categories in Early Twentieth Century U.S. Governmental Sources.1
By Keith Brown
Presented in October 2008 at the "Macedonian Identity through History" conference hosted by the
Institute of National History in Skopje, Macedonia.
Colleagues in the United States tend to smirk when they learn that Macedonia has an
Institute for National History. They imagine it, I think, as a place where self-styled
defenders of the nation pursue methodologically outdated projects of positivistic, literalist
research intended to prove beyond any reasonable doubt that the historical roots of the
Macedonian nation are long and deeply embedded in the land. To pursue the organic
metaphor one step further, this view represents the Institute, and the project of
“Macedonian Identity through History,” as something akin to a solitary, proud olive
tree—gnarled, twisted, stubborn and enduring—entire unto itself. I think there is, or can
be, more to the project of national history than that, and this paper is offered in that spirit,
as a kind of manifesto for an approach that resists dogmatism, and recognizes the organic
ties between Macedonian national history, and history as practiced elsewhere.
Let me begin by articulating five principles for the practice of national history. First, I
attach especially value to so-called “bottom-up” perspectives. In this I am influenced by
1 Paper presented at Conference entitled “Macedonian Identity through History,” Institute for National
History, Skopje, October 2008. I am grateful to the members of the Institute and especially to its current
director, Todor Cepreganov, for the invitation to contribute to this event.
my training in socio-cultural anthropology, which I share with fellow presenters
Anastasia Karakasidou and Goran Janev. When it comes to history, then, I take as my
second principle a sincere effort to hear voices, and try to enter the world of the past, by
as many paths as I can. Because I can’t have conversations with people in the past, I am
especially interested to find traces of conversations or interactions, or arguments, in the
archival record, and eavesdrop on them. I call these moments of friction in the archive.
Third, I try to interpret these voices in context, without imposing my own perspective or
agenda, or over-simplifying them. As a default, I approach them with humility: I am all
too aware that, let’s say, a butcher from Prilep around 1903 would be suspicious of me,
and might in fact ridicule me as a soft-handed bureaucrat. I take the line that in his
everyday life and speech, if his descendants are anything to judge by, he was sometimes
serious, sometimes joking; playful, ironic and poetic, as well as brutally straightforward,
stubborn, or even pigheaded in different contexts. We don’t know exactly how a
conversation would go, especially if it turned to national consciousness. Even for leaders
like Goce Delchev, Pitu Guli, Damjan Gruev and Jane Sandanski—the four national
heroes named in the anthem of the Republic—the written record of what they believed
about their own identity is open to different interpretations. The views and self-
perceptions of their followers and allies might well be even more elusive.
My fourth principle, then, is to let go of the idea of certainty. I recognize that this runs
counter to traditional historical and social scientific commitments to uncovering truth. It
also might appear to betray those who see that commitment as a necessary and vital
component of their mission to counter deliberate efforts to erase or deny contemporary
Macedonians’ connection with the historical past. I should therefore be clear that I am not
calling for a post-modern abandonment of empirically-grounded work. Nor do I refute
that the historical record provides ample evidence that in the period from 1870 until
1912, Macedonia’s population was victimized by a variety of alien forces: British consuls
of the time described the fervor with which Grecomans (or, in the local idiom,
Grkomani), Arnauts, Bashi-bazouks, komiti, antartes and chetniks robbed Slavic-
speaking Christians of their rights to worship as they chose, their property, and any sense
of security.
All those named groups, though, have passed into history, which brings me to the
dimension of Macedonian history that I find compelling, that the people whose stories, in
the last resort, constitute that history have, over the course of the 20th century,
demonstrated enduring resistance to grand narratives imposed from outside or from
above. So I see continuity in their continuous skepticism toward any and all attempts by
states—and their soft-handed servants—to have the last word on who they “really” are
(or who they are not). I suggest that such attempts have been made by quite a number of
regimes—including for example Greece with regard especially to the rural population in
the area around Florina (Lerin) and Kastoria (Kostur). The desire and drive to “fix”
Macedonia’s population, using contemporary terms that acquired their ethno-national
significance only late in the nineteenth century, represents what can be called “historical
totalitarianism”, and I consider it the fifth principle of national history to resist historical
totalitarianism, rather than enact it, whether wittingly or not. This fifth principle, I
suggest, brings the national historian into closer communion with the particular qualities
2 Although Douglas Dakin (1966) and others who rely mainly on Greek documentation reject this figure as too high, I am persuaded by the Bulgarian and Macedonian historians’ position, based on a wider range of sources from Ottoman records and those of the Bulgarian state and the Macedonian Revolutionary Organization. of endurance—what Macedonians might term inaet—of those Prilep butchers and at the risk of falling into paradox, I want to argue—drawing mainly on historical sources
documenting labor migration from Macedonia to the United States in the early part of the
twentieth century—that the continuity of Macedonian national history is the continuous
labor of generations of Macedonians against various forms of historical totalitarianism.
These five principles inform much of my ongoing work, from which this paper is derived.
Here I document the archival traces of labor migration from Turkey-in-Europe to the
United States of America in the early twentieth century. I learned of the phenomenon of
this migration from the Ilinden Dossier in the National Archives in Skopje in 1993, and
subsequently learned more from the rich literature on pecalba or gurbet from a range of
Macedonian and foreign authors (Petrovski 1981: Konstantinov 1964: Gounaris 1989;
Palairet 1979, 1987; Schierup and Alund 1987; Cvijic 1966; Petroff 1995). This is a
phenomenon, of course, that cuts across history –from early-mid nineteenth century
movement into Greece, Serbia, Romania, and Asia Minor, and later, to Europe as well as
Australia, South Africa. It remains a phenomenon today, as well. But my focus here is on
the specifics of movement in the period after the Ilinden Uprising of 1903. As various
sources have confirmed, upwards of 20,000 people—mostly men, but some women—
participated in the work of the Macedonian Revolutionary Organization in those years.2
Where did they go? And in an atmosphere where their true national identity is in much
dispute, could we find what they called themselves? In a sense, I was still operating in the
heroic discoverer mode of historical inquiry, anticipating that the next folder, or the next
fund, or maybe the next archive, would offer the definitive proof, or the master-key, to
resolve the question. So I went to the National Archives in Washington DC in that frame
of mind: that the immigration records would offer a magisterial verdict on the case of
Macedonian national identity.
And of course, as anyone could tell me (and probably, people did: I just didn’t hear them)
it wasn’t so straightforward. What I did find was that the passenger manifests which
record every arrival in the United States provide, as well as conventional vital statistics—
name, age, sex, profession—the reported place of last residence—often a village name—
and also destination, nationality, and a category of “race or people”—the last of which I
focus on in this paper. These documents are not authoritative, and I do not treat them as
such: instead, they are the traces of a set of interactions between different migrants and a
bureaucracy composed of different parts. It is the process of their assembly, rather than
the truth-claims that the final product distils, that I find compelling and worth closer
scrutiny.
I take the passenger manifests, then, as examples of the kind of conversation or argument
on which historians can eavesdrop. In each case, the first draft of the transcript of that
conversation was produced by a steamship company in interaction with the individual
migrant or ticket-seller, all of whose economic interest was to keep the traffic of people
flowing – to secure the entry of the individual, as well as meet the requirements of the
United States Federal Government. It was originally filled out with an eye to what it was
3 In his memoir, which bears the signs of some stylization or fictionalization, Stoyan Christowe vividly
describes the interactions that he and a fellow-immigrant had with an immigration official and a translator
(Christowe 1976: 134-139) meant to achieve. It was then checked – authenticated, supposedly against physical reality—by an inspector at the moment of entry on Ellis Island, or Baltimore, or wherever
else the alien made his or (less often) her way onto US soil. That authentication, though,
took place with its own urgency. Ellis Island, for example, at the height of the traffic in
1907, processed around 5000 aliens in the course of a six and a half hour working day.
At its maximum capacity, the Immigration station had 21 inspection lines operating. The
average negotiation and revision of the manifest, then, took place in roughly 30 seconds
(Cowen 1932: 185). If we recall the necessity for translation in many cases, there was
very little time for any correction to the record.3 Combined with the abundant evidence,
from investigations as well as memoirs of immigrants, that the “address given” could
often be unknown to the immigrant: that patronymics were used in place of what would
be institutionalized as surnames: and that passports were frequently recycled and used by
different individuals, or were filled in with inaccurate information, we need also to be
cautious of using such material in any straightforward, positivistic way.
So what can we do? The pathway I follow here is to focus on the column headed “race or
people,” and compare the top-down logic which dictated what should appear in it with
the actual entries that do appear. The decision to create this column, and collect this data,
was made in the 1890s, in response to the “new immigration” from the Russian, Austrian
and, to a lesser extent, Ottoman Empires. The list of races or peoples that was used was
drawn up in 1898 by a commission of scholars, bureaucrats, and front-line employees of
the Immigration Service (FIGURE 1).
FIGURE 1: LIST OF RACES OR PEOPLES, GENERATED IN 1898.
It was a document that represented a mix of philosophical approaches to the question of
race: but the central principle was utilitarian. In subsequent writing on the list,
immigration officials recorded that it took into account what associations they anticipated
these new migrants making with each other – the point was not, then, to speak in a
scholarly debate over head breadth –at a time when craniometry was still considered
serious science, there was never, as far as I have determined, any suggestion that
immigrants be systematically charted as individuals in this way—but rather, to provide
raw material on which policy might be made which would bear in mind the kinds of
social support, educational or policing needs that cities might have to deal with the new
influx of manual laborers into cities and states.
The Immigration Service was, then, interested in “historical races” and the industrial
future, rather than genetics (Fairchild 2003). The list is product of one particular effort to
distinguish between subjects of empires in Europe by race or nationality, language or
religion. Black African immigrants are not sorted with such care (occupying only one
category): Asia is split between Chinese, Korean and Japanese (No Thais, Burmese, or
Vietnamese, let alone any effort to “sort” and categorize South Asians, which was such a
preoccupation of British imperial authorities in the same period (Dirks 2001). Apart from
Mexicans and Cubans, other Central and South Americans likewise appear unsorted as
“Spanish Americans.”
In the zone of focus—Europe—what seems apparent is a mixture of influences, among
which ownership of a distinct language seems paramount, but with a clear political
component—in that categories with a recognized, historical state often persist. In some
cases, language and state followed the same lines: so German, French, English, Spanish,
and Portugese all seem somewhat straightforward and transparent. Indeed, this was the
implicit model on which the immigration service had relied before 1898, assuming that
“nationality”—that is, the passport-issuing government—also revealed something about
the individual traveler. Of course, the two discourses of politics and language-use did not
always operate so easily, and different, inconsistent criteria seem to have been applied for
different cases. There are, for example, no “Swiss” immigrants, the expectation being that
political subjects be categorized as German, French or Italian, on the basis either of
“stock” or language. Similarly, there are no Belgians, but Flemish (but no Walloons).
And the nation-state of Italy found its citizens classified as either (North) or (South) – the
distinction being coded as regional. Irish, Welsh, English and Scotch appear as four
different categories, while British (like Swiss, a “national” rather than a “racial”
category) does not. These are examples of how the information gathered was intended to
supplement the category of “nationality” which had been collected before.
The mismatch between those two categories—political citizenship or subjecthood, and
belonging in historical, cultural and linguistic terms— was clearest in the case of the
Russian, Austro-Hungarian and Turkish Empires, from which many of the immigrants
came. The Immigration Service’s interest in mapping “race or people” onto “nationality”
is shown in Figure 2, below.
FIGURE 2: RACES OR PEOPLES MAPPED ONTO EUROPEAN STATES, 1908.
Source: enclosure in a letter from the secretary of the Immigration Commission to
William R. Wheeler, dated December 15 1908 (NARA RG 85, Entry 9: 52363/25).
4 I have included Roumanian, in the light of Folkmar’s recommendations, discussed below, with regard to Vlahs.Here, the Austrian Empire was represented in sixteen categories (Bohemian, Bosnian,
Croatian, Dalmatian, German, Hebrew, Herzegovinian, Italian (North), Magyar,
Moravian, Polish, Roumanian, Ruthenian (Russniak), Servian, Slovak, and Slovenian):
the Ottoman Empire (as of 1900) by Armenian, Bulgarian, Greek, Hebrew, Roumanian
Servian, Syrian and Turkish). 4 There is an interesting set of claims about language, then,
embedded here: for in distinguishing Bosnian, Croatian, Dalmatian, Herzegovinian,
Servian, and also Montenegrin (included as a separate category, presumably guided in
part by a history of statehood), the list seems to distinguish between people speaking
variants of a common South Slavic language, more recently labeled Serbo-Croat, and
separated by political frontiers.
The list also served to create or authorize likeness across new frontiers, between citizens
of the relatively new nation-states of Southeastern Europe—Serbia, Greece, Roumania
and Bulgaria, or the new central European state of Germany, and non-citizens of shared
language or “descent” within empires. This double recognition—which arguably served
as endorsement of irredentist ambition on the part of such states—contrasted with other
cases of non-recognition: Albanians, for example, a Southeast European people whose
aspirations to national unity were entirely based on common language, were omitted from
the 1898 list as well as this 1908 list, and were added only in the 1930s (long after the
country acquired statehood).
This list poses a particular kind of dilemma for any historian, but especially the historian
of Macedonia. It is easy to treat the 1898 list as a bureaucratic relic which demonstrates
the persuasiveness of the ideals of nation-statism of the period. What, though, of the
appearance of Macedonian on the list in the letter from 1908? The arbitrariness and
variability of U.S. documentary practices becomes particularly clear when one considers
the way in which the 1911 Dictionary of Races or Peoples, commissioned by Congress
and compiled by Daniel and Elnora Folkmar, re-omits Macedonian, and offers a new
formula for discerning the “true” identity of immigrants from the Balkans, summarized in
figure 3.
FIGURE 3: Folkmar’s rules for labeling immigrants from Turkey-in-Europe.
Derived from Folkmar and Folkmar 1911: also in NARA RG 85, Entry 9: 52320/11)
This interpretation of the “race or people” of the Ottoman subjects dwelling in the three
vilayets of Salonika, Manastir and Uskub, represents an interesting hybrid of positions
espoused by Ottoman policy-makers and Patriarchate elites. It postulates that none of the
5 These statistics are derived from the search engine in Ancestry.com: a random sampling suggests that the entries are mostly accurate. As a guide to future researchers using this path, keyword searches can be misleading: “Macedonia” was the name of a ship sailing regularly from Piraeus to the United States, and so a search with that term yields a large number of Greeks from “Old Greece” who traveled that route.
Ottoman Empire’s subjects could be “Bulgarian” or “Servian” (a key plank of the
Patriarchate view, also embraced by the Greek government), and also that there are no
Albanians—they are either Greek (if Greek-speaking) or, if Turkish-speaking, Turkish.
Other subjects of the Empire might be Wallachian/Roumanian (reflecting official
Ottoman policy which in 1905 recognized a Vlah millet), or Greek or Turkish, depending
on “mother tongue.” Although there is no reference to religion, one can argue that the
language of liturgy, at a pinch, would stand in for mother tongue – rendering the Slavic-
speaking majority of Turkey-in-Europe’s Christian population, by a process of following
the path of least resistance, Greek.
This is, of course, at odds with what American and British travelers with experience in
the region had reported, with regard to the national consciousness expressed by the
Christian Slavic-speaking majority (Brailsford 1906; Moore 1906; Upward 1908;
Sonnischen 1909). And it is also clear that employees of the Immigration Service, too,
quickly rejected such a schema in the way they classified immigrants from the region
named by immigrants as either “Turkey-in-Europe” or Macedonia. Even from the
compiled statistics of the Immigration Service, Turkish subjects were recorded as
Bulgarian or Servian, in contravention of these principles. But beyond that, if one
searches the records themselves, the violation of the top-down categorical system is even
more striking. In the ten years 1903-1913, in Ellis Island alone, 19,011 incoming aliens
reported as their last place of residence either “Macedonia” or “Turkey-in-Europe.”5
Of these, just over 1,000 were recorded as Greeks, just over 1,000 as Turks, and 170 as
Roumanians. In other words, in only a little over 11% of cases were the criteria from
above applied to process these individuals—a majority of whom provided as their place
of origin not Macedonia, but Turkey in Europe. Violations in the case of Servians (492)
or Albanians (238) were relatively rare – but still depart from the official practice. The
departure from authorized practice was far more striking in the case of entrants from
Macedonia who were classified as Bulgarian—a category approved only for “residents of
Bulgaria”—who number 3,422 – that is, over three times the number of those classified
as Greeks.
These numbers leave 12,634 aliens from Macedonia still unaccounted for. They entered
the official records under a wholly unauthorized label, as Macedonians from Macedonia.
Almost all have forenames and patronymics largely consistent with names among today’s
Macedonian-speaking citizens of the Republic of Macedonia. They made their way into
other ports as well, though in smaller numbers – to Baltimore (only 338, out of a total
who gave either Macedonia or Turkey-in-Europe 4,456 as place of origin) and to
Galveston (256 out of 2,731). But according to official US Immigration policy, and
counting practices, as well as the national histories of Greece and Bulgaria, they should
not exist at all.
Looking more closely at the manifests themselves reveals evidence that this rule-breaking
had its own history. In 1904, for example, as the record reproduced below shows (figure
3), the inspector took the time to time to enact, at least in part, official policy, and
reclassified men originally listed as “Macedonians” as “Greek,” “Bulgarian” or
“Servian.”
FIGURE 4: Detail from Passenger Manifest of the S.S. Kroonland, arriving 15 March
1904 in New York from Antwerp, and showing the Ellis Island Inspector’s overwriting of
“Macedonian” with “Bulgarian” and “Servian” under the category “Race or People.”
That leaves open the question of how the category “Macedonian” got entered on the
manifest in the first place—especially when we remember the interests of the steamship
company, and migrant in making the passage through Ellis Island as smooth as possible.
So we might predict that the category would disappear. The news that government
inspectors were changing the category of “Macedonian” would filter back to the
steamship companies, their agents, and the ticket-sellers and migrants in Macedonia, and
would-be entrants to the United States would adapt, tactically. But instead, the opposite
occurs. Entrants claiming to be “Macedonian” appear in larger numbers over the next six
years, and inspectors stop reclassifying them as something else, but allow the category to
stand.
This, I suggest, is surprising—especially when we remember that, as Papailias puts, it
archives are “imprints of governance, traces of imperial imaginaries and products of
discourses and technologies of documentation… marshaled by the state to describe,
manage and rule various ‘problematic’ populations” (Papailias 2005:6). Immigrants and
inspectors are meant to be disciplined in different ways by the creation of the archive, yet
they are, if you will forgive the pun, manifestly not. What does this mean? It could be
sloppy book-keeping by overworked inspectors. We could accept the judgment of
“experts” of the time who rejected the appearance of “Macedonian” in this column as
either “patriotic misrepresentation” (Folkmar and Folkmar 1911: 27) or “confusing and
inaccurate” (Letter from Albert Sonnischen, quoted in Balch 1910: 275). These experts
were influential at the time, and in official government statistics, Macedonians were all
converted to Bulgarians in the annual summaries presented to Congress each year. But a
massive breaking of categorical rules by people expected to abide by them—and here I
count both the Inspectors who allow the category to stand, and the immigrants who
6 Besides the list included as Figure 4, above, census takers, and investigators for the Dillingham
commission report distinguished “Macedonian” from Bulgarian, as did the Louisiana’s Commissioner for Immigration in 1908. The term occurs regularly throughout the archival record—one rather less savory instance being in a 1909 document where immigrant inspector Marcus Braun, investigating prostitution, assigns Macedonians a different code number for use in telegraphic communications to Bulgarians (NARA RG 85, Entry 9: 52363/27)
It makes, then, a source of friction which I find compelling—a clash between a top-down process of classifying immigrants according to a somewhat arbitrary set of government-sponsored, expert-
endorsed categories, and a bottom-up self-classification arising out of ordinary people’s
voices. We should recall, in this regard, the clear evidence that many of those who came
to the US from Macedonia in this period were young men who had been involved with
revolutionary activism against Ottoman rule, or who chose the path as an alternative to
getting caught up in violence. Their decision to declare themselves as Macedonian at the
border—in a context where they had no reason to take such a risk, and where so much
else about answers given to the inspectors was deeply pragmatic, and designed to smooth
the path into America, rather than introduce friction – remains, for me, a profound sign of
something more than widespread error or delusion. In this context, it looks deliberate and
purposeful, and maybe even a sign of political consciousness generate this category in their own assertions—seems to be more than “patriotic misrepresentation” (except in the sense that any assertion of national identity by anyone is) and seems hard to dismiss as “confusing” to those for whom, on both sides of the inspection table, it made sense of their reality. I therefore take both “expert” responses
as signs of exasperation in the face of “non-expert” practice, and thus as confirmation of
how great a hold the idea of a distinctive, non-Bulgarian, Macedonian population had
become in the process of migration to the United States. And it spread beyond inspectors
and the migrants themselves to leave other archival traces.6
If the entry “Macedonian” demonstrates some control by these migrants of the terms on
which their entry into the United States was recorded in the archive, they could not
control how their apparent identity as Macedonians was itself stigmatized. Here, then, I
turn to the “yellow peril” of the title, and suggest the value of openness to comparative
perspectives in thinking about Macedonian national history, and the place of migration in
it. The phrase occurs in a detailed expose of the way in which Macedonian labor
migration was in part a product of commercial activity involving steamship agents, the
representatives of both certain US states and also industries, money-lenders. The author,
an Immigrant Inspector named Frank Garbarino, sought in particular to make a case
against local entrepreneurs who made their living from their fellow-countrymen’s
migration. In a letter to his superiors dated March 23 1909, Garbarino wrote,
As long as these padrones are permitted to colonize their aliens and hold a heavy hand
over them, just so long will they be undesirable aliens. They are unable to bring their
families here, and really become the “yellow peril” of the Caucasian race.
(NARA, RG 85 Entry 9: 52447/3/part 1: 79.)
The term he chose—“yellow peril”—was a reflection of particular interest at the time in
Chinese immigration. Historian Donna Gabaccia has analyzed how and why Italians—
and in particular South Italians – came to be referred to in similar terms, and argues that
there were two elements at work—both structured by existing race relations in the United
States (Gabaccia 1997). Thirty years after the American Civil War, discourse about labor
distinguished between “free” and “unfree” labor in racialized terms, reflecting the
7 I focus here on Gabaccia’s work on labor relations in particular. Other works that usefully deconstruct
racialist theories prevalent among U.S. political leaders, academics and the general public of the time,
pointing to the inconsistencies around terms like “race,” “stock” and “nation” include Dyer 1980; Gerstle
2001; Zeidel 2004.
historical experience of “white” and “black” arrivals in the US, respectively. Chinese
immigration, at a superficial level of skin-color, posed an anomaly in this discourse. But
Gabaccia argues, persuasively, that their “in-between” classification also owed something
to the way in which this stream of migrants entered the labor force, often through forms
of indenture that were neither fully free nor fully unfree. Indenture is a stretchable
concept: it could refer to relations to a particular company or factory, or to a money-
lender (often predatory) or to a “big man” or padrone, a labor broker, in other words.
Gabaccia argues that Italian labor migrants often were willing to navigate different forms
of indenture that were stigmatized in a US ideology built on the model of the free,
choice-making individual, operating in a “free market” of labor. Mobile, bachelor, so-
called “coolie” labor, operating in “work-gangs,” threatened that.7
Gabaccia’s analysis helps us make sense of how Macedonians lived, worked and were
perceived in the United States. Like Chinese and (South) Italians, these migrants were
often continuing patterns of seasonal labor migration—termed pecalba in Macedonia—
created over generations. There were existing routines of working in groups or gangs,
sharing risks and costs as well as profits, often living communally (Palairet 1987; see also
Schierup and Alund 1987: 64-6). These arrangements are described in the United States
context by labor migrant turned author Stoyan Christowe, as well as one Chicago
sociologist documenting Bulgarian practices (Christowe 1976: 264ff; Hunt 1910). Some
field investigators noted their particular virtues, comparing in particular Macedonian
mores favorably with other groups in their cleanliness, sobriety and thrift (see for
example Roberts 1912: 314.
This on the ground reality, though, passed ideologues by. One Commissioner in New
York, in a 1910 letter to his boss in DC referred to the “backward races” of Southern and
Eastern Europe and imputed to them “very low standards of living, … filthy habits and
… an ignorance which surpasses belief” to Keefe, September 1910 (Commissioner
Williams to Keefe, cited in Vought 2004: 82).
Another view from the same year, expressed in correspondence from officials in St.
Louis to Washington groups together Italians, Greeks, Bulgarians and Macedonians, as
well as generic “Slavs” from the Austrian and Russian empires of the time, as
…exceedingly ignorant classes of common laborers from the southern countries of
Europe and the Asiatic border who, as a rule, lack sufficient intelligence to know or
understand the plans made for them, or their destinations. Generally speaking, they
are of a class who would not dare to undertake a journey to America or to seek
employment here without the leadership of the persons responsible for their coming.
(NARA, RG 85 Entry 9: 52885/34A)
While an officer based in Portland, Oregon describes them as “herded by bosses who, by
intimidation as well as by the natural gregariousness of the men themselves, keep them in
subjection.” (NARA, RG 85 Entry 9: 52885/34)
Gabaccia’s analysis, which focuses on patterns of work, helps us makes sense of
blinkered and prejudiced top-down perspectives like these. Its racist overtones, though,
also had a scientific alibi. South Italians found their perceived shortcomings were
attributed in part to genetic origin, by the more eugenically influenced commentators of
the time (who argued, in terms that seem bizarre today, that South Italians had “Saracen”
blood). Macedonians and Bulgarians fell victim to a similar stigmatization, which had
political, racial and linguistic components. First, their place of origin in Turkey and
subjection to Ottoman rule cast doubt on their fitness to rule themselves, and hence on
their Europeanness (and “whiteness”). Second, the fact that their language was Slavic tied
them to general stereotypes of Slavs as undisciplined, prone to drink. But they were
additionally stigmatized through the perception that Bulgarian was itself the most
“corrupt” form of Slavic language (Folkmar and Folkmar 1911: 27), and also, by the
contention that Bulgarians were an anomaly in that their language was Slavic, but their
“stock” was Mongol and therefore, in supposedly objective terms at the time, oriental
(and not one of the European branches) (Folkmar and Folkmar 1911: 108). The official
view of the time was that “Macedonian” was a dialectal (and therefore less developed)
variant of “Bulgarian” in linguistic terms, and a more primitive sub-group in
“racial”terms—even more impure and suspect, then, than the already impure and suspect
Bulgarians with whom they were always associated.
Macedonian migrants traveling to the United States, then, found their identities over-
determined by a range of structuring factors far beyond their control, and including ideas
regarding forms of labor, political borders, racialist ideology among so-called scientists,
and concerns around the imagined risks of miscegenation and crime. Primarily minding
their own business, and pursuing their own family- and community-oriented agendas of
survival, Macedonians were to some degree damned in local eyes, whatever they did. It
is true they were not “free” laborers – but nor, arguably, were almost all migrants in this
and any period. The idea of the “pioneer” who strikes out for an unknown land simply on
faith that a will to work, and a strong back will see him through, has always been a
fiction tied in with US self-image. Somehow Macedonian migrants, like South Italians,
Chinese, and other laborers of the time, with existing structures of labor organization that
flexed to incorporate transoceanic migration, found themselves cast as “other” and also as
“backward.” Their tactical, self-interested, and contingent subjection to industrial
businesses, labor agents, was classified as a character defect, shared by a whole people.
Where, then, does all this leave us? I conclude by suggesting an analogy between this
specific research and the wider task of writing Macedonian national history. I think that
the data I have briefly discussed here points toward one specific form of history. I am
increasingly concerned with empirical evidence; as I said, I’m interested in other people’s
voices and conversations, who experienced things that I haven’t and I consider my main
task to try to understand and convey as much of that experience as I can. But I also want
to put that evidence to work not to answer the demands of others, but to question the
systems of power in which the demands are made. I consider that Macedonian national
history has been dominated by efforts to find the irrefutable proof of historical longevity,
of a collective, long-suffering people moving through time. But this is an impossible,
Sisyphean task; no nation in the world can meet that standard. I began this project
thinking I could perhaps prove that people called themselves Macedonians on the way to
America in the early twentieth century, long before the establishment of a Macedonian
Republic within Federal Yugoslavia. I still think that they did: But I think the more
important finding is to expose the complex structure of economic realities, power
relations and embedded racism that shaped people’s experience, and to use the data to
highlight the contingency of this and all such systems of ranking peoples and the
authenticity of their national identities by pseudo-scientific means.
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