Edward Banfield on White Ethnic Assimilation

An old model for uplifting and unifying the country.

Edward C. Banfield, San Francisco, 1945. Photograph by John Collier.

NOTE: Physiognomy is NOT REAL. Banfield was a beautiful Anglo farm boy from Connecticut. I wanted to publish this short aside for later reference, when I go through other sociological and psychological programs for uplifting the downtrodden and unassimilitated that have become dominant today.

Edward Banfield’s The Unheavenly City[i] seems rather quaint now given the advances in data collection and science since publication. Nonetheless, I’m still very fond of it because it preserves some of the frankness and accessibility that was once widespread in non-Marxist social science, and because it contains some of the qualitative speculation upon moral genealogy that’s so controversial (and thus so entertaining to talk about) today. Banfield, it should be noted, was one of the first professors to be “cancelled”, in his case by feminist students and professors, and seems to have inspired a lot of irrational rage that persists even to this day. Indeed, I’ve heard a mainstream academic complain of how irritating he found Banfield’s habit of limply dangling a cigarette from his lips during lectures.

The Unheavenly City

The Unheavenly City presents an informal “logic” of metropolitan growth explaining the incentives and feedback loops which entice immigrants into cities, push upper classes out, create new upper classes and permanent lower classes, and invite old upper classes back in. While developing this logic, Banfield employs the concept of time orientation beloved by contemporary economists and libertarians to explain historic trends, one of which was the inconsistent rates of assimilation among white ethnic immigrants.

Banfield notes that by the 1830s, most of the American lower and working classes consisted of Catholic immigrants. For instance, in 1832, the South Boston Almshouse held twice as many immigrants as natives.[ii] By 1840, immigration increased rapidly, mostly from peasant cultures like the Irish and then later Italians and Eastern Europeans. Banfield speculates about the immigrant psychology of the time:

Coming from places where ordinary people had never had opportunities to rise by effort and enterprise, these immigrants, it is plausible to conjecture, tended to see the world as a place ruled by fate or luck. Most were probably more concerned with survival from day to day than with getting ahead, and the idea that one might get ahead by saving and investing – by some form of self-improvement – must have been unfamiliar to most and unintelligible to some. On the other hand, that they chose to emigrate strongly implies that they were not all present-oriented.[iii]

In contrast with old-stock American day laborers, illiteracy and innumeracy were common for these peasants, and many speculated that, despite the free resources afforded them, such as the “free mechanics libraries”, the peasants would end up in slums. This eventually spurred Massachusetts to pass the first compulsory schooling law in 1852, about which Banfield dryly adds, “[u]ntil then it had been taken for granted that anyone able to go to school would not fail to do so.”[iv]

Banfield indicates that the peasants rarely took advantage of the free services or became skilled laborers. While he concedes in the latter case that discrimination and prejudice could have been one obstacle, he remains convinced that the present-oriented time orientation of these immigrants was the primary culprit. His proof? Jewish immigrants:

The Jewish immigrants were very different from the peasant peoples. Like the Old Stock Americans, they were future-oriented. They believed, as had the Puritans, who were in many ways like them, that they were under a special obligation to assist in the realization of God’s plan for the future. The idea of making sacrifices in the expectation of future rewards came naturally to them. Even more than the Old Stock Americans, the Jewish immigrant worked to acquire the capital (not only money and other material goods but also knowledge, skill, character, attachment to family and community, and so on), that would enable him to rise.[v]

Banfield bolstered this argument by noting that from 1885 to 1890, Irish immigrants comprised 12.6 of the population but accounted for 60.4% of the almshouse population (13 do 60), 36.7% of the workhouse, and 15.5% of prison inmates. Eastern European Jews, in contrast, while comprising only 3% of the population, were not found in the almshouses and only made up 1% of the workhouse and 1% of the prison population.[vi]

Banfield speculates that the “Anglo-Saxon Protestant elite” probably discriminated against people who “showed little disposition to get ahead and in favor of those who showed much”, suggesting that it was the time orientation of the peasants that induced this discriminatory treatment by the elites.[vii]

Throughout the book, Banfield speculates upon how time orientation and other malleable cultural traits (yes, he believed time orientation could be inculcated) affected the status of different groups. For instance, Banfield humorously describes a Jewish man’s immensely beneficial relationship with his mother:

The Jewish mother, as described by Zena Smith Blau, was in this respect the exact opposite of the lower-class Negro mother…The Jewish mother held her son in bonds of love and mutual dependence beyond his childhood and even his youth, all the while subjecting him to intense and constant verbal stimulation.[viii]

Banfield was convinced that the “American political style”, drawn from the upper classes -- meaning “dissenting Protestants and Jewish traditions” -- was the best mechanism for assimilating and uplifting immigrants and the lower classes, because it was oriented toward the future and progress for the individual and society.[ix]

This is the old progressive liberal model which receives lip service today from politicians but which, so far as I can tell, informs little of the programs, legislation, or policies of the Democratic Party.

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[i] The Unheavenly City was originally published in 1968 but here I rely upon The Unheavenly City Revisited, 1974, by Edward C. Banfield.

[ii] 64

[iii] 65

[iv] 66

[v] 66

[vi] 68

[vii] 68

[viii] 246

[ix] 273