Fergus Nicoll

FAITH, LANGUAGE, AND IDENTITY: THE ROLE OF EDUCATION IN THE AMERICANIZATION OF “SYRIANS” IN THE UNITED STATES, 1880–1928¹

Abstract
This article seeks to address a significant lacuna in Arab American Studies in respect of the role played by primary, secondary, and adult education in the integration of hundreds of thousands of mainly Christian immigrants from the Ottoman Levant between the 1890s and the late 1920s. The article begins by discussing the context in which US federal authorities sought to assimilate and “Americanize” these new immigrants through the education of adults and minors in a rapidly evolving public education system, also addressing the developing role of charitable, parochial, and other private schools within the nascent Arab American community. At the heart of national policy was a concern, voiced particularly loudly during the second half of World War I, that the loyalty of immigrants to their new country had to be embedded through a deliberate inculcation of common American values. The education system, in its various forms, bore the brunt of this work. This ideological policy, however, often came into conflict with a countermovement of cultural pluralism, through which it was attempted to retain or reclaim intellectual, cultural, and social legacies from the migrants’ countries of origin. After tackling this wider context, the article focuses on the disparate communities of Arabic-speaking immigrants, from New York to states such as Michigan, Mississippi, Nebraska, and California. Within this heterogenous but, initially at least, mainly Christian diaspora, an intense debate took place throughout the first quarter of the twentieth century over these questions of Americanization, race, identity, the desirability, speed, and comprehensiveness of assimilation, and the extent to which the language and cultural legacy of the mother country would have to be sacrificed in becoming American. These debates, focused on education, shaped the self-view of the nascent diaspora community in ways that lasted until the more nationally diverse “second wave” of post-World War II Arab immigration.

ملخّص

تسعى هذه المقالة إلى معالجة ثغرة كبيرة في الدراسات العربية الأمريكية فيما يتعلق بالدور الذي لعبه التعليم الابتدائي والثانوي والتعليم للبالغين في دمج مئات الآلاف من المهاجرين من بلاد الشام العثمانية (وكانوا باكثريتهم مسيحيين)  بين تسعينيات القرن التاسع عشر وأواخر عشرينيات القرن العشرين. تبدأ المقالة بمناقشة السياق الذي سعت فيه السلطات الفيدرالية الأمريكية إلى استيعاب هؤلاء المهاجرين الجدد و"أمركتهم" من خلال تعليم البالغين والقاصرين في نظام تعليمي حكومي سريع التطور، كما تتناول الدور المتنامي للمدارس الخيرية والطائفية وغيرها من المدارس الخاصة داخل المجتمع العربي الأمريكي الناشئ. في قلب السياسة الوطنية كان هناك قلق، تم التعبير عنه بصوت عالٍ بشكل خاص خلال النصف الثاني من الحرب العالمية الأولى، مفاده أن ولاء المهاجرين لبلدهم الجديد يجب أن يكون من خلال غرس متعمد للقيم الأمريكية المشتركة. تحمل نظام التعليم، بأشكاله المختلفة، العبء الأكبر من هذا العمل. ولكن هذه السياسة الإيديولوجية كانت تتعارض في كثير من الأحيان مع حركة مضادة للتعددية الثقافية، والتي حاولت من خلالها الاحتفاظ بالإرث الفكري والثقافي والاجتماعي من بلدان المهاجرين الأصلية أو استعادته. وبعد تناول هذا السياق الأوسع، تركز المقالة على المجتمعات المتباينة من المهاجرين الناطقين بالعربية، من نيويورك إلى ولايات مثل ميشيغان وميسيسيبي ونبراسكا وكاليفورنيا. وفي إطار هذا الانتشار غير المتجانس، والذي كان يتألف في البداية على الأقل من المسيحيين، دار نقاش مكثف طوال الربع الأول من القرن العشرين حول هذه الأسئلة المتعلقة بالأمركية، والعرق، والهوية، ومرغوبية وسرعة وشمولية الاستيعاب، والمدى الذي يتعين فيه التضحية باللغة والإرث الثقافي للبلد الأم لكي يصبح المرء أميركياً. وقد شكلت هذه المناقشات، التي ركزت على التعليم، النظرة الذاتية لمجتمع المهجر الناشئ بطرق استمرت حتى "الموجة الثانية" من الهجرة العربية بعد الحرب العالمية الثانية والتي كانت أكثر تنوعاً من ناحية .الوطن الأصلي للمهاجرين

INTRODUCTION: EDUCATION AS A THEME IN ARAB AMERICAN STUDIES

This article seeks to make the case that education was an instrumental force in the shaping of Arab American identity during the earliest decades of diaspora formation in the United States. Education, especially in public schools, was an important interface at which mainly Arabic-speaking immigrants began to experience life as a minority for the first time. The anthropologist John Ogbu has argued that those whose emigration is based on a belief that a new nation would offer more economic prosperity, greater social opportunity, and more political freedom become “voluntary minorities”—and that education is a crucial step in any upward mobility among such communities.² The school-adaptation patterns of successful minorities such as the “Syrians”—so classed in most official documentation because of the large number of immigrants from Mount Lebanon, a subdivision of the Ottoman province of Syria—explain why such communities were so successful in overcoming barriers related to their different language and culture, and to European American prejudice.

The school was also an environment in which race played a significant part. These earliest, mainly Lebanese émigrés had left behind an Ottoman Empire made up of Turks, Arabs, Kurds, Jews, Greeks, Slavs, Armenians, and, at its fringes, black Africans; one where, according to the laws embodied in the millet system, social categorization was primarily sectarian rather than racial.³ In the United States, they had now arrived in a country where race was the most entrenched and defining social division. For an Arabic-speaking school pupil, or adult enrolled in night school, race played a highly visible part in the relationship between the student and an almost entirely white teaching body. Education was a field in which gender mattered, too, and in which conventional expectations imported from the sending countries were often overturned by the less conservative societal norms of the New World. As a result of these and other factors, education was the focus of often intense debate within the Arab American community, in which arguments over integration, assimilation, “Americanization”—the declared aim of federal policy—and cultural pluralism were thrashed out over identifiably discrete phases in the early twentieth century in the Arabic- and English-language newspapers of the diaspora.⁴

Immigrants from the Middle East, of course, were far from alone in asking how best to educate their children amid a wider debate over the assimilation of huge numbers of enthusiastic but non-Anglophone and often illiterate new Americans. Arabic-speaking Levantines were a tiny minority among the Italians, Russians, Poles, Germans, and Scandinavians arriving from Europe. Arab Americans were also negotiating an education system that itself was in a state of flux, as national and local authorities tried to recalibrate outdated teaching processes to keep up with rapid social changes and to offer a compelling alternative for parents who would otherwise send their children out to work.

Scanning the published literature on the Arab American experience, however, reveals that education during the earliest years of mass immigration into the US has been insufficiently and unsystematically studied. Despite the widely rehearsed trope that education was a strong personal motive for emigration and that illiterate first-generation immigrants were enthusiastic about their children’s education in America, nothing by way of systemic analysis has been carried out in respect of the actual pursuit of satisfactory schooling. In terms of the pre-migration school experience, the education of Ottoman Arab nationals in the sending societies of the Middle East—often by American and European missionary groups and often in the context of unsatisfactory indigenous options—has been well-studied and, as will be seen, played into the diaspora’s internal responses to Americanization over time.⁵ But in the context of the post-migration experience in the US, only general remarks about the perceived desirability of secondary and tertiary education, without focus and usually pertaining to individual circumstances, can be found scattered throughout many works regarded as canonical in the field.⁶

Several otherwise important contributions to the historiography, including some that engage in detail with contemporary debates over Americanization, assimilation, and cultural pluralism, address education, a key part of those processes, in only glancing terms.⁷ Three works are worth highlighting because they do include a detailed examination of the educational experience of the earliest Arab Americans; as such they are as conspicuous in the field as they are valuable for the cultural overview they present. These are: the third instalment of Louise Seymore Houghton’s 1911 four-part analysis of the Syrian diaspora; James Ansara’s pioneering 1931 thesis on “The Immigration and Settlement of the Syrians;” and Elizabeth Boosahda’s much later recording of reminiscences by the previous generations, albeit specific to educational experiences in Worcester, MA.⁸ Such works notwithstanding, this prevailing lack of detailed discussion of early immigrant education can be compared with the much more intensive studies focused on the schooling of Arab immigrants after World War II. These later arrivals navigated a social environment colored by events in the Middle East, and in which the anxiety and insecurity of a growing and increasingly varied Arab American community over integration, acceptance, and attainment was acute.⁹ But even works devoted to the evolution of Levantine or Middle Eastern Arabs into Arab Americans, such as Katibah’s “Asiatic Immigration: Syrian-Americans,” and Bawardi’s The Making of Arab Americans, failed to address the education of earlier generations as a specific contributing factor in that change.¹⁰

This, then, is the historiography to which this article seeks to contribute by examining the earliest phases of Arab American education for the first time and addressing a significant aspect of a complex and multifaceted field. The chosen methodological approach engages with contemporary debates in America among both the policymakers and providers of immigrant education on the one hand—at federal, state, city, and even school level—and the “consumers” of that education, including adults and children. While reflecting on and profiting from secondary sources where necessary, the article chiefly draws from English- and Arabic-language primary sources, including speeches by federal officials, US government documents, records and yearbooks of charitable institutions, memoirs, newspaper reports, editorials, op-eds, published poetry, and oral histories gleaned from Ellis Island, Alixa Naff’s recordings, and more recent interviews by third-generation Arab Americans that discuss their grandparents’ educational experiences. The article begins, however, with an attempt to set these discussions in context: an assessment of the immigration/education challenge as articulated by the host community into which Arabs sought to settle, primarily through official documents and contemporary speeches made by those responsible for encouraging and managing the process of Americanization.

US ATTITUDES TO EDUCATION AS PART OF AN “AMERICANIZATION POLICY”

America is looking with anxious hope to the school as the chief instrument of Americanization.¹¹

So began a 1920 Immigration Commission investigation into the perceived deficits among America’s immigrant community in the areas of functional literacy, citizenship training, and basic spoken English. From the early 1880s to the end of World War I, the US federal government and American society more broadly had been grappling with the challenge of absorbing hundreds of thousands of new immigrants. “Americanization” was often proposed as the panacea to meet the central problems of the immigrants’ linguistic and social integration with their new neighbors, themselves of multiple national origins.¹² This term encapsulated diverse personal and collective identifiers, including naturalization, citizenship status, and civic values. In some discussions, race was the elephant in the room: not always mentioned but an ever-present aspect of inter-community dialogue over language, eligibility for citizenship, and social interaction. Other contemporary publications did not hesitate to place the issue of race front and center.¹³ In short, Americanization meant different things to different people, and was debated widely at national, state, and city administration levels, especially during and immediately after World War I.¹⁴ Some manifestations of Americanization were benign if didactic; take the series of “Lessons in Patriotism,” published in the Literary Digest, for example. The column’s dual aim sought to “give the latest information and opinion on foreign races being assimilated into American thought and institutions; secondly, to advise Americans on their responsibilities toward this new increment of American citizenship.”¹⁵

The imprecise definition of the values embodied in Americanization contributed to a diversity of interpretation.¹⁶ As Mel van Elteren has written, if immigration prompted the invention of Americanization, “Americanization in turn prompted the invention of a set of terms by which America could be regarded as having some sort of predefinition . . . [even if] the Americanness implied in this Americanization was a fiction.”¹⁷ Those of a progressive (i.e., broadly left-of-center) mindset understood those values broadly to indicate discipline, productivity, and opportunity based on hard work, mutual tolerance, and equality. Origins were irrelevant if an immigrant played by the rules. Those with a lower tolerance of multiculturalism in society instead saw American-ness as equating to whiteness and Europeanness, prompting a spectrum of responses to immigration that ranged from generalized nativism to assumptions of white supremacy and even, in the 1920s, eugenicist-inspired anti-immigrant legislation. Immigrants of Middle Eastern origin were forced to go to court to distinguish themselves from so-called “Asiatics,” who were particularly targeted by racist immigration laws, including the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 and serial legislation between 1905 and the 1930s aimed at Japanese and Filipinos. And in terms of language, the 1906 Nationality Act made the ability to speak English a requirement for naturalization as a US citizen, while the Immigration Act of 1917 barred entry to immigrants who were not literate in any language.¹⁸

The Johnson-Reed Act of 1924 represented more than the culmination of this trend: it amounted to the acme of racially motivated American legislation in this sphere, one which, in the words of Richard Soash, “screwed the lid on the melting pot.”¹⁹ The law sought to favor immigrants from northern and western Europe by limiting the number of immigrants from elsewhere through a “national origins quota.”²⁰ For Arab Americans from the former Ottoman province of Syria, the law dramatically reduced the number of arrivals, dropping from the thousands seen annually over the first two decades of the century to just 123 per year from what was now French Mandate Syria and 100 from British Mandate Palestine, the latter the statutory minimum.²¹ “America of the Melting Pot Comes to End,” blared a New York Times headline above a triumphant article penned by the co-sponsor of the act, US Senator David A. Reed, who boasted that “the racial composition of America at the present time thus is made permanent.”²²

Ideological agendas aside, it was swiftly recognized at city, state, and federal levels that, if Americanization were to mean anything, it had to embrace everybody, and it had to start young. In 1903, the president of the New York Kindergarten Association, Hamilton W. Mabie, wrote: “The kindergarten age marks our earliest opportunity to catch the little Russian, the little Italian, the little German, Pole, Syrian and the rest and begin to make good American citizens of them.”²³ But the crucial word that the Immigration Commission should have included in 1920 was that America was still “looking with anxious hope to the school as the chief instrument of Americanization.”²⁴

The federal government knew that its efforts lagged behind those of several social activist organizations. The so-called “International Institutes” of New England had set out not just to integrate and educate new arrivals during this immigration boom period in cities such as Boston, but to mold them into efficient and appropriately skilled American citizens.²⁵ In Massachusetts, the Friendly House was founded by wealthy Arabophile (and occasionally Arabic-speaking) members of the Junior League of Worcester.²⁶ The North American Civic League for Immigrants (NACLI) had been working since 1907 “to change the unskilled inefficient immigrant into the skilled worker and efficient citizen.”²⁷ Efficiency, indeed, was the watchword of the NACLI manifesto, summed up in a four-page pamphlet published in 1910:

Whatever will make the immigrant worker a more efficient worker, a more cheerful liver, a more thoughtful neighbor, and a more active citizen—whatever, in short, will make him more economically and socially efficient—will tend to strengthen the state and elevate humanity.²⁸

Anxiety over basic literacy as a prerequisite for good citizenship—indeed, anxiety about a systemic failure in the “melting pot” principle of Americanization—had intensified during the recent war.²⁹ The year 1916 had seen a pronounced spike in public expressions of concern, from President Woodrow Wilson down, that old beliefs in the natural assimilation of “hyphenated” Americans, a process in which education had always played a vital part, had been tested and found wanting.³⁰ Addressing the first national Citizenship Convention in Washington, DC, on 13 July 1916, President Wilson remarked that the “friendly and intimate instruction” owed to “the great multitudes of hopeful men and women who press into this country” should come from “the school which all of us attend, which is furnished by the life of the communities in which we live and the nation to which we belong.”³¹ For William Maxwell, Superintendent of Schools in New York City three years earlier, the “proper education of the immigrant child” embraced English language training but also health education, “intellectual education,” “how to play,” and the rights and duties of an American citizen.³² And the US Bureau of Education was itself well aware that “the great problem of the Americanization of the immigrant” had been “thrown into especial prominence by the war”—not least by the revelation that 7 percent of those who registered for the draft were functionally illiterate and could not sign their own names.³³

As the Ottoman Empire was allied to Germany and diplomatic relations between Washington and Istanbul were severed in April 1917, the presence of a large resident minority with ancestors or living relatives in that empire was potentially problematic. Where did their loyalties lie: were they, like German Americans, a potential “alien enemy” within?³⁴ Another reason for anti-immigrant sentiment during the war years was the perceptibly larger number of new arrivals. The years preceding World War I saw the highest rates of immigration by mainly Arabic-speaking people from the Middle East—people deemed “non-white” by many European Americans. German consular staff in Beirut estimated that 24,000 people left Mount Lebanon, Damascus, and Beirut in 1912 alone, compared to 1,400 the previous year.³⁵ So it was no coincidence that, according to the pioneering scholars of Arab-American assimilation Philip and Joseph Kayal, “anti-Syrian resentment reached its peak in 1914–1915.”³⁶ Still, this was only the latest trigger for a root-and-branch reassessment of local, regional, and national education systems catering to the children of immigrants, among them the Arab Americans who are the focus of this article.

THE US EDUCATION SYSTEM: A WORK IN PROGRESS

The age of progressive education in America had been underway, with significant geographic variation, since the early 1880s.³⁷ New curricula emerged to prepare children and young adults for a rapidly changing, industrializing, and more technologically sophisticated workplace.³⁸ Of course, it was America’s rapid and continuing economic growth that attracted immigrants, comparing favorably with the privation endured by many in their countries of origin in Europe and the Middle East; however, more than a willingness to work hard was required for those immigrants who wished to find a place in that burgeoning land of opportunity.³⁹ The burden of transforming multiple national groups from linguistically siloed and therefore socially introspective communities into productive Americans in a cohesive society fell, essentially, to the school system. Compulsory schooling laws prescribing entry ages and a minimum age for leaving education varied from state to state, because the legal right to pass compulsory attendance legislation was based on the Tenth Amendment and was therefore a state rather than federal prerogative.⁴⁰ By 1900, thirty states required attendance until the age of fourteen or higher. As will be seen, such legislation was often designed to keep young children out of the workplace and in school. But many such laws specifically targeted immigrant students for whom state legislators saw mandatory attendance as “solving two problems at once: the evils of child labor and the dangers of alien culture and religion.”⁴¹

The priority challenge was oral language teaching and basic literacy in English. The 1910 US Census produced some remarkable statistics about the degree of linguistic assimilation by America’s newest arrivals. The total number of US residents then classified as both foreign-born and white—categories that included Ottoman nationals from “Turkey in Europe” and “Turkey in Asia”—was 13,345,545.⁴² Of this number, 3,383,110 had arrived from England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales, and non-Francophone Canada, leaving 9,962,435 for whom English was not their first language. Of these, 2,953,011 were assessed by the census-takers as “Unable to speak English.”⁴³ While striking, this final figure, nearly three million Americans, also means that nearly seven million men, women, and children had acquired the host language to a satisfactory level in the (unspecified) time that they had been in the United States. Looking more closely at Arab Americans, aka “Syrians,” statistics from the Bureau of Immigration in 1911 found that 56.42 percent of the community were illiterate, with 43 percent of those at the peak working age (i.e., between 14 and 45) unable to read or write.⁴⁴ Gregory Orfalea states the case even more baldly: the early Syrians were “overwhelmingly illiterate before coming to the United States.”⁴⁵

While this urgent priority was recognized in US government departments, anxiety about instilling “Americanness” in new immigrants at the cost of spurning their own innate qualities was a persistent theme in policy deliberations. When Commissioner P. P. Claxton sought in 1911 to distil experiences and lessons learned to date in a new manifesto for the US Bureau of Education, he insisted that immigrants, both adults and children,

must be prepared for American citizenship and for participation in our democratic industrial, social and religious life . . . [but] we must respect their ideals and preserve and strengthen all of the best of their Old World life they bring with them. We must not attempt to destroy and remake—we can only transform. Racial and national virtues must not be thoughtlessly exchanged for American vices.⁴⁶

The author of another report five years later worried about “uni-lingualism:”

The insistence on English as a prerequisite to Americanization is one thing, but the sudden and radical suppression of all foreign languages by city of State command . . . [and] attempting to command immediate and utter forgetfulness of the old country to foreigners is another. . . . The common assumption that the foreigner has nothing to lose and everything to gain in the transition; that he has nothing of himself, his background, his country to give in exchange for what he receives, makes both him and the new country the losers.⁴⁷

AMERICANIZATION 101: BE WHITE

There was certainly an irony in the expressions of anxiety on the part of US officialdom over immigrant literacy at a time when literacy tests designed to be impossible to pass enabled segregation and voter suppression in the “Jim Crow” southern states.⁴⁸ Indeed, language aside, the strict racial segregation of early twentieth-century US society meant that successful assimilation on the part of Arab Americans implied assimilation into—or at least acceptance by—white society. Jennifer Holsinger wrote that “assimilation, and in this case racial formation, is a dialogue in which immigrants are active participants, although most times constrained by the social, political and historical context.”⁴⁹ In practice, that meant that, in Charlotte Karem Albrecht’s words, “Syrians had to have contact with the right kind of Americans . . . they had to have a widespread contact with white Americans.”⁵⁰ But in reality, as both Albrecht and Sarah Gualtieri have observed, Arab Americans inhabited a fluid and not entirely comfortable middle ground “between white and non-white.”⁵¹ Arab American oral history confirms the sometimes-precarious nature of belonging in this new society. Arriving in the Mississippi Delta, Syrians often settled in more affordable African American or racially mixed neighborhoods, where they were not alone in experiencing an ambivalent reaction, if they were lucky, to their presence from the white population. “My mother used to tell us that we were not accepted fully as citizens really,” Pat Davis Sr. told James G. Thomas of the Center for the Study of Southern Culture at the University of Mississippi. “The Lebanese were called names and, you know, looked down upon, but not like the African American people. We were able to go to the white schools. We were able to drink out of white fountains and go to the white restrooms.”⁵²

Nor did Arabs encounter only prejudice against blackness: as alluded to above, they also had to differentiate themselves in law (if not in society) from “Asiatics.” Indeed, the first legal ruling on the question of race in respect of newly arrived “Syrians” did not come until 5 November 1909, when Judge George Hutton of the Superior Court in California concluded that Syrians were white and, as such, could become US citizens.⁵³ This was not, however, the end to legal argument: the following decade saw multiple and conflicting rulings on the issue. One legal scholar pronounced that it was “perplexing” that “judges qualified Syrians as ‘white persons’ in 1909, 1910, and 1915, but not in 1913 and 1914.”⁵⁴ Again, it is Gualtieri who has presented the most complete analysis of “the Syrian racial prerequisite cases,” concluding with two crucial cases in 1923, as a result of which it was established in law that “Syrians were eligible to immigrate into the United States, so they were therefore eligible to naturalize . . . and the Syrian eligibility question never again reached the courts.”⁵⁵

In day-to-day life, therefore, the progressive attitudes espoused by earnest Immigration Commission officials were far from universal. By the 1890s in New York City, the term “street Arab” was shorthand for an impoverished and likely thieving urchin of either gender and irrespective of race or original nationality.⁵⁶ That casually racist shorthand was echoed by contemporary press descriptions of actual Arabs. Terry Hammons has written of enduring social prejudices in the US that were rooted in a combination of nineteenth century Bible studies and Orientalist fantasy, amplified by the reports of missionaries and travelers moving in often hostile territory. The result was that, well into the twentieth century, Arabs were often seen by Americans as “lazy, voluptuous, greedy, treacherous, violent, fatalistic, and of course, fanatical.”⁵⁷ Such attitudes were echoed in turn-of-the-century US print media, where skeptical, nose-holding, or openly racist accounts of the nascent Arab-American communities in New York and Pittsburgh showed that the “anti-Syrian resentment” identified by the Kayals in 1914–15 was nothing new.⁵⁸ A full page of the Illustrated American magazine in October 1893 was devoted to “Scenes in the Turkish Quarter of New York,” part of a longer article headlined “A Plague of Men.” One figure poses in fez, embroidered waistcoat, and traditional baggy trousers over the caption “Just landed.” The same gentleman is then pictured alongside a teenaged boy dressed in smart three-piece suit, foulard, watch-chain, and cane. This time the caption is “Ancient and Modern Syria”—and the message about which fitted in in America was clear.⁵⁹

EDUCATION AMONG THE EARLIEST ARAB AMERICAN IMMIGRANTS

For new arrivals from the Middle East, learning English fast was crucial, both for business success and for social cohesion beyond ghettoized, Arabic-only communities. Self-appointed community leaders—many of them the beneficiaries of high-quality indigenous or missionary education in Beirut, Damascus, Baghdad, and Mount Lebanon—were already exploring and agitating for educational opportunities for their children by the early 1890s.⁶⁰ The first school serving this new diaspora community was opened in Lower Manhattan at 95 Washington Street on 5 May 1892. The building housed the office of Dr. Amīn Ḥaddād, secretary of a new Syrian society that had been set up the previous month precisely to pursue “the advancement of the condition of the Syrian people of New-York, principally by the training of their children.”⁶¹ Dr. Ḥaddād’s speech to mark the formal inauguration of this fledgling kindergarten facility, involving just two pupils at first, addressed the difficulties experienced by Syrian migrants:

There is but little chance for many of these people, especially the uneducated, to care for themselves in a strange land without some aid or encouragement being extended to them. . . . Is it not wise, or allow me to say, is it not our duty to devise some means to make these Syrians good Christian American citizens and to educate them, so that when they vote they will do it intelligently and in time become self-supporting instead of a burden on the community?⁶²

Nor was it only children that were the focus of the education drive. In late September 1892, the Turkish Consul-General in New York, Xenophon Baltazzi, presented a petition to the city’s Board of Education, requesting that a room be provided in Grammar School No. 29 on Greenwich Street for adult Syrian immigrants to study English.⁶³ Such a disposition, argued the Orthodox Christian newspaper Kawkab Amrīka (Star of America), would show that Syrians, unlike other foreigners, were keen to “conform to the customs and condition of things in the land of their adoption.”⁶⁴ The newspaper’s founding editor, Ibrahim Arbeely, would go on to publish America’s first English/Arabic dictionary and phrasebook.⁶⁵ This large volume is cleverly arranged with forty pages of basic English-Arabic instruction and vocabulary printed at the beginning of the book as a Western reader would read it, while the far more substantial content, 630 pages of comprehensive Arabic-English tuition, is printed from the other end of the book. As Naff has observed, the book taught immigrants as much about assimilation as language, “providing them with a wide range of American business forms and letters as well as social courtesies, tastes and manners.”⁶⁶

The most successful vehicle for teaching English, civics, and a variety of more specialized work-related skills to adult immigrants was night school.⁶⁷ The NACLI offered a series of illustrated lectures made freely available to education professionals teaching evening classes “in an effort to attract the residents of the foreign colonies to the schools in their neighborhood.”⁶⁸ It also published pamphlets—in Arabic for their Syrian readership—on a range of patriotic themes, including “The United States, Its People and Its Laws,” “The Need of Learning English and the Advantages of an Education,” and “A Primer for the Alien Desirous of Becoming a Citizen,” as well as cut-out-and-keep guides to all-American figures such as George Washington.⁶⁹ Albert Shields, district superintendent for New York City’s public schools, argued in May 1913 that the evening school should be “a sort of glorified public social settlement” to complement the work of agencies such as the NACLI that were already “doing splendid work in aiding the immigrant.” Shields stressed the necessity of high-quality teachers: “In no other branch of instruction does the personality of the teacher count for so much.”⁷⁰ Later that same decade, however, the US Bureau of Education lamented that the policy of most night-school instruction in English still rested upon a fallacy, “that teaching English to foreigners is a simple, secondary matter, and may be safely entrusted to any who can be found to accept the pittance allowed such instruction.”⁷¹

The Syrian Society of the City of New York had a night school in place as early as May 1892. In its first annual report, the society noted proudly how Saleem Hadeed (possibly a relative of the school’s founder) “devotes two hours five evenings of each week . . . to the noble work of teaching and drilling the young men and boys of his race and nation.”⁷² But New York was far from alone in using a combination of the public school system and night schools in the expansion of its educational facilities for immigrants. In regular daytime classes in Lawrence, MA, “natives mixed freely with foreigners. Not one of the city’s schools in 1896 had a dominant number born in any one country and most had students from five to seven ethnic groups. Only the Syrians were confined to one school.”⁷³ And it worked: data from 1909 shows that of the 686 Syrian employees recorded as working in Lawrence, 73.9 percent of the men and 34.6 percent of the women were assessed as being able to read and write in English.⁷⁴.

Fifty miles southwest, the Dartmouth Street School in Worcester ran a “special grade” where, as James Arraj later recalled, “they had a young girl there who spoke Arabic, helped us out, interpreted for us,” enabling the youngster to progress rapidly: “I caught on to English very nicely . . . and I was skipping grades.”⁷⁵ In Grand Rapids, MI, in February 1908, Mayor George Ellis had the backing of the city’s churches when he cautioned the education board against canceling night schools; they were, he argued, “no longer an experiment but a necessity,” offering “the best opportunity for assimilating the foreign population and . . . a favored institution for inculcating American values.”⁷⁶ As far away as California, the Bethlehem Institute in Los Angeles provided free day and night school, employment, and housing to Syrians alongside Russian, Mexican, Japanese, Armenian, Italian, and Jewish immigrants.⁷⁷ In Boston, the Quincy Grammar School was established on Tyler Street in 1905 for adults and children. There were already twenty-six evening schools in the city, with an average annual attendance of 9,247 students; some were illiterate Americans, but most were recent arrivals from a wide variety of countries. “Out of the total of 2,119 pupils attending five named schools, including Quincy Grammar,” the Boston Sunday Globe discovered, “90 percent of the number could not speak, much less write, a word of English when they entered.”⁷⁸

New immigrants from the Arabic-speaking eastern Mediterranean were, of course, part of this wide range of nationalities. At Quincy Grammar, students were guinea pigs in a hothouse of progressive educational theories being tested on real pupils, among them the arrangement of “single-headed” classrooms, in which the school was divided into several classes taught simultaneously in different rooms.⁷⁹ These innovations were clearly relished by newcomers, including prospective community leaders from the various Christian groups. The 1905 Boston Globe article on Quincy Grammar quoted above found

a most interesting group of 16 men from Beirut, Damascus, Jerusalem, etc. [including] a Catholic priest, Rev Peter Nisby Darhouney, graduate of the Syrian college of Beirut. He is in the city until the Syrian church in Lawrence [MA], where he is to go as pastor, is completed. The minister of the Syrian Protestant chapel went to the Quincy school [for] two years for instruction. The Greek Syrian priest, and the priest of the Russian Orthodox church were also enrolled as pupils, and last year a Syrian nun attended half the term.⁸⁰

While American commentators clearly found the presence of the clergy intrinsically validating, the role of the churches in education would, as will be seen, prove divisive as the debate over schooling intensified within the diaspora community.

A mile south of Quincy Grammar, Denison House was the focus of educational facilities explicitly devoted to female students and their families, a sector identified as a priority in Houghton’s comprehensive social overview of the Arab American community in 1911. “The eastern custom of neglecting to educate girls,” she wrote, “probably counts for much in this percentage of illiteracy [56 percent]. For Syrian parents to send a daughter away from home to school requires even yet a courage and resolution quite heroic on the part of both daughter and parents.”⁸¹ In this respect, Denison House was a pioneer: a club for Syrian women had been set up in 1907, followed three years later by a broader educational society, the “Gemaat Surea Americanea” (Syrian-American League). Nor was the focus solely on classroom tuition; addressing what the Denison House management team called “neighborhood hygiene,” 157 of 288 families receiving treatment from surgeons, physicians, and nurses—including home visits—were Syrian. “Suddenly,” noted the board at Denison House, “everyone has become acutely conscious of the presence of the immigrant among us. Everyone is asking whether he is a national asset or a liability.”⁸² Once again, for the executive committee, directors and, as importantly, donors, it all boiled down to transforming immigrants into model citizens, especially at a time of national emergency.

CHURCH VS. STATE SCHOOLS

When Lucius Hopkins Miller surveyed the Syrian community in New York City in 1903, he found that 80 percent of Syrian families with children between the ages of six and fourteen in the communities of Lower Manhattan, South Ferry, and South Brooklyn had enrolled them in school. Of these students, fewer than half attended public schools, while a substantial majority were enrolled in private schools operated by the Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant churches.⁸³ The question of church-sponsored education was hotly debated within an Arab community that became more comfortably embedded in American society over the first quarter of the twentieth century—a debate largely missing from the historiography of the diaspora.⁸⁴ Philip and Joseph Kayal wrote that for some early Syrian immigrants, there seemed to have been “a tendency . . . to imitate a custom of the old country by having their children put into educational boarding schools run by various religious denominations.” In practice, they added, this meant that “practically all the Syrian children of the Catholic faith (Maronites and Melkites) attended parochial schools while the Orthodox and Presbyterians had only [sic] the public system to depend on.”⁸⁵

By contrast to the Maronites and Greek Orthodox, Muslim families in the US had no formal Islamic pedagogical institutions to which they might send their children until the 1930s, as a direct result of the founding of the Nation of Islam in Detroit.⁸⁶ Faute de mieux, as Yvonne Yazbeck Haddad’s research revealed, the early Muslim immigrants “sent their children to Christian Sunday schools and daily vacation bible schools so that they would receive a proper moral education.”⁸⁷ Research within one Maronite community in Ohio appears to demonstrate a belief that the only education that would secure a prosperous future for children was available through “a Church-school system similar to the kind prevalent in Lebanon with the French Catholic missionaries.”⁸⁸ Indeed, Maronite churches in small New York towns like Utica and Olean built their own schools to cater to the children of their communities.⁸⁹ In Richmond, VA, the small population of Lebanese immigrants sent their children to the school attached to Saint Patrick’s Roman Catholic Church, until a dispute with Bishop Augustine van de Vyvor prompted them to withdraw the children and send them to the public school instead.⁹⁰ “In the same way that in Lebanon my parents and their families had been trained by French and Lebanese nuns and priests in parochial schools,” Peter Awn has written, “so here they naturally followed the same tradition, feeling that a parochial education was somehow their birthright.”⁹¹

For others, however, such schools represented an unwelcome continuation of an intrusive and parasitical sectarianism that they thought they had shaken off when leaving the Levant. Some of the most vituperative articles denouncing the grip of the clergy on Lebanese society appeared in al-Hoda, the New York newspaper founded, ironically, by the Maronite Mokarzel family. The first broadside came in October 1904, when Sheikh Yūsuf ʿAwād wrote to denounce the “religious fanaticism” (al-taʿsub al-dīnī) that had been imported to America. He listed seven causes for the failure and “backwardness” of new arrivals in the US: poor integration with other communities; a lack of technical knowledge; a lack of competitive focus; sectarian bigotry; mutual mistrust among the community; laziness; and clinging to outmoded traditions. Having described the disease, the sheikh wrote, all that was needed was the prescription for a useful cure: “Establish schools. Schools. Schools. Kill fanaticism [qatl al-taʿṣub].”⁹²

The following month, al-Hoda published a powerful poem by Mikhāʿīl Asʿad Rustum, whose sprawling account of ten years in America, Stranger in the West, had been published a decade earlier to widespread acclaim, both in the diaspora and back in Lebanon.⁹³ His poem in al-Hoda was a warning of escalating pitch against importing the sectarian clannishness of Mount Lebanon. The only winners in a mutual tussle of envy and competition between immigrants, he wrote, in which “Our profits continue to increase / But we gain no status,” were the clergy:

As long as fanaticism is alive among us, and our hearts are filled with hatred,

As long as our priest is a despot . . . and we consent to his wild tendencies,

We obey his orders like a child obeying his father. . . .

O priest of God, these souls have been kept from the right path . . .

While you have forsaken your Lord after dedicating to Him your selfless soul. . . .

O would that you would serve your flock, so that they would be grateful to you,

Instead of minding other people’s business.⁹⁴

This sentiment, albeit without the anti-Catholic acrimony, was endorsed in 1906 by Faraḥ Anṭūn, a Lebanese intellectual based in Egypt.⁹⁵ In an article for his own al-Jāmʿa newspaper entitled “Observations in America,” Anṭūn wrote that America’s political sophistication and press freedom were less important than its system of mandatory elementary schools. His conclusion was the passionate argument “that Arabs study in American schools rather than establishing their own schools, where the ‘Eastern’ mentality might be perpetuated.”⁹⁶ Earlier the same year, in a continuation of al-Hoda’s concerted campaign, Jamīl Maʿlūf had contributed a long opinion piece in which he warned that indulging the “megalomania” (hub al-ʿaẓima) of the clergy by giving them any say in education would trigger a “great catastrophe” and an “incurable disease” (al-dāʾal-ʿaẓāl) that would “plant into the hearts of our young people the spirit of ignorance and disunity which was planted in our hearts by clerical schools in our home country.”

It is insanity for parents to try to educate their children in foreign schools if they expect a bright future for them in America. True, forgetting our customs and maybe our language too is difficult for parents to bear—but it is inevitable as long as their children’s future is here. What is more difficult for the parent who has only a few years to live: sacrificing the pleasure of having a short conversation with his son [in Arabic] or sacrificing that son’s entire life?⁹⁷

Despite such campaigns, early émigrés did, as has been shown, entrust their children to church schools. In 1911, the US Immigration Commission compiled statistics from thirty-seven cities relating to the wider American debate over public versus parochial schools. The commission reported that 1,281 children, born outside the US to “Syrian” fathers, were enrolled in public schools.⁹⁸ This figure was part of a total of 1,048,490 foreign-born public-school pupils—that is, a miniscule 0.12 percent of all immigrant children—suggesting that the new Arab American diaspora presented a negligible part of the overall challenge to the educational establishment, compared to the far greater numbers of Italians, Germans, Russians, etc. Considerably fewer children were counted as attending Christian parochial schools. Data from twenty-four cities, also in 1911, showed that just 149 Syrian students were classed as foreign-born parochial school pupils. Again, this was a tiny proportion: just 0.07 percent of the 221,159 immigrant children in American parochial schools.⁹⁹ But these statistical comparisons are, in one respect, flawed: they assume that all Arab American children were in school. It is highly likely, however, that many Syrian children were called on to work.

SCHOOL OR EMPLOYMENT?

As discussed above, learning English was, from the immigrant perspective, the essential ingredient in getting ahead. Stacy Fahrenthold has presented fascinating evidence on the range of jobs undertaken by immigrants from different parts of the Ottoman Empire, for which English was essential.¹⁰⁰ Indeed, many families simply could not afford to prioritize education over work. Descendants of Lebanese immigrants consistently describe their forebears’ relative lack of education. Khalīl Jabūr, who arrived in America at the age of fourteen in around 1896, was “not educated. He could do math in his head, but he couldn’t write it down,” so his daughters kept the books for him at his wholesale dry goods company in Vicksburg, MS.¹⁰¹ Yūsuf Khalīl Korkmas was also fourteen when he left Jūrat el Turmus in the Maronite-dominated canton of Kisrawān in 1898. “I’m not sure my dad would be considered third grade education [i.e., at the level of a nine-year-old] in Lebanon,” his son recalled. “He did not know any English. When they would speak Arabic to us, they would insist that we answer in English, so they could learn English.”¹⁰² So several big industrial companies, including car manufacturers such as Ford Motors in Detroit and mill operators across New England, set about arranging their own education facilities.¹⁰³ Workplace learning was a pragmatic way to train and retain personnel while making a loud statement about their own corporate contribution to Americanization. Turks, too, experienced the same pressures. As Ahmed Emin Yalman discovered in 1912, “[s]ome expected to get rich fast in the United States, but they had to work in factories to maintain their lives with hardship. Some intended to get [an] education in industry, business, and other fields. However, they had to quit schools due to financial problems.”¹⁰⁴

As for Lebanese immigrants, thousands became itinerant door-to-door salesmen, scattered across New England and out into the Midwest. These men, women, and children were memorably described by James Ansara as “unlettered and sometimes unwanted.”¹⁰⁵ Naff has pointed out that, for these people, peddling was itself a way of rapidly improving the vendor’s English and speeding up social assimilation. Such commercial forays, she wrote, were the “schools of the road”—although she included a cautionary tale about Syrian peddlers in Cedar Rapids, IA, who picked up rudimentary Bohemian from Czech immigrants without realizing that, as a lingua franca, it had a strictly local currency.¹⁰⁶

Youngsters were also regularly seen out on the roads of New England and the Midwest, peddling their wares. The often-harsh reality of child labor was a very real alternative to education. Truancy, Donald Cole tells us, was “a nightmare for the principals” of Lawrence, MA, averaging 8,500 cases a year.¹⁰⁷ There are many stories of teenagers having to work to help the family pay the rent. After arriving in New York from Mount Lebanon with his father at the age of fourteen in May 1901, Ilyās Naṣr was on the road by early summer, carrying character references from local Presbyterian ministers.¹⁰⁸ While his disabled younger brother Naṣrī was sheltered and educated at a charitable school upstate in Tarrytown, Ilyās purchased his merchandise from Lebanese wholesale suppliers on Washington Street in Lower Manhattan, while his home for the next five years was the Mills Hotel at 160 Bleecker Street in Greenwich Village—subsidized lodging where working men (or boys) with meager salaries could rent a tiny room for twenty cents a night and eat for fifteen cents a meal.¹⁰⁹ Tanios Girgis Obeit had received no education when he left the Port of Tripoli and arrived in the US at the age of thirteen. Instead of school, he went to work directly, first as a water-boy on his brother’s road construction gang in Pittsburgh, then in the spinning room in the cotton factory at Clark Mills outside Utica, NY.¹¹⁰ For Richard Herbert, similarly unschooled in rural Mount Lebanon, a brief period in school in North Adams, MA, was “a beautiful experience,” but within a year he was hard at work, first at the Barber Leather Company and then on ten-hour shifts at the Hoosac Cotton Mills for twelve dollars a week.¹¹¹

The campaign to end child labor through federal legislation was slow to bear fruit. The work of the National Child Labor Committee began at the turn of the century, but it was not until 25 June 1938 that President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed into law the Fair Labor Standards Act, which enshrines most of today’s legislation relating to child labor. The committee’s greatest asset in reaching the American public was the work of Lewis Hine, who photographed children in a multitude of often hazardous work-places, often securing his images against the wishes of their employers.¹¹² A typical Hine photograph from 1911 shows a six-year-old boy working alongside his eight-year-old sister—two of nine children among seventy pickers, “mostly Syrians from Boston and Providence”—in the Maple Park cranberry bog outside East Wareham, MA.¹¹³ Of course, such activism sought to give all American youngsters, not just recent immigrants, the right to a childhood not just free from exploitation but also focused on education. Research by the pioneering social worker Jane Addams in Chicago in 1903 investigated the instances of truancy among under-age newsboys (and girls) in the city:

Among the 1,000 newsboys examined there were 75.1 per cent who came under the Compulsory Education Law.¹¹⁴ Of these 662 gave the name of some school they were attending. . . . It was found, however, that in many cases their attendance was so irregular as to amount to truancy.¹¹⁵

So Syrian children were active participants in the workforce. The Miller survey of 1903, cited above, was pragmatic in this respect. His finding that 80 percent of the Syrian families surveyed had children between the ages of six and fourteen enrolled in school meant, of course, that 20 percent did not.¹¹⁶ Miller accepted fifteen as the age of de facto adulthood (i.e., employability), although the age of compulsory education was raised that year in New York State from fourteen to sixteen.¹¹⁷ While his assessment that only twenty-five children from the Syrian community in New York City were working in shops, factories, or as itinerant salesmen seems implausible, Miller was forced to concede that “doubtless there are many more in the community whose education is interfered with more or less by the selfish demands of parents upon their children’s earning capacity.”¹¹⁸

NEW IMMIGRANTS, NEW ARGUMENTS OVER AMERICANIZATION”

The movement is led by the Syrian-American literati of New York, Boston, and Detroit, mostly men who were not born in America but immigrated as boys and young men. Their propaganda is not that Americanization be hampered but that there is something in the Syrian heritage that is worth preserving. They ask that certain cultural ideals and traits which are the products of thousands of years of cultural development be retained by the Syrians in the United States.¹²⁰

This time, the intra-mahjar arguments were aired in the pages of the community’s new English-language publications, especially the Syrian World. A decade had passed since the end of World War I, with its attendant fears about potential subversion from within, and the consequent extinction of the Ottoman Empire. This was recognized in late 1927 by the Reverend Wade Mansur, a Lebanese-born Presbyterian minister in Omaha, NE, who contributed the first of two articles on “Problems of Syrian Youth in America” to the Syrian World and for whom the premise was simple: “The Great War now marks the dividing line between the old and the new in Syrian-American thinking.” The parents of young Arab Americans may have intended to return to the Middle East but they themselves did not, forcing a generational shift in attitudes towards “race prejudice,” marriage, patriotism, religion, and education.¹²¹ For Mansur, these new Americans were, effectively, former Syrians—a point hammered home in April 1929 when he sent in a new piece arguing that the change had been effected by the immigrants’ “intelligent choice of America”: “We stand for America first and nothing else. We declare America’s ideals, our ideals; her citizenship, our citizenship; her institutions, our institutions.”¹²²

Mansur was not the first of this generation to think about these issues in the new post-war context. In September 1926, Habib Katibah had argued in the Syrian World that Americanism, while hard to define, was a “gigantic psychical and spiritual movement” that “should have as its immediate objective the conversion of untutored foreigners into good, responsible American citizens.”¹²³ Earlier that year, no less a figure than Khalil Gibran had used the debut issue of the Syrian World to address “young Americans of Syrian origin.” His remarks were, perhaps inevitably, more poetic than practical:

I believe in you, and I believe in your destiny.

I believe that you are contributors to this new civilization. . . .

I believe that you can say to the founders of this great nation, “Here I am, a youth, a young tree whose roots were plucked from the hills of Lebanon, yet I am deeply rooted here, and I would be fruitful.” . . .

I believe that even as your father came to this land to produce riches, you were born here to produce riches by intelligence, by labor.

And I believe that it is in you to be good citizens.¹²⁴

As more celebrated and influential members of this increasingly settled—and intellectually confident—community chimed in on the debate, practical pointers and useful backgrounders became part of the discussion. In the spring of 1928, Joseph W. Ferris contributed a closely argued two-part analysis of the long legal process, outlined above, by which Syrians had been determined to be eligible for US citizenship.¹²⁵ Fascination with the way the community was seen by their American neighbors was reflected in June 1928 by the re-issue of an article by J. Ray Johnson of the Foreign Language Information Service (motto: “To interpret America to the Alien and the Alien to America”), which had published the piece in their own magazine, the Interpreter.¹²⁶ Leaning heavily on the scholarship of Philip Hitti and other Lebanese advisers, Johnson’s community profile presumably presented a view that the editors of the Syrian World endorsed, including its notes on industry, geographical spread, sectarian divisions (“the deepest lines of cleavage in the Syrian national community”), and the post-war “renaissance of the Syrian nation.”¹²⁷

But there was also a counter-tide from those who argued that too much was being lost, reflecting a resistance to Americanization that was illustrated by, for example, the Cleveland, OH, family whose English-speaking parents allowed only Arabic at home “so that their children may not get away from them.”¹²⁸ In Richmond, VA, the Maronite priest Fr. Abdalla Tarabay ran an Arabic school for Lebanese children: “A typical effort of immigrant churches to teach the mother tongue to second generation children.”¹²⁹ In the same edition as Johnson’s article, Naʿūm Mokarzel—brother of the Syrian World’s editor and himself editor of al-Hoda, the paper which had been so invested in the debate over Americanization twenty years earlier—confessed to being “seized with grief upon being told that not only is our young generation ignorant of Arabic but that it has a decided apathy to it.”¹³⁰ Later in 1928, the topic of teaching Arabic to the second generation grew livelier. The August edition of the Syrian World featured not only a two-page article on “Teaching Arabic in America” but also passionate letters from Edward Karam of Pittsfield, MA, and Clare Bishara of Brooklyn, who opined that it was parents, some of them “even ashamed of their mother tongue and indifferent to their precious traditions,” who were “woefully negligent in this respect.”¹³¹ Ruby Nakfoor, a member of the Young Phoenician Society at her Lansing, MI, high school, agreed: “Our parents didn’t encourage us any further. They didn’t have the patience to help their children, some wondered what good the Syrian language could do them in America, and others didn’t approve of it at all, and we ceased learning.”¹³² Almost a year later, George Ferris echoed those anxieties about the fundamental identitarian nature of language. “It is obvious,” he lamented, “that the younger generations of Syrians in America are rapidly losing contact with the native tongue of their parents. Many of them, educated in the public schools and colleges, although able to understand the Arabic language, yet are unable to read or write it, and … the Arabic language among those of Syrian descent is doomed to extinction, or near extinction.” More worryingly, he wrote, “the history of foreign minorities in the United States . . . would seem to indicate that separate, distinct, racial groups are doomed to be absorbed into the body politic.”¹³³

Such sentiments were echoed in the words of another of the Arab American community’s finest ambassadors in America. Ameen Rihani was the author of the 1911 novel The Book of Khalid, as well as multiple works of poetry, historical and political analysis, philosophy and literary criticism.¹³⁴ He had been a central member of the New York-based Pen League and, arguably, the founding father of Arab-American literature.¹³⁵ In early 1929, the Syrian World ran, alongside several tributes to the author by several distinguished contemporaries, the translation of a speech by Rihani entitled “Americanism and Native Culture,” in which he echoed the sentiments of those pioneering US federal officials who had tried to incorporate immigrants of many origins into a reshaped education system without sacrificing their many native qualities and urged his own community not to forget or abandon their roots in the Middle East:

I am a firm believer in Americanism; but I also believe in foreign culture. . . . Every people, ladies and gentlemen, has a certain culture, which reflects the best of its racial heritage; and the nation in which these various cultures abound and are incorporated harmoniously into its own spirit, without losing altogether their original identity, is destined to become the greatest nation in the world. . . . [T]he foreign-born and their descendants in this their adopted country, cannot better perform their duties as citizens than by preserving their native culture and keeping alive all that is good in their racial characteristics. That is why I say to the new Syrian generation: do not sacrifice everything in your racial heritage and do not assimilate everything in your new surroundings.¹³⁶

CONCLUSION

These reservations look in hindsight like a doomed attempt to reverse an irreversible process. From the earliest years of Arab immigrations, primary and high school education was pursued as part of what Donald Cole called “the immigrants’ search for security in Americanism,” a quest articulated in Arabic newspapers like al-Wafāʾ (Fidelity) which actively encouraged Americanization and, more prosaically, recommended its readers in Lawrence, MA, to “study English because it will help you earn money.”¹³⁷ Indeed, it is impossible to argue that the forces of assimilation and Americanization did not affect those Lebanese and other Arab Americans who remained in the United States—and even more so their immediate descendants. An education that was at first hard-won became an established and valued norm. The public school system that had adapted so rapidly to absorb so many illiterate and untrained newcomers, adult and child, was now accepted as natural and necessary.

As the numbers of first- and second-generation Arab Americans graduating from high school began to increase—and with the arrival of well-educated young adults from Beirut and Mount Lebanon—thoughts within the community began to turn to tertiary education. The 1911 Immigration Commission survey indicated that Syrian representation in American colleges could only improve from what was an extremely low base. Data from seventy-seven US academic institutions showed that, of 2,979 foreign-born male students, fifteen were Syrian, eight of them studying medicine. Of the 387 foreign-born female students, two were Syrian, both studying medicine.¹³⁸ In 1931, James Ansara noted that “the higher education of Syrian girls has been badly neglected, due to the survival of an old world prejudice against liberally educating girls. . . . To the majority of Syrians the only use they have for a college education is merely as a stepping stone to some profession and since only boys are expected to enter professional life girls have been denied further education.”¹³⁹ And as late as the 1960s and 1970s, six professional Arab American women interviewed by Naff described how they had overcome the lack of formal education in their younger lives—material used to powerful effect by Sheila Corey to demonstrate the shortfalls of both the pre-emigration and US education systems in respect of girls.¹⁴⁰

The Lebanese teacher and historian Philip Hitti believed that the malaise was not just about women and girls: educational forces in the diaspora were, he wrote, “lamentably meagre and ineffective” and a “rush for material betterment” had “created in the Syrian-American a mercenary spirit and abated his generally recognized zeal for higher education.”¹⁴¹ As a way of helping, Hitti had earlier compiled a guide to the American educational system, from kindergarten to “Greek letter fraternity.” In it, he described the 1916 founding of the Brooklyn-based Syrian Educational Society (SES), which operated in New York and Boston and awarded fifteen annual scholarships to students of “Arabic-speaking origin” under the motto “The future of the Syrian people lies in its youth, and the hope of the youth is in education.”¹⁴²

Across America, then, the second and third generations of immigrant families graduated not just high school but college too, going on to careers in fields as diverse as medicine, law, heavy industry, commerce, the automotive sector, textiles, engineering, real estate, and politics. What had been, for a couple of generations, Arab neighborhoods began to thin out and disappear.¹⁴³ It was Naff who observed in the 1980s: “The relatively high degree of Americanization among first generation Syrians and the relatively low degree of ethnic consciousness in the second generation are two of the indications that the assimilation process penetrated sectors of the Syrian community more deeply than might have been expected.”¹⁴⁴ The “anxious hope” with which US officialdom had invested in the school system as the “chief instrument of Americanization” had been more than rewarded. It was education—of adults in night school and of their children in such public, private, parochial, and diocesan schools as were variously available—that transformed a widespread scattering of inchoate clusters of Arab immigrants who happened to be in America into a transnational yet coherent and identity-conscious community of Arab Americans.

NOTES