The History of White People

by Nell Irvin Painter

  But while Adamic might join Kallen in the language of race in 1934, he departs from him in two important ways: Adamic usually links race to culture, as if to hedge his bets on permanence. Members of his second generation are distinctive by “race and culture,” whereas for Kallen a generation earlier, race was the same thing as culture. Adamic glimpses the possibility of change in the thirty million new Americans, for he notes the ability of a few young people to become attractive and successful. They simply need encouragement to become full-fledged Americans.

  ENCOURAGEMENT CAME from several quarters, notably from a New Jersey Quaker, Rachel Davis DuBois (1892–1993), a Woodbury high school teacher inspired by W. E. B. Du Bois and angered by Father Charles Coughlin’s broadcast anti-Semitism. DuBois pioneered what was called “intercultural education” by establishing the (nongovernmental) Service Bureau for Intercultural Education in 1934 to help other teachers reach out to their second-and third-generation immigrant students and incorporate information about them in their curricula—multiculturalism avant la lettre.29* As she approached the federal government and radio broadcasters with a plan to counter derogatory images of alien races, Adamic was one of her supporters.*

  By 1940, some 83 percent of American homes had a radio, which the Office of Education in the U.S. Department of the Interior was willing to use if an outlet could be found to carry DuBois’s programs on American history integrating the contributions of (virtually) all groups of Americans.† The National Broadcasting Corporation turned DuBois down. Speaking for NBC, James R. Angell, former president of Yale University, found her topic too controversial, concluding, “I think I should let this dog sleep. Certainly I am not disposed to stir up the menagerie just at the moment.” The Columbia Broadcasting Corporation, however, welcomed the project and broadcast Americans All, Immigrants All in twenty-six weekly radio segments between November 1938 and May 1939. (See figure 25.2, Americans All, Immigrants All.)

  The series title came from a 1938 Franklin Roosevelt speech to the Daughters of the American Revolution, in which he announced, “We are all immigrants.” In broadcast order, the programs focused on English, Hispanic, Scotch-Irish and Welsh, Negro, French-speaking, Irish, German-speaking, Scandinavian, Jewish, Slavic, Oriental, Italian, and Near Eastern Americans.30 Success stories all, the various outsiders made their way into American mainstream success via dedicated, hard work. Well, not quite all. Negroes, scrunched down in the lower left-hand corner of the advertisement and dwarfed by talismans of the old slaveholding South, were still struggling for inclusion. Even so, by including African Americans as Americans, Americans All, Immigrants All marked a turning point. For most Americans, seeing Negroes as Americans meant something new under the sun.

  FROM ST. Jean de Crèvecoeur in 1782 to Horace Kallen in 1915 and into the late 1930s, to speak of American “races” was to speak of Americans of Jewish, Slavic, Italian, Irish, German, and, even, “Anglo-Saxon” and “Teutonic” background, identities assumed to be more or less permanent. Black people were relegated to a separate and lower racial compartment along with Native American Indians and Asians, not entirely American, if not completely alien. The American was a figure of European heritage.

  Fig. 25.2. Cover of advertising brochure for Americans All, Immigrants All, 1938.

  By the late 1930s, however, the prospect of war with the racial state of Nazi Germany was enlarging the concept of American, so that nonwhites, notably black people, began to gain a toehold. One of the most popular radio broadcasts of the era reflected a new inclusiveness. The broadcast in question was not America’s all-time most popular radio program, the blackface Amos ’n’ Andy Show, but a special broadcast starring an honest-to-goodness black person.

  The African American lawyer, actor, and singer Paul Robeson (1898–1976) performed this broader version of American identity by debuting Ballad for Americans in November 1939 before a CBS radio audience. An eleven-minute cantata originally composed for a left-leaning Federal Theater Project review in 1937, Ballad for Americans asks, “Am I an American?” and answers resoundingly, “I’m just an Irish, Negro, Jewish, Italian, French and English, Spanish, Russian, Chinese, Polish, Scotch, Hungarian, Litvak, Swedish, Finnish, Canadian, Greek and Turk, and Czech and double Czech American. And that ain’t all. I was baptized Baptist, Methodist, Congregationalist, Lutheran, Atheist, Roman Catholic, Orthodox Jewish, Presbyterian, Seventh Day Adventist, Mormon, Quaker, Christian Scientist and lots more.”

  A twenty-minute ovation erupted at the song’s end, and appreciative callers jammed the network’s switchboard for two hours. A runaway hit, Ballad for Americans went on to serve as the theme song for the 1940 Republican nominating convention.31 The two racial systems—one for the races of Europe and the “alien” races, one for the black/white dichotomy—were beginning to collide, and Robeson’s generous list of American roots began an ever so slow and bumpy process of substitution of a multiple for a singular—the American—national identity.

  26

  THE THIRD ENLARGEMENT OF AMERICAN WHITENESS

  The Second World War rearranged Americans by the millions. Some 12 percent among a population of 131.7 million—roughly 16 million people—served in the armed forces, which threw together people whose parents hailed from all over Europe.1 Millions of civilians migrated to jobs around the country, further diluting parochial habits. Some 2.5 million southerners left the South, and northerners went south to training camps and war work.2 Louis Adamic had dreamed of a second, more homogenized immigrant generation, and one had already started in the Civilian Conservation Corps, fruit of the New Deal’s earliest days. Now, a decade later, millions rather than tens of thousands left home.

  Let us remember that this mixing occurred with several notable exceptions. Black Americans—who numbered some 13.3 million in 1940—were, of course, largely excluded. Their time would come much later, and with revolutionary urgency. But also excluded were Asian Americans. Even so, other Americans—provided they qualified as white for federal purposes—experienced a revolution of their own. Indeed, the white category itself had expanded enormously, well beyond European immigrants and their children. Included now were Mexicans and Mexican Americans.

  The handsome Julio Martinez from San Antonio plays a leading role in the multicultural Army squad of Normal Mailer’s best-selling war novel The Naked and the Dead (1948). No bit player, Martinez, like Red Valsen, the Swede from Montana, and Sam Croft, the Anglo-Saxon hunter from Texas, rates a chapter of his own.3 Since the mid-1930s, federal and Texas state laws had defined Mexicans as white and allowed them to vote in Texas’s white primary.4 While Asian American and African American service personnel were routinely segregated and mistreated, Mexican Americans fought in white units and appeared in the media of the war, witness the boom in popular war movies like Bataan (1944), starring the Cuban Desi Arnaz (who in the 1950s would become a television star as Lucille Ball’s husband in the long-running I Love Lucy series).

  Meeting new people in new places broke down barriers. The novelist Joseph Heller (1923–99) left his Jewish corner of Brooklyn’s Coney Island and went south to the Norfolk Navy Yard in Portsmouth, Virginia. Heller was not surprised to find that local whites studiously ignored their black fellow workers in the navy yard. But the “uniform virulence with which Protestants regarded Catholics” amazed him. Luckily for Heller, such hostility was not his problem; as a Jewish New Yorker, he became a novelty, treated well and chatted up warmly in lunchtime breaks—with a single exception.

  One discussion, he wrote in his memoir, “turned to religion and I chose to volunteer the information that Jesus was in fact Jewish and of presumed Jewish parentage. The immediate and united stiffening of the entire circle of white faces was an instantaneous warning that they had never been told this before and did not want to be told it now, or ever. Even my closest pals bristled.”5 Similar lessons in cultural difference occurred countless times.

  It was federal policy that supplied lessons in diversity, and fe
deral policy also defined its limits, by means of a rigidly enforced segregation that imprisoned 110,000 Japanese Americans and counted up fractions of Negro “blood” in order to separate black servicemen from white.6 By and large, only those being kept apart and their allies noticed the segregation for quite a long while.* The loudest notes of wartime stressed inclusion, and the song of brotherhood echoed over the years.

  THIS THEME of inclusion had emerged during the New Deal of the 1930s as a means of strengthening the Democratic allegiance of new voters in immigrant neighborhoods. President Roosevelt addressed immigrants and their children in a spirit of oneness. The outbreak of war in Europe in 1939 intensified American condemnation of intolerance. One of the president’s “four freedoms” defining the goals of the war was freedom of religion.7† In 1940, the popular picture magazine Look showed how far religious prejudice had fallen out of favor by publishing a special issue denouncing anti-Semitism. When Charles Lindbergh in September 1941 blamed the war on the British, the Roosevelt administration, and the Jews, the normally cautious New York Times denounced his anti-Semitism.8‡ An example of official wartime Americanism appears in the seven propaganda movies the U.S. Army Signal Corps commissioned. Entitled Why We Fight and directed by Hollywood’s Frank Capra (1897–1991). These films sought to teach enlisted men the democratic basis of the war.

  The Capra family’s story, one of Sicilian immigrants, presents a cogent example of two experiences, one older and one newer. As eventually a fabulously successful filmmaker, Frank Capra stands out from the crowd. His older brother, Ben, was not so lucky. Frank and the rest of his family immigrated to California in 1903 to join Ben, whose life had been more representative of Italian immigrants’ misadventures.

  Ben Capra had contracted malaria while working in the sugarcane fields of Louisiana with other Italians and African Americans. A black woman had nursed him back to health, and he stayed with the black family for two years. Later, in New Orleans, Ben fell victim to the beating, kidnapping, and transport that ensnared many a vulnerable immigrant of the time. Shipped to a sugar island in the Pacific Ocean, he and a buddy escaped peonage in a rowboat and were miraculously rescued by an Australian liner and taken on to California. There Ben settled,* and there his younger brother Frank spent, as he reports, a miserable American childhood: “I hated being poor. Hated being a peasant. Hated being a scrounging newskid trapped in the sleazy Sicilian ghetto of Los Angeles. My family couldn’t read or write. I wanted out. A quick out.”9 The military offered a route of escape.

  Frank Capra served in the U.S. Army in the First World War and was naturalized a U.S. citizen in 1920. His extraordinary film career began in the 1930s, culminating in iconic films such as It Happened One Night (1934), Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936), You Can’t Take It with You (1938), and Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939). In Mr. Deeds Goes to Town and Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, ordinary Americans defeat the nefarious forces of financial and political corruption, confirming the power of upstanding, small-town individuals. The good guys were always unquestionably Anglo-Saxon.† Even scenes set in cities and on farms show exclusively Anglo-Saxon crowds forming an all-American, Anglo-Saxon backdrop to the all-American, Anglo-Saxon protagonists played by, say, Gary Cooper or Jimmy Stewart.‡ Omnipresent Nordicism characterized Hollywood feature films throughout the period, even though most filmmakers—writers, directors, producers—came from immigrant backgrounds, both Jewish and Catholic.

  Frank Capra’s screenwriters Robert Riskin and Sidney Buchman were eastern European Jews. Buchman, a communist, would be black-listed during the anticommunist 1950s. Not that the Left would have offered Capra, Riskin, and Buchman ready examples of ethnic multiculturalism, for the Communist Party took its cues from the movies. Prominent communists in the United States routinely exchanged their European ethnic names for anodyne English-sounding ones: the Finnish American Avro Halberg became Gus Hall; the Jewish American Solomon Israel Regenstreif became Johnny Gates; the Croatian Stjepan Mesaros became Steve Nelson; Dorothy Rosenblum became Dorothy Ray Healey. Even the CP’s worker iconography gave the American worker a Nordic face and a tall, muscular body.10

  Popular literature also mirrored the movies, even as the war effort stressed diversity. A 1945 study by Columbia’s Bureau of Applied Social Research found that stories published between 1937 and 1943 in magazines reaching twenty million readers featured 889 characters, of whom 90.8 percent were Anglo-Saxon. The rare non-Anglo-Saxons were stereotyped as menial workers, gangsters, crooked fight promoters, and thieving nightclub owners, while Anglo-Saxons in central roles were honest and admirable, their superiority taken for granted.11 The advertising seeping into every corner of American popular culture beamed out smiling Nordics free, beautiful, and desirable.

  With real American identity coded according to race, being a real American often meant joining antiblack racism and seeing oneself as white against the blacks. Looking back to the war years, an Italian American recalled a tempting invitation to take sides during the Harlem riot of 1943: “I remember standing on a corner, a guy would throw the door open and say, ‘Come on down.’ They were goin’ to Harlem to get in the riot. They’d say, ‘Let’s beat up some niggers.’ It was wonderful. It was new. The Italo-Americans stopped being Italo and started becoming Americans. We joined the group. Now we’re like you guys, right?”12 The temptation and the decision to succumb did not pass unnoticed. Malcolm X, spokesman of the black nationalist Nation of Islam, and Toni Morrison, a Nobel Prize laureate in literature, later noted that the first English word out of the mouths of European immigrants was frequently “nigger.” Actually, Morrison said it was the second, after “okay.”13

  Much—too much—of 1940s American culture stayed stuck in the racist 1920s, although some code words fell out of fashion. The roots of “Nordic” in Madison Grant’s Nazi-like eugenics disabled it for use in the 1940s. Prewar names of the categories of dolichocephalic and brachycephalic also disappeared, though FBI “wanted” posters and mug shots continued to depict miscreants in profile as well as full-face. The shape of the head, it seems, still said a good deal. Nor did the cephalic index fade as in the American’s ideal face shape—the dolichocephalic, long-headed oval of Norman Rockwell’s quintessential Americans, rather than the brachycephalic square or round. Be tall, be blue-eyed, and, if a woman, be blond.

  Autobiographical statements of Americans born in the 1940s reveal a keen awareness of the difference between American standards of beauty and the bodies of women increasingly being called “ethnic.” This term dated back to the 1920s, but it came into common discourse only after the Second World War as a way to label the children and grandchildren of Louis Adamic’s second immigrant generation. English, German, Scandinavian, and Irish Americans did not fall under the “ethnic” rubric, which had become a new marker for the former “alien races.” An Italian American recalled his mother, in the 1940s, “referring to the Irish families on the block as ‘the Americans.’”14 For quite some time, ethnic Americans looked from afar on the “blond people,” the term of the anthropologist Karen Brodkin for the “mythical, ‘normal’ America” of magazines and television. In quest of the tall, slender “normal” American silhouette, she wrote, “my mother and I were always dieting. Dieting was about my and my mother’s aspirations to blond-people standards of feminine beauty.”15

  Much nose bobbing, hair straightening, and bleaching ensued. Anglo-Saxon ideals fell particularly hard on women and girls, for the strength and assertion of working-class women of the immigrant generations were out of place in middle-class femininity. Not only was the tall, slim Anglo-Saxon body preeminent, the body must look middle-rather than working-class.

  And the middle class was growing in actual fact. Once again, Joseph Heller explains the economic transformation that began with military service: “My total income upon entering the air force as a private was as much as I’d been able to command outside, and as an officer on flight status was greater than I was able to earn afterwar
d when starting out in my civilian pursuits.” After the war, the money just got better.16

  Here is Heller again, on top of the world in 1945: “I felt myself walking around on easy street, in a state of fine rapture. What more could I ask for? I was in love and engaged to be married (to the same young woman I was in love with). I was twenty-two years old. I would be entering college as a freshman at the University of Southern California, with tuition and related costs paid for by the government.” And the guys from his neighborhood were doing all right, too:

  After the war, Marty Kapp [a Heller neighbor] continued what technical education had begun in the navy V-12 program and graduated as a soil engineer (yet another thing I’d not heard of before). For all his career he worked as a soil engineer with the Port Authority of New York—on airfields and buildings, I know and perhaps on bridges and tunnels, too—and had risen to some kind of executive status before he died. He did well enough to die on a golf course…. I was able to go to college. Lou Berkman left the junk shop to start a plumbing supply company in Middletown, New York, and looked into real estate with the profits from that successful venture…. Sy Ostrow, who was taught Russian in the service so that he could function as an interpreter, returned to college and, with pained resignation, saw realistically that he had no better alternative than to study law.17