The History of White People

by Nell Irvin Painter

  THE CHANGE from 1920s hysteria to 1940s cultural pluralism occurred simultaneously in politics and in culture. As the Irish experience had illustrated, voting played a crucial role in the making of Americans out of the despised race of Celts. Though now snuggled into the Nordic race fold, Irish Americans continued to face discrimination as Catholics. But their difference no longer seemed as intrinsic and permanent as when they were disdained as members of the Celtic race. Indeed, voting made all the difference in the world.

  Overall voting participation had fallen steadily since its high point in 1896, when about 80 percent of all eligible voters had cast their ballots. After the turn of the century, none of the political parties—Republican, Democratic, or Socialist—mobilized voters at the grass roots. Immigrants and, increasingly, their children hardly voted at all. The effect of the 1920 Nineteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, allowing women to vote, was simply to aggravate low voter participation by doubling the number of eligible voters without mobilizing women to come to the polls. Poor and working-class women outside of college suffrage clubs seldom overcame social obstacles to their voting. In 1924, only about 49 percent of eligible voters actually voted.4

  People who did vote were more likely native-born of native parentage and economically prosperous. Since both Republicans and Democrats in Congress supported immigration restriction and prohibition, political parties, as the journalist Walter Lippmann noted, remained “irrelevant.” Consequently, as immigrants from southern and eastern Europe gradually naturalized (a process that usually took a decade or more) and their American-born children came of age, they lacked motivation to go to the polls. Only the Irish and their children took full advantage of politics, being well acquainted with the distribution of patronage jobs.5 In Laughing in the Jungle (1932) the Slovenian-born journalist Louis Adamic describes the immigrant state of political consciousness even after settling permanently in the United States: “the Bohunks…had little interest in American events, institutions, and politics…. Saturday evenings and Sunday afternoons, when they came together, the talk was largely about affairs in their native villages. Their newspapers devoted a good part of their space to clippings from the small-town sheets of southeastern Europe.”6 But things began to change in the late 1920s.

  The 1928 presidential race of New York’s Democratic governor, Al Smith, created much controversy, dividing the citizenry over prohibition and religion—especially Protestant versus Catholic. While the losing Smith campaign brought more voters to the polls in immigrant neighborhoods, the victory of the cold-fish, ultra-Anglo-Saxon Herbert Hoover hardly kept them mobilized. The outcome might have been different if the colorful, down-to-earth Smith had won, but his Catholicism and immigrant background proved too great an obstacle, given the shape of the electorate in 1928.7 For working-class voters of all backgrounds, only the policies the New Deal made politics engaging.

  THE NEW DEAL policies of the first hundred days in 1933, notably the Civilian Conservation Corps and the Works Progress Administration, did bring new voters out in droves. For the first time, the federal government was addressing the crisis facing working people, so many of them from immigrant backgrounds.8 In 1934 and, especially, in 1936, masses of young voters flocked to the polls. People who had not voted, voted now, and they voted Democratic. In Chicago, for instance, the electorate was 100 percent larger in 1936 than in 1920.9

  The New Deal coalition supporting Franklin D. Roosevelt was solidly working-class. During the First World War hundreds of thousands of black southerners had moved to jobs in industrial centers of the North and Midwest, and they represented one of the four members of the coalition. Well-educated, middle-class intellectuals of progressive politics represented the second. White southerners who traditionally voted for the Democratic party of the Solid South were a third, and last came a coalition of immigrants and their children, often oriented toward organized labor.

  Organized labor reaped enormous benefit from the New Deal, with an upsurge of industrial (as opposed to skilled) organizing that brought millions into the labor fold in the mid-1930s, under the aegis of the surging new Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO). Emboldened unions meant labor power, in the form of protection from arbitrary shop floor management and, potent in the long run, increased wages. For the immigrant working class—and outside the South the working class consisted overwhelmingly of immigrants and their children—better wages laid the groundwork for economic mobility. This is not to say that the whole New Deal coalition was prolabor. Not at all.

  The New Deal coalition, in fact, was as lumpy as could be, with certain parts working against the interests of others. The needs of working-class northern black voters, for instance, took a backseat to the powerful southern Democrats’ obsession with white supremacy and abhorrence of labor unions.10 Southerners in Congress kept the New Deal segregated, so that black people were largely excluded from policies regarding labor, housing, education. The newly created Social Security Administration, for example, excluded the two largest categories of black workers, those laboring on farms and in domestic service. The military, of course, remained either segregated (Army, Navy) or exclusionary (Marines, Air Force). African Americans got the worst of it, and President Roosevelt also balanced the interests of his Jewish constituencies against the preferences of his Catholics, as in the case of the radio priest Father Charles Coughlin.

  COUGHLIN BROADCAST from Royal Oak, Michigan, a former Klan stronghold not far from Henry Ford’s Dearborn, both near Detroit. In the late 1920s Ford, in his seventies, had folded his newspaper and largely withdrawn his anti-Semitic crusade, handing his mantle to the nationally popular Coughlin, with whom he lunched monthly.11 At first Coughlin supported the New Deal, and Roosevelt envisioned Coughlin as a conduit to Catholic voters. Two influential Irish Catholic intermediaries smoothed Roosevelt’s approach to Coughlin: the wealthy Joseph P. Kennedy of Massachusetts (father of John, Robert, and Edward Kennedy) and Frank Murphy, the mayor of Detroit.12 The approach did not yield lasting fruit, however, for Coughlin soured on the New Deal and stepped up his anti-Semitic broadcasts.13 Anti-Semitism increased in visibility in the United States with the National Socialists’ seizure of power in Germany in 1933.

  German Nazis did not lack supporters in the United States, although the Nuremberg Laws of 1935, which expelled Jewish Germans from a wide range of jobs and institutions, made pro-German sentiments increasingly controversial. Prominent Americans such as William Randolph Hearst, who had extolled Benito Mussolini, Italy’s Fascist dictator since 1922, did back away from Hitler’s more toxic Germany, with its internecine violence, negative eugenics, Jew-baiting, and illegal rearmament.14 Nonetheless, Henry Ford and another hero of American technology found ways to admire Germany. Charles Lindbergh had soared into legend in 1927 as the “Lone Eagle” by flying across the Atlantic alone in a tiny airplane. He remained a hero in the 1930s—indeed, he remains a hero today, thanks to his amazing feat of individual skill and bravery.

  After his triumphant return from France, Lindbergh had taken Ford, then sixty-four, on a plane ride in August 1927. Ford, in turn, made Lindbergh a technological consultant, and the two stayed in close touch until the Lindberghs left the United States in 1935 after the highly publicized kidnapping and murder of their son. Ford remembered later, “When Charles comes out here, we only talk about the Jews.” As a resumption of the European war loomed in 1939, Lindbergh published a screamingly racist article in Readers’ Digest, in which he cited aviation as “another barrier between the teeming millions of Asia and the Grecian inheritance of Europe…priceless possessions which permit the White race to live at all in a pressing sea of Yellow, Black, and Brown…. We, the heirs of European culture, are on the verge of a disastrous war, a war within our own family of nations, a war which will reduce the strength and destroy the treasures of the White race…. [I]t is time to turn from our quarrels and to build our White ramparts again.”15 Ford nodded in agreement.

  Ford and Lindberg
h also had German honors in common. Both received the Grand Service Cross of the Supreme Order of the German Eagle, the highest honor to a distinguished foreigner, in 1938—Lindbergh in Germany, Ford in Detroit before an audience of fifteen hundred prominent citizens.16 It was not until the pogrom of Kristallnacht in 1938 and the onset of ever more violent attacks on Jews in Germany and Austria that the tide truly turned, and it became more difficult to find anything good to say about the Nazis.

  Once the United States entered the war that had resumed in 1939, Americans, led by President Franklin Roosevelt and his New Dealers, drew sharper contrasts between Nazi racism and American inclusion. They pointed out that whereas Germany and Japan, the country’s two prime enemies, based their national identities in race, the United States had become a nation of nations—Walt Whitman’s words in Leaves of Grass of 1855—a nation united in its diversity. This version of the society had been heard earlier in the twentieth century.

  BEFORE THE hysteria associated with the First World War snuffed it out, a nascent and similar cultural pluralism had been taking shape. One early example was the Menorah Journal, a magazine created in 1915 by Jewish students at Harvard seeking a middle road between their religious and their national identities, between living as Jews and living as Americans. One of them, Horace M. Kallen (1882–1974), answered Edward A. Ross’s intemperate The Old World in the New (1914), first in two articles for the Nation in February 1915, then in a book, Culture and Democracy in the United States: Studies in the Group Psychology of the American Peoples (1924).17 His repudiation of the purely Anglo-Saxon character of the United States came to be known as “cultural pluralism.”*

  Kallen chronicled wave after wave of European immigrants, beginning with the British, Irish, Germans, and Scandinavians, and continuing with others long denigrated as “new immigrants”: French Canadians, Italians, Slavs, Jews. They deserved to be integrated, whereas the Anglo-Saxon stock was highly overrated, whether in burnt-out New England or in the South, where “the native white stock, often degenerate and backward, prevail among the whites…[who] live among nine million negroes, whose own mode of living tends, by its mere massiveness [to contaminate the whites].”18 Note that non-Europeans do not figure as immigrants or as constituents of Kallen’s ideal America.

  Confusingly, nor do the children of European immigrants come off very well. Kallen belonged to the numerous throng of would-be friends of the immigrant who looked askance at their American-born children. The second generation, he regretted, “devotes itself feverishly to the attainment of similarity [to Anglo-Saxons]. The older social tradition is lost by attrition or thrown off for advantage.” Crime and vice appeal as routes to wealth and shallow amusement.19 Better they should return to the picturesque immigrant ways of their parents. So much for a melting pot.

  Rather than proposing, à la Henry Ford, an Americanizing melting pot, in which immigrant “ethnic types” would melt into ersatz Anglo-Saxons or be forced to leave the United States, Kallen envisioned American culture as “a great and truly democratic commonwealth,” as “an orchestration of mankind. As in an orchestra, every type of instrument has its specific timbre and tonality, founded in its substance and form; as every type has its appropriate theme and melody in the whole symphony, so in society each ethnic group is the natural instrument, its spirit and culture are its theme and melody, and the harmony and dissonances and discords of them all make the symphony of civilization.”20 But Kallen’s was a symphony of purely European civilization.

  The progressive intellectuals Randolph Bourne and John Dewey quickly echoed Kallen’s preference for ethnic color in 1916 and 1917. Bourne welcomed “our aliens” into American culture as equal partners with the Anglo-Saxon, heralding a new United States: “we have all unawares been building up the first international nation…. America is already the world-federation in miniature…the peaceful living side by side.” Dewey admitted, “[T]he theory of the Melting Pot always gave me rather a pang,” because he disliked the idea of “a uniform and unchanging product.” Speaking to Jewish college students, Dewey much appreciates difference, and is willing to support the cause of Zionism.21 These sentiments had been a promising start, but such welcoming words largely went silent during the 1920s. Then, in the 1930s, a defender of the immigrants’ American children appeared in popular culture.

  LOUIS ADAMIC (1898 or 1899–1951) was born in Blato, Slovenia, then an Austrian possession.* After his prosperous peasant parents sent him to high school, he immigrated to the United States in 1913, a self-described “young Bohunk.” Settling in New York City, Adamic did unskilled labor in the offices of the Narodni Glas, a Slovenian-language newspaper, one of thousands of institutions immigrants had created to serve their communities. Ambitious and hardworking, he began translating articles from the New York World into Slovenian, then graduated to writing about Slovenians in America. When Narodni Glas folded in 1916, a victim of the persecution of foreign-language periodicals during the First World War, Adamic joined the Army, where he gained U.S. citizenship. Demobilized in 1923 in San Pedro, California, the port of Los Angeles, he spent the next six years there, working and writing colorfully about himself and the Croatian workers in San Pedro.22

  These articles so charmed California literati, notably Cary McWilliams, Mary Austin, and Upton Sinclair, that they eased Adamic’s approach to H. L. Mencken, who in 1928 began publishing the first of eight of Adamic’s articles in the American Mercury, the most fashionable literary magazine of the 1920s.23 (See figure 25.1, Louis Adamic.)

  After relocating to New York City in 1929, Adamic began to publish at a furious rate. His first real book, Dynamite: The Story of Class Violence in America, appeared in 1931 to favorable reviews and a boost from the Nobel prize–winning novelist Sinclair Lewis.24† Dynamite signaled Adamic’s abiding sympathy for workers, which soon made him a supporter of the CIO, the great industrial labor federation born of the New Deal. His 1932 autobiography, Laughing in the Jungle, a series of satirical sketches, also well received, earned him a prestigious Guggenheim literary fellowship in 1932.

  As a Guggenheim Fellow, Adamic was able to visit his former home—part of Yugoslavia since the end of the First World War—for the first time since leaving it nearly two decades earlier, bringing along his non-Slav American wife, Stella. In Split, Dalmatia, Adamic met Ivo (John) F. Lupis-Vukich, formerly publisher of a foreign-language newspaper in Chicago, who lectured Adamic on the importance of second-generation immigrants in the United States, the “strangers” most Americans did not understand. Adamic took this idea to heart.25

  Fig. 25.1. Louis Adamic on his book tour, 1934.

  A chronicle of his stay in Yugoslavia, The Native’s Return (1934) became a Book-of-the-Month Club main selection, quickly sold fifty thousand books, and remained a best seller for nearly two years. It brought Adamic twenty or more letters a day from Slavs living in the United States. In the course of promoting his book in heavily Slav industrial centers, Adamic delivered his “Ellis Island and Plymouth Rock” lecture hundreds of times, becoming the prime spokesman for immigrants and their children. His response to the crowds and to yet another nativist editorial by George Horace Lorimer of the Saturday Evening Post coalesced into “Thirty Million New Americans” in Harper’s Magazine in November 1934. Despite its patronizing tone, this piece quickly became a classic statement of 1930s cultural pluralism.

  “Thirty Million New Americans” and Adamic’s subsequent books and articles sought to recast the fundamental identity of Americans. His main points were simple: the U.S. population is diverse, not essentially Anglo-Saxon, and immigrants are full-fledged Americans. As he said often, Ellis Island deserves a place at the center of American origins, right next to Plymouth Rock. As the product of so many regions and cultures, the children of immigrants carried a vast potential to “enrich the civilization and deepen the culture in this New World.”26

  In many ways Adamic unwittingly picked up themes from the nineteenth and very early twentieth cent
uries. His view of immigrants even shared a point with Ralph Waldo Emerson. Whereas Emerson had blithely consigned these “guano races” to faceless hard work, death, then service to the greater American good as mere fertilizer, Adamic paused lovingly with immigrant workers while they survived. He gave them names, such as Peter Molek, and listened to their wisdom. Broken after decades of dangerous work in American mines and steel mills, they recognized their alternating role as both builders of American progress and—their own word—“dung.”

  “The Bohunks indeed were ‘dung,’” Adamic agrees in his autobiography, but he loved “their natural health, virility, and ability to laugh” and the way they saw themselves as working-class in their adopted country. A Slav without formal education, like the fictional Molek, would see injustice where “millionaires who wore diamonds in their teeth and had bands playing while they bathed in champagne.” Living in miserable slums, impoverished immigrant laborers recognized that the fundamental flaw of American society lay in the maldistribution of wealth.27

  In fact, ambivalence dominated Adamic’s attitude toward his immigrant peers. Though Kallen was writing two decades earlier from Harvard, and Adamic focused on working-class neighborhoods in Pennsylvania and the industrial Midwest, both authors depict American-born children of immigrants somewhat unfavorably.* As Adamic describes them, most in the second generation are ashamed of their parents and filled with feelings of inferiority, rendering them “invariably hollow, absurd, objectionable persons,” whose “limp handshakes” give him the “creeps.”28 In time they may contribute to society, but at the moment they constitute a problem, and here Adamic’s ambivalence emerges full-blown. The children of immigrants present “one of the greatest and most basic problems in this country; in some respects, greater and more basic [than] the problem of unemployment, and almost as urgent.” They are a “problem” thirteen times in the article’s eleven pages, on account of their “feelings of inferiority” (sixteen times). Their “racial” identities (ten times) separated them from “old [Anglo-Saxon] stock” Americans (nine times). Even their champion was using the language of races to paint a dismal picture.