Oscar Handlin

Oscar Handlin (September 29, 1915 – September 20, 2011) was an American historian. As a professor of history at Harvard University for over 50 years, he directed 80 PhD dissertations and helped promote social and ethnic history, virtually inventing the field of immigration history in the 1950s. Handlin won the 1952 Pulitzer Prize for History for "The Uprooted" (1951). Handlin's 1965 testimony before Congress was said to "have played an important role" in passage of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 that abolished the discriminatory immigration quota system in the U.S.
Biography.
Handlin was born in Brooklyn, New York, on September 29, 1915, the eldest of three children of Russian-Jewish immigrants. His mother, the former Ida Yanowitz, came to the United States in 1904 and worked in the garment industry. His father, Joseph, immigrated in 1913 after attending a commercial college in Ukraine and being stationed in Harbin, China, as a soldier during the Russo-Japanese War. Handlin's parents were passionately devoted to literature and the life of the mind. Their experience of religious persecution in Czarist Russia made them fiercely devoted to democracy and social justice (Handlin was a proto-"red diaper baby.") The couple owned a grocery store, the success of which along with real estate investments enabled them to send their children, Oscar, Nathan, and Sarah, to Harvard.
Known for his prodigious memory that allowed him to attend classes without taking notes, in 1930, Handlin entered Brooklyn College at age 15, graduating in 1934, then earning a M.A. from Harvard University in 1935, after which he won a Frederick Sheldon Fellowship for research in Europe. "I don't know why," Dr. Handlin joked in a 1952 "Boston Globe" interview. "I guess they just liked my face." Traveling in England, Ireland, Italy, and France, he began assembling material that would become his first book "Boston's Immigrants, 1790-1865" (1941).
Between 1936 and 1938, Handlin taught history at Brooklyn College before reentering Harvard University.
According to Handlin, it was Arthur M. Schlesinger, Sr. who "directed my attention to the subjects of social history that have since occupied much of my attention," urging Handlin to write his dissertation on immigration to Boston in the late 18th and early 19th centuries.
In 1940 he received his PhD, joining the faculty in 1939 and remaining until 1986, his work centering around the topic of immigrants in the U.S. and their influence on culture.
During his time as a graduate student at Harvard, Handlin was denied the position of vice president in the Henry Adams Club for being Jewish. He was among the first Jewish scholars appointed to a full professorship at Harvard. He also taught at the Harvard Extension School.
A man of few words outside the lecture room, Handlin made every word count. He was possessed of a sardonic wit honed by his love of the novels of James Branch Cabell, the operettas of Gilbert & Sullivan, and the cartoons of Al Capp, who was a family friend.
He died at age 95 on September 20, 2011, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Despite being a staunch anti-Communist and Vietnam War hawk, he was honored by both leftist and rightist academics.
Administrator.
Handlin was very active as a scholarly organizer and administrator. In the Harvard history department he helped create the Center for the Study of the History of Liberty in America, and directed it 1958-67; he also chaired the Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History from 1965 to 1973. From 1962 to 1966 he was a top official of the United States Board of Foreign Scholarships, which gives out Fulbright scholarships. He served on the board of overseers of Brandeis University, and was a trustee of the New York Public Library. He was Harvard's head librarian from 1979 to 1984 and acting director of the Harvard University Press in 1972.
In 1972-3 Handlin was the Harold Vyvyan Harmsworth Professor of American History at Oxford University.
Positions.
Immigration.
Among Handlin's many important contributions was his pioneering work on immigration to America. In his Pulitzer Prize–winning book "The Uprooted" (1951), he opens with the famous declaration: "Once I thought to write a history of the immigrants in America. Then I discovered that the immigrants "were" American history." In the process, Handlin laid the ground for study of immigration by the succeeding generation of historians, even though many of them would dispute his immigrant archetype of a peasant guided primarily by religious conviction, having no familiarity with wage work or urban settings, and having experienced migration first and foremost as alienation from family, community, and tradition.
Handlin was one of the most prolific and influential American historians of the 20th century. As an American historian and educator he was noted for his in depth examination of American immigration history, ethnic history, and social history. His dissertation (1941) was published as his first book "Boston's Immigrants, 1790-1865: A Study in Acculturation" (1941). The book was highly regarded for its innovative research on sociological concepts and census data. In 1941 it won the prestigious John H. Dunning Prize from the American Historical Association as outstanding historical work published by a young scholar. The "American Journal of Sociology" described it as "the first historical case study of the impact of immigrants upon a particular society and the adjustment of the immigrants to that society. The writer has opened a new field for historical research and has also made a significant contribution to the literature of race and culture contacts."
In 1947, he and his first wife Mary Flug Handlin published "Commonwealth: A Study of the Role of Government in the American Economy: Massachusetts, 1774-1861", which revealed for the first time the importance of political action in the development of the U.S. free enterprise system.
By the late 1950s, Oscar Handlin was publishing a book nearly every year, covering the fields of civil rights, liberty, ethnicity, urban history, the history of education, foreign affairs, migration, biography, adolescence, even a book of poetry. Sometimes he wrote collaboratively with his first wife Mary Flug Handlin and, after her 1976 death, with his second wife Lilian Bombach Handlin, whom he married in 1977.
In the 1960s, Handlin published 11 books, wrote a monthly column for the "Atlantic Monthly", directed the Center for the Study of Liberty in America, helped manage a commercial television station in Boston, chaired a board that oversaw Fulbright Scholarship awards, all in addition to his teaching duties at Harvard. From 1979 to 1983 he was director of the Harvard University Library. He also edited a 42-volume collection of books on subjects relating to immigration and ethnicity, "The American Immigration Collection" (1969). During the next three decades, Handlin published 12 more books, many on the subject of liberty, and edited at least 20 biographies. He continued his work with immigrants with "From the Outer World" (1997), which collected the travel accounts of visitors to the United States from non-European countries.
"He reoriented the whole picture of the American story from the view that America was built on the spirit of the Wild West, to the idea that we are a nation of immigrants." (James Grossman)
American slavery.
Oscar Handlin argued that racism was a by-product of slavery, and that the main focus was on the fact that slaves, like indentured servants, were regarded as inferior because of their status, not necessarily because of their race.
Civil Rights Movement.
In 1964, Handlin published "Fire Bell in the Night: The Crisis in Civil Rights", which criticized white supremacists and suburban liberals, but also criticized leftists for their Communist-inspired solutions such as quotas, school busing, and affirmative action, writing: "Preferential treatment demands a departure from the ideal which judges individuals by their own merits rather than by their affiliations."
Left and Right.
In March 1961, Handlin signed an ACLU-organized petition of scholars demanding that the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) cease operations.
In 1961, Handlin published "The Distortion of America", his critique of the attractions of Communism. The 1996 2nd ed. covers Yugoslavia, China, and Arthur Koestler. "The study of the human past persuades me that, despite the frequent risks of failure, man has the capacity to make order and find purpose in the world in which he lives when he uses the power of his reason to do so."
His long-time colleague Bernard Bailyn noted Handlin's commitment to providing a historical perspective on policy issues:
In 1979, Handlin published "Truth in History", which criticized New Left historians and the corruption of American universities with faddishness, hiring quotas, overspecialization and fragmentation in history studies, and deficiencies in graduate training.
The Vietnam War.
In December 1967, Handlin was one of 14 anti-Communist American scholars who co-wrote a report for the Freedom House Public Affairs Institute, which argued that disaster would strike if the U.S. withdrew from Vietnam. In 1988, Handlin, John Silber et al. founded the conservative National Association of Scholars.