Epilogue

Brooklyn’s America

What is an American? Francie Nolan, the heroine of Betty Smith’s novel A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, encounters this question on the first day at her new school. When the teacher calls the roll, and asks each child her lineage, the answers are alike: “I’m Polish-American. My father was born in Warsaw.” “Irish-American. Me fayther and mither were born in County Cork.” Only Francie’s answer is different, and is offered with pride:

“I’m an American.”

“I know you’re American,” said the easily exasperated teacher. “But what’s your nationality?”

“American!” insisted Francie even more proudly.

“Will you tell me what your parents are or do I have to send you to the principal?”

“My parents are American. They were born in Brooklyn.”

All the children turned around to look at a little girl whose parents had not come from the old country. And when Teacher said, “Brooklyn? Hm. I guess that makes you American, all right,” Francie was proud and happy. How wonderful was Brooklyn, she thought, when just being born there automatically made you an American!¹

For Francie Nolan, granddaughter of immigrants from Ireland and Austria, the issue was settled. But for her classmates, including the Polish-American and the Irish girl who spoke with the heavy brogue of her parents, the question of nationality was still contested. They, too, had been born in Brooklyn, but did that make them American? What about their parents? We have seen the efforts of groups ranging from “uptown” Jews to Protestant women’s clubs to make Brooklyn’s twentieth-century immigrants more American, teaching them to read and speak English, understand American civic institutions and norms, and adopt the behavior of native Americans. These efforts were not necessarily hostile, but they often established a standard that left little room for the retention of Old World habits and values.

Frederick Boyd Stevenson went further. He wanted immigrants to think in English and rejected the legitimacy of one man’s declaration of divided affection for America and his country of origin. Like other old-stock Brooklynites, Stevenson ultimately accepted immigration restriction as the only solution to the problems posed by the New Immigrants, a solution that settled the question Francie Nolan faced on that first day of school. The granddaughter of old immigrants might be acceptable as an American. The New Immigrants were not.

This contest was by no means restricted to Brooklyn. As the number of recently arrived immigrants mounted in America and the tensions generated by World War I and the Russian Revolution increased, it became a national issue of great importance. Theodore Roosevelt, one of the earliest advocates for a robust Americanization program, had no patience with hyphenated Americanism, arguing instead that immigrants must give up all vestiges of prior loyalties, language, and culture and become “Americans pure and simple.” Optimistic that this could be done, Roosevelt loudly applauded Israel Zangwill’s 1908 play, The Melting Pot (it was dedicated to TR), which he understood as a salute to the melting away of alien cultures in response to the day-to-day experience of American life and the remolding of immigrants into an Anglo-Dutch form.² He seems not to have considered the possibility of fusing disparate cultures into a new American, only partly in the shape of people like himself.

Roosevelt’s friend Madison Grant was skeptical of any such amalgamation of cultures, or of attempts to reshape immigrants into a preexisting American form. Imbued with currently fashionable theories of eugenics and race, Grant (who was descended from original settlers of New Netherland and Massachusetts Bay) published his highly influential The Passing of the Great Race in 1916. The book divided the peoples of the world into three enduring and incompatible races, Caucasoids, Negroids, and Mongoloids, with further division of the mostly European Caucasoids into Nordics, Alpines, and Mediterraneans. Superior to the other groups and subgroups, Nordics formed the basic American racial stock, now threatened by the large-scale migrations to the United States of Mediterraneans and Alpines (from Eastern Europe), who were certain to outbreed and even inter-breed with American Nordics, resulting in the latter’s “race suicide.” Grant’s solution was, obviously, neither racial amalgamation nor an intense program of Americanization. Only rigid segregation of the races and, more importantly, the closing off of further immigration would save America.³ Vice president of the Immigration Restriction League from 1922 until his death in 1937, Grant helped set the ideological context for the Immigration Act of 1924.

Grant was by no means the only racial theorist of this era. In 1920, Lothrop Stoddard published The Rising Tide of Color against White World Supremacy, with an introduction by Grant, that was even more dire in its predictions of the coming challenge to Nordic supremacy. Not just America but Western Civilization was threatened by a population explosion among nonwhite races, their migration to parts of the world in which Nordics were dominant, and the impending collapse of colonialism.⁴ Like Grant, Stoddard was impressed by eugenics as a mechanism to limit nonwhite populations. Margaret Sanger may have designed her American Birth Control League as a way of helping poor women. For Stoddard, who was a founder of Sanger’s League, and a member of the American Eugenics Society and the Ku Klux Klan, birth control was crucial to the preservation of Nordic dominance.

Many old-stock Americans embraced these ideas before and during the 1920s. Whether one identified as Nordic, Anglo-Dutch, or Anglo-Saxon, the threat of alien invasion could appear real, imminent—indeed, well underway— and transformative of the character of American society. “What does it mean to be a Gentile in New York?” asked Pearson’s Magazine in 1917. “It means that you are lonesome” in the presence of so many Jews, who are increasing at so rapid a rate that “Gentiles will shortly be on exhibition at the Bronx Zoo, where the children of Israel may regard them with curious eyes.” In the city, Jews could not be escaped. “You pay rent to a Jewish landlord, buy your food from a Jewish market man, your medicines from a Jewish druggist, your dry goods from a Jewish merchant.” When you have been sick and are discharged from a Jewish hospital where you were treated by Jewish doctors and nurses you might wish to celebrate with a new suit of clothes. You search the city for a Gentile tailor “and when you find one with an Irish name at last you learn later that his true name is Feinheimer.” The grim anti-Semitism of this article—the thesis that Jews have taken over the American metropolis—belies its intended humorous tone. The American Hebrew & Jewish Messenger reprinted it as a warning to Jews who might not have understood the depth of resentment toward them.⁵

Four years later the American Hebrew responded to former Cornell University president Jacob Gould Schurman, who had warned Americans that the much-extolled melting pot was melting very few immigrants. “Either we can never become a homogeneous American people,” Schurman declared, “either unassimilated masses of European nationalities must share our domain with us, or we must set limits to the tide of immigration so that a unified national life and consciousness shall remain possible for us.” The melting pot does not melt, responded the American Hebrew, “because there is no warmth applied to it.” Attempts to assimilate and Americanize immigrants have not succeeded because they have paid so little heed to the foreigners’ own values and feelings. “Patience and love must go into the process. When a famous painter was once asked by a beginner how he mixed his paints, the significant reply was ‘With brains, sir.’ If we were asked how to make the Melting Pot melt, we should be tempted strongly to say, ‘With brains and heart, sir.’ ”⁶

The American Hebrew accepted the idea of a melting pot, even while it insisted on the legitimacy of foreign cultures, in essence suggesting that assimilation cannot and should not entirely efface those cultures while turning immigrants into true and loyal Americans. Half a dozen years earlier, a brief, two-part article in The Nation went well beyond this argument and proved to be far more influential. Horace Kallen’s “Democracy Versus the Melting Pot: A Study of American Nationality” was the first of many publications by this young Jewish-American academic that challenged the melting pot itself on behalf of what Kallen called “cultural pluralism.”⁷ The goal of achieving a unitary American type within a homogeneous culture was not only unrealistic—it was undesirable. Dismissive of the Rooseveltian insistence on an Anglo-Dutch Americanism as mere “cultural primogeniture,” Kallen questioned the very idea of homogeneity as the necessary foundation of a democratic society and its civic institutions. As an alternative to the melting pot, he offered the metaphor of the symphony orchestra, with its many instruments of different “timbre and tonality,” each essential to the performance of complex symphonic music. Society, too, is complex, Kallen argued, and “each ethnic group is the natural instrument, its spirit and culture are its theme and melody, and the harmony and dissonances and discords of them all make the symphony of civilization.”⁸

Kallen assumed the permanent existence of a dominant “Anglo-Saxon” class, which he thought could be persuaded to enact laws embodying the best precepts and practices of American democracy, and usher in a “multiplicity in unity.” “Democracy Versus the Melting Pot,” however, focused exclusively on groups that had emigrated to the United States from Europe: Irish, Germans, Scandinavians, Poles, and Jews. Published in 1924, Kallen’s “Culture and the Ku Klux Klan” contrasted these once derided and exploited immigrants, who had (or would soon) become “more or less stably settled in the United States,” to the “steady and cumulative antagonism” still administered to “the Negro.” Noting that KKK members were “native, white, and Protestant,” Kallen did not mention conflict between ethnic groups and Blacks and implied that cultural pluralism would make racism go away. Kallen’s lack of serious and sustained attention to the unique challenges of race in America, according to one eminent critic, was “a fatal elision” in his theory of cultural pluralism.⁹

Kallen’s argument stimulated others who were dissatisfied with both “cultural primogeniture” and an Americanization designed to eliminate diversity. In a letter to Kallen, John Dewey urged an “assimilation to one another—not to Anglo-Saxonism,” and in his own essays wrote of homogenization as a false goal. Randolph Bourne, a friend of Kallen’s and a former student of Dewey’s, wrote powerfully of a “trans-national America” that gave no primacy to the English culture from which he himself descended, nourishing instead a cosmopolitan mix of cultures, none effacing any other, each contributing to a larger whole characterized by diversity rather than either a homogeneous mass or the imperial rule of a hegemonic group. This, to Bourne, was not merely a goal, but an achievement, for in the era of the New Immigration the United States was already living “that miracle of hope, the peaceful living side by side, with character substantially preserved, of the most heterogeneous peoples under the sun.”¹⁰

It took time for these bold and expansive ideas to become influential beyond the worlds of the academy and urban liberal journalism. In the meantime, during the 1920s at least, the agenda of Madison Grant and Lothrop Stoddard carried significantly more weight among those who wielded disproportionate power in the formulation of public policy. Old-stock Americans celebrated the passage of the immigration restriction acts of 1921 and 1924, which drastically limited the migration to America of Eastern and Southern Europeans. To the defenders of the Nordic race in America the legislation confirmed the supremacy of their ideas and values and, many of them thought, secured a permanent victory over those who spoke of the evils of “cultural primogeniture” and the benefits of “cultural pluralism.”

It did neither. Immigration had largely ceased, but the door had been closed too late. Immigrants had already formed their families, built their communities, and set to work toward a better life. Many of them and many more of their children thrived in America, and while that thriving generally involved a significant degree of assimilation it almost never resulted in the abandonment of prior ethnic identities. William Thomas and Florian Znaniecki observed Polish-American communities as something new, enduring, and by their nature different not only from the Nordics that preceded them but also the communities of other hyphenated Americans. In their fine-grained studies, Horace Kallen found confirmation of his predictions of a culturally plural America. During the 1930s the racial theories of Grant and Stoddard lost much of their persuasiveness, a process no doubt hastened by their embrace by Adolf Hitler and other European fascists. As these ideas faded and ethnic communities proved their worth and staying power, the theory of cultural pluralism became more widely accepted, rising to become a fundamental component of the American Creed. The successful fight against Nazism and the realization of the full dimensions of its racist horrors helped confirm the pluralist American ideal, as did the insistence by our first Roman Catholic president that the United States is a nation of immigrants.

Though fundamental to American identity, cultural pluralism—which in the twenty-first century has been supplemented and to some extent supplanted by the concept of multiculturalism—still contends with reassertions of xenophobia and white nationalism, and with considerable resistance from people who do not accept the premise that cultural diversity not only defines America but is one of its greatest strengths. Still, the lady who lifts her lamp beside the golden door knows the value of the wretched refuse of any teeming shore. And Brooklynites know that their uniquely vibrant borough, as much as or more than any other place in America, is where huddled masses learned to breathe free.