Julius Drachsler's Intermarriage in New York City

Abstract

Julius Drachsler's 1921 book, Intermarriage in New York City, examined 171,356 individual marriage license applications from New York City in the years 1908–12. The author found little intermarriage across social lines among immigrants but a considerable amount among their U.S.-born children. This study replicates Drachsler's by taking a 1% sample (N = 1,714 cases) of the same set of marriage license applications for the same years. The replication results show that Drachsler correctly found an increasing trend to intermarriage between the first and second generations, and with close to the same proportions as Drachsler's work. The replication study of New York City marriage licenses is also consistent with the results from a 1910 sample of married couples living in New York City, taken from the Integrated Public Use Microdata Sample. The replication study differs from Drachsler's reported findings on the extent of intermarriages across social lines of nationality and race, mainly due to the idiosyncratic way that Drachsler defined those two constructs. The New York City marriage license files offer the researcher further opportunities to pose and answer questions about intermarriage.

Keywords:

• Drachsler
• generations
• intermarriage
• replication

Notes

¹Julius Drachsler, “Intermarriage in New York City: A Statistical Study of the Amalgamation of European Peoples,” Ph.D. Diss, Columbia University, 1919. Drachsler was the rare graduate student who published his dissertation in two overlapping books, first as a book titled Democracy and Assimilation (New York: Macmillan, 1920) and again in Intermarriage in New York City (New York: Columbia University Studies in History and the Social Sciences, 1921). Chapters in both books were taken from the 1919 dissertation manuscript. Intermarriage in New York City reprinted some of the same chapters from Democracy and Assimilation, as well as 100 pages of tables in a series of appendices that are confusing to the reader, if only because the page numbering jumps back and forth from the pages in the disseration, the pages in Democracy and Assimilation, and the page numbering in Intermarriage in New York City.

²To his credit, Drachsler realized the existence of what subsequent scholars called the “1.5 Generation,” that is, foreign-born persons who arrived in the United States at a young age. Drachsler mused that “in reality [they] may not be a group of adult foreigners upon whom the old world culture had left an unmistakeable impression” (Drachsler 1921, 29). See also Caroline Waldron Merithew (2009).

³Annemarie Steidl, Wladimir Fischer-Nebmailer, and James Oberly (2014) took up the problem of the difficulties of using the 1910 IPUMS for understanding the multiethnic migrants from the Habsburg Empire.