Dangerous persons, delayed pilgrims: Baltic displaced persons and the making of Cold War America, 1945--1952

Between 1945 and 1952, ships carrying undocumented refugees from Estonia and Latvia reached landfall in the United States. In later decades, Americans may have called these migrants "illegal aliens" or "boat people." Contemporaries, however, called them "Pilgrims," evoking the founding mythos and racial origins of the American nation. The warm reception accorded Baltic "Displaced Persons" or "D.P.s" stood in contrast to the nation's anti-immigrant mood. By 1950, special legislation which temporarily bypassed the national origins quota system allowed entry to D.P.s of all nationalities. If questions of immigration are questions of national identity, then this postwar wave of migrants occupied a historic juncture in the formation of American national identity. The significance of D.P.s, in short, lies in the cultural symbolism attached to them, and their role in the construction of American identity at a crucial moment in the nation's history.;Given the national origins quota system, the admission of D.P.s required the rehabilitation of certain "races" considered "undesirable" members of the imagined community that defined the "American nation." Placing the racial "inbetweeness" of Eastern Europeans at the center of analysis, the admission of the D.P.s reveals an attempt to resolve the racial contradictions that World War II and the Cold War had exposed through the expansion of "whiteness." As the vanguard of this wave, Baltic D.P.s played a crucial role in this construction. Their anti-Communism dovetailed neatly with contemporary American political culture, and their admission served to contain communism at home through immigration. It also marked them as suitably white in an era in which many Americans still clung to a vision of the United States as an Anglo-Saxon Protestant nation.