Forging Identities: Arab-Americans in the Pan-Arab Era

73 Pages·2014·0.44 MB·English

by  Mike Tablet

Forging Identities:
Arab-Americans in the Pan-Arab Era

By Michael Berro

Davidson, North Carolina
April 2014

A Thesis Submitted for the Seminar of the
Kendrick K. Kelly Program in Historical Studies
(History 488-489)
Table of Contents

Introduction…………………………………………………………..……………1

Chapter One: Becoming American:
Arab Assimilation between the Great Wars ……………………….……………19

Chapter Two: Forging Identity:
The National Association of Syrian and Lebanese Clubs…………….…………31

Chapter Three: Who’s An Arab?
Lebanese-Americans in the pan-Arab Era………………………………………..53

Conclusion…………………………………………………………………….….6
Introduction

Identity is complex for a variety of reasons, but perhaps most so because a person’s
identity is comprised of many smaller identities. As Linda Colley aptly stated, “Identities are not
like hats. Human beings can and do put on several at a time.”1 While it is certainly possible for a
person to adopt more than one identity, it does not mean that we as humans cannot privilege a
certain identity while downplaying others in an effort conform to those around us. Whether
cultural, religious, or ethnic in nature, those shared identities of humans form a basis from which
they can begin building a community that distinguishes its members from others who do not
share that identity. However, as communities develop and expand, they too are engulfed in even
larger and broader structures whose members are bound together by different reasons than that of
one’s original community. However, which identity is the most prevalent, the most important?
Does the importance change when a person is in the privacy of their home? And what happens
to a community when different members seek to engage its members with competing ideas of
identity?
This thesis answers how these themes related to the experiences of the Arab-American
community in the United States between roughly 1940 and 1970. Consider this quotation from
James Ansara, the former executive secretary of the National Association of Syrian and
Lebanese-American Clubs (NASLAC), “[Our people] don’t go around broadcasting the fact that
they are Arabs. For instance, Nader doesn’t go around broadcasting he’s an Arab. Now my son…
does not deny that he is an Arab or of Arab origin, but he doesn’t go around saying, I am an

1 Linda Colley, Britons: Forging a Nation, (1707-1837, New Haven: Yale University Press,
1992), 6.
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Arab. I and some others of our generation have identified ourselves as Arabs, but not many do.”2
While this was a reflection of the state of Arab-Americans in the 1980s, it reflected a reality that
Ansara and other leaders of the National Association sought to challenge in the 1950s and 1960s.
ThrouFr4gh the actions of the National Association and various publications, Ansara, the leaders
of NASLAC, and select Arab-Americans sought to forge an inclusive Arab-American identity
that would be able to unite and mobilize the entire Arab-American community in the United
States. Despite their efforts, they found an Arab-American public that proved largely unwilling
to unite behind the vision of identity NASLAC presented. This thesis will explore the actions and
motivations that drove these early proponents of an Arab-American identity, highlighting the
impact that foreign organizations such as the Arab State Delegation office and Arab
governments, especially the United Arab Republic, and its leader Gamal Abdel Nasser played in
this early effort to forge an Arab-American identity.
Scholarship dealing with Arab immigration and assimilation in the United States prior to
1967 consisted of only a handful of works. One such work was “The Syrians in America” in
1924, which sought to understand the reasons early Arab immigrants left Lebanon and Syria and
were drawn the United States.3 Another was Abdo Elkhoy’s “The Arab Moslems in the United
States” which sought to study the rates of Americanization in two separate Arab communities in
Toledo, Ohio and Detroit, Michigan with the goal of determining if religion hindered the process
of assimilation in immigrant communities.4 These studies reflected the general goals of

2 James Ansara, “Oral History”. Michael W. Suleiman Collection, Arab-American National
Museum, Detroit, Michigan.

3Philip K Hitti. The Syrians in America. (New York: George H. Doran Company, 1924.)

4 Abdo Elkholy, The Arab Moslems in the United States: Religion and Assimilation. (New
Haven, Conn: College & University Press, 1966.)
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scholarship on Arab-Americans prior to 1967: namely, the desire to understand the reasons these
immigrants came to the United States and measure the degree they had integrated into American
society.
The majority of works on Arab-Americans have focused on two specific timeframes.
Scholarship on of Arab-American immigration prior to World War II has succeed in highlighting
some of the motives, challenges, and developments that the first wave of Arab immigrants faced
in United States. The second period that scholars of Arab-Americans have focused on is the
period after the third Arab-Israeli war. However, the development of the Arab-American
community between World War II and the war of 1967 remains almost completely untouched by
the scholars of Arab-American history and this period is treated as a static period of assimilation.
For example, while various authors have examined the importance of the early Arab-American
press as a marking for of Arab immigrants, they have failed to extend their examinations into the
following decades in the 1940s, 50s, and 60s.5 One of the major developments in the Arab
mindset, namely the rise of Pan-Arabism under Gamal Abdel Nasser, also remains relatively
unexplored in its relation to the Arab-American community. Scholars acknowledge the
importance of Arab nationalism in the 1950s and 1960s as part of a vision of greater prosperity
that gave high hopes to many Arabs, but have relegated the idea of Arab nationalism and its
relationship to Arab-Americans to a single paragraph in the larger history of Arab-Americans in

Elkholy concluded that religion did not play a significant role in hindering the assimilation of the
Arab communities; rather he found that occupation was the prominent factor in the communities’
assimilation rate.

5 See Elayyan Hani Ismaeal, “The Syrian world in the New World : the contextual
beginnings of Arab American literature and the part it played in identity formation” in Darcy
Zabel’s, Arabs in the Americas: Interdisciplinary Essays on the Arab Diaspora. (New York:
Peter Lang, 2006): 37.
Isamel explores the ways in which the first English publications for Arab-Americans, the Syrian
World, helped serve as a marker for the assimilation of the community in 1920s and 1930s.
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many of their works.6 The possible influence of pan-Arabism as a shaping factor of the Arab-
American experience and Arab immigrants’ conceptions of identity is almost completely absent
in discussions on Arab-Americans. Laurel Wigle and Sameer Abraham’s article “Arab
Nationalism in America: The Dearborn Arab Community” is a singular exception to this trend
and their work provides a glimpse in the importance that Arab nationalism and political
developments in the Middle East played in mobilizing the predominantly Palestinian Arabs of
Dearborn.7 Their work also incorporates an analysis of how Arab immigrants relate and
politically organize in response to the political developments in their countries of origin.
However, their study explores only a portion of the larger Arab-American population. Due to the
limited scope of their work, their argument stresses the perpetuation of a collective Arab identity
in Dearborn rather than the creation of a unique Arab-American identity, and failed to
distinguish the similarities and differences between those identities.
Instead, discussion concerning Arab-Americans’ efforts to mobilize nationally have
focused on the aftermath of the 1967 war. The developments following this war included the
mobilization of large numbers of Arab-Americans protesting the negative portrayals of Arabs in
the American news, as well as the creation of new Arab-American organizations to combat these
negative portrayals.8 Moreover, scholars have given credit to these groups for the establishment
of a collective Arab-American identity that “made no distinction among members based on

6 See Randa A Kayyali, The Arab Americans. (Westport, Conn: Greenwood Press, 2006),
p. 33.

7 Laurel D. Wigle and Sammer Y. Abraham, “Arab Nationalism in America: The
Dearborn Arab community, in David W. Hartman eds. Immigrants and Migrants: The Detroit
Ethnic Experience (Detroit, Michigan: New University Thought Publishing Company, 1974):
279-302.
8 The groups that followed almost immediately after the war included the Arab-American
University Graduates (AAUG), The United Holy Land Fund (UHLF), and the Palestine Red
Crescent Society (PRCS).
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religious affiliation or national origin.” 9 This stands in contrast to the influence ascribed to
earlier Arab-American organizations, such as NASLAC, which have been dismissed as
“inconsequential” when compared to the rates of mobilization found post-1967.10
While there is certainly merit in their claims that NASLAC enjoyed a smaller
membership than later organizations, the tendency to dismiss NASLAC as insignificant and the
extreme emphasis on Arab-American mobilizations after 1967 has left a gap when considering
the development of Arab-American identity. As a result, a concerted effort to understand the
factors that drove the earliest proponents of a national Arab-American organization and the
factors that led to their failure has yet to be undertaken.
Another factor that may contribute to the post-war focus was that Arabs became a focal
point in American political consciousness following the war. This was, in part, due to the
perception of Arabs as a terrorist threat and and a significant jump in the number of Arabs who
began immigrating to the United States after 1965. However, the expansion in interest regarding
Arab-Americans was not limited to negative depictions in the American media. These depictions
provoked a response from Arab-American community in the form of new Arab-American
organizations such as the Association of Arab-American University Graduates (AAUG), which
sought to actively combat negative portrayals of Arabs by sharing the history of Arabs in
America with other non-Arab-Americans. While the majority of works on Arab-Americans
pursued the goal of correcting the stereotypes of Arabs in the American mindset, select works

9 Yvonne Yazbeck Haddad’s Not Quite American? The Shaping of Arab and Muslim
Identity in the United States. (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, Center for Urban Studies,
2004), p. 20. For a particular reference to Arab Christians, see Philip Kayla, “Arab Christians in
the United States” in Sameer and Nabeel Abraham, Arabs in the New World: Studies on Arab-
American Communities, 44-63.

10 Michael Suleiman, 8.
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pertaining to the Arab-American experience also began to appear, as groups began to study the
experiences and development of early Arab-American communities across the United States.
While many of these publications continue to combat the stereotypical images of Arabs
in the popular mindset of American society, their attempts have carried a price. Michael
Suleiman described the majority of literature on Arab-Americans as seeking “[to celebrate] the
Arab-American presence in America, rather than to truly engage in scholarship about specific
facets…of Arab culture in the Americas.”11 The price of such corrections is that Arab-
Americans have become characters in an America-centric story describing either their
assimilation across America or Arab-Americans’ positive contributions to American society. As
a result, the Arab-American community has become a passive contributor to American society
rather than a dynamic entity with its own struggles and agenda.
The history of Arab immigration to the United States began in the late nineteenth century
but determining the exact number of Arab immigrants who came to the United States has proved
to be a continuous challenge. One of the major reasons was that United States’ immigration
officials grouped Arab immigrants from the Ottoman Empire with Greek, Arminian, and Turkish
immigrants under the larger label of Turkish, making an accurate estimation nearly impossible
for the first thirty years of Arab immigration. By World War II, estimates regarding the

11 See Darcy Zabel’s introduction in Arabs in the Americas (New York: Peter Lang,
2006). 1-2.
Michael Suleiman, one of the premier scholars on Arab-Americans, also reflects this sentiment
in his introduction to Arabs in America: Building a New Future. (Philadelphia: Temple
University Press, 1999).
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population of Arab immigrants and their posterity ranged from 350,000 to 800,000; the degree
discrepancy has continued to grow.12
Despite studies on Arab-American communities being incomplete, there is a general
consensus among scholars on the history of Arab immigration to the United States. Arab
immigration has traditionally been divided into three waves, which correspond with the
underlying demographics of each group of immigrants. The first wave began in the 1880s and
lasted until 1924. The first wave was was overwhelmingly composed of Christians
(approximately 90% of the immigrants identifying as Christians, albeit from various sects of
Christianity). Almost all hailed from the Greater Syrian region, particularly the area of Mount
Lebanon, and they came to the United States in pursuit of economic opportunity and many
embarked with the intent on returning to their homelands after achieving financial success.13
The second wave of immigration spanned from 1924 until 1965 and marked a period
during which the immigration of Arabs to the United State stopped almost entirely. It coincided
with the existence of the Johnson-Reed Quota Act of 1924 (popularly known as Asian Exclusion
Act). The tenure of the act, enacted 1924 until its repeal in 1965, has been described as a period

12 350,000 was the official U.S. government figure cited in Philip Hitti’s “The
Emigrants,” published in the 1963 edition of the Encyclopedia of Islam. The estimate of 800,000
was provided by Ashad G. Hawie, The Rainbow Ends (New York: Theo. Gaus’ Sons, 1942),
149-151.

13 See Hitti,48; Alixa Naff’s Becoming American: The Early Arab Immigrant Experience
(Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1985), 83; Samir Khalaf’s “The
Background and Causes of Lebanese/Syrian Immigration to the United States before World War
I,” in Eric J. Hooglund, ed., Crossing the Waters: Arabic-Speaking Immigrants to the United
States before 1940, (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1987), pp. 17-35; and
Charles Issawi’s “The Historical Background of Lebanese Emigration: 1900-1918,” in Albert
Hourani and Nadim Shehadi eds., The Lebanese in the World: A Century of Emigration (London:
I.B. Tauris, 1992), pp. 227-42.
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of assimilation for the first wave of immigrants.14 The exceptions to this halt in Arab
immigration were the immediate family members of naturalized immigrants, the arrival of a few
thousand Palestinian refugees following the first Arab-Israeli war in 1948, as well as a handful of
political exiles from across the Middle East due to the turbulent nature of post-colonial politics.
The third and final wave stretches from the end of the Asian Exclusion Act in 1965 to the
present day. The reasons that members of this wave chose to emigrate vary; some were fleeing
political turmoil in their countries, others sought educational or economic opportunities available
in the United States. The members of this wave immigrated from every Arabic speaking nation,
came from variety of social and educational backgrounds, and numbered more than 400,000
individuals between 1965 and 1992.15 The single shared trait in this wave was that the majority
of immigrants were Muslims.
The experiences of the first wave of Arab immigration and their descendants are the
immediate concern of this thesis. That is not to say that the resumption of Arab immigration in
1965 had no effect on discussions concerning Arab-American identity, in fact it may well have
been instrumental in the successful manifestation of a popular Arab-American identity.
However, this thesis main goal is to explore the conflict over Arab-American identity that
developed prior to its manifestation in 1967; showing that identity in the community was a
contested topic, over which competing factions sought to engage to the Arab-American
community to further their own goals. Given that we are dealing with this first period of
immigration, there are a few things to keep in mind. Nearly all of the Arab-American immigrants

14 Kayyali, 32.

15 Ibid., 33.

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