Get Me Out of Here?!

BRIAN BALOGH: If you’re just tuning in, this is BackStory. And we’re talking today about the path from citizenship in American history. I’m Brian Balogh, representative of the 20th century. And I’m here with Ed Ayers.

ED AYERS: From the 19th century.

BRIAN BALOGH: And Peter Onuf’s with us.

PETER ONUF: Speaking for the 18th century.

BRIAN BALOGH: Now, of course, Americans have always emigrated for economic reasons. And they continue to do so. But listening to that story about those who emigrated to the Soviet Union in the ’20s and ’30s, it occurs to me that in the 20th century, there’s a new kind of emigration– an emigration that has something to do with attitudes towards the state, at least for certain populations.

So I think about draft resistors in the late ’60s and 1970s who left the United States, emigrated to Canada– 30,000 of them, rather than being drafted, and often in a statement of protest. And I’m just curious to know whether there were Americans who left for similar ideologically-driven reasons back in your centuries. Were there Americans who left because they were embarrassed or upset about being American?

ED AYERS: Well, I wouldn’t speak for Peter’s long-ago century, but I will talk about the 19th century. And the answer, Brian, is not really, because that was a time when you would have had the greatest emigration from this country. And it was often by people who had not been here that long. They came here for those very pragmatic reasons that you were talking about.

They came here to be able to raise enough money to buy land back at home. They came here to raise enough money to get married, to be able to walk back into the village at home and hold their heads up. Now I’m talking about people coming from Europe to the steel mills of the Midwest, but I’m also talking about men from China coming here to the gold mines and railroads of the West. And in both those instances, they were led by the transportation companies and their employers when they got here. It wasn’t the Bill of Rights–

BRIAN BALOGH: It wasn’t the state. It was these private companies.

ED AYERS: Exactly. And they’re saying come here. Make your money. And then maybe you will go back home. So it’s interesting how different the 19th century is from the 20th century. I don’t know, Peter, if– which pattern prevailed in the 18th century?

PETER ONUF: Well, it’s an interesting combination, or it speaks to both. I think the important thing to know about immigrants from early America– that is, after 1776 when there is an America– is that they can leave the United States without feeling they’re abandoning or betraying American values. Far from being hostile to a state which hardly exists, instead they believe that they are putting into operation that very pursuit of happiness that Jefferson writes about in the Declaration.

Keep this in mind that the people Americans used to be were subjects of a King. It is the mark of a citizen to make free choices. Citizenship itself is voluntary.

ED AYERS: So where do they go with all this?

PETER ONUF: Well, they go all over the Western world, as they frequently call it. Many Americans are going into what is still then the Spanish empire or what would later be Mexico or into the Caribbean. But what they think they’re doing is fulfilling what you might call the American dream. It’s sort of a paradox, because that American dream in its fulfillment is pretty concrete, [? sordid ?], and material. They’re stripping resources from land and expropriating Indians and doing all that horrible stuff.

BRIAN BALOGH: They are subjecting the rest of the continent to the American idea.

PETER ONUF: So here’s the paradox– Brian, thinking toward the 21st or the 20th century– and that is you can be a good American, a patriotic American, while you’re leaving America. Emigration is not necessarily a commentary on the state. It may be a testimony to American values.

BRIAN BALOGH: Well, guys, on that note, it’s time for us to emigrate out of this studio. But listeners, the conversation continues online. Drop in at backstoryradio.org and tell us about people in your family who set out to find the American dream on foreign shores.

PETER ONUF: That’s backstoryradio.org. Don’t be a stranger.