“I remember the letter that one of her uncles wrote to them, saying that a member of her family wanted to sell the house on Woodrock in High Point, and would they be interested. And they were, and they bought it. I personally find High Point rather a provincial setting but let me tell you, they struck that town with lightning, because people in high point always knew she was beautiful but imagine having a Frenchman as a husband, very unusual.”
While the Lurcy’s journey to America was a collaborative effort, George’s successful transition within American society, and subsequent rise, was from Alice. Assimilation isn’t a linear or steady process, it’s entirely dependent on the host society’s view of the specific minority group’s identity. This results in an assimilation process that could either take place within someone’s life or generations. If a dominant culture doesn’t view a minority group highly, structural barriers could be placed throughout the society that disadvantaged members of that group. These disadvantages could be discriminatory laws that prevent minorities from higher education, labor practices that cut off immigrants from employment opportunities, or even social norms that frame intermarriage as something socially unacceptable (Bean and Brown). In the case of George’s assimilation into American society, the aspect of his identity that would have interfered the most with assimilation would have been his Jewish heritage, however, through changing his last name it would then fall on his French identity.
Though this national identity, alongside other Western European immigrants, on the federal level was something already accepted within American politics and immigration policy. With the Immigration Act of 1924, less than two decades before George migrated to America, Asian immigrants were banned from migrating to America, and an immigration quota of 165,000 was set for countries outside of the Western Hemisphere. A country’s immigration quota was based on 2 percent of the US population from that country recorded in the 1890 census (The Immigration Act of 1924). These quotas favored western European immigrants, France had 3,954 while Armenia had 124, and was established to “preserve the ideal of U.S. homogeneity.” Besides being xenophobic and racist to immigrants who fell outside of America’s construct of ‘whiteness,’ it showcases and reverberates the beliefs around immigration at that time. That there is an acceptable or ‘good’ immigrant, who could easily assimilate within American society without tainting the racial/ethnic homogeneity or disturbing the norms and American values that make it so ‘great.’ That’s why for George his main barriers towards assimilating would be in the interpersonal, economic and cultural.
At the beginning of George’s assimilation into American society, he was able to circumvent major cultural, economic, and social barriers that other immigrants faced by being married to Alice. While at first George was “unusual” since he was a Frenchman married to a southern debutante in a booming but small furniture town, he slowly became accepted because of Alice’s family’s status within High Point. Alice’s father, Fred Barbee, a university of North Carolina graduate, and Mother, Bertha Snow Barbee, the oldest child of one of the founding fathers of High Point’s furniture scene, held prominent positions in the community (Powell). These positions were tied to the Presbyterian church and the furniture industry both of which made up a majority of the town’s culture and values. By marrying into this prominent family of wealth and moral fortitude, it gave him a connection to the town that locals could interface and connect with. From intermarriage comes the probability for an immigrant to have a closer connection with the host society’s values and from these stronger connections they have a higher chance of getting a better paying job than their endoamously married counterparts (Meng and Gregory).
For George, this tracks through his decision to enroll at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill. Alice’s father, notable alumni and successful businessman, presumably suggested and used his resources to help George get into the university. After he was accepted into UNC’s master program for political economics, the fifty-five-year-old George Lurcy thrived and within no time graduated with honors and the ambition needed to make it as a financial advisor in the competitive streets of New York City. From there he would reestablish himself, alongside his lovely wife, as a genius economist, an urbane socialite, and one of the greatest art collectors of all time. Yet this was only possible through the connections he gained through his marriage with Alice. After all, love does conquer all but it doesn’t hurt if that love has a few connections to go along with it.
Citations:
Bean, F. D., & Brown, S. K. (2019, July 19). Assimilation Models, Old and New: Explaining a Long-Term Process. https://www.migrationpolicy.org/article/assimilation-models-old-and-new-explaining-long-term-process.
The Immigration Act of 1924 (The Johnson-Reed Act). https://history.state.gov/milestones/1921-1936/immigration-act.
Meng, X., & Gregory, R. G. (2005). Intermarriage and the Economic Assimilation of Immigrants. Journal of Labor Economics, 23(1), 135–174. https://doi.org/10.1086/425436
Powell, W. S. (2015). Snow, Ernest Ansel. https://www.ncpedia.org/biography/snow-ernest-ansel.