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STUDIES IN AMERICAN POPULAR
HlSTORY AND CULTURE

Edited by
Jerome Nadelhaft
University of Maine

A ROUTLEDGE SERIES
STUDIES IN AMERICAN POPULAR HISTORY
AND CULTURE
JEROME NADELHAFT, General Editor

THE FACTORY GIRL AND RACE-ING MASCULINITY

THE SEAMSTRESS Identity in Contemporary
Imagining Gender and Class in U.S. Men's Writing
Nineteenth Century American John Christopher Cunningham
Fiction
CRIME AND THE NATION
Amal Amireh
Prison Reform and Popular
WRITING JAZZ Fiction in Philadelphia, 1786±
Race, Nationalism, and Modern 1800
Culture in the 1920s Peter Okun
Nicholas M.Evans
FOOD IN FILM
AUTOMOBILITY A Culinary Performance of
Social Changes in the American Communication
South, 1909±1939 Jane Ferry
Corey T.Lesseig
DECONSTRUCTING POST-
ACTORS AND ACTIVISTS WWII NEW YORK CITY
Politics, Performance, and The Literature, Art, Jazz and
Exchange Among Social Worlds Architecture of an Emerging
David A.Schlossman Global Capital
Robert Bennett
STUDIES IN THE LAND
The Northeast Corner RETHINKING THE RED
David C.Smith SCARE
The Lusk Committee and New
FIRST Do No HARM
York's Crusade against
Empathy and the Writing of
Radicalism, 1919±1923
Medical Journal Articles
Todd J.Pfannestiel
Mary E.Knatterud
HOLLYWOOD AND THE RISE
PIETY AND POWER
OF PHYSICAL CULTURE
Gender and Religious Culture in
Heather Addison
the American Colonies, 1630±
1700 HOMELESSNESS IN
Leslie Lindenauer AMERICAN LITERATURE
Romaticism, Realism, and
Testimony
iii

John Allen A Cultural and Intellectual

History of the Antimission
No WAY OF KNOWING
Movement, 1800±1840
Crime, Urban Legends, and the
James R.Mathis
Internet
Pamela Donovan WOMEN AND COMEDY IN
SOLO PERFORMANCE
THE MAKING OF THE
Phyllis Diller, Lily Tomlin, and
PRIMITIVE BAPTISTS
Roseanne
Suzanne Lavin
THE LITERATURE OF
IMMIGRATION AND
RACIAL FORMATION
Becoming White, Becoming
Other, Becoming American in
the Late Progressive Era

Linda Joyce Brown

ROUTLEDGE
New York & London
 Published in 2004 by
Routledge
29 West 35th Street
NewYork, NY 10001
Published in Great Britain by
Routledge
11 New Fetter Lane
London EC4P 4EE
Copyright © 2004 by Routledge
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group.
This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005.
“To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s
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All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or
utilized in any form or by an electronic, mechanical, or other means, now
known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any
information storage or retrieval system without permission in writing from
the publisher.

ISBN 0-203-32772-1 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN 0-415-94931-9 (Print Edition)

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Brown, Linda Joyce, 1967-
The literature of immigration and racial formation : becoming white, becoming
other, becoming American in the late Progressive Era / Linda Joyce Brown.
p. cm. —(Studies in American popular history and culture)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-415-94931-9 (hardback : alk. paper)
1. American literature—20th century—History and criticism.
2. Emigration and immigration in literature. 3. American literature—Women
authors—History and criticism. 4. Immigrants’ writings,
American—History and criticism. 5. Difference (Psychology) in
literature. 6. Passing (Identity) in literature. 7. Women immigrants
in literature. 8. Ethnicity in literature. 9. Whites in literature.
10. Race in literature. I. Title. II. Series: American popular
history and culture (Routledge (Firm))
PS228.E55B76 2004
810.9′3522′09041–dc22
2004001247
vi
 For Al Cheverine
and
For my parents, Mary Dostert Brown and Paul
Asa Brown
 Table of Contents

Acknowledgments ix
Preface Questioning Race, Questioning xi
Whiteness

Chapter One Introduction: Race, Whiteness, and Women 1

Immigrants
Chapter Two Coming Into Whiteness: Mary Antin’s 29
Claim to Assimilation
Chapter Three “Why couldn’t we have been either one 59
thing or the other?” Monolithic Identity
and Ethnic Construction in the Fiction and
Autobiography of Sui Sin Far
Chapter Four “This hideous little pickaninny” and the 85
Formation of Bohemian Whiteness: Race,
Cultural Pluralism, and Willa Cather’s My
Ántonia

Epilogue The Legacy of Progressive Era 109

Racial Formation and the Re-Racialization
of Immigrant Bodies
Notes 117
Works Cited 127
Index 135
 Acknowledgments

While completing this book, I was assisted by a Professional

Development Support Grant from the Office for Academic Affairs at
Mitchell College. I also was able to present an early version of my
epilogue with support from a Graduate Project and Travel Grant from
the University of New Mexico’s Office of Graduate Studies.
A number of people guided, challenged, assisted, and supported me
while I worked on this book. I owe a debt of gratitude to them all.
I especially wish to thank Minrose Gwin, the chair of my dissertation
committee at the University of New Mexico, for her careful reading and
thoughtful advice on my work. I am particularly grateful for her
patience and encouragement through the long writing process. I could
not ask for a better mentor.
I also wish to thank the members of my dissertation committee,
Christine Sierra, Patricia Clark Smith, Shane Phelan, and Jesse Alemán,
for their helpful suggestions throughout this project. This book is much
stronger because of them.
Thanks also to SueAnn Schatz, Ruth Salvaggio, and Carolyn Wood-
ward who offered valuable critique on some early chapter drafts. Ruth
Higgins deserves thanks for generously assisting me with editing (and
giving up a holiday weekend to do it!). Karen Ward helped with
graphics formatting, and my editor at Routledge, Kimberly Guinta, was
always quick to respond to my many questions about the publication
process. Thanks!
My colleagues at Mitchell College Library have graciously helped me
find and acquire the sources I needed. Thanks and kudos especially to
Tara Borden Samul.
Others have helped me on this project both directly and indirectly. I
especially wish to thank my parents, Paul Asa Brown and Mary Dostert
Brown who offered material support at a crucial point in my work and
who also inspired me by believing in the value of education.
x

The kindness and welcome offered me by Amy and David Cheverine

sustain me. Thank you!
Finally, I thank Al Cheverine, a most generous reader and a constant
source of inspiration. Your support and encouragement make it all
worth-while.

REPRINT ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I would like to express appreciation for permission to reprint several
lines from the following: Rina Ferrarelli, “Emigrant/Immigrant I.” First
published in Looking for Home. Ed Deborah Keenan and Roseann
Lloyd. (Milkweed Editions, 1990), 61.
A different version of this book’s epilogue was originally published
in journal form. This work originally appeared in The Centennial
Review, Vol. 41, No. 3, 1997, published by Michigan State University
Press.
 Preface
Questioning Race, Questioning Whiteness

Two separate personal experiences inspired my original interest in

critical race theory and in critical whiteness studies in particular. Both
of these incidents occurred in the early 1990s while I was beginning
graduate school, and both raised questions for which I had no easy
answers. In many ways, this study has been my attempt to work through
the questions that these experiences presented.
The first incident occurred as a male friend and I were walking along
a downtown street in Eugene, Oregon. Two young men passed us,
walking in the opposite direction. As the men passed, the closest man
leaned toward me and said very quietly, loud enough for me but not my
friend to hear, “race traitor.” My friend is Japanese American; my
ancestors were primarily European. At the time, certainly, I immediately
saw the racism in the man’s remark; only later did I begin to examine the
assumptions inherent in the man’s words. I have come to connect them
with some of the ideas about racial formation that I discuss in this book.1
Here are some of the assumptions that I have imagined the man in
Oregon to hold: he assumed that my friend and I were a couple (we
were walking closely together, I remember, perhaps arm-in-arm), and
inherent in that assumption is the supposition that we were both
heterosexual. The man, I imagine, assumed that I was “white” and that
my friend was “Oriental.” Most specifically relevant to this project, I
think, are these assumptions: the man saw my companion as a racial
threat to his concept of “America,” and he saw me as a traitor because I
was reneging on my supposed promise as a white woman to be one of
what Chandra Talpade Mohanty has termed the “reproducers of the
nation” (27).
The very fact that I could make “sense” of the man’s two-word
comment suggests that essentialized racial discourse is not just familiar
to a handful of extremists. That the man bothered to address his
comment to me—rather than simply thinking it or addressing it to his
xii

companion—implies that he was fully aware that the concept of race he

expressed continues to have currency. Furthermore, he was not making
reference to some archaic racial system: the threat he perceived—of
miscegenation, of the blurring of divisions in his racially stratified
world—as well as the warning of danger that I felt viscerally were very
much of the moment. Beyond showing that essentialized racial ideology
continues to carry weight in our society, however, the experience
highlights that both my friend and myself are implicated in that
ideology. My friend, because he is part of a racially defined minority in
the United States, was already aware of this: when, after the men had
passed, I told him what had been said, he expressed anger but hardly
seemed surprised. For me, someone who has had the privilege afforded
most white people of focusing on race or ignoring it as I choose, the
experience emphasized that whether or not I have been aware of it on a
daily basis, race affects who I am in the world, how I am perceived,
what privileges I am allowed.
The second incident that inspired my work on race occurred while I
was teaching introductory expository writing. I had asked the students
to break up into small groups and to discuss their cultural backgrounds.
Specifically, I asked them to identify their cultural heritages and to
describe several examples of the values or customs that they received
from their families or their culture more broadly; in other words, what
do you believe, what do you practice, and from where do you get these
traditions? Many of the students in the class were of primarily European
descent, and, since the texts that we were reading in the class included
writings by people of diverse cultural backgrounds, I was worried by a
tendency toward generalization that I had noticed in previous classes; I
did not want European-American students to read an essay by an
African American, for example, and assume “So this is what black people
think.” In “Talkin’ That Talk,” Henry Louis Gates, Jr. explains that
“‘racism’ exists when one generalizes about the attributes of an
individual (and treats him or her accordingly). Such generalizations are
based upon a predetermined set of causes or effects thought to be shared
by all members of a physically defined group who are assumed to share
certain ‘metaphysical’ characteristics” (403–4). Hoping to highlight the
problems inherent in racial generalization, I asked the students to
identify their specific backgrounds in order to show the diversity that
exists even within a small group.
The assignment, I thought immediately afterward, was an utter
failure. A few students came up with the kind of answers that my
agenda begged. A Vietnamese-American student spoke of her religious
 xiii

beliefs; a Nez Perce student shared his ideas about family life. Most
European-American students, though, came up with very little. “I’m
just white,” was a response, as was “My family is mainstream
American.” If anything, the exercise seemed to reaffirm that white
people are white and that other people have culture.
Since this classroom experience, I have come to question why so
many European Americans claim an identity that is at the same time
indefinable and a coherent “given.” Why did so many European-
American students have trouble getting specific about their cultural
histories? Why did a question about culture evoke the vocabulary of
race (“I’m just white”) and national identity (“mainstream American”)?
Why did many of my students see their own identities—whether
expressed in cultural, racial, or nationalist terms—as normative, while
the young man who called me a “race traitor” marked both me and the
friend with whom I walked with clearly racial identity tags?
Not all of the questions raised by these two experiences are
answerable within the scope of a single book. Instead, I mention them
not only to explain my personal investment in this project but also to
emphasize some of what is at stake in contemporary investigations into
the history of race. Both of the experiences I mention here emphasize
the need to understand how ideas of race have been formulated, to
explore how those formulations intersect with formulations of other
axes of identity such as sexuality, nationality, ethnicity, and class, and
to investigate just how these formulations both feed off and form
actions, whether those actions are spontaneous racist remarks or the
formalization of government policies on immigration.
In this study, I have chosen to examine the literature of immigration
in the Progressive Era of U.S. history.2 Historians tend to disagree
about the precise dates spanned by the Progressive Era. Rogers M.
Smith has noted that, “Though scholars dispute what progressivism
was, few deny that both major parties and American politics generally
changed during the first two decades of the twentieth century in ways that
comprise a distinct Progressive Era” (410). Smith, acknowledging that
his closing date is somewhat arbitrary, puts the dates at 1898–1912.
Others have described Progressivism beginning as early as 1890 and
extending as late as the 1920s. The beginning and closing dates of the
era might be best determined dependent on one’s historical focus. If
focusing on the women’s suffrage movement during the time, for
example, one could convincingly argue that 1919 serves to mark the end
of the Progressive Era. When discussing immigration, as I do here, 1924
might better serve as a closing date, as this was the year that Congress
xiv

passed the Immigration Act of 1924 (the Johnson-Reed Act), the most
restrictive immigration legislation to date. When I refer to the
Progressive Era, I am less concerned with a specific set of dates than
with contextualizing my discussion within an historical period
characterized by social and political reforms as well as, as I shall show,
extreme xenophobia and heightened debate about racial classification of
immigrants. My interest in the literature of immigration of this period
stems from my desire to better understand how racial categories have
been formed and transformed. The first two decades of the twentieth
century are an especially fruitful period for such an examination, as this
period abounded with debate over racial definitions and over who was
“fit” to become an American, as I shall show in the following chapter.
While the formations of race during the Progressive Era that I examine
in this study are not the same as formations of race at the turn into the
twenty-first century, I work under the assumption that those earlier
formations have influenced the latter and that they still have resonance.
This book investigates how the seemingly separate categorical systems
of race, ethnicity, gender, and national identity intersect in the formation
of “whiteness” in the United States. More specifically, I examine how
texts by and/or about women immigrants construct racial, ethnic, and
national subjectivities, how these subjectivities infuse the changing
definition of whiteness in the early twentieth century, and how these texts
reify and resist hegemonic racial ideology. Throughout, my project has
been strongly influenced by critical race theory, feminist theories of
difference, and recent endeavors to better understand the social
construction of whiteness.
In my first chapter, “Race, Whiteness, and Women Immigrants,” I
survey some of these recent developments in critical race theory,
especially regarding the construction of whiteness. I also survey
historical iterations of race in the United States, looking particularly at
the range of racial discourse in the Progressive Era. I then explain my
focus on women writers, arguing that understanding how women have
been constructed racially is crucial to understanding processes of racial
formation. I close this chapter by discussing how literary texts may be
read as “racial projects” and how this kind of reading can increase our
knowledge both of the literature and of the historical production of race.
My second chapter, “Coming Into Whiteness: Mary Antin’s Claim to
Assimilation,” examines Mary Antin’s autobiography The Promised
Land (1912). Overtly, as a number of critics have noted, Antin’s
autobiography is a celebration of immigrant assimilability crafted to
counter the xenophobic ideology that was prevalent during the
 xv

Progressive Era. What few critics have recognized, however, is how

Antin subverts her own celebratory narrative to question both the
possibility and desirability of full assimilation. She accomplishes this
primarily by creating an autobiographical immigrant subject that reveals
more complexity than most critics have acknowledged. Antin shows
herself as becoming an unmarked “American” subject—a participant in
the socially constructed category of “whiteness”—at the same time that
she marks her autobiographical self in terms of gender and cultural
affiliations. As I argue, however, Antin undermines the equation
between becoming white and becoming American when she questions
the possibility of complete assimilation and subverts the white
American autobiographical pattern.
In “‘Why couldn’t we have been either one thing or the other?’:
Monolithic Identity and Ethnic Construction in the Fiction and
Autobiography of Sui Sin Far,” I argue that Sui Sin Far (Edith Maude
Eaton) creates a dialogue between a racialized Chinese identity and the
invention of an ethnic identity, Chinese American, as she negotiates
between narrative layers in her writing. My reading focuses on several
of Sui Sin Far’s short stories from Mrs. Spring Fragrance (1912) as
well as her autobiographical essay “Leaves from the Mental Portfolio of
an Eurasian” (1909) in order to show how Sui Sin Far’s fiction and
autobiography fully engage in the processes of constructing ethnicity
and questioning the racial essentialism of her time. Because systems of
racial categorization at the time she was writing were much less
malleable for Asian immigrants than for European immigrants, Sui Sin
Far cannot claim, as Mary Antin did for eastern Europeans, that Chinese
immigrants could be accepted as white. Instead, she de-essentializes
racial categories, in particular the supposedly dichotomous categories of
Oriental and white, at the same time that she emphasizes ethnic
difference by creating a Chinese-American identity.
In my fourth chapter, “This hideous little pickaninny’ and the
Formation of Bohemian Whiteness: Race, Cultural Pluralism, and Willa
Cather’s My Ántonia,” I argue that Cather constructs the character of
Ántonia both as an ethnically-marked Bohemian and as a white
American. By creating Án-tonia this way, Cather affirms an American
identity that, for all of its ethnic markers, becomes racially solidified as
white and, hence, normative. When Cather constructs European
Americans as ethnically diverse but racially unified she sidesteps
eugenicists’ claims of Nordic superiority, claims that were gaining in
popularity during the 1910s. In doing so, Cather presents an optimistic
but problematic cultural pluralism similar to that advocated by other
xvi

progressive thinkers of the time. Cather, however, can only disrupt

one construct of racial difference by reaffirming another. Ántonia’s
Bohemian whiteness is made possible, I argue, by an important yet
often overlooked scene in the middle of the novel. In this scene, “the
Negro pianist” Blind d’Arnault entertains the young men and women of
the town of Black Hawk. It is only because black Otherness is reified
through the character of Blind d’Arnault that the Bohemian Ántonia can
enter into whiteness. Thus, while Cather presents a novel that is
optimistic about the contribution of the “new immigrants,” she cannot
escape the racial binaries of colonialist discourse.3
I close this study with an epilogue that addresses some of the changes
in racial formation during the past two decades. In this chapter I
contrast the recent developments in critical understanding of race and
whiteness with less promising representations of race in popular media.
I look specifically at an issue of Time magazine from the early 1990s in
which biological racial categories, similar to those I locate in the
Progressive Era, are reified through a computer-generated, “hyperreal”
immigrant image on the magazine’s cover. This image reveals both how
racial essentialism continues to have popular salience and how the
textual strategies of racial formation have changed since the
Progressive Era.
At the heart of this study lies the assumption that whiteness is not a
stable, unified category of human classification. Instead, whiteness, like
other racially-defined groupings, is an ever-shifting terrain, one that has
changed markedly since the nineteenth century and continues to evolve
as we move into the twenty-first. Furthermore, I work under the
assumption that the history of immigration is crucial to understanding
shifts in the terrain of whiteness, and to understanding processes of
racial formation more generally. Upon arrival in the United States,
immigrants enter into the racial fabric of the country and change that
fabric. While processes of racial formation are always in-progress for
U.S.-born citizens as well as for immigrants, focusing on immigrants
allows us to look at a crucial moment in the racial formation process, a
moment when racial assignment occurs and when individuals negotiate
for a specific racial assignment and/or try to construct an identity in
relationship to that assignment. As the chapters in this book make clear,
texts by and about new immigrants to the United States can reveal how
these processes occur. In focusing on immigrants’ relationships to
whiteness, I am not attempting to assert an overarching theory of the
formation of whiteness. Indeed, the differing approaches to theorizing
whiteness offered by theorists in recent years reveal that the formation
 xvii

of whiteness is complex, multifold, and often fragmentary. My approach

is necessarily selective; I do not attempt to address all, or even most, of
the ways that whiteness has formed. Instead, I view my analysis as
one part of a larger project of better understanding racial formation and,
more specifically, the construction of whiteness. Examining cultural
production by and about immigrants during the late Progressive Era
allows us to better understand constructions of racial difference and
their relationship to subjectivity during a critical period in the formation
of whiteness and consequently to better understand some of the
processes by which race, more generally, is formed.
xviii
 Chapter One
Introduction: Race, Whiteness, and
Women Immigrants

Farm by farm, township by township, the displacement of

the American goes on—a quiet conquest, without spear or
trumpet, a conquest made by child-bearing women.
Edward Alsworth Ross, The Old World in the New

The term race, used in reference to human categorization, has existed in

the English language since at least the sixteenth century.1 The
connotations and cultural meanings of race, however, have hardly
remained stable since its first usages. While this study cannot attempt to
cover all of the changes in the definitions of the words race and
whiteness since their earliest uses in English, it is important to note
some significant changes in European and American conceptions of
race in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In 1735, Swedish
botanist Carl von Linnaeus divided humans into four subspecies in his
famous Systema Naturae (Tucker 9). Linnaeus’s system of classification
relies on the identifying qualities of skin color, kind of civilization, and
place of origin. Thus, Linnaeus’s notion of race is not solely a
biologically-based one. Influenced by Linnaeus, both biologists and
anthropologists in the nineteenth century attempted to develop a more
“scientific” system of racial categorization. In doing so, they frequently
shunned qualitative criteria such as a person’s system of beliefs in favor
of what was supposed to be more easily quantifiable data such as skin
color, stature, and cranial shape.
These pseudo-scientific methods of classification were used to justify
assumptions about moral and intellectual differences between races2
But while the moral connotations of certain racial categories—most
notably the assumed binary of “white” and “black”—remain similar in
different systems of racial categorization, the systems themselves vary
greatly. I innaeus posited four racial categories; Arthur Comte de
2 THE LITERATURE OF IMMIGRATION AND RACIAL FORMATION

Gobineau focused on three, with a dominant Aryan sub-race (1855);

other writers have proposed at least forty-five distinct races (Reports of
the Immigration Commission 5: 3); in nineteenth-century America,
legal codes often recognized only “white,” “Negro,” and “Indian” (Omi
and Winant 82). In some of these systems, the term white applies to
anyone of European origin as well as people from certain regions of
Asia. In other classificatory systems, white refers only to people of
European descent. In still other systems, people from different parts of
Europe are separately classified, and only those from north-western
Europe are considered fully “white.”3
While scientists and anthropologists continued to debate how to
racially classify humans, few doubted that humans could be classified
based on observable, biological criteria,4 and by the end of the
nineteenth century, the debate about racial classification became central
to issues of American immigration. In the middle of the nineteenth
century, increased immigration from Ireland caused significant public
backlash, prompting restrictionist groups such as the Know Nothings to
form and inflaming discussions of Irish racial inferiority. While this
discourse of Irish racial inferiority continued through the nineteenth
century, during the second half of the century, debates over the racial
categorization of people of European descent often seem to be eclipsed
following abolition and the increased immigration of laborers from
Asia, particularly from China. Although the definition of who was
“white”—and therefore considered desirable as an immigrant—was
nebulous during this time, the definition of who was racially Other
became ever more solidified. While citizenship in the United States has
been racially based almost since the nation’s inception (Mohanty 24),
the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 was the first law banning
immigration of a specific racially-defined group.5 Thus, during the
second half of the nineteenth century, we can see the codification of
racially-based immigration policy.
The increase in emigration from eastern and southern Europe at the
end of the nineteenth century prompted a renewal of debate over the
racial status of these immigrants and their consequent fitness for
assimilation. Many minority groups such as African Americans,
Mexican immigrants and Mexican Americans, Asian immigrants and
their descendants, and American Indians were routinely classified by
their racial “Otherness”; however, the status of the “new” immigrants
from eastern and southern Europe remained a question in scientific and
legal venues as well as in popular thought.6 This debate over the racial
status of Europeans emerged in numerous forms of cultural production.
 INTRODUCTION: RACE, WHITENESS, AND WOMEN IMMIGRANTS 3

The “increasing fragmentation and hierarchical ordering of distinct

white races (now in the plural),” Matthew Frye Jacobson explains, “was
theorized in the rarified discourses of science, but it was also reflected
in literature, visual arts, caricature, political oratory, penny journalism,
and myriad other venues of popular culture” (41).
To better understand the shifting terrains of race and whiteness in
U.S. history, it should prove useful at this point to turn to recent
developments in critical race theory that have focused on this history. I
will then return to a discussion of how race, and whiteness specifically,
was theorized during the late Progressive Era.

CONTEMPORARY THEORIES OF RACE

The critical study of whiteness and white privilege is a relatively new
phenomenon, stemming largely from the emergence and development
of critical race theory. While scientists have known for some time that
race is useless as a biological concept, race continues to form and
organize lives, even while the practices of our lives form and organize
race itself. Put another way, race, while signifying nothing concrete or
scientifically meaningful, continues to both signify and have cultural
significance. As Gates puts it, “When we speak of ‘the white race’ or
‘the black race,’ ‘the Jewish race’ or ‘the Aryan race,’ we speak in
biological misnomers and, more generally, in metaphors. Nevertheless,
our conversations are replete with usages of race which have their
sources in the dubious pseudoscience of the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries” (“Writing ‘Race5” 4). This passage comes from Gates’s
introduction to “Race,” Writing, and Difference, a collection of essays
originally published in a 1985 volume of Critical Inquiry and edited by
Gates into a book that has had significant influence in the field of
critical race theory, particularly in its applications to the study of racial
representation and language. Gates’s introduction to the collection along
with his concluding essay “Talkin’ That Talk” worked to contextualize
and foreground the issues that have become central to critical race
theory and its application to language and literature—“the complex
interplay among race, writing, and difference” (“Writing ‘Race’” 15)—
and led to further studies of this interplay. Most significant to this
study, Gates’s writing, as well as the essays collected in the volume,
shift the examination of race onto the terrain where it belongs, and in
doing so raise a number of questions: Given that race is a social
construction, how and why is it constructed and maintained? By and for
whom? What roles do language and literature play in that construction?
4 THE LITERATURE OF IMMIGRATION AND RACIAL FORMATION

And what possibilities do they offer us for resisting hegemonic racial

constructions?
Other writers who place the construction, or in their own words the
for mation, of race at the center of concern are Michael Omi and
Howard Winant. Similar to Gates’s earlier study, Omi and Winant
question notions of race as an “objective term of classification,”
concluding that

Attempts to discern the scientific meaning of race…seek to

remove the concept of race from the historical context in which it
arose and developed. They employ an essentialist approach which
suggests instead that the truth of race is a matter of innate
characteristics, of which skin color and other physical attributes
provide only the most obvious, and in some respects most
superficial, indicators. (64; emphasis in original)

Rather than employ such an essentialist idea of race, these authors

suggest, we need to analyze race precisely in relation to “the historical
context in which it arose and developed.”
Omi and Winant argue against using ethnicity-, class-, and nation-
based theories alone to explain the construction of race in the United
States. Noting that “race and racial dynamics in the United States have
been theoretically understood by relying on one of three central
categories: ethnicity, class, or nation” (11–2), Omi and Winant go on to
argue that none of these paradigms has been sufficient to allow us to
understand race. In particular, they claim that ethnicity theory has
overly relied on analogies with patterns of European immigration,
consequently not accounting for “any special circumstances which
racially defined minorities encounter in the U.S.” (22). Furthermore,
Omi and Winant take issue with the ways that ethnicity theory has been
applied to blacks; “with rare exceptions,” they note, “ethnicity theory
isn’t very interested in ethnicity among blacks. The ethnicity approach
views blacks as one ethnic group among others. It does not consider
national origin, religion, language, or other cultural differences among
blacks, as it does among whites, as sources of ethnicity” (22). While
Omi and Winant also note that ethnicity theory has provided useful
insights, they ultimately claim that it does not adequately explain or
account for race. Because “ethnic group-, class-, and nation-based
perspectives all neglect the specificity of race as an autonomous field of
social conflict, political organization, and cultural/ideological meaning”
(48), Omi and Winant propose a new model for understanding race, that
 INTRODUCTION: RACE, WHITENESS, AND WOMEN IMMIGRANTS 5

of “racial formation.” Their text is devoted to studying this

“sociohistorical process by which racial categories are created,
inhabited, transformed, and destroyed” (55).
I find Omi and Winant’s discussion of racial formation useful to an
examination of representations of turn-of-the-century immigration for
several reasons. First, it allows us to escape the dangerous trap of
essentializing x racial difference. But it also allows us to avoid equating
race with culture, an equation that works, as Anthony Appiah notes, to
biologize “what is culture, or ideology” (36; emphasis in original).
Furthermore, the concept of racial formation lets us examine the
sociopolitics of formations of racial difference. As Nancy Leys Stepan
and Sander L.Gilman point out in their essay “Appropriating the Idioms
of Science: The Rejection of Scientific Racism” (1991), racial
categories “had material weight in the lives of individuals and groups;
racial identities were embodied in political practices of discrimination
and law, and affected people’s access to education, forms of
employment, political rights, and subjective experience” (73). Referring
specifically to the scientific discourse on race, the authors add that it
“was one of the most authoritative languages through which meaning
was encoded, and as a language it had political and social, as well as
intellectual consequence” (73). Stepan and Gilman make it clear that the
effects of racial categories on people’s lives are wide ranging, but they
also emphasize that the practices of encoding difference, what Omi and
Winant would consider projects of racial formation, impact the way that
“society is organized and ruled” (Omi and Winant 56). Thus, examining
the processes of racial formation at work in the discourses of
immigration can provide a more textured picture of the relationship
between those discourses and structures of power.
While writers such as Gates, Omi and Winant, Stepan and Gilman,
and Appiah have theorized how racial difference in general has been
formed and articulated, in recent years other writers have turned their
focus to understanding the development of specific racial categories,
including whiteness. These writers largely respond to the problem of
seeing whiteness as normative or, perhaps more accurately, the problem
of not seeing whiteness at all. One of the earlier theorists to call
attention to white privilege was Peggy McIntosh. In “White Privilege
and Male Privilege: A Personal Account of Coming to See
Correspondences through Work in Women’s Studies” (1988), McIntosh
draws parallels between the two forms of privilege in her essay’s title as
she attempts to unpack the “invisible knapsack” of white privilege.
Grounding her discussion in her own experiences, McIntosh develops a
6 THE LITERATURE OF IMMIGRATION AND RACIAL FORMATION

tentative list of some conditions of her day-to-day existence that are

determined by her race. She also begins to examine what “privilege”
itself is. Noting that “we usually think of privilege as being a favored
state, whether earned, or conferred by birth or luck,” she goes on to
distinguish between “unearned advantage” and “conferred dominance,”
both of which constitute white privilege in the United States (296–7).
Reflecting that the silence surrounding privilege is what keeps
inequitable systems of power in place, McIntosh ends her essay with a
call to end this silence and to work to “reconstruct power systems on a
broader base” (299).
One writer and researcher who seems to have heeded McIntosh’s call
is Ruth Frankenberg. Like McIntosh, Frankenberg rejects the idea that
race is a problem solely for racially-defined minorities; rather, she
begins her work with the assumption that both “white people and people
of color live racially structured lives” (1; emphasis in original).
Frankenberg’s White Women, Race Matters: The Social Construction of
Whiteness (1993) offers detailed accounts of what it means to be a white
woman in the United States. Frankenberg’s analysis is based on
interviews with self-identified white women on how race shapes their
lives. Frankenberg makes her project explicit from the outset: she aims
to begin “exploring, mapping, and examining the terrain of whiteness”
(1). While rejecting the idea that racism is solely a problem for racially-
defined minorities and not an issue for those who identify as “white,”
Frankenberg sets out to make whiteness visible and socially specific
instead of normative. To do so, she focuses her interviews and her
analyses of them on specific aspects of white women’s experiences,
paying special attention to the complexities of race as experienced
through childhood, in interracial relationships, and through parenting.
Frankenberg’s study is informed both by critical race theory—
particularly that of Omi and Winant—and socialist feminist theory. The
three paradigms of white race consciousness that she outlines stem
directly from her observations of twentieth-century feminism and also
reflect the views of the women she interviews. Frankenberg names these
paradigms (or mo ments or discourses, as she alternately calls them):
essentialist racism, color and power evasion, and race cognizance
(14–5). The first of these, essential ist racism, refers to what many
Americans today would consider racism: a belief in essential,
biological, and hierarchical inequality of races. Frankenberg sees the
second paradigm as characterized by claims of “color-blindness” and
evasion of power inequalities; it is epitomized by the belief that we are
all “the same under the skin” (14). Despite “the best intentions of its
 INTRODUCTION: RACE, WHITENESS, AND WOMEN IMMIGRANTS 7

adherents,” color-blindness, which Frankenberg shows intersecting with

liberal humanism, “preserves the power structure inherent in essentialist
racism” (147). The third paradigm, and the one that holds the most hope
for confronting racism, “insists once again on difference” but does not
define difference hierarchically or essentially. The terms of “race
cognizance” are articulated by people of color, and inequality refers to
social structure, not to essentialized racial difference (14–5).
Frankenberg is careful to point out that, while one can often trace these
three paradigms to specific historic and political moments, they can also
exist concurrently, and a single person can articulate multiple discourses
(143, 157, 189).7
This last idea is particularly relevant to my project. The historical
period that I examine here can be seen as an era predominated by
hegemonic, essentialist racism; however, Frankenberg’s definition of
these three paradigms can help a reader of early twentieth-century
literature see the intricacies of racial discourse during this time. Since
multiple discourses on race can exist simultaneously, a reader is
reminded to look for disruptive discourses on race, paradigms that resist
or subvert dominant ideology, operating within other repressive
discourses on race. I will return to this idea when I discuss literary texts
as racial projects later in this chapter.
Frankenberg’s specificity about what constitutes whiteness is also
particularly useful to a study of the formation of racial categories.
Frankenberg carefully defines whiteness, providing a definition that is
too often missing or left implicit in earlier discussions of race and
racism in the United States. Whiteness, Frankenberg argues, is defined
by a set of three “linked dimensions”: “First, whiteness is a location of
structural advantage, of race privilege. Second, it is a ‘standpoint,’ a
place from which white people look at ourselves, at others and at
society. Third, ‘whiteness’ refers to a set of cultural practices that are
usually unmarked and unnamed” (1). Since publishing White Women,
Race Matters, Frankenberg’s definition of whiteness has evolved,
especially regarding the extent to which whiteness is “unmarked and
unnamed.” As she notes in her later essay “The Mirage of Unmarked
Whiteness” (2001), upon scrutiny, “the notion of whiteness as
unmarked norm is revealed to be a mirage or indeed, to put it even more
strongly, a white delusion” (73). Thus, while whiteness has been formed
in such a way to make it invisible to many people who are considered
white, it can be fully visible to people who have a different relationship
to the centers of power.
8 THE LITERATURE OF IMMIGRATION AND RACIAL FORMATION

Frankenberg frequently uses the term cultural practice, rather than

culture alone, to emphasize the activity involved in the formation of
culture. Culture does not refer to a bounded space, a “thing” that
individuals either possess or do not, but rather refers to a wide range of
activity that is not “separate from material life” White Women, Race
Matters (192). Frankenberg’s definition allows for understanding
whiteness as something that is always in the process of change and that
is always place-specific and time-specific. Thus, for example, when the
Russian-Jewish immigrant Mary Antin describes idolizing American
patriots, as I discuss in the following chapter, she is limning a cultural
practice that is part of her repertoire of whiteness in the early twentieth-
century United States. Worshiping dead pa triots is as much a cultural
practice as was Antin’s earlier chanting of the songs of David in the
Pale of Russia. However, composing a patriotic poem on George
Washington, as Antin did, might not be as salient as a white cultural
practice in present-day New Mexico, say, as it was in Antin’s Boston,
and it almost certainly would not be a white cultural practice in a
country other than the United States. Frankenberg’s definition of
whiteness suggests that such place-specific and time-specific cultural
practices work to structure racial identities.
While writers such as McIntosh and Frankenberg have sought to
discover what whiteness means in the lives of contemporary
Americans, other theorists of whiteness have turned their attention to
the historical development of whiteness as a racial category. One of the
most ambitious and influential of these recent works is Theodore W.
Allen’s The Invention of the White Race. Published in 1994, the first
volume of Allen’s Invention, subtitled Ra cial Oppression and Social
Control, presents a sustained comparison between race in the North
American colonies and in Ireland. Allen concludes volume one by
describing the “sea change” experienced by Irish immigrants to the
United States, as they were transformed from victims of racial
oppression to upholders of slavery. In volume two, subtitled The Origin
of Racial Oppression in Anglo-America (1997), Allen focuses more
directly on the formation of whiteness in the American colonies.
Allen, a member of the “socio-economic” school of historians, begins
volume one of his two-volume treatise with a vehement argument
against the “psycho-cultural” school of thought on the origins of slavery
and racism. In the “psycho-cultural” tradition (Allen singles out
Winthrop Jordan and Carl Degler as representatives), racial slavery is
seen to stem from preexisting racially-based prejudices held by
Europeans and their American descendants. Allen considers this
 INTRODUCTION: RACE, WHITENESS, AND WOMEN IMMIGRANTS 9

psycho-cultural position not only inaccurate but also dangerous to

current conceptions of race: if racism is innate, there is little hope for
changing racist attitudes and practices. In addition, he argues against
those socio-economic historians who view racism as providing actual
benefits for European Americans; instead, Allen argues, racism offers
what he characterizes as “illusory” benefits, in the form of racial
privileges, but not concrete improvement such as an escape from
propertylessness, in the lives of the majority of European Americans.
Allen summarizes his criticism of these two views of racism: “whether
racism be ‘natural born’ in European-Americans, or whether it be the
function of actual (as against illusory) benefits for all ‘whites’ as a
result of racial oppression, the implications for ridding our society of
the curse of racism are equally unfavorable” (1:19).
Instead, Allen argues, the “invention” of whiteness and the
consequent racially-based form that oppression took in the colonies that
were to become the United States were deliberate political acts of the
ruling class. Building on Edmund S. Morgan’s argument (American
Slavery—American Free dom, 1975), Allen sees Bacon’s Rebellion
(1676–7) as a turning point in American racial history. During Bacon’s
Rebellion, bond laborers of both African and European descent joined
forces against the aristocracy. In response to this proletarian threat, the
ruling class instituted racially-based slavery in place of bond servitude,
the indentured servitude of both African and European workers. By
allowing certain proletarians, European workers and their descendants,
to share in privileges based on skin color, as Allen explores in detail in
volume two, the ruling class disrupted the possibility of proletarian
solidarity, providing the ruling class with a system of social control that
nominally included poor “whites” but that ultimately consolidated
power for the ruling class.
Perhaps the most important aspect of Allen’s work is his persuasively
argued insistence that “whiteness” did not simply emerge as a socially
salient category by chance or accident but instead was deliberately
“invented” by the ruling class. This thesis alone provokes interesting
questions. If racial difference was a conscious invention, how did it come
to be seen by so many as a “natural” phenomenon? How were different
groups of European immigrants adopted into the system of whiteness
when its benefits, as Allen shows, were illusory and did not involve, at
least for immigrant workers, material improvement in their lives? And
if whiteness were invented to preserve the power of the ruling class and
to establish the slave/ocracy, how did abolition affect the systems of
racial difference in the United States? Not all of these questions are
10 THE LITERATURE OF IMMIGRATION AND RACIAL FORMATION

within the scope of this project. The last two of these questions, however,
have been addressed by other writers in the 1990s, including historian
David R. Roediger.
In The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American
Working Class (1991), Roediger focuses primarily on the formation of
whiteness immediately preceding the American Revolution and through
abolition in the nineteenth century. Roediger’s starting point is a
premise suggested by W.E.B.Du Bois in Black Reconstruction: that
whiteness has functioned as a “psychological wage” for white workers,
a privilege to compensate for “alienating and exploitative class
relationships” (Roediger 13). This “psychological wage” fits nicely with
the “illusory” benefits of whiteness discussed by Theodore Allen. Also
like Allen, Roediger sees the proletariat as central to the development of
race in the United States. According to Roediger, the formation of the
working class is indivisible from “the systematic development of a
sense of whiteness” (8). Unlike Allen, however, Roediger, is
particularly concerned with the psychoanalytic dynamics of whiteness
and with how language functions in its construction.
Roediger focuses on the thoughts and anxieties of nineteenth-century
white workers in order to show the inextricability of whiteness and
working class identity. The American Revolution fostered a desire
among workers of European descent to view themselves as free, as
personally independent. Industrial growth and entrenched wage
dependence, however, highlighted workers’ lack of independence and
social mobility. According to Roediger, one of the laborers’ responses
was denial. Consequently, “the white working class, disciplined and
made anxious by fear of dependency, began during its formation to
construct an image of the Black population as ‘Other’” (14). White male
workers, then, psychologically distanced themselves from the institution
of slavery by distancing themselves from those who were slaves.
Working class identity subsequently became intertwined with white
racial identity.
One of the most interesting and useful aspects of The Wages of White
ness is Roediger’s careful attention to the function of cultural practices
and language in the formation of racial difference. Roediger devotes
considerable space to analyzing the role of minstrelsy in the
construction of white identity, and he also examines how the language
employed by white workers helped create and perpetuate racial
difference. Roediger provides a number of examples of this racialization
of the language of labor: for example, many workers adopted the term
boss (from the Dutch baas) in place of master with its connotations of
 INTRODUCTION: RACE, WHITENESS, AND WOMEN IMMIGRANTS 11

slavery, and domestic workers frequently rejected servant, a term also

associated with slavery, in favor of hired help. This linguistic
reconfiguration helped white workers to “define and accept their class
positions by fashioning identities as ‘not slaves’ and ‘not Blacks’” (13).
Directly influenced by the works of Roediger and Allen, Noel
Ignatiev’s How the Irish Became White (1995) continues, in some
ways, where these other studies left off. Ignatiev explores how one
oppressed group of immigrants, the Irish, sought acceptance in the
United States by recreating themselves as white workers. Ignatiev
shows this transformation by examining relations between Irish and
African Americans from the early nineteenth century through
Reconstruction, particularly in Philadelphia. He is especially concerned
with how Irish workers achieved political viability by allying
themselves with pro-slavery Democrats. Like Roediger, Ignatiev sees
Irish workers as active participants in their own racial construction.
Ignatiev writes an unusual kind of history, aimed, in his own words,
“not so much at facsimilitude as plausibility” (178). There are
certainly some gaps in Ignatiev’s study. For example, despite the
author’s goal of showing how the Irish were “actors in their own
history” (3), the book does little to show the agency of Irish women,
perhaps because of the work’s overt concern with party politics in an
era prior to women’s suffrage. This omission is particularly striking
when the relationship between parenthood and race is considered: the
race of a child has long been considered to be determined by the race of
the mother. Thus how Irish women became white would seem to be
crucial to the question of how the Irish, in general, became white in the
United States.8 Furthermore, by focusing on the relations between Irish
immigrants and African Americans, Ignatiev might be missing some of
the subtleties of white racial formation, especially regarding the role of
populations that do not always easily fit in a black/white binary.
Despite its limitations, however, How the Irish Became White is a
useful addition to the study of the history of racial formation for a
number of reasons, not the least of which are the author’s methods.
Ignatiev’s sources are wide-ranging; he draws on historical accounts,
newspaper articles, oratories, personal letters, and fictional works. By
incorporating these diverse sources, Ignatiev emphasizes that the
discursive repertoire of race is itself wide-ranging. Implicit in Ignatiev’s
account of whiteness, as in Roediger’s, is the assumption that the
cultural production of an era can reveal how race was formed and
inhabited during that time.
12 THE LITERATURE OF IMMIGRATION AND RACIAL FORMATION

Similar to Ignatiev’s study of the Irish, Karen Brodkin’s How Jews

Became White Folks and What that Says About Race in America (1998)
explores racial constructions by tracing one group’s movement from
not-white to white in the United States. To develop this historical shift,
Brodkin draws on critical race theory as well as her own family’s
experiences in a methodology that she describes as “a slightly
unorthodox combination of participant observation, insider ethnography,
and grounded theory” (4). She is especially concerned with how gender
and class work to form race and how race informs constructions of
gender and class. This interrelated triad of race, class, and gender forms
the basis of her discussion of national identity and whiteness.
Most relevant to this project is Brodkin’s discussion of how racial
categories are necessarily gendered in the United States. While some
theorists of whiteness have largely ignored the role of gender in the
process of racial formation, often subsuming women under the category
of “worker,” Brodkin, like Frankenberg, brings gender to the forefront
of her discussion. Brodkin explains that in the United States, the “idea of
nation has been built around the myth that its populace consists of two
mutually exclusive kinds of people who are defined by mutually
exclusive ways of being women and men”: “white ladies and gentlemen”
and “nonwhite and savage ‘hands’” (175–6). Thus, entering into
whiteness involves adopting the “right” gendered role, and this role is
both formed by and formative of one’s class position. Brodkin uses an
example from 1920s journalist William Allen White to illustrate this
relationship: “And as the Aryans of Greece tried democracy with their
bondwomen and failed, and the Aryans of Rome tried a Republic with
slaves and failed, so they who came to America from Latin countries
failed in this new world because their new world homes were half-caste
and not free, and the liberty they sought was license and not sacrifice”
(qtd. in Brodkin 176). In this ideology, adopting the “right” gendered
role is essential to being considered fit for participation in the nation;
“the racial nature of woman-hood,” Brodkin explains,” is precisely
what distinguishes those who are fit for democracy from those who are
not” (176).9 In this sense, Brodkin’s study provides a useful complement
to Frankenberg’s White Women, Race Matters; while Frankenberg
focuses her investigation on how race shapes white women’s lives,
Brodkin investigates how gender shapes race. Read together, the two
works emphasize the interrelatedness of gender and race, as well as
their inseparability from matters of class, sexuality, and national
identity.
 INTRODUCTION: RACE, WHITENESS, AND WOMEN IMMIGRANTS 13

Rather than focusing on one culturally distinct immigrant group as do

Ignatiev and Brodkin, Matthew Frye Jacobson studies emigrants from
across Europe in Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants
and the Alchemy of Race (1998). Jacobson is particularly concerned
with the formation of whiteness as different immigrant groups defined
their fitness for American citizenship. Jacobson’s approach is guided by
two premises: first, that race “is absolutely central to the history of
European immigration and settlement” (8), and, second, that “race
resides not in nature but in politics and culture” (9). While Jacobson
outlines these premises at the beginning of his book, he also implicitly
argues them throughout the work, as he shows how race, and whiteness
specifically, has been politically and culturally fabricated, and how
“European” has come to be synonymous with “white.” Yet, while
Jacobson establishes that not all European immigrants were deemed
white in the past, he warns against “facile comparisons” between the
racial experiences of European immigrants and those of other non-white
groups, pointing out that “it is not just that various white immigrant
groups’ economic successes came at the expense of nonwhites, but that
they owe their now stabilized and broadly recognized whiteness itself
part to these nonwhite groups” (9).
Jacobson’s work differs from that of Allen and Roediger, as the
author himself recognizes. While Jacobson notes the significance of
these other authors’ contributions to the study of whiteness, he also
points out the limitations in their arguments. Most specifically,
Jacobson finds that Allen’s and Roediger’s focus on class limits their
abilities to illuminate the full complexities of whiteness, to set it
“against a broad historical backdrop,” and to show the formation of
whiteness “outside the economic arenas of class concern and social
control” (18–9). Jacobson, while recognizing the importance of class
and socioeconomic power dynamics, works to go beyond these issues,
particularly to show articulations of race in the areas of “national
subjectivity and national belonging” (21). One of the ways Jacobson
does this is by examining the history of how race has been used to
determine “fitness for self-government” (20). Much of his discussion is
framed by the 1790 Act of Congress that restricted “the rights of
citizenship” to “free white persons,” and he not only explores how this
restriction has affected immigration and naturalization but also its
impact on notions of manifest destiny and on national subjectivity more
generally. Between the 1840s and the 1920s, Jacobson argues,
“continual expansion and conquest pulled for a unified collectivity of
European ‘white men,’ monolithic and supreme, even while nativism
14 THE LITERATURE OF IMMIGRATION AND RACIAL FORMATION

and the immigration question fractured that whiteness into its

component—‘superior’ and ‘inferior’—parts” (204). Throughout his
study, Jacobson highlights the socio-political dimensions of racial
categories and emphasizes the contingencies of race, nation, power, and
cultural production.
Of the works on whiteness that I discuss here, Jacobson’s is
especially relevant to my concerns in this project. Jacobson not only
focuses on immigrants from Europe, he also devotes considerable space
to an examination of early twentieth-century articulations of racial
difference. In doing so, his text-suggests the importance of studying
these issues in the late Progressive Era. “In general,” Jacobson remarks,

a pattern of racially based, Anglo Saxonist exclusivity dominated

the years from 1840 to the 1920s, whereas a pattern of Caucasian
unity took its place in the 1920s and after…. Between the 1920s
and the 1960s concerns of “the major [racial] divisions” would so
overwhelm the national consciousness that the “minor divisions,”
which had so pre-occupied Americans during the period of
massive European immigration, could lose their salience in
American culture and disappear altogether as racially based
differences. (91–2)

Jacobson also identifies 1924, the year that Congress passed the
restrictive Johnson-Reed Immigration Act, as a significant year in this
shift. While “residual traces of the scheme that had reigned between the
1840s and the 1920s persisted into the mid-twentieth century,”
suggesting that “nineteen twenty-four may be the high-water mark of
the regime of Anglo-Saxon or Nordic supremacy…and not its proper
closing date,” racial lines were nonetheless redrawn in the 1920s (93).
To me, the period preceding the Immigration Act of 1924 seems
especially crucial to understanding how this shift occurred. By focusing
this book on the years immediately preceding the redrawing of racial
lines, I aim to highlight some of the processes by which European
immigrants were refigured as racially normative and what that re-
figuration meant for Americans who were not deemed white.

EUROPEAN IMMIGRATION AND RACE IN

THE PROGRESSIVE ERA
During the Progressive Era, much of the debate surrounding
immigration centered on the racial character of the “new immigrants.”
 INTRODUCTION: RACE, WHITENESS, AND WOMEN IMMIGRANTS 15

Writers of the time noted a shift in the populations who were

immigrating to the United States. The restrictionist sociologist Henry
Pratt Fairchild summarizes in Im migration: A World Movement and Its
American Significance (1913): “Roughly speaking, the old immigration
came from the north and west of Europe, the new immigration comes
from south and east of that continent” (129). According to Fairchild, the
old immigrants “were of a racial stock very closely related to the early
settlers of the country,” and Fairchild makes it clear that “the early
settlers,” in his mind, were English (130). In contrast, “the new
immigration is made up from people of a very different racial stock,
representing the Slavic and Mediterranean branches of the Caucasian
race rather than the Teutonic” (130). While all Europeans, to Fairchild,
are “Caucasian,” the racial differences within this overarching racial
category are significant: the immigrants from southern and eastern
Europe “are by no means so closely related in physique or so similar in
mental characteristics to the people of the United States as the
immigrants of early periods” (143). Fairchild largely ignores
immigration from parts of the world other than Europe, claiming that
“immigration to the United States is as yet almost wholly a European
movement” (129). To make this claim, Fairchild must disregard
significant immigration from other parts of the globe, particularly from
Asia. As I discuss in chapter 3, Asian immigration was considered
important enough by others, especially on the west coast, that
considerable debate surrounded the issue. Fairchild does, however,
make a claim about non-European immigration that reveals his
perceived racial dividing line: “In so far as there are any immigrants
from non-European sources they would naturally be classed with the
new immigration” (129). Whether or not the mention of classification
refers directly to race, Fairchild suggests that the “new immigrants”
from Europe and all non-European immigrants are more akin to each
other than either is to the “old immigrants” from western and northern
Europe.
Fairchild, to a great extent, locates his restrictionist argument in the
belief that the racial difference of the “new immigrants” would cause
difficulties with assimilation that would consequently lead to social
problems. While Fairchild tends to blur the boundaries between race
and what we would now term ethnicity—claiming vaguely, for
example, that “with the difference in race go differences in mental
characteristics, traditions, and habits of life” (130)—other writers of this
period made clearer the primacy of biologically-based difference in
16 THE LITERATURE OF IMMIGRATION AND RACIAL FORMATION

their anti-immigration arguments. Writing in 1907, political economist

John R. Commons asserts:

Race differences are established in the very blood and physical

constitution…. Races may change their religions, their forms of
government, their modes of industry, and their languages, but
underneath all these changes they may continue the physical,
mental, and moral capacities and incapacities which determine the
real character of their religion, government, industry, and
literature. (7)

Similarly, eugenicist Madison Grant—whose The Passing of the Great

Race (1916) I address more fully in chapter 4—insisted on the
biological basis of racial differences both globally and within Europe,
drew direct correlations between biological difference and difference in
mental characteristics and “spiritual and moral traits” (199), and further
emphasized the superiority of the “Nordic race” to the other races he
envisioned.
Still other writers were less consistent about the racial classification of
the “new immigrants.” In The American Scene (1907), Henry James
implies that these newcomers, noting Jewish immigrants in particular,
are racially different from the “old immigrants” without taking a direct
stance on immigration restriction. In his chapter “New York and the
Hudson: A Spring Impression,” James compares Jews living in
New York to, variously, fish, worms, ants, squirrels, and monkeys, and
in doing so calls on a Euro-American tradition of using animal
metaphors to depict the racial Other (100–02). While James avoids
overtly invoking “race,” preferring instead terms such as type and tribe,
he nonetheless reiterates racial essentialism, as when he notes that
Italians, “over the whole land, strike us, I am afraid, as, after the Negro
and the Chinaman, the human value most easily produced” (98).
James’s curious phrasing challenges interpretation. By “easily
produced,” does he refer to a presumed high birthrate? Does he imply
a simplicity about these “races” that makes “production” or
reproduction “easy?” However one interprets James’s judgement about
the “easily pro duced” nature of Italians, African Americans, and
Chinese, at the very least James suggests that essential racial differences
exist both among European immigrants and between immigrants, and the
descendants of immigrants, from Europe, Asia, and Africa. Yet other
passages in “New York and the Hudson” present a more sympathetic
view of European immigrants, and even draw into question the
 INTRODUCTION: RACE, WHITENESS, AND WOMEN IMMIGRANTS 17

essentialism of racial difference among European immigrants. His

favorable comments, for example, about the Italians he has met in Italy—
those Italians who possess “that element of the agreeable address”—
suggests that Italian “difference” might not be so innate, after all (98).
James’s representations of, and attitudes about, racial difference are far
too complex to fully analyze here, but I want to emphasize that this
complexity, this knotty and often contradictory ideology of race, exists
even within a single text by a single author.10
Numerous other texts, from diverse academic disciplines as well as
from popular media and the arts, serve to illustrate the range of racial
discourse surrounding immigration during the first two decades of the
twentieth century. I address several of these texts in the following
chapters, further discussing the works by Fairchild, Commons, and
Grant, and also examining, in chapter 3, texts that focus more
specifically on Asian immigration and race, such as those by Burton
L.French and James D.Phelan. In the following section of this chapter,
however, I focus on one group of texts, a multi-volume government
publication, as this group in itself embodies some of the extremes of
this discourse on race, especially as it relates to European immigration.
In 1911, the U.S. Congress published The Reports of the Immigration
Commission, a series of detailed reports resulting from an intensive,
government-sponsored investigation into numerous aspects of
immigration and immigrant life. The reports are notable partly for their
appearance of exhaustiveness; they were published in forty-one
volumes, most volumes contain nearly 1,000 pages, and they present
extremely detailed explorations of issues ranging from the Effect of the
Employment of Recent Immi grants upon the Establishment of New
Industries to The Tendency to Insanity among the Immigrants, by
Nationality or Race.11 The extensiveness of the Commission’s
investigation—which was completed over a period of three years and
cost about one million dollars (Curran 126)—appears indicative of the
growing anxiety about immigration in the period immediately before
World War I. The “immigration question” became the focus of
numerous magazine articles, sociological texts, autobiographies,
and fictional narratives as well as the focus of Congress’s Immigration
Commission.
When I first began to survey the Reports of the Immigration Commis
sion several years ago, I was looking especially for information
regarding the cultural assimilation of immigrants. My interest in the
idea of assimilation stems from other reading about early twentieth-
century immigration; many other authors, whether for or against
18 THE LITERATURE OF IMMIGRATION AND RACIAL FORMATION

immigration restriction, presume that a successful immigrant is one who

can be assimilated into “American” culture, a culture that, although
rarely defined, is usually presumed to be fairly homogenous and
reflective of the values of an Anglo-European hegemony.12 When I
approached the Immigration Commission’s reports, however, I was
surprised by one volume in particular: Changes in Bodily Form of
Descen dants of Immigrants, a report on an anthropological study led by
Franz Boas, an immigrant himself. Here was a report about
assimilation, but not about the kind of assimilation—the change of
culture, of traditions, of values—that I had presumed to be central to
debates about immigration. Instead, the report focused on physical
change—change in head shape, stature, hair color—in descendants of
immigrants, and concluded that children of European immigrants
develop “in such a way that they differ in type essentially from their
foreign-born parents” (1:44).
The method followed in this study of “changes in bodily form” is in
keeping with empirically-based pseudo-scientific studies of race
prominent in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Boas
attempts to situate the study by asserting that “It was suggested to the
Commission that if measurements of the bodies of European
immigrants and their descendants at different ages and under different
circumstances could be made in a careful way by pseudo-scientific
anthropometrists, valuable results might be reached” (1:44). By
situating his study in this way, Boas at first allies himself with the field
of anthropological anthropometry, a field of study that was largely
concerned with using the measurement of human bodies to establish the
biological basis and hierarchical quality of racial difference. What Boas
concluded from such measurements was that changes in “bodily form”
do indeed occur in the descendants of European immigrants. The
report’s conclusions were based on a number of different bodily
measurements of immigrants. One of the aspects on which the
researchers focused particularly was the head shape of immigrants; they
found that “the head form, which has always been considered one of the
most stable and permanent characteristics of human races, undergoes
far-reaching changes due to the transfer of the people from European to
American soil” (2:505). Boas provides a specific comparison as an
example of such a change: “the east Eu ropean Hebrew, who has a very
round head, becomes more long-headed; the south Italian, who in Italy
has an exceedingly long head, becomes more short-headed; so that in
this country both approach a uniform type, as far as the roundness of the
head is concerned” (38:5).13 To arrive at these conclusions, the
 INTRODUCTION: RACE, WHITENESS, AND WOMEN IMMIGRANTS 19

investigators relied on specific empirical data; they measured and

compared width and length of the heads of immigrants to produce a
“cephalic index” that supposedly represents the head shape of an
immigrant.14 In other parts of the study, the investigators measured
features such as stature as well. In the end, the conclusions Boas draws
from these measurements are wide-sweeping. “We are compelled to
conclude,” he writes, “that when these features of the body change, the
whole bodily and mental make-up of the immigrants may change”
(2:506).15
For Boas, the importance of the investigation into “changes in bodily
form” lies in the conclusion that change indeed occurred. Such a
conclusion would indeed be unexpected (the word Boas uses) to
someone who was convinced that race is a real, immutable, biological
category. If biologically-based racial difference was not a generally
accepted way of understanding the world, an investigation into racial
change would hardly be considered to be worthwhile. However, while
starting from this assumption about race, Boas goes on to conclude that
physical changes do indeed occur, showing the instability of
biologically-based racial categorization, at least as far as those
categories apply to European immigrants and their descendants. While
Boas’s study does focus specifically on Europeans, his conclusions have
implications for race more generally. If bodily features as well as “the
whole bodily and mental make-up” of individuals change over time,
race cannot be viewed as immutable essence.16
While Boas seems to question racial essentialism in Changes in
Bodily Form, the same cannot be said of the authors of other volumes of
the Reports of the Immigration Commission (Figure 1). In another
volume of the Reports, a Dictionary of Races or Peoples, anthropologist
Daniel Folkmar and physician Elnora C.Folkmar make clear their belief
in the natural constitution of racial categories. In this Dictionary,
different races are defined, in part through physical description, in part
through language, and in part through moral and mental characteristics.
While racial divisions are sharply drawn throughout the text, the
defining criteria of racial difference are nebulous and sometimes
contradictory. These contradictions reveal themselves in the different
categorical systems the authors employ. For example, after
acknowledging that the “number of the chief division or basic races of
mankind is more in dispute at the present time than when Linnaeus
proposed to classify them into 4,” Folkmar and Folkmar explain that
they have chosen to use a system that categorizes people as “Caucasian,
Ethiopian, Mongolian, Malay, and American, or, as familiarly called,
20 THE LITERATURE OF IMMIGRATION AND RACIAL FORMATION

Figure 1. “Sketches of Head Forms” from The Reports of the Immigration Com
mission, volume 38, Changes in Bodily Form of Descendants of Immigrants.

the white, black, yellow, brown, and red races” (1:211). But the authors
are hardly consistent with their choice of this system. They immediately
follow their description of these five races with a table that provides
statistics about twenty-eight different races in Europe alone. Under the
heading “Race or people” Folkmar and Folkmar are careful to
distinguish between such races as “Slovak,” “Hebrew,” and “English
and Scotch” (1:214). Following this, the authors offer yet another
system of racial classification that they clearly link to biological
difference, claiming that there are at least three races in western Europe:
“the Teutonic’ or ‘Nordic’ (tall, blond, and long-headed), the ‘Alpine’
 INTRODUCTION: RACE, WHITENESS, AND WOMEN IMMIGRANTS 21

(broad-headed), and the ‘Mediterranean’ (brunette and long- headed)”

(1:218).
Furthermore, the authors are inconsistent regarding their criteria for
determining precisely what constitutes a race. For example, they claim
that “race is determined by language in such phrases as ‘the races of
Europe’ but by physical qualities, such as color, hair, and shape of
head, when we speak of ‘the five great races’ or divisions of mankind”
(5:13). Matthew Frye Jacobson points out, however, that European
groups, supposedly defined by language, “are irretrievably cast as racial
groups throughout the Dictionary, so that even within the unifying
construction of a grand ‘Caucasian’ race, among European peoples
difference itself is consistently defined as both biological in nature and
extreme in degree” (79). For example, eastern Bulgarians, according to
the report, are “distinctly long-headed…predominantly brunette, with
dark hair, although it is said that 40 per cent have light eyes. The race is
rather low in stature and stockily built, but no distinctly Mongolian
feature remains, unless it be the high cheek bones and rather narrow
eyes which are common amongst them” (1:222). Folkmar and
Folkmar’s Dictionary provides similar biologically-based detail about
the other “races” of Europe: “the ‘Jewish nose,’ and to a less degree
other facial characteristics, are found well-nigh everywhere throughout
the race” (5:74). The report also links moral and mental qualities to
essential racial difference, characterizing southern Italians, for example,
as “excitable” and “impulsive” (5:82) and Slavs as careless “as to the
business virtues of punctuality and often honesty” (5:129).
The detail and confidence of these descriptions of specific races seem
to contradict the findings of the study on Changes in Bodily Form.
While the report on Changes started with the assumption that racially-
based physical difference both existed and held some significance, its
conclusions called into question the stability of racial difference. For the
authors of the Dictio nary, in contrast, racial difference continues to rely
on stable, biologically-determined essences.
Elazar Barkan has described the Reports of the Immigration Commis
sion on the whole as “the high point of political propaganda for
immigration restriction before the Immigration laws were enacted in the
twenties” (83). While the other volumes of the Reports are not as
consistently and explicitly racist as the Dictionary, they do largely
reflect, or at least do not question, the assumption that racial difference
is a factor in immigration and that race is a biologically meaningful
entity, rather than a social construction. In this sense, Changes in Bodily
Form of Descendants of Immigrants is an anomaly in the Reports, a
Exploring the Variety of Random
Documents with Different Content
 BUCŞANU (Valachia) Documentele ne relevează pe Barcea
logofătul din Bucşanî, pe la anul 1592. — (Odobescu A. R.). — O altă
serie de acte dintre 1590 — 1615, ne vorbeşte de Dragul, şi copiii seî
: Neagu şi Caplea cu moşia lor, cari par a li boeri din această familie.
Bărcan de la Buxiani stolnicul, e renumit prin revoluţia ce încercă a
face cu boeriî în potriva lui Radu Mihnea la 1611 — 12: «Iar un
boeriu mare, anume Bărcan vel stolnic de la Merişanî, ear de moşie
se trăgea de la Buxanî, el călcă jurământul, şi cu dânsul încă şi alţi 8,
că făcură svat în taină ca să omoare pre Radu Vodă şi să ridice domn
pe Mihaî cămăraşul, pentru căcî-î împresurase cu o mulţime de
greci... Iar Radu Vodă prinzând de veste, îndată porunci de’î
prinseră, şi porunci de’îtăiă pre toţi...», dice Cronica anonimă (t. IV,
p. 306 m. ist.), care susţine pe domn. — Acest boer avea într’adever
o mare însemnătate prin neamul şi demnitatea sa, care vedem ast-
fel că se află printre boeriî de frunte încă pe la 1600. Făcând o
observare, credem că Barcan marele stolnic, e acelaş cu Barcea de la
1592, pe atunci fără demnitate, ci simplu nobil-logofet. — (v.
Merişanu). Borcan marele stolnic, avu un tiu : Staico paharnicul
Buxianul, «fiul lui Bărcan de la Buxianî» cum dice Cronica ţeriî, când
enumeră principalii partizani aî lui Gheorghe Băleanu, la ivirea
faimoasei rivalitaşt între Bălenî şi Kreţuleştî etc., în dilelele lui Antonie
Voevod (1669). La venirea lui Duca Vodă, acesta trimese înainte în
ţară
 — 100 să anunţe, pe Constantin slugerul, fiul logofătului
Stoica Ludescul, care însă fu prins de partida Bălenilor, între cari
Radu Năsturel şi Staico Buxianul, şi pus în butuci, credend că spunea
minciuni. Audind că într’adevăr vine Duca, ei fugiră peste graniţă
«iar Radul Năsturel şi cu Staico au fugit la munte», etc. — (pag. 13,
V; mag. istor.). Boerul Vintilă Bucşanul, împreună cu soţia sa
Dumitrana Buiceasca, sunt îngropaţi amândoi la monăstirea dintr’un
lemn (Vâlcea), — Trăia cam pe la 1640 — 50. Preda Buxianul marele
Logofăt, pieri în lupta care se dede la asediul cetăţei Leva, de Turci,
ajutaţi de domnii români, în contra Nemţilor: — «atunci au pierit şi
Preda vel Logofătul Buxianul şi Ivaşco Cepariul, Constantin Vărzariul
vel paharnic, şi alţi mulţi», 19 Iulie 1664. — Cronicarul dice că
«perirea acestora au fost osânda de la Dumnedeu trimisă», pentru
că fuseseră uniţi cu Grigore Vodă şi cu Stroe Vornicul contra lui
Constantin Cantacuzino, la uciderea acestuia. — Ventilă căpitan
Buxianul, fost peste Olt mare căpitan de margine, iscăleşte în 1717
din Sibiu scrisoarea boerilor munteni refugiaţi, către Principele
Eugeniu de Savoia, cerând ajutor contra Turcilor; împreună cu
Golescu, Bălăceanu, Băleanu, State Leordeanu, Kretzulescu, etc. —
In Septembre acelaş an, tot boerii refugiaţi scriu o altă adresă cu
noui cereri. El muri la 1718. — (Hurmuzache. — Doc. tom. IV. p.
193, 199). In lista boerilor munteni, trimeasă de Tige lui Steinville la
1719, figurează Constantin Buxan Logofăt. — (id. p. 242). In
decursul trecutului secol au mai existat boeri descendenţi din
această familie, însă mai căzuţi şi retraşi de la boeriile înalte, de alt-
fel ca multe din familii cari în timpul nostru, d’abia au mai păstrat o
amintire din trecutul lor, dacă nu de loc. Nu credem ca azi să mai
existe urmaşi direcţi al acestuî neam, de şi nu putem afirma lucrul în
mod sigur. Une-ori (în secol, din urmă) şi-au zis şi «Bucşeneşti».
 BUDIŞTEANU (Valachia) Familia Budişteanu, una din vechile
familii boereştî pământene, e originară din judeţul Argeş, comuna
Budeasa, de pe malul stâng al rîului Argeş, aproape de Piteşti. La
1786, trăiau la moşia lor părintească, trei fraţi Budiştenî şi anume,
Răducan, Şerban şi Nicolae. — Descendenţii acestora, linie
bărbătească astăzi în viaţă, sunt : I. Din Răducan Budişteanu, prin
fiul seu Clucerul Ion Budişteanu, se trage : Constantin I. Budişteanu.
— Apoi fraţii Budiştem : Dumitru , Nicolae şi Ion , copii ai căpitanului
Dumitru Budişteanu ; precum şi un alt fiu al acestuia, anume Majorul
Pavel Budişteanu. II. Din Şerban Budişteanu se trag : — Colonelul
Alexandru Budişteanu , fost senator, etc., care din căsătoria sa cu
Ecaterina născută c-tesă de Rosetti, are trei fii: Dumitru, Alexandru
şi Radu Budişteanu ; — Generalul Constantin Budişteanu , fost
Ministru de resboi, etc. — si L-t. Colonel Nicolae Budişteanu , câteşî
trei fraţi şi copii ai Serdaruluî Alex. Budişteanu, fiul lui Şerban. — Din
Ghiorghiţă Budişteanu, un alt copil al lui Şerban descind Manole şi
Gheorghe Budişteanu. — Tot din Şerban se mai trag şi Treptenii din
judeţul Argeş, care mai târdiu a luat acest nume dupe moşia lor. III.
Din Nicolae Budişteanu se trag fraţii : Constantin, Gheorghe şi
Nicolae, fii lui Drăghici Budişteanu, unul din copiii lui Nicolae.
Constantin Budişteanu are trei băeţi, Pefre, Nicolae , şi Cicerone. —
Tot din Nicolae se trage şi Lt. Colonel Ion Budişteanu. Dintr’o altă
spiţă a Budiştenilor descinde căpitanul Nicolae Budişteanu, fiul lui
Ion Budişteanu din comuna Găvana, judeţul Argeş. io
 BUHUŞ f (Moldova) Veche familie moldovenească, pe care o
găsim în istorie din sec. XVI; şi care joacă mare rol în al XVII.
Vistierul Buhuş, după nume Dumitru, îl aflăm cum ne arată
letopiseţul, mergând la anul 1631 cu alţi boerî la Constantinopnl,
spre a protesta contra numire! de domn, a lu! Alex. Iliaş; împreună
cu Costin postelnicul, Logofătul Başotă, Spătarul Ureche, Hatman
Savin şi Vasile Lupu vornic. Apoi în 1633 comploteză contra acestui
domn, detronându-1. Dumitru Buhuş muri la 1647, şi mormântul seu
acoperit cu o piatră, se află la mănăstirea Criveştî. Intr’un document
din 1621 (Acad.; August 24, se vorbeşte de Grigore Buhuş, care se
împacă cu Dumitru Buhuş, în pricina unu! ţigan. Acest! do! boerî
erau fraţi împreună ; — iar fiul visteruluî Dumitru, erea Marele
logofăt nicolae Buhuş, pe care îl întâlnim în numerose documente. In
timpul lu! Vasile Lupul, pe când erea în Moldova Cazacul Timus, se
aflau ca zălog! la Hatmanul Cazacilor, nepoţi! Iu! Vasile W. «şi den
feciori! de boier! de ţară, Nicolae Buhuş şi Ion Prăjescul . . .» (Let. I,
322). Acelaş domn, către sfârşitul domniei, trimete pe Nicolae
Buhuş, acum Jicnicer, cu alţî do! boerî să prindă pe Ştefan pârcălabul
de Soroca şi să-l trimeaţă legat la Hotin; iar apoi să meargă cu toţi la
Hmil Hatmanul. An. 1653. (Miron Costin I. 326), Ma! târziu, e mare
Logofăt al Moldovi! sub maî mulţi domni. Rudă aprope cu dînsul a
fost : hatmanul Alexandru Buhuş, care erea titrat ca vel
 — 103 — pitar la 1668 ; iar la 1670, 1676, 1680 ca
Hatman. In anul 1669 venind pe tron Duca W, chemă pe Buhuş care
era fugit în Valachia, şi îl trimese cu tătarii contra faimosului Serdar
Hâncu, la Epureni, unde acest din urmă fu învins şi prins. In timpul
domniei lui Dumitraşco Cantacuzen îl regăsim ca Hatman, luptând
contra Nemţilor la Podişoara, lângă Suceava (1674): «pe Nemţi i-au
lovit Buhuş Hatmanul şi dând năvală în tabără la loc larg, au ucis
calul de sub Hatmanul, şi căzend într’un răzor cu faţa în sus aşa a
năvălit Nemţii numai ca să-l ia»... Decusară căpitanul scotându’l din
învălmăşeală, el încalecă din nou . «Şi au mai dat năvală, cum dice
letopiseţul, şi au rupt tabăra Nemţilor în două, şi au pierit câţi-va, şi
pre mulţi i-au luat vii şi i-au trimes la Dumitraşco Vodă; pentru care
isbândă, în mare cinste erea Hatmanul la Dumitraşco W. şi vestit
nume avea la Turci». (Letop. Cog. III, p. 14). La 1685, Duca Vodă în
a treia domnie a sa, întorcendu-se din Transilvania, unde fugise de
Petriceicu şi de Cazaci, şi aflând că la Tecuci e o oaste comandată de
Hăbăşescu, trimese pe cumnatul seu Hatmanul Buhuş, care o risipi.
In urmă însă Duca fu prins, iar Buhuş d’abia scăpă. — Cu 7 ani
înainte, la 1678, Antonie Roset V. fiind detronat de Vizir, care se afla
în ţară, acesta «au pus caimacam în scaun pe Ghenghea Vornicul şi
pe Sandu Buhuş Hatman». — (N. Costin II, 16). — Acest viteaz şi
mare boer, s’a ilustrat mult în istoria Moldovei pe timpul seu. —
Cronicarul Neculce zice «că nimica nu i s’au ales de casa lui şi de
feciorii lui». — (let. II, B). Tatăl seu era Sandu Buhuş, care de
asemenea fusese Hatman ; iar mama sa erea Dafina, în urmă soţia
lui Dabija Vodă. Cu Buhuş, ea mai avusese încă doi copii : Nastasia,
sora Hatmanului AL, care se căsători cu Duca Vodă, pe când erea
vistiernic ; şi fratele ei : Lupaşco Buhuş Spătarul, despre care citim în
cronică : — (Neculce, II p. 192). «Dabija având un fiastru al seu,
făcut de Doamna Dabijoaia cu Buhuş ; făcut’au mare nuntă în curţile
domneşti cu acel fiastru al seu Lupaşco, care acel Lupaşco au a 
 — 104 — juns pe urmă Spătar mare în ţara muntenească,
şi au luat o fată a lui Iordaki vistierul Cantacuzino». — Elena Buhuş
erea soţia lui Manolaki Rosetti. — Un Constantin Buhuş e mărturisit
de documente la anul 1641. Vel clucerul Ion Buhuş, al cărui grad de
rudenie cu Hatmanul nu’l cunoaştem, trăia în jurul anului 1700. Din
1689, are un hrisov domnesc pentru întărire de posesie. Mai pe
urmă devine mare logofet al Moldovei, în care rang îl aflăm la 1710,
în timpul domniei lui Nicolae Mavrocordaţ, care’l însărcină împreună
cu Ion Paladi să facă verificarea visteriei, neglijată de Georgiţă
Apostol vistierul. O dată cu detronarea lui Nicolae Vodă, Buhuş fu
arestat de Iusuf aga ce venise cu mazilia, pentru neachitarea unui
bir vechiu, dar el fugi din vistierie unde erea închis, scăpând ast-fel
de a fi dus la Ţarigrad. Nicolae Buhuş, care credem că e fiul
precedentului, erea mare Logofet al Moldovei la 1757, când îl găsim
adesea în divanul domnesc ca mărturie în diferite acte. Familia se
continuă până în secolul nostru, stingându-se prin ultimii 2
descendenţi ai ei : «Matei Buhuş, dice Boldur Lăţescu în adnotarea
operei lui Cantemir, cel de pe urmă din acest neam, s’au stins în
zilele noastre». Vornicul Dimitrie Buhuş, ultimul membru al acestei
mari familii, născut 1806, -f 185.. Epitaful seu, făcut de Costache
Negruzzi, şi săpat pe piatra tombală, zice: «Din nobila tulpină,
familie slăvită, Român adevărat, «Eu singur rămăsesem, când
moartea cea cumplită, Cumplit m’a secerat. «Si vita Buhusească
uscată se retează 5 î * De-acum de pe pământ...». Totuşi din ramuri
îndepărtate ale familiei, mai există astă-zi descendenţi în Basarabia.
 BUICESCU t (Valachia) Veche familie, care în al XVII veac
poseda între alte proprietăţi, moşia din Băneşti, etc. — Ortografia
numelui o găsim variând chiar în cronicari, une-ori: «Boicescu», alte
ori «Buicescu», care pare forma cea veche. Diicul Spătar, boer
însemnat de care vorbesc şi cronicarii Moldovei, s’a ilustrat pe la
1652, fiind încă tânăr «si în mare cinste la Matei Basarab». — Ast-fel
cronicele (Anonyma val. şi M. Costin), ne vorbesc cu prilejul urcărei
pe tron a lui Gheorghe Ştefan, de: «Diicul spătarul muntenesc al lui
Matei V., ce se ispitea să fie el domn», care fusese trimes de Matei
să ajute lui Gheorghe pentru ocuparea domniei, în contra lui Vasile
Lupu, lucru ce reuşi. (1653).— El luase parte la multe din luptele lui
Matei W., dând probe de o mare valoare şi vitejie. — La 1654: «după
ce au şezut Constantin Vodă în scaun... se dice că au lost trăgând
nădejde de domnie şi Dicul spătarul, cărui unii din prietinii sei
fâcându-i de ştire că moare Matheî Vodă, îndată au purces de la
Buiceşti, de au venit, iar când au sosit el, Constantin s’au fost pus în
scaun Vodă...» (Şincaî, III, 97). Din aceste ambiţiuni ale sale, şi din
vaza ce avea, se vede că familia sa erea însemnată prin vechimea şi
puterea ei. Diicu fiind vel clucer, pieri ucis de Mihnea III la anul
1658. (v. Comăneanu). — După cum ne arată documentele, fiul
marelui spătar Diicu, erea Papa Buicescu, biv-vel paharnic şi comis,
citat ast-fel
 — 106 — la 1687. — După aşezarea pe tron a lui Şerban
Cantacuzino Voev. «...întru aceste vremi şi Papa Boicescul unindu-se
cu câţî-va boerinaşî de aî ţăreî, s’au dus la Odriu x) să pârască pe
Şerban Vodă... Şi mergând Papa Paharnic la Viziriul, câte au ştiut le-
au zis, dar au biruit banii (lui Vodă), şi l’au dat legat şi pe el şi pe cei
alţi de i-au dus la Şerban Vodă; şi pre Papa l’au ertat (au den
porunca vizirului, au den rugăciunea sororiî lui, Marina Filipeasca) şi
l’au lăsat viu, iar pe ceî-l’alţî i-au omorît». — (Const. căpitanul. —
Cronica, mag. istor. II, 32). Soţia sa erea Dumitrana Buîceasca, fiica
luî Pană Spătarul Filipescu şi nepoata luî Mănailă postelnic din Văleni.
Intr’un act din 1690, Papa e citat cu fiul seu: Diicul Boicescu, care ca
şi moşul seu e spătar la anul 1700. — Fiica sa, ţinea pe Vintilă mare
căpitan de margine, *j* la 1718 (Bucşanu). Păuna Buiceasca, fiica luî
Diicu, a fost soţia luî Drăghicî Cantacuzino. (Geneal. Cantac.). Nu
credem că această familie originară din Valachia, unde avea
proprietate Buiceştiî, să aibă o legătură cu familia boerească din
Oltenia: «Boicescu», — cunoscută din secolul trecut şi din care sunt
azî urmaşi, — ci ea a dispărut încă după 1720. 0 Adrianopole.
 BUJOREANU (Valachia) Un Sarchiz de Bujoranî, trăia înainte
de anul 1608 în dilele lui Radu Voevod, dupe cum aminteşte un
hrisov domnesc. — (act. Archiv. St. B.). Patru generaţiuni ale acestei
vechi familii, dupe cum se vede originară din judeţul Velcea
(Oltenia), se pot stabili prin ajutorul documentelor, «â cheval» pe al
XVII şi XVIII secol : Şerban Bujoreanu fost mare vistier, spătar, apoi
Mare Ban, 1716. El erea însurat cu jupâneasa Elinca Brătăşanca, de
la care avu un fiu. Una din moşiile pe cari le stăpânea dânsul, erea
Păuşeştî, dupe care adese ori eî se numesc pe lângă Bujoren! şi:
Pauseştî. — El e iscălit în multe documente ale divanului ca vistier
1689 — 1716, apoi ca v. Ban. — 1716 \ Mavrocordat trimese ştire în
tară că vine domn, rânduind caimacam! pe Mihaî Cantacuzino, Radu
Golescu, spătar Dudescu şi Şerban Bujoreanu. Puţin dupe acea,
boeri! Oltenie! închinându-se cu toţî locuitorii, armatelor germane :
«Nicolae Vodă audind acestea, au trimes pe Bojoreanul şi pe
Obedeanul să se nevoiască, cum dice cronicarul, că doară ar putea
desplăti pe Români! de peste Olt de către nemţi, şi multe pagube şi
nevoi făcea oamenilor, că pe Banul Bojoreanul l’au prins în cătăn! de
la Brâncovenî şi l’au dus până la Zătrenî, de acolo scăpând, au venit
la Domnul... Vodă se întrista şi se mira, ce va să facă, neştiind că
Bojoreanul, Golescul şi Băleanul şi alţi!, sunt car! fac acestea, ca să
dea ţara în mâna nemţilor». — (Sinea! III, 389—91). — Dupe
aceasta urmă ocuparea defini 
 108 — tivă a Olteniei, al cărei istoric e cunoscut. — (v.
Golescu, Brăiloiu, Obedeanu, etc.). Banul Bujoreanu a murit probabil
puţin după acea, de oare-ce erea foarte înaintat în verstă. — Radu
Popescu rezumă, în modul seu, ast-fel acţiunea boerilor cu Austria:
«...o seamă de boiarî... fiind capete: Radul Golescul, Grigore
Băleanul, Şerban Bujoreanul, au tras şi pe alţi boeri în partea lor şi
au făcut o cetişoară, şi au început a se sfătui, sfaturi vrednice de rîs,
adică cum să închine ei ţara împăratului nemţesc, şi să ceară Domn
pe Iordache Beizadea, feciorul lui Şerban Vodă (Cantacuzen), care se
afla sub protecţia nemţilor...». (Cronica ; mag. istor. IY, 95). Un
nepot de frate al Banului, erea Preda «Buzuranul», cum îl numeşte
raportul conţinând lista boerilor olteni din 1719 (din Velcea), cu dare
benevolă către Austria. Fiul lui Şerban Banul, a fost, din jupâneasa
Ilinca : Radu vornicul Bujoreanu, 1735, numit şi «Clucer R.
Pauseşcul» când avea acest titlu. El erea însurat cu jupâneasa
Mihalcea, soţia lui Tănase Sărăcinescu, care apoi deveni : călugăriţa
din Bujoreni, Marta. — (doc. m. Pauseştî. — Arh. St. B.) Fiii lor :
Dima şi Mihalcea, sunt citaţi împreună încă din anul 1697, în
tinereţea lor; iar al treilea: Clucerul Tănase Bujoreanul, zis şi
«Păuseşcul», de care vorbeşte Cronica sub Brâncoveanu, avea moşie
în Pauşestii din Velcea, şi soţie pe jupâneasa Aspra. Fata lor :
Jupaniţa Stanca erea copil la anul 17 14.— (v. magas.ist.il, p. 151).
Boerul Drăghici Bujoreanu, amintit la an. 1740, fiind însurat cu fata
lui Pârvul Păianu, a avut de fiu pe : Mihai Bujoreanu, dovedit de
asemenea la an. 1763. Clucereasa Luxandra Bujoreanca, e citată la
1794 (August etc.) când cere prin o jalbă de la Vodă Moruzi ca, o
«şcoală pentru învăţătura copiilor de pomană, la o moşie a dumneaei
Tărtăşesţii, ce este în jud. Ilfov . », şi care fusese înfiinţată de un
moş al ei, să primească un ajutor şi scutiri de la domnie, menţionând
că : «Scăpătând
 — 109 — neamul dumneaei, n’au putut să o mai ţie, şi aşa
s’au prăpădit». (V. Ureche. — Alex. Moruzi V. p. 264). Astă-dî mai
există ca descendenţi ai acestui neam, ce odinioară a jucat un rol în
ţară : Ioan Bujoreanu, n. 1834, fost Director şi sub Director al
Imprimeriei Statului, vechiu magistrat şi publicist, autorul
însemnatului uvragiu : «Colecţiune de legile vechi şi noui ale ţerii», şi
alte lucrări, etc; — Şi fratele seu, Majorul Bujoreanu.
 BUZESCU t (Valachia) Ilustră şi veche familie, a cărei
origină se leagă de Basarabî, înainte de secolul XV, în care sunt
cunoscuţi. încă de pe atunci erea în mare spleudoare şi cu mare
trecere la domni, cu cari se înrudeau ca Basarabî. Italianul Ciro
Spontoni, contimporan cu cei trei Buzeştî, spunea că descindeau din
familia italiană Strozzi, care ar fi emigrat în evul mediu din Italia.
Această afirmare erea însă o simplă fantezie, neîntemeiată pe nimic.
«Moşia Drăgoeştî cu 45 alte trupuri de moşii şi cu ţiganii, au fost de
baştină ale Buzeştilor, de la stremoşiî lor, de la Jupâneasa Neaga, fica
luî Duduc, şi de la fiul seu Manea Ghizdăveţiu şi de la sora lui
Jupâneasa Dumitra şi Vladaia, încă din dilele Domnilor celor vechi,
de la Vlad Voevod, fiul luî Vlad W....» etc. (v. Odobescu; Antiq. j. R.
p. 149) ; pe la 1488. La anul 1518, găsim pe marele bAN Vlad
Buzescul «ce ’şî vărsa sângele pentru ţară», şi care primi de la
Neagoe-Vodă satul Crucea. El începu zidirea monăstireî Căluiul din
Jud. Romanaţî (pe la 1520), împreună cu fraţii seî Dumitru
Pârcălabul şi Balica Spătarul, dupe cum se vede într’o inscripţie.
Această inscripţie e d’asupra uşeî de piatră a advonuluî, sculptată în
slavoneşte cu litere de 6 cm. şi începe : «Cu voia Tatălui şi cu
ajutorul Spiritului Sânt. Amin. Eată dară eu robul Stăpânului meu
Isus Christos ; jupân Vladul Banul, cu fraţii seî, jupan Dumitru
Parcalabul şi Balica Spatariul, început’am
 — 111 — acest Sânt locaş în dilele lui Basarab Voevod, şi
dupe aceia a fost părăsit multă vreme . » etc. Vlad Banul, împreună
cu fraţii seî, sunt printre ctitorii acelei monăstiri. Din anul 1517, se
păstrează un chrisov al lui «Ito Basarab Voevod, fiul bunului Basarab
Voevod», prin care Vodă dă moşia Căluiul de sus, câtă erea partea
Albului, de moştenire lui Vlad, Dumitru si Balica, să le fie si urmasilor
lor. Chrisovul e iscălit ca întăi martor, de Banul Albul (Basarab). Banul
Vlad Buzescul avu un fiu, pe armaşul Radu Buzescul, care e tatăl
celor 3 celebri fraţi Buzesti din timpul lui Mihaî V. Aceasta se citeşte
şi în urmarea inscripţiei de mai sus a fiilor seî: ...«până am ajuns şi
eu robul lui I. C. Jupan Radu marele Armaş şi cu fraţii mei Jupan
Preda Spătarul şi Stroe postelnicul, nepoţii lui jupan Vladul Banul şi
fiii lui jupan Radul fost mare armaş, vezut’am acest locaş neisprăvit,
de aceia noi am ridicat acest hram în dilele prea cuviosului... ho
Mihnea Voevod» (1588). Clopotul monastirei Căluiul poartă o
inscripţie arătând că fusese făcut de Radu B. în acelaş an. Preda
marele Ban Buzescu, fratele mai mare din cei trei faimoşi Buzesti,
cari joacă un mare rol printre boeriî lui Mihaî Viteazul. Născut înainte
de jumet. secolului XVI, f la 1612 în urma fraţilor seî, fusese în
ultimul timp, mare Ban al Crajovei. De obicei, când Mihaî pleca în
expediţii, el era lăsat să administreze ţara în lipsa Domnului. Ast-fel
se întâmplă când Simeon Movilă usurpă tronul viteazului principe în
1601 şi când Buzeştiî remaşi să cârmuiască ţara, gonesc pe acest
domn. — Dupe moartea lui Mihaî el sprijină cu credinţă pe Radu
Şerban. Pe când bandele Tătarilor pustiau ţara sub acest din urmă,
se deteră mai multe lupte. Intr’una din ele se dice că unul din
Buzesti, Preda dupe unii, omorî într’un duel singular pe fiul hanului
Tătăresc Gherai, câştigând ast 
 — 112 fel lupta. Poetul Bolintineanu a versificat acest
frumos episod în poezia «Preda Buzescu». — Dar fiind şi el rănit i s’a
tras moartea, cum dice Şincaî: «Ci Preda încă s’au rănit la cap şi
venind la Braşov să se vindece, au murit, fiindu’î rana
nevindecăcioasă....» (II, 497). — Fondul morţeî e adevărat, însă nu
Preda, ci Stroe e cel care a fost eroul acestei lupte. — Soţia Banului
Preda a fost Cătălină. Radu marele clucer Buzescu, fost mare spatar,
cel mai vestit dintre fraţi. La 1575 fusese vel postelnic; la 1588
Spatar. — Ca general însemnat al lui Mihaî e trimes, în deosebite
împrejurări să apere ţara. La 1593, împreună cu Banul Udrea
Băleanu şi cu 6000 oşteni aî Olteniei, trecu în Ardeal pe la Turnu
Roşu spre a întâlni pe Mihaî. — La 1595, înainte de faimoasa bătălie
de la Călugărenî, el merge cu Stroe înaintea hanului Tătăresc la
Galaţi ; şi în acelaş an sunt din nou trimeşî să ia Hârşova de la Turci,
pe când Banul Mihalcea asediâ Silistra. — Mihaî îl trimete în solie la
Basta ; iar în domnia luî Radu Şerban îl regăsim în solie cu Tătarii.
Scrisorile şi toată corespondenţa sa, se păstrează în arhivele Vieneî.
Radu Buzescu avusese 2 soţii: Stanca (-j* 1590), de la care avu 3
copii, şi Preda fica mareluî Ban Mihalcea, cu care îmormântă capul luî
Mihaî cel mare în monastirea Dealul, la picioarele tatăluî seu. — El
muri la anul 1610. Anonymus Carolisensis (cit. de Şincaî. II, 376)
zice despre Radu, că : «Radu acesta clucerul erea din cei mal de
frunte dintre boerî şi prea bogat, pentru că moştenise mai a treia
parte din Valachia; ştia şi ungureşte». — Epitaful seu se află în
monăstirea Căluiul, nnde fu îngropat, murind la 10 Ianuar 1610. —
Stroe stolnicul Buzescu, al treilea frate ; ilustru boer. muri la 1602, în
vârstă de 70 de ani. II găsim maî adesea împreună cu fratele seu
Radu ; aşa în 1595 la Vidin, când ambii scăpară viaţa luî Mihaî Vodă,
înconjurat de o ceată de Turci, gata să’l străpungă. El e acel care se
luptă cu Tătarul ; fiind rănit i se trase moartea şi fu îngropat în
biserica din Stăneştî (din Velcea) a neamuluî ; — pe mor 
 — 113 — mânt se citeşte: «....se lovi cu cumnatul hanului
şi-l ajunse pe tătar de se răni». — Piatra tombală a fost pusă de
soţia sa Sima (f 1617): «Dacă voi muri să me îngropaţi lângă
dumnealui aici». — Pe un bas relief, dedesupt, se vede lupta lui
Stroe cu Hanul. Muri fără urmaşi. Viteaz ca şi fraţii sei, ajută în tot-
deauna pe domnul seu ; si acuzarea ce s’a adus Buzestilor ca si altor
boeri, că ar fi trădat pe Mihai, pe când acesta erea încurcat în
Ardeal, e de tot neîntemeiată. — (Laurian, etc.). Fraţii Buzeşti ereau
înrudiţi cu principii Wizniowiecki, însemnată familie de nobili poloni,
descendenţi din ducii Lituaniei. Mulţi scriitori italianî, în memoriile şi
descrierile lor contimporane (v. docum. din arhivele Venezziei, cit. de
Exarcu Rev. de Arch.), cu admiraţiune vorbesc despre aceşti «baroni
Valachî Buzeşti» şi despre renumele lor, lăudând mult marile lor
fapte. Pe lângă marea bogăţie ce posedau, Buzeştii primesc pentru
serviciile lor, deosebite danii de la domnitori. Astfel Radu Şerban Bas.
dărueşte moşia sa Predeştiî din Mehedinţi, lui Radu Clucerul.
Legenda populară a păstrat şi ea pe Buzeştii, dar sub o figură urîtă,
neconformă caracterului lor, arătându-î cu Căpleştii de omorâtorî ai
lui Radu Calomfirescu , un viteaz boer, distins în luptele cu Tătarii.
Acesta cerând un ajutor ca să desrobească pe mama sa de tătari,
domnul îi dă : «Pe Buzeşti şi pe Căplesti Zmeii ţeriî româneşti,
Purtătorii oştilor Şi fruntea boerilor !». Dar aceştia, de rea credinţă,
se unesc şi ucid pe Radul cu lăncile. Domnul aflând fapta lor cea rea,
îi osândeşte şi-i dă pe mâna gâdeluî, care’i decapitează. Legenda e
frumoasă, şi, de şi are o amintire istorică, totuşi imaginaţia e mai
mare ca adevărul, căci vitejii Buzesci
 — 114 — n'au pierit nici o dată de moarte ruşinoasă. — De
alt-fel am semnalat legenda ca simplă tradiţiune. (Colecţia
Alexandri). Portretele vechilor Buzescî se află în monastirea lor
Căluiul, în care se mai găsesc mormintele lui Preda şi Radu, Stanca
Buzeasca, a Banului Radu B. şi al luî Constantin. Mai sunt zugrăviţi
Mihaî Vv., Petru V. (Cercel), familia lui Mihaî V., Sima Buzesca. Marele
boer Radu Clucer Buzescu, a avut 2 fiî şi o fată: Maria Băneasa,
căsătorită cu Iordache Catargiu Banul; Stroe postelnicul, -j- tânăr la
1689; şi Radu Banul Buzescu din Strejeşcî, care moare la 1647 în
timpul luî Mateî Bas. W., sub care fusese vel Ban, şi boer însemnat
sub domnii anteriori. Avu de soţie pe Elena sau Ilinca, şi fiu pe
Mateiu postelnicul. Aceasta se vede şi în înscrisul seu din 1646, prin
care iartă de românie pe ţăranii din Cerneţî. — El maî avu încă 4
copii, *}• tineri şi îngropaţi în mormânt cu dânsul la Căluî : David,
Marica, Ilinca, Preda. Preda Buzescul Banul, avusese de fică pe
Mara, care se căsători cu Preda spătarul din Cepturoaia (f 1635),
nepot Banuluî Radu Buzescu, cu care avu 2 fete, din cari Kera Ilinca,
se căsători cu fiul Banului Radu: Mateiaş sau Mateî Postelnicul din
Cepturoaia (f către 1673), înrudindu-se ast-fel din nou între dânşii.
Din 1656 a rămas chrisovul luî Constantin W. enorm de întins, dat
Elenei şi fiuluî eî postelnicul Mateiaş, privitor la averea Buzescilor, şi
de o mare importanţă. Se coprind cele 128 de moşii ale lor, plus
cele-l’alte averi. Mateî Post. cu soţia sa Kera Ilinca, avură 2 fii: Barbu
Buzescu, f fără copii, trecut în lista boerilor olteni din 1719 cu dări
către imperiu, (j. Romanaţî), în timpul ocupaţiuneî austriace; şi
Constantin. Constantin I Buzescu, însurat cu Maria; muri la 1733,
înmormântat la Căluiul. In acelaş an fondase cu soţia sa prima
biserică din satul Strejeşcî: «în dilele prea înălţatuluî
 — 115 — împărat Carol VI...» — II găsim ca martor în mai
multe documente de la încep. sec. XVIII; şi împreună cu fratele seu
Barbu. — El avu de fiii pe Ilie şi Nicolae. Ilie, (sec. trecut) ştim că a
avut doi fii pe : Fiera, fost colonel în armata rusă şi pe Constantin
Buzescu care trăia la sfârşitul secolului trecut. Constantin avu de
copii pe Păuna soţia lui Şerban Vornicul Ştirbey ; pe Preda, Radu şi :
Constantin III Buzescu, ultimii din această familie. Constantin B.
muri la anul 1833 şi pe mormântul seu din biserica de la Strejesci,
zidită de dânsul la 1818, se citeşte: Buzesciî, ce din vechime Pentru
ţară s’au jerfit, S’au sfârşit acum prin mine Precum domnul a voit....
etc. încheiând: «Smeritul Const. Buzescu, sfârşitul neamului seu».
(1831 Ianuar.) — El nu lăsă de cât două fice: Aristeia Grădişteanu şi
Elena Darvari *[-.
 CĂLINESCU (Valachia) Familie boerească, de origină veche
din judeţul Prahova, unde se află şi satul Călineştii, proprietate a ei,
pe malul rîuluî Prahovei. Cel d’întâî, pe care’l găsim chiar în cronice,
şi care e strămoşul familiei de mai târdiu, se prezintă în persoana lui:
Iancul Căpitanul de la Călinesti. Seimenii resculându-se în contra
principelui Constantin Şerban şi a boerilor săi: «neamul dorobănţesc
împreună cu seimenii se sculară turburaţi si fără de veste... abătură
în neamul românesc i * în boieri, de’i ucidea... prepuindu-le că au
sfătuit pe Constantin Vodă să scoată pe seimeni, şi ei ticăloşii
(sărmanii) nimica n’au Ştiut...» etC. — (Cronica anonimă in mag.
istoric IV, 338).— Acest măcel mişelesc, se întâmplă în ziua de 17
Februarie 1655, şi atunci periră 15 boeri, printre cari: Preda Beca de
la Maia, Drăghici de la Greci, Papa Brâncoveanul, Cârstea
Cornăţeanul, Georma Banul, Dumitraşcu Frejuranul, Udrea de la
Doiceşti, slugerul,... «şi Iancul căpitanul de la Călinesti». Boerul
Patraşco Călinescu, poate fiul(?) acestuia, trăia către sfârşitul acelui
secol, având de fică pe Maria, soţia lui Barbu Rudeanu, la 1740. Sora
lui Barbu Rudeanu anume jupăneasa Ilinca, erea soţia lui Matei
Călinescu vel setrar, poate de asemenea frate (?) cu Maria, în care
cas vine o înrudire dublă între ambele familii. — Matei Călinescu avu
o fată Stanca, măritată cu serdarul lenache.
 117 — La 1750, Postelnicul Andrei Călinescu, prin
testamentul seu, (diata) lăsă o foarte mare avere urmaşilor. (Doc.
Arhiv.). Ne lipsesc datele genealogice până în secolul nostru, când pe
la 1800 şi în urmă, trăiau Grigore Călinescu, cu soţia sa n. Bălteancă,
avend un singur fiu: Generalul Athanasie Călinescu, născut 1822
Bucureşti. Iuncăr în armată la 1888; oficer la 1845; colonel la 60. —
La 12 Iulie 1863 primi ordin să meargă în urmărirea celor 300 de
polonezi ai lui Milkovski, ce călcaseră teritoriul român. Reuşi cu
trupele sale a înconjura acea ceată la Rânzesti, desarmându-î. La
1869 esi din armată si în 1880 fu numit general în rezervă, şi în 1883
inspector general al gardei naţionale, care apoi se desfiinţă.- -
Căsătorit cu Olga Zefcari, având o fică: Ana căsăt. Marian; şi fiu pe:
Demetru Călinescu, (căsătorit cu Elena Bolintineanu). Ambii sunt
singurii descedenţî ai familiei Călinescu. n
 CALLIMAKI (Moldova) Origina familiei Callimaki sau Calimah
e din Bucovina, unde apare în timpuri mai vechi sub numele de
«Călmaşul»,, care s’a grecizat în «Callimaki», de către fiii lui Teodor
Kallimaki, crescuţi la Constantinopol. După memoriul publicat de un
medic italian G. Assani, asupra familiei, şi alte isvoare, se găseşte pe
la sfârşitul sec. XV: Filip Calimaki, de origină din Florenţa, venit
preceptor în Polonia, în mare favore la curtea lui Albrecht, ca
consilier intim. Disgraţiat din cauză că ar fi îndemnat pe rege să facă
un resboi desastruos cu Ştefan W., plecă în Italia, unde muri. — Alţii
zic că el erea de origină byzantină şi secretar al al lui Leopold al
Germaniei. — Soţia şi copii lui trebuind să plece din Polonia, s’ar fi
stabilit în Moldova, de unde apoi urmă familia. După cercetările
documentate ale d-lui Xenopol (Ist. si geneal. casei Callimaki) aceste
afirmaţiunî sunt eronate; familia fiind de origină pur moldavă. Primul
cunoscut, autor al familiei, este Vasile Călmaşul, născut pe la anul
1640, care trăia prin secolul XVII şi avu de soţie pe Arvunia. Fiul seu
este Teodor Călmaşul, Vornic de Câmpulung, pe care ’1 găsim cu
acest titlu prin 1720. El se căsători cu Ruxandra fica lui Grigore Ghica
domnul Moldovei, iar în prima căsătorie ţinuse pe Nastasia, de la
care însă n’avu copii. Avea proprietăţi în Bucovina. El avu 2 fete :
Maria Canano şi Paraschiva; iar băeţi trei: Gavril, Ioan, Dumitraşco.
Mitropolitul Gavriil Calimaki (1689 — 1786). Fusese mi 
 — 119 — tropolit al Tessaloniculuî între 1740 — 58, apoi al
Moldovei şi Sucevei 1758 — 86. El zidi catedrala St. Gheorghe din
Iaşi. De un caracter ferm şi drept, contimporan cu fratele seu Ion
Voevod, — el ţinu scaunul Moldovei până la o verstă foarte înaintată.
— Numele seu înainte de a se călugări, erea Gheorghe. Io an
Calimach voevod (1690 — 1760), domn al Moldovei 1758 — 60. Fu
crescut de tînăr la Lemberg în Polonia. Mai târdiu Nicolae
Mavrocordat îl trimese la fratele seu, care erea Dragoman al Porţeî.
Calimah fu locoţiitor de Dragoman timp de 6 ani, până îu 1752 când
fu însuşi numit mare Dragoman al Porţeî. La anul 1758 ocupă tronul
de Principe al Moldovei, domnind 2 ani, când fu decapitat de Turci.
— Din soţia sa Raliţa, născută Hrisoscoleu (?), avu 2 fice şi 2 băeţî:
— Sevastiţa, căs. 1 cu Vlasto ; 2 cu Mihaiu Suţu W. ; şi Maria, soţia
lui Alex. Vodă Mavrocordat. Fii seî Alexandru şi Grigore, domniră
amândoi. Grigore W. Calimah (1735 — 69), domnul Moldovei în 2
rânduri 1760 — 64 şi 1766 — 69. Căsătorit cu Ileana fica lui
Alexandru Mavrocordat, de la care avu 3 fice : Smaranda, Ralu şi
Maria. (Domnia lui : Xenopol Ist. R. tom. VI.) Alexandru Calimah
Voev., fiul mai mare al lui Ioan Vodă şi frate cu preced, n. 1737, -J-
1821, exilat în Asia Mică. Domnul Moldovei (1795 — 99) şi fost
Dragoman al Porţeî. Soţia sa erea Elena, fica luî Grigore Vodă Ghica
(1727 — 77), de la care avu 2 copii, şi 2 fete: Raluca şi Eufrosina. —
Al doilea fiu aî seu Ioan Calimaki (1781 — 1821), fost mare terziman
al Porţeî, avu din căsătoria sa cu Roxandra Moruzi, mai multe fete şi
douî băeţî : — Grigore Calimaki general în armata rusă (1815 -j-
1875), căsătorit cu fica luî de Breuil; şi Alexandru (1817 — 74),
oficer rus, căsătorit cu o Rusanoff. Scarlat Calimah vodă fiul luî
Alexandru V. şi frate cu Ioan, — n. 1773, -J* 1 821 ; domn al
Moldovei 1806 şi 1812 — 1819; peste ambele ţerî în 1821. In prima
domnie după câte-va lunî de la venirea sa, Ruşii ocupară Moldova,
 — 120 — şi el trebui să fugă la Constantinopol (1806).
După pacea de la 1812, obţinu din nou tronul domnind 7 ani. El, ca
şi contimporanul seu Caragea face un cod de legi pe care pune să’l
traducă în greceşte după codul civil austriac, de către
Flechtemmacher. Acest german isprăveşte lucrarea împreună cu un
legist grec Anania ; transcriind’o şi pe românesce. Legislaţia lui
Calimah în Moldova ca şi a lui Caragea în Valachia a rămas în vigoare
până la introducerea codului Napoleon. — Scarlat Calimaki în 1819
părăseşte tronul ; iar la 1812 fu exilat de Turci şi apoi omorît, acuzat
că ar fi favorizat revoluţia grecească. Domnia lui s'a ilustrat însă
prmtr’o serioasă administrare. Din căsătoria sa cu Ruxandra fica lui
Mavrogheni Voev., el avu 2 fiee : Eufrosina căs. cu Nikefor
Papadopol, Raluca Paladi, şi fiu pe Pr. Alexandru Calimaki (1802—
1879), refugiat la Kiev după moartea tatălui seu, unde crescu. Pe
urmă fu trimes pe lângă ambasada otomană în Paris. In 1853 i se
dete tronul principatului de Samos; dar el se retrase în Franţa. In
1855 ambasador la Viena. Căsătorit cu Eufrosina Cantacuzino-
Paşcanu. Din al treilea fiu al lui Teodor Câlmaşul, se trage ramura de
astă-zî; anume: Dumitraşco Calimaki (1705 — 1758), frate cu Gabriel
şi Ion Voevod, avu rangul de vel-BAN. In 1754 prin hrisov de la
Grigore Ghica, primeşte ca dar un loc, alături de moşia sa: Stânceştii
(din Botoşani), rămasă până adi a familiei. El se căsători cu Maria
fiica lui Alex. Sturdza, cu care avu fete, pe AncuţaHrisovegbi şi Safta
Greceanu; iar fiu pe: Io an Calimaki (1750 — 86), paharnicul. Acesta
avu întâia soţie pe Joiţa Sturdza, fără copii; şi a doua pe Ruxandra
Catargi (în 1780); care rămase văduvă după 6 ani de căsătorie,
având 2 copii. Testamentul Roxandei datează din 1813. Maria, fiica
sa, *j- 1853j avu de bărbat pe Boldur Costache. Alexandru Callimaki,
fiul lui Ion şi al Roxandei (1781 —
 — 121 — 1837), mare Vornic al ţerei de sus. Se însură
prima oară cu Ileana Gavriil Conachi, având un fiu Xenofon, -j*
1820; şi al doilea cu Maria Cuza, f 1843, de la care avu de fiică pe
Smaranda Alex. Beldiman, năs. 1838; «iar fiu pe: Teodor Callimaki
(1836 — 1894). La alegerea de prinţ a lui Cuza, dânsul împreună cu
Negri merg la Constantinopol spre a anunţa îndoita alegere, şi
reuşesc a veni cu firmanul de întărire al Sultanului. Reprezintă,
România la Belgrad, sub Cuza. De la 1876 luă parte în diferite
legislaturi, ca liberal, -j- 1894 la moşia Stănceştî. Căsătorit cu
Zenaida fica pr. Alexandru Moruzi, n. 1840; având 2 fii şi 3 fiice: Ralu
Cantacuzino-Paşcanu ; Zenaida soţia comtelui Dem. de Roma;
Smaranda n. 1871; Alexandru Callimaki, fiul lui Teodor Callimaki,
născut 1866, căsătorit cu Maria Vernescu, având copii pe Scarlat
(1896) şi Teodora (1895); şi Ion Callimaki, fratele seu, al 2-lea fiu al
lui Teodor C., n. 1880 ; sunt singuri descedenţî actuali aî familiei.
Armoiriile coprind: pe fund de argint, un arc şi o săgeată pe care se
încolăceşte un şarpe (roşu) ; acestea încartierate şi cu armele ţerilor
româneşti. Coroana princiară.
 CÂMPINEANU (Valachia) Cel d’întâî Câmpineanu de care
vorbeşte istoria, este Vasile Căpitanul, pe care la anul 1659 Mihnea
Vodă îl omoară, împreună cu socrul seu Vornicul Radu Cândescu şi
cu alţi boerî, aruncându-i din casele domneşti jos (în Târgovişte) cu
lanţurile de grumazi, «iar dorobanţii, ne spune cronica anonimă
(Magazinul istoric) se bucură şi’î călca cu picioarele şi-şi bătea joc de
trupurile lor». Causa omorîrei a fost că boeriî s’au împotrivit planului
nebunesc al domnului de a ridica resboiu asupra Turcilor, lucru
patriotic susţinut de toţi boeriî, ucişi fără vină. Numele de
Câmpineanul, vine de la moşia veche «Câmpina» din Prahova. El
fiind ucis, soţia sa a fost pusă la torturi şi deposedată de toată
averea. (Vedi de moartea lui : Fotino, Ist. Dacie! IV, 108). Drăghicî
Câmpineanu, fiul căpitanului Vasile (?) şi al ficei vornicului Radul
Cândescu, îl găsim la anul 1705, sub Constantin Brâncoveanu Vodă,
Capucehaia (sau trimes al ţerii) la Poartă. — Un alt fiu al aceluia,
anume Pavel, a emigrat în Moldova cam pe la începutul secolului
XVIII. — Fără a şti legătura lor în şirul familiei, sunt însemnaţi,
marele Căpitan Manta Câmpineanu şi fiul seu Căpitan Pârvu
Câmpineanu, cari figurează ambii pe lista boerilor mari, pe care
generalul baron de Tige o trimete Mareşalului Stein viile în 1718, 12
August ; care listă e în arhivele vieneze şi publicată în docum. de
Hurmuzache (t. VI, p. 242). —
 — 123 — Pantazi Câmpineanu, fiul lui Pavel, care emigrase
în Moldova, se căsătoreşte la Iaşi cu principesa Maria, fiica pr.
Constantin Cantemir, fiul lui Antioh domnul Moldovei, deci nepot de
frate cu Dimitrie Vodă Cantemir Având titlul de clucer, Pantazi ocupă
înalte dregătorii în ţara românească. La 1769, se iviră manifestele
împărătesei Rusiei Ecaterina II, chemând pe toate popoarele supuse
Turciei, la arme. Pantazi Câmpineanu întâmpină pe majorul rus
Karazin la Buzău, şi amândoi vin împreună la Bucureşti de unde Vodă
Gr. Ghica fugise. După acea Pantazi se duce cu Mitropolitul ţării
Grigore, în solie la Petersburg. — Pe la 1764 el murise, căci vedem
într’un chrisov al lui Const. Şuţu, că: «băneasa Anica Filipeasca, sora
răposatului Clucer Pantazi Câmpineanu, este autorizată a opri pe
nepotul ei Constantin, fiul lui Pantazi, de a înstrăina ceva din
clironomia părintească». Din căsătoria sa, Clucerul Pantazi avu 2
băeţi : pe Scarlat şi Constantin, cari amândoi intrară în slujba
rusească, ca ofiţeri în Regimentul de Grenadieri. Scarlat Stolnic
Câmpineanu, fiul lui Pantazi; întors în ţară de mai mulţi ani, erea la
1785 ispravnic al Buzăului, fiind biv-vel Stolnic. — Când Nicolae
Mavrogeni se lace domn şi strânge oşti româneşti contra Austriei,
sileşte pe Scarlat Câmpineanu să se facă căpetenie a armatei, sub
cuvent că cunoaşte tactica rusească. In Februarie 1788, Mavrogheni
venind cu armată către hotarul Austriei, Câmpineanu fuge pe ascuns
la Sibiu, apoi se înfăţişează la împăratul Iosef II, şi’i dete sfatul de a
schimba sistemul de luptă, adoptat de mareşalul Lassi şi a nu mai
ataca pe Turci în 3 coloane, ci numai într’una singură, spre a nu se
slăbi forţele. Vodă Mavrogheny ca să ’şî răsbune, exilă pe tânăra
Câmpineanca, soţia lui Scarlat, anume Luxandra, fica lui Cândescu,
la Edi-Hule (temniţa cu 7 turnuri) în Constantinopol. Aci stete ea mai
mulţi ani închisă împreună cu fiul său Constantin.
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