Arissa H. Oh

 International adoption is in the news almost daily, but its numbers are in decline and the tone of the conversation around it has darkened. Celebrity adoptions and heartwarming stories of orphans finding "forever families" in the U.S. have given way to more skeptical coverage that emphasizes the underside of international adoption: the profit motive that leads to illicit practices and the lack of regulation and oversight in a vast system that shuffles children around the world.

The American evangelical crusade for international adoption has received particularly sustained attention. Since the middle of the last decade, evangelical churches and organizations have encouraged their members to adopt children from abroad, often providing funds to help with the high costs. They have promoted a culture of adoption by publicizing a “global orphan crisis,” a disputed concept in itself. Children—many not actually orphans—are adopted hastily by well-intentioned but ill-prepared parents. Horror stories of fraud and abuse abound.

Much of this is not new. International adoption did not begin in the 1990s, or even in the 1980s. Americans began adopting children from abroad at the end of World War II, mainly from places with significant U.S. troop presences, like Germany and Japan. Systematic international adoption began in Korea after the Korean War (1950-1953) as a way to remove mixed-race “GI babies,” the children born of Korean women and foreign military personnel. It quickly grew to include non-mixed-race Korean children, and then spread to other developing countries: most notably Vietnam in the 1960s, Colombia in the 1970s, Guatemala and India in the 1980s, and China, Romania, and Russia in the 1990s.
   
Nor have evangelicals become focused on international adoption only in the last several years. A central reason why adoption from Korea became systematized was the intervention of American evangelicals. They publicized the plight of Korean children in need of rescue, lobbied Congress for the changes in immigration laws that made these adoptions possible, and promoted the practice among their friends, churches, and communities. American evangelicals considered international adoption a form of missionary work long before the megachurch leaders of the 21st century began to cultivate an adoption boom.

The current reporting on evangelical adoption overlooks the importance of race in international adoption. The vast majority of these adoptions involve white parents and non-white children. In the 1970s, as Americans faced a white baby “famine” at home, a hierarchy of desirability became firmly established in which non-white children from abroad were preferable to African-American children. These children were not white, but they weren’t black either. That they could be rescued from poverty and backwardness heightened their sentimental appeal. Today, Americans cross the color line more readily to adopt black children from African countries. Their blackness is mitigated by their perceived exoticism and victimhood.

Consumerism and humanitarianism have always been uncomfortably entangled in both domestic and international adoption. Regardless of their reasons for adopting, would-be adopters have had to venture into the marketplace in order to obtain a child. Americans long ago declared in principle that children cannot be assigned a market value, but adoptive parents, especially those adopting internationally, engage in what looks like consumerist behavior: selecting children priced according to race, sex, age, disabilities, and country of origin.

These market dynamics explain why the corruption that has captured the attention of many journalists today is not new. Baby-hunting, trafficking, and stealing; document forgery; unclear relinquishments; coercion of birth parents (usually mothers); substituting one child for another—all of these practices have shadowed international adoption since it began. The unintended consequences of international adoption also follow the practice wherever it goes, especially the vicious cycle of orphanage expansion and child abandonment, and foreign governments’ use of international adoption as a substitute for domestic child and social welfare.

Reforms to make international adoption more ethical are decades overdue. The process needs to be more stringent, uniform, and transparent. Americans also need to rethink its purpose. Should international adoption be about finding families for children, or children for families? This all-important question lies at the troubled heart of international adoption, and it demands an answer from all Americans, not just evangelicals.

Arissa Oh is an assistant professor in the history department at Boston College, where she teaches classes on race, gender, and immigration in 20th-century U.S. history. She is in the process of publishing her first book, Into the Arms of America: The Korean Origins of International Adoption.

Mimi Cowan

In yesterday’s post I gave you the basics of Chicago’s 1871 Great Conflagration, as they called it, and how Mrs. O’Leary became everyone’s favorite scapegoat. I also promised you a story about what French socialists, women with Molotov cocktails, Mrs. O’Leary, and the creation of modern Chicago all have in common.

So here’s where the story starts: as I flipped through a series of old images of Mrs. O’Leary, I realized that she looked different in every picture.
That’s because Mrs. O’Leary hid from the press; she didn’t want anyone to sketch her likeness in the papers. As a result, illustrators were free to depict her in anyway they chose. But if these aren’t accurate representations of Mrs. O’Leary, what were the models for these images?

Turns out that these depictions of Mrs. O’Leary bear a striking resemblance to images of the pétroleuses of the 1871 French Commune.

In March 1871, the citizens' militia and city council of Paris ran the French national government and army out of the city, and then declared a socialist-style government, referred to as the Commune. After taking back several Paris neighborhoods throughout April and May, the French army began their final attack on the remaining Commune-controlled areas. There were vicious street battles, and fires broke out and burned much of the city.

According to the French press, female radicals, dubbed pétroleuses, had supposedly started many of these fires, using petroleum-filled vessels, sort of like Molotov cocktails. While historians have not found any evidence that pétroleuses actually existed, the contemporary press nonetheless depicted these women as the source of the fires that ravaged the city.

Less than two weeks before the fire in Chicago, the Chicago Tribune ran an article detailing the Parisian trial of five supposed pétroleuses. The article claimed that the women were “repulsive in the extreme, being that of the lowest, most depraved class of women . . . their clothes were sordid, their hair undressed, their features coarse, bestial, and sullen” (Chicago Tribune, September 26, 1871).

This description of the pétroleuses could be applied to the images of Mrs. O’Leary. Images of the pétroleuses and of Mrs. O’Leary share the same wrinkled, masculine features; sharp, long noses; and wild, stringy, unkempt hair.

Perhaps the people who drew Mrs. O’Leary depicted her with characteristics of a pétroleuse simply because both were accused of burning their cities down. But I think it’s more than that.

In the early 1870s Chicago’s business elite had begun to worry that their large immigrant working-class population would turn against them and overthrow the city government to establish a Commune, just as they had in Paris only weeks before the Chicago fire.

So when Mrs. O’Leary was presented as a scapegoat for the fire, illustrators were able to use her to express the deepest fears of the businessmen of Chicago: that the large immigrant working-class population might embrace the ideas of dangerous European radicals and destroy the city. The myth of Mrs. O’Leary, then, was not necessarily a condemnation of the real, live Kate O’Leary. It was a warning to Chicagoans about the threat posed by radical working-class immigrants. Beware, these images said, because they’re already among us, destroying our city, just like they did in Paris.

The irony of all this is that the 1871 fire provided a clean slate of sorts and allowed Chicago to develop into a modern industrial powerhouse in the last quarter of the 19th century. Without the opportunity for rebirth provided by the fire, this may not have occurred. In addition to the fire, however, there was one other necessary ingredient for Chicago’s industrial transformation: the presence of a large working-class immigrant population.

Perhaps Mrs. O’Leary, then, did represent what working-class immigrants would do to the city, but the illustrators got it backwards: instead of destroying it, the fire, Mrs. O’Leary, and hundreds of thousands of hard-working immigrants just like her were, in fact, the future of the city.

So, next time someone blames the 1871 Chicago fire on Kate O’Leary and her fidgety cow, you can let them know that she didn’t do it, but she’ll be happy to take the credit.

Mimi Cowan

Yesterday I told my eighty-eight-year-old grandmother I was writing a blog post about the Great Chicago Fire. She replied, "the one the cow started?"

Yup. The one the cow started. Well, actually, no. Everyone and their grandmother have blamed Chicago's biggest disaster on Mrs. O'Leary and her incendiary bovine for the past 142 years, but here's the thing:

The cow didn't do it.

But that got me thinking. Why, almost a century and a half later, is her name often the one thing people know about the fire? I've got some theories so grab a mug of milk, pull up a stool, and keep an eye on that lantern.

First, a little background: Late on Sunday October 8, 1871, a fire broke out on the west side of Chicago. Legend tells us that Catherine O'Leary placed a lantern behind the hoof of the cow she was milking. The cow kicked and the lantern broke, catching the surrounding hay on fire. Within moments, the entire barn was engulfed in flames.

Whether or not Mrs. O'Leary and her cow were at fault, there was most certainly a fire in or near the O'Leary barn that night. Thanks to an unusually dry summer, a city made of lumber, and a stiff wind, the flames spread too quickly for firefighters to control. By 1:30am the fire had engulfed the city courthouse, almost a mile from the O'Leary home, (and in the process destroying most of the city's records, to the horror of twenty-first century historians. Ahem.). Two hours later, when the city's pumping station burned down, firefighters all but gave up.

The fire raged all day Monday, consuming the downtown and north side. Fortunately, rain arrived early on Tuesday October 10, mostly extinguishing the flames. But also extinguished were the lives of at least 300 people. Additionally, about 100,000 were left homeless (about a third of the city's population), and property worth nearly $200 million dollars (somewhere between $2 and $4 trillion dollars in today's currency) was destroyed.

All this at the hands (okay, hooves) of a cow. Except, um, not. Most historians agree that it probably wasn't Mrs. O'Leary and her cow's fault. In fact, the official inquiry into the fire, way back in 1871, found Mrs. O'Leary not guilty. But somehow the myth took off anyway.126 years later, the Chicago City Council again exonerated Mrs. O'Leary and her cow (see Chicago Tribune October 6, 1997). But even today, if people know anything about the Great Conflagration of 1871 in Chicago, they know about Mrs. O'Leary and her cow.

So I started wondering: how did Mrs. O'Leary become the scapegoat and, more importantly, why?

The "how" was pretty easy to find out: on October 18, 1871 an article in the Chicago Times claimed that Mrs. O'Leary was a seventy-something-year-old Irish woman (she was actually in her late thirties or early forties) and that she had lived off handouts from the county poor relief board for most of her life (also false; she helped support her family of seven with a small milk business). When she was denied aid one day, the article explained, Kate O'Leary swore revenge on the city and later enacted this revenge with the careful placement of a lantern.

Despite the fact that just about the only thing that was correct in this article was Mrs. O'Leary's name, it was the root of what turned out to be a lifetime of shame and ostracizing for Kate O'Leary.

I still wanted to know why this myth stuck if it wasn't the truth. Turns out that the answers tell us more about late 19th-century Chicago than they tell us about Kate O'Leary. Tomorrow I'll tell you what French socialists, women with Molotov cocktails, Mrs. O'Leary, and the creation of modern Chicago all have to do with one another.

But here's a spoiler: if I were Kate, I'd take credit for it after all.

As a young kid Ms. Cowan loved history, except Chicago history. And immigration history. And labor history. After spending her twenties working at some of the nation's top opera companies, she changed careers, enrolled in grad school, and discovered her passion for all things historical; especially Chicago, immigration, and labor history. She has been a resident of the City of Big Shoulders for the last four years while researching and writing her (Boston College) doctoral dissertation on Irish and German immigrants in 19th-century Chicago.

Kevin Kenny*

The word “diaspora” is remarkably popular. But what does it mean? 

The New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary defines diaspora as “The dispersion of Jews among the Gentile nations,” giving as a secondary definition “all those Jews who lived outside the biblical land of Israel.”

A Harlem "Back to Africa" announcement, Negro Club, New York (1929). Courtesy of the New York Public Library.

By this definition, diaspora is both a process (the scattering of Jewish populations) and a thing (their communities abroad). This double meaning is the source of much confusion.

Until recently, diaspora referred almost exclusively to Jewish history. In the 19th and 20th centuries, many other groups—including people of African, Armenian, and Irish descent—adopted the term and molded it to their own purposes. As its illustrative example, the OED cites “[t]he famine, the diaspora and the long hatred of Irish Americans for Britain.” Today, diaspora is applied to virtually every group that moves from one place to another.

The key period of expansion in the usage of diaspora was the half-century after World War II. The reasons are not hard to find. During the era of decolonization, globally scattered populations of African origin forged new transnational bonds of solidarity. Migrant and ethnic communities of Asian origin (e.g., ethnic Chinese in Indonesia and Vietnam or South Asians in East Africa) were expelled from their adopted countries. Global migration assumed a massive new scale. And the international recognition of refugees brought new attention to involuntary migration in particular.

With the proliferation of usage, inevitably, came a decline in coherence. Diaspora is now virtually a synonym for “migration” and “ethnic group”—two related but distinct terms that duplicate the basic bifurcation in the dictionary definition. And because diaspora is now used so broadly, it has lost its analytical bite.

Over the last generation, sociologists and political scientists have responded to this conceptual confusion by constructing elaborate typologies concerning the origins, scale, nature, and character of diasporas. Their goal is clarify, once and for all, which kinds of migration and ethnic group count as diasporic, and which do not.

But typologies have some obvious drawbacks.They can be arbitrary: Who gets to decide on the criteria? Conversely, they can be over-inclusive, with all forms of population movement lumped together under the ecumenical umbrella of diaspora. Between the two extremes lies the checklist approach: Tick off seven out of ten requirements and your group qualifies as diasporic. But if these requirements belong to different orders of experience—some concerning the process of migration and others the lives of migrants abroad—comparison between diasporas becomes impossible. The result is incoherence.

In the end, trying to pin the term diaspora down under a single, fixed definition is futile. Yet leaving its meaning entirely open-ended drains the term of analytical value. Is there a way out of this dilemma?

For historians, the solution is to reframe the question. Instead of seeking a definitive answer to the timeless and static question “What is a diaspora?” we can examine evidence to determine how and why people use the idea in specific times and places.

Approached in this way, diaspora is neither a process nor a thing, but an idea that people use to make sense of the world created by migration. But what kinds of people? Scholars like us? Policy makers and governments? Or migrants in their everyday lives? In other words, is diaspora a category of analysis or a category of practice? The answer is that it is both.

Diaspora is not simply a construct that scholars use to analyze the social, cultural, or political world. It is also an idea that migrants use to make sense of their everyday experience and that governments deploy for political and economic purposes.

As an idea, diaspora has three overlapping elements that vary in relevance depending on the historical circumstances. These can be labeled as follows: relocation, connection, and return. It should be added that people do not necessarily need to use the word “diaspora” to think about migration issues within this framework.

The first element is relocation. If diaspora meant the same thing as migration, both words would not be necessary. The idea of diaspora allows us to distinguish between migration in general and particular forms of migration. Diaspora has its greatest explanatory power when applied to involuntary migration—involving, for example, slavery, famine, or genocide.

The second element is connection. When the members of a migrant community in a given country of settlement involve themselves in the affairs of their homeland, they may or may not begin to see themselves as a diaspora. This form of interaction, after all, is commonplace. But when the connections in question involve not only the homeland, but also a web of globally scattered communities, they assume a multipolar rather than a unilinear form. The interrelated communities can then be seen as nodes within a diasporic network or web.

The third and final element of diaspora is return. Every conception of diaspora features a homeland, whether real or imagined. Return to this homeland can be literal, as in the Zionist movement, but it is more often metaphorical or spiritual. The great majority of African-descended people in the Americas, for example, could never hope to move literally to Africa. But this very fact helps explains the cultural and political potency of their desire to do so.

Relocation, connection, return: These are the three elementary aspects that make up the idea of diaspora. Together they constitute a powerful framework for thinking about migration.

Kevin Kenny is Professor History at Boston College. He is author of Diaspora: A Very Short Introduction (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013).

From Puck magazine, 1912.

Benjamin Railton

In the final stages of my work on The Chinese Exclusion Act: What It Can Teach Us About America (Palgrave Pivot, June 21, 2013) I found myself struggling with a challenge that I believe faces all of us who seek to produce works of public scholarship. Much of the history on which my book focuses is well known to academic historians, but is (to my mind) almost entirely unknown (if not indeed often misrepresented) within the broader American community.

For example, the first of the three main “lessons” I seek to draw from the Chinese Exclusion Act has to do with the history of legal and illegal immigration, and more exactly with the commonplace phrase “My ancestors came here legally.” Academic historians are likely to know that there were no national immigration laws prior to the 1882 Exclusion Act (or at least its immediate predecessors/starting points such as the Page Act), that prior to 1921 there remained no laws that affected any immigrants not arriving from China or related Asian nations, and that between 1921 and 1965 the quota laws were directly based on ethnic/national discrimination. Yet most Americans have no sense of that history.

So how do we public scholars bridge that gap? How do we produce work that can speak both to academics and general readers? For me, the answer lies, at least in part, in a two-pronged approach: in my Introduction I explicitly address these questions for fellow academics, arguing that we scholars need to do more to bring our shared knowledge to broader public audiences; and then my three main chapters represent case studies in that approach, that is, efforts to write about subjects currently of interest to academic historians in such a way that will also enlighten a broader audience.

As I take the next steps with the project, seeking spaces and conversations where I can share its ideas, I continue to consider these questions, and to work on finding a voice and approach that can speak to different communities. I’d love to hear your thoughts on this subject and, of course, on the book!

Ben Railton is associate professor of English and coordinator of American Studies at Fitchburg State University. He is the author of Redefining American Identity: From Cabeza de Vaca to Barack Obama (Palgrave Macmillan 2011) and Contesting the Past, Reconstructing the Nation: American Literature and Culture in the Gilded Age, 1876-1893 (University of Alabama Press, 2007). He maintains the daily AmericanStudies blog (http://americanstudier.blogspot.com).

An 1882 cartoon: "THE ONLY ONE BARRED OUT. Enlightened American Statesman.--"We must draw the line somewhere, you know." Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

Hidetaka Hirota

A detail of Carol M. Highsmith's aerial view of the Ellis Island immigration station. Courtesy of the Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Div.

The recent publication of books on Ellis Island in New York and Angel Island in California—Vincent J. Cannato, American Passage: The History of Ellis Island (HarperCollins, 2009); Erika Lee and Judy Yung, Angel Island: Immigrant Gateway to America (Oxford University Press, 2010)—reminds us of aspects of the American immigration experience that cannot be overlooked.

At these landing stations immigrants were inspected and often detained under the provisions of federal immigration law. Those of undesirable character, such as paupers, people “likely to become a public charge,” and “feeble-minded persons,” were denied landing and ordered to return to their countries of origin. To Chinese immigrants, a separate set of exclusion and deportation laws applied between 1882 and 1943. 

Where did these federal restriction laws come from? While episodes of immigration control at the federally run landing stations might sound familiar to people interested in United States history, immigration policy before Ellis Island and Angel Island is not so well known, even to American historians.

Some of the roots of American immigration control can be traced back to earlier immigration laws in seaboard states. Since the 18th century, coastal states adopted policies for preventing the landing of destitute passengers and foreign paupers. While New York and Massachusetts were most successful in institutionalizing immigrant exclusion (denial of admission), the Bay State went further by implementing policies for deporting immigrant paupers already in the state. These state policies laid the foundations for federal immigration law that developed from the late 19th century onward.

As important as the succession of law from state to federal levels was how state officials enforced immigration control. In Massachusetts, for example, officials made little distinction between noncitizens and naturalized citizens in deporting Irish immigrant paupers. Immigrants were also deported without necessary court warrants, thus illegally. In criticizing the manner of removal in the state, a Boston newspaper declared in 1855 that humans were being sent from Massachusetts to the other side of the Atlantic with less formality and documentation than “the sending of a tub of butter, or a barrel of apples, from Fitchburg to Boston.”

The deportation of citizens, the coercive treatment of undesirable foreigners, and the inhumanity associated with removal proceedings all characterized the implementation of later federal immigration law, especially when it came to Asians and Mexicans.

Hidetaka Hirota is a postdoctoral fellow at Boston College. He is the author of “The Moment of Transition: State Officials, the Federal Government, and the Formation of American Immigration Policy,” Journal of American History 99 (March 2013), winner of the 2012 Organization of American Historians Louis Pelzer Memorial Award.