland. Mittelalterliche Fantasien vom vollkommenen Leben (Frankfurt am Main, 2000). Pleij suggests the proliferation of such tales in Western Europe from the seventeenth century onward was in part a response to the growing number of hyperbolic travel reports. Pleij, 296. See also Werner Wunderlich, "Das Schlaraffenland in der deutschen Sprache und Literatur. Bibliographischer Uberblick und Forschungsstand," Fabula 27 (1986): 54-75; Dieter Richter, Schlaraffenland. Geschichte einer popularen Phantasie (Cologne, 1984).

74. There are references to Cocagne as early as the thirteenth century in France; the word is thought to be derived from the Latin coquina, kitchen. See Pleij, Der Traum vom Schlaraffenland, 40-52.

75. Peter Assion, "Schlaraffenland schriftlich und mundlich. Zur Wiederkehr von Marchenmotiven in der Auswanderungsdiskussion des 19. Jahrhunderts," in Lutz Rohrich and Erika Lindig, eds., Volksdichtung zwischen Mundlichkeit und Schriftlichkeit (Tubingen, 1989), 109-23.

76. Sperschneider, Walder, Felder, Bergeshohn, 91.

77. Adele C. Friedman, "Love, Sex, and Marriage in Traditional French Society: The Documentary Evidence of Folksongs," The French Review 52, no. 2 (1978): 243, 242.

78. Bela Gunda, "America in Hungarian Folk Tradition," The Journal of American Folklore 83, no. 330 (1970): 406-416. Gunda provides translations but not the original Hungarian texts.

79. Puskas, Ties that Bind, 84.

80. Gunda, "America in Hungarian Folk Tradition."

81. Gjerde, "Response," 155.

82. Donna Gabaccia, ed., Seeking Common Ground: Multidisciplinary Studies of Immigrant Women in the United States (Westport, 1992); Christiane Harzig et al., Peasant Maids--City Women: From the European Countryside to Urban America (Ithaca, N.Y., 1997).

83. Suzanne M. Sinke, Dutch Immigrant Women in the United States, 1880-1920 (Champaign, 2002).

84. Donna Gabaccia, "Women of the Mass Migrations: From Minority to Majority, 1820-1930," in Hoerder and Moch, European Migrants, 90-114.

85. Reeder, Widows in White, 65-6. Sicilian doctors sometimes blamed the emigration of a husband or son for contributing to insanity among women left behind. See also Vito Teti, "Noti sui comportamenti delle donne sole degli 'americani' durante la prima emigrazione in Calabria," Studi emigrazione 24:87 (1987): 13-46.

86. Gunda, "America in Hungarian Folk Tradition."

87. Gunda, "America in Hungarian Folk Tradition."

88. Reeder, Widows in White, 68-9. For critiques in Mexican corridos of the way the United States changed emigrants' attitudes toward wealth and women's behavior, as well as the loneliness inherent in the emigration experience, see the texts collected in Maria Herrera-Sobek, Northward Bound: The Mexican Immigrant Experience in Ballad and Song (Bloomington, 1993).

89. Gunda, "America in Hungarian Folk Tradition."

90. Gunda, "America in Hungarian Folk Tradition."

91. Siegmund A. Wolf, Worterbuch des Rotwelschen (Mannheim, 1956), 33, 114.

92. Alain Rey, ed., Le grand Robert de la langue francaise, 2nd ed. (Paris, 2001); Pfister, LEI.

93. Pfister, LEI.

94. Gunda, "America in Hungarian Folk Tradition."

95. Luxemburger Worterbuch; Pfister, LEI.

96. Pfister, LEI.

97. It could also be a boast that is not credible. Battaglia, Grande dizionario.

98. Cinel, National Integration, 119.

99. Friedrich Kluge et al., Badisches Worterbuch (Lahr, 1925-1940).

100. Wossidlo and Teuchert, Mecklenburgisches Worterbuch.

101. Pfister, LEI.

102. Tullio de Mauro, ed., Grande dizionario italiano dell'uso (Torino, 1999). Such expressions depicting returnees as snobbish are at odds with the observations of immigration historians of the democratic conduct of returnees who had experienced the United States as a society with relatively few class or caste distinctions. Both kinds of behavior, of course, upset the social order. See, for example, Reeder, Widows in White, and Puskas, Ties that Bind.

103. Bodnar, Remaking America, 14.

By Max Paul Friedman

Florida State University