Abstract
At the dawn of the twentieth century, a wave of Russian Molokan immigrants arrived in Southern California, bringing with them dreams of religious freedom, agrarian simplicity, and communal self-determination. What they encountered instead was a complex web of industrial ambition, Progressive idealism, and American social engineering. This paper traces the Molokans’ journey from the Caucasus to the barrios of Boyle Heights and the fields of Baja California, highlighting the often-overlooked intersections between philanthropy and profiteering, altruism and assimilation. Figures such as Rev. Dana Bartlett, C.P. de Blumenthal, and Peter A. Demens emerge not only as benefactors but as agents in a broader campaign to reshape immigrant identity in the image of American modernity. As the Molokans struggled to preserve their language, faith, and way of life amid English classes, labor contracts, and “citizen factories,” a generational divide widened—one marked by the fading echoes of Russian hymns in American schoolyards and the loss of cultural continuity to the demands of industrial capitalism and patriotic conformity. This study contends that the Molokan experience exemplifies the quiet unraveling of an immigrant community caught between spiritual conviction and the machinery of assimilation.
Date
Spring 2025