Between black and white: Early Lebanese and Syrian emigration to the United States

Emigration to the United State of America from the Levant region can be traced back to the foundations of the country. The term used to describe Syrians and Lebanese in this article will be Syrian as this was the term used during the early 20th century.

Private Nathan Badeen was possibly the first Syrian to be documented in the USA, having served in the army against the British and was killed in 1776.

However, he was not the first known-Arabic speaker in the Americas — a Moroccan slave named Estevanico was brought into the country by the Spanish expedition into Florida in 1527. But unlike Estevanico, Badeen is held up as a patriot and a successful example for Arab and Syrian integration into America.

"The first Arab Muslim would not gain the legal right to be naturalised until the 1940s, thus the 1915 case would divide Arab immigrants along the lines of religion"

Wanting to be seen as a model minority by the wider society, downplays the tension that exists for Syrians and Lebanese diasporas in their new host countries during the 19th and early 20th centuries.

Residents from Ottoman Syria, including Lebanese and Palestinians, came in waves and Philip Hitti estimates that between 1899 to 1919, some 90,000 had settled mostly in the Eastern part of the United States.

Those who came before the 20th century were registered as Turks, as 'Syrian' was not officially adopted until the turn of the century.

Many of the new arrivals took on jobs as peddlers or travelling salespersons who go from place to place either selling small items or illicit products such as drugs.

The peddler status among Syrians has generated much debate among scholars of Arab-American studies.

Alixa Naff was the first to author a major book on the subject, arguing that pack peddling — which involved bringing consumer goods to small or sparsely populated areas in America — enabled Syrians new opportunities to build networks and integrate into America.

Unusually for the period, Syrian women were heavily involved in the trade and this afforded them greater mobility than possible for other women in America during this period.

But while Naff’s research is impressive and a wonderful resource as it includes interviews, letters and photographs, some scholars feel she paints too rosy a picture of Syrian integration into American life.

Naff discusses the ways Syrians were welcomed into the US, but Charlotte Karem Albrecht feels it downplays the anxiety that many Americans had about their new countrymen.

‘Exotic’ looking men and women travelling far distances across the country, led many to think of them as defying gender expectations and thus being deviants.

An article on the Syrian American peddler community in Harper’s Weekly in 1890, said their commercial system was “simple” and “essentially Asiatic”.

The article says the Syrians will ask for 10 times more for their wares than what they would accept and deploy psychological tricks to secure the sale.

Adaptation to life in America was fraught with tension and anxiety. The Dow vs the United States court case underlines an ambiguous position Syrians found themselves in at the start of the 20th century.

George Dow, a Maronite Christian and immigrant from north Lebanon launched legal action after his naturalisation leading to citizenship was denied in 1914.

"The 1790 naturalisation act officially racialised citizenship in the United States, stating any foreign-born resident needed to be white and free-born, i.e. not a slave, to have the right to American nationality"

The problem George Dow and other Syrian immigrants had was there was a sense of confusion on how to racially classify them.

The 1790 naturalisation act officially racialised citizenship in the United States, stating any foreign-born resident needed to be white and free-born, i.e. not a slave, to have the right to American nationality.

As Khaled Beydoun writes, the 1790 act compelled foreign residents to convince authorities that they fitted into the definition of white and litigate their identities.

Islam was often framed as hostile to American ideals by the courts following the legislation.

The 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act and the 1885 Alien Contract Labor Law further restricted settlement and citizenship routes for those defined as Asian.

The Dow case was not the first Syrian naturalisation case — previous cases had gone the way of the partitioner and those individuals were naturalised.

"Life in America did not mean the Syrian diaspora forgot the home country, on the contrary, many used their positions in America to advocate for causes in the Middle East"

This would have encouraged him to pursue citizenship through the courts, however, his first case tried in a district court in South Carolina failed.

The Syrian community mobilised and launched a campaign fundraiser to fund his appeal. Again the appeal failed.

At the heart of the issue was tension between the so-called scientific understanding of race vs common wisdom approaches to it.

Dow mounted his case based on the racial science pervasive in his day, which essentially classified Semites as white, based on the works of German physician Johann Friedrich Blumenbach (1752-1840).

Blumenbach wrote “modern Syrians are mixed Syrians, Arabians, and even Jewish blood. They belong to the Semitic branch of the Caucasian race, thus differ widely from their rulers, the Turks, who are in origin Mongolian.”

However, the judges took the view that it was common sense that white in the 1790 act meant European and thus George Dow did not qualify. It was Dow’s appeal to the Court of Appeals in 1915 that would see him get citizenship.

The Appeals Court accepted the scientific definition offered by Dow’s defence, and the case would enable Arab Christians to become US citizens, but not Muslims.

Despite ‘becoming white’ legally, as Sarah Gualtieri writes, socially Syrians were still seen as somewhere between Asian and Black long after the court victory.

Syrians lived in precarious positions and were seen as an in-between group. Charlotte Karem Albrecht makes the point that racially being Syrian was not based on who they were, but on how they related to blackness and other non-white groups.

The first Arab Muslim would not gain the legal right to be naturalised until the 1940s, thus the 1915 case would divide Arab immigrants along the lines of religion.

"Life in America did not mean the Syrian diaspora forgot the home country, on the contrary, many used their positions in America to advocate for causes in the Middle East"

To become white offered advantages and there was no benefit to being anything else at the time, thus as a newly established community, the Syrians were responding to the environment of their times. They did not choose the environment, but they did have a choice over how they responded to it.

Life in America did not mean the Syrian diaspora forgot the home country, on the contrary, many used their positions in America to advocate for causes in the Middle East.

Diaspora communities were seen as strategically important as Stacy Fahrenthold outlines in Between the Ottomans and the Entente, Istanbul sought to court them.

It was hoped the Syrian community would give the Ottomans influence in American and South American politics. However, the political mobilisation of the diaspora would eventually turn against the Ottomans during the First World War.

The United States alongside Latin America became a harbinger of Arab, Syrian and Lebanese nationalism.

The diaspora was not passively receiving political ideas from the Middle East, they were very much helping to shape it. Lebanese nationalists grew deeply concerned by the prospect of a French Mandate of Lebanon as the First World War drew to a close. 

Diaspora communities who were increasingly distinguishing themselves from one another, i.e. Lebanese, Syrian etc.., sought to influence the outcome of the Paris Peace Conference in 1919. 

Syrian nationalists in the diaspora campaigned to set up an American mandate for Syria — the idea was that no matter what, Syria and Lebanon were going to get swallowed up by either Britain or France and the only thing that would stop them was America.

If America could turn Syria into a protectorate, with the anti-colonial principles Washington was espousing at the time, Syria could fully develop into an independent country. The French prevented access to the conference for the diaspora communities.

The story of the Syrian and Lebanese diasporas is diverse and complex. Assimilation into American life was not straightforward as the wider society did not know what to make of them.

They occupied a strange in-between status during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, sitting at the heart of America’s racial tensions.

Anxiety over what Syrians were brought to America and whether they should be allowed to gain citizenship, led many to argue for the adoption of whiteness, but even after the 1915 court case remained in an uneasy position.

Being in the US afforded them opportunities to advocate for causes back home and to shape political discourse in the Middle East.

All of this indicates the importance and power the diaspora communities enjoyed and were recognised as such by great powers from the French to the Ottomans.

Usman Butt is a multimedia television researcher, filmmaker and writer based in London. Usman read International Relations and Arabic Language at the University of Westminster and completed a Master of Arts in Palestine Studies at the University of Exeter.

Follow him on Twitter: @TheUsmanButt