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THE HEYDAY OF THE FOREIGN-LANGUAGE PRESS

A Nation of Immigrants

In 1900, 46 percent of the nation's population was composed of first- or second-generation immigrants. Beginning in 1896 immigrants from southeastern European countries outnumbered those from northwestern European countries, bringing with them a diversity of languages and cultures that America had never before experienced. Many of these new Americans could not read at all, and most of them could not read English but were eager to learn. In the last decades of the nineteenth century, most foreign-language papers were run by intellectuals or clergy on the European model of dedication to one religion or ideology. In the first decade of the twentieth century all this changed. More than one thousand foreign-language papers operated, the number peaking at thirteen hundred in 1914. More than 140 of these were dailies, and 40 percent were in German. German-, Polish-, and Yiddish-language papers claimed circulations of one million readers in each language; the Italian papers reached about seven hundred thousand; and the Swedish, five hundred thousand. The single largest daily was the German New Yorker Staats-Zeitung, with a quarter of a million readers.

Learning to Assimilate

Innovators such as Abraham Cahan of the Yiddish Jewish Daily Forward and Charles Barsotti of the Italian Il Progresso brought the conventions of Pulitzer's New Journalism to their readers: an emphasis on features and plenty of pictures. While foreign-language papers printed news from the home countries of their readers and news from within their ethnic communities, they also provided advice for successful assimilation into American culture. They carried news about employment opportunities and proper behavior on the job and articulated a sense of ethnic identity and pride consonant with successful adjustment to life in America. An enthusiastic promoter of Italian culture and Italian-American pride, Barsotti raised statues of famous Italians all around New York City: Verrazano in Battery Park, Garibaldi in Washington Square, Columbus in Columbus Circle, Dante at Broadway and Sixty-third Street, Verdi at Broadway and Seventy-third Street.

Success Means Failure

The growing number of foreign-language publications early in the century does not indicate how volatile the industry was. For every one hundred papers that started, ninety-three stopped. As each generation of immigrants passed into the main-stream of American culture, the need for an "immigrant" press diminished. After World War I newly restrictive policies abruptly arrested the flow of immigration. By 1960 there were half the number of foreign-language publications that there had been in 1914. A more appropriate term for those remaining would be ethnic papers, since the readers were no longer necessarily first- or second-generation immigrants. The flowering of the immigrant press between 1900 and 1930 remains one of the most understudied areas of American history.