Project Proposal: Arab-Americans and American Democracy
American society has been multiethnic from its beginnings, often more so than it wanted to be, and there have been Arab-Americans since before the Revolution -- Moroccan or Lebanese sailors, perhaps, who signed aboard an American merchant ship in the Mediterranean and ended up settling down in New York or Philadelphia. Alone in a strange country, however, they could have little opportunity to pass on an Arab identity to children, much less to create a cohesive and self-aware Arab-American community.
The great immigration between the Civil War and World War I, however, brought larger numbers of Arab immigrants, swept in with the great migration from northern Mediterranean countries, especially Italy. Often they were (in modern terms) Lebanese and Syrian Christians, and perhaps identified themselves more by their church (e.g., "Assyrians") than as Arabs. By the turn of the 20th century, small but distinct immigrant communities of Arab background had taken hold in some American cities. A particular concentration, for example, ended up in Michigan.
To their neighbors, these early Arab-Americans were probably scarcely distinguishable from other Mediterranean immigrant groups. They were subject to the same prejudices as other "swarthy," olive-toned people in a society that prized the blond Northern European ideal, but there were too few of them to arouse distinct prejudices save on a neighborhood level. Popular-culture images of Arabs as tent-dwelling nomads were too exotic to be applicable even as stereotypes. Moreover, many Arab-Americans came from backgrounds with education and skills. They established businesses and moved out of immigrant neighborhoods and into the middle class. By the mid-20th century, most Americans were hardly aware of Arab-Americans as a distinct group, yet a scattering of Arab Americans had achieved prominent positions in business and g...