The History of White People

by Nell Irvin Painter

13 Alan Brinkley, Voices of Protest: Huey Long, Father Coughlin, and the Great Depression (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1982), 82–121. Coughlin was especially influential in 1934–35.

  14 David Nasaw, The Chief: The Life and Work of William Randolph Hearst (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2000), 488–90, 494–98.

  15 Reader’s Digest, Nov. 1939, pp. 62–67.

  16 Baldwin, Henry Ford and the Jews, 281–88.

  17 Horace M. Kallen, “Democracy versus the Melting-Pot,” Nation, 18 Feb. 1915, pp. 190–94, and 25 Feb. 1915, pp. 217–20, and Culture and Democracy in the United States: Studies in the Group Psychology of the American Peoples (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1924). See also Sidney Ratner, “Horace M. Kallen and Cultural Pluralism,” Modern Judaism 4, no. 2 (May 1984), 185.

  18 Kallen, “Democracy versus the Melting-Pot,” 192.

  19 Ibid., 194.

  20 Ibid., 220. Werner Sollors summed up Kallen’s vision as “Once a trombone, always a trombone!” in Beyond Ethnicity: Consent and Descent in American Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 185.

  21 Randolph Bourne, “Trans-National America,” Atlantic Monthly 118 (July 1916): 93; John Dewey, “The Principle of Nationality,” Menorah Journal 3, no. 3 (Oct. 1917): 206, 208.

  22 Adamic, Laughing in the Jungle, 67–70, 98, 101–2, 109.

  23 Ibid., 262–65; Louis Adamic, My America, 1928–1938 (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1938), 48; Dale E. Peterson, “The American Adamic: Immigrant Bard of Diversity,” Massachusetts Review 44, nos. 1–2 (Spring–Summer 2003): 235.

  24 Adamic, My America, 135, 191.

  25 Ibid., 188.

  26 Louis Adamic, “Thirty Million New Americans,” Harper’s Magazine 169 (Nov. 1934): 684, 694.

  27 Immigrants as dung in Adamic, Laughing in the Jungle, 18–20, 104, 254, 292–93, 298, 320; the quote appears on 104. Adamic never lost sight of the tremendous toll of industrial accidents on immigrants’ bodies and lives. Workplace accidents also appear as a routine part in the work of Pietro di Donato. The opening scene of his Christ in Concrete, a 1937 novel of Italian immigrant bricklayers, describes a deadly industrial accident. Christ in Concrete succeeded wildly on its initial publication, then largely disappeared from the canon of immigrant literature. Thomas J. Ferraro, in Feeling Italian: The Art of Ethnicity in America (New York: New York University Press, 2005), 52–60.

  28 Adamic, “Thirty Million New Americans,” 684, 687, 694.

  29 Barbara Diane Savage, Broadcasting Freedom: Radio, War, and the Politics of Race, 1938–1948 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999), 22–24. See also the “Inventory of the Rachel Davis DuBois Papers, 1920–1993” in the Friends Historical Library of Swarthmore College, http://www.swarthmore.edu/ Library/friends/ead/ 5035dubo.xml#bioghist.

  30 Savage, Broadcasting Freedom, 24–26, 291.

  31 Ibid., 61; Kennedy, Freedom from Fear, 761.

  CHAPTER 26: THE THIRD ENLARGEMENT OF AMERICAN WHITENESS

  1 Gary Gerstle, American Crucible: Race and Nation in the Twentieth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 188, 196, 203–4.

  2 James N. Gregory, “The Southern Diaspora and the Urban Dispossessed: Demonstrating the Census Public Use Microdata Samples,” Journal of American History 82, no. 1 (June 1995): 112, 117; Gerstle, American Crucible, 35, 196.

  3 Norman Mailer, The Naked and the Dead (New York: Rinehart, 1948), 18–20, 63–67, 156–64, 222–35.

  4 Thomas A. Guglielmo, “Fighting for Caucasian Rights: Mexicans, Mexican Americans, and the Transnational Struggle for Civil Rights in World War II Texas,” Journal of American History 92, no. 4 (March 2006): 1215–16. After 1945, Native American Indians were included with Caucasians (1232).

  5 Joseph Heller, Now and Then: From Coney Island to Here (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1998), 152–53.

  6 Ira Katznelson, When Affirmative Action Was White: An Untold History of Racial Inequality in Twentieth-Century America (New York: W. W. Norton, 2005), 101–2. See also John M. Kinder, “The Good War’s ‘Raw Chunks’: Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead and James Gould Cozzen’s Guard of Honor,” Midwest Quarterly 46, no. 2 (Winter 2005): 106, 187–202.

  7 David M. Kennedy, Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929–1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 760.

  8 “Lindbergh Sees a ‘Plot’ for War,” New York Times, 12 Sept. 1941, p. 2; “The Un-American Way,” ibid., 26 Sept. 1941, p. 22. See also “Lindbergh Is Accused of Inciting Hate,” ibid., 14 Sept. 1941, p. 25.

  9 Quoted in Gerstle, American Crucible, 173–74. See also 153, 170–75. Jonathan J. Cavallero, “Frank Capra’s 1920s Immigrant Trilogy: Immigration, Assimilation, and the American Dream,” MELUS 29, no. 2 (Summer 2004): 27–53, reminds readers that Capra’s three films of the 1920s treat the American immigrant experience and criticize the materialism at the core of the American dream.

  10 Gerstle, American Crucible, 166, 172.

  11 Louis Adamic, A Nation of Nations (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1945), 7.

  12 In Gary Gerstle, “The Working Class Goes to War,” in The War in American Culture: Society and Consciousness during World War II, ed. Lewis A. Erenberg and Susan E. Hirsch (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 118. Cynthia Skove Nevels, Lynching to Belong: Claiming Whiteness Through Racial Violence (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2008), 1, 6–7, 36, 154–160, makes a similar point.

  13 David R. Roediger, ed., Black on White: Black Writers on What It Means to Be White (New York: Schocken, 1998), 19. In 1965 the noted African American theologian Howard Thurman contended, “The immigrant who comes to this country seeking a new home soon realizes…[that the] sooner he accepts the dominant mood, the sooner will he be accepted, not as a foreigner but as a white American…. That he may have been the victim of racial, religious, or political persecution in his homeland does not matter. The general tendency is for him to make his place in the new world secure by ingratiating himself to the white community as a white man in good standing.” Thurman, The Luminous Darkness: A Personal Interpretation of the Anatomy of Segregation and the Ground of Hope (New York: Harper & Row, 1965), 36.

  14 Michael Novak, The Rise of the Unmeltable Ethnics: Politics and Culture in the Seventies (New York: Macmillan, 1972), 106–7.

  15 Karen Brodkin, How Jews Became White Folks and What That Says about Race in America (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1998), 10–11, 17.

  16 Heller, Now and Then, 167.

  17 Ibid., 167–68.

  18 Richard D. Alba, Italian Americans: Into the Twilight of Ethnicity (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1985), 75, 83–84.

  19 See Rudolph M. Susel, “Slovenes,” in Harvard Encyclopedia of American Ethnic Groups, ed. Stephan Thernstrom (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1980), 941.

  20 Theda Skocpol, “The G.I. Bill and U.S. Social Policy, Past and Future,” Social Philosophy and Policy 14 (Summer 1997): 96–97.

  21 Kenneth T. Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 206.

  22 Katznelson, When Affirmative Action Was White, 112–15.

  23 See David Kushner, Levittown: Two Families, One Tycoon, and the Fight for Civil Rights in America’s Legendary Suburb (New York: Walker, 2009). See also Tom Vanderbilt, “Alien Nations,” Bookforum 15, no. 5 (Feb.–March 2009): 14.

  24 The American Experience, “Miss America,” http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/ amex/missamerica/ peopleevents/e_inclusion.htm.

  25 Michelle Mart, “The ‘Christianization’ of Israel and Jews in 1950s America,” Religion and American Culture: A Journal of Interpretation 14, no. 1 (2004): 116–25.

  26 Robert Zussman, “Review: Still Lonely after All These Years,” Sociological Forum 16, no. 1 (March 2001): 157–58.

  27 Carol A. O’Connor, “Sorting Out the Suburbs: Patterns of Land Use, Class, and Culture,” American Quarterly 37, no. 3 (1985): 383.

  28 Lizabeth Cohen, A Consumers�
�� Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2004), 122–23.

  29 Louise DeSalvo, Crazy in the Kitchen: Food, Feuds, and Forgiveness in an Italian American Family (New York: Bloomsbury, 2004), 9–13.

  30 Cohen, Consumers’ Republic, 152–53.

  31 Thomas A. Guglielmo, “‘No Color Barrier’ Italians, Race, and Power in the United States,” in Are Italians White? How Race Is Made in America, ed. Jennifer Guglielmo and Salvatore Salerno (New York: Routledge, 2003), 29.

  32 Jonathan Rieder, Canarsie: The Jews and Italians of Brooklyn against Liberalism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985), 27–28.

  33 See Douglas S. Massey and Nancy A. Denton, American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993). Whereas the role of government was glaringly obvious and unpleasant in the creation and maintenance of public housing for the urban poor, e.g., Chicago’s depressing Robert Taylor projects, the crucial federal role in financing suburbanization was hidden, allowing home buyers to believe they had acquired their homes purely through their own virtuous, hard work. See David Freund, “Marketing the Free Market: State Intervention and the Politics of Prosperity in Metropolitan America,” in The New Suburban History, ed. Kevin M. Kruse and Thomas J. Sugrue (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 11–32, Thomas J. Sugrue, Sweet Land of Liberty: The Forgotten Struggle for Civil Rights in the North (New York: Random House, 2008), 201–7, and Thomas J. Sugrue, “The New American Dream: Renting,” Wall Street Journal, 14–15 Aug. 2009, W1–2.

  34 James Loewen, Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension of American Racism? (New York: New Press, 2005), 6–17.

  35 Katznelson, When Affirmative Action Was White, 114–15; Cohen, Consumers’ Republic, 167–72.

  36 Herbert J. Gans’s pioneering study, The Levittowners: Ways of Life and Politics in a New Suburban Community (New York: Pantheon Books, 1967), notes racial restriction only in passing, and not until p. 185.

  37 Restrictive covenants can be used for a variety of ends, from stipulating lot size to regulating where owners can cut down trees. However, the restrictive covenants in question here deal with race. When the Roosevelt administration created the FHA in 1934, its manual to sellers included a model racially restrictive covenant on the ground that “if a neighborhood is to retain stability, it is necessary that properties shall continue to be occupied by the same social and racial classes.” After the U.S. Supreme Court outlawed the enforcement of racially restrictive covenants in Shelley v. Kraemer (1948), the FHA and the VA continued to practice segregation, but not in writing. Their lending did not open suburban housing to African Americans until the 1970s. See http://www.developmentleadership.net/ current/worksheet.htm.

  38 Kenneth T. Jackson, “Race, Ethnicity, and Real Estate Appraisal: The Home Owners Loan Corporation and the Federal Housing Administration,” Journal of Urban History 6 (1980): 433. On racial segregation in the mid-twentieth-century North, see Sugrue, Sweet Land of Liberty.

  CHAPTER 27: BLACK NATIONALISM AND WHITE ETHNICS

  1 Bruce Perry, Malcolm: The Life of a Man Who Changed Black America (Barrytown, N.Y.: Station Hill Press, 1991), 2–3, 113–17, 139–41, 161–62.

  2 Autobiography of Malcolm X as Told to Alex Haley (New York: Ballantine Books, 1965), 404. See also Thulani Davis and Howard Chapnick, Malcolm X: The Great Photographs (New York: Stewart Tabori and Chang, 1993).

  3 Perry, Malcolm, 115–16; Nell Irvin Painter, Creating Black Americans: African-American History and Its Meanings (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 254.

  4 Perry, Malcolm: 181. See also Nell Irvin Painter, “Malcolm X across the Genres,” American Historical Review 98, no. 2 (April 1993): 396–404.

  5 Perry, Malcolm, 175–76.

  6 Michael Novak, The Rise of the Unmeltable Ethnics: Politics and Culture in the Seventies (New York: Macmillan, 1972), 71–77.

  7 James Baldwin, The Price of the Ticket: Collected Nonfiction, 1948–1985 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1985), xiv, xviv, xx, 431–32.

  8 Margaret Mead and James Baldwin, A Rap on Race (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1971), and Kai T. Erikson, In Search of Common Ground: Conversations with Erik H. Erikson and Huey P. Newton (New York: W. W. Norton, 1973).

  9 Michael Omi and Howard Winant, Racial Formation in the United States from the 1960s to the 1990s, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 1994), 99.

  10 See Mary Waters, Ethnic Options: Choosing Identities in America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 90–93, and Micaela de Leonardo, “Racial Fairy Tales,” Nation 253, no. 20 (9 Dec. 1991): 752–54. Herbert Gans coined the phrase “symbolic ethnicity” in “Symbolic Ethnicity: The Future of Ethnic Groups and Cultures in America,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 2 (Jan. 1979): 1–20.

  11 Pierre L. van den Berghe, Race and Ethnicity: Essays in Comparative Sociology (New York: Basic Books, 1970), 10. Van den Berghe explains, “What makes a society multiracial is not the presence of physical differences between groups, but the attribution of social significance to such physical differences as may exist.”

  12 See Richard Alba, Ethnic Identity: The Transformation of White America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990), and Waters, Ethnic Options.

  13 Novak, Rise of the Unmeltable Ethnics, 135, 166–67, 198.

  14 Ibid., 67, 71, 77.

  15 Dan T. Carter, The Politics of Rage: George Wallace, the Origins of the New Conservatism, and the Transformation of American Politics (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995), 137–38, 146–51.

  16 Michael Novak, “Novak: The Rise of Unmeltable Ethnics, Part I,” 30 Aug. 2006, http://www.firstthings.com/onthesquare/?p=450.

  17 James Traub, “Nathan Glazer Changes His Mind, Again,” New York Times, 28 June 1998.

  18 Nathan Glazer and Daniel P. Moynihan, Beyond the Melting Pot: The Negroes, Puerto Ricans, Jews, Italians, and Irish of New York City, 2nd ed. (New York: MIT Press, 1970), 16–17.

  19 Alejandro Portes, “The Melting Pot That Did Happen,” International Migration Review 34, no. 1 (Spring 2000): 243–44.

  20 Glazer and Moynihan, Beyond the Melting Pot: lxii–lxvi, lxviii, lxxiv (quote on lxxxiii, emphasis added). Michael Novak quoted this insult in Rise of the Unmeltable Ethnics, 93.

  21 Glazer and Moynihan, Beyond the Melting Pot, xvi.

  CHAPTER 28: THE FOURTH ENLARGEMENT OF AMERICAN WHITENESS

  1 Victoria Hattam, “Ethnicity and the Boundaries of Race: Rereading Directive 15,” Daedalus 134, no. 1 (Winter 2005): 61–62, 67.

  2 Measuring America: The Decennial Census from 1790 to 2000, U.S. Department of Commerce, U.S. Census Bureau (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 2002), 100, and Jennifer L. Hochschild, “Looking Ahead: Racial Trends in the United States,” Daedalus 134, no. 1 (Winter 2005): 71.

  3 Hochschild, “Looking Ahead,” 76.

  4 Richard D. Alba, Ethnic Identity: The Transformation of White America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990), 9–12.

  5 Lillian Smith, Killers of the Dream, rev. ed. (New York: W. W. Norton, 1978), 36–37, 84, 90–94, 123–24, 163–65.

  6 John Howard Griffin, Black like Me (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1961); Robert Bonazzi, Man in the Mirror: John Howard Griffin and the Story of Black like Me (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books: 1997), 54–92.

  7 Grace Halsell, Soul Sister: The Journal of a White Woman Who Turned Herself Black and Went to Live and Work in Harlem and Mississippi (New York: World Publishing, 1969), and Grace Halsell, In Their Shoes (Forth Worth: Texas Christian University Press, 1996), 123–68.

  8 See Troy Duster, “The ‘Morphing’ Properties of Whiteness,” in Making and Unmaking of Whiteness, ed. Birgit Brander Rasmussen, Eric Klineberg, Irene J. Nexica, and Matt Wray (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001), 129.

  9 David R. Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (London: Verso, 1991), and How Race Survived U.S. History: From the American Revolution to the Present (New York: Verso, 2008
). See also Kimberlé Crenshaw et al., eds., Critical Race Theory: The Key Writings That Formed the Movement (New York: New Press, 1995), Richard Delgado, ed., Critical Race Theory: The Cutting Edge (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1995), Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic, eds., Critical White Studies: Looking behind the Mirror (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1997), and Ian F. Haney Lopez, White by Law: The Legal Construction of Race (New York: New York University Press, 1996), provide useful introductions.

  10 Rasmussen et al. eds., Making and Unmaking of Whiteness, 7. To confuse matters further, sociologists have discovered that multiracial people change their identities according to context. Other people’s perceptions influence how their identity gets phrased.

  11 See chapter 11. The quote comes from The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, vol. 5, English Traits, ed. Philip Nicoloff (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994), 26.