New Englander and Yale Review, Volume 32

During the years of the migration itself, the national appetite was for testimonials from inside working-class precincts, reflecting the increasing assumption, in the words of a Chicago clergyman in 1887, "that every workingman is a foreigner." The market for insider tales of ethnic labor inspired New England-descended and Yale-educated Hamilton Holt, the managing editor of The Independent of New York City, to solicit and publish some seventy-five autobiographical sketches, sixteen of which later appeared in a single volume, The Life Stories of Undistinguished Americans as Told by Themselves (1906; reprinted 1990). Tellingly, the reviewers focused on the contributors who were representative of the four central populations of the great migration, all in stereotypical occupations — a Jewish garment worker from Poland, a Swedish farmer, an Irish maid, and an Italian bootblack — even though Hamilton included alongside the classic types oral histories of such non-European immigrants as a Syrian who clerked in an "oriental goods" store, a Chinese laundryman, and a Japanese servant, as well as that of an Igorrote Chief (representing the 237,000 surviving Indians) ...»