Preparation of this book began in 1992 amid the celebrations and commemorations marking the quincentenary of Columbus’s voyage. Those events unfolded as several versions of how to be an American were put forth. Films, magazine and newspaper articles, books, scholarly conferences and exhibitions, and even a reenacted voyage of replicas of Columbus’s ships all marked our collective recognition of the epochal event. Unlike the four-hundredth anniversary centered on the Columbian Exposition of 1893 in Chicago, the commemoration of the early 1990s was suffused with controversy and ambivalence about the meaning of the European arrival, especially for native peoples of the...

The first stirrings among German American Jews regarding immigrant distribution occurred in the 1870s, when the United Hebrew Charities (UHC) of New York devised plans for resettling eastern European Jews in interior communities. Organized in 1874 through the union of five charitable and relief associations, the UHC in its first year formed an Emigration Committee for “assisting families and individuals to more promising fields of residence than our city.” Between October 1874 and April 1875, the UHC contributed to the transportation of ninety-two adults and children, only forty of whom settled in other parts of the United States. The remaining...

In 1903, early in his tenure as general manager of the IRO, David Bressler asserted that the passage of increasingly stringent immigration laws was provoked in part by “congestion and its resultant economic and social evils.” Consequently, any measures to reduce congestion would also weaken the position of immigration restrictionists, for “[without] socalled Ghettos and Jewish East Sides, there would be no logical reason to oppose or restrict the immigration of Jews into this country.”¹ In the same vein,The American Jewish Yearbookof 1906 stated simply: “The work of distribution of the immigrants is still the greatest problem that...

The IRO was not only an interlocutor in the rancorous public debate on immigrants and immigration in the early twentieth century; it was also part of an internal Jewish discourse on congestion, unemployment, and the proper relationship of immigrant Jews to American society. The IRO stated its positions through various formal channels that provide an important official view of the organization. The documentary record of annual reports and the like is nonetheless top-heavy, furnishing a restricted version of the encounter between eastern European Jews and their American Jewish benefactors. The statements of IRO officers, especially Cyrus Sulzberger and David Bressler,...

Although the IRO counted more than one thousand towns and cities in its cooperative network, a small number of recurrent conflicts regularly interrupted effective operation of the resettlement process. No problem was unique, and with varying frequency Jewish communities across the country clashed with the main office. The disagreements centered on the numbers of immigrants sent to a community. The IRO agencies and committees wanted to receive only as many newcomers as could be quickly employed, whereas the main office pressured them to receive a steady, if not increasing, volume of immigrants. Immigrants who were sent from New York but...

The IRO was born amid the controversies over the eastern and southern European immigration to the United States. The organization vigorously defended immigration in a prolonged debate centering on its economic consequences and the repercussions of a steady cultural diversification of the nation. Nearly a century later, when large-scale immigration is again a controversial fact of American life, these twin concerns have reemerged as the dominant themes in the current discussion. Although the numbers of immigrants coming to the United States are to an extent smaller than the annual arrivals in the thirty years before World War I, the arguments...