WHO IS AN AMERICAN?

The “Race Problem” and the “Science” of Eugenics

Even before American participation in World War I, what contemporaries called the “race problem”—the tensions that arose from the country’s increasing ethnic diversity—had become a major subject of public concern. “Race” referred to far more than Black-white relations. The Dictionary of Races or Peoples, published in 1911 by the U.S. Immigration Commission, listed no fewer than forty-five immigrant “races,” each supposedly with its own inborn characteristics. They ranged from Anglo-Saxons at the top down to Hebrews, Northern Italians, and, lowest of all, Southern Italians—supposedly violent, undisciplined, and incapable of assimilation.

The emergence of eugenics, which studied the alleged mental characteristics of different groups of people, gave an air of scientific expertise to anti-immigrant sentiment. Racial “purity” became an obsession of eugenicists. The Race Betterment Foundation and the American Breeders’ Association eugenics committee, both established in 1906, aimed to promote the “purity of the gene pool” and warned about the menace posed by people with “inferior blood.” The Eugenic Records Office issued certificates to people who could demonstrate their “Nordic purity.”

Indiana in 1907 passed a law authorizing doctors to sterilize the developmentally disabled housed in state institutions so they would not pass their “defective” genes on to children. During and after World War I, numerous other states followed suit. In Buck v. Bell (1927), the Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of these laws. Carrie Buck, an eighteen-year-old committed to a Virginia institution for the “feeble-minded,” sued to prevent her sterilization by the state on the grounds that it violated her right to the equal protection of the laws, guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes’s opinion rejecting her plea included the widely publicized statement, “Society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind. . . . Three generations of imbeciles are enough.” By the time the practice ended in the 1960s, some 63,000 persons had been involuntarily sterilized. American eugenics policies for manipulating the character of the population were carefully studied in Nazi Germany.

The very nationalization of politics and economic life served to heighten awareness of ethnic and racial difference and spurred demands for “Americanization”—the creation of a more homogeneous national culture. A 1908 play by a Jewish immigrant writer, The Melting Pot, gave a popular name to the process by which newcomers were supposed to merge their identity into existing American nationality. Public and private groups of all kinds—including educators, employers, labor leaders, social reformers, and public officials—took up the task of Americanizing new immigrants. Public schools paid great attention to Americanizing immigrants’ children. The federal and state governments demanded that immigrants demonstrate their unwavering devotion to the United States.

The Anti-German Crusade

German Americans bore the brunt of forced Americanization. The first wave of German immigrants had arrived before the Civil War. By 1914, German Americans numbered nearly 9 million, including immigrants and persons of German parentage. They had created thriving ethnic institutions including clubs, sports associations, schools, and theaters. On the eve of the war, many Americans admired German traditions in literature, music, and philosophy, and one-quarter of all the high school students in the country studied the German language. But after American entry into the war, the use of German and expressions of German culture became a target of prowar organizations.

By 1919, the vast majority of the states had enacted laws restricting the teaching of foreign languages. Popular words of German origin were changed: “hamburger” became “liberty sandwich,” and “sauerkraut” “liberty cabbage.” The government jailed Karl Muck, the director of the Boston Symphony and a Swiss citizen, as an enemy alien after he insisted on including the works of German composers like Beethoven in his concerts.

Even as Americanization programs sought to assimilate immigrants into American society, the war strengthened the conviction that certain kinds of undesirable persons ought to be excluded altogether. The new immigrants, one advocate of restriction declared, appreciated the values of democracy and freedom far less than “the Anglo-Saxon.” Stanford University psychologist Lewis Terman introduced the term “IQ” (intelligence quotient) in 1916, claiming that this single number could measure an individual’s mental capacity. Intelligence tests administered to recruits by the army seemed to confirm scientifically that Blacks and the new immigrants stood far below native white Protestants on the IQ scale, further spurring demands for immigration restriction.

Fighting for Rights and Freedom

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“A 1919 cartoon, Close the Gate, warns that unrestricted immigration allows dangerous radicals to enter the United States. It shows an astronaut carrying a suitcase labeled “Undesirable” entering an open gate to the U.S. through a door labeled “Immigration Restrictions.””

No matter how coercive, Americanization programs assumed that European immigrants and their children could eventually adjust to the conditions of American life and become productive citizens enjoying the full blessings of American freedom. This assumption did not apply to non-white immigrants, non-white nationals of U.S. overseas territory, or Blacks.

The war led to further growth of the Southwest’s Mexican population. Wartime demand for labor from the area’s mine owners and large farmers led the government to exempt Mexicans temporarily from the literacy test enacted in 1917. Segregation, by law and custom, was common in schools, hospitals, theaters, and other institutions in states with significant Mexican populations. By 1920, nearly all Mexican children in California and the Southwest were educated in their own schools or classrooms. Phoenix, Arizona, established separate public schools for Indians, Mexicans, Blacks, and whites. Although in far smaller numbers than blacks, Mexican Americans also suffered lynchings—over 200 between 1880 and 1930. Discrimination led to the formation of La Gran Liga Mexicanista de Beneficencia y Protección, which aimed to improve the conditions of Mexicans in the United States and “to strike back at the hatred of some bad sons of Uncle Sam.”

WHO IS AN AMERICAN?

From Randolph S. Bourne, “Trans-national America” (1916)

Who Is an American?: Randolph S. Bourne

Probably the most penetrating rejection of the Americanization model issued from the pen of the social critic Randolph Bourne. In an article in The Atlantic, Bourne envisioned a democratic, cosmopolitan society in which immigrants and natives alike retained their group identities while at the same time embracing a new “trans-national” culture.

No reverberatory effect of the great war has caused American public opinion more solicitude than the failure of the “melting-pot.” The discovery of diverse nationalistic feelings among our great alien population has come to most people as an intense shock. . . . We have had to listen to publicists who . . . insist that the alien shall be forcibly assimilated to that Anglo-Saxon tradition which they unquestionably label “American.”. . . We act as if we wanted Americanization to take place only on our own terms, and not by the consent of the governed. . . .

The Anglo-Saxon was merely the first immigrant. . . . Colonials from the other nations have come and settled down beside him. They found no definite native culture . . . and consequently they looked back to their mother-country, as the earlier Anglo-Saxon immigrant was looking back to his. . . .

There is no distinctively American culture. It is apparently our lot rather to be a federation of cultures. This we have been for half a century, and the war has made it ever more evident that this is what we are destined to remain. . . . What we have achieved has been rather a cosmopolitan federation of national colonies, of foreign cultures, from whom the sting of devastating competition has been removed. America is already the world-federation in miniature, the continent where for the first time in history has been achieved that miracle of hope, the peaceful living side by side, with character substantially preserved, of the most heterogeneous peoples under the sun. . . . America is coming to be, not a nationality but a trans-nationality, a weaving back and forth, with the other lands, of many threads of all sizes and colors. Any movement which attempts to thwart this weaving, or to dye the fabric any one color, or disentangle the threads of the strands, is false to this cosmopolitan vision.

QUESTIONS

1. Why does Bourne believe that the “melting pot” has failed?
2. What does he mean by describing America as a “trans-nationality”?

Asian Americans also experienced continued discrimination and exclusion. In 1906, the San Francisco school board ordered all Asian students confined to a single school. When the Japanese government protested, President Theodore Roosevelt persuaded the city to rescind the order. He then negotiated the Gentlemen’s Agreement of 1907, whereby Japan agreed to end migration to the United States except for the wives and children of men already in the country. In 1913, California barred all aliens incapable of becoming naturalized citizens (that is, all Asians) from owning or leasing land. And in 1917, Congress passed legislation creating an “Asiatic barred zone” banning immigration from much of Asia.

Despite such discrimination, Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders served in the military. Leaders of these groups saw such service as an opportunity to win greater freedom. The Chinese American press insisted that even those born abroad and barred from citizenship should register for the draft, to “bring honor to the people of our race.” Filipino leaders hoped wartime service would strengthen the case for national independence. Despite their ambiguous status as neither citizens nor aliens, thousands of Filipinos served in the U.S. army and the navy.

Native Americans and World War I

World War I intensified debates among Native Americans about freedom, citizenship, and the place of American Indians in U.S. society. More than 12,000 American Indians served in the military; most volunteered but many were drafted. Native Americans held conflicting views about military service. With widespread poverty and poor health conditions on reservations, the Society of American Indians (discussed in Chapter 18) saw the war as an opportunity to win freedom and citizenship. But many Indians viewed the draft as an assault on their sovereignty. The Pueblo, Hopi, Navajo, Haudenosaunee, Lakota, and Ojibwe peoples opposed the draft. The Oneida and Onondaga nations insisted on fighting alongside the United States as an ally and declared war on Germany. Native American soldiers’ casualty rate was higher than other groups’, with white officers using Indians for dangerous tasks such as scouting.

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Poster for D.W. Griffith’s 1915 film “The Birth of a Nation.”�The poster shows a KKK member riding a horse and burning a cross.

The Color Line

By far the largest non-white group, African Americans were excluded from nearly every Progressive definition of freedom described in Chapter 18. After their disenfranchisement in the South, few could participate in American democracy. Barred from joining most unions and from skilled employment, Black workers had little access to “industrial freedom.” Nor could Blacks, the majority desperately poor, participate fully in the emerging consumer economy, either as employees in the new department stores (except as janitors and cleaning women) or as purchasers of the consumer goods now flooding the marketplace. Progressive intellectuals, social scientists, labor reformers, and suffrage advocates displayed a remarkable indifference to the Black condition.

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“A cartoon from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, April 17, 1906, commenting on the lynching of three black men in Springfield, Missouri. The shadow cast by the Statue of Liberty forms a gallows on the ground.”

Roosevelt, Wilson, and Race

The Progressive presidents shared prevailing attitudes concerning Blacks. Theodore Roosevelt shocked white opinion by inviting Booker T. Washington to dine with him in the White House and by appointing a number of Blacks to federal offices. But in 1906, when a small group of Black soldiers shot off their guns in Brownsville, Texas, killing one resident, and none of their fellows would name them, Roosevelt ordered the dishonorable discharge of three Black companies—156 men in all, including six winners of the Congressional Medal of Honor.

Woodrow Wilson, a native of Virginia, could speak without irony of the South’s “genuine representative government” and its exalted “standards of liberty.” His administration imposed racial segregation in federal departments and dismissed numerous Black federal employees. Wilson allowed D. W. Griffith’s film The Birth of a Nation, which glorified the Ku Klux Klan as the defender of white civilization during Reconstruction, to have its premiere at the White House in 1915.

In one of hundreds of lynchings during the Progressive era, a white mob in Springfield, Missouri, in 1906 falsely accused three Black men of rape, hanged them from an electric light pole, and burned their bodies in a public orgy of violence. Atop the pole stood a replica of the Statue of Liberty.

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A photograph of the men who founded the Niagara movement at a 1905 meeting on the Canadian side of Niagara Falls.�W.�E.�B.�Du�Bois is in the second row, second from the right, in a white hat. There are no women present at this meeting, but there is one male child. All of the men are well dressed and wear hats. Most are black but a few appear to be white, including the child. Four men are seated in the front row, four are seated behind them, one with a child on his lap, and four stand in the back. The background is of Niagra Falls.

W. E. B. Du Bois and the Revival of Black Protest

Black leaders struggled to find a strategy to rekindle the national commitment to equality that had flickered brightly, if briefly, during Reconstruction. No one thought more deeply, or over so long a period, about the Black condition and the challenge it posed to American democracy than the scholar and activist W. E. B. Du Bois. Born in 1868, and educated at Fisk and Harvard universities, Du Bois lived to his ninety-fifth year. The unifying theme of Du Bois’s career was his effort to reconcile the contradiction between what he called “American freedom for whites and the continuing subjection of Negroes.” His book The Souls of Black Folk (1903) issued a clarion call for Blacks dissatisfied with the accommodationist policies of Booker T. Washington to press for equal rights. Du Bois believed that educated African Americans like himself—the “talented tenth” of the Black community—must use their education and training to challenge inequality.

In some ways, Du Bois was a typical Progressive who believed that investigation, exposure, and education would lead to solutions for social problems. But he also understood the necessity of political action. In 1905, Du Bois gathered a group of Black leaders at Niagara Falls (meeting on the Canadian side because no American hotel would provide accommodations) and organized the Niagara movement, which sought to reinvigorate the abolitionist tradition. “We claim for ourselves,” Du Bois wrote in the group’s manifesto, “every single right that belongs to a freeborn American.” Four years later, Du Bois joined with a group of mostly white reformers, shocked by a lynching in Springfield, Illinois (Lincoln’s adult home), to create the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. The NAACP, as it was known, launched a long struggle for the enforcement of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments.

The NAACP’s legal strategy won a few victories. In Bailey v. Alabama (1911), the Supreme Court overturned southern “peonage” laws that made it a crime for sharecroppers to break their labor contracts. Six years later, it ruled unconstitutional a Louisville zoning regulation excluding Blacks from living in certain parts of the city (primarily because it interfered with whites’ right to sell their property as they saw fit). Overall, however, the Progressive era witnessed virtually no progress toward racial justice.

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A cover illustration of a piece of sheet music from 1919. It suggests that because they fought side by side with white soldiers in World War�I (although the army was racially segregated), black soldiers deserved legal equality on their return to the United States. The cover reads, “Are they equal in the eyes of the law? Words by Sergt. Allen R Griggs, Jr. Music by Miss L.E. Campbell composers of “Please Let You Light Shine on Me” Price 25 cents.” At the bottom of the cover, it says, “Published by Campbell-Griggs Pub. Co. 711 Saxon Ave., Memphis, Tenn.” The cover features Justive, depicted as a woman wearing a white, Roman-style dress and a white blindfold labelled, ’Justive,“ holding a scale with a miniature white man on one side and a miniature black man on the other. They are both dressed in soldier’s uniforms. The scale is perfectly balanced. Above Justice’s head, as if in a thought bubble, there is a drawing of a black soldier and a white soldier fighting together on a battlefield in front of a tank.”

Military Service and the Promise of Freedom

Among Black Americans, the wartime language of freedom inspired hopes for a radical change in the country’s racial system. The Black press rallied to the war. Du Bois himself, in a widely reprinted editorial in the NAACP’s monthly magazine, The Crisis, called on African Americans to “close ranks” and enlist in the army, to help “make our own America a real land of the free.”

Black participation in the Civil War had helped to secure the destruction of slavery and the achievement of citizenship. But during World War I, closing ranks did not bring significant gains. The navy barred Blacks entirely, and the segregated army confined most of the 400,000 Blacks who served in the war to supply units rather than combat. Contact with African colonial soldiers fighting alongside the British and French did widen the horizons of Black American soldiers. But although colonial troops marched in the victory parade in Paris, the Wilson administration did not allow Black Americans to participate.

The Great Migration

Nonetheless, the war unleashed social changes that altered the contours of American race relations. The combination of increased wartime production and a drastic falloff in immigration from Europe opened thousands of industrial jobs to Black laborers for the first time, inspiring a large-scale migration from South to North. On the eve of World War I, 90 percent of the African American population still lived in the South. But between 1910 and 1920, half a million Blacks left the South. The Black population of Chicago more than doubled, New York City’s rose 66 percent, and smaller industrial cities like Akron, Buffalo, and Trenton showed similar gains. Many motives sustained the Great Migration—higher wages in northern factories than were available in the South (even if Blacks remained confined to menial and unskilled positions), opportunities for educating their children, escape from the threat of lynching, and the prospect of exercising the right to vote.

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“Migration Series: in the North the Negro had better educational facilities,” Jacob Lawrence 1940–41. Casein tempera on hardboard. This panel from the Migration Series (which depicts the exodus of African-Americans from the South to the North after WWI) depicts three black girls in colorful dresses in a classroom writing numbers on a blackboard.

The Black migrants, mostly young men and women, carried with them “a new vision of opportunity, of social and economic freedom,” as Alain Locke explained in the preface to his influential book The New Negro (1925). Yet the migrants encountered vast disappointments—severely restricted employment opportunities, exclusion from unions, rigid housing segregation, and violence that showed that no region of the country was free from racial hostility. The new Black presence, coupled with demands for change inspired by the war, created a racial tinderbox that needed only an incident to trigger an explosion.

Racial Violence, North and South

Dozens of Blacks were killed during a 1917 riot in East St. Louis, Illinois, where employers had recruited Black workers in an attempt to weaken unions (most of which excluded Blacks from membership). In 1919, more than 250 persons died in riots in the urban North. Most notable was the violence in Chicago, touched off by the drowning by white bathers of a Black teenager who accidentally crossed the unofficial dividing line between Black and white beaches on Lake Michigan. By the time the National Guard restored order, 38 persons had been killed and more than 500 injured.

Violence was not confined to the North. In the year after the war ended, seventy-six persons were lynched in the South, including several returning Black veterans wearing their uniforms. The Tulsa massacre, the worst single incidence of racial terror in American history, occurred in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in 1921 when more than 300 Blacks were killed and over 10,000 left homeless after a white mob, including police and National Guardsmen, burned an all-Black section of the city to the ground.

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Photograph of Marcus Garvey (founder of the Universal Negro Improvement Association) sitting with a gavel in hand.

The Rise of Garveyism

World War I kindled a new spirit of militancy. The East St. Louis riot of 1917 inspired a widely publicized Silent Protest Parade on New York’s Fifth Avenue in which 10,000 Blacks silently carried placards reading, “Mr. President, Why Not Make America Safe for Democracy?” In the new densely populated Black ghettos of the North, support emerged for the Universal Negro Improvement Association, a movement for African independence and Black self-reliance launched by Marcus Garvey, a recent immigrant from Jamaica. To Garveyites, freedom meant national self-determination. Blacks, they insisted, should enjoy the same internationally recognized identity enjoyed by other peoples in the aftermath of the war. Du Bois and other established Black leaders viewed Garvey as little more than a demagogue, but the massive movement he built testified to the popular appeal of Black nationalist ideas and the sense of betrayal that had been kindled in Black communities during and after the war. Garvey’s influence spread to the Caribbean, Canada, and Africa. The government launched an investigation into Garvey in 1919, hoping to deport him as an “undesirable alien.” Charged and convicted of mail fraud in 1922, Garvey was deported in 1927.