Making Americans: Immigration, Race, and the Origins of the Diverse Democracy. (Book Reviews).

Making Americans: Immigration, Race, and the Origins of the Diverse Democracy. By Desmond King. (Cambridge, Mass., and London: Harvard University Press, 2000. Pp. [xii], 388. $45.00, ISBN 0-674-00088-9.)

In Making Americans political scientist Desmond King analyzes the impact of immigration on American political development. When Americans disagreed about immigration policies, created Americanization programs, and passed immigration laws, he argues, they were actively defining what it meant to be American. And from the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882 to the repeal of the national-origins system quotas in the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act, American immigration policies defined potential Americans as white. "Anglo-Saxon Americanism" (p. 14), he insists in an argument that will not surprise southernists, was the dominant conception of American citizenship. After 1920, in a kind of self-fulfilling cycle, immigration law made sure most immigrants were white even as Americanization programs were designed to assimilate white newcomers. Together, these trends reinforced whiteness as Americanness internally--against groups like African Americans and Native Americans--even as they controlled and shaped the population of American immigrants. Multiculturalism, in turn, grew out of this long denial of America's true pluralistic origins.

King begins by defining his terms and reviewing the history of American immigration before 1920. In particular, he examines the comprehensive forty-two-volume report on immigrants and immigration policies issued by the Dillingham Commission in 1911. The 1920s, however, were the key decade for restriction, the period when quotas were first created for non--Western Hemisphere immigration, the moment when America shifted from (with the exception of the Chinese) an open door policy to a tight policy of immigration control. Discussions of immigration, King finds, focused almost exclusively upon European immigration. Most people from elsewhere, a 1923 Department of Labor memorandum asserted bluntly, fell into "the unnaturalizable races" (p. 199). Much of the rest of the book examines the intellectual and political context in which the 1924 Johnson-Reed Immigration Act was passed, its effects on immigration and the American polity, and its dismantling in the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act. King persuasively argues that the 1965 act should be considered part of a 1960s civil rights trinity, along with the better-known 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act.

For historians, the most interesting and original part of King's argument is his analysis of post-1965 political history and the origins of multiculturalism. He defines multiculturalism as "the explicit acknowledgment of competing and coequal sources of cultural and ethnic identity in a political system" (p. 32). For King, both the new ethnic politics since the 1960s and multiculturalism are reactions to a long history of "Anglo-Saxon Americanism" (p. 14). White ethnics mobilized a form of group politics to assert identities "undervalued in the surge to Americanize" (p. 258). More recently, multiculturalism is the "programmatic ambition of those groups in the United States who conclude that their historical experiences have been belittled or ignored in conventional narratives of U.S. history and who were largely written out of the Americanization process" (pp. 258-59).

While much of Making Americans, at least in its major outlines, will strike historians as a synthesis of what we already know about immigration, Americanization, and the meaning of twentieth-century American identity, King supplies the details. Many southernists, for example, may be unaware that southern politicians tried and yet failed in December 1914 to restrict black immigration and especially an influx of migrants from the Caribbean who had been working on the Panama Canal. House member Martin Madden, representing a Chicago district with many black voters, excitedly argued that this legislation was "the most drastic I have ever seen proposed. It is discrimination of a kind that can not be justified" (p. 154). Unfortunately, King's awkward and repetitive prose makes it difficult to discover these fascinating details.

GRACE ELIZABETH HALE
University of Virginia