The History of White People

by Nell Irvin Painter

  Meanwhile, in February and October 1917 Russia experienced a first and then a second revolution in the name of the working class. The second one, proclaiming itself Marxist, Bolshevik, and Soviet, took Russia out of the European slaughterhouse of war. Furthermore, it increased the attraction of socialism as an alternative to senseless, belligerent politics and bolstered the appeal of Marxism as a sweeping explanation for the human condition.

  At bottom, Marxism touted class conflict, rather than race conflict, as the motor of history. Such a substitution of class for race did not alter Americans’ social ideology, for foundational law and the organization of government data (such as the census) still relied on categories of race. The Russian revolution did not persuade Americans to think about labor and politics in terms of class; they continued to interpret all sorts of human difference as race.

  Therein lay a crisis of race ideology. If the Teutonic white peoples of Europe represented humanity’s apex, how had they reverted to savagery so easily? The African American sociologist W. E. B. Du Bois had an answer: “This is not Europe gone mad; this is not aberration nor insanity; this is Europe; this seeming Terrible is the real soul of white culture…stripped and visible today.”6 In the face of the first great crisis of whiteness, saving the “real soul of white culture” became Americans’ task after the war, one imposed and accepted amid a clash of ideas and events. The Russian revolution and wave after wave of strikes converged on hereditarian concepts of permanent racial traits à la Ripley’s Races of Europe. The idea of the “melting pot” was already under stress when wartime anxieties tested it further.

  By the armistice of November 1918, “bolshevism” in the American public mind meant the world turned upside down. In Germany a socialist revolution followed the abdication of Emperor Wilhelm II, evidently spreading the red tide. Many in the United States felt themselves stuck in a bad dream, in which Bolshevik Wobblies were running things, foreign strikers were fomenting chaos, and an insurrectionary proletariat threatened to seize government, murder citizens, burn churches, and in general destroy civilization. The end of civilization meant ugly, ignorant, unwashed immigrants breeding freely—their defects innate, hereditary, and permanent—and native Americans trodden underfoot. Events of 1919 simply made things worse.

  The whole world seemed in convulsion. Strikes and revolutions raged on every continent, in France and even in England. In the United States, 1919 began with a general strike of 100,000 workers in Seattle, an event that seemed so unthinkably un-American that it had to have foreign causes. Another Saturday Evening Post cartoon explains where strikes come from and offers a solution to the labor crisis.7 (See figure 21.2, Roun, “100% Impure.”) A grubby, dark-skinned “undesirable alien” with a red flag in his hat for socialism, offers a potent, tempting drug, “100% proof strike” to befuddled “labor.” According to race theory’s prevailing wisdom, labor’s head shape tells a tale. It is flat in the back, thus marking him as a brachycephalic Alpine, hence bovine of intelligence and easily misled by “undesirable alien.” The valise of “undesirable alien” contains four other bottles of poison, three labeled “discontent,” “labor trouble,” and “strife.” Arriving in the nick of time to save poor, dumbfounded “labor” is a policeman labeled “US.” The solution to the labor problem caused by “undesirable alien” must therefore come from stringent federal governance.

  Fig. 21.2. Ray Roun, “100% Impure,” Saturday Evening Post, 1921.

  Seattle’s general strike lasted only a week, but it was long enough to offer conservatives time to trumpet Bolshevik infiltration right here at home, which mounting strikes seemed to prove: 175 in March, 248 in April, 388 in May, 303 in June, 360 in July, and 373 in August. More strikes had taken place in 1917, but more workers had gone out in 1919’s climate of hysteria. This was also the summer of bloody attacks on African Americans who had come up from the South to jobs in northern industry. Antiblack pogroms made 1919 the Red Summer: red for bloodshed as well as labor conflict.8

  Strikes rolled into the fall: some in places where famous strikes had occurred before and some where striking seemed unthinkable. In September 350,000 steelworkers struck U.S. Steel factories in six states, climaxing a decades-long campaign for an eight-hour-day and recognition of the steelworkers’ union. In November 600,000 railroad workers in twenty states walked off the job, and wildcat strikes paralyzed transportation locally. Nearly half a million coal miners threatened to strike in November, when coal heated American homes and schools.

  Even the police played a part. In Boston 1,200 police struck for higher wages and union recognition, throwing the city into chaos. Calvin Coolidge, governor of Massachusetts, announced that the police had no right to strike, called in the state national guard, and emerged an instant hero. Commentators likened striking Boston police to Bolsheviks. Coolidge became the Republican vice presidential candidate in the fall of 1920 and president after President Warren G. Harding’s death in 1923.

  Popular hysteria bred confused thought. Most strikes had centered on wages or conditions on the shop floor, but now labor militancy merged with socialism and anarchism, notions deemed foreign and un-American. A poem published in a steel industry magazine linked politics to nativity:

  Said Dan McGann to a foreign man who worked at the self-same bench.

  “Let me tell you this,” and for emphasis, he flourished a monkey wrench,

  “Don’t talk to me of this bourgoissee, don’t open your mouth to speak

  “Of your socialists or your anarchists, don’t mention the bolshevik,

  “For I’ve had enough of this foreign stuff, I’m sick as a man can be

  “Of the speech of hate, and I’m telling you straight, that this is the land for me.”9*

  Anarchists had presented a popular target since the late nineteenth century, and in the present unrest a murder in Massachusetts offered opportunity to clobber anarchism in the persons of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, Italian laborers associated with Luigi Galleani, publisher of the revolutionary Cronaca Sovversiva (Subversive Chronicle). Sacco and Vanzetti, convicted of murdering two security guards in the course of a robbery in Braintree, became a cause célèbre on account of the questionable conduct of their trials, which ended with the hanging of both men in 1927, after enormous controversy.†

  INVESTIGATIONS PROLIFERATED. The Saturday Evening Post, which reached some ten million Americans, ran a series of “fire alarm” articles warning of the intertwined immigrant-bolshevik menace.10 The U.S. Senate took up investigations of domestic bolshevism, hearing testimony that Jews had caused the Russian revolution. With the Post’s amplification, claims that Jews caused strikes and revolutions, bolshevism, socialism, syndicalism, strikes, and the melting pot ricocheted through a jumpy society.

  Bombs and bomb scares joined strikes as sowers of disorder. Bombs were sent to prominent men in the federal government and to post offices countrywide, aimed especially at proponents of immigration restriction. Although the identity of the bombers was not known, foreign radicals and labor organizers got the blame. American Legionnaires broke into IWW halls and beat up whomever they found, and the U.S. Justice Department began raiding socialist meeting halls far and wide in the fall. Dragnets in November yielded 249 deportable (i.e., noncitizen) radicals and took them on a “Red Special” to Ellis Island for deportation. The deportees included the famous anarchist Emma Goldman. No socialist, and certainly not Russian, Goldman was nevertheless shipped to Russia as a bolshevik.*

  The specter of a bolshevism hagriding Americans made suspect any departure from conventional thought, political or cultural. Before and during the war “Americanization” projects had attempted to teach immigrants English and turn them into Americans. But wartime fears of espionage and sedition intensified this campaign into a press for “One-hundred percent Americanism.” One hundred percent Americanism meant not simply unstinting support for the war and the closing of radical newspapers such as Il Proletario, with its sharp criticism of Ameri
can public life, but also a renunciation of old-country ways of living and speaking. Cities and employers coerced employees into Americanization courses, where the English language, civics, and an upstanding way of life were strictly encouraged. The National Americanization Committee, led by the New York labor reformer Frances Kellor, was nominally a federal organization but functioned according to Kellor’s vision. The committee defined its work as “the interpretation of American ideals, traditions, and standards and institutions to foreign-born peoples,” “the combating of anti-American propaganda activities and schemes and the stamping out of sedition and disloyalty wherever found,” “the elimination of causes of disorder, unrest, and disloyalty which make fruitful soil for un-American propagandists and disloyal agitators,” and “the creation of an understanding of and love for America and the desire of immigrants to remain in America, and have a home here, and support American institutions and laws.” These often intense classes met several times per week and were closely monitored by the authorities.11

  Before the war Henry Ford had set up one of the longest-lived one hundred percent Americanism systems in his Michigan automobile plants. Ford’s Sociological Department, a model of Americanization, taught autoworkers “how to live a clean and wholesome life,” according to Ford’s own idea of “living aright.” Speaking English, passing regular home inspections, remaining sober, keeping a savings account, and sticking to “good habits” were mandatory, while riotous living and roomers were strictly forbidden.

  The Ford school was intended to Anglo-Saxonize an immigrant workforce, as symbolized at graduation. At center stage stood a huge, papier-mâché melting pot with stairs on both sides. As the band struck up a rousing tune, graduates in their national clothing went up the stairs on one side, entered the melting pot, and came out on the other side singing “The Star-Spangled Banner” and waving American flags. They were now dressed in derby hats, pants, vests, jackets, stiff white collars, polka-dot ties, and a Ford Motor Company badge in each lapel.12 For women, Americanization meant conforming to social workers’ notions of proper housekeeping, cooking, dressing, and child rearing. In sum, Americanization imposed the use of English and patriotic conformity. Socialistic notions were nowhere to be found here or, indeed, anywhere in the American power structure.

  22

  THE MELTING POT A FAILURE?

  Every national tenet needs its stentorian voice, and for well over half a century the Saturday Evening Post spoke for American anti-immigrant racism. Founded in 1821, it was by the 1920s, with more than two million subscribers, the nation’s most popular periodical, as well as an excellent platform for a well-illustrated, coldhearted, nativist campaign against immigrants from eastern and southern Europe.

  Declaring immigration restriction a matter of life and death for the American people, the Post editor George H. Lorimer (1868–1937) so powerfully shaped public opinion that his magazine influenced American lawmakers all too eager to assuage panicky constituents. The House Committee on Immigration heard Lorimer’s Saturday Evening Post editorial of 7 February 1920 read aloud: “The matter of race must be given more attention…. [T]hese alien peoples are temperamentally and racially unfitted for easy assimilation…. The rank and file of these unassimilated aliens still live mentally in the ghetto…. In thought they are still stoned by the gentile…. They are serfs to tradition—narrow, suspicious, timid, brutal, rapacious….”1 The races in question, of course, were white.

  Part of Lorimer’s genius was his ability to blend his message with a great gift for recruiting talented writers and artists. In 1916, for instance, he hired a green young painter on the strength of two covers painted on spec; Norman Rockwell subsequently painted Post covers for forty-five years. And although Lorimer’s personal politics leaned far to the right, he did not hesitate to employ writers like Sinclair Lewis, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Theodore Dreiser, Jack London, and Stephen Crane, who stood more to his left. But Lorimer did make sure that one man bigger than all the foregoing agreed with him right down the line.2

  Kenneth L. Roberts (1885–1957) harbored a great distaste for southern and eastern Europeans—especially Jews—and an abhorrence for racial “mongrelization.” Both Roberts and Lorimer believed that immigration would extinguish the race of native Americans, because “races cannot be crossbred without mongrelization any more than dogs.” A proud Maine Yankee whose ancestors, he claimed loudly, came to Maine in 1639, Roberts graduated from Cornell University in 1908.3 During the First World War, he served in the U.S. Army’s Siberian Expeditionary Force. He joined the Saturday Evening Post staff in 1919 and quickly succeeded. In the first seven months of 1919 alone, he earned $7,700, at a time when doctors and lawyers earned around $2,000 a year.4

  Roberts stayed with the Post for ten years, before leaving in 1928 to write historical fiction, books that are still read and appreciated, especially by the listeners of North Country Radio in northern New York State and the guests on Garrison Keillor’s Prairie Home Companion cruises.* Therefore, the best portrait of Roberts appeared some two decades after his Post pieces on immigration. In 1940, on the occasion of the publication of his new novel Oliver Wiswell, Time magazine celebrated his best-selling novelist’s career with a cover story.5 His Northwest Passage (1937), a novel celebrating his ancestors in the French and Indian wars, was made into a well-received 1940 movie vehicle for Spencer Tracy. Universally popular, Roberts received honorary degrees from Colby, Dartmouth, Bowdoin, and Middlebury Colleges and shortly before his death, in 1957, a special Pulitzer Prize citation for historical fiction. Time called him “the finest U.S. historical novelist since James Fenimore Cooper.” (See figure 22.1, Kenneth Roberts.) But our interest in Roberts lies in the context of the 1920s.

  Fig. 22.1. Kenneth Roberts, “Angry Man’s Romance,” cover story, Time magazine, 25 November 1940.

  Even friends admitted that Roberts was a “difficult human being…among the most irascible men alive, whose conversation was profusely decorated with profanity.”6 But, at bottom, he—like his editor Lorimer and the Post cartoonist Herbert Johnson—detested anything having to do with progressive reform. Roberts came to hate the New Deal and its architect, Franklin D. Roosevelt, so much that “he glued Roosevelt dimes to the clamshells he used as ashtrays, the better to grind ashes into FDR’s face.”7 Even Lorimer, no friend of immigrants or Jews, had to tone down Roberts’s blatant racism before his articles could appear in the Post. In his books Roberts speaks freely about “damned half-negro Italians, half-Mongol Jews, and thoroughly bastardized Greeks and Levantines.”8

  DURING THE great unrest following the First World War, Lorimer asked Roberts to investigate postwar immigrants. The upshot, in 1920–21, was Roberts’s pungent, firsthand reports from Europe, eventually gathered from his Saturday Evening Post pieces into a 1922 volume called Why Europe Leaves Home.

  Immigration had reached crisis proportions, Roberts howled. It absolutely had to be stopped. Agreeing with his editor Lorimer three times in one article, Roberts termed immigration restriction “a matter of life and death for the American people.” The threat was racial: either the United States would break up into a series of racial groups, fighting, bickering, haggling “over their alien racial differences,” or, worse, “a new composite race of people wholly different from the Americans of the present day” would emerge, a motley, inefficient, mongrelized race.9 Having roamed far and wide on the Post’s dime, Roberts described Czechs as “backward, illiterate, dirty, thick-headed,” and English workingmen as “runty, stunted, malformed, buck-toothed, obviously mal-nourished, diseased and generally wretched specimens.” Southern Italians had descended from the mongrelized slaves of the Roman empire. Because the American nation, like ancient Greece and Rome, grew out of blond Nordic genius, mongrelization would ruin the United States as surely as it ruined the ancients.10 And so it went.

  The intensity and widespread circulation of Roberts’s anti-Semitic venom merged into an ugly tide of hatred. Pounding away at the Jews as “m
ean-faced, shifty-eyed,” and “unassimilatable [sic]” “human parasites,” “a poisoned emigration from Europe,” and the natural agents of bolshevism, Roberts’s articles herald a deepening preoccupation with Jews in popular discourse.11 Anti-Semitism was already well established in the United States but grew increasingly abusive in the early twentieth century. Before the war Jews had figured as only one in a list of inferior Europeans, along with Slavs and Italians. Now Jews moved to the top, personifying the menace of immigration and bolshevism in racial terms.*

  One example of the stereotypes assigned to Jewish immigrants, often termed “Hebrews,” lay in the popular work of the Wisconsin professor Edward A. Ross. Deemed an expert on immigration since his 1901 lecture on race suicide, Ross repeated familiar stereotypes in his widely read and influential The Old World in the New: The Significance of Past and Present Immigration to the American People (1914): Jews are loud and pushy; they lie and cheat; Jewish men pursue Gentile rather than Jewish girls. Ross repeated the familiar orthodoxy of the time that immigrants were lowering the level of American intelligence and American beauty. In a famous phrase echoing Shakespeare’s The Tempest, Ross called new immigrants “the Caliban type” who “belong in skins, in wattled huts at the close of the Great Ice Age. These oxlike men are descendants of those who always stayed behind.”12 Ross maintains, with many others at the time, that race purity produces beauty. As we know, William Z. Ripley had in 1908 also predicted that the crossing of heterogeneous strains would make Americans ugly. Ross foresees “a good many faces of a ‘chaotic constitution,’” the outcome of the blending of “dissimilar” European races.