“300,000 Thrifty Letts in U.S.:” speculation and exaggeration in reports about early Latvian immigrants in America

ABSTRACT

Estimates of the number of ethnic Latvian immigrants and their descendants who lived in the United States and Canada before World War II have varied widely. Reports in scholarly and popular publications from the period, as well as later work, often relied on replication of unsubstantiated information or on incomplete readings of federal census data. This article examines these sources and suggests that the population of pre-war ethnic Latvians was much smaller than often reported, a finding that has ramifications for how we understand their perceived failure of cultural maintenance.

KEYWORDS:

• Latvians
• census
• population
• press
• ethnicity
• immigration
• historiography

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Fredrik Barth observed that ethnic identity ”depends on the maintenance of a boundary” (Barth 1998, 14). Language is one means of signalling belonging to an ethnic group.

2. Speakers of Latvian were to be identified as ‘Russ.-Lettish,’ but in practice this was not always the case. Population schedules – the sheets on which census takers recorded data – reveal that at times Latvian speakers were identified as using Lithuanian (Gauthier 2002). In one unusual case, a census taker working in the community of Scranton, Pennsylvania, found a number of immigrants from Russia whose mother tongue was recorded as ‘Littish,’ not ‘Lettish’. Based on their surnames they were Lithuanians, not speakers of misspelled Latvian. Even in cases where information was recorded accurately, the data for Lithuanian and Lettish were combined in the final report into one statistic, with the result that the number of Latvian speakers in 1910 cannot be determined without a monumental effort.

3. 1900–1930 Complete Count Data (Preliminary), compiled by Ancestry.com and IPUMS USA, University of Minnesota, www.ipums.org.

4. The number was drawn from the 1930 federal census table reporting year of immigration by country of birth, not by language group or ancestry. In addition, the 1900 census did not ask respondents for their year of immigration, only for the number of years of US residency.

5. The journal was published by the Baltic Institute in Toruń, Poland. From 1935–1936 it was known as Baltic Countries, but from 1937–1939 it enlarged its scope and was retitled Baltic and Scandinavian Countries. Rouček (1902–1984) was a Czech immigrant to the US who became a professor of sociology.

6. For example, Rouček repurposed and updated his work for the book One America: The History, Contributions, and Present Problems of Our Racial and National Minorities (Brown and Rouček 1945). Data and observations from the book about Latvians and other ethnic groups were subsequently used in a report to the Senate (1950).

7. The story, carrying various headlines and emphasizing different elements, appeared across the US in December 1920 and January 1921. The focus of the story was the return of Latvian troops to their new homeland after fighting with allied forces against the Red Army in Siberia. See, for example, Eau Claire Leader (1920); Yuma Sun (1920); and Utica Morning Telegram (1921).

8. The circulation of Strādnieks (1906–1919) was listed as 13,000 in N. W. Ayer & Son’s American Newspaper Annual & Directory (Ayer 1918). That same year Proletāriets (Proletarian) (1902–1917), the monthly journal of the rival Lettish Socialist Labor Federation of America, reported a circulation of 5,832. Both numbers are suspect and may reflect the press run rather than the actual number of subscribers. By comparison, during the 1912 Socialist Party national convention in Indianapolis, the National Lettish Organization reported that for Strādnieks ‘the number of its subscribers varies between 1,200–1,500.’ Latvian socialists and anarchists abroad often printed publications with a goal of smuggling a large share into the homeland. Other periodicals, such as the Baptist magazine Jaunā Tēvija (New Fatherland) (1913–1917), the nationalist and Christian newspaper Amerikas Vēstnesis (1896–1920), and the nationalist Amerikas Atbalss (American Echo) (1920–1922), were listed in the Ayer directory, but did not report circulation numbers. In its first year of publication, Amerikas Vēstnesis printed about 1,000 copies per issue, but had only about 200 subscribers. The extra copies were used for advertising and distributed by the Reverend Hans Rebane as he traveled the country to meet with Latvian immigrants (Akmentiņš 1984, 103).

9. In the case of Latvia and other new nations, quotas under the Immigration Act of 1924 were to be based on a government estimate of ‘the number of individuals resident in [the] continental United States in 1890 who were born within the area included in such new countries.’

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Andris Straumanis

Andris Straumanis was an associate professor of journalism and director of the journalism program in the Department of Communication and Media Studies at the University of Wisconsin-River Falls. His research interests included the media of the Latvian diaspora, particularly periodicals published before the Second World War, as well as the role of digital humanities in researching migration history.