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Chapter Three

MORE SLOVENIAN AND MORE AMERICAN

How the Hyphen Unites

ON A cold, misty April 19,1875, President Ulysses S. Grant and key members of his cabinet joined the centennial celebration of the beginning of the American Revolution at Concord and Lexington, Massachusetts, where they listened to speeches made by illustrious Anglo-Americans, among them Ralph Waldo Emerson, Julia Ward Howe, James Russell Lowell, and John Greenleaf Whittier. It was a high moment for the Anglo-American leadership of Massachusetts, who were reminded by Thomas Merriam Stetson, the master of ceremonies of the festive day in Lexington, that the fallen heroes of Lexington and Concord all had English names. Speaking of the martyrs of the Revolution, Stetson called their courageous stand against the larger British force “the flower and consummation of principles that were long ripening in the clear-sighted, liberty-loving, Anglo-Saxon mind.”¹

The Anglo-Americans, especially in New England, thought of themselves as charter members of the republic. Americans from other backgrounds were relative newcomers, and persons of color, despite the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments, still were treated essentially as outsiders, and within a few years after the centennial their position as outsiders would be more sharply defined. With the end of Reconstruction, blacks in the South were relegated to the position of a subjugated, segregated rural proletariat. Chinese laborers were excluded from immigrating to the United States in 1882, and the Dawes Act was passed in 1887 in an attempt to assimilate Native Americans (Indians) by breaking up tribal lands.

By the time of the centennial in 1875, however, probably most Anglo-Americans accepted the necessity of immigration from northern and western Europe. Employers greedily sought white immigrant labor, and the Republican party platforms of 1864 and 1868 made explicit the connection between capital expansion and the venerable myth of asylum by asserting that “foreign immigration, which in the past has added so much to the wealth, development of resources, and increase of power to this nation—the asylum of the oppressed of all nations—should be fostered and encouraged by a just policy.”² Immigrants from Germany kept coming in large numbers (718,182 between 1871 and 1880, totaling more than one-quarter of all immigrants and a third of those from Europe), and German-speaking enclaves existed all over the Midwest, but their arrival did not often raise the sharp anxieties that Benjamin Franklin and other Anglo-Americans had expressed in the mid-eighteenth century when they said such immigrants might “Germanize us.” Immigration from Ireland, while substantial (436,871 in the 1870s), had been halved in the twenty-year period between 1861 and 1880 from the previous twenty years, and the percentage of Irish compared with other immigrants had gone down steadily since the 1850s.³

The Irish still aroused hostility even though mine operators, railroad owners, small manufacturers, and a growing number of Americans in commerce and the professions had grown used to having them fill a variety of unskilled and semiskilled jobs. They were more threatening to Anglo-Americans than Germans or Scandinavians not just because they were Catholic (a substantial number of Germans were Catholic, too) but also because, poor and unskilled, they crowded into the cities of the Northeast, where their presence was linked to alcoholism and other diseases, and to crime.

Northern Europe accounted for 90 percent of all immigration in the 1860s and 80 percent in the 1870s, but as the numbers from Ireland went down, those from Scandinavia went up, almost doubling between 1871 and 1880 over the previous decade. Scandinavians were overwhelmingly Protestant, and a large number, like the Germans, moved to the Midwest, where almost everyone came from somewhere else. Their arrival met relatively little opposition; even though they spoke their ancestral languages at home and sometimes in school, they entered the political life of their communities and, as did the Germans, established ethnic associations in the American pattern of voluntary ethnic pluralism.

Immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe

With continued confinement of free blacks to the coercive, segregated labor system of the South and with continued exclusion of Chinese laborers from immigration, the leaders of American industry and commerce in the North looked to European immigrants to keep the cost of labor low. Immigrant labor was cheap for many reasons. A high proportion were young, single men who brought no children for the state to educate. As noncitizens, they were subject to deportation for at least five years, and, lacking language skills in most cases, they also lacked mobility. Native-born workers, on the other hand, were organizing in unions, demanding a shorter work day and work week and higher wages. With the number of immigrants from northern Europe going down (in the last four years of the 1870s never above 177,826 [1879] in any year), employers and labor contractors began to look to southern and eastern Europe for workers. In the 1880s, the number of immigrants more than doubled over the previous ten years (2,271,925 to 4,735,484), and net migration as a percentage of American population growth rose from slightly more than 25 percent to over 40 percent in the same decade.⁴ American capital looked for labor in southern Italy, where large numbers of unemployed and underemployed single men were willing to come to the U.S. to build roads, buildings, and reservoirs. They took jobs in what economists would later call a secondary labor market—low-skilled, heavy-muscle, often temporary jobs segregated from mainstream economic opportunities. During the 1880s, immigration from Italy, nearly all of it from the poor south, jumped six times over what it had been in the 1870s. It doubled again in the decade of the 1890s to 651,893, and quadrupled from 1901 through 1910 to 2,450,877.

Russia and other eastern European countries provided another source of workers. From the decade of the 1870s to the decade of the 1890s the number of immigrants from Russia, most of them Jews, increased more than ten times, from nearly 40,000 to 505,290; from 1901 through 1910 (when Poles were counted among Russians, Austro-Hungarians, and Germans) the number of immigrants admitted to the U.S. grew to 1,597,306. The percentage of all European immigrants who came from the east and south of Europe rose steadily from nearly 20 percent in the decade of the 1880s to 53 percent in the 1890s and 75 percent from 1901 through 1910 as the exploding industrial revolution in the United States called for workers in the Midwest as well as in the North.⁵

Most immigrants were Catholics, including Italians, Poles, and Slavs. Along with a substantial number of Greeks and Jews, these were peoples whose languages, appearance, customs, and religions combined with their poverty to mark them clearly as outsiders. That the composition of immigration changed so drastically—in the 1870s one of every four immigrants from Europe was from the United Kingdom, in the 1880s, one of every eight—gave rise once more to apprehensions for the preservation of American identity and unity.

Guarding the Gates: A Racial View of American Identity

But what was the essence of American identity? On what did American unity depend? For Jefferson, American identity was a matter of American ideology, and American unity depended upon newcomers embracing the principles that gave rise to and sustained self-government. He had said nothing about nationality or race. But for the forty years between 1880 and 1920, a period of almost continual national debate over the meaning of American identity and unity, Jeffersonian arguments were mixed in a potpourri of concerns about class, culture, and race.

As always, skilled, semiskilled, and unskilled native-born workers worried about the negative effect that immigrants would have on wages and working conditions. Often confined to city neighborhoods where their children were obliged to attend school with the children of immigrants, native-born workers were much more likely than high-level managers or employers to be upset by the strange ways of the newcomers. But the antiimmigrant appeal was widespread, reaching into the rural South, where there were few immigrants, to small towns in the Midwest, and to the upper reaches of Beacon Hill and the Back Bay, where the Brahmins of Boston kept the Massachusetts idea alive despite and perhaps because of the rising power of the Irish.

Woodrow Wilson, professor of government at Princeton University, observed in 1901 that earlier in the nineteenth century “men of the sturdy stocks of the north of Europe” made up the main force of immigrants, but now “multitudes of men of the lowest class from the south of Italy and men of the meaner sort out of Hungary and Poland” who had “neither skill nor energy nor an initiative of quick intelligence” were coming in such huge numbers “as if the countries of the south of Europe were disburdening themselves of the more sordid and hapless elements of their population.”⁶ Complementing the image of Europe disgorging huge unwanted populations was the picture of an American gate that was open and unguarded. “Wide open and unguarded stand our gates,” warned Thomas Bailey Aldrich in a poem in the Atlantic Monthly in 1892, “and through them presses a wild, a motley throng” who “bring with them unknown gods and rites.” Appealing to the American goddess of liberty, he concluded, “O! Liberty! White Goddess! … Lift the downtrodden, but with the hand of steel / Stay those who to thy sacred portals come / To waste thy gifts of freedom.”⁷

The fears expressed by Wilson and Aldrich were echoed in editorial pages, labor union halls, and political rallies, and in pseudoscientific thinking about race and culture. A former dean of the Lawrence College of Science at Harvard, Nathaniel Shaler, explained patiently in a book about Jews, blacks, and other outsiders that Jews could “never become effectively reconciled with any Christian society.”⁸ Jews, said Shaler, will never make good Americans because “they are to our race a very unpleasant people … socially impossible.”⁹

Shaler did not call for a complete ban on immigration of Jews, only of “the degraded” among them, along with “such composite folk as the southern Italians and those from the lower Danube and the Balkan Peninsula.”¹⁰ Despite such commonly held attitudes, the tremendous growth of the American economy sustained the demand for cheap immigrant labor. Industrial interests, in particular, resisted restrictionist proposals, and in 1907 the National Association of Manufacturers called for a loosening of the existing minor controls on immigration. Immigrant-ethnic groups, already adapted to the American pattern of voluntary ethnic pluralism, mobilized against immigration restriction in 1907. The Ancient Order of the Hibernians, for example, signed an agreement with the largest ethnic organization in the nation, the German-American Alliance (more than a million and a half members) to oppose all immigration restriction.¹¹ In 1907, the year of greatest immigration to the U.S., more immigrants were admitted lawfully (1,385,459) than in any single year before or since, the third year in a row in which more than a million immigrants had arrived. The sheer volume of immigration (the previous decade, 1891–1900, saw an annual average of 370,000) gave impetus to restriction.

The Immigration Restriction League, founded in 1894 by five Boston-born-and-bred graduates of Harvard College who believed with utmost certainty that they were defending Americanism, brought back the Massachusetts idea once again. Americans had built a glorious city on the hill, now a representative self-governing republic. The descendants of those who had been there at the creation felt obliged to protect it from contamination. Grossly exaggerating the differences between the newcomers and older groups of immigrants, one professor of education at Stanford University saw the eastern and southern Europeans as “lacking in self reliance and initiative, and not possessing the Anglo-Teutonic conceptions of law, order and government.” Their arrival, he asserted, had already tended “to corrupt our civic life.”¹²

The plea for immigration restriction met strong political opposition—from employers wanting more muscle, ethnics wanting more brothers and sisters, and a growing band of social workers and politicians wanting more clients. Minor restrictions and reforms led to the banning of prostitutes and convicts (1875), of lunatics and those likely to become public charges (1882), and of contract laborers (1885). When Congress, for the first time, placed all immigration under federal authority, steamship companies were obliged to carry back to Europe those passengers rejected by U.S. inspectors (1891). The 1891 act also provided for deporting aliens already in the U.S., stipulating that any alien who became a public charge “from causes existing prior to his landing” could be expelled within a year after arrival.

The principal legislative objective of the Immigration Restriction League was a literacy test, first proposed in 1887, requiring all male adult applicants for immigration to read and write their own language. The standoff between the pro- and anti-immigration forces was reflected in the schizophrenic immigration bill of 1907, which gave the secretary of commerce the power to admit immigrants in borderline cases if he deemed them needed for the work force, and which required immigrants to pay a head tax of four dollars, twice the amount prescribed before. The most important part of the legislation was the creation of an immigration commission, a tripartite body consisting of three U.S. senators, three members of the House of Representatives, and three appointed by the president, Theodore Roosevelt. Reporting three years later on December 5, 1910, the commission recommended, with only one dissent, a two-decades-old proposal of a reading and writing test “as the most feasible single method of restricting undesirable immigration,” a proposal that had passed the Congress in 1897 only to be vetoed by President Cleveland.¹³

With so many conflicting pressures, the political parties straddled the issue of immigration in the early 1900s. Both Republican and Democratic party platforms promised a continuation of the exclusion of Chinese labor but were uncertain about European immigration until 1912, when the Republicans pledged “the enactment of appropriate laws to give relief from the constantly growing evil of induced or undesirable immigration, which is inimical to the progress and welfare of the people of the United States.”¹⁴ The Democrats, increasingly dependent on ethnic-immigrant votes, did not join the growing call for restriction, though in their 1916 platform they took a swipe at German, Irish, and other ethnic anti-preparedness groups when they condemned “combinations of individuals in this country, of whatever nationality or descent, who agree and conspire together for the purpose of embarrassing or weakening our government or of improperly influencing or coercing our public representatives in dealing or negotiating with any foreign power.”¹⁵

As the United States reacted to the war among the European powers, a growing number of Americans became concerned about hyphenates whose affection for the old countries might make them something less than 100 percent loyal. The Prohibition party in 1916 said in classic civic culture terms, “We stand for Americanism. We believe this country was created for a great mission among the nations of the earth. We rejoice in the fact that it has offered asylum to the oppressed of other lands.… But he who loves another land more than this is not fit for citizenship here.”¹⁶ Growing mistrust of immigrants led in 1917 to the passage of the literacy test over Wilson’s veto.¹⁷ (Wilson, now a Democratic president dependent upon the political support of most of the ethnics, had changed his stance since 1901.)

With the entry of the U.S. into the First World War, immigration was drastically diminished, and restriction was no longer an immediate issue. The war unleashed a frenzy of antiforeign feeling, much of it directed against the Germans, who until that time had maintained a large network of German-language clubs, newspapers, and churches in the U.S. All “foreign” religions and cultures were attacked, especially by a revived Ku Klux Klan and particularly in the South, the Midwest, and the Far West, where many small-town and rural Protestant Americans saw the Klan as defending American purity against what was seen as the growing power of big-city Catholics and Jews. Examples of hysteria were legion. Tom Watson of Georgia campaigned successfully for a seat in the U.S. Senate, claiming that Wilson had become a tool of the Pope. The governor of Florida warned that the Pope planned to invade the Sunshine State and to transfer the Vatican there. Several itinerant preachers for the Klan warned against a Roman plot to destroy the only true Christian nation, and the Grand Dragon of the Klan in Oregon told its members that it must work actively to keep the country from a takeover by immigrants.¹⁸

The literacy test did not curb the large flow of immigrants from eastern and southern Europe, and in 1921 Congress, following another recommendation of the Immigration Commission (1907-1910), passed into law a provisional measure for strict quotas on each European nation. The act established an annual ceiling of 355,000 on European immigration and limited the number of immigrants of each nationality annually to 3 percent of the number of foreign-born persons of that nationality resident in the U.S. at the time of the 1910 census. This first quota act was extended for two years, but in 1924 came passage of what was heralded as a permanent solution to immigration problems, the Johnson-Reed Act, more commonly known as the National Origins Act. It provided for an annual limit of 150,000 Europeans (plus the wives, parents, and minor children of U.S. citizens), a complete prohibition on Japanese immigration, the issuance and counting of visas against quotas abroad rather than on arrival, and the development of quotas based on the numerical contribution of each nationality to the overall U.S. population rather than on the foreign-born population.

Recognizing that it would take some time to develop new quotas, the bill provided as a stopgap measure for the annual admission of immigrants to be no more than 2 percent of each nationality’s proportion of the foreign-born U.S. population in 1890. The old Pennsylvania approach of accepting as Americans white Europeans regardless of their national background was repudiated. Use of the 1890 instead of the 1910 census meant a reduction in the annual Italian quota from 42,000 to about 4,000; in the Polish quota from 31,000 to 6,000; and in the Greek quota from 3,000 to 100. The commissioner of immigration reported, one year after the 1924 legislation took effect, that virtually all immigrants now “looked exactly like Americans.”¹⁹

Immigration from southern and eastern Europe now slowed to a trickle. Would the newcomers from eastern and southern Europe who had already arrived become Americans, or constitute some foreign, undigestible irritant in American society? Holding fast to the idea that American identity was based on conformity to the culture and religion of the earliest American settlers, many restrictionists saw in ethnic churches, fairs, songs, food, and dozens of other manifestations of voluntary ethnic pluralism ample proof that the newcomers were not becoming American. Madison Grant, whose book The Passing of the Great Race (1916) had issued an urgent call for restriction, wrote in 1925 that “the example of the Pennsylvania Germans [Amish] shows us that it will take centuries before the foreigners now become Americans.” And observing the community of Hamtramck, in Detroit, where he alleged a mass meeting of Polish residents demanded Polish rule, he concluded, “there certainly was no ‘melting pot’ in Hamtramck.” ²⁰

“The myth of the melting pot has been discredited,” said Albert Johnson, a principal author of the 1924 National Origins immigration legislation.²¹ In 1926, Henry Pratt Fairchild in The Melting Pot Mistake saw “the native and the foreigner … growing steadily farther and farther apart, and the spheres in which they move … growing more and more distinct and irreconcilable.”²² Efforts to Americanize the newcomers, no matter how well-intentioned, were doomed to fail, argued Fairchild, because the deepest feelings of love and affection of immigrants lay understandably with their ancestral homelands.

Efforts to Americanize the Newcomers

The Americanization movement Fairchild thought futile had been hard at work even before July 4, 1915, when the first official national Americanization Day was held, with the motto, “Many Peoples, But One Nation”²³ (soon to be replaced by “America First”). The leaders of the movement acted on the assumption that immigrants from southern and eastern Europe and their children could be remade by the American environment, just as immigrants from the north and west of Europe, including impoverished and despised Irish Catholics, had been remade in the nineteenth century. Wilson’s secretary of the interior, Franklin Lane, whose department issued an Americanization Bulletin during 1918 and 1919, wrote that in “fashioning a new people … we are doing the unprecedented thing in saying that Slav, Teuton, Celt and the other races that make up the civilized world are capable of being blended here.”²⁴

Education in a variety of settings was the chief strategy of the Americanizers. As early as 1907, New Jersey passed legislation to support evening classes in English and civics for the foreign-born, and a new organization called the North American Civic League for Immigrants was created “to improve the environment and the spirit of America, the knowledge of America, and the love of America and one’s fellow men into the millions gathered and gathering here from the ends of the earth.”²⁵ A nonsectarian organization that sought support from Protestants, Catholics, and Jews, the league selected Boston, site of antiimmigrant agitation, and then the second-largest port of entry to the U.S., in which to begin its program of education in English and good citizenship.²⁶ By the end of the first year, it had organized committees in thirty-six cities in nine states to assist in its program of assimilation; eighteen of the committees were in Massachusetts. Granted space by the federal government in the new immigration station in Boston, it enlarged its role as a coordinating organization, becoming a repository of information on immigration aid societies, immigration boarding houses, the character and availability of interpreters, and other services, and published a series of messages stressing patriotic themes for newcomers to the United States in nine foreign languages, including Yiddish, Arabic, and Finnish.

Similar to the North American Civic League was an organization developed in Chicago in 1908 called the League for the Protection of Immigrants (the Immigrants Protective League by 1910), which also sponsored programs to welcome newcomers and to educate them in American ways.²⁷ In New York, a special gubernatorial commission, after finding evidence of considerable exploitation of and discrimination against immigrants, recommended establishment of a Bureau of Industries and Immigration to promote the effective employment of immigrants and their development as useful citizens, a recommendation that was enacted in 1910.²⁸

Many social clubs such as the General Federation of Women’s Clubs and the National Society of the Daughters of the American Revolution, labor unions such as the American Federation of Labor and the United Mine Workers, and business organizations such as the Chamber of Commerce joined schools and other agencies of government in the Americanization movement. Industry participated, partly because it believed that the failure of immigrants to learn English resulted in an economic loss. Henry Ford set up classes in his plants and required attendance of his five thousand non-English-speaking employees. The International Harvester Company produced its own lesson plans for the non-English-speaking workers in its plants, which clearly taught more than English. The first plan read:

I hear the whistle. I must hurry.

I hear the five minute whistle.

It is time to go into the shop …

I change my clothes and get ready to work …

I work until the whistle blows to quit.

I leave my place nice and clean.

I put all my clothes in the locker.

I must go home.²⁹

The first report issued by the Bureau of Industries and Immigration in New York in 1912 stressed the importance of ensuring liberty and justice. In 1914 the Federal Bureau of Naturalization sponsored citizenship classes throughout the public schools. Its program brought candidates for citizenship together with naturalized citizens for patriotic exercises.³⁰ By 1919, the Bureau of Immigration reported that 2,240 communities were conducting classes for immigrants. That year, the bureau entered into an agreement with the National Council of the Boy Scouts of America, in which the Scouts were pledged to serve as guides and ushers in citizenship receptions. Many states followed the lead of the national government in setting up departments or bureaus of Americanization, and some state boards of education conducted special training courses for Americanization teachers.³¹

At the height of the Americanization movement in 1921, the National Society of the Daughters of the American Revolution published a Manual of the United States: For the Information of Immigrants and Foreigners in English and seventeen other languages, which in its first four editions was distributed in two million copies throughout the nation.³² The general tone of the booklet was welcoming: “To the men and women who come from far-off lands to seek a new home in America and become its loyal supporters as good citizens, the Daughters of the American Revolution extend a cordial welcome.” Citizenship was the key, according to the DAR. “We ask you to make yourselves worthy to become a citizen of our country, to study its history, to become acquainted with its literature, its traditions and its laws…. It is a proud honor to have American citizenship conferred upon you. It is more honorable to deserve such citizenship,” wrote a past president-general in her address of welcome. She invited the outsiders “to share in this citizenship when you have learned its duties and privileges,” promising them that “this is a land of equal opportunity for all. We offer you these equal opportunities.”³³

The DAR booklet made it clear that becoming an American was a matter of belief and faith and not ancestry, at least if one was white and from Europe, or possibly Japanese, since immigration from Japan between 1900 and 1920 justified one booklet in Japanese even though Japanese nationals were ineligible for citizenship (Japanese immigration would be banned three years after publication of the booklet). Immigrants should “make themselves worthy to receive the great gift of American citizenship; to become true Americans in heart and soul.”³⁴ The booklet advised that there must be some visible sign of what was in one’s heart and soul, and that the best way to show it was to learn English. Immigrants were urged to study the problems of government. “Then you will be the kind of citizen America needs.”³⁵ The advantages of citizenship, voting, holding public office, obtaining passports, and other benefits were stressed. In exchange for these benefits, the immigrant citizen was advised to vote, accept jury duty enthusiastically, and pay taxes without evasion.

For the European immigrant, the path to citizenship was still clear, quick, and simple. The obligations of citizenship, far from being onerous, called for participation in the American system of self-government. The DAR was not asking newcomers to abandon feelings of affection for their old countries. “America does not ask you to forget your old home,” said the booklet. But in taking the oath of allegiance to the United States, new citizens must promise to give up allegiance “to your former country.… You cannot have two countries.”³⁶

The DAR did not have cause to doubt the immigrants on the question of political allegiance. It was not a major issue for most of those who came from southern Italy, who hated the oppressive rule of the north, or of Jews who came from Russia or Poland or Austria-Hungary, where anti-Semitism was vicious, or even of the Slavs, Poles, Lithuanians, and others from eastern Europe, whose old-country allegiances were religious and cultural much more than political. The problem for immigrants was rather the anguish of trying to be understood in a foreign language, of being mocked for strange customs, of having to listen to an Irish priest and not understanding a word he said, of being shocked by the newly irreverent behavior of children, and of being unable to adjust from a peasant life to industrial work. The problem was the pain of separating from one’s loved ones and then sometimes of broken marriages in the new country. The anguish was about the danger of losing cultural and religious loyalties and sensibilities, the fear of acquiring in America what one immigrant called a “flavorless … soul.”³⁷ Even though they still felt like strangers in the new country, sometimes strangers even to their children, they often felt cut off from the old world, too.

Acceptance into the political community was tainted by inhospitable actions toward expressions of ethnicity, and during and for several years after the war, German-Americans especially did not feel it was safe to show the hyphen because many Americanizers scorned the newcomers as un-American when they showed pride in things German. Charles Heartman, an American writer of German birth and an advocate of immigration from Germany, urged that “when they come, let them be cut off from German influence, from a German press, from a German club.”³⁸ Another German-American, Gustavus Ohlinger, acquiescing in the view that cultural pride was a sign of political disloyalty, denounced a speech given in Milwaukee to ten thousand German-Americans by the president of the German-American National Alliance, who had told his audience not to permit “our two thousand year culture to be trodden down in this land,” and exhorted them to “remember … the benefits of German Kultur.”³⁹ Such attitudes, Ohlinger pointed out, had led to insistence by Germans and other groups in Chicago for public school instruction in their own languages, which could only lead to “racial feuds” that would “disrupt the country and make it a heterogeneous mass of warring factions.”⁴⁰ From 1917 to 1923, twenty-three German Catholic publications were discontinued and the two-million-member National German-American Alliance, organized in 1901 to promote German culture in America and the interests of German-Americans, had to disband in 1918.

Japanese, Chinese, Scandinavian, Greek, and Hebrew language schools also were under constant attack, but most immigrants who stayed in the United States (about a third went back) began to replicate the pattern of voluntary ethnic pluralism established by the Germans, Dutch, Scandinavians, Scotch-Irish, Irish, and English themselves in earlier years. Armenians, Greeks, and Albanians established their own orthodox churches, the Polish, Italian, and German Catholics their own parishes, and nationality groups among the Jews created their own small synagogues in an effort to keep fellow countrymen together and make the transition easier to the strange and often hostile new world. Ethnic-group leaders opposed attempts in the Americanization movement in the early 1920s to disparage foreign cultures, such as state laws forbidding the teaching of foreign languages. Making a defense in terms of American ideals, a Polish-language newspaper asserted, “It is deplorable that so many Americans object so much to foreign customs. It smacks decidedly of Prussianism, and is not quite at all in accordance with American ideals of freedom.”⁴¹ A Hungarian paper said that “Americanization does not mean the suppression of foreign languages.” An Italian newspaper said that “Americanization is an ugly word,” if “it means to proselytize by making the foreign born forget his mother country and mother tongue.”⁴²

However much immigrants felt hostility from native-born Americans, they usually were welcomed by presidents from Grover Cleveland to Woodrow Wilson. One can imagine the joy felt by Jews when President William McKinley appeared on September 16, 1897, with his cabinet for the laying of a cornerstone for a Washington synagogue⁴³ or the excitement of five thousand newly naturalized citizens as they listened to a speech by President Wilson at Convention Hall in Philadelphia on May 10, 1915, where facing the new citizens were great flags draped on twenty pillars, festoons of bunting, and a wreath thirty feet in diameter below electric lighted letters: “Welcome to a government of the people, by the people, for the people.” Several ethnic groups petitioned Wilson for special celebrations to enable the foreign-born to demonstrate their loyalty. On July 4, 1918, thirty-three nationalities sent representatives on a pilgrimage to the Washington Monument as the president’s guests, and parades, pageants, and mass meetings celebrating American freedom were held all over the country.⁴⁴ Nonetheless, most immigrants did not rush to naturalization. Their first interest was in making a living, and a second interest for perhaps a majority was in returning home. The story of one immigrant, which came to the author in a cigar box found by a colleague, probably was typical of many of the single male sojourners from southern Italy who came to the U.S. to work, with the expectation of returning home. Salvatore DeMeo, whose passport listed him as a contadini (peasant), came from Castellonorato in the province of Latina to Waltham, Massachusetts in 1894. After working as a day laborer he obtained a job in the Waltham mill and made enough money to travel back and forth to Italy in 1919, 1928, and 1929, a classic sojourner pattern. Not until 1930, eleven years after his arrival, did he decide to stay. For three years he took courses in English on American citizenship, receiving credit for 312 hours of instruction. In the Corona cigar box in which his naturalization and other certificates were found neatly folded in a looseleaf binder, DeMeo also kept the Waltham book of American citizenship, a sixty-seven-page manual outlining basic facts of American history, city, county, and state governments, presented in a question-and-answer format. In DeMeo’s well-worn booklet he was told that being 100 percent American does not depend on where one’s grandfather was born but on obeying the laws of the United States. “All residents of America should become citizens of America.… America needs all the wisdom of all the people who live under her flag.”⁴⁵ Underlined were the words that told the naturalized citizen to vote every year, “not just when he feels like it.” He should examine the records of the men running for office and “vote for what I believe in my own heart is right, and for the best man, no matter what his race or creed or ancestry.”⁴⁶

In the very year in which DeMeo began taking his citizenship course, 1930, President Herbert Hoover responded to a criticism from Italian-born mayor Fiorello LaGuardia of New York by telling him, “you should go back to where you belong and advise Mussolini on how to make good honest citizens in Italy. The Italians are predominantly our murderers and boodeggers … like a lot of other foreign spawn, you do not appreciate the country which supports and tolerates you.”⁴⁷ It was an outrageous expression of bigotry against a man who, in addition to being a distinguished mayor of the largest and most important city in the country, had flown in the U.S. Air Force in the First World War and in the Second would play a major role in directing the national war effort. Did Hoover make LaGuardia feel like an outsider? Probably not. Like many other talented immigrants from eastern and southern Europe, he found it easy to claim membership in the American civic culture because its ideals, symbols, and founding myth did not require him to stop feeling Italian, something that Hoover had forgotten.

Italians and Jews Claim Their American Identity

LaGuardia was thoroughly assimilated. No one would necessarily know that he was foreign born. But there were some who actually claimed an American identity even though they were fresh off the boat. What accounted for the fact that foreign-speaking and -acting newcomers felt a direct relationship to the founding fathers? Lincoln had already given that answer in 1860 when he pointed out that though immigrants could not claim ancestors who made the Revolution or founded the republic, they “felt a part of us” because those who wrote the ideals expressed in the Declaration of Independence meant them for all people for all time. That is why the newcomers had the right to claim them as forefathers “as though they were the blood of the blood and flesh of the flesh of the men who wrote the Declaration.”⁴⁸

Perhaps Lincoln understood so well because he wanted German votes, or perhaps because of his friendship with Carl Schurz, who had spoken on “True Americanism” at Faneuil Hall only a year earlier, or because of his own wisdom. Whatever the reason, Lincoln understood that generations of newcomers from all parts of the globe spoke of “our forefathers, who brought forth this nation” as if they were truly related to the heroes of the Revolution and the early republic, just as Jews and non-Jewish guests speak on Passover of coming out of Egypt from slavery as if they were physically there in the desert about fifteen hundred years before Christ’s birth. American ideals and principles were universal and could be claimed by anyone, as could the symbols, rituals, and heroes connected to those ideals. Crèvecoeur had written of “our alma mater.’” An Irish immigrant marveled at “our glorious Constitution.” Schurz spoke of “our institutions.”

The eastern and southern Europeans claimed American heroes and legends as theirs, too. The scions of Brahmin families in New England often looked at the newcomers and thought that they could not possibly understand all that had gone into the making of free American institutions. To Henry Adams in 1911, a new society was being formed, and he felt powerless to deal with it “and its entire unconsciousness that I … or George Washington ever existed.”⁴⁹ Adams totally misunderstood the power of the ideas of his New England ancestors. But only a few years later, a young Jewish immigrant woman, Mary Antin, wrote of “our forefathers” in a series of articles in the Atlantic Monthly. Writing that “George Washington himself could not mean more than I when he said, ‘my country’ after I once felt it,” she explained that “for the country was for all citizens, and I was a citizen, and when we stood up to sing ‘America!’ I shouted the words with all my might.”⁵⁰ Antin would walk the steps of the Boston public library, not far from her tenement home, lingering to read the carved inscription: Public Library—Built By The People—Free To All. Calling it her “palace” because she was a citizen, she would say to herself repeatedly as she watched the scholars and the “fine-browed women” and their children going in and out of the library, “this is mine … this is ours.”⁵¹

Probably Antin did not know that Asian immigrants were ineligible for citizenship, although she wrote of the boys in her neighborhood making fun of a “Chinaman.” Perhaps she did not know of the decimation of the Indians, and that those who lived on reservations were still ineligible for citizenship, or of the misery of many native Hawaiians following annexation of the islands by the U.S. She must have been aware that most blacks were denied even the most elemental of rights, including the right to vote, through systematic oppression and intimidation throughout the South and even in many places in the North. But she did not mention blacks. She certainly had knowledge of the mounting opposition of Anglo-Americans to immigrants and immigration, and of the deep resentment they felt against such upstarts as herself, a Jew, no less, a member of the hated tribe, claiming to be an American on equal terms with others.

Only six years after publication of Antin’s book, another Russian Jewish immigrant, Jacob Abrams, when questioned about his anarchist beliefs by Judge Henry Delamar Clayton, Jr., a fifth-generation American, began his reply, “When our forefathers of the American Revolution—” At that point, Judge Clayton exclaimed, “Your what?” Again, Abrams said, “My forefathers,” whereupon the judge asked incredulously if he meant to refer “to the fathers of this nation as your forefathers?”⁵²

Clayton did not believe that the First Amendment was for naturalized citizens. Two years before the Abrams case, when he empaneled a grand jury in New York City, the judge had declared that “naturalized citizens who unfairly criticize the government should get off the face of the earth, or at least go back to the country they left…. I have no sympathy with any naturalized citizen who is given to carping criticism of this Government.”⁵³ But Abrams was not even a citizen. How dare he speak of “our forefathers”! Twice Clayton asked, “Why don’t you go back to Russia?”⁵⁴ Later in the trial, the judge recalled Abrams’s use of the term “our forefathers”: “I said, What? You were born in Russia and came here four or five years ago and not a citizen, an anarchist, who can never become a citizen. Our forefathers … why, just look at it.”⁵⁵ Abrams undoubtedly sensed that the forefathers’ ideals were his.

The ardent patriotism of immigrant Mary Antin became commonplace, as Jewish, Greek, Polish, and other ethnic organizations sponsored naturalization classes and “I Am an American Day” and encouraged newcomers, especially their children, to participate in the civic life of their communities. But the claiming of America was much less dramatic for the vast majority of eastern and southern European immigrants, a large portion of whom were too busy surviving to even apply for naturalization.

Salvatore DeMeo was more typical of most immigrants than Mary Antin, although DeMeo also began acting like an American even before he became a citizen, despite his trips to and from Italy. Having made deposits regularly in the Waltham Savings Bank during the 1920s, he had accumulated nearly four thousand dollars in 1929, only three months after his last return from Italy. After the onset of the Depression and the closing of the banks, he quickly discovered that he had rights under Massachusetts law to recover some money from the Waltham Trust Company, another bank in which he had funds, and then in liquidation. He joined other depositors in a legal struggle and recovered $408.60, or 74.4 percent of his original balance, facts I discovered from papers found in the cigar box with George Washington’s profile stamped on its cover. DeMeo and millions like him quietly went about the business of becoming Americans, even as they maintained some of the religious practices, culinary preferences, and family values of the old country. In that respect, they were no different than the Anglo-Americans themselves, with their Presbyterian and Anglican rites, scones, puddings, and English and Scottish music and dance. Cultural and religious prejudices were commonplace among all groups, but the prejudices of the Anglo-Americans had greater significance because they had more power of all kinds, including cultural power.

Randolph Bourne, a rebellious descendant of English settlers, wrote in 1916, at a time of growing hostility toward newcomers from southern and eastern Europe, that “the truth is that no more tenacious cultural allegiance to the mother country has been shown by any alien nation than by the ruling class of Anglo-Saxon descendants in these American states. English snobberies, English religion, English literary styles, English literary references and canons, English ethics, English superiorities, have been the cultural food we have drunk in from our mothers’ breasts.”⁵⁶

Strengthening the Civic Culture Through Voluntary Pluralism

Those who thought of themselves as charter members could not logically have their political ideology and deny cultural diversity too. The ideology that led to First Amendment freedoms and Fourteenth Amendment protections ensured the development of cultural diversity. Even amid the ethnic and religious bigotry of what John Higham called “the tribal Twenties,”⁵⁷ as in the mining town of West Frankfurt in southern Illinois, where crowds rushed into the Italian district, “dragged cowering residents from their homes, clubbed and stoned them, and set fire to their dwellings,”⁵⁸ a white and essentially Anglo-Saxon U.S. Supreme Court upheld that principle of the civic culture—freedom of religion and of association in all things private—that gave birth to and protected voluntary ethnic pluralism.

In a series of three landmark decisions, Justice J. C. McReynolds made it clear that although he sympathized with the cultural conformists, it was his and the Court’s responsibility to uphold the principles of freedom that led to expressions of ethnic and religious diversity. In 1919, Nebraska passed a law forbidding the teaching of modern foreign languages to children between eight and sixteen. The special intention of the law, like others passed in South Dakota and Iowa, was to eliminate the German language, particularly in church-related schools run by German-Americans, but the overall effect of the law would have been to disparage the foreign languages and cultures of several other immigrant groups as well. Although the supreme courts of Iowa, Ohio, and Nebraska upheld such acts as constitutional on the broad ground that the legislature could decide what the common welfare demanded, McReynolds, speaking for the U.S. Supreme Court, said that the states had acted unconstitutionally.

The Court was sympathetic to the desire of the legislature “to foster a homogeneous people with American ideals, prepared readily to understand current discussions of civic matters….” It was cognizant of the fact that “the foreign born population is very large, that certain communities use foreign words, follow foreign leaders, move in a foreign atmosphere, and that the children are thereby hindered from becoming citizens of the most useful type.” However, while a law to prohibit the teaching of foreign languages in the schools would have been fine in ancient Sparta, where the education of males to be ideal citizens was entrusted to official guardians, it was not for the U.S. McReynolds asserted that Spartan ideas on “the relation between individual and state were wholly different from those upon which our institutions rest.” “The protection of the Constitution,” the Court insisted, “extends to all, to those who speak other languages as well as to those born with English on the tongue.”⁵⁹

Two other decisions also strengthened the idea that Americans were united by their loyalty to a civic and not a religious, linguistic, or other characteristic of a tribal culture. In 1922, Oregon passed a law requiring all students to attend public schools; the intent was to stamp out Catholic and other parochial religious schools. Sued by the Society of Sisters, a Catholic order, the plaintiffs, having lost their case in the Oregon Supreme Court, appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court; they were supported by, as amici curiae, the American Jewish Committee, the Seventh-Day Adventists, and the Domestic and Foreign Missionary Society for the Protestant Episcopal Church. Justice McReynolds, and the majority opinion, upheld the right of Americans to send their children to private or parochial schools. In what are essentially private matters, the Court ruled, diversity is protected by the Constitution. The freedoms given all Americans prevent the state from taking actions “to standardize its children.… The child is not the mere creature of the state; those who nurture him and direct his destiny have the right, coupled with the high duty, to recognize and prepare him for additional obligation.”⁶⁰

The conception of American identity as based on membership in a civic culture had an even more difficult test three years later, in 1926, when the Court heard arguments on a law in the Territory of Hawaii on whether private language schools were free to shape their own curricula if they complied with the requirements of the public schools. Even some empathic social workers and teachers in Hawaii were worried that Nisei children, by the mid-1920s more numerous than Caucasian children in the public schools, might resist Americanization. A large proportion of Japanese-American children continued to speak Japanese in their homes; a majority attended Japanese-language schools, sometimes getting up as early as four a.m. to go to schools that also taught Japanese values, customs, and history; some were even taught to venerate the emperor of Japan as a semideity.

The Hawaii legislature attempted to regulate the language schools through strict examinations for teachers and oversight of curricula. After several years of litigation in the territorial and federal courts, the U.S. Supreme Court held that the laws regarding the language schools were unconstitutional. After noting that there were 163 foreign-language schools in the territory (nine Korean, seven Chinese, and the remainder Japanese), Justice McReynolds found, this time under the Fifth Amendment, that an action by the territory to deprive parents of the right to raise their children through special language schools could not be sanctioned even though such schools encouraged an understanding and love of foreign ancestral languages and cultures.⁶¹ The practical effect of these three decisions was to encourage American patriotism not by stamping out old-culture sensibilities, as the cultural conformists wished and as many of the children of immigrants actually tried to do, but by giving legal permission to immigrants to carry on their ethnic traditions.

When the Danish immigrant journalist Jacob A. Riis concluded his autobiography in 1902 with a panegyric to the American flag and the ideals for which it stood, he also wrote of his love for the Danish countryside and of the Danish king. But as a Scandinavian he had not faced the attacks of the cultural conformists as did immigrants from eastern and southern Europe one or two decades later.⁶²

Explaining how the hyphen unites an old identity with a new one, Slovenian-born journalist Louis Adamic said that the chemistry of the hyphen intensified both feelings. In his autobiography, My America, Adamic told of returning to the village in which he was born and being asked, “Do you consider yourself an American or a Slovenian?” The answer came swiftly that Adamic believed himself to be an American, “not only legally and technically but actually,” adding, “I sometimes think I am more American than a great many of them.” Then Adamic must have confused many of the villagers when he remarked, “I am also a Slovenian … and I would say that I am an American of Slovenian birth; but, if you like it better, you can consider me as a Slovenian who went to America when he was not quite fifteen and became an American.… there is no conflict in me between my original Slovenian blood or background and my being an American.”⁶³ Even though he lost fluency in his mother tongue, slovenstvo (which means deep love for and loyalty to Slovenian traditions) had become a powerful part of his being. It was the genius of America, he said, to give room for him to find and give “the essentials of it [slovenstvo] wider and fuller expression than I could probably ever have found had I remained at home.”⁶⁴

The hyphen had triumphed, not in defiance of Americanism but as an expression of it. Paradoxically, the arrival of millions of immigrants from Europe and hundreds of thousands from Asia strengthened the Jeffersonian idea that Americans are held together by common beliefs and practices in self-government. The cultural and racial conformists kept looking to Europe for models of national identity and not to the American experience itself. When Henry Pratt Fairchild argued in 1926 that the melting pot had been a huge mistake, he also insisted that the Americanization movement was bound to fail because it was based on the idea that assimilation could be produced by a program of citizenship. Because he did not understand that the civic culture was the unifying culture of Americans, he was certain that the newcomers would, when put to the test, revert to an atavistic allegiance to their ancestral nations. To make his point clear, he asked:

Suppose that you, John Smith, native American of old New England stock … had received an attractive offer of a business position in Germany.… you soon became fluent in the language … attended German opera, read German books, took part in religious services in German churches, spent your evenings in German beer gardens, and by every means got as near to the heart of the German people as possible. Your children, born in Germany, went to German schools, played with German children, spoke German more readily than English, were never taken to visit the United States.⁶⁵

Then Fairchild asked, suppose war broke out between the U.S. and Germany. Would your children fight for the Germans? To Fairchild, the question was rhetorical. Of course, he insisted, John Smith would not urge his children to enlist in the German army. He would expect his children to feel allegiance to the homeland of their ancestors, “and however painful the act of turning their backs upon friends and associations, to respond unreservedly to the ultimate appeal of nationality.”⁶⁶

It did not work that way in the U.S. Crowding into their own ghettoes, some Italian immigrants wore horns of gold or coral along with a religious medal under their shirts.⁶⁷ But that did not keep them from participating in citizenship classes given by the Sons of Italy and other organizations. By 1927, there were five hundred Polish Roman Catholic grade schools. But that did not keep the Poles from expressing a fierce American patriotism.⁶⁸ In the 1880s in Worcester, Massachusetts, the Ancient Order of the Hibernians, an Irish nationalist society, held a picnic on July 4, in which the exuberance of the Irish served “both as a preservation of Irish customs and a defense of American freedoms.”⁶⁹ Worcester Swedes’ Independence Day picnics in the 1890s attracted about 4,600 out of a total Swedish-American population of 11,000. They began with services at one of eight Swedish Protestant churches, and ended at the picnic with patriotic speeches, sometimes in Swedish. All ethnic groups of Worcester “used the Fourth as an occasion to assert their particular identity and values,” even as they celebrated their American freedoms.⁷⁰ The sojourner French Canadians of Worcester, more insular than the Irish or the Swedes, tended to celebrate St. Jean Baptiste Day rather than the American Independence Day, and when they did observe the Fourth “they generally demonstrated more of an ethnic than an American identity.” But those who were interested in settling in the U.S. permanently, such as members of the Ward Three Naturalization Club, celebrated the Fourth of July without giving up their love for the French language and culture.⁷¹

Of all the new European groups, the Jews provided the sharpest refutation of those who argued that American identity was based on one kind of religion and/or culture. In the U.S., Jews would build hospitals, orphanages, cemeteries, schools, fraternal societies, and communal institutions just as they had in Poland, Russia, and other European countries. But now there was a difference. For the first time in the history of their diaspora they experienced not mere toleration as a group but the protection of equal rights as individuals. Often they felt the sting of anti-Semitism, and many drifted or wrenched themselves away from the older Orthodox practices and from the Yiddish language, partly because of the pressures they felt to be culturally like most Americans. Those who maintained a fierce pride in their Jewish identity illustrated Tocqueville’s principle that “patriotism grows by the exercise of civil rights.” Jewish leaders who in 1916 filed a complaint against the School Committee of Boston because Jewish children were forced to sing Christmas carols in the public schools argued on grounds of patriotic civic culture principles, including the First Amendment.⁷²

Old-world traits were transplanted, to borrow from the title of the first major sociological analysis of immigration, but the authors of the study argued that assimilation was inexorable in the United States.⁷³ Robert Park and Herbert Miller were right with respect to political assimilation. But they underestimated the ability of ethnic-Americans to nurture, sustain, and re-create their religious and cultural inheritance in new forms of ethnicity in an ever-changing kaleidoscope. Horace Kallen, the son of a rabbi from Germany, not only saw that possibility but argued its merit in a 1915 article in the New York weekly, The Nation.⁷⁴ Even Kallen at first did not understand the totally voluntary nature of ethnic-Americanism when he argued that it was necessary for the U.S. to become “a federation or commonwealth of nationalities” in order to ensure cultural democracy.

Such a federation was out of the question. If it had occurred, the very basis of American unity—equal rights of individuals—would have been vitiated for the more traditional approach of other nations to group pluralism in which the identity and rights of the individual are derived from his or her membership in a group. That Kallen did not grasp the essence of voluntary pluralism—no one used the phrase—as a diversity based on the free choice of individuals united by a common civic culture was hardly surprising, since it had never existed in his or anyone else’s experience before. But Kallen, influenced by the criticism of John Dewey, whose commitment was to individuality and diversity, quickly backed away from the appeal for a “federal republic” of nationalities or “a federation or commonwealth of national cultures.” By 1924, he was using the term “cultural pluralism” and defining it as a “fellowship of freedom and cooperation” that would result in a “national fellowship of cultural diversities,” describing, in effect, what is here called voluntary pluralism.⁷⁵

The eastern and southern European immigrants answered Jefferson’s question as to whether the country would become “more turbulent” because of massive immigration. The U.S. was not notably more turbulent because of their arrival. Most of the major episodes of internal violence in American history—Shay’s Rebellion, the Whiskey Rebellion, Dorr’s Rebellion, and the Civil War itself—occurred long before they came, and most of the labor and racial violence of the twentieth century would have occurred without them. Their presence actually helped to make Americans more aware of the civic basis of their national identity. In the period of heaviest migration from eastern and southern Europe (1881-1924), the Washington Monument was dedicated (1884), the centennial of the adoption of the Constitution was celebrated (1887), the pledge of allegiance to the American flag was adopted (1892), and the Lincoln Memorial was dedicated (1922).

Entry into the U.S. had been made much more difficult with the passage of the Immigration Law of 1924 based on a new version of the old Massachusetts idea of excluding people thought to be difficult to assimilate because of their nationality and religion. But the gates were kept open long enough to prove that the Pennsylvania idea worked for the nation. Immigrants actually helped to strengthen and more sharply define the civic culture, encouraging a voluntary ethnic pluralism within the framework of civic unity that was different from anything the world had ever known.