Race, the Children of Immigrants, and Social Science Theory

BRIAN GRATTON

"The second generation simply shows an intensification of all the bad qualities of the first." Puck, 1882

IN 1909, Lewis Hine clicked the shutter on a "Polish Boy" in the doffers box at the Quidnick Mill.1 In that towheaded, slender figure, leaning casually against the ominous black metal of the power loom, he captured one of the discontents in Americans' increasingly jaundiced view of immigrants: why do they treat their children like that? What kind of Americans will these unfortunate youth become? For those in the anti-child labor and nativist movements of the early twentieth century, the future looked dark. Immigrants brought with them a host of ills, not the least a tendency to exploit their children at the expense of their schooling. Such primitive behavior implied cultures inferior to that of the United States, ones destined to drag the nation down to the dismal conditions so evident in their European homelands.