Nancy L. Green is the author of The Other Americans in Paris. Businessmen, Countesses, Wayward Youth 1880-1941, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014). Born and raised in Chicago, Illinois, and Cleveland, Ohio, Nancy first came to Paris to do research for her dissertation and, after comings and goings, settled here in the 1980s. She earned a doctorate from the University of Chicago and a doctorate d’Etat ès-lettres from the University of Paris 7. She is professor of history at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, and author of numerous books and articles. In this interview, authors Ellen Hampton and Nancy Green talk about immigration, elites, and the evolution of Americans in Paris.
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Ellen Hampton: You are an historian of immigration and of labor, and particularly the intersection of the two. How did The Other Americans in Paris coincide or differ from your previous work?
Nancy Green: With a bit of guilt. This book does indeed represent a shift from labor history to a history of elites. But the link remains in my dual interest in migration and forms of work. I may stretch the point a bit in arguing that even the writers in Paris were cultural workers, but it is enlightening to see figures such as Sylvia Beach or singer and cabaret owner Bricktop as businesswomen. Even more importantly, I show how businessmen (“immigrant workers” of another sort) had hard work convincing French managers and politicians of the value of their goods. In this respect the book takes part in what has been called a new social history of capitalism.
You quote historian Warren Susman in the introduction. Here’s another from him: “The writing of history is as personal an act as the writing of fiction. As the historian attempts to understand the past, he is at the same time, knowingly or not, seeking to understand his own cultural situation and himself.” How personal is this new book?
I am neither a countess nor a business(wo)man nor a wayward youth! - although I am an American living in Paris. I always like to think of my historic research as both distanced – the advantage of being more than half a century removed from the cast of characters – and perhaps informed by a particular sensitivity to the subject.
One of the points you emphasize is the two-way traffic of cultural transmission. As the expat Americans became more French, Paris became more American. How did you measure the influence?
It is very difficult to measure. I see it more as a quandary on both sides, leading both to praise and damnation and often a certain defensiveness.
In the introduction, you write that Americans abroad have not been considered immigrants, because the country has had no mass emigration experience. In what ways did Americans in Paris echo the behavior of other immigrant groups?
If you consider the classic identity formation of immigrant groups – churches, clubs, newspapers, meetings – the Americans in Paris clearly fit the bill. They created a community and defined themselves as such (using the early 20th century term “colony”). One of the clearest expressions are the American Chamber of Commerce directories that were published in the interwar years, 700-page tomes full of detailed lists of Americans residing and working in Paris. And not just businessmen: Man Ray, Gertrude Stein, Edith Wharton and Anna Gould, formerly Comtesse de Castellane but Duchesse de Talleyrand by the 1920s, are all listed there. All identified as Americans in France as the directory was called.
Are today’s Americans in Paris very different from the group you studied? Are they (we) coming to Paris for the same reasons?
No and Yes – for business and pleasure. What I argue is that this early history is necessary to understand those who set the stage and indeed built many of the American institutions still servicing the community today: the American Library, the American Church, the American Cathedral, the American Chamber of Commerce, the American Hospital, etc.
The years you cover were hard-core Jim Crow in the United States. Were Americans in Paris able to step outside of racial antagonism?
As Tyler Stovall (Paris Noir) has pointed out, it was more the post-World War II generation of African-Americans in Paris who left the U.S. explicitly to escape racism there. However, the myth of a color-blind France dates to early on. African-Americans in France were well appreciated during World War I (and not just because of the wildly popular jazz bands), and they felt freer on the streets of Paris. But there are ugly incidents where white Americans who had brought their racism with them, took umbrage at black Americans frequenting the same cafés as they did and asked the café-owners to throw them out! When the French café owners did take the side of American blacks – not always, but often enough to be remarked – this further confirmed the difference between Jim Crow America and life in Paris.
The book is written in an informal, almost chatty style that is easily accessible to the non-academic reader, but is founded in solid professional research and published by an academic press. Are you trying to merge the two approaches? Can it work?
To answer your two questions: Yes; and I hope so! Professional historians have been debating the importance of bringing narrative and a clear writing style back to the trade. Not to mention humor! It is in any case my way of reading the archives and using the great stories found there to ask critical questions about transnational elite migration and Americanization.
Who was your favorite among the many singular characters you profiled?
That is a hard choice, between the wayward youth, Warner Miller, who left for Europe with only his violin in hand in order to escape a stern father who wanted him to become a businessman, and the transnational Europe-trotter, the fabulous Gertrude Moulton, who described herself as “a veritable Etna in cataclysmic eruption.”
Is there any part of the broader era that you’d like to focus on for another book?
If truth be told, first I’d like to do a television series with the consulate as the hub, with people coming in and out with all sorts of problems, from the serious to the frivolous and with the cross-cultural misunderstandings of living abroad to boot. I have become fascinated with consulates! Where else can you find amazing stories of obstreperous Americans turning to their government for help in everything from searching for lost watches to help with a difficult French hat maker? This raises larger questions about consulates not just as gatekeepers handing out visas, but as key nodes in the protection of citizens abroad. If a TV series doesn’t work, there’s always an academic conference… In the meantime, however, I am working on a project on gender and migration. Men and women do not necessarily move, migrate, or settle in the same ways.
We look forward to your next book! Thank you for participating in the Paris Writers News interview.
--Ellen Hampton
Nancy L. Green is professor (/directrice d’études/) of history at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris, where she is a member of the Centre de Recherches Historiques. Born in Chicago, raised in Chicago and Cleveland, she went to the University of Wisconsin at Madison and then the University of Chicago, where she received her doctorate in 1980.Having come to Paris to do research for her dissertation, she ended up staying and doing a /doctorat d’état /at the Université de Paris VII (1996). A specialist of migration history, comparative methods, and French and American social history, her major publications include: /Ready-to-Wear and Ready-to-Work: A Century of Industry and Immigrants in Paris and New York/ (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997); /Repenser les migrations /(Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2002); (with François Weil),//eds., /Citizenship and Those Who Leave /(Urbana: University of Illinois 2007); and (with Marie Poinsot), eds., /Histoire de l’immigration et question coloniale en France /(Paris: La documentation française, 2008).Her most recent book, on the varieties of expatriation and elite migration, entitled: /The Other Americans in Paris//: Businessmen, Countesses, Wayward Youth, 1880-1941,/appeared in July 2014 (University of Chicago Press).
Other books by Nancy L. Green:
Histoire de l’immigration et question coloniale en France, with Marie Poinsot, eds., 2008;Citizenship and Those Who Leave: The Politics of Emigration and Expatriation, with François Weil, eds., 2007; Repenser les migrations, 2002; Jewish Workers in the Modern Diaspora, ed., 1998; Ready-to-Wear and Ready-to-Work: A Century of Industry and Immigrants in Paris and New York, 1997; Et ils peuplèrent l'Amérique: L'Odyssée des émigrants, 1994; The Pletzl of Paris: Jewish Immigrant Workers in the Belle Epoque, 1986.
About Ellen Hampton: Author of Playground for Misunderstanding (2013) and Women of Valor: the Rochambelles on the WWII Front (Palgrave-Macmillan), a non-fiction account of a group of women ambulance drivers organized by an American woman during the Second World War, Ellen Hampton has a PhD in history from the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS). She teaches history at Sciences Po and is the Paris resident director for City University of New York. Before moving to France, she worked as a journalist in Miami and Latin America, for The Miami Herald, The Miami News and Cox Newspapers. She is the mother of two sons.
