Robert L. Fleegler argues that by the 1950s and 1960s Americans had come to recognize and embrace the “contributions” to American society and culture made by Southern and Eastern European immigrants, thus simultaneously transforming them from persons stigmatized as undesirable under restrictionary “national origins quotas” laws and creating the intellectual foundation for the political rejection of those quotas in 1965. The epilogue to Ellis Island Nation ends with the as yet unanswerable question whether or not the disparaged immigrants of today (mainly from Latin America) will also ultimately find integration through acknowledgment of their own distinctive contributions. Although the author acknowledges that the transformation he describes is related to the consolidating whiteness of the earlier immigrants (an observation that could result in pessimistic predictions as the epilogue considers the future of today's immigrants), Fleegler is not interested particularly in race in this analysis. He chooses instead to focus on a rather loosely related cluster of ideas that he calls “contributionism” (2). This is not a term that falls easily from the lip, and Fleegler neither discusses its origins nor claims to have invented the term. (The term seems to have been introduced early in the twentieth century by advocates of full civil rights for African Americans.)

While I was not ultimately convinced that the term “contributionism” adds a great deal analytically to already existing historical understandings of debates over immigration and American identity, Ellis Island Nation nevertheless offers a balanced and readable narrative of those debates in the years between World War I and the 1960s. Fleegler incorporates a lively array of voices, taken from political debates around key immigration laws (e.g. the 1952 McCarran-Walter Act), films, public celebrations, and – for my sensibilities at least, the most original and intriguing – textbooks aimed at students of several ages. These are not sources that reveal too much about the agency, wishes or thoughts of the immigrants-in-transformation themselves, of course. But they can and they do, in this book, paint a portrait of Americans as intermittently conflicted over current immigrants even while celebrating the earlier arrivals who purportedly built the United States as a “nation of immigrants.” This is already a fairly well-accepted interpretation of past debates but Fleegler offers a well-written narrative and the book can particularly be recommended for general readers and advanced undergraduate students.

For specialist readers there will be few surprises in Ellis Island Nation. The periodization – the nativism of the early twentieth century, the debates over identity introduced by the early cultural pluralists (among whom Fleegler numbers the well-known Randolph Bourne, Horace Kallen and Israel Zangwill, and the arguably less well-known Louis Adamic), the World War II quest for unity and tolerance, and the Cold War context of 1950s debates over the national-origins quotas – is a broadly accepted one and Fleegler's documentation of contributionist ideas does not require any major revisions. In many respects, the most original chapter is titled “The Cold War and Religious Unity”; it presents a particularly useful discussion of the relation between religious and ethnic tolerance, especially in the political arena. While the story of how John F. Kennedy's Catholicism became an issue in the 1960 presidential election is not completely unknown, it functions here as a good illustration of how contributionism differed from the public celebration of commonalities (among Protestants, Catholics and Jews) as a foundation for tolerance.

As this suggests, Fleegler works hard, historiographically, to distinguish “contributionism” from “universalism.” He sees universalism as the main theme of Gary Gerstle, Matthew Jacobson and Peter Novick's earlier analyses of the debates of the war and postwar years. I do not completely agree with that reading. More oddly, Fleegler makes almost no effort to establish how contributionism differed from the notion of “immigrant gifts” that has been explored recently by Diana Selig in her book Americans All: The Cultural Gifts Movement (2008). Throughout Ellis Island Nation, the reader senses an ongoing tension between an argument being made for the “gradual growth” of contributionism over time and a narrative that instead shows the existence of contributionism as a rather sturdy if intermittent element in American discussions of national identity from the late nineteenth century onward (15). Fleegler briefly introduces Crevecoeur, Whitman and Melville as having introduced early arguments for contributionism. The author points to a number of Congressmen, who represented large numbers of immigrant-born constituents, as adopting positions that were effectively rebuttals of restrictionist arguments in the early twentieth century. At times, contributionism becomes almost synonymous with the imagined, American “nation of immigrants,” itself little evoked before the 1960s. What was it that drove the waxing and waning of contributionist imaginations of the American nation or the “gradual growth” that Fleegler advocates? While the book's epilogue points to current debates about immigration, it does not offer the kind of concluding thoughts that could have clarified whether, and how, contributionism itself changed over time. Were the contributions that were understood to have facilitated the integration of the “Castle Garden” immigrants of the early nineteenth century significantly different from the contributions that seemed most salient in the contributionism of the 1950s? An answer to that question might have helped readers anticipate the kind of future nation that Fleegler imagines when he chose to end his book with a focus on today's debates and the stigmatization of today's immigrants.