An Intermingling of Many Ethnicities? Intermarriage of U.S. Migrants from Austria-Hungary as an Indicator of Acculturation

According to the historian and sociologist Joel Perlmann, intermarriage is a crucial, probably the crucial, mechanism of ethnic intermingling, and of assimilation (however we chose to define that term). Intermarriage can serve both as a measure of acculturation and as an agent producing it. High rates of intermarriage among different ethnicities are considered to be indicative of social integration. At the same time, intermarriage expands the ability of families to pass on different ethnic cultures to their children and thus could be an agent of acculturation. Yet while ethnic intermarriage is widely recognized as an indicator for social integration, few historical analyses attempt to assay long-term trends within a single research design.

My paper will contribute to an understanding of this historical process by describing patterns of assertive mate-seeking among migrants from Austria-Hungary, other European migrants and people already born in the US in the last decades of the 19^th and the first half of the 20^th centuries. My paper considers the following research questions: Which of these groups such as Poles, Hungarians, Czechs, Jews or German speakers from Austria-Hungary were most endogamous and how did this change over time? Did patterns of endogamy mimic patterns of residential segregation since migrants groups were often segregated spatially? For migrants the marriage market could be limited and spouses from the some ethnical background were simply not available in the near surrounding. Or, even more important, in an unknown environment it might even have become more important to stick to the same community and marry ethnically endogamous. What about the second generation, were they more likely to intermarry? When there was ethnic intermarriage, which groups actually did match?