Rethinking Mary Antin and The Promised Land

Abstract

Mary Antin’s The Promised Land enjoyed extraordinary success when it was first published in 1912. It was widely and generally very favorably reviewed, and sold, along with the book that followed it, Those Who Knock at Our Gates (1914)—a plea for open immigration at a time of increasingly restrictionist sentiment—more than 100,000 copies. The Promised Land made Antin a celebrity, controversial at times as she went on the lecture circuit from 1913 to 1916 and stumped as an ardent advocate for the immigrant, for Progressive party politics (she had a warm relationship with Theodore Roosevelt, who much admired her work), and latterly, for Zionism. The Promised Land continued to be printed and sold to enthusiastic readers, libraries, and other institutions through the 1920s, and as late as the 1940s it was often used as a public-school civics text. After 1920, though, with the breakup of her marriage because of emotional and financial stresses caused by World War I and her husband’s dismissal from his professorship at Columbia University, Antin endured long bouts of mental illness, withdrew from the public arena, and wrote very little. Her reputation went into eclipse; her work and her character itself were often impugned.