The Harvard Study

The Harvard Study – A Presentation at the OTC Reunion

by GERHARD SONNERT

(OTC Children worked with Harvard University researchers Gerald Holton and Gerhard Sonnert on a major study supported by the Mellon Foundation. The study focused on the experiences and contributions of children fleeing Nazi persecution and immigrating to the United States. Over 2000 people participated through surveys and interviews, including over 200 OTC children)

Thank you, Iris. And good morning to you.

I don't think I know many of you. I haven't known many of you personally, but I feel I know you and I saw all these hands because I know you got mail from us and you actually returned it, and I'm delighted to report at latest count we have had 180 filled out questionnaires back. And to all of you who filled them out and sent them back to us, our sincere thanks. For those of you who haven't sent them back, this is time for a little appeal. It's not too late yet. So we accept yours if you want to send it back.

Today I can present some initial results, and these results are really hot off the presses. We had to enter the data and then process the data. This is not a small job, and it was completed last Thursday. So I just threw out some frequency distributions that I'll show you in the second part of this presentation.

But let me start by giving you the framework or the larger background of the study because, as Iris has said, the OTC study is part of a larger process of Project Access of immigrants who came to America regardless of how they came without parents like you or with parents.

How did we get interested in this? Gerald Holton, who, by the way, is from Vienna and was in a Kindertransport to England then came to the United States from there in 1940, and myself, I've done a lot of research on Albert Einstein, famous physicist, and we noticed that the existing research on refugees concentrated on adult refugees and especially on world famous adult refugees like Albert Einstein. And there's a whole group of world famous people among that group of refugees in all sorts of human endeavor from the sciences to the arts to music to film making, intellectuals, and poets.

It's probably not much of an exaggeration if you say that Germany itself had destroyed a major part of its cultural potential by what it did to its what they call (not English) by expelling them from Germany.

If you look back in history, there is almost a parallel to this. You probably have to go back to the fall of Constantinople to look at a cultural exodus of that magnitude. So it's certainly understandable why literature has focused on the adults, and especially high achieving adults. But we wondered what happened to the younger ones, the children who came as refugees who had been not researched that much at that point.

There were some studies of immigrants that were done early in the forties and fifties, and these studies had what we call a melting pot ideology, America as a melting pot. And they said about the adults, "Well, the adults have some difficulty in adjusting because they're set in their ways, but they'r doing a good job. And as to the children, no problem at all."

The findings in those days was that the children would become indistinguishable Americans almost instantaneously, so that was the melting pot theory of what happened to the children, to the immigrant children. And we were not absolutely sure that this was right. And we decided for these reasons to take a closer look at the children's generation.

Of course the children's generation of immigrants was characterized by huge disruptions at an early formative age.

They're very drastic words to describe this experience: Oppression, deprivation, separation, drama, trauma. It was a harsh time.

We've heard stories about this, and I think it's absolutely essential that these stories are being told, but equally essential we thought is the question what happened afterwards. It's now over half a century that these early events in your lives have happened and you proceeded to lead lives from the thirties and forties to now to a new century, so our question was what happened afterwards? What kind of life course did this generation chart in a new country, in a new environment from very inauspicious beginnings, of course.

And our expectation was that this generation would be extraordinarily successful or make extraordinary contributions to their new country. And I don't think there will be many in this room who would object to this and say, "No. This generation has many failures or problems, social problems."

But we felt it was important, almost necessary to go beyond anecdotes and to get some numbers and systematic study of how this group did as a group and to get some figures to support our initial expectation.

In addition to this purpose of our study, the socioeconomic outcomes of this group, we were also interested in the area of identity formation. What kind of identity did these individuals form on the basis of these huge disruptions and upheavals early on in their lives? How do they think now about Germany? About America? About what happened to them?

So these are questions that were also interesting to us. And yesterday was very interesting as I listened to these stories and we got a whole range of responses from the instantaneous Americanization that was observed in the fifties. "Once I came to America, I became American period." Too, lingering feelings of being different, of being somehow not like the native born Americans but of having some extra element in your identity. And our study hopefully will address these issues and modify them a little more.

As Iris said, we not only studied people who came without parents, but everybody who came regardless of with or without parents. And we have three methods. I'm talking about our methods now. In the social sciences, there is no perfect method and there is not even one method that is considered superior to all other methods. Very different from the natural sciences where you have one preferred method. In the social sciences, we don't. And our response to that situation was to use different methods.

We used three main methods. And our expectation is that these three main methods all have strengths the and weaknesses but they can compensate for each other by using more than one method, we'll get a more complete picture.

So these three methods are first what's called secondary analysis of representative existing databases. The second one is the questionnaire that you know the questionnaire very well. And the third one is semi-structured interviews where you talk to people.

What I want to do now is present some results from our secondary analysis first. That's, you all know, the census that comes around every 10 years at even years, 1960, '70, so on. The form you usually get is useless for our research because it's too short. But a small proportion of the people who get the census are selected for so-called long forms and then you get man more questions. And we were very fortunate to find the 1970 census long form one that asked questions that made the sample appropriate for our analysis. It's a pretty close fit. It's not a perfect fit because it goes from 1935 through 1944 as the year of immigration, but it's close enough. So we were lucky to have these data and these give us a very representative view of the larger group and I'm now going down and showing.

All right. The way social scientists determine socioeconomic status is conventionally by three measures: Income, education and occupation. That's what we usually measure. And so we looked, and I'm giving you the census data for the whole group now. The income level for the immigrants was 185 percent of the American born that we compared it with. Almost twice as much.

Income 180 percent. That's almost double. Education is 50 percent, which is we looked at people with college education and beyond, and almost half of the immigrant men achieved that educational level, 19 percent of the women versus 15 percent of the American born men and 8 percent of the American born women.

The interesting thing about this is that on the whole, the immigrant women were more highly educated than the American men. So that is a testimony to the high educational achievement of this group.

And finally occupation. We looked at the top census category which is called professionals that the census throws out, and over 40 percent of the immigrant men are in this top category, 25 percent of the immigrant women, 15 percent of the American born men and 14 percent of the American born women. This is a picture of extremely high achievement.

And I'll show you some -- and the 186 percent is that blue spike. This graph distinguishes Central European and Eastern European immigrants, and the thick black line is 100 percent which reaches the baseline of American born -- of the American born population of the same age. And you see that the blue spike in that category of immigrants who came between 1935 and 1944 and then you see a precipitous decline from here to here (indicating.)

And just as a sideline, this is an example of what we call Simpson's Paradox. Because if you look at the genders differently, you find that the immigrant men in that group did better than the native men and the immigrant women did better than the native women. So why does this group do worse in aggregate?

Well, the answer to that question is that the gender distribution changed dramatically. And the second group, 1945 to 1949, consists of 80 percent of women, and women have a lower income. So even though the women did better than the native born women and the men did better than the native born men, the group as a whole scores lower because of the gender imbalance.

Does anybody have an idea why? War brides, GI brides from the occupation. And so that resulted in a lot of immigration by women from Central Europe. So I just wanted to show that little Simpson's Paradox. Here I already talked about this. This is -- if you look at the top column, that's over four years of higher education. And that green color is four years college. And if you take them together, you'll see that the Central European men, almost half of them, have achieved that level and that's very unusual compared to all the other categories. And enough of that. That was the census analysis.

We did another analysis with the National Jewish Population Survey, which I'm just not -- I don't have time for, but this is another -- a more meaningful study. In the census we compared the immigrants to the regular American population and we also compared it to the native born white American population which was very similar. But the National Jewish Population survey allows you to compare immigrant Jews to native born Jews. So that's a meaningful comparison group.

But now on to your group. And I don't have color yet. This is about the questions of how much the early events in your life still move you in some form.

The top panel is how often you think about Europe and the bottom panel is how often you think about the events of your migration. And you see very similar patterns whereas the -- from time to time is the highest category on both sides of the distribution.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Could you explain the headings because we can't see them?

GERHARD SONNERT: Yes. The bottom one is, I think about Europe and it goes from never to rarely, from time to time, often, very often and constantly. The bottom is thinking about migration with the same labels for the

categories and also with very similar distributions.

This is a slightly different question that we pose. How much do you think these early events or your early upbringing influenced your life?

And you see that considerably is the largest category in the top, the influence of the European upbringing was rated as considerable by a third, and at the bottom is the influence of the migration also considerably the highest response.

This is what people encountered when they came to America. Given the fact that this was the OTC group and people were -- children came unaccompanied, it's not surprising that more than half of you moved into a foster home or with foster parents. The second largest category is the people who moved in with family members who had already been living in the United States.

And this is, I think, a very interesting panel in light of yesterday's discussion because we heard some very positive reports about foster families and how things went. But you can see that the experience of living outside the immediate family ran the gamut of all sorts of experiences from very negative to very positive; although the most frequent response was positive. So I would say the majority of you had positive experiences in living outside of your family and maybe a third had less than positive experiences.

This is about the relationship of children that you encountered in those situations. And there again the most frequent response was positive experience and -- but we should not neglect that some also had bad experiences.

This is the income distribution in categories. So the mid category is $50,000 to $89,999. To the right of it the category is $90,000 through $149,999. And to the right of that is $150,000 plus.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: For what year?

GERHARD SONNERT: For this year. When you filled out the questionnaire, which was this spring.

So this bears out what I said or what we found for the census of the whole group; that it was a group that did exceptionally well. And this is the result for the OTC --

AUDIENCE MEMBER: How does that compare with the national average?

GERHARD SONNERT: We don't know that yet. I can't tell you. I can just give you the numbers as they are. We didn't do anything else but to look at these data for now.

IRIS POSNER: Let's hold questions.

GERHARD SONNERT: This was a question about how much you communicate with your own children about your early upbringing. And very few said that they never talk with their children about this. Most people said that they talk with their children from time to time. And the second largest category or a third said they talk with their children frequently. And I suspect if we had done this study 20 years ago, we would have gotten a very different graph because as people get older, they open up more and talk more about it than they used to talk about it maybe 10, 20, 30 years ago. And a lot of people made notes, "Now I talk with them but I didn't talk with them when they were younger."

This is too small to read, but I'll explain it. This is about religion. And we asked parallel questions for father, mother and yourself. The top one is father, then in the middle is mother, and the bottom one is your own religiousness. And it's -- the parents are very similar. Only the not at all religious category is more elevated for the fathers than for the mothers. And the children or your generation in that case, is much less religious than the parents' religion, which is probably in line with a lot of societal trends in current society.

This is how often you returned to the country of your childhood, Germany most of the cases or Austria. And about a little less than a fifth never went back at all. The largest group, about I would say a quarter, went once and then there were people who even went more. So less than a fifth went even more frequently than six times.

Here's our identity question. We asked people to pick one. And if you -- if you noticed, we asked about identity in two different ways because people of course have multiple identities. So we let people rate how much they felt Jewish, how much they felt American. And you could check very much so on all of them, but they kind of made you pick one. And most of the people, half, about half of the people who sent back their questionnaires said they're American. And the next most popular category was Jewish-American. All the other categories really were not -- were rare responses.

These are your political views as a group. You can say over 40 percent; maybe 45 percent identified themselves as Democrats followed by those who said middle of the road and then the other responses are not that frequent.

And that was the following question, after you answered what kind of political views you had, we wondered if you thought that your early history, life history had something to do with this. And interestingly enough, almost nobody said it had a little bit to do with it. The mildly category was almost non-existent. So a fifth said no, not at all. It has nothing to do -- how I feel politically has nothing to do with where I came from. And the other said, yeah, it had somewhat to do or even more than that. But nobody was kind on the fence and said mildly, or almost nobody.

You might remember that. That was our little profile of traits and this is (inaudible), which I didn't have time to do, but I thought it's interesting just to give you the averages. The group averages, and maybe we should concentrate on the ones that are higher than five and below three because that's the areas where you feel as a group that you're different from your American average peers. So punctuality is a very high place. Also being organized, they feel that they are more organized than the average American.

By contrast, interest in popular music is less strong among this group. Also interest in celebrities is also less strong. Perhaps we'll ask other people and see if we find that pattern or if we find another pattern.

Classical music. There is a higher interest in classical music and a higher interest in learning. Also people say they're more family oriented and hardworking than others. Like to read.

There's the second half of this. Disciplined at work was found to be -- you felt that you were more disciplined in work than the average. Like to paint is not a hobby that many of you have or you feel that you're much less interested in painting than the average American would be.

And I should come to a close. And I thought this was a nice viewgraph to conclude because it has an optimistic message. We asked people how satisfied they were with their lives. And more than half of you were very satisfied with their lives, and then more than a third were satisfied with their lives. These were the two largest categories by far.

And maybe that's a good overall picture of your group, and I should stop here.