BOO KS
255
Problems arising from Mr. Handlin's method troubled me.
It
would be helpful to know-and this question could have been answered
with a figure or two--exactly how representative his ideal type
is
of
the whole stream of immigration. Further, there is a certain antagon–
ism between the use of the ideal type, a valid but usually bloodless
sociological method, and the compassionate story he has sought to
tell. I would not have thought before I read
The Uprooted
that this
antagonism could be surmounted so well; still, the more vivid and
immediate Mr. Handlin's story gets, the more one feels that he has
departed from his original intention of sampling the broadest possible
range of immigrant experience. He also has a tendency to make of the
immigrant's case a prototype of all suffering, appropriating to the
immigrant several burdens that have been borne by others as well,
and minimizing the immigrants' gains by failing to look at the poverty,
famines, wars and persecutions faced by those they left behind. This
is a tale of
acute
poverty,
extreme
hardship,
severe
shame and agony,
relieved occasionally but not, I think, enough by reference to other
aspects of immigrant life.
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