Special Sorrows

Conventional wisdom would have us believe that every immigrant to the United States “became American,” by choice and with deliberate speed. Yet, as Special Sorrows shows us, this is simply untrue. In this compelling revisionist study, Matthew Frye Jacobson reveals tenacious attachments to the Old World and explores the significance of homeland politics for Irish, Polish, and Jewish immigrants at the turn of the twentieth century.Drawing on Yiddish, Polish, and English-language sources, Jacobson discovers the influence of nationalist ideologies in the overt political agendas of such ethnic associations as the Knights of Zion and the Polish Falcons, as well as in newspapers, vernacular theater, popular religion, poetry, fiction, and festivals, both religious and secular. In immigrant communities, he finds that nationalism was a powerful component of popular sensibility.A captivating example of Jacobson’s thesis is immigrant reaction to American intervention in Cuba. Masculinist/militarist strains of nationalist culture met with the keen impulse to aid a subjugated people. The three national groups, rich with memories of their own subjugation, found an unlikely outlet in the Caribbean. But when the U.S. war for Cuban liberation was followed by a crusade for Philippine subjugation, immigrants faced a dilemma: some condemned the American empire rich in Old World parallels; others dismissed the Filipinos as racial “others” and embraced the glories of conquest. In effect, the crucible of American imperialism was vital to many immigrants’ Americanization, in the sense of passionate participation in national politics, pro or con.This work answers the call of scholars to recover the full experience of these immigrants. It adds to the tapestry of America’s turn-of-the-century political culture and restores an essential transnational dimension to questions of ethnic identity and behavior.

A scholarly study of the real roots of what Jacobson calls ‘America’s largely assimilated but ultimately unmeltable ethnics.’ It’s a startling point of view for readers who are accustomed to the self-congratulatory myth of America as a beacon of liberty to which the ‘huddled masses’ of the world look with longing., Interest in the ways homeland allegiances and feelings of peoplehood have influenced American ethnic political behavior…is long standing among diplomatic and ethnic historians… Matthew Frye Jacobson’s original, well-conceived work decisively moves the subject from the realm of politics to the new cultural history. Light is shed on an old subject, which, now freshly illuminated, is revealed to be far more laden with significant meanings than one might have thought… In reconceiving the subject of the international politics of ethnic groups, Jacobson forms a dynamic conceptual grid at the juncture of nationalism, race, and gender. His understanding of the importance of whiteness in rooting the ethnics’ own emergent American identities and in complicating their understanding of the experience of victimization leads to the deft analytical maneuver that forms the center of the book: the presentation of Irish, Polish, and Jewish responses to the Spanish–American War and, in its wake, the American acquisition of a colonial empire in Asia and the Caribbean… [T]his is a pathbreaking, intelligent book that deserves a wide reading, both for what it reveals about American ethnicity and for its contributions as an analytical model., Most recently scholars like Thistlethwaite, Nugent, and others have depicted the migration as an international and global phenomenon, viewing the movement as a dispersion to many lands, a diaspora. Matthew Josephson follows this latest trend of placing migration in a world context. His work, Special Sorrows, highlights the importance of the national homeland in the minds of newcomers and thereby makes a substantial contribution to our understanding of American immigrant adjustment… His comparative approach and his linguistic feat are admirable. As a result the reader comes away with the surprising insight that ethnic nationalism was important well beyond the traditional patriotic societies… The work will also intrigue its audience from its employing the latest feminist or gender theory on nationalism., Jacobson is a remarkable kind of historian, as comfortable with the subtle analysis of literary texts as in tracing the complex historical paths of nationalism through diverse groups., This interesting book provides what in effect is a revisionist approach to the history of immigration to the United States, by examining the continuing connection to their homelands of immigrants who were Irish, Polish, and Jewish, and by examining their reactions to changes in American foreign policy.

Matthew Frye Jacobson is William Robertson Coe Professor of American Studies and History at Yale University.