Armenian Americans

From Armenia to the United States

The historic Armenian homeland straddles the eastern portion of present-day Turkey, the western portion of the former Soviet Union south of the Transcaucasian Mountains (including where the present-day Armenian republic lies), and the northwestern portion of present-day Iran. Over the centuries, this location put Armenians at a major crossroads of trade, cultural exchange, and war between the world's East and West, and Armenia alternated between states of independence and subjugation by invading powers. Through these changing political situations, Armenians [Page 90]maintained their sense of nationhood, with a distinct alphabet and a distinct Christian Church, the Apostolic Church, similar to but not affiliated with Eastern Orthodox denominations.

By the 19th century, most of historic Armenia was part of the Ottoman Empire, with Armenians living as one of the millets, the religious national subdivisions of the empire. Most lived as peasant farmers or petty urban laborers, suffering extra burdens of taxation and personal indignity as a religious minority. Eastern Armenians during these years lived under the rule of Czarist Russia.

After Turkey's November 1914 entry into World War I and subsequent battlefield defeats before Russian armies, the Young Turk triumvirate presided directly over the Armenian genocide of 1915, resulting in the slaughter of between 1.0 million and 1.5 million Armenians and the slower deaths of many more over the next several years. The U.S. ambassador to Turkey, Henry Morganthau, and other diplomats protested the killings and saved what few lives they could. At the behest of European leaders, late in 1920 U.S. President Woodrow Wilson proclaimed the rightful borders of Armenia to include substantial portions of historically Armenian provinces currently ruled by Turkey. He did so with ironic timing because at that time Armenia was under siege by both Turkish and Soviet Russian armies. By the start of 1921, a tiny slice of the historic homeland had been rechristened the Soviet Republic of Armenia.

An estimated 60,000 Armenians already lived in the United States on the eve of the genocide. The figure had reached approximately 100,000 by 1924, the year that the Johnson-Reed immigration restriction act reduced subsequent Armenian entry to a slow annual trickle. Among those cities and towns with sizable Armenian populations were Boston, Watertown, and Worcester, Massachusetts; New Britain, Connecticut; New York City; Union City, New Jersey; Detroit, Michigan; and Fresno, California. A typical Armenian community had an Apostolic church and a smaller Evangelical (Protestant) church as well as headquarters of one or more Armenian political parties.

Because U.S. naturalization law during the early part of the 20th century required foreign-born persons desiring citizenship to be White (or, in an ironic legacy of the Reconstruction era, to be of African descent), Armenians on two occasions found themselves in federal court arguing their whiteness: first in the 1908 Supreme Court case In re Halladjian and then in 1925 in Oregon federal district court with United States v. Cartozian. The Armenians prevailed in both cases.

...