the assumption of inherent racial superiority by dominant groups around the world is neither supported by science nor justified by ethics. The effort to adjust race relations on that basis and by the use of force is a denial of Christian principles of the inherent superiority of ethical values and the supreme worth of personality. As it applies to the white and Negro people in America, it is a philosophy that leads only to suffering and despair.[646]
The FCC quoted universalist passages from the New Testament rather than passages reflecting Jewish ethnocentrism that predominate in the Old Testament. This was an elite viewpoint, and there was a major gap with popular attitudes. The 1920s saw the Protestant masses devoted to immigration restriction and fearful of Communism and other forms of political radicalism associated with immigrants, with many sympathetic to the Ku Klux Klan. Despite these popular sentiments, the Protestant media and ministers in the North and the South attacked the KKK throughout the 1920s. Some liberal ministers were forced to leave their congregations because of popular attitudes.
This liberal Protestant elite established itself at the highest levels of the culture well before the final fall of Anglo-America: “From 1918 to 1955, the concept of national identity held by Anglo-Protestant university administrators, intellectuals, federal bureaucrats and the federal executive underwent a shift from a WASP conception to a more pluralist construct.”[647] This elite attitude embraced pluralism rather than assimilation.
But this brand of Christian liberal progressivism was not characteristic of the great mass of American Whites: They “soon found themselves marginal not only to American society, but to the Progressive mainstream as well.”[648] During the 1920s there was a rise of fundamentalist, non-elite Protestantism typified by figures like Billy Sunday and Carl McIntire in opposition to the liberal elite establishment. The masses of Protestants, even in liberal denominations, did not buy into the cosmopolitanism of the elites. The FCC and the religious media opposed the Reed-Johnson immigration restriction act of 1924—very much a minority point of view. During the 1930s and the early stages of World War II, the only successful attempt to get Protestant politicians to respond positively to refugees was when they were British. Jewish refugees were harder to place, and the response was not enthusiastic. The FCC had no success in lobbying for the Wagner-Rogers Bill that called for 20,000 German Jewish children to be admitted outside the quotas.[649]
The FCC entered the mainstream when it condemned communism after World War II. But the leadership of the FCC (now called the National Council of Churches) remained well to the left of its constituents throughout. A study in the late 1960s showed that 33 percent of the laity advocated civil rights activism versus 64 percent of clergy; 89 percent of the laity felt Black problems were their own fault, versus 35 percent of clergy; 42 percent of laity backed the national origins provisions biasing immigration to Western Europe versus only 23 percent of clergy. Clearly, Protestant religious elites had little effect on the attitudes of the laity.
The liberal progressives and ecumenical Protestants were an elite of university-educated people who self-consciously thought of themselves as a “better element”—that is, they had a sense of moral and intellectual superiority so common on the left today. But Kaufmann acknowledges that this “genteel liberal progressive vision was limited” and by itself probably would not have resulted in profound cultural change.[650] In general, the liberal Protestant elite moved in step with their secular liberal brethren, i.e., following secular trends rather than leading them, and as a result they are ultimately of little importance for understanding the fall of Anglo-Saxon America.
Academic Cultural Determinism and
Anti-Darwinism
In academic history in the late nineteenth century, Frederick Jackson Turner thought of America as a melting pot in which the frontier environment fused immigrants into an American race. The new race would not be Anglo-Saxon or English but distinctively American. Turner was therefore a Lamarckian—a believer in the idea that acquired traits could be inherited: The American frontier environment shaped the characteristics of the new race which were then passed down as genetic traits.
Nevertheless, Turner was not sympathetic to the new immigrants. “Evidently, Turner had merely emphasized one part of his inherited American ethnic mythology (frontier, liberty, agrarianism) without jettisoning the other symbols (Protestantism, Nordic whiteness).”[651] But it was a short step from Turner’s ideas to more radical forms of liberal cosmopolitanism. His general perspective was assimilationist—distrust of new immigrants combined with hope that they would become culturally assimilated to Anglo-Saxon culture and a common racial identity.
Ultimately, however, this tepid form of WASP academic liberalism had little importance. By 1915, Franz Boas and his students dominated the American Anthropology Association and began to have a wide influence in other academic disciplines. Boasian anthropology is the premier cultural determinism theory of the twentieth century and may be considered a Jewish intellectual movement.[652] Kaufmann almost completely ignores Boas’s influence, but, as discussed below, the Boasians were critical to the demise of Darwinism in the social sciences, and the demise of Darwinism was a critical linchpin underlying any viable intellectual basis for Anglo-Saxon ethnic defense. Without a Darwinian theory, the way was open to the erection of a blank-slate theory of culture which ultimately resulted in an intellectual establishment that would view the eclipse of Anglo-America as a moral imperative.
The Secular Left
Beginning in the late nineteenth century, WASP intellectuals began interacting and making alliances with first- and second-generation immigrant Jewish intellectuals who were quite favorable to the lack of ethnic identity they found in their WASP cohorts. Ultimately, the leftist intellectual scene, which had never percolated through to the great mass of Americans, became dominated by Jewish intellectuals, with vast ramifications for the direction of American culture in the late twentieth century and beyond. Unlike their liberal WASP forebears, the Jewish left was eventually able to have a transformative effect on American popular culture and attitudes in the direction of cosmopolitanism.
Kaufmann credits two Jews, Felix Adler (1851–1933) and Israel Zangwill (1864–1926), with promoting nineteenth-century American universalist tendencies to the point of completely rejecting ethnicity altogether. Adler founded the New York Society for Ethical Culture in 1876 and became president of the Free Religious Association (see above) in 1878. Kaufmann quotes Adler as advocating the dissolution of Judaism via assimilation and eventually withering away: “Individual members of the Jewish race [will] look about them and perceive that there is as great and perhaps greater liberty in religion beyond the pale of their race and will lose their peculiar idiosyncrasies, and their distinctiveness will fade. And eventually, the Jewish race will die.”[653]
However, Adler believed that Jews should only “universalize themselves out of existence when the task [of ethnic dissolution of non-Jews] was complete,”[654] indicating that he disapproved and feared ethnic identity among non-Jews. Indeed, Adler declared that “So long as there shall be a reason of existence for Judaism, so long the individual Jews will keep apart and will do well to do so.”[655]
According to Adler, then, the “reason for the existence” of Judaism was to evangelize his new universalist religion of ethical culture until the whole world was converted. Kaufmann observes that under Adler’s influence “Anglo-Protestant thinkers would call for [Anglo-Protestantism’s] termination as forthrightly as Adler did for the Jews.”[656] In the event, the Anglos applied Adler’s doctrine to themselves, but without waiting for non-Anglos like Adler to shed their ethnic identities and sense of group interests.
Indeed, Adler’s ideas are remarkably congruent with the ideas of prominent Reform Judaism rabbis of the period. Kaufmann Kohler (1843–1926) is an important example of the Reform tendency (also seen, e.g., in Kohler’s mentor, David Einhorn (1809–1879), and Samuel Hirsch (1815–1889) ) to assert that Je
wish ethics is universalistic while at the same time maintaining that Israel must remain separate in order to present a moral beacon to the rest of humanity—a beacon of universalism and ethnic dissolution of non-Jews. “One cannot underestimate the importance of the fact that the central pose of post-Enlightenment Jewish intellectuals is a sense that Judaism represents a moral beacon to the rest of humanity.”[657]
This suggests that Adler retained a Jewish identity. He was married to a Jewish woman and maintained Jewish associates—for example, a close friendship with Louis Brandeis, an influential Supreme Court justice and an important Zionist activist of the period; Brandeis was married to a sister of Adler’s wife.
Adler was thus the prototype of the twentieth-century secular Jewish political activist of the left—opposing Anglo-Saxon ethnic hegemony and making alliances with non-Jews with similar political sympathies while retaining a Jewish identity. Indeed, in 1901 Adler was presented with an award from the above-mentioned Rabbi Kohler, who noted that Adler had embraced Jewish nationalism instead of cosmopolitanism.
A senior Reform rabbi and former critic, Dr. Kaufmann Kohler, stated .... with Adler in attendance, that although the Society for Ethical Culture was initially seen as a breakaway from Judaism, it had come back to its roots. The Society was a product of Jewish religion and race, Kaufmann Kohler stated, adding that Adler himself had declared to East Side Jews in 1900 that “he was in heart and sentiment one with them.” … Adler’s initial criticism of Judaism had mellowed to friendliness, Kohler stated. “Nationalism took the place of cosmopolitanism.” ... “If the society becomes a permanent historic force it will be regarded as a stream of Jewish origin and character.” ... “The great and noble achievements of Dr. Adler redound to the credit of the race and the religion that nurtured them. The lofty idealism and purity of character of the men and women of this society emanate from the same source from which Jew and Christian derive strength and inspiration.”[658]
My review of Jewish secular leftists shows that they typically retained a strong sense of Jewish identification—often not explicitly or religiously, but rather in their friends, associates, spouses and attitudes toward Jewish issues, especially anti-Semitism.[659] Many Jewish leftists who denied having Jewish identities found that they had a profound commitment to Judaism with the rise of National Socialism in Germany and to Israel during the Six-Day War of 1967. In general, the Jewish identification of non-religious Jews is complex, with Jewish identity more likely to surface during perceived threats to Jews.
Israel Zangwill, the other Jewish advocate of ethnic dissolution highlighted by Kaufmann, had a strong Jewish identity. Despite marrying a non-Jew and advocating the dissolution of all ethnic groups, Zangwill was a prominent advocate of a Jewish homeland and was active in Jewish politics throughout his life.
Indeed, Zangwill was well aware that Anglo-Saxon ideals of individualism and universalism could be used in the battle against immigration restriction. During the debate on the 1924 immigration law, the House Majority Report emphasized the Jewish role in defining the intellectual battle in terms of Nordic superiority versus “American ideals,” highlighting Zangwill’s role in particular, while the committee favored an ethnic status quo which was eventually enacted into law:
The cry of discrimination is, the committee believes, manufactured and built up by special representatives of racial groups, aided by aliens actually living abroad. Members of the committee have taken notice of a report in the Jewish Tribune (New York) February 8, 1924, of a farewell dinner to Mr. Israel Zangwill which says:
Mr. Zangwill spoke chiefly on the immigration question, declaring that if Jews persisted in a strenuous opposition to the restricted immigration there would be no restriction. “If you create enough fuss against this Nordic nonsense,” he said, “you will defeat this legislation. You must make a fight against this bill; tell them they are destroying American ideals. Most fortifications are of cardboard, and if you press against them, they give way.”[660]
Although Kaufmann represents Zangwill as advocating the melting together of all racial groups, the reality is a bit subtler. Despite his own marriage, Zangwill’s views on Jewish-gentile intermarriage were ambiguous at best and he detested Christian proselytism to Jews. Zangwill was an ardent Zionist and an admirer of his father’s religious orthodoxy as a model for the preservation of Judaism. He believed Jews were a morally superior race whose moral vision had shaped Christian and Muslim societies and would eventually shape the world, although Christianity remained morally inferior to Judaism. Jews would retain their racial purity if they continued to practice their religion: “So long as Judaism flourishes among Jews there is no need to talk of safeguarding race or nationality; both are automatically preserved by the religion”[661]—a view that certainly accords with an evolutionary perspective on Jewish religious writing and practice.[662]
Although the country as a whole had moved toward ethnic defense, often with an explicitly Darwinian rationale, Adler was part of a network of leftists who worked to undermine its cultural and ethnic homogeneity. An important node in this network was the Settlement House movement of the late nineteenth–early twentieth century. The settlements were an Anglo-Saxon undertaking that exhibited a noblesse oblige still apparent in White leftist circles today. They were “residences occupied by upper-middle-class ‘workers’ whose profile was that of an idealistic Anglo-Saxon, university-educated young suburbanite (male or female) in his or her mid-twenties.”[663] The movement explicitly rejected the idea that immigrants ought to give up their culture and assimilate to America: “To put the immigrants (as individuals) on an equal symbolic footing with the natives, a concept of the nation was required that would not violate the human dignity of the immigrants by denigrating their culture.”[664] Cultural pluralism was encouraged: “The nation would be implored to shed its Anglo-Saxon ethnic core and develop a culture of cosmopolitan humanism, a harbinger of impending global solidarity.”[665]
The leader of the Settlement House movement, Jane Addams, advocated that America shed all allegiance to an Anglo-Saxon identity. Addams came from a liberal Quaker background—another liberal strand of Protestant culture that, like the Puritans, stemmed from a distinctive British sub-culture.[666] In general, the Quakers have been less influential than the Puritans in the United States (although they had a critical role in the British antislavery movement discussed in the following chapter), but their attitudes have been even more consistently liberal than the Puritan-descended intellectuals who became a dominant intellectual liberal elite in the nineteenth century.[667] For example, John Woolman, the “Quintessential Quaker,” was an eighteenth-century figure who opposed slavery, lived humbly, and, most tellingly for the concept of ethnic defense, felt guilty about preferring his own children to children on the other side of the world.[668]
A connection between Jane Addams and the Puritan intellectual tradition was that Harvard philosopher William James influenced Addams and approved her ideas. James was a member of Felix Adler’s Ethical Culture Society, which Kaufmann terms “the fount of Jewish cosmopolitanism,”[669] and one of his students was Horace Kallen, the premier theorist of a multicultural America—and an ardent Zionist.[670] James was a moral universalist: “Moral progress is a value that outweighed group survival,” a point of view that “reaffirmed Felix Adler’s cardinal dictum that particular ethnic groups had a duty to sacrifice their existence for the progress of humankind. … The dominant Anglo-Saxon group had no case for its preservation but instead needed to devote itself to bring about the new cosmopolitan humanity.”[671] This was a rarified phenomenon of a small but elite minority: even many settlement workers believed in an Anglo-Saxon America and favored immigration restriction.
Randolph Bourne’s 1916 Atlantic Monthly article is a classic statement by a prominently placed Anglo intellectual advocating a multicultural ideal for America.[672] Bourne (who, as Kaufmann notes, was a disciple of Horace Kallen) acknowledged the concern that different nationa
lities hadn’t blended, but he advocated that America become the first “international nation”—a “cosmopolitan federation of national colonies.” All other ethnic groups would be allowed to retain their identity and cohesion; only the Anglo-Saxon is implored to be cosmopolitan. In particular, Bourne wrote that “it is not the Jew who sticks proudly to the faith of his fathers and boasts of that venerable culture of his who is dangerous to America, but the Jew who has lost the Jewish fire and become a mere elementary, grasping animal.”
People like Bourne, H. L. Mencken, and Sinclair Lewis had a strong sense of intellectual elitism and rebellion against Protestant, small-town America—individualist rebellion against conformity to cultural norms much like that seen among the libertarian anarchists discussed above. A character in Sinclair Lewis’s Main Street complains that the townspeople have a “standardized background … scornful of the living. … A savourless people, gulping tasteless food … and viewing themselves as the greatest race in the world.”[673] The character was mildly excited by Scandinavian immigrants but deplored the fact that they were absorbed without a trace into the mainstream Protestant culture of America.
These attitudes could also be found among Jewish intellectuals. Walter Lippmann called America “a nation of villagers”[674]—a harbinger of the hostility of Hollywood to small-town America.[675]
The Period of Ethnic Defense: 1880–1965
We have seen that the view among elite liberal intellectuals in the nineteenth century that America was the product of Anglo-Saxon ethnicity coincided with optimistic ideas about an Anglo-Saxon future. Towards the end of the century, however, as American intellectuals were coming to grips with large-scale immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe, such optimistic views of an Anglo-Saxon future were more and more difficult to defend, especially because a large number of the immigrants were (correctly) seen as politically radical and unassimilable. The decades leading up to the passage of the 1924 immigration law and thereafter were a period of ethnic defense. Optimistic, liberal views on immigration persisted among a small group of intellectuals, but they were politically powerless. Among many pro-restrictionist intellectuals, Darwinism displaced Lamarckism.
Individualism and the Western Liberal Tradition Page 24