This Was America, 1865-1965: Unequal Citizens in the Segregated Republic 9781644696385

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THIS WAS AMERICA 1865–1965 UNEQUAL CITIZENS I N T H E S E G R E G AT E D R E P U B L I C

North American Jewish Studies

Series Editor Ira Robinson (Concordia University) Other Titles in this Series Catalog of the Gerald K. Stone Collection of Judaica: A Bibliographical Resource for Canadian Jewish Studies Gerald K. Stone Strange Journey: John R. Friedeberg Seeley and the Quest for Mental Health Paul Roberts Bentley A Story of Jewish Experience in Mississippi Leon Waldoff Anti-Shechita Prosecutions in the Anglo-American World, 1855–1913: “A major attack on Jewish freedoms” David Fraser Conversations with Colleagues: On Becoming an American Jewish Historian Edited by Jeffrey S. Gurock History, Memory, and Jewish Identity Edited by Ira Robinson, Naftali S. Cohn, and Lorenzo DiTommaso For more information on this series, please visit: academicstudiespress.com/northamericanjewishstudies

THIS WAS AMERICA 1865–1965 UNEQUAL CITIZENS I N T H E S E G R E G AT E D R E P U B L I C

G E R D KO R M A N

BOSTON 2022

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Korman, Gerd, author. Title: This was America, 1865–1965: unequal citizens in the segregated republic / Gerd Korman. Description: Boston, MA: Academic Studies Press, 2022. | Series: North American Jewish Studies | Includes bibliographical references. Identifiers: LCCN 2022001447 (print) | LCCN 2022001448 (ebook) | ISBN 9781644696378 (hardback) | ISBN 9781644696385 (adobe pdf) | ISBN 9781644696392 (epub) Subjects: LCSH: African Americans--Relations with Jews. | Jews--United States--Social conditions. | African Americans--Social conditions--To 1964. | Segregation--United States. | United States--Ethnic relations. | United States--Race relations--History. Classification: L CC E184.36.A34 K67 2022 (print) | LCC E184.36.A34 (ebook) | DDC 305.800973--dc23/eng/20220202 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022001447 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022001448 Copyright © 2022 Academic Studies Press All rights reserved. ISBN 9781644696378 (hardback) ISBN 9781644696385 (adobe pdf) ISBN 9781644696392 (epub) Book design by PHi Business Solutions Cover design by Ivan Grave On the cover: The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., center, and Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, second from right, march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, March 21, 1965. Courtesy of Susannah Heschel Academic Studies Press 1577 Beacon Street Brookline, MA 02456, USA [email protected] www.academicstudiespress.com

To Gadi

Contents

Acknowledgmentsix Prefacexiii Introduction1 Part One: Republican Ethnicking 1. Veritas 2. Races 3. Promised Lands 4. Ethnicking 5. Profiling 6. Peoplehood Citizens

29 31 55 74 93 106 122

Part Two: Republican Discipline 7. Safeguarding the Public Square 8. Screening and Quarantines 9. At Work in Danzig 10. Nationalizing Secular Peoplehoods 11. Battling Citizens 12. Bending Hierarchies

131 133 155 172 187 209 240

Part Three: Last Words 13. Pasts in US 14. US in the Public Square 15. Ethnicking in Plain Sight

261 263 273 292

Epilogue315 Index319

Acknowledgments

I continue to appreciate the influence of teachers and scholars, first at Brooklyn College, afterwards at the University of Wisconsin where I was a graduate student in the Department of History. Among them was George Mosse, John Hope Franklin, John Burnham, George Rawick, and Ping Chiu. These scholars helped me to stay the course, to remain an American historian with a Euro-American perspective, learning to keep African and Jewish Americans in the main frame of my analytical narrative. In Cornell University’s Department of History, I leaned on the incomparable Paul Gates. John Weiss and Dick Polenberg always helped; I appreciated the influence of Walter LaFeber, Steven Kaplan, and Isabelle V. Hull. In the Department of Government Peter Katzenstein remains an inspiration; and in the Department of German Literature Sander Gilman showed me in one of his seminars what imaginative interdisciplinary research and teaching could accomplish. Beyond Cayuga’s Waters, in the fields of Modern Jewish History, I benefitted from the leadership of Henry Feingold, at The City College of New York, from the work of Yehuda Bauer at Yad Vashem and the Hebrew University, and from Saul Friedlander at Tel Aviv University and UCLA. As an American historian at Cornell’s New York State School of Industrial and Labor Relations, I had the benefit of a tolerant interdisciplinary faculty. I remain indebted: to my seniors, Maurice Neufeld, Milton Konvitz, and to my first dean, Vernon Jensen; to three of my other deans, Robert B. McKersie, David Lipsky, and Harry Katz; to the distinguished Ron Ehrenberg, and to Frank Miller, Sam Bacharach and Nick Salvatore, each of whom became special colleagues. I cherish my memory of John Windmuller, a colleague, office mate, and a beloved friend. Here I need to take a moment to say a few words about the years of my tenured residency at Cornell, for they played an important part in my academic experience with subjects entangled with the Euro-American history of the Holocaust. I taught traditional American “free” labor history in a context that always discussed the importance of Euro-American kinds of “forced labor.” Clio was my guide. In the antebellum history of the United States that meant paying special attention to black enslaved workers. After “Emancipation 1863,” while paying

x

Acknowledgments

attention to Europe’s serfdoms and its after-years, I stressed the American history of a segregated republic when white citizens locked many black citizen workers into “Black Codes” and when white ethnic citizens found themselves forced into other forms of prison and contract labor. My attention to Germany’s use of Jewish forced labor in WWI and WWII provided part of the context for discussing forced labor as part of Nazi Germany’s “Final Solution” for exterminating its millions of Jewish prisoners. This ILR teaching experience helped to shape my work as an American historian for whom the Holocaust never stood alone as a parochial “Jewish subject”; it was always a new secular subject, the catastrophic historical phenomenon of mid-twentieth century for which the Euro-American history of forced labor provided a precondition. In writing this book I have been blessed with the help of friends and former students. Historian John Burnham of Ohio State was a pioneer in the study of psychiatry and medicine: he improved the last version of this book. At Assumption College John McClymer’s knowledge of American ethnic history helped me to rethink my first drafts. Former students have been most gracious: Marc Kruman at Wayne State University gave me early advice in preparing the book for publication; Melvyn P. Leffler at the University of Virginia made me sharpen my critical distance, and most recently David Oshinsky, now at New York University, reviewed a late version and gave me the benefit of his scholarship and professional connections. So too did Steve Zipperstein, an old friend I first met at Cornell; for many years now he has been at Stanford University. His knowledge of Jewish history in Europe and America enriched my efforts to improve the manuscript; and so did Marisa Magano, the copy editor he recommended. Under the sensitive leadership of chief editor Alessandra Anzani, the editorial staff of the Academic Studies Press has transformed that manuscript “This was America” into a printed book. In my efforts to bring this manuscript to print I gratefully acknowledge the help of family and dear friends. My daughter Arona Korman Gvaryahu, is a teacher of English literature in Israel; she examined every version of the manuscript: her detailed comments improved it on almost every page. A grandson, Dr. Amit Gvaryahu, is a fellow historian at the Hebrew University; he reviewed the manuscript for publication. My son Joshua Korman is Professor of Clinical Surgery at Stanford University, his wife, Dr. Siobhan Fink Korman, is a psychologist, and my brother Manfred Korman, is a New York City educator; they provided support and funded the project, and together with son Ezra, an Israeli educator, they read all or many manuscript pages and raised critical questions

Acknowledgments

along the way. Our Natalia Indrimi, Executive Director at Centro Primo Levi, brought an illustration to the book’s cover. I had help from special friends, some of whom served as readers and offered valuable comments: Lynn Paltrow, is a dear friend from her student days at ILR. She is a famous civil rights attorney with standing at the United States Supreme Court, and she remains the long-time Executive Director of National Advocates for Pregnant Women; Suzanne McNear is the well-known writer on the East End of Long Island; and Carol Mellor is an Attorney at Law and a leader of the League of Women Voters. Long-time friend Howard Roth, is a regular luncheon partner, who helped me to appreciate the subject of “epigenetics.” Finally, I cannot leave this page of acknowledgement without paying loving tributes to the most important individuals in my adult life. Beginning in 1955–56, in Madison, Wisconsin, where she was a student of famed Joshua and Esther Lederberg, the late Dr. Ruth Zloten Korman, a teacher and publishing geneticist at Cornell University, managed our family, in time one with four children; she also educated an ignorant husband, especially about the Yiddish language and the subject of genetics. Ruth died in 1989. Since then, another generation has taken charge, during which Ann and I found each other, becoming partners, and recently having to mourn the death of beloved children, daughter Malka Steyn and Ann’s son Paul Guggenheim. Dr. Ann Sandford is a fellow historian who has published in European and American history and as a professor has taught European history at Regis College and had a successful career at the Digital Corporation: she may not always see them, but I sense her fingerprints on every page of this book.

xi

Preface

This Was America is a historian’s work that takes its title from a Ralph Ellison passage; and so much more from his other writings during the era of the Civil Rights Revolution. In 1965, Ellison spoke about the “main stream” of American culture insisting that the phrase expressed “an exact mirroring of segregation and second-class citizenship.” He said, “This is America,” a nation of subcultures brought into being by the “interaction among diversified cultural groups, Jewish or Negro, whether they are urban or rural.” It is they that have “helped to shape whatever it is we are who call ourselves Americans.”1 Since then, “ethnic group” has become a more fashionable term than “nationality” and “subculture,” but the people so labeled by our changing constructs have remained essential in determining whatever it was when, in the past, we called ourselves Americans. In fact, when Ellison wrote of subcultures and their interactions, he invested them with the meanings and sentiments that the Civil Rights Revolution clarified: “republican peoplehoods” had engaged the nation’s “ethnicking.” Ellison would have understood these ethnicking’s effects, for in the 1960s, he had said about himself as a writer: “I wish that we would dispense with this idea that we are to get in somewhere. The main stream is in oneself. The main stream of American literature is in me, even though I am a Negro, because I am a Negro I possess more of Mark Twain that many white writers do.”2 Ellison explained why he could make that claim. He had “learned certain things, not because I embraced … [ Judaism] and not because of my blood components, but because I was in cultural contact with a group of people who were very expressive. This is America, as far as I know. I know of no way of defining this reality out of existence.” It is in the folk stories that “Negroes” tell each other in one place and “Jews” tell each other in another. “There is a basic unity of the experience, despite all the other stuff. … [There] are many idioms of American culture, including, certainly, a Negro idiom of American culture in the South: It is in speech, manners, dress, cuisine. It is American, and it has existed a long time. It has refinements and crudities. It has all the aspects of cultural reality.” Each 1 Ralph Ellison, “The Negro American,” Daedalus 95, no. 2 (Winter 1966): 413–414, 435–441. 2 Ibid.

xiv

Preface

“minority group, including Negroes, tries to impose its sense of the total experience upon everyone else. That is not scary and it can be creative for everyone. … I think we owe something to the total experience.” Ellison defended his subculture, he said, “because it is precious to me, because I believe it is a vital contributing part of the total culture. I do not want to deny that. If I did, then I would have to throw away my typewriter and become a sociologist.” He was not alone. Philip Roth compressed a similar trope as a “Newark Jew.” Then, having so identified himself, Roth insisted that he was “a free American” when working as a novelist.3 As an ordinary historian, I have benefitted from the Civil Rights Revolution. It has influenced this study of ethnic history in the past century of the United States.

3 Ellison, ibid., 41. Roth spoke in 2001: “I Have Fallen in Love with American Names: Shaping a Writer,” New Yorker, June 5, 2017, 46–47.

Introduction

The decades following WWII seeded the Civil Rights Revolution’s arrival, even though victory euphoria muffled the nation’s angry voices. Militant African Americans, living with their ever-lengthening unique shadow of enslavement, had fought segregation as if there was no war and the war as if there was no segregation. But African Americans understood that as a collective, more so than any other living group of people in the United States, they would not benefit from many of the government’s wartime promises, certainly not the ones promising freedom from want and freedom from fear. Since the end of the civil war segregationists and militant racists had remained too powerful. Euphoria also shunted another, much smaller, conspicuous minority group of the republic, the traumatized yet divided Jewish-American people. Horrific wartime news, lacerated by the initial failure to comprehend the Nazi regime’s “Final Solution” for the Jewish Question, precluded millions in the United States from immediately recognizing that another distinctive Euro-American catastrophe had struck. The wartime murder of relatives, friends, and fellow Jews. Five or six or more million in some fifty months or so: in German occupied Europe, unarmed Jewish civilians without a sovereign state to defend them—or, except for a few, to accept them as refugees. Then, in the years when the African American Civil Rights Revolution began to find its footings in the South, the unique experience helped to energize the larger Zionist mobilization effort supporting the new sovereign Jewish state of Israel.1

1 The African American press paid attention to voices and organizations wanting to use Nuremberg’s lessons to fight colonialism and in the United States lynching and segregation: the ­Amsterdam News, the Pittsburgh Chronicle, and the Chicago Defender, 1945–1948. In 1944 Eugene Holmes, professor of philosophy at Howard University, wrote about one ­African ­American context. “Can [Negroes] see the relationship which exist between Congress that ­Negroes have nothing to expect  in a victory and that all Negroes  must return to Africa” (­Chicago Defender, June 3, 1944). For Jewish Americans see Henry L. Feingold, A Time for Searching: Entering the Mainstream 1920–1945 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1992), 220–265; Edward S. Shapiro, A Time for Healing: American Jewry since World War II (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1992), 189–201; Melvyn L. Urofsky, “American Zionism to the Founding of the State of Israel” and Rafael Medoff, “Revisionist Zionism in America,” in Encyclopedia of ­American Jewish History, 2 vols. (Norman, OK: University of Oaklahoma, 2008), 1:203–212.

2

Introduction

But not among American historians; they usually responded to the reports about the “Final Solution” as another tragic WWII atrocity story—a kind of private one about Jews. In the instance of this book, a 1964 lecture by C. Vann Woodward must have influenced my thinking about the place of the “­Holocaust” in this yet unwritten chapter of the nation’s history. For even as the Civil Rights Revolution was moving into its most intense moments and spawning public meetings with Woodward and other scholars and public intellectuals, the international media again brought the Holocaust to many an American reader. First came the dispatches from Jerusalem, where famously Israel tried and executed Adolf Eichmann, and then in 1964 they came from Frankfurt, Germany where Auschwitz trials detailed much of the killing center’s operations. Woodward had come to Cornell University, my home institution, for one of its famous lecture series. He was a distinguished historian, a scholar of the modern South and most recently author of a popular and influential study, The Strange Career of Jim Crow. As he discussed African American moments of liberation following the issuance of President Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation in 1863, there came to mind with megaphonic impact the joys and tragedies of the liberated as they walked out of the past with free steps and as they rushed to get away: in his telling many drowned, in overcrowded southern river boats; in 1944–45, in liberating army camps, some who were starving, their self-control gone, used their freedom to move: said one observer years later, to jump into boiling soup kettles. About that ’44–45 liberation Woodward, the American historian, was silent but it was an event still echoing for Jewish American ears that had heard the news about death camps and other Nazi prisons, the news about that historic world phenomenon, in the United State the privatized Holocaust. This experience at the lecture was important because at the time, during the Civil Rights Revolution, the memories about the “Final Solution” and about the A ­ llies’ “Nurenberg Trials” participated in Cornell’s Stadtler Hall, refreshed by the news from J­ erusalem and Frankfurt. Yet in Woodward’s lecture, as in the weeks, months, and years before and after the lecture, the historic phenomenon was missing from almost all works about the past written by professional historians working in the United States. That inexcusable silence screamed, influencing the kind of studies presented in this book about the first half of the twentieth century, when America’s antisemitism had been potent and influential. There was a Euro-American context for the murder of millions of Jews. It had been driven by the same constructed facts concerning biology, race, and religion that informed the privatized c­ atastrophes

Introduction

experienced by African Americans in the time of their enslavement, and then during their enforced segregation in so many years in the twentieth century. And in the early sixties that segregation seemed as permanent as it had been from the start. Woodward was convinced that the seventy-year-old complex structure of segregation remained secure as ever, echoing John Hope Franklin from 1956: “The wall of segregation had become so formidable, so impenetrable, apparently, that the entire weight of the American tradition of equality and all the strength of the American constitutional system had to be brought to make the slightest crack in it.” And no doubt, Franklin was recalling some of the words from his friend Thurgood Marshall who ten years earlier had warned against a campaign of civil disobedience. “[A] disobedience movement on the part of Negroes and their white allies, if employed in the South, would result in wholesale slaughter with no good achieved.”2 This study deploys a prism through which to view Jewish and African A ­ mericans, two of the nation’s significant ethnic groups enmeshed in a dynamic collage of collectives all living in a segregated republic called the United States of America. This prism includes the recent slipstreams used by students who clarified for a modern society America’s dynamic nationality; they called attention to “minority” life shrouded by white “majority” miasmas. In the one hundred years since the civil war, all had lived with a public square that projected a so-called national “common culture,” which in fact was “owned,” by white Anglo-Americans and their fellow-travelers, citizens of the “majority” who privatized black and white “minorities,” keeping most of those citizens within a hierarchy of collectives. There, for many decades, those “minorities” shared that important characteristic, well summarized most recently by leading American historians. Said one about the citizenry and its actual nationality: “They understood each other less as discrete individuals than as members of groups,” and each group contained citizens variegated in the ways they usually differentiated: “By sex, race, wealth, kinship, religion, and persistence of community.” For most of the hundred years since the civil war this meant: “As long as citizenship remained ­local, as it always had been in the United States, citizens were manifestly unequal.”3

2 New York Times, November 22, 1946; John Hope Franklin, Mirror to America: The Autobiography of John Hope Franklin (New York: Farrar, Strauss, and Giraux, 2005), 156–159; Gavin Wright, Sharing the Prize: The Economics of the Civil Rights Revolution in the American South (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013), 278n17; Michael Obrian, ed., The Letters of C. Vann Woodward (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013), 166–67. 3 Richard White, The Republic For Which It Stands: The United States During Reconstruction and The Guilded Age 1865–1896 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), 59, and 405–439, 697–729, 875 for his comment on “island communities.”

3

4

Introduction

Such a prism placed over the main streams of the nation’s past reveals profound truths, some of which Eric Foner has now clearly identified in his The Second Founding. Namely, in the mid 1860s, in the early months of “Reconstruction,” Radical Republicans pressed their moderate congressional colleagues to launch three civil war Amendments to the Constitution so that heretofore enslaved African American persons could become American citizens, by birthright the equal of any white birthright citizen. In time, these amendments would ­become critical constitutional enablers for the nation’s dynamic collage of r­ epublican collectives. The first section of the 14th Amendment contained the clauses to make that revolutionary event happen, not in its intended promise at the time of its passing, but later, much later, beginning in the decades following World War I. For in the words of this leading authority on the period of Reconstruction, the amendment “for the first time elevates equality to a constitutional right of all Americans. It makes the Constitution a vehicle through which aggrieved groups and individuals who believe that they are being denied equality can take their claims to court.” The amendment’s first section was race neutral, meaning that, in time, its clause guaranteeing equal protection of the law for all, “has had enormous consequences. … In recent decades,” he wrote in 2019, “the courts have used the amendment to expand the legal rights of numerous Americans other than the descendants of slaves.” Rooted in the Euro-American colonial past, African Americans sustained their memories alone: about enslavement and emancipation; the mortal battles during years of “Reconstruction”; about their side of urban cages constructed with codes of legal racial segregation; but as well American blacks nurtured the collective sustenance provided by leaders who guided them in paths of religion, education, and politics. African Americans remembered that white men in their public square privatized the identity of black fellow citizens. But it was not until a generation ago, in the preface to his astonishing Reconstruction (xxii), that Eric Foner reminded his readers how different life in the United States had been during the decades since the civil war when in general the greats among his teachers and earlier historians “all but ignored the black experience.” White scholars could not or would not even “view emancipation itself as among the most revolutionary aspect of the period …” of the civil war and Reconstruction. In those decades, only memories among African American elites and leaders reminded them of a sense of entitlement to uniqueness and singular importance in comparison to any of the white “peoples” or “nationalities” of the republic. Black hands in cotton fields shaped the nation’s economy and politics. Westward migrations by white slave owners influenced the early state history of Missouri and of some other new states, invariably causing

Introduction

constitutional crises. For many decades after the civil war white coercion and ­segregation of black life affected the republic’s politics everywhere; most importantly it did so in the life of the states in the former Confederacy, and for a century after the civil war in the federal government and its institutions. All along, in black common-sense convictions about kinfolk, the unique painful yesterdays bonded with claimed racial and religious legacies inherent in the miasmas engulfing them. They shared memories of individual experiences that they knew were also unique to them as citizens of color. For notwithstanding the three civil war Amendments to the Constitution that the nation adopted to cleans the republic of its nefarious institution of enslavement, blacks learned early that the republican public square in a regime of segregation would make null and void the collective birthright of citizenship owned by millions of black men and women. Many other citizens, such as Jewish or Mexican Americans in their own collectives, remembered as well what happened or was happening to them. Custodians of the public square maintained an institutional framework for screening out one or another group with a collective identity of its own: The militants among them claimed to know which people or nationality would fail to pass muster by republican criteria using biocultural standards expressed in the languages of race and religion. In other words, in America’s segregated republic with a “public square,” life was extra hard in America’s world of differentiated privatized nationalism. Its many groups struggled to keep head above water, somehow sustaining themselves with each of their changing collective memories sustained. Groups of segregated blacks fought to overcome threats of starvation and disease while imprisoned in the white strait jackets of education and employment. White life was radically different, often also desperate but usually desperate with a white difference. Before the Great Depression of the 1930s, in the republic’s capitalist society, for most there was only widespread temporary employment available; and often, business cycle driven booms and busts impacted ­differently in rural regions, mining towns, and local metropolitan neighborhoods. Successful individuals and their families tended to loom large, even as their fellow-working poor citizens, surely the starving, had to manage by themselves, with the help of friends, relatives, and with luck, with bits of support from private charity groups and emerging labor unions. But before the segregated republic’s Roosevelt Administration could start to change these circumstances, during long months of unemployment the important help had to come from the hurting citizens themselves. In this context of change the long and steady process of privatization demanded a historian’s attention now that the Civil Rights Revolution had

5

6

Introduction

joined the Holocaust in providing today’s unique prisms for comprehending a special historic chapter of republican segregation in a century of Euro-American pasts. That chapter would be complicated, with its many actors participating with innovations and responses in the face of unexpected challenges to practices and institutions hundreds of years old. It involved the lives of millions of white and black citizens, experiencing the challenges and demands of segregation as it became the republic’s modus operandi on rural lands and towns where white citizens had enslaved millions of blacks; in the South most comprehensively, in the North often less so. Among privatized black and white citizens, there was the competition, implicit or explicit, in campaigns for recognition of uniqueness, and if not that than surely for the recognition of particularity, each commonly used in justifying special treatment from officials in private and public government. Leaders knew historical records supported black constructions of collective memories about their peoples’ catastrophes reaching back to Jamestown, Virginia; and these allowed fellow black citizens to claim uniqueness in the republic’s history of contesting nationalities. Besides, in common sense convictions about kinfolk, the painful yesterdays bonded with the usually claimed racial and religious legacies inherent in the miasmas surrounding them. For the collectives’ citizens their particular station meant that they and most of their leaders would nurture their own individual republican identity. ­African Americans hardly ever used the marker “nationality” but often did use the markers of “people” and “race.”4 Blacks lived with their memories about enslavement and emancipation: their mortal battles during years of “Reconstruction”; about urban cages constructed with codes of legal racial segregation; but African Americans as well nurtured the sustenance provided by their leaders of religion, education, and politics. As white men in their public square privatized the collective identity of black fellow Americans, many other whites, in their own nationalities, experienced different kinds of privatization. Custodians of the public square also maintained an institutional framework for other groups of white citizens who did not pass muster by white male biocultural standards usually expressed in the languages of racism and religion. Jewish Americans became a privatized collectivity. 4 Nationality was often used in many settings. Most recently in the New York Times ( July 30, 2020), the late John Lewis used the word “ethnic.” In his last message to the nation he wrote about his future “Beloved Community.” Millions of people “motivated simply by human compassion laid down the burdens of division. … [Y]ou set aside race, class, age, language and nationality to demand respect for human dignity.” But, of course, “nationality” remained an identifier for a person’s national citizenship, as in the question at stations of passport control.

Introduction

For Jews “privatized” also meant the cultivation of their incomparable collective memory. In the middle decades of the twentieth century, while white ­Americans in their public square still privatized the nationality of Jewish ­American citizens, Jews nurtured collective memories about historic Christian and Islamic campaigns against Judaism and its followers, antisemitism in federal and state policies, in local practices of renting and buying places of residence, in employment, and in educational institutions. To be sure, in American history these singular experiences of African and ­Jewish Americans, belong to the nation’s one hundred years since the civil war. But in this kind of a study, it is also important to call attention to an important part peoplehoods and nationalities played in American history because their continuous interplay was part of an important American process that here requires the special identification of “ethnicking,” and later, in this introduction, a fuller discussion. (Briefly stated ethnicking is not unlike “musicking,” a musicologist’s sense of sound patterns constantly bumping into each other, staying separate, influencing, and disappearing as a distinctive expression.) With the use of “ethnicking” as an organizing principle, this study can present African American street eruptions of the Civil Rights Revolution as representing the potential demands of collaged peoplehoods which for so many decades the republic’s public square had been privatizing, effectively silencing collective expression in the halls of representative government. African Americans had retained and sustained a powerful sense of collective identity, of memory, religion, working class sentiments, and of a need to provide leaders for the nation’s black “minority.” Now, during the Civil Rights Revolution, especially in the South, African Americans marched as a people demanding equal standing before the law and in the public square. Others in the nation’s collaged nationality took note of black militancy, notably Jewish Americans who had also lived with a public square privatizing them.5

5 Wright, Sharing the Prize, 1–104. “The public square has always been synonymous with a society that acknowledges public life and life in public, which is to say a society distinguishing the individual from the state” (Michael Kimmelman, “The Craving for Public Squares,” New York Review of Books 63, April 7, 2016, 18–22). This architectural critic for the New York Times also wrote: “The perfect square, it turns out is also a state of mind” (ibid., 22). “Public identities” is a term sociologist Karyn Lacy coined to identify the “cultural capital” inherent in the public square she studied two decades ago in her work on interactions between middle-class Black and white people (“How to Convince a White Realtor You’re Middle Class,” New York Times, January 21, 2020). See Joel Perlmann, America Classifies the Immigrants: From Ellis Island to the 2020 Census (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018), passim, on the changing uses of “race,” “peoplehood,” “nation,” and “nationality.” These conceptual terms for collective identities were part of the popular vocabulary used by the century’s members of congress, federal agencies, and by the organizations and individuals who tried to influence them.

7

8

Introduction

This book is organized into three parts: “Republican Ethnicking,” “Republican Discipline,” and “Last Words.” Within part one, such subjects as “Races,” “Language of Ethnicking,” “Promised Lands,” and “Peoplehood Citizens” demonstrate in some detail that constricted minorities were in fact also republican peoplehoods consistently striving for equal collective standing in that public square and its “common culture” discourse.6 In part two, “Screening and Quarantines” and five of the other chapters demonstrate in detailed examples just why and how republican governments disciplined striving republican peoplehoods, such as Jewish and African American; these chapters also show how the resulting tensions bring on conflicts of the fifties and sixties, pushing the republic into a time of “Bending Hierarchies.” Part three demonstrates in three chapters how reforms reflect the burdens of the past and how the striving of African and Jewish American republican peoplehoods are beginning to change the public square in fundamental ways. With this framework and its subdivisions, many other subjects and topics engage Jewish and African American peoplehoods and nationalities seeking to enter the public square in a segregated republic. Here some deserve more attention than others. But first: the nation’s complex course in the 1960s influenced this historian to study the nation’s ethnic past, this time focusing on Jewish Americans during its history as a segregated republic. For the Civil Rights Revolution pushed the nation’s citizens, to recognize that the street eruptions and massive demonstrations also contained another demolition effort seeking to destroy white republican segregation. This one bubbled to the surface in gatherings of contesting speeches and conversations by public intellectuals and other academics trying to understand and give direction to the turmoil leading to the transformative civil rights legislation of 1964 and 65. With the help of 6 Ibid., 150–197. I use the term “peoplehood” more or less along lines of Kathleen Conzen and her associates in their article about immigrants and their offspring. In the 1990s, and in the formal vocabulary of our craft, they had stressed the following: “one important dimension of contextuality was the ‘others’ who shared the space in which immigrants lived and worked. Much of the negotiation of identities was through interactions with these ‘others,’ both as models of ethnic performance to be emulated or spurned, as sources of cultural elements to be assimilated or rejected”; “outcomes depended in large part on the particular immigrant group’s strategy and will of survival. The internal dynamics, resources, and histories of the group were in themselves of major consequence in the process of ethnicization. Leadership, degree of institutional completeness, cultural particularity, and the power of the idea of peoplehood, all played a role.” In the end, “[e]thnicization was not necessarily characterized by an easily negotiated unanimity about the identity of the immigrant group. More often the process was fraught with internal conflicts and dissension over the nature, history, and destiny of its peoplehood” (Katherine Conzen et al., “The Invention of Ethnicity: A Perspective from the U.S.A.,” Journal of American Ethnic History 12 [Fall 1992]: 3–41).

Introduction

federal courts this effort provided national tools for the deliberate ending of a century-old white republican segregationist influence on the everyday government policies in the United States. The period of revolution in the sixties influenced this reading of America’s ethnic past because after WWII, in Nuremberg, Germany, the victorious Allied powers identified, tried, but without accepting any indirect involvement themselves, sentenced German leaders as war criminals and authors of the Final Solution. Later, by way of Supreme Court decisions and Congressional legislation, the republic acknowledged that it owned and therefor enshrined the collective memories of African Americans as it had done with those of white Anglo Americans from the beginning of the republic. These significant national experiences focused attention on the kind of subject matter illustrated by an example stemming from the days of the Revolution itself. In the beginning, this project in social history responded to a critical change of publicly discussed concepts for comprehending what the changes had wrought. For many years, and with good reason, specialists in this kind of history had paid attention to small groups of reform minded “cultural pluralists,” who as early as 1915 came to be associated with the writings of Horace Kallen, a young Jewish immigrant who for many years taught and published as an academic social philosopher and active public intellectual. Especially in times of war and revolution in Europe, some emerging social scientists and their supporters fought for respect of minority citizens associated with collective identities and their cultural integrity; these actively engaged scholars and their supporters fully expected minorities to become part of American life, each integrated on their own terms. In the segregated republic, cultural pluralists sought to temper abilities of politicians—especially those who were entranced by their xenophobic passions—to command private and public efforts to restrict incoming migration. Together with the impact of WWI, these efforts all but ended the arrival of substantial numbers of white migrants from Southern and Eastern Europe— Catholic, Greek Orthodox, Jewish as well as others–who American xenophobes considered unwanted “material” for their republic. They also wanted to properly “re-educate” many of the foreign-born and their children living here. As raceconscious politicians, they focused on selected groups of families and their single kinfolk—they could include citizens—with programs seeking to assimilate, that is to “Americanize” them properly. Cultural pluralism, as an idealized feature of a segregated society, came into its own after WWII, in the 1950s and early 60s. It flourished among specific groups of white ethnics, such as elites of Jewish Americans. As an ideal it had helped to sustain war campaigns and mobilization drives; and these had carried over

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to the Korean War and to many other days of international tension during the Cold War. For in the United States the rhetoric of cultural pluralism appealed to enthusiasts always on the lookout for handmaidens to glorify the segregated republic’s epochal struggle with an atheistic Soviet Union over the future of “Judeo-Christian civilization.” But not for many others, usually not for most African American activists in the South engaging local authority during the Civil Rights Revolution. For them, and especially for growing numbers who campaigned with them, cultural pluralism as a national policy could apply also to black citizens only after the end of the era of segregation commanded by Southern white politicians. In time, as black militants in the South chipped away at long-time practices, as for example in eateries and bus travel, affected segregationists began to give way. Now black activists, and some of the public intellectuals in their ranks, found vocabulary more appropriate for a society having started to end its century-old social and economic hierarchies. In 1964 and 1965, with new congressional civil rights legislation, an enforcing Johnson Administration, and a Warren Supreme Court declaring the acts constitutional, legal changes began for the public standing of millions of African American citizens. Now they were beginning to become again what their forbears had started to become during the first Reconstruction period: equal partners in the public square. For a historian working years later, the early “multiculturalism” in the United States of the mid-sixties was the concept used for embracing the emerging reality; it also became the beginning and end of this study with a Jewish focus occurring in between, during the time of the segregated republic’s existence. As it could for the offspring from New England’s white Puritan Yankees, so too could multiculturalism acknowledge blacks as a group of citizens owning their collective memory of enslavement and segregation as an integral part of the American republic’s history. African Americans were changing: legally, into what was now becoming one of many equal, hybrid, public collectives in a nation state where criteria from the past world of hierarchical biocultural convictions officially would no longer participate. At the same time, it was also becoming obvious that this historic moment contained potential competitive political pressures being generated by charged up hybrid collectives derived from white and black multi-ethnic populations. Those pressures would flow into the national arena as federal public policies continued to respond positively to the African American civil rights campaign. Other important subjects belonged to this history. It was dominated by white planters whose influence radiated out of the lands of the defeated Confederacy. Over many decades, lasting into the early 1960s, with the power of governments

Introduction

they, and their many white supporters in the South and in the North, succeeded in sustaining a segregated republic with a bifurcated nationalism. It consisted of an official, public nationalism broadcast by the republic’s nation state’s leaders and white ethnic groups, such as Anglo-Americans citizens who usually insisted that they owned the history of the Revolutionary Generation. And of a nationalism informally banding republican ethnic citizens associated with the black and white peoples or nationalities that white segregationists and their acquiescing supporters privatized in the name of republicanism and free market enterprise: As powerful and influential white collectives they denied the privatized legal standing in public courts and informal standing in the public square, even though, in the case of blacks, they did so with special state legislation, local government codes, and with stingy black school funding to protect a constant supply of unskilled dependent workers. This conduct rested on biocultural criteria, memories of black enslavement, on race and religion, and usually on informally constructed physiological derivatives and popular stereotypes. In their behavior, participants of the privatized nationalism also expressed themselves in a discourse of ethnicking. *** So privatized nationalism was another important subject belonging to the history of the segregated republic. It emphasizes black and white heterogeneous groups with collective identities of their own. White republican custodians ruled it, often as self-appointed guardians who protected the public square as their own. Their hands manipulated the domains of politics, the media, the world of public education, religion, and the ethnic hierarchies ruling much of the nation’s employment. They imposed republican segregation experiences on fellow citizens whose parents and grandparents had been enslaved almost always by Christian owners who knew blacks were inferior creatures with the minds and emotions of white children no older than five or six years. And not only in the South where segregation became so deeply institutionalized. Especially after the Great Migration northward, in the twentieth century, black collective experiences participated in the republic’s daily affairs in ever expanding urban and metropolitan life. There, usually more so than in the South, they, republican citizens, became one of the many blocked differentiated groups with collective political experiences calling for public recognition as a voting people or nationality. They were also known as minorities, and later, in the life of the republic, communities, subcultures, or ethnic groups. Over time these groups of citizens with their privatized nationality experienced differently the denial of collective standing in the public squares. In the case of blacks in the South, their privatization came with the stingy public funding authorized and administered by

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white segregationists under the doctrine of separate but equal: in comparison to most public white schools’ “separate” education in these conditions almost always was tantamount to providing a poorly publicly funded privatized system for black children. So, in most of the two thirds of the twentieth century main line professional American historians usually kept those experiences out of their published works; for those kind of events were made to belong to “private matters,” that did not make it into the calendars of collective bargaining contracts or into those of white public schools—in these only minority children required parental permission requests for keeping their children at home for religious holydays being observed among the people or nationality in which they lived. With privatizing patterns in hand, custodians of the public square maintained an institutional framework for those groups of other citizens who did not pass muster by white male biocultural standards, usually expressed in the languages of racism and religion. Before the civil war white men, with their enslaved African Americans in the public square, had privatized the collective identities of Mexicans, and Mormons; and after the first years of Reconstruction, in each of their lifetimes, new African American citizens began to remember decades of segregation in an American republic where the mix of events institutionalized a hierarchical pattern of influence. Other peoples and nationalities also remembered what had happened. In this process, Jewish Americans had become ­privatized. For a century, citizens in these groups remained in complex hierarchies of different kinds of second-class citizenships. But African and Jewish Americans insisted that their respective memories also persuaded them and their leaders to insist that each of their people had unique pasts in Euro-American history. Among the republic’s blacks hovered the long shadow of white enslavement of parents and grandparents, and among them as citizens the constant tactile reminder of mental and physical cages of America’s institutionalized policies of segregation; among Jewish Americans, memories remained of a different kind of long shadow, this one cast by Catholic and Protestant theology derived from Biblical New Testament stories of the murder of Jesus in Palestine’s Jerusalem. This Euro-American shadow hung umbrella-like over Europe’s mass expulsions, inquisitions, crusades and pogroms—after WWII Jews in the United States also knew that Germans with their unique Final Solution had been able to murder Jewish millions, including many kinfolks of American citizens. These singular experiences have consequences that deserved attention as special topics of interest. Among Christian African American leaders, comparisons with selected Central American and European black and white groups of nationalities occurred often. During the one hundred years Jewish Americans in their rapidly

Introduction

increasing numbers served as a common point of comparison to many an emancipated and enfranchised African American. For in the era of the American and French Revolutions, this Jewish People—in God’s Bible His People which had been rescued by the Exodus from Egyptian bondage—they too had been emancipated again, not from Christian enslavement and its theological justifications, but from many of the restrictive and coercive ghetto confinement imposed by Catholic and Protestant theologians and by governments with their long histories of repeated brutal campaigns against Jews and their Judaism: Santo Domingo’s revolution against Napoleonic rule; Irish struggles with England also had been a source of inspiration; and so had Jews, only in their case within American history, from restricted colonial beginnings, to an emancipated collective tied to the biblical vision of a Puritan Promised Land, in turn institutionalized by the early slave-owning republic of the United States. Jews were useful because those black leaders were convinced that their fellow black citizens of the United States also had to “become a people worthy of recognition.” Historian David Davis writes: “From the pre-civil war decades to the 1890s, when few American blacks had ever seen a Jew … diverse figures not only drew frequent parallels between the persecution of modern Jews and blacks but urged fellow blacks to emulate the Jews’ unity, pride, and quest for knowledge and achievement.”7 Jewish immigrants, in larger numbers now than they had been coming in the many decades of ante-bellum years, arrived following the civil war’s First Reconstruction and the Depression of 1873; they did so increasingly in the years when the system of Southern white penal segregation provided preconditions for the republic’s nationalities. These migrants from the Russian empire had followed earlier Jewish immigrants from German language areas of Central Europe who, by the time of the civil war, had come to dominate Ashkenazi Jewish life in New York, Philadelphia, Charleston, and Cincinnati, where, though few in numbers, Sephardim, originating from families in Spain and Portugal but usually migrating from England, had been so influential in the formation of America’s founding Jewish institutions. It is important to emphasize in this study that in most of the century following the civil war, Jews lived in a republic where its white penal segregation stripped African Americans of newly acquired birthright citizenships and trapped them in a coercive and exploitive political and economic order lasting into the 1960s. Together with unique memories of enslavement, the ongoing black experiences with privatizing segregation became critical components of the ­republic’s African American 7 David Brian Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2014), 136.

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peoplehood and influences. After the civil war, Jewish men and women and many others in specific white groups of citizens, generally speaking, experienced lesser forms of privatization of their collective identities. White Christian AngloAmerican elites and their cultural allies, as a practical matter, especially in towns and cities, dominated the nation’s public life; and they placed specific collectives of Jews and others, in the lower ranks of a socially constructed biocultural hierarchy. While the focus of this project remained on Jewish Americans, an important black tradition participated in this expression of privatized “multiculturalism.” African American narratives and Black Spirituals, so often influenced by the New Testament and especially by its versions of the Hebrew Bible, would intertwine with the unique collective memories of fellow Jewish citizens; they had Israelites as biblical ancestors who had been enslaved and emancipated in a liberating Exodus. No doubt, those narratives helped to stimulate the development of this project; for it was also becoming a study of contesting peoplehoods and nationalities in the country’s segregated republic. To African Americans, especially to their leaders, who usually ignored the realities of a constant impoverished Jewish life in Europe, economic and financial achievements by relatively few Jews were useful. They could be made to demonstrated how a “despised” immigrant group, starting with the peddler’s cart, could acquire and then use wealth to blunt and overcome acts of discrimination. Jews purchased the property denied to them as renters. On the other hand, that pedagogical use of Jews went hand in hand with expressions of classic antisemitic tropes locked into traditional anti-immigrant stereotypes and slogans. Two statements about Jews at the end of the nineteenth century were comprehensive: “By turning their attention entirely to trade they have been enabled to command respect by reason of their money solely … [and yet blacks are] the real producers of the wealth of the country.” In the South blacks had a real advantage over “the Hebrews,” a people that does not produce anything, and instead strives “to control the business of the entire country.” In an appeal to Northern blacks to come South for economic opportunities, the second statement also used the stereotype of Jewish economic control: “Come down and buy and sell to our people … and you will make money and have it, instead of the Hebrew having it as he has it now.”8

8 Leon Litwack, Trouble in Mind (New York: Vintage, 1998), 356. Max Weber held related views: kosher laws required “to this day in the United States [1919–1920], the concentration of orthodox Jews in the great cities (while the reform [sic] Jews in isolation were able to pursue the very profitable business of usuriously exploiting the rural Negro” (Max Weber, Ancient Judaism, ed. and trans. Hans Gerth et al. [Glen Coe, Ill.: Free Press, 1952]), 253.

Introduction

It is surely significant that Booker T. Washington, the famous African American leader, also shared and spread these stereotypes and the apparent ignorance of the Jewish condition; but he knew how to put a finer point on them. As had the Jew, the African American would also achieve recognition from the white man when he had “entwined himself about America in a business and industrial sense.”9 In Washington’s eyes, Jews had somehow become financiers, merchants, musicians, scholars, and statesmen of the entire world. To a Christian student of the Hebrew Bible, the conclusion was obvious: “If out of such material, God could create such people, what may he not do with our Southern Blacks.” In 1906, he asked the visiting H. G. Wells from England the ultimate question: “Why can we not also become a peculiar people like the Jews?”10 In the perspective of sixty years, the Civil Rights Revolution pushed the nation’s citizens to recognize what the street eruptions and massive demonstrations represented: Increasingly elites named the driving events of the 1960s as a campaign to institutionalize American “multiculturalism,” a campaign that brought its larger achievements into view. African Americans, and the nation’s other “privatized” identities, had constructed the footstools for “multiculturalism.” For as individuals each was a citizen of the United States but perceived by the “other” in their respective tribal masks, long ago constructed with fragments, bits and pieces from collective identities associated with “peoplehood” or “nationality,” so to speak, living outside the public square of the republic. To cite two important examples. For each African and Jewish American during these hundred years, “the other” in the republic had learned how to justify bigotry with self-assured perceptions: in the instance of the black person, especially the skin color framed the mingling with stereotyped impressions about biocultural traits from the primitive human, from language and from specific physiological characteristics; in the case of a Jewish person Christian or Islamic narratives, so deeply rooted in profound hateful anti-Judaic messages and practices, provided the precondition for mingling with biocultural traits. These kinds of experiences in the segregated republic had institutional consequences which deserved attention. White planters and their allies in the public square had driven the process by which blacks, and also privatized white 9 Litwack, Trouble in Mind, 354; David B. Davis, “Jews and Blacks in America,” New York Review of Books, December 2, 1999. 10 Booker T. Washington, The Future in America: A Search After Realities (New York: Chapman & Hall, 1906), 198. H. G. Wells, with a streak of English antisemitism, thought it a mistake: ­American Blacks deserved better. See also Leonard Dinnerstein, “The Historiography of American ­Antisemitism,” in Uneasy at Home: Antisemitism and the American Jewish Experience, ed. Leonard Dinnerstein (New York: Columbia: 1987), 257–267.

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nationalities, formed a collage, its structure a social stratum, made up of citizens with their collective identities, each containing their own folk memories, religion, customs, class ideals and associations, habits, and bigotries. In this collage the republic’s black collective was unique because, after the early period of Reconstruction, white segregationist rulers began to govern in the domain of the former Confederacy, first with and then without black votes. By the end of the Reconstruction period, in states and local communities, here, there, and then everywhere postwar planters and their white allies installed, and with their governments’ taxes payed for, what two decades later the Unites States Supreme Court legitimized. The judges in their majority claimed “separate but equal” treatment in public life for a black and white person met their reading of the United States Constitution. At the time the lone dissenting Supreme Court judge must have recognized the potential connection between the decision of his colleagues and the authoritarian administration the segregated republic used for ruling Native American tribes forced to live on government reservations. Implicitly, the subject at hand was the availability of extreme options for governments to manage collectives considered “unfit” for national efforts at assimilation and integration. In 1897, in his famous lonely dissent from Plessy v Ferguson, Justice Marshall Harlan implied as much about his republic when its Supreme Court allowed it to act without restraint in relation between blacks and whites. For the Court empowered a state or its local government to rule over the civil conduct of blacks and whites “to regulate the side of the street of its cities and towns as to compel white citizens to keep on one side of a street, and black citizens on the other,” he wrote, and more; for under this decision, he asked why “not the separation in railroad coaches of native and naturalized citizens of the United States, or of Protestants and Roman Catholics?” In the shadow of that protecting umbrella emerged the segregationists’ civic practices and institutions. They governed the black and white citizen into the 1960s, in their practical administration in fact ruling a public and private parochial world. For decades, both had to cope with the larger institutional influences that framed and detailed in legal language the federal context in which daily life occurred in local constituencies.11 Most influential on the strivings of republican

11 Ira Katznelson, Fear Itself: The New Deal and the Origins of Our Time (New York: Liveright, 2013), 5–25, passim; David A. Bateman, Ira Katznelson, and John S. Lapinski, Southern ­Nation: Congress and White Supremacy after Reconstruction (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018), 3–70, 158–216, 323–377, 381–403; White, The Republic for Which It Stands: The United States During Reconstruction and the Guilded Age, 1865–1896, passim.

Introduction

peoplehoods in the nation at large was the legal segregation of African American citizens as a normal condition in the South; for federal legislation, executive actions, and Supreme Court decisions most assuredly until a decade after WWII protected that segregation and its collateral potency. That protection assured a comfortable nestling for hierarchical white ethnic public-square abstractions and expressions of common-sense convictions. Anglo-Saxonism became popular, as did other, race-based “sacred kitsch.” The mix often became part of the preached rhetoric of the American imperialist chorus. Well into the twentieth century, echoes circulated in the mainstreams of American “public life.” The Supreme Court’s decision to inject the concept of “separate but equal” into the very fabric of the segregated republic, added another important topic to many others invariably engaged with the subject I have identified as American “ethnicking.” It was quite an important process because with it collaged republican peoplehoods played important parts in the nation’s history: fluid interfaces of peoplehoods and nationalities—ethnic societies and groups and s­ ubgroups— constantly fashioning and refashioning themselves, if only because they exist in the larger republic where, especially in moments of accelerating in-migrations, they often share the same or related geographic spaces of political culture and economy. Bits and pieces—of well-known sophisticated political theology, deeply held ideological convictions, verbal art forms, with flexibility and longevity —morph into socially accepted expressions and insults, tasteless and boorish. Social contexts were part of ethnicking. These helped guard the public square by informally institutionalizing the commonsense verities about citizens of socalled minorities, black or white. The work of influential social scientists—two of them have each been awarded the Nobel Prize for their independent work in economic behavior—has helped to better understand how an individual’s memory of experiences with collective identities participated in most decisions effecting daily conduct. In play was the constancy of imperfection in human rationality; being blind to one’s own biases is one example. For a social historian who also assumes that we are irrational but have the capacity to act rationally, this work by Daniel Kahneman and Richard Thaler called to mind the “sacred kitsch” so often part of peoplehoods’ collective sentiments.12 Doctors usually assumed 12 Saul Friedlander, ed., Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the “Final Solution” (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), 1–53, 66–81, 108–127. Ernest R. May, a distinguished American historian, called attention to Kahneman and some of his colleagues in his Strange Victory: Hitler’s Conquest of France (New York: Hill and Wang, 2000), 282, 512n13. See also Michael Lewis, The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds (New York: Norton, 2017), passim. With the help of psychological studies of trauma, Jeremy Cohen

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that racial hierarchies reigned; they were convinced that Americans lived with “black” and “Jewish” diseases. Fragments and debris, the bits and pieces, from experience, theology, and ideology, participated in daily decisions among custodians of the public square and among African and Jewish American citizens living in their peoplehoods. So too were fragments of thought and speech parts of ethnicking, the bits and pieces inherent in ordinary common place and common-sense expressions. These went along with complex experiences of citizens living among the nation’s peoples and nationalities. Legacies were also part of ethnicking. They included the pervasive influence of a Euro-American common-sense miasma, “like begets like.” It was tantamount to an endowment. It was part of the stuff and staff of life of parents, of farmers and imaginative animal breeders, of folk religions and emotions of “fellow feelings.” Presumed by self-appointed privileged others to be biologically different, inferior, or dangerous, Jewish and African Americans, as convicted citizens in their republican peoplehoods, each on their own terms and racial experiences understood the miasma governing them and many of the nation’s other hierarchies of constriction. These republicans were entangled with the distinctive determinisms of biology coded for race.13 wrestled with the place of memory in what we usually call “experience.” Jeremy Cohen, Sanctifying the Name of God: Jewish Martyrs and Jewish Memories of the First Crusade (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 2004), vii–x. In summer 1964, when we were colleagues in the Department of History at the University of Rochester, Hayden White sensitized me to this enduringly complex historiographical issue. Johan Cilliers, “The Unveiling of life: Liturgy and the Lure of Kitsch,” HTS Teologiese Studies/Theological Studies 66, no. 2: a815, DOI: https:// doi.org/10.4102/hts.v66i2.815: 1–5n130 has some passages helpful for explaining my usage of “sacred kitsch”: “It simplifies and trivializes complex ideas by reducing them to stereotypes. … It in fact oversimplifies life, glossing over paradoxes … oversimplifying life, handing out howto-do it’s instead of wisdom and discernment.” Kitsch can “create realities ‘smaller or larger than life. … Symbols and rituals are introduced, left out, shattered and fragmented without taking cognizance of the … context motivations, [or] historical settings.” In my republican use of “sacred kitsch” I have also benefitted from Dr. Ruth Z. Korman and other modern geneticists, including most recently David Reich in his “How Genetics Is Changing Our Understanding of ‘Race,’” New York Times, March 23, 2018. This Harvard professor is now convinced that “we are learning that while race may be a social construct, differences in genetic ancestry that happen to correlate to any of today’s racial constructs are real.” Notwithstanding this conviction, Reich, the geneticist, reminded his readers “to treat each human being as an individual and to empower all people, regardless of what hand they are dealt from the deck of life. Compared with the enormous differences that exist among individuals, differences among populations are on average many times smaller” 13 Ron Chernow, Grant (New York: Penguin, 2017), 690–691; Steven Hahn, A Nation Under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 206–215; Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877 (New York: Harper, 1988), 281–307; Gerd Korman, “­Political Loyalties, Immigrant Traditions, and Reform: The Wisconsin German-American

Introduction

Slogans and expressions always participated, embedded in fragments and legacies, circulated among the ethnicking citizenry; and therefore, this framework and its subdivisions attends to them. Usually they derived from collective memories and common sense convictions. These, like racial stereotypes, sustained vocabularies invoking beliefs and values that compared to those flourishing in doctrines of religion and secular ideologies. “Sacred kitsch” is an appropriate term for them: sacred because they often were as embedded as the rules for a Sabbath observer or in disputes among Christian clerics claiming to know who was a heretic; kitsch because the belief or value often was part of common place collective sentiments and expressions, many arriving and leaving like a leaf blowing in the wind. Notably, these kind of peoplehood convictions and refractions, as in the case of “like begets like,” came in bundles of religious-like values that inhere within the common sense of ethnicking. This kind of “kitsch” usually was as real as it was sacred to its owners and served as part of the discourse among citizens of the republic who almost always were also engaged with different collective identities. Whatever these claims on “minority” citizens, the sense of privilege and responsibility of United States citizenship, to exercise, to have, or to want, was a common denominator among republican peoplehoods.14 To demonstrate to readers how these complex tensions expressed themselves, the study’s structure finds room for details of experiences in different, smallspaced local settings: in urban neighborhoods; within groups of reformers and labor organizations; and in the public health bureaucracies that controlled neighborhood life during cholera fears and other epidemics. To illuminate how these complex tensions reverberated nationally, the focus shifts to political leaders, and then on to American historians who, as teachers and preachers, framed the pasts for the citizenry. Throughout the decades following the civil war, these publicists sustained the hierarchy shaped and governed by white AngloAmerican Christian males and their fellow-travelers. In the final chapters of this book, this study pays special attention to the influence of findings by modern geneticists. They had been reacting to the racial genocide of WWII and to the

Press and Progressivism, 1909–1912,” Wisconsin Magazine of History 40 (Spring 1957): 161–167; Arthur A. Goren, New York Jews and the Quest for Community: The Kehillah Experiment, 1898–1922 (New York: Columbia, 1970), 187–213. See also Edward R. Kantowics, “Politics,” in Harvard Encyclopedia of American Ethnic Groups, ed. Stephen Thernstrom et al. (Cambridge, MA: Havard University, 1980), 803–812.­ 14 Oscar Handlin, “Group Life within the American Pattern: Its Scope and Its Limits,” Commentary 8 (November 1949): 411–416 and “Israeli ties and U.S. Citizenship: II: America Recognizes Diverse Loyalties,” Commentary 9 (March 1950): 220–226.

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racism being fought by the Civil Rights Revolution. As in the past, they and modern anthropologists had struggled to overcome fossils embedded within the minds of citizens, including those of important political leaders and numerous scholars, particularly historians. The old republican tradition of explosive urban rioting became part of ethnicking. Between the Great Depression and World War II, in Chicago, for example, significant in-migration followed a decade of stable population growth. White officialdoms governing Chicago’s public square had sustained and expanded the practices of segregation of black fellow citizens because of the racial characteristics of their peoplehood. Noticeably, in 1957, militants belonging to Calumet Park’s “Slavic,” “Polish,” and “Italian” peoplehoods turned violent to protect their claimed turf with symbols; within the rioting, when confronting Jews or other white strangers, they used the name of their “parish” like a birth certificate.15 While the Euro-American concept of “peoplehood” remained in circulation, ethnicking had a long half-life, for constructed memories belonged to identities caught up in the lives of individuals. Obviously, ethnicking involves complex experiences. At the risk of stating the obvious: each resident and citizen had to find his or her way in capitalist societies, stratified by mingled biocultural convictions, patriarchal ethnicities, and social classes; each person had to do it with the help of relatives or new friends, in the nation’s differentiated markets and local neighborhoods. Often residents faced challenges from speakers of strange languages and practitioners of strange customs, a demanding, religiously observant neighbor, or political and clerical leaders, some of whom were corrupt. In time, when participating in the electorate—citizen and resident, foreign-born, native migrant, or local native—they encountered different kinds of mobilizations, restrictions, ballots and boxes, and parts of complex national experiences, such as tariffs against people and goods, business cycles, and wartime hysterias. Fragments from these ethnicking experiences tangled with preached ideals in school books and political rhetoric; they came together as American republicanism when wrapped in the language of the Declaration of Independence and the United States Constitution. This ideology disciplined while permeating America’s different kinds of peoplehoods. As early as 1867, in three southern states under the Union’s military rule, thousands of freed slaves arrived at the

15 “Significantly, once the riot shifted from an antiblack to an anti-Semitic and antiradical demonstration, Blacks were not attacked” (Arnold R. Hirsch, Making the Second Ghetto: Race and Housing in Chicago, 1940–1960 [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983, 1998], vii–xiii, 81–93, 212–258, 293–299).

Introduction

polls as new republican citizens with their memories of enslavement. But also, all the while, occupied whites, once part of a republican ruling master class, insisted that “their Black Republican” remained a biologically inferior creature unfit to exercise his state’s voting privileges. Many of the militants among them had served the Confederacy as soldiers in defense of slavery. In opposition to their upside-down new world, defeated republicans remembered their losses. Terrorizing violence, bringing thousands dead and wounding new citizens, left profound public and private scars of collective memories.16 In the meantime, amidst white ethnic tensions and violence, a very different ethnicking example, of the play of collective memories, occurred during the first decades of the twentieth century, in Wisconsin’s early primaries and on New York City’s Lower East Side. In Wisconsin, German Americans mostly voted for their “German” candidate, while in the general election they voted their regular party line. In Manhattan, ethnicking local republican practices and ideals infused Jewish peoplehood experiences when Meyer London and Morris Hillquit ran as Socialists. The ethnicking in the segregated republic had affected scholars and bureaucrats, helping them to make many of these citizens part the nation’s “minorities.” Their memories had been privatized, alive and active, shared amongst themselves as public ones. Their comings and goings were usually of little or no account to the main media and power brokers, or to the historians of the public square. Just before Pearl Harbor, Louis Wirth, a respected sociologist, of The Ghetto fame, had written about his “minorities.” They were the ones “who because of physical or social or cultural differences receive differential treatment and who regard themselves as a people apart. Such groups characteristically were held in lower esteem, are debarred from certain opportunities or are excluded from participation in national life.” Those minorities, said a recent observer, could be marginalized even if they made up sixty percent of an examined population.17 Perhaps that helps to explain why, a few years later, there was no rumble for turning the events happening in defeated Germany into a “public issue” in 16 By 1874 President Grant had to use federal troops to suppress a murderous insurrection in New Orleans; it had killed more than two hundred Black citizens. General Phil Sheridan, who pacified rebellious Louisiana, estimated that in the decades after the civil war those kinds of veterans, participating in paramilitary organizations, killed over two thousand and wounded over two thousand other African American citizens. Chernow, Grant, 759–765; David W. Blight, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 98–139; Goren, New York Jews and the Quest for Community, 187–213. See also Kantowics, “Politics,” 803–812. 17 Louis Wirth, “Morale and Minority Groups,” American Journal of Sociology 47 (November 1941): 415–433; Wesley Morris, “Fair Share,” New York Times Magazine, January 27, 2019, 13–15.

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the United States—after all, state policies of black segregation were rampant. Rumbles did not happen even though, as the guns of WWII fell silent, competing phrases, such as “crimes against humanity” and the “crime of genocide,” had gained entry to the offices and corridors of Allied victors, the United States and Russia, the United Kingdom and France. At the war-crime trials in Nuremberg, their representatives had made certain to protect those victors from legal suggestions of conflation—the victors’ practices of colonialism, segregation, and totalitarianism—with criminal charges against the Nazi leaders in the dock. At Nuremberg, the victors concentrated on revealing the contexts and details of the Final Solution and other indictable acts committed by the nation sitting in the dock, defeated wartime Germany. The objective was to punish Nazi leadership cadres and to set precedents for the future. These were expected to protect religious and racial groups from the policies of a sovereign state, the kind of annihilations Nazi Germany had let loose, especially upon Jews. The revolution had effected the ethnicking that came with it, afterwards still, when personal encounters interacted with the active memory of challenging turbulence on the streets. Civil Rights seedlings had been sprouting, the segregated republic’s privatized peoples and nationalities soon to becoming important players in the changing nation. Starting in the 1970s, the United States began to embrace some of the “privatized” collectives with architectural expressions on or at the hallowed republican Mall in Washington DC., the physical heartland of the still segregated nation’s public square. When President John Quincy Adams had ended his presidency in 1829, that was where the original building of the Smithsonian Institution began to stand and continued to expand. During the Civil Rights Revolution the new ones began to nestle in stone at the capitol: the National Museum of the American Indian (as part of that Smithsonian) on that Hallowed Mall (1989), the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, at that Hallowed Mall (1993), the National Museum of African American History and Culture (as part of that Smithsonian) on that hallowed Mall (2006), and soon to be a Hispanic Museum.18 But it is surely important to also note at the end of this introduction that these museums represented architectural expressions of the “multiculturalism” insisted upon by leaders of the Civil Right Revolution. Popular ethnicking–it had gained enthusiasm with a slowly transforming body politic trying to let go of traditional notions of assimilation and of cultural pluralism–institutionalized the changelings: For in their stony presence and remarkable collections they

18 Arlene Davila, “A National Museum for Latinos,” New York Times, December 23, 2020.

Introduction

also could be representing much else, as Yale historian David W. Blight in 2002 suggested in a different context: “Deflections and evasions, careful remembering and necessary forgetting and irreconcilable versions of experience,” these, he said, “are all the stuff of historical memory.” the stuff, in the midst of which fellow citizens as well as his fellow historians participated with their personal memories. Witness Oscar Handlin, the illustrious professional American historian at Harvard, to fully appreciate what Blight was talking about. Handlin, in some of his many publications from the 1960s and in his later years, remembered in The American Scholar (1997) “On Being Jewish: The Endless Quest.” He included recollections of the tensions he had encountered in so many decades of the segregated nation in which the American history of the new black citizens, and of many another republican peoplehood, had been privatized. Even as, in the form of precious collective memories African Americans, and others of the privatized peoplehoods, learned to cultivate their own republican experiences by themselves, professional white scholars in the mainstream of Clio’s servants, usually distanced themselves with the calculated indifference practiced by the segregated republic’s white politicians and most of its white media chieftains.19 Handlin demonstrated how his Jewish memories intersected with everything, that is how professional knowledge interacted with his ethnicking, with his material and mental environment. For in the American Scholar he shared some of his experiences starting with his childhood in a Brooklyn neighborhood where he acquired his special shield. With it he lived in his neighborhood and in his larger New York City; and with it, starting in the 1960s, he would challenge multiculturalism and its Holocaust in the professional world waiting for him at Harvard University. Almost a generation later, the details remain significant; for he illustrated what professional colleagues in American history usually did not do even when they did mention the genocide campaign of WWII: Handlin used famous writers of Jewish fiction, to mention particular Jews who had been murdered, their scandals in Hasidic courts, their shady business practices, and the engagements of pleasure-seeking vacationing wives. Handlin wrote: “My family and the small community of which I was a part and the bigger community of which that was a part … [gave that shield to] me. 19 See “The Perils of Indifference” (https://www.ontrack-media.net/english2/html/E2RdM1L02_perils.pdf), a talk delivered by Elie Wiesel at the Clinton White House, April 12, 1999, in which, as an example of his subject, he called attention to the Roosevelt administration’s infamous decision in 1939: it refused a haven to the more than nine hundred Jews who were on the German SS. St. Louis, which was returning to its homeport in Nazi Germany after the Cuban government had refused to honor its passengers’ landing rights; Blight, Race and Reunion, 5.

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My situation was a fact, given, taken for granted.” He recalled: “It was not good; it was not bad, not a matter of choice or election, but rather an aspect of my personality and character, just as was the fact that I was short not tall, chubby not thin. That was the way I was.” Handlin also insisted: “An even more important circumstance established by the milieu in which I grew up was the rule of life that one had to recognize the world as it was and not as it should be … a hard abrasive world left no room for illusions. Problems such as discrimination and poverty were confining, could be painful, could lead to other problems, but they were not surprising.” Hitler, another Jew killer, belonged to the infamous “events in central Europe[that] could not quite surprise a youth familiar with Kishinev and blood libel stories, with Cossack depredations and incidents going back to [Bogdan] Chmielnicki and Torquemada.” After leaving early a Yeshiva in Lower Manhattan, where he had learned how to educate himself in the great secular libraries of the city, he attended high school and then the new Brooklyn College. Later, he was admitted to Harvard’s graduate program where Arthur Schlesinger, his major professor and himself the son of a Jewish immigrant convert to the Lutheranism of The Deutschtum in Ohio, told him early on that as a Jew he could not hope for an academic appointment in an American university. No surprise, Handlin wrote: that was the way it was in American ethnicking, even in this honored professional world. He was right; and he was wrong. With his ownership of the segregated republic’s ethnicking tensions, he became one of Harvard’s professors, one of the nations’ leading professional historians, ranging widely over Euro-American history, writing especially in the fields of migration and ethnic contests in urban neighborhoods, but also explored details in practices enslaving blacks in colonial Virginia. Handlin had emerged early as a public intellectual, identifying as a cultural pluralist and later as an ethnic pluralist who opposed multiculturalism and Affirmative Action programs;20 he had also started early to engage in American Jewish History as a professional field, and to publish books and articles on its subjects. But not as a professional Jewish historian did he participate in these activities. And not as one of the few fellow historians in the United States, who then, during the Civil Rights Revolution, identified the larger context of “The Final Solution” as a significant historical phenomenon which they came to name The Holocaust. In Handlin’s lifetime, for him and most of his American history

20 Alan M. Kraut, “Oscar Handlin and the Idea That We Are a Nation of Immigrants,” Hsia Diner, “Oscar Handlin a Jewish Historian,” and Reed Towrie, “Oscar Handlin and the Problem of Ethnic Pluralism and African American Civil Rights,” Journal of Ethnic History 32 (Spring 2013): 26–35; 37–45; 53–61.

Introduction

colleagues “The Final Solution” remained one the many atrocities of World War II, to which in this country organized Jewry alone had come to pay serious attention, perhaps to preclude another abandonment–the other had been the black Euro-American catastrophe–in the segregated nation’s public memory. In the early 1960s, Handlin had made his position clear, in print. In a book: The Americans: A New History of the People of the United States. And when historian Handlin had written a review in the Journal of American Sociology of Raul Hilberg’s book, The Destruction of European Jewry, published a year before. (At the time neither Hilberg nor his book was well known; indeed the Journal named him Paul Hilberg.)21 In the review Handlin thought the book was “enormously helpful as an approach to the problem” how the Nazi regime “pursued” a “systematic policy” that murdered millions “without any rational purpose and contrary to its own interest.” Handlin appreciated Hilberg’s “careful, lucid unfolding of how the tragedy developed” and the ways he brought home “its full horror as few other treatments have.” Unfortunately, suspected Handlin, his deep immersion in the “world of the bureaucrats” may have obscured “the human beings who were their victims.” He also faulted Hilberg for apparently assuming someone could have stopped it all, suggesting to Handlin that Hilberg did not confront the very “possibility … that nothing could have prevented the holocaust[sic] once the war had begun, not the German people, nor the Allies, and least of all the Jews.” Readers of the review should not have been surprised by his book The Americans, published around the same time. To be sure, when he used “Holocaust” here, this use of the word with a capitol H in Jewish publications, had just started to represent a particular Jewish catastrophe. But in The Americans, he wrote with the voice of fellow professionals in the United States, as when he wrote about Irish or Norwegian Americans: Handlin mentioned Jewish Americans on many a page of sophisticated narrative. But he wrote his chapter on WWII without Jews: It was about the “Holocaust” in the sense that young William Eduard Burkhart Du Bois had used “holocaust” in 1897 when writing about the African American catastrophic experience after the civil war: “The holocaust, of war, the terrors of the Kuklux Klan[sic], the lies of the carpet baggers, the disorganization of industry, and the contradictory advice of friends and foes left the bewildered serf with no new word beyond the old cry of freedom.”22 In The Americans Handlin used Holocaust to identify the catastrophe which had 21 American Journal of Sociology 68 ( July 1962): 147–148. 22 Handlin, The Americans (New York: Little, Brown, 1963); W. E. Burghardt Du Bois, “Strivings of the Negro People,” Atlantic Monthly 80, August 1897, 194–198.

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engulfed E ­ uro-America, part of the book’s last section entitled: “The Threat of Totalitarianism 1939–1962.” A generation later, by which time an international “Holocaust” historical literature had become institutionalized, the Handlin, who had made his way from a Jewish Brooklyn neighborhood, turned to a misleading frame of reference, as had many others turned among his professional colleagues.23 But unlike his fellow American historians, he explicitly wrote with his own Jewish American historical memory and ethnicking voice, about Jews and The Holocaust in Euro-America.24 In 1997, in the long quoted paragraph below–it begins with the 1960s—he first bemoans the lack of critical distance in the media’s popular expressions about the Holocaust, especially among international Jewish sources, from their survivors and relatives. But then historian Handlin reverts to the scholar who had written The Americans: “The next decade thrust the Holocaust to the foreground. Certainly the tortured had acquired the right to scream as did their surviving kin. And the need to express outrage increased rather than diminished with the passage of time, stoked by the Eichmann trial, by highly publicized sentimental fiction, movies, and museum displays, which stirred emotions, but no sense of identification. That happened to them! But not to us! They, in retrospect became saintly loving communities, devoted to scholarship–forgetting the scandals that repeatedly rocked Hasidic courts, the occasional dubious business practices and the violent arguments that shook such families as I. J. Singer’s The Brothers Ashkenazi, and the gross self-indulgence of Sholem Aleichem’s

23 For early examples see Gerd Korman, “Silence in the Textbooks,” Yad Vashem Studies 8 (1968): 183–202; “The Holocaust in American Historical Writing,” Societas 2(1972): 251–270; and Nightmare’s Fairy Tale: A Young Refugee’s Home Fronts 1938–1948 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2002), 149–168. 24 For example, in “History Forum,” The American Scholar 67, no. 1 (1998): 91–106, eleven wellknown American historians contributed to a discussion about the teaching of history to the next generation. The group included C. Vann Woodward, Edmund Morgan, John Patrick Diggins, John Higham, and David A. Hollinger. Linda K. Kerber wrote about teaching subject matter that was missing, requiring that “we recognize that the past has been constructed by men and women of many backgrounds and identities, individually and in the relation with each other.” In too many of their hands, African and Jewish American men and women “are marginalized.” It is “a chapter in the history of imperialism; a chapter in the history of heresy; or part of the history of ‘universal man.’”

Introduction

vacationing wives in the fashionable spas. And particularly when discussions shied away from theological explanations of evil or blamed the disaster on a bad gene in German culture, forgetting the French Cagoulards or the Austrians, Ukrainians, and  the Poles, or for that matter the four million hooded American klansmen, the Holocaust too becomes a museum, a badge of identity, not an instrument of understanding.”  Four years later, Blight at Yale must have felt compelled to correct his older colleague at Harvard and by implication many others, with this passage in his major work about a period in the history of the segregated republic. There, with a Euro-American perspective different from Handlin’s, he attended to Klan violence in the liberated South during Reconstruction. “Torture, almost by definition, drives human beings beyond their limits of endurance and understanding. Auschwitz survivor Jane Amery [wrote]: ‘Whoever was tortured, stays ­tortured … whoever has succumbed to torture can no longer feel at home in the world. Trust in the world … will not be regained.’ Klan violence was never so systematic as the Nazi Holocaust: the death of freedmen or white Republicans was never its sole aim.”25

25 Blight, Race and Reunion, 118. See also 111, and for footnote and index references, 419–420, 482, 496.

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Par t One

REPUBLICAN ­E T H N I C K I N G

CHAPTER 1

Veritas

Here at home, public schools study the Civil Rights Revolution as a public good; and demographers report unprecedented numbers of ethnic intermarriages. The New York Times also reports about “ancestry,” “endowment,” or a genome affecting disease risk. There in Rome, the Papacy reinforces Vatican II. Judaism remains the beneficiary of God’s election. The Talmudic corpus belongs to the eldest brother among Abrahamic worshipers. In Washington, DC, in 2009, an African American family moves into the White House. These challenging events happened after the end of a hundred-year period since the civil war. By their very difference to the embedded institutional arrangements of a much older yesteryear, these events call our attention to what has now been identified as our “Southern Nation.” After the years of Reconstruction into the era of WWII, that nation governed the republic with congresses of the United States, whose majorities held firm in the beliefs of White Supremacy. They framed and detailed in legal language the federal context in which ethnicking occurred in the local constituencies where republican peoplehoods interacted.1 For African American citizens that legal segregation became a normal ­condition in the South; for federal legislation, executive actions, and Supreme Court decisions until a decade after WWII protected that segregation and its collateral potency in the republic. The Southern Nation’s protection assured a comfortable nestling for hierarchical white ethnic abstractions and expressions of common sense convictions in the public square. For example, Anglo-Saxonism became popular, as did other race-based convictions about inherited characteristics, about “inferior” groups of people, the mix often becoming part of the preached rhetoric in the American imperialist chorus mobilized to justify military ventures in the Philippines or in Columbia for the sake of a Panama Canal. 1 Ira Katznelson, Fear Itself: The New Deal and the Origins of Our Time (New York: Liveright, 2013), 5–25, passim; David A. Bateman, Ira Katznelson, and John S. Lapinski, Southern Nation: Congress and White Supremacy after Reconstruction (Princeton: University Press, 2018), 3–70, 158–216, 323–377, 381–403; White, The Republic for Which It Stands, passim.

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At home doctors held fast to racial hierarchies and remained convinced Americans lived with “black” and “Jewish diseases.” And all along, AfricanAmerican and Jewish-American citizens lived with charged fragments and debris of their own collective identities that influenced their common convictions about the incomparability of their racial and religious legacies: slavery, emancipation, the years of “Reconstruction,” and legal segregation; and by mid-twentieth century, in its Euro-American years, centuries of Christian and Islamic persecution, the “Holocaust,” and a recovered ancient state of Israel.2 To appreciate the significance of these collective memories for American ethnicking experiences, it is instructive to recall some of what happened during the era of WWI. Then, first and second-generation foreign and domestic migrants, men, women, and children, all but dominated much of the population numbers, especially in contentious metropolitan America. As its structures of segregation, ghettoization, and patriarchy held firm, the country’s profound economic transformations helped energize the moments of class and labor conflict that gave the decades a reputation all their own. Instruments of intimidation, if not subjugation, abounded: lynching festivals of fellow citizens, mostly victimizing African Americans but also many Mexican Americans; these, in the 1890s, were at their worst among the brutal assaults by white Christians who acted with passionate convictions about their republicanism, their race, and their religion. These self-appointed moral actors sought to suppress or constrict collective memories of republican peoplehoods different from and inferior to their own. In the white public square, those convictions encouraged groups of citizens to value themselves and strangers. A famous anthropologist taught that their “wisdom is shamelessly and unapologetically ad hoc. It comes in epigrams, proverbs, obiter dicta, jokes, anecdotes …—a clatter of gnomic utterances—not in formal doctrines, axiomized theories, or architectonic dogmas.”3 An influential

2 Conzen et al., Journal of American Ethnic History, op. cit; Timothy L. Smith, “Religion and Ethnicity in America,” American Historical Review 83 (December 1978): 1155–1185, his footnote 2, and comment on 1162. John Higham, “Leadership,” 642–647, Edward R. Kantowicz, “Politics,” 803–813, for politics among German and Irish peoplehood republicans see 421–423, 535–544, and Thomas C. Holt, “Afro-Americans,” 5–23, Arthur Goren, “Jews,” 571–598; see also Michael Novack, “Pluralism: A Humanistic Perspective,” 772–781, and Michael Walzer, “Pluralism: A Political Perspective,” 781–787, all in Stephan Thernstrom et.al., eds., Harvard Encyclopedia of American Ethnic Groups (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980). Hereafter HEAEG. 3 Clifford Geertz, Local Knowledge: Further Essays in Interpretive Anthropology (New York: Basic Books, 2000), 73–93 quoted in Peter Brown Through the Eye of a Needle: Wealth, the Fall of Rome, and the Making of Christianity In the West, 350–550 AD (Princeton: Princeton Univer­sity

Ve r i t a s

American historian would write of practices that were, “full of debris,” using the simile about New England’s “Puritans:” they were all caught up in a “muddied, multilayered process … by which culture was transmitted, one that functioned to preserve and pass along many bits and pieces of past systems of belief.” The debris from these events brought their long history into the commonsense lexicon. Anglo-Americans in the revolutionary generation used them to proclaim self-evident truths and infused them with new civic sacredness about the rights of individuals and the independence of a sovereign American people.4 “I make no apology for having dwelt so long on the contemplation of … federal precedents,” wrote slaveowner James Madison in “Federalist 20,” in 1787. “Experience is the oracle of truth; and where its responses are unequivocal, they ought to be conclusive and sacred.” In his 1913 inaugural address, President Woodrow Wilson spoke of “the stuff of our convictions,” which in his case not only sustained but also intensified federal practices of segregation and the Americanization programs of his Administrations. And in the midtwentieth century, in the last lines of his essay “Two Concepts of Liberty,” Isaiah Berlin observed: “Principles are not less sacred because their duration cannot be guaranteed. Indeed, the very desire for guarantees that our values are eternal and secure in some objective heaven is perhaps only a craving for the certainties of childhood or the absolute values of our primitive past.”5 Perhaps that was why he could write about the resilience of a bent twig, an apt metaphor for the half-life of peoplehood memories which endure long periods of suppressions and confinements. The lexicon was dynamic and always amenable to change. In these hundred years, a true newcomer was modern biology. Increasingly, its debris entangled with state policies and with constructed and bundled forms of privatized peoplehoods. To take an example from the late nineteenth century: as an awareness

Press, 2012), 55; anthropologist Scot Atran’s letter to the editor, New York Times, August 21, 2014 reminded Paul Krugman that “sacred values” are an important cause for mobilizing violence, revolution, and war; David D. Hall, Worlds of Wonder, Days of Judgment: Popular B ­ elief in Early New England (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990)11. 4 Edmund Morgan, Inventing the People: The Rise of Popular Sovereignty in England and America (New York: Norton, 1989), 14–15 5 Isaiah Berlin used the “bent twig” metaphor of the poet Schiller to illustrate what happened in Poland and other parts of Central Europe: at the time of liberation, the long-repressed, flexible, and resilient nationalities or peoplehoods snapped back, changed but focused. In these lines I have adapted language used by Fran de Waal, professor of psychology at Emory University. In “What I learned from Tickling Apes,” he discussed what humans need to understand about themselves and other animals, each of which “has its own cognition, its own senses and natural history” (“op ed,” New York Times, April 8, 2016).

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of the germ theory of disease spread among educated citizens, many began to ask, if a bacterium caused the disease, then what groups of people were most likely to carry the deadly germ? These bits of new biological information fortified old boundaries and hierarchies about contagion and infection. For the debris congealed among citizens and their governments, where it could be made to serve as patina for making judgements about incomers now deemed dangerous to the neighborhood and to the public health of the nation. In practice ethnicking was complex in part because of so many different collective memories in the United States. Their importance is easy to underestimate. They were constantly changing and adjusting to a dynamic public square usually shaped by ownership claims from the republican assimilationist. As did stereotyped Anglo-Americans, other groups also had deep and changing connections to the history of this country. Private peoplehoods had been engaged in long journeys of experiences. African Americans most notably had been mapped by competing republican regimes of the Southern Nation. Black soldiers who had fought in the Revolution and during the civil war helped significantly to bring victory to Union armies. After the defeat of the Confederacy, the victors, with promising constitutional amendments, ended slavery and enfranchised new citizens to participate in the political privileges of the Union. Even so, the victors broke many of their promises. The Southern Nation’s profound, hundred-year influence benefitted from what historians have come to appreciate: notwithstanding the impact of three “great” depressions and two world wars, the century contained a unique period of economic growth and positive changes in American standards of living. Within that regime, those with public and private authority acted as custodians and enforcers of flexible ethnic hierarchies in diverse regional economies and local and state politics; they impacted the main streams of the republic’s history often by expressions of common sense consisting of proclaimed self-evident truths of the kind derived from the language of the Declaration of Independence. These truths have abounded because groups of people with collective identities and their elites were usually convinced that they stemmed from or could lay claim to a superior pedigree, and that their forebears, real or claimed, had become ruling minorities in the founding years of the nation. They converted private memories into public ones and into the official memories of their governments. Employers as citizens lived with segregated public employment in the military, schools, and with most other government occupations. In their private milieu, those employers, often sharing with groups of workers attitudes about

Ve r i t a s

relations between craft skills and republican peoplehoods, administered ethnic locks on local occupational patterns in a polyglot nation.6 Among white citizens, with their own endowed legacies, ethnicking had been part of American neighborhoods experiencing their own changing circumstances. Antebellum examples abound. In the 1850s, in Wisconsin, where Poles from Prussia had often settled near established German residents in the lake port city of Milwaukee, the first American language they encountered was the German they knew from home, not the English language of the republic. In Worcester, Massachusetts, Swedish might serve as the first significant American language for later arrivals. All incomers quickly encountered other complex important features of American life; for family practices remained anchored in folkways, and these usually participated in teachings about differences between individuals and differences between groups of individuals. At the end of the civil war, Jewish Americans in some of the congregations in the South commemorated the loss of the Confederation with mourning rituals derived from the destruction of ancient temples in Jerusalem. In later generations, of ethnicking practices, including some of the most violent available, white custodians and enforcers could insist on an unchanging aggressive patriotic nationalism with which they excluded segregated African Americans from “official” national cultures and positive discourse. Militarily defeated cultures, such as those of the Native American tribes or Mexicans, often endured military pursuits and government reservations or other lives of citizenship persecuted by specific discrimination and oppression, including lynching festivals, some attracting participators by the thousands. For them, public school curricula and calendars did not acknowledge their presence and ignored their pasts;7 in the context of a federalizing public square, officials usually treated most dynamic memories cherished by many an ethnic group, as cumbersome baggage in need of a dumpster.

6 Gerd Korman, Industrialization, Immigrants and Americanizers: The View from Milwaukee, 1866–1921 (Madison: State Historical Society of Wisconsin, 1967), 15–84. 7 On this scholarly understanding of nationalism see for example, Michael Kammen, Mystic Chords of Memory: The Transformation of Tradition in American Culture (New York: Knopf, 1991), passim; James J. Sheehan, German History, 1770–1866 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), passim, and Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism (New York: Verso, 1981, 2006), passim. Ben Halpern in Jews in the Mind of America, ed. Charles Herbert Stember et al. (New York: Basic Books, 1966), 273–301 discusses early signs of the place of the Holocaust and Israel in Jewish identity in the United States. Kate Brown, A Biography of No Place: From Ethnic Borderland to Soviet Heartland (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), passim, makes an argument for diversity in the “Borderland” of the Ukraine, even under Soviet rule in the 1920s and early 1930s.

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The Civil Rights Revolution revealed the landscape. Most collective memories and expressions of common sense remained active. As African Americans pushed past the public square’s gate keepers, they also provided a different perspective about American yesterdays. Willful public amnesias received attention, like the Turkish massacre of the Armenians. Martin Luther King told the world of America’s one-hundred-year-old bad check promising freedom and full citizenship to African Americans. To be sure, tourists and neighboring publics had learned how to adopt the sights as their own civic treasures: Manhattan’s Catholic St. Patrick Cathedral, the Jewish Temple Emanuel, and, in time, Harlem’s nightclubs. The general public had also absorbed “foreignisms,” melodies, and recipes, as well as the “Katzenjammer Kids” and the “Bintel Brief” from the German and Yiddish immigrant press. And taxpayers had always owned cheap labor pools and squalid, crime-ridden neighborhoods. But minority memories had remained private, akin to a structured market enterprise, especially when WWI and subsequent restrictive legislation had all but stopped Europeans from arriving. Amnesia, at times self-imposed by the caged or ghettoized, had prevented old and new Jewish peoplehood memories from all but seeping into the nation’s public square. America’s modernizing nation state had included the term “peoplehoods” when “ethnic group” came into use as a stand-in for the concept of “minority;” and now that a breaking morning had arrived in America, the republic also awakened to the Holocaust. Among Jewish Americans this Euro-American phenomenon cried out for recognition, comprehension, and a place in the changing American public square. But as in European countries, and deep within its own American historical context, the old public square inhibited minority affairs, keeping them private well into mid-twentieth century, even when confronting the new monstrosity of the Euro-American World.8 In 1964, sociologist Milton Gordon clarified the content of this kind of ethnic identity in the American past. Yet, even though he had made his language attractive to militant African Americans on the march, American historians and other scholars did not appreciate Gordon much more than they had appreciated a generation of earlier critics of traditional versions of American cohesion among the republic’s citizens. A recent evaluation of Gordon’s interpretation of group behavior in the American past clarified his meaning in this way: “The term peoplehood … articulated a category broad enough to include particular religious, national, and tribal bonds, yet permeable enough to allow for the integration of American democratic ideals.” In that same year, Martin Kilson, a young political 8 Tony Judt, “Epilogue,” in Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2006).

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scientist at Harvard University, spoke about the concept informally to the campus Crimson: “I suppose we’re looking for a new Negro identity, a psychological process, which has its roots in a broader Negro community.” He said, “It’s true that Negroes, like anyone else, prize individuality. But the thing the compulsive liberal can’t understand is that we also like to swing together. You know, like we did in my good father’s church back home.” Two decades later, historian Eric Foner would demonstrate what had happened earlier to African American memories in his classic study about post-civil war Reconstruction. The old Public Square was in place. He recalled its power to privatize horrific events by boxing in the history of minority affairs. The Square was, “accorded scholarly legitimacy—to its everlasting shame—by the nation’s fraternity of professional historians. … Only in the family traditions and collective folk memories of the black community did a different version of Reconstruction survive.”9 The ethnicking landscape exposed by the Civil Rights Revolution allows for a return to the era of WWI, in order to obtain a deeper understanding of expressions from an older tradition of public intellectuals who helped to introduce the content of new ethnic common sense verities. Even though they were preoccupied with white ethnics, Horace Myer Kallen and Randolph Silliman Bourne offered the republic their sophisticated, historically sensitive challenges of the Southern Nation’s hierarchies and common sense convictions. Kallen had been part of a cadre of reform-minded, academically trained publicists emerging at the turning of the century. As a Harvard graduate with two years at Princeton, he returned to Cambridge as a graduate student and teaching assistant. Kallen’s training in philosophy, psychology, and literature included studies with William James, George Santanya, and Barret H. Wendall at a time when Kallen was familiar with the texts of emerging secular Jewish ideologies and of older postChristian pagan ones about cosmopolitanism. In the midst of stimulating the students he now encountered in Cambridge—and they included special individuals whom he remembered and wrote about, perhaps one from Japan, but especially Alain LeRoy Locke from African-American Philadelphia—Kallen began to

9 Milton Gordon, Assimilation in American Life: The Role of Race, Religion, and National Origin (New York: Oxford University Press, 1964), 55–57, 77 and Noam Pianko, Jewish Peoplehood: An American Innovation (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2015), 58, 77. In 1964 Martin Kilson of Harvard would have agreed.  Henry Louis Gates, Jr.’s foreword to Martin Kilson’s Transformation of the African American Intelligentsia, 1880–2012, quoting Martin Kilson in Harvard’s The Crimson in 1964, as reported by Charles M. Blow in the New York Times, November 16, 2015; Pianko, Jewish Peoplehood, 58; Gleason, HEAEG, 55–57; Foner, Reconstruction, 608–609.

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think with them about the concept he would name “cultural pluralism.” By then, other scholars were becoming preoccupied with related issues that required attention to an emerging biological corpus of studies about bacteria and cells in a Darwinian framework.10 In time, these transformative developments slowly changed academic and popular understandings of the behavior of individuals and the groups in which they lived, including their commonsense convictions. Kallen and Bourne engaged in what was a Euro-American conversation and its vocabularies. Gripped by WWI patriotic anxieties about the cultures and loyalties of immigrants and their children, Kallen assumed that “peoplehood” was a European fact and concept. However, unlike many a publicist who thought those constructs had no future here, he was convinced that Europeans’ dynamic peoplehood in the United States could exist as a transplant, one with a long half-life the country could trust. Those ethnics and their peoplehoods, they would be loyal and patriotic republican citizens contributing to the well-being of their United States.11 Bourne, for his part, was more realistic, also prejudiced, but no less optimistic about America’s future. He wrote about transplanted “national colonies,” saying, “we know what happens.” People have a core, but beyond that, “distinctive behaviour get washed out. … Masses of people are half breeds, neither assimilated Anglo-Saxons nor nationals of another culture.” The half-breed is the “most rudimentary” of Americans. “It is not the Jew who sticks proudly to the faith of his fathers and boasts of the venerable culture of his who is dangerous to America, but the Jew who has lost the Jewish fire and become a mere elementary, grasping animal.” So, disintegrate these nuclei of nationalistic culture and, “we create hordes of men and women … a mob. … They become the flotsam and jetsam of American life.” We need to trust them to adjust on their terms; they will merge but not fuse. Trust who we are and our future. “It is not what we are now … but what this plastic generation may become in the light of a new cosmopolitan ideal.”

10 Jeffrey C. Stewart, The New Negro: The Life of Alain Locke (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018), 48–96, 128, and 217–225, where Stewart discusses Felix Adler’s Universal Race Congress meeting in London in July 1911. Among others, the papers delivered by Franz Boas, Du Bois, and Israel Zangwill addressed the kind of issues important to Kallen. Boas the anthropologist followed the new studies in bacteriology and cellular structures; others were sociologists, such as as Robert Parks, William Isaac Thomas, and E. Franklin Frazier. 11 John Higham,  Send These to Me: Immigrants in Urban America, rev. ed. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984),  202–203, 207–208. On Kallen, if only to appreciate the differences in perspective resulting from the historical moment each emphasized, it is instructive to compare, in the HEAEG, John Higham, “Leadership,” Philip Gleason,” Identity and Americanization,” William Peterson, “Concepts of Ethnicity,” and Michael Walzer, “Pluralism A Political Perspective.”

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To be sure, Kallen and Bourne also nested biocultural determinisms, a practice they shared with most of their contemporaries, including those who did not ignore them. These last usually accused both men of being defenders of “minority cultures.” In Zionist Kallen’s case, the charge was Jewish culture; for he had been born in Central Europe to a well-educated, German-speaking Orthodox Jewish family that migrated to the United States with intact religious notions about “Amcho” (Your [God’s] People). In the case of both, the charge was that Kallen and Bourne failed to appreciate the power of class loyalties.12 Kallen and Bourne had insisted that the fighting faiths of war did not warrant coercive militant Americanization campaigns because they were based on a fundamental misunderstanding of America’s ethnic groups: The United States was not Europe, and it must not go there—in their empires, Europeans subjugated national minorities to governmental policies and to the cultural dominion of the majority. Bourne explicitly insisted that if understood properly, this country had the potential of heading to a different future, a much more cosmopolitan one in which Anglo Americans and their descendants would compare to other ethnic groups, say a German- or Jewish-American one. Republican individualism and diverse collective identities would merge. Bourne was hopeful and idealistic: they would peacefully change and accommodate each other. So was Kallen: “The common language of the commonwealth, the language of its great political tradition, is English, but each nationality expresses its emotional and voluntary life in its own language, in its own inevitable aesthetic and intellectual forms. The common life of the commonwealth is politico-economic, and serves as the foundation and background for the realization of the distinctive individuality of each natio that composes it.” By the light of the Civil Rights Revolution, a rereading of these well-known texts has been revealing; and so, too, has a new encounter with Ernestine Rose, a white librarian in Harlem and contemporary of Kallen and Bourne during and after WWI.13 Kallen, who became famous for his use of the term “cultural ­pluralism,” 12 Eric L. Goldstein, The Price of Whiteness: Jews, Race, and American Identity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), 178–182. For Kallen’s reactions to his critics in 1924 see his Culture and Democracy in the United States (New Brunswick: Transaction, 1998), passim, especially 148– 151; Randolph Bourne, “Transnational-America, Atlantic Monthly 118, ( July 1916), 86–97. 13 Gary Gestle, “The Protean Character of American Liberalism,” American Historical Review 99 (October 1994): 1043–1073, especially 1051–1073. For some years now the use of “peoplehood” has been a subject of academic discussion as well as an ideological issue. Noam Pianko’s Jewish Peoplehood (New Brunswick: Rutgers, 2015), passim surveys and explains many of the competing arguments from the perspective of Jewish scholarship. See also Roger M. Smith, Political Peoplehood: The Roles of Values, Interests, and Identities (Chicago: University Press, 2014),

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and Bourne for his concept of a “Triple Melting Pot,” were long-known for challenging symbolically the famed American “melting pot” and suggesting an American vision that presented some sort of unique internationalism. These two men exchanged ideas, were almost always white sighted in their writings, and each had agendas that were different and complicated; Rose, about whom more later, was also white, but saw black in her published work. After WWI, as the head of New York’s Harlem library branch, she participated in Harlem’s African American renaissance. In her work and articles, she demonstrated publicly what at the time Kallen and Bourne could have incorporated into their works and visions if they had taken them as seriously as she had the work of Du Bois and other black scholars and publicists.14 In fact, as did contemporaries, they were writing about “republican peoplehoods” while using the much earlier constructed term “minority.” Minority had been implicit in 1915 in Philadelphia. German submarine warfare was starting to take its toll when President Woodrow Wilson, with the stuff of his convictions, stated to newly naturalized citizens some of his appreciations of Americanization ideals: “You cannot become thorough Americans if you think of yourselves in groups. America does not consist of groups. A man who thinks of himself as belonging to a particular national group in America has not yet become an American, and the man who goes among you to trade upon your nationality is no worthy son to live under the Stars and Stripes.”15 A few years later, in 1921, Kallen would write about those groups and their commonsense verities differently. In American life, “just in so far as it has been liberal and liberating,” it has “formed the dynamics and inspiration of the effort of American Jews in behalf of Zion, as it has other European groups in behalf of collective freedom and self-expression in their ancestral lands.” However, the republic imposed commands: “This is a freedom which for good or evil, they cannot attain and should not seek in America. Their utmost here is … to contribute their own … experience to the dominant cultural tradition and fuse their old community with the overruling one of the new place.” Kallen suggested what was likely to happen when they participated in what I have called a republican peoplehood. passim, and John Lie, Modern Peoplehood (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), passim. 14 See page 87 below. 15 Woodrow Wilson, “Address to Naturalized Citizens at Convention Hall, Philadelphia, May 10, 1915,” https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/address-naturalized-citizens-conventionhall-philadelphia; See also Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, The American Presidency ­Project: Woodrow Wilson, https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/people/president/woodrow-wilson.

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“The  contribution, consequently, which the Jews or any other  non-English peoples are likely in America to make to civilization is not Polish, nor French, nor German, nor Jewish,  but American.”  Under the influence of new states in the wake of WWI, and of Marcus Garvey’s popular “Back to Africa” movement, did Kallen the Zionist explain that, as was the case of other peoples in the American republic, Jews can give “a Jewish expression to a society’s life only where they can do so completely.” Only in cases where “the Jewish community can survive and grow into as Jewish can the Jews’ contribution to civilization be Jewish. The French or English or Italian contributions to civilization come from France, England and Italy, not from America. For obvious reasons each is more purely and essentially that and nothing else in the home country which is a living individuality of its particular kind, absorbing and assimilating influences from the whole world and making them over into the substance of its own flesh and spirit.” Kallen insisted that the ideal of self-determination of peoples has also to be for Jews. “Or for that matter, for the Negroes. … If the arguments for Palestine find their parallel on behalf of Liberia they do so no less on behalf of England and France, Germany and Italy and Russia.” For Kallen, that meant critics who applied the term “tribalism” to Jews, and “for that matter” to African Americans, were using a “perverse name for what in the political tradition of Europe and the aspiration of peoples has usually been called democracy.”16 In the ethnicking chambers of the republic the meanings of these passages resonated in neighborhood districts and newsprint workshops. Republican peoplehoods owned their building blocks and other important experiences that helped shape their commonsense beliefs. For example, Jews—they are usually identified as “Hebrews,” “American Jews,” or “Jewish Americans”—are also a “People of the Talmud.”17 That phrase conveys the sense of ancient roots, 16 Horace Kallen, “Zionism: Democracy or Prussianism,” New Republic, April 5, 1921. 17 Gerd Korman, “Jews as a Changing People of the Talmud: An American Exploration,” Modern Judaism 21 (February 2001): 23–66. In his battle with Karaites, R. Saadia Gaon (882–942 AD) used “Am Ha Torah” to designate Rabbanite Jewry, which made the Talmudic corpus its governing source. R. Saadia “strongly held that the Jews were a people only through the Torah and hence the leadership should be vested in a man who had the authority to interpret the Torah [omtehnu ehnena omah ki am betorahtehnu].” Solomon Zeitlin, “Saadia Gaon–­ Champion for Jewish Unity Under Religious Leadership,” in Saadia Studies (Philadelphia, Dropsie College, 1943), 397. See also Henry Malter, Saadia Gaon His life and Works (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1942), 157; H. H. Ben-Sasson et al., A History of the Jewish People (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1976), 443–461; Moshe Halbertal, People of the Book: Canon, Meaning, and Authority (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), 9, 16–17, 58; Norman A. Stillman, The Jews of Arab Lands: A History and Source Book (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1979), xv, 31–39, 47–48, 52, 60–61, 189–191, 198–199, 208–210, 269–270; Gavin I. Langmuir, History, Religion, and A ­ ntisemitism

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dynamic language practices, and continuous bonds to uniquely entwined traditions: priestly people, religious rites and rituals, all anchored in canonized texts and a Promised Land situated between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River; a light-skinned people, designated as a distinctive race, owners of an unusual history of persecution, and well-known for individual achievement in Christian and Islamic societies. Together, in their bits and pieces, Euro-American common sense about Jews manifested itself in those years, sometimes suddenly, publicly, in the form of traditional European government policies of expulsion. The most dramatic American example occurred in 1862, when General Ulysses S. ordered all Jews as a “class” to leave immediately from the states under his military authority. At the time, even as Grant, a recent convert to abolition, was arming “contrabands” from enslavement to serve in his Union army, he had his private and public reasons for the expulsion order. But in his United States, all were rejected when, within two weeks, President Lincoln countermanded his general’s order number eleven; and by Grant himself, once he was elected president of the United States. But at bottom, and in its moment, it was Grant’s common sense about Jews that led to his sudden action in response to the private and public triggers.18 If only because they revealed the normality of private and public republican barbarism, African American experiences are an inherent part of the American history contextualizing those triggers. To state the obvious, black citizens radiated influence throughout the republic’s past because of their unique experiences in the Southern Nation. Examples from the 1860s and 1870s are dramatic and horrific. The victors in the civil war had suddenly transformed millions of enslaved African Americans into free men, women, and children, and many of the men into voting citizens who participated in the life of the republic; but then, within a decade, most in the Union stopped fighting for the freedman’s fully authorized rights and privileges. William Graham Sumner, a father of modern American sociology, voiced one important reason for the abdication, for the privatization of African American peoplehood: he pretended there were no black and white republican peoplehoods, no ethnic hierarchy in his republic’s

(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 295–297; Jacob Katz, “Post-Zoharic Relations between Halakhah and Kabbalah” and Isadore Twersky, “Talmudists, Philosophers, Kabbalists: The Quest for Spirituality in the Sixteenth Century,” in Jewish Thought in the Sixteenth Century, Texts and Studies/Harvard University Center for Jewish Studies ed. Bernard Dov Cooperman (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983), 2:283–307l; 2:431–457. 18 Chernow, Grant, 232–236; William F. McFeeley, Grant: A Biography (New York: N ­ orton, 1982), 122–124; Jonathan Sarna, “General Grant’s Infamous Order,” New York Times, ­December 12, 2012.

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“free system of industry,” which offered, “to every living human being chances of happiness indescribably more than what former generations have possessed.” In 1883 Sumner had a living example “at hand. The Negroes, once slaves … used to be assured care, medicine, and support; but they spent their efforts, and other men took the products. They have been set free. That means only just this,” he told his reading public with the conviction of many of his generation of white fellow citizens in the victorious North: “they now work and hold their own products, and are assured of nothing but what they earn. In escaping from subjection they have lost claims. Care, medicine, and support they get if they earn it.”19 When it came to African Americans, Sumner and most whites conveniently ignored a fundamental condition of human existence—remembering experiences, acting on them, and sharing them with relatives and friends. Inaugural addresses of presidents, between the administrations of Ulysses S. Grant and James A. Garfield, in vain asked the country to make certain that white and black citizens were assured of all their rights under the new civil war amendments to the Constitution. (In practice, President Grant was different. As a civil war general he had turned into an abolitionist commander, who armed “contrabands,” in 1863 turning them into Union soldiers; and as commander in chief he fought the Ku Klux Klan during his administration’s first years of Reconstruction20). There are many explanations for the white lordship over African American citizens during the influence of the Southern Nation; they are well known but bear repeating. One pierces the heart. Old collective memories remained powerful. Enslavers had persuaded themselves and most of their fellow-citizens that they had no choice but to see human slaves in animalistic terms. In the colonial society, and then in the antebellum republic in which owners and their hired overseers flourished. White residents had agreed: African American slaves were human oxen or cows, and so they could be fed at the trough; and they were illiterate children, always too young to have memories of their own. That was why The Nation, in 1874, felt free to compare campaigns against the atrocious “Ku-kluxing” to “the cholera … a loathsome disease.” Editors knew the causes of each: in the case of cholera, it is the “filth and bad drainage” in crowded alleys. In the case of Ku-kluxing it is the low standard of “industry,” “intelligence,”

19 William Graham Sumner, What Social Classes Owe Each Other (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1884), 65. 20 Chernow, Grant, 280–284 and 642–644, notes the many African and Jewish Americans Grant appointed to positions in the federal government, and calls attention to Grant’s efforts on behalf of persecuted Jews in Central Europe.

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“­morality,” and “good conduct” among most negroes—“so low they are but slightly above the level of animals.”21 Fundamental policy assumptions worked here. Those who shared editor E. L. Godkin’s convictions usually had assumed that the “average” inferior African American creature before emancipation had no human capacity for the white owner’s kind of memory. So afterwards, in the face of all kinds of contrary evidence during “Reconstruction” they believed that African Americans could not be properly educated for full-fledged republican citizenship: they must be locked out of the public square’s collective memory.22 Most recently, Ira Katznelson and his colleagues, political scientists who have long studied segregation, insisted that these kind of post-civil war convictions in time led to a nationally accepted “system of differentiated citizenship based on race, a system in which some Americans, thought to be incorrigibly inferior, were accorded only limited rights.” In the Southern Nation, there was also a profound collateral impact. In the main stream of American history that system of differentiated citizenship was an inherent part of the larger past of republican peoplehood. In a nation where federal institution all but belonged to the Southern Nation, some of the characteristics attributed to African Americans were easily tagged onto other peoplehoods.23 There were other powerful experiences that helped determine the content of ethnicking and common sense verities. Many a patriot in the full flush of civil war victory had praised ideological traditions of republican imperatives, available to all classes, races, and religions: individualism, free markets, and generational upward mobility of individuals and their families. Usually, Americans had also expressed themselves in folk beliefs about collective inheritances, often unaffected by the scientific understandings that had been undergoing profound changes since the middle years of the nineteenth century. For all their inconsistencies and variations, often depending on time, place, and favorite fear of the

21 The Nation cited in Foner, Reconstruction, 526, 454–459, 488–500; Blight, Race and Reunion, 98–139; Chernow, Grant, 699–711 for his successful campaign against the Klan. See also the Nation, July 6, 1865, April 27, 1871, June 15, 1871 and August 3, 1871, when the editor entertained the notion that it would have been better to have “garrisoned the Southern country for five years keeping it in order with soldiers till the Southerners themselves were ready to behave sensibly”; and also Litwack, Trouble in Mind, 53–113 and David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation (New York: Knopf, 2014), 3–44. 22 Katznelson, Fear Itself, 159; Michael Walzer, “Pluralism: A Political Perspective,” HEAEG: 783–787. 23 All sorts of attributes and stereotypes traveled from one ethnic group to another. For an early example see Ronald Takaki, “The Tempest in the Wilderness: The Racialization of Savagery,” Journal of American History 79 (December 1992): 909.

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moment, these beliefs, had embedded themselves within white America’s flexible forms of ethnic hierarchy and citizenship, as well as in a most extraordinary economy and transformational society. At the same time, in most of the country, in an unregulated labor market and open shop, employers with their local ethnic labor contractors enforced who on a company payroll belonged to the “throwaway” working people.24 American political cultures glorifying individualism managed different arrangements for those with folk beliefs held in common by large numbers of people. Under the tutelage of a victorious militant nation the country had reunified; and it had transformed a capitalist society, rich in technological innovation, veining, and banding. From the past, the victors had brought formal and informal racial and religious practices for disciplining the hierarchies dominating America’s diverse populations. These overlapped internal boundaries of gender and social class. In the case of African Americans, the new citizens used their radically changing circumstances to find competing leaders with whom to fight for the franchise and their elected officials. They republicanized an emancipated and enfranchised African American peoplehood. During unique upheavals, in moments of liberation from enslavement and republican achievements in the months of “Reconstruction,” the distinctive collective memories of African Americans entangled with their past times in slave land.25 Within these, they found themselves as individual republican citizens. When after a few years the victorious union government permitted white segregationists in their state governments to grievously violate the sacred republican promises made to African Americans by the federal government, the new citizens’ sense of distinctive peoplehood incorporated the caged private worlds of their urban neighborhood and field

24 Robert J. Gordon, The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living Since the Civil War (Princeton: University Press, 2016), 206–287, 535–565, 605–652; Stanley Lebergott, Manpower in Economic Growth: The American Record since 1800 (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964), passim; Korman, Industrialization, Immigrants, and Americanizers, passim; Gerald Sorin, A Time for Building: The Third Migration, 1880–1920 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992) 1–11, 109–169; Henry L. Feingold, A Time for Searching: Entering the Mainstream 1920–1945 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 47–54, 126–30, 137–139, 144–145, 150–152). See also Jerold Auerbach, Unequal Justice: Lawyers and Social Change in Modern America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976), passim. 25 “Frederick Douglass understood this process early on. In 1863, in response to Lincoln’s Emancipation Declaration General Grant turned “contrabands” into armed Union soldiers. At the time Douglass was convinced that arming them would assure freed slaves of their United States citizenship. Chernow, Grant, 280–285.

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of ­agricultural sustenance.26 So African American republicans as a people remembered. In the wildest days of Southern white segregation that followed Reconstruction, they sang “Lift Every Voice and Sing” as their own national anthem when in 1900 it became available from the hands of the Johnson brothers.27 In the case of white groups, even as republican assimilationists used their American ideals to campaign for dissolution of “foreign” group loyalties, that white society tolerated, accepted, or encouraged ghettoizing by discrimination and yet rewarding individual achievement. In turn, “foreigners” used their circumstances for sustaining and republicanizing vibrant peoplehoods with distinctive memories. All, black and white, were filtering bits and pieces of the nation’s republican ideology through their own experiences and traditions.28 Coerced African Americans as citizens in their republican peoplehood became powerful agents of change. They did this within their own caged ethnic society, with their unique racial and religious experiences and shared memories, of enslavement, military service, and emancipation, paramilitary engagements during Reconstruction, and their endurance of lynching carnivals and other murderous rampages.29For the victors’ federal military decisions and the Supreme Court’s protection of states from the Fourteenth Amendment channeled their influence if only because the harshness of the Southern Nation grew in place by virtue of fearsome impacts from the economic depressions of 1873 and 1893. By the decade of the Spanish American War, that channeling included criteria affected by new racial stereotypes derived from doctrines of social Darwinism and imperial aspirations. In turn, these helped shape ­segregation’s 26 In 1899, after the invasion of Spanish Cuba, in an “Open Letter to President Mckinley from the Colored People of Massachusetts,” they demanded to know why as president, who had found a constitutional way to protect foreign revolutionaries, he could not find the authority to protect “American citizens doing their simple duty at home [who] happen to be Negroes residing in the Southern States”? Sigmund Diamond, ed., The Nation Transformed: The Creation of an Industrial Society (New York: Braziller, 1963), 405. 27 Brent Staples, “Colin Kaepernick and the Legacy of the Negro National Anthem,” New York Times, November 21, 2017. 28 Gerd Korman, “Labor Historians and Immigrants,” American Jewish History 78 (December 1988): 289–301. 29 Eric Foner,” Reconstruction Revisited,” Reviews in American History 10 (December, 1982): 82–100; Foner, Reconstruction, 77–123; Steve Hahn, A Nation Under Our Feet: Black ­Political Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration (Cambridge: University Press, 2005), passim; Blight, Race and Reunion, passim, especially 98–139, 300–337; S­ terling ­Stuckey, Slave Culture: Nationalist Theory and the Foundations of Black America (New York: ­Oxford University Press, 1987), passim; Leon F. Litwack, Been in the Storm so Long: The Aftermath of ­Slavery (New York: Vintage, 1980), xiv, and passim; Litwack, Trouble in Mind, passim; George P. ­R awick, The American Slave from Sundown to Sunup: The Making of the Black Community (Westport: Greenwood, 1972), passim.

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legal structures and legal language, which impacted all ethnic groups and the citizens associated with them. Activist among the new citizens also continued to take for granted republican individualism, civil rights, and civil liberties; they also continued to commit themselves to dynamic and distinctive ideals of ­peoplehood. Finally, the revolutionary transformation of America’s material conditions also impacted the content of ethnicking and its common sense verities. Domestic economic circumstances for decades wrapped expectations about the future.30 Transformation had been everywhere, unevenly distributed to be sure, but between 1870 and 1960 the nation turned from employing most of its people in agriculture and commerce to employing most in industry, and by 1945, it was starting to employ more than half of its workers in its service sector. Notwithstanding wars and depressions, the standards of living had changed dramatically as the primary sources of power went from wind and water to steam, to the internal combustion engine and electricity, while research in physics and engineering, bacteriology, biochemistry, and genetics led to powerful applications in modernizing America: railways and steamships, streetcars, subways, bicycles, tractors, and automobiles, airplanes; and pharmaceutical firms producing life-changing and life-saving medicines, such as antibiotics—almost everybody lived healthier and longer lives. Innovations brought to wholesale and retail urban markets readymade clothing, inexpensive wrist watches, and other consumer products such as refrigerators; and elevators kept pace with change in the building trades transforming newly designed tenements into skylines of ever-expanding metropolitan areas. These kinds of material changes influenced the lives of millions, but as participants of privatized republican peoplehoods, such influences were also refracted in changing common sense verities especially about infant mortality and employment opportunities. A hundred years of modernization did not preclude different kinds of suffering as well as extraordinary opportunities and challenges. From the former slave lands of the South, African Americans with their collective memories moved short and long distances in their internal migrations north and west; there, they had also changed opportunities for employment, 30 Gordon, Rise and Fall of American Growth, passim; Henry L. Feingold, A Time for Searching: Entering the Main Stream (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1992), 125–154; Edward S. Shapiro, A Time for Healing: American Jewry Since World War II (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1992), 61–158; Gary Gerstel, American Crucible: Race and Nation in the Twentieth Century (Princeton: Princeton University, 2001), 239–345; D. W. Meining, The Shaping of America: A Geographical Perspective on 500 Years of History (New Haven: Yale, 1998), vol. 3, Transcontinental America, 1850–1915, 187–323.

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n­ otwithstanding exploitation in segregated factories, mines, and railway transportation. All along, during and after WWII’s economic boom, many of the “ordinary” practices associated with the long dark African American pasts remained in place. Two personal experiences are telling here. Less than a decade before their efforts to end the sovereignty of Plessy vs. Ferguson, young historian John Hope Franklin and Thurgood Marshall of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), understood all too well what was happening. Franklin was forced to sit in a segregated baggage railroad wagon from where he could see German prisoners of war riding in an all-white integrated passenger car!31 His friend Thurgood, fully engaged with his people’s collective memories, described some of America’s other realities, especially in the South. In November 1946, at his organization’s youth conference in New Orleans, the New York Times quoted him as saying: “[A] disobedience movement on the part of Negroes and their white allies, if employed in the South, would result in wholesale slaughter with no good achieved … any non-violence or disobedience movement” along the lines of tactics used in India, “would bring violence on the part of local and State police which would result in the imprisonment of hundreds of young people and the death of scores, with nothing achieved except a measure of publicity which we are now getting for our struggles with a minimum of suffering.” By then, as in its beginnings, so, too, in the decades bringing the last years of the century since the civil war, news and rumours about different kinds of horrific events struck the ethnickiing chambers that resonated far and wide among EuroAmerican peoplehoods and their common sense constructions. These involved Jews especially in the depression and war of the 1930s and 1940s. Pent-up fusions of inheritance beliefs and convictions about germs causing deadly epidemics had found their triggers. The fighting in Europe and Asia brought news of unimaginable explosions of state sponsored radical xenophobia deeply influencing national beliefs. Overseas, these had justified massive terror programs of what we euphemistically have come to call “ethnic cleansing:” population transfers, forced labor, civilian casualties, mass murder, and the distinctive cleansing campaigns of Jewish life. These last brought the news about abrupt beginnings of

31 It is a well-known story, repeated by President Bill Clinton in 1995 when he awarded John Hope Franklin the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Franklin wrote about it in Mirror to ­America: The Autobiography of John Hope Franklin (New York: Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 2005), and he told it to the author at the 1999 convention of American historians in Toronto. On Marshall and Franklin working on Brown, see ibid., 156–159.

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the end of more than a hundred years of political emancipation in Western and East Central Europe. For then, between February and October of 1941, German euphoric responses to military achievement on the Eastern front made everything on the Nazi leadership’s dynamic wish-list seem possible, including the secret “Final Solution” executed in years of major German battlefront defeats. As in the century’s first decades, most victors used their miasma of collective amnesia, this time to shroud the world’s millions dead and wounded. Christian Americans in the public square all but ignored the victim of that Final Solution. They lost almost all among the many millions listed as atrocity victims. Often that helped with a related problem, one that Jewish Americans themselves faced during the war: most could not accept as fact that the Nazi state had executed visions and plans to murder all Jewish life in the lands it had occupied. Acceptance meant that the German regime had or had acquired the support and acquiescence of millions in a respected Christian society to murder each and every Jew in occupied Europe. In any event, accustomed to keeping Jewish collective memories out of the public square, these convictions in the United States held firm, even between 1944 and 1951, in the presence of abundant evidence at Nuremberg documenting the “Final Solution.” At the time and a decade later, most scholars and activists getting involved in the Civil Rights Revolution seem not to have appreciated the significance of events involving Associate Justice Robert Jackson and the Nuremberg postwar trial. As had most Americans, they, too, had missed the opportunity to gain a serious introduction to the subject of republican peoplehoods and their ethnicking in the public square of the United States. When organized civil rights turmoil started to crash into the public square, it brought along black “private” memories and convictions from the deep past but without the benefit of the knowledge of the “Final Solution” of the “private” Jewish “Holocaust”: the Southern Nation’s filters of whiteness, Christian antisemitism, what can be identified as the antisemitism of post-Christian pagans, and Jewish “private” memories about yesterday in particular; for by the early sixties, there hovered another congealing amnesia effecting many a conviction about what had transpired at Nuremberg. World War II had not yet changed many minds and emotions of Christian clerics about the Crucifixion and Jewish conversion; the “Good News” was still expected to transform Jews and their Judaism.32 And not

32 Gary Will, “Catholics and Jews: The Great Change,” New York Review of Books 21, March 2013, 36–37; Proceedings of the [Conservative] Rabbinical Assembly Convention (1946): 121–137 has a number of comments about Catholic clerics rejecting ecumenical overtures by Jewish clerics; Jeremy Cohen, Christ Killers: The Jews and the Passion from the Bible to the Big Screen (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 167–182.

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surprisingly, that attachment to prewar decades also ­continued to manifest itself toward the subjects of peoplehoods in general, and towards Jewish American collectives in particular. During fierce Vatican II discussions about Jews, it was a small minority that had successfully fought for Pope John XXIII. For at least twenty-five years, the information about those murders of individuals, and the knowledge about the purpose of slaughtering an entire people, remained largely contained in new ethnicking collective memories among organized American Jewry. Explicitly neither information nor knowledge registered in the public square where Supreme Court justices were parsing the meanings of “group” and “individual” to begin opening it to the private worlds of African American and Hispanic republican peoplehoods. Meanwhile, except in the new state of Israel where they were declared national martyrs, the millions of Jewish dead also remained private. Or, if by chance they counted in the public square, they were included as part of all other atrocities in times of revolution and war. And then, from the start of the postwar era, especially in military occupiers’ enthusiasms for decontextualized comparisons, the common sense of the matter made it obvious all over again: Jews always exaggerated their own importance, the uniqueness of their disasters, and their need for special help.33 In this context, it is easy to overlook that ethnicking Jews in the United States also retained their other very different memories. Most of their urban employment had come from Jewish employers, especially in particular industries, such as clothing manufacture. That sector came to have large factories, for example, those made famous by the Triangle Fire, but was characterized by small scale shops; and in the first half of the twentieth century, most of them, large and small, were organized by increasingly powerful social democratic needle trade unions fighting against exploitation, unhealthy working conditions, and for the power to participate in bargaining collectively about those conditions, wages, and hours of employment. Together, shops and unions facilitated the dramatic upward mobility of Jewish Americans enabling them to move as individuals from urban working classes to middling folk, while a smaller but growing ­proportion

33 But a committee in the Library of Congress did decide to make “Holocaust” a new main subject entry because of the many international book titles that in 1968 included the word. The committee reported some correspondence with historians questioning the change. Charles Beard and Theodore Wiener (Catalogue Division), telephone conversation with Gerd Korman, August 10, 1971. For examples of decontextualized comparisons see the postwar years in Gerd Korman, “Survivors Talmud and the U.S. Army,” American Jewish History 73, no. 3, and twenty years later in Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique (New York: Norton, 1963), 294ff.

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left the world of the shop altogether, moving especially into white collar professional ranks as they became available. By the mid 1960s, two decades after the employment boom of WWII, economic transformations kept the commonsense hopeful about the future in America, helping to keep liberal and aging social democratic reformers optimistic about the Civil Rights Revolution. Even so, these changing people of the Talmud now, during the Vietnam War, encountered old-new ethnicking screeds. Militant black power advocates claimed to speak for an African American republican peoplehood. In their ethnicking, they up­­ dated traditional international stereotypes with anticolonial and anti-capitalist slogans, hurling them against an American Jewish republican collective that heard in many of its neighborhoods the slogan, “Never Again.”34 Other practices of that past in the United States also remained in the background when Jews as individuals revealed some of the sources for their commonsense assumptions. Dr. Louis Sokoloff, a longtime student and pioneer of human brain function, recalled a related strand of collective memory by invoking his grandfather’s advice as he was deciding whether to go to college around 1941: “He advised me to choose a profession, any one in which all my significant possessions would reside in my mind because, being Jewish, sooner or later, I would be persecuted and I would lose all my material possessions; what was contained in my mind, however, could never be taken from me and would accompany me everywhere to be used again.”35 Ethnicking in changing republican peoplehoods had obviously continued to express itself in decades of hierarchy and segregation, but in these Cold War years, another integrationist enthusiasm among common sense expressions became popular: God himself had joined the official American Pledge of Allegiance. The effort was about muting collective identities and assimilating individuals, usually white ones, into a newly constructed civilization, an American “JudeoChristian” one. It consisted of the three major religious bodies, though they were unequal in demographics and influence—Protestantism, Catholicism, and Judaism—within which interethnic marriages were expected to occur. At the same time, the emerging concept of “ethnicity,” instead of serving as a transformative euphemism, was beginning its coexistence with that older racism, antisemitism. A linguistic devaluation of “peoplehood” had also gained momentum, attracting scholars impacted by a new, a DNA-oriented biology and republican integrationist ideology; they wanted to make the “Judaeo-Christian” civilization 34 Shapiro, A Time for Healing, 61–158. 35 New York Times, August 5, 2015.

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less discriminatory. Meanwhile, the “cognitive explanations” embedded in the older Euro-American vocabulary of “nation,” “nationality,” “race,” “state within a state,” and “people,” had been giving way. Increasingly, the use of neutralizing modifiers became popular. First the sparsely used “community” became attractive and, eventually, in the wake of the Civil Rights Revolution, “the view” became “fashionable” in popular culture that “ethnicity” was a “social good.” (Before then, however, except for social scientists and their readers, contemporaries usually did not use ethnic. A personal example: In the 1940s and 1950s, I was never asked “what is your ethnicity?” On the streets where I walked it was always “nationality,” and then when I replied “American.” I was told, “Yea, but your nationality?” “American.” “What are you, Jewish or something?”)36 Obviously “nationality” from the old Euro-American vocabulary still seemed to make more sense in ethnicking discourse because, like the term or expression of “nation” or nationhood,” nationality sounded as if it was connected to a nation rooted in lands with boundaries and a government that granted citizenship to its “nationals” and protected them; or, it had been an inherent part of the Southern Nation, part of its common sense. No doubt for that reason, Kallen had preferred to use “natio,” though he also used “ethnic,” or “ethnic nationality;” concepts that did not come into vogue until after WWII, when they slowly replaced or reshaped the concept of “minority.” In the older European empires, “peoplehoods” and “nationalities,” such as Poles, Czechs, Serbians, and Jews with their few Zionists, had been perceived by their discriminating imperial states as dangerous flotsam and jetsam, unrealistic nation-state wannabees—states within a state—not unlike striving Palestinians and Kurds today. In this country, during WWI, when Kallen and Bourne had written against them, shrill nativist militants feared those nationalist strivings among the country’s black and white peoplehoods. To be sure, within many of them, a portion of African and Jewish American, Polish, or German republicans attended to the constancy of a deeply rooted peoplehood. With it went the common conviction everybody assumed: family descent patterns are biologically and culturally determined. And some peoplehood enthusiasts had 36 Mitchell Duneier, Ghetto: The Invention of a Place, the History of an Idea (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016), 22–84, 216–237; Clair Drake and Norris R. Clayton, Black Metropolis: A Study of Negro Life in a Northern City (New York: Chicago University Press, 1945), 379–469, and Goren, New York Jews and the Quest for Community, 57–244 give fine examples of republican peoplehood in action during the interwar years; Nick Salvatore, We All Got History: The Memory Books of Amos Webber (New York: Times Books, 1996), passim is a biography of a “recovered” republican peoplehood citizen in the decades after the civil war. See also Stephan Thernstrom et.al., “Introduction,” in HEAEG, ix; on PBS News, November 13, 2015, Deraled Wing Sue, psychologist and professor at Columbia’s Teachers College, reported a similar exchange about his nationality in Oregon decades later.

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long shared what can be called a second promised land syndrome, a Palestine, an American, a Caribbean, or African place where African Americans could live without whites, a Bolshevik Russia, in the 1960s a Castro’s Cuba, or a Zionist Israel. But as Kallen understood all along, that other promised land almost always coexisted and was subordinate in a peoplehood republican’s “chains of affection,” that commanded “ultimate loyalty” to the American republic.37 The Civil Rights Revolution had brought into focus the country’s most recent century and its ethnicking. Popular collective memories and common sense assumptions had been ruling the nation’s public square, making it possible to privatize many of its black and white republican peoplehoods. Segregation practices and policies, imposed upon former enslaved African Americans and their children, were the most radical expressions of that racial privatization of American citizens. And, in ways quite different, race and religion also participated in the privatization of many another of the country’s republican peoplehoods as they and their citizens were kept out of the public square. Jewish Americans, who had their own distinctive international history of brutal persecution, were one group. So, when African Americans forced their revolution into the public square, other constructed minorities long privatized also benefitted by becoming recognized republican peoplehoods. Change was complicated. In the first years after WWII, when the presence of the state of Israel began to intersect with a Holocaust consciousness, common sense expressions usually wrapped the Final Solution in memories of war atrocities as if it were a package. Certainly among mainstream American historians that is what happened. They did it differently in comparison to events in African American history, but they did it nevertheless. David Shannon, an important American historian, wrote to his former major professor at the University of Wisconsin as if he was an expert on young Jewish colleagues who had been born and bred in New York City and were now trying to understand agrarian Populists. They were, he said, in 1965 just a generation from the shtetl, and therefore saw a potential pogrom in every gentile agrarian protest movement. In fact, this historian was writing about the years between 1944 and the early fifties. Those scholars in question could easily have been motivated not only by what he said was “ancient history,” but also by the impact on their public American history of the new memory scars in their generation of the millions of Jewish dead. For Daniel 37 As “ethnic group” can mean peoplehood, in some passages I use the terms interchangeably, hoping that the context makes my meaning clear. I have adapted language from David Brooks, “The Incompetence Caucus,” New York Times, 13 October 2015.

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Bell, soon to become a famous sociologist, launched the controversy in the Jewish Frontier in 1944, a small Labor Zionist magazine that had early in the war screamed about the atrocities later subsumed by the term “Holocaust.” The title of his article was, “The Face of Tomorrow.” Oscar Handlin, already a renowned Harvard historian, published his scholarly article in 1951 in Publications of the American Jewish Historical Society. Influential Richard Hofstadter from Columbia University discussed the subject in connection with American proto fascism, the focus of an article with the title, “Populist Influence on American Fascism,” by Victor C. Ferkiss, a student of Ezra Pound’s writings.38 Years later, long after he had agreed with Shannon’s evaluation, John Higham, a contemporary of Shannon, and by then at the end of a distinguished career, mirrored a change that had begun earlier without him. He had found his way to incorporating the Holocaust into the study of American history.39 Without saying so, he did this with a nod to scholarship from a decade before that had faulted him for his evangelic efforts to appreciate past constructions of “national unity and national identity.” At long last, he had come to recognize that, “documentation of memory supplies much of our ethnic history with a vividness that reached burning intensity in the rediscovery [sic] of the Holocaust.” That conclusion had led him to write: “If memory is at the core of ethnic identities, historians of the making of modern America might do well to take the promptings of memory as seriously as the coercions of race.”40 Stephen Greenblatt, Harvard’s famed student of English literature, had to face that reality when his parents implicitly remembered the Holocaust out loud as they drove past New England’s “empty” farm country.41 38 Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The “Objectivity Question” and the American Historical Profession (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 340–341; Gerald Sorin, A Time for Building: The Third Migration, 1880–1920 (Baltimore: John Hopkins, 1992), 38–68, and note 54; John Higham in Jews in the Mind of America, 237. Mitchell Duneier, using Google’s Ngram corpus is convinced that by 1943–45 news of the destruction of the Warsaw Ghetto and of other Jewish killing fields under German occupation was in the air, so to speak (Ghetto, 83–84). But so was the aura of the Popular Front, especially after the German invasion of Russia. Duneier pays close attention to the authors of Black Metropolis, a book that includes an introduction by Richard Wright where he demonstrates the importance of the anti-fascist filter in viewing Hitler, Nazis, and Jews. That filter may well have participated in popularizing the concept of “black ghetto.” 39 Gerd Korman, “Silence in the Textbooks,” Yad Vashem Yearbook (1968); “The Holocaust in Historical Writings,” Societas (1972). 40 Higham, Jews in the Mind of America, 237; Higham, “The Amplitude of Ethnic History: An American Story,” in Not Just Black and White: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives on Immigration, Race, and Ethnicity in the United States, ed. Nancy Foner and George M. Frederickson (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2004; 2005), 62; Lawrence W. Levine, “The Unpredictable Past: Reflections on Recent American Historiography,” American Historical Review 94 ( June 1989): 675. 41 Greenblatt, “If You Prick Us,” New Yorker, July 10, 2017, 35.

CHAPTER 2

Races

While Kallen and Bourne challenged the governing ethnic hierarchies of their day, they all but ignored those ruling over African Americans. But not necessarily as individuals, as an angry Kallen, stresses in 1907 in one of his Oxford letters to Professor Kendall, the subject being the bigotry confronting Alain Locke: “As you know I have neither respect nor liking for his race—but individually they have to be taken, each on his own merits and value, and if ever a negro was worthy this boy is.”1 In 1915, in Nation magazine, Kallen is too preoccupied with making the case for European peoplehoods in America and too obtuse to embrace all of America’s people, some of whom he is certain were white, of “native stock,” and “often degenerate and backward.” And then there are the “nine million negroes.” They have their own “mode of living,” he wrote, and are “influential” on the larger population of the southern states. Its “mere massiveness,” Kallen claims, “standardize[s] the ‘mind’ of the proletarian South in speech, manner, and the other values of social organization.” That kind of recognition of African American influence was as far as his insights would take him in 1915. In some ways, it was not all that different from the attitudes of Southern whites afraid that without segregation and its violence, their “negroes” would pollute “Southern White” biocultural society. This sensitive student of European nationalities, and Jewish history in particular, did not in 1915 recognize in the millions of “influential negroes” another peoplehood equally fit to play particular notes in his “symphony of civilization.” In 1915, it was striking because African American peoplehood was there for the study in the New York City Kallen knew well. After Garvey’s whirlwind, Kallen in 1921 would write about them differently when he wrote that Jews and Negroes were equally fit to determine their future in Palestine and Liberia. In 1924, Kallen published his book, Culture and Democracy in the United States: Studies in the 1 Stewart, Locke, 121, and 122–129 for the full context of the bigotry at Oxford.

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Group Psychology of the American People. In it, he articulated his concept of “­cultural pluralism.”2 At the same time, Kallen moved among Jews active in non-Jewish populations: social scientists, editors and reporters, philanthropists, settlement house workers, socialists, trade unionists, and Workmens’ Circle enthusiasts. Some, including Kallen himself, may have heard black “Jazz.” In those years, it was being played in Chicago, not that far from Madison, Wisconsin, and in Manhattan, where Kallen taught and lived once he joined, in 1919, the founding faculty of the New School for Social Research. Jazz was an emerging form of music in which, “playing is predominantly ‘writing’;” it was the very phenomenon he had heard in his changing “symphony of civilization.”3 What is more, Kallen’s contemporary black citizens, who worked the cotton fields as tenant farmers and increasingly had moved to live in southern towns and cities, were now providing the foot soldiers to give shape to contents of their own peoplehood. As had Jews and followers of other peoplehoods, African Americans had embraced “self-determination as a goal and vehicle of change,” and believed in their people’s capacity to establish “a special place in historical memory and destiny,” to use historian Steve Hahn’s recent language. As it was for most participants in America’s peoplehoods, each of their worlds was “not so much about nationhood … [or] about structures as about solidarities.”4 In the instance of African Americans, their sense of collective, “in varying degrees … [made] the centrality of race and racism … markers of experience in American society, the importance of black self-determination … a goal and vehicle of change, and [they recognized] the perils of seeking alliances outside of the African American community. They often assign[ed] Africa a special place in historical memory and destiny.” Hahn labeled the African American peoplehood mix “garveyism.”5 2 Kallen, Culture and Democracy in the United States, passim 3 Cliff Hill Korman, professor of music, University of Brazil, Rio de Janeiro, phone conversation, May 20, 2012. 4 Steve Hahn, A Nation Under Our Feet, 7–10, 473, and passim. In his lectures at Harvard in 2009, “The Political Worlds of Slavery and Freedom,” without explanation the term “peoplehood” is conspicuously absent. Discussions of ethnicities and peoplehood among social scientists became especially important in the mid 1960s. Philip Gleason, “American Identity and Americanization,” in Harvard Encyclopedia of American Ethnic Groups, ed. Stephen Thernstrom et al. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980), 31–58. See also Ira Berlin, The Making of African America: The Four Great Migrations (New York: Viking, 2010), 152–200, where without saying so explicitly, the author places the free South-North African American migration in the larger context of American immigration history, and “The Negro American” issue, Daedalus (Fall 1965), 2 vols., passim 5 I have adapted Hahn’s language to help clarify the meaning of peoplehood in general (­Nation Under Our Feet, 7–10, 473). “Colored People” was already in use by 1821 at the New York

Races

This important aspect of the nation’s ethnicking requires attention to the local detail to be found in Harlem; but first, Hahn’s formulations need some attention, because he had predecessors who also grounded theirs in complex ideological controversy.6 One early example is from 1929. E. Franklin Frazier published his careful and well documented sociological study about African American peoplehood, where he preferred to use the term “Negro Community.” In his article, Frazier wrote about its solidarities and institutions manifesting a sense of self determination. George Rawick was another important predecessor who later in life became influential, especially among students of American slavery. In the 1960s, he was a young American historian and longtime socialist activist in the midst of revising his approach toward African American history.7 By 1964, when Gordon published his contribution for understanding the nature of American peoplehoods, and Kilson talked of “compulsive liberals,” Rawick started to publish his essays about the significance of a mobilized militant black community in the history of America’s working class and in its power to transform American society. Rawick wrote: “The Negro movement is part of the general movement of the American working class, a class produced and developed by the most advanced industrial capitalism in the history of mankind. When the Negro movement emerges today it is linked with the entire development of American society. It follows the model created by the whole American working class—and then advances the struggle to new heights.” Twenty-five years later, John Hope Franklin quoted Rawick writing about the “Historical Roots of Black Liberation.” He had written about slaves that, “fashioned their own independent community through which men and women and their children could find the cultural defences against their oppressors.” Franklin went on to say that,

Constitutional Convention. Ann Sandford, Nathan Sanford: Reluctant Reformer (Albany: Suny Press, 2018), 100, 175n7 and Elizabeth Stordeur Pryor, “The Etymology of Nigger: Resistance, Language, and the Politics of Freedom in the Antebellum North,” Journal of the Early Republic 36 (Summer 2016): 204n1. Pryor maintains that “‘colored’ was a descriptor consciously chosen by Black activists in the nineteenth century ‘to signal racial unity.’” The example she gives of usage of the term is in a title, “Coloured Citizens,” and was “at least as early as 1829 in use by a Black Bostonian,” while the white General Erastus Root had used the term … in 1821.” 6 Stuckey, Slave Culture is such an influential predecessor. Labor historians like Herbert G ­ utman learned from E. P. Thompson’s The English Working Class how ethnic group cohesions were fundamental for understanding the transformation of the American working class. 7 Michael O’Brien, The Letters of C. Vann Woodward (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013), passim. His correspondence provides insights for appreciating the growing intensity, and angry controversies among American historians during the Civil Rights Revolution, especially when they involve the issues Rawick engaged. Vann Woodward does not mention Rawick but his close engagements with Genovese focuses on many of those issues.

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although “none of them would, perhaps, have put it quite … [Rawick’s] way, historians John W. Blassingame, Eugene D. Genovese, Herbert G. Gutman … Lawrence Levine … [and others] would have credited the slave community with being a major and viable institution throughout the slave era.”8 Rawick had taken seriously what Hahn called “solidarities” and the “importance of self-determination.” In fact, at one point in his transformational years, Rawick had been explicit about one difference between himself and a historian, then a Stalinist emerging to greatness as a devotee of Clio, Eugene Genovese. Both were serious Marxian scholars, political activists, and students of American slavery. In those years, Rawick phoned me after a long telephone conversation with Genovese, explaining their different interpretations of enslaved community life. He told me something like this: Toward the end of our conversation, Genovese suggested that perhaps the difference between us came from our different family backgrounds, Catholic and Jewish (at the time, George was his own non-Zionist, post-Talmudic, secular peoplehood Jew).9 There was no elaboration. Rawick, a democratic socialist, was surely no compulsive white Jewish liberal. Like Gordon, at least in the spirit of Kilson, Rawick’s trajectory also mingled with what for him would have been an unfulfilled consequence, at least for the time being: without the mobilization of America’s working class, mobilized African Americans became a potential change agent for the place of peoplehoods in America’s public square. In that perspective, it is important to recall that in 1964, Rawick had also written: “Under slavery, the American Negro instead of becoming a brutalised and infantilised creature built a community and culture out of the remnants of the African past and out of the American experience, its meanings infused with the sense of life of African tribal society, reinforced and made whole again by the American experience, made whole 8 Journal of American History 75 (1988). 9 Rawick to Korman, telephone conversation, recalled but not recorded. We had been intimate friends since graduate school in the Department of History at the University of Wisconsin. For me, his reports of this conversation received confirmation when Genovese formally injected Catholicism into his conservative turn. See J. William Harris, “Eugene Genovese’s Old South: A review essay,” Journal of Southern History 80 (May 2014) where in footnote 77 he cites his references supporting the passage about Genovese’s conversion to Catholicism. See also Franklin, Mirror, 325. David B. Davis noted: “Gutman’s extremely influential book reflected the rigid, idealistic, and romantic dichotomies of the 1960s, when, for a moment, power hardly seemed to matter. A central question is the degree to which slave family life, far from being a wholly autonomous force as Gutman maintained, became subject to rules which whites pragmatically chose to ensure the stability and profitability of the slave system” (New York Review of Books, 1997). Since Genovese seemed more sensitive than Gutman about the impact of slave owner power on enslaved men and women, perhaps at the time of that conversation Rawick leaned more towards Gutman’s work.

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in such a way that what emerged was only possible to have occurred in the American environment.”10 Harlem was changing dramatically, from being a thriving Jewish neighborhood to a black mecca, spawning the Harlem Renaissance even as, within ten years, it became a ghetto slum. Real estate failures, combined with the arrival of large numbers of African Americans from the South, shattered many a Harlem dream about a share in Manhattan’s prosperity.11 These were some of the local changes occurring from seismic ethnic population shifts that had been underway since the late nineteenth century: ever-accelerating African American migration while, after August 1914, wartime brought a dramatic decline of Jewish migration out of East Central Europe. Both were momentous in their impacts, on lands of emigration and places of settlement, albeit to different calendars, the Jewish arrivals cresting with the outbreak of war and, except for a few months in 1919 and 1920, remaining damned up by postwar immigration restrictions. The African American exodus from the South had been extraordinary because of its massiveness, duration, and distinctiveness. In comparison to other African American migrations, this movement, on a recently South-North connected railway system, had many of the characteristics of the general Atlantic migrations out of Europe. In contrast, the earlier African American migrations had been different. They had been forced: overseas from Africa and over land, from the Upper South into the Southeast and later, into the Southwest; and during and right after the civil war, migrations out of Slave land were more like prison escapes en masse. They occurred in the form of “contraband” moving into Union lines, and then, in the face of land-binding “Black Codes,” moving into short lived occupied territories by the North’s military. But the massive migration from the later nineteenth century into the first part of the twentieth century was a migration of freed peoples, often enjoying their journey with their own prepared foods, albeit having to cope with threatening segregated 10 David R. Roediger, “A White Intellectual among Thinking Black Intellectuals: George Rawick and the Setting of Genius,” South Atlantic Quarterly 109, no. 2 (Spring, 2010): 225–247, especially footnote 9: George P. Rawick, “The American Negro Movement,” International ­Socialism 16 (Spring 1964): 16–24. My reference comes from www.marxists.org/archive/Rawick/1964/xx/negro.htm, accessed on August 20, 2009. Rawick insisted that the 1964 article was the basis for the whole “history of the American working class,” even in his CV, filed in box 1, folder 1, GRP. See also “George P. Rawick to Dear Vince[nt Harding],” May 20, 1974, box 6, folder 46, GRP. 11 Jeffrey S. Gurock, When Harlem Was Jewish, 1870–1930 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1979), passim; Gilbert Osofsky, Harlem: The Making of a Ghetto: Negro New York, 1890–1930 (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee Publisher, 1996), ix–187.

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travel arrangements and accommodations. Between 1914 and1929, about 500 came each day, counting 15,000 a month; by 1930, 1.3 million lived outside of the South, three times as many as thirty years earlier; and by 1939, some half a million African Americans had left. In metropolitan centers, Boston, New York, and Pittsburgh, their share of the total population went from one percent or two percent to six percent to eight percent: Chicago grew from 44,000 to 234,000, Detroit from 6,000 to 120,000. Increasingly, they had been moving in the South from rural lands into small towns and then to bigger ones, into urban and metropolitan centers, before entraining to the urban and metropolitan locations of the Northeast and later the Far West, into California. Often, they had their elders’ family memories about slavery and sharecropping and their own experiences with local ordinances trying to keep them in their place. But, as historian Ira Berlin has noted, it is difficult to identify them as migrating peasants: these urbanizing folk with a Slave land of heart and mind were “immigrants” now leaving their “old country” with African American common-sense expectations about freedom in the urban North. With these, the stuff of peoplehood, they adjusted, after 1914 many turning toward becoming distinctive migrant workers if only because of their “occupational and residential concentration in the burgeoning factory life of northern towns and cities as well as in their dry docks and railroad yards.”12 Their ethnicking had also been differentiated, in part because of changing material circumstances in the urban worlds they entered. The tiny elites from the first years of this migration illustrated some of the profound change they experienced once the confluences for mass movements to the North had begun. Initially, and then only for a short time in new places of residence, a small fraction of the African American men and women gainfully employed, professionals, proprietors, and skilled workers, obtained their elite status from their sources and amounts of income, from “tawny color and [from] assertions of respectability.”13 With these, as barbers, caterers, waiters, or in much smaller numbers as practitioners of medicine, law, or ministers of religion, they presented the African American face to white economic and political publics. At the same time, in the all but segregated economy, they demonstrated to their 12 Berlin, The Making of African America, 154ff. Berlin speaks of “immigrant proletarians.” The term may be misleading. See Nick Salvatore, We All Got History, passim where he argues for an appreciation of a middle-class value system among African Americans locked in servile segregated occupations. James Grossman, Land of Hope: Chicago, Black Southerners, and the Great Migration (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1991) 66–160, 259–265, 352n10; Black Metropolis, op. cit., 51–87, 379–469; Osofsky, Harlem, 127–158. 13 Berlin, Making of African America, 177ff.

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own struggling people fighting for “negro work” some of it on the upper rungs on the ladder of opportunity. Later, the elites, with their organizational webs, “Old Settlers” proud of an African American middle class, and its values, and lifestyles, faced challenges from the newcomers. These were not unlike encounters with new arrivals pouring into Manhattan’s Jewish neighborhoods before World War I; twenty-five years later Henry Roth portrayed them in Call It Sleep:14 “Their strange accents, garish dress, loud music, religious enthusiasm, and country manners—along with poverty … threatened,” reports Berlin about African Americans, not Roth, “the image the Old Settlers had cultivated so carefully. … They attempted to elevate the newcomers to their own standards of dress and deportment … [with] admonitions not to ‘appear on the street with old dust caps, dirty aprons and ragged clothes and above all, Keep your mouth shut please!’” When they did speak, it was a variant of the language of black Harlem; and it was “not alien,” as optimistic James Weldon Johnson, a senior NAACP leader, insisted in 1925 when he thought about Manhattan’s future. It is “not Italian or Yiddish; it is English. Harlem talks American, reads American, thinks American.”15 Into Harlem, by 1917, from neighborhoods to the south, some 150,000 Jews with their American English and Yiddish, had moved, initially into developed sections north of 110th st. and east of Third Avenue, where German Jewish families had established themselves amid Harlem’s rural landscape. Later, especially once rapid transit connections allowed a rider to reach “downtown” Manhattan in fifteen minutes, large numbers of Russian Jews came north changing the makeup and location of Jewish Harlem. But within a few years, only a fraction remained. In 1920, Central Harlem was already a third Christian black—a public school on 135th Street registered 2100 “colored children;” by 1930, that center was more than two-thirds black. Another way of expressing this demographic drama is to note that between 1920 and 1930, 120,000 Jews left while 90,000 blacks arrived. Jewish socialists, like Morris Hillquit, at election time, and Joseph Schlossberg of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers, had contacts with A. Philip Randolph and other African American socialists. Lillian Wald spread her Visiting Nurses, a spin-off from the Henry Street Settlement on the Lower East Side, to Harlem’s 14 Henry Roth, Call It Sleep (New York: Macmillan, 1934), passim; Goren, Kehilla, 134–185 discusses the private police the uptown German Jewish banker Jacob Schiff paid for, and Lilllian Wald administered, to control East European immigrant “Jewish” crime on the Lower East Side. 15 “Harlem: The Culture Capital,” in The New Negro, ed. Alan Locke (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992; Albert and Charles Boni, 1925), 309.

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center, establishing a nursing station near the black speakers’ corner and home of the local public library on 135th st. and Lenox Avenue.16 Senior members of the International Ladies Garment Workers and other “Jewish” unions worked with the short-lived National Association for the Promotion of Labor Unionism among Negroes; and still others did what Kallen himself had done, in his case as early as 1906 at Harvard, befriending some of the men who, as Harlem artists and writers, would achieve distinction in American culture and politics. During WWI, Kallen experienced the magnetic power of Marcus Garvey’s rhetoric about an African promised land for Negroes.17 In ways Kallen failed to do in those years, contemporaries of his did include “Negroes” among America’s voices. Besides African Americans, there were some others whose vision included the republic’s black citizens. One of these is especially noteworthy for, in a few pages in 1920 and 1921, in articles no longer than Kallen’s in The Nation, so, too, had Ernestine Rose in her articles demonstrated the realities of ethnicking among the nation’s minorities charged with a sense of peoplehood. Recently recovered from a dumpster outside of the house she once owned, her private papers show librarian Rose to be a white Episcopalian reared in unusual family circumstances in Bridgehampton, Long Island, a hamlet not known as a well-spring nourishing urban reformers.18 In her post as librarian at 135th Street and Lennox Avenue, Rose did much to encourage Harlem’s black performing artists, painters, writers, and clerics, reformers, and radicals. From her, Kallen could have learned about the institutional realities in Harlem, and he could have seen how well they compared to the institutional structures he praised among European peoples, especially his own. Rose was in touch with Jews in Manhattan. Schlossberg may well have been one of these. By 1924, he was one of Kallen’s fellow activists in Labor Zionist circles and taught in the Rand School of Social Science, close to Rose’s library at the black speakers’ corner. There, his Rand School socialist colleague Randolph edited and published the Messenger and sustained Harlem’s “Messenger Group;” 16 Hsia R. Diner, In the Almost Promised Land: American Jews and Blacks, 1915–1935 (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1977), 179–185; Davis, “Jews and Blacks in America,” New York Review of Books, December, 1999. 17 Diner, Almost Promised Land, 11, 137, 199–209. 18 Ann Sandford, “Rescuing Ernestine Rose (1880–1961), Harlem Librarian and Social A ­ ctivist,” Long Island History Journal 22 (Summer 2011): 1–11. I am indebted to Sandford for educating me about Rose. See also Barbara Hochman, “Investing in Literature: Ernestine Rose and the Harlem Branch Public Library of the 1920s,” Legacy 31 ( January, 2014): 93; Betty L. Jenkins, “A White Librarian in Black Harlem,” Library Quarterly 60 ( July 1990): 216–231; Ernestine Rose, “Books and the Color Line,” Survey, April 15, 1922.

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there, too, Randolph introduced Marcus Garvey to his street audience. This was the corner where Rose became head librarian of the Harlem branch of the New York Public Library, which had stood since 1905, when Harlem was not yet the black mecca of Manhattan. But after WWI, when Rose was appointed head librarian, that change was in full swing, and she turned her library into one of the engines for developing a cultural renaissance in African American Harlem. Rose helped link the New York Public Library, the Carnegie Foundation, and the African American collector Arthur Schomburg to each other, making possible the change that turned her library into the Schomburg Center for Negro Art and Literature. In that capacity, at times subjected to policy critiques by black leaders, Rose moved in circles that included not only Randolph, Hubert Harrison, and William E. Du Bois, but also Langston Hughes and Alain Locke, the last being Kallen’s friend from his student days at Harvard and Oxford.19 Rose’s work as reformer in New York’s public library system also revealed a perspective that went beyond the accepted meaning of ethnic engagement. She demonstrated how in Kallen’s day it was possible in an American institution—a Carnegie Library of the New York Public Library System—to provide employment for encouraging and sustaining “peoplehoods” in urban neighborhoods. In 1915 or later, Rose may well have found Kallen in The Nation or The New Republic, but in her case, as in the work of Lillian Wald, those efforts were not limited to Europeans in America. Long before her Harlem days, on the Lower East Side, near Chatham Square, at thirty-three East Broadway, Rose had worked with a polyglot population, including some three hundred Chinese residents and significantly many more Russian Jews. “There had been no call for Chinese books,” she told a New York Times reporter, “but as all the other nations could get books in their own languages, it seemed to me that it was worth the experiment to put in some Chinese books, and notify the quarter that they were there.” Once done, educated Chinese came with enthusiasm, as they were especially interested in books on history and science. By then, Rose had become experienced in working with other ethnic groups, ones she called “nations,” and made comparisons among them. “Jews are the greatest readers. In all libraries fiction is in greatest demand. … Here science is second, due to the desire of the Jews to better their condition … books on informative subjects they devour. It is so even with the children, though in their case they want the books printed in English, as do the youngsters of all nationalities,” 19 These circles in Harlem were supercharged with ideological currents affected by fascist and Communist politics in Europe and in the United States. Stewart, Locke, 438, 460–462, 488, 724–739.

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including the Chinese.20 Always, Rose tried to serve her readers’ needs on their terms, making it her business, as in the case of the Chinese, to learn about the different dialects and reading habits of different occupational groups, like “laundrymen.” In the military, during her European service in WWI, Rose tried to provide that kind of service to segregated black American soldiers. And in Harlem, she went to work in the service of African American and Hispanic populations. Shortly thereafter, Rose wrote about her impressions. Segregation was everywhere, but in the black world a “new note” was “being struck.” It “comes from the colored race, which is joining now with the white in its cry for race integrity.” She saw important benefits as the cry called on African Americans to study their history and acquire the knowledge for developing their cultural institutions, above all to develop the “negro’s own peculiar racial gifts and powers.” For she was convinced that, “no race can take its proper place in the world until it knows itself and learns to develop itself.” The optimistic Harlem Rose saw after WWI reminded her of other white “nationalities” she had encountered in lower Manhattan. Black people in their many thousands, with “their teeming social and business life, their churches, theaters, newspapers, restaurants and beauty parlors are divided by as many lines, national, political, social, as a white group of similar size.” With an ambition not unlike that of a traveler eager to report to ignorant readers about a newly discovered vibrant place, Rose called Harlem New York’s “black city” containing “a few alien whites as scattered shopkeepers, and old residents, clinging to their homes. This city,” she wrote, “has its own churches, its theaters, its newspapers, its clubs and social life. … There are three churches, each with a parish numbering more than two thousand, in Harlem, and at least thirty others, varying in size. … All denominations, from Baptists to Episcopalian, are represented; there are a large Catholic parish, several Jewish churches [sic], and a number of Eastern and African sects.” It was a “negro world … swarming with clubs, societies, organizations of sorts, for the support of religious or political movements, as for instance, the Bahai faith, or Marcus Garvey’s ‘Back to Africa’ propaganda, as likewise for the mutual betterment or advancement of members.” Rose participated in these in diverse ways, including in her library’s Thursday night forum focusing on “economic and social literature.” She was impressed by what she heard: “The economic unrest is seeping in among our colored people, and some of the most intelligent questions I have ever heard have been asked after the lectures … [about] social and racial problems. So much for Mr. Madison Grant’s assertion, ‘Negroes never become socialists.”

20 New York Times, March 26, 1911.

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Rose wanted her readers to know that these “activities are sponsored and managed to a large extent, by colored people.” So, she gave examples. “The offices of the Urban League are filled with negroes, altho both races are represented on the national board of directors. The colored branches” of the Y’s “are managed entirely by colored people. The newspaper editors are negroes, and represent negro thought exclusively. The clergy are negroes, except in the case of the Catholic Church. On the corner of 135th Street and Lenox Avenue a bank has just been erected, which is financed by colored capital, and is under colored control”; increasingly so too was local real estate and even police and fire stations have “some colored men in their forces.” Rose revealed her sensitivities to diversity within groups that outsiders, in their eagerness to see homogeneity, often missed: “Yet tho this great group is held together by the tie of color, and by the same bond is separated from its white neighbors, within itself it is crossed and divided by many conflicting lines of thought, belief, and hope.”21 She saw the familiar: “the most deeply-cut is that of nationality. Nearly half this population is foreign, from the British or Spanish West Indies or South America. From the British West Indies comes an educated, thinking and ambitious group, interpenetrated by white blood, unused to the color line and inexpressibly galled by it … they form a separate alien group, a bitter, proud people. Those from the Spanish possessions and from South America form as alien a group, but one which is indifferent rather than antagonistic. Both their language and their color exclude them from much of American life. Those from the Islands, unused to participate in political life, do not feel the need of naturalization privileges. They came to America for a livelihood, and that end accomplished they are satisfied with their own native life with its clubs and gambling groups, its freedom. Police estimates place the number of such alien citizens from 20,000 to 30,000 in this district.” Rose was nuanced in her appreciation of black realities. She, too, wrote of the “dual personalities” residing in so many loyal and proud Americans who knew all about their second-class status in the civic society. “This is true of all racial groups, and if so, how much more so of the colored race, which is separated from the white by the barrier of a very recent servile condition and present social ostracism.” She had a big picture of this entire process by which, “the Negro race places itself beside the other great racial groups which are learning, on American soil, to develop side by side in harmony, in mutual consideration, and in

21 Ernestine Rose, “Serving New York’s Black City,” Library Journal 16 (15 March 1921): 255–6.

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co-operation which may make eventually a new America.” Rose had few illusions in her hopes and optimism, just as she realized how much she herself had learned lately about black America. “Preconceived opinions die of malnutrition.” Rose was forming new ones about African Americans, and these made her look with confidence toward the future. “Most deeply I am impressed with his tremendous reserve power, which, when fully called forth, will lead to ends we cannot now conceive.” Rose was also convinced that, “the race, in its developing self-consciousness, is becoming increasingly sure of the necessity before it of working out its own destiny, of settling its own problems. The majority of colored people do not, I believe, hate the whites but they are expecting less and less from them.” With these new convictions about the “awakening of a great people,” Rose wrote confidently about the issue Kallen had incorporated in his discussions of pluralism: “Assimilation of races is a very large matter to be mentally approached with awe. But if races are to live in mutual helpfulness, certainly they must learn to co-ordinate their interests and activities.” Rose was also attuned to the possible deeper meanings of the ethnicking swirling around her in Harlem. “The political line is greatly affected in its trend by racial issues. The mind of the Northern Negro, to be sure is awakening to the great social stir of the day, and there is a growing group of socialists and more radical thinkers who align themselves according to political thought rather than that of race. But by and large, Negroes choose their social and political doctrines according to its probable effect upon their racial status.” Clearly Garvey impressed her. Every reader of newspapers knew about him and his Black Star steamship line. Rose wrote: “The garvey[sic] movement, with its emphasis on Negroid ideals, its area of a free and unified Africa, is an expression of deep-buried hopes and instincts, and to them owes its immense appeal.” She raved about him and his magnetism. His was an “incredible movement or dream, rather. … This great leader,” Rose wrote using his count of the number of his followers, “who has gathered under his banners some 4,000,000 colored people all over the world, stands for uncompromising race integrity, a return to Africa, and the establishment there of a black racial and political life.” But her enthusiasm did not preclude an appreciation of the influence of other important older leaders. She knew that “the mass of men cling … to the conservative and modest aims and methods of Booker T. Washington. This is the way of the common man whose course is planned of him. There is likewise a middle, highly intelligent, thinking group, who object to segregation and all special methods placing them apart from the trend of individual opportunity.” This group was smaller than the followers of the late Washington or of the magnetic Garvey. It believed “in equal opportunity along all lines, based on individual merit. The most distinguished exponent of

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this belief is Dr. W. E. B Du Bois, president of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and author of several powerful books.” These perspectives suggest speculation about Rose’s contemporary Horace Kallen, particularly his pioneering examination of American nationality. Had he shared her perspective, would Kallen not have been able to comprehend the peoplehood worlds of all of America’s residents, including their sacred kitsch about race, religion, and distrust of his own European-like anti-clericalism. Between 1915 and 1924, would Kallen not have written about the African Americans’ rich organizational life and their intellectual and political vibrancy in the detail he revealed when writing about Poles, Germans, and Jews. In other words, African Americans and Hispanics would have been playing in his orchestra, thus demonstrating Kallen’s emancipation from a Euro-American prism; he would have been writing about the American society he later claimed to comprehend.22 This librarian from Bridgehampton remained with Harlem’s library until 1942.23 As in older pasts all memories had not been dumped; they were participating, and, as in older pasts, they and their fragments mingled with hope. Memories did not lose kith and kin, nor their suffering and rivalries, if only because s­ cholars and politicians recalled and rewrote. They had done so centuries ago, as historian David W. Blight reminded his readers when he recast a civil war generation’s “strains of memory” into perceptions of the past. This recasting occurred as well among African Americans with their strains of memories, affecting the shape of their collective identity, of their developing republican peoplehood.24 In fact, by Blight’s time, the subject of memory itself had come under critical scrutiny; and among some scholars, it was looked at through the lens of the Holocaust and its inscrutable events: by these days, the very activity of representing the past in anything but chronicles and annals was a serious point of contention. As such it was one of the latest challenges presented to the subject of national memory.25 For that subject, in one version or another, had come under different rubrics, sometimes associated with what eighteenth- and nineteenthcentury Germans called a “Volksgeist:” an identifiable kind of “our people’s

22 Stephen J. Whitfield, “Introduction,” in Horace M. Kallen, Cultural Democracy in the United States, xliii–l. 23 She retired to Bridgehampton where she remained active in civic affairs. She died in 1961. 24 Blight. Race and Reunion, 300–301, passim; Hahn, Nation Under Our Feet, 249–264. 25 Friedlander, “Introduction,” in Friedlander, ed., Probing the Limits of Representation, 1–21; Omer Bartov, “Intellectuals on Auschwitz: Memory, History and Truth,” History and ­Memory  5 (Spring–Summer 1993): 87–129. Blight, Race and Reunion, 111 found some of Primo Levi’s passages about the Holocaust helpful for understanding his American subject.

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spirit;” or during the civil war in the American South, in a different context, it was a nation-wannabe regional spirit, that was well suited to nation building and war time.26 After WWII, a concept of choice for many in the academy became “national character,” even though for David Riesman and other social scientists, it was but a “construct or fiction … which has not been conclusively demonstrated to exist.”27 In later decades their successors have made such constructions or “imagined communities” the basis of distinctions between modern and premodern “collective groups without embracing the primordialist position that overlooks any modern influences on group definitions.” In the meanwhile, since the 1960s, among American historians, insisted Lawrence Levine, “an exciting and pioneering dynamic” took hold “in which historians explored unchartered groups and institutions; made the expressive culture of the folk and of popular entertainement part of American culture; wondered openly about the direction of cultural diffusion and hypothesized that cultural influence could proceed from the socioeconomic bottom to the top as well as vice versa.” These historians, insisted Levine, “have done more to enable us to understand … [the American past] in its full complexity and diversity than any preceeding generation of historians.”28 When believed in with the mantel of the sacred, constructions and convictions of believers also bound past, present, and future. Usually they did so with an aggressive biocultural agenda. Profiling and stereotyping veined American society. Among all, the cacophony helped to shape, confuse, and harden common sense attitudes toward different peoples and their memories, toward their inheritances—blacks from enslavement and Jews from Talmud studies. This mix was important in the life of peoplehoods when ethnic advocates structured their hierarchical alignments: it drove a people’s station and collective identity, invariably persuading believers they were fighting harmful or evil influences in the constant struggle toward a public good benefitting humanity. This mix helped to construct a patriot’s purposeful memory with the biocultural debris that festered 26 McPherson, NYRB, December 2008; The Annals of the American Academy of Political and ­Social Science 370 (March, 1967): 16–35. 27 David Riesman, “Some Questions about the Study of American Character in the Twentieth Century,” ibid., 36–47. 28 Levine, “The Unpredictable Past”, 675; Pianko, Jewish Peoplehood, 85. For discussions of the constructed generic concept, and for the particular versions, see Conzen et al., “Inventing Ethnicity,” op. cit; Rogers M. Smith, Political Peoplehood: The Roles of Values, Interests, and Identities (Chicago: University Press, 2015), passim; Pianko, Jewish Peoplehood, passim. I also appreciate the judgement expressed so carefully in the 1990s by Conzen et. al, op. cit: “In our view, ethnicity is not a ‘collective fiction,’ but rather a process of construction or invention which incorporates, adapts, and amplifies pre-existing communal solidarities, cultural attributes, and historical memories. That is, it is grounded in real-life context and social experience.”

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when many changes did come to the republic. For perceptions of peoplehood identities were subject to what most people held dear regarding bits of biocultural beliefs. They determined self-evident common-sense convictions. “Like begets like,” mingling with fragments of religious doctrines, such as “Chosen People” and “Promised Land,” these often ruled understandings of who inherited what, thus enabling believers to envelop themselves in convictions of agency and hierarchy. This cacophony also included scientific bits and pieces reflecting the controversial voices of a Lamarck, a Darwin, an August Weismann, a Koch, or a Pasteur, by the 1920s an Einstein in the pages of the “New York Times.” Many a conversation and publication shared all sorts of beliefs. Often, common usage attributed to an expression the kinds of truth associated with verities heard in private spaces and public places of work, market, or houses of worship: all blacks are children in bodies of adults, Jews killed Christ, they cheat, the Irish drink, and Indians are instruments of the devil. These fragments impacted the uninitiated, usually about infectious diseases, which would be transmitted to the vulnerable, cholera or typhus by the Chinese in San Francisco, and by Italians and Jews fresh off infected ships. All this could happen even as formal scientific knowledge was heard among politicians, publicists, historians, and other ­academics. Between the end of the civil war and World War I, the reputation of diverse groups had been constantly affected by scientists trying to undo embedded common-sense beliefs of biological events. Heroic efforts found and demonstrated the presence of specific germs causing tuberculosis and cholera, and by 1915, when most investigators agreed that lice and nits brought typhus, proved these were the living creatures people encountered and transmitted when killer epidemics struck. This still terrified helpless millions. Ignorance and the absence of a cure left common sense observations to direct fear toward the other. God and sin retained the power to cohere debris so that peoplehoods could be blamed for illnesses and death. As inheritance met the bacterium, and then genetics, new fragments and debris followed suit, often attaching to older popular folk notions of hereditarianism. Darwin in the 1860s and 1870s, and later Darwinians, often continued to hold on to “like begets like.” Many, more commonly and for longer in Europe than in the United States, did so even after Weismann demonstrated conclusively that acquired characteristics could not be inherited. He did that first in 1883, by cutting off the tails of twenty-one mice and breeding them with these tails and then, in 1890, through his experiments using human cells.29 29 No doubt the findings and conclusions about the significance of epigenetics places this late nineteenth-century controversy in a different light. Eakin C. Mark, Science 344 (May 23, 2014):

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All sorts of beliefs about blacks, Jews, and other white peoplehoods remained rooted in traditional notions about the familial transmission of acquired characteristics among beasts and humans. Besides, the gap between the diagnosis and cure of threatening contagious diseases remained as before. Many a practitioner of modern medicine, and those whom they influenced, continued to believe in the inheritance of personal and collective characteristics, “natural” or “acquired.” But now, with the aid of modern science, they could rationally gaze on a carrier of an identified contagious bacterium as a potential killer and valuable marker for suspecting members of an entire group. The convergence brought another important consequence. Even though metropolitan areas had benefitted from sanitation plants, clean water, modern sewers, and changes in personal hygiene, for each resident the personal treatment gap remained open until the arrival of sulfa drugs and later antibiotics. Until then many a government official and politician continued to perceive threats to the public good based on customary stereotyping and profiles. This profiling was associated with folk notions of hereditarianism, such as “like begets like.” To be sure, and it deserves repetition: after 1890, in the small world of high scientific culture, Weismann’s work pushed experimentalists to catch on and catch up; and in 1900, three investigators independently rediscovered Mendelian genetics. But in the meantime, in the American population at large, the old folk notions had persisted, if anything in later years many a believer intensified his or her convictions. Within the frameworks of ethnic hierarchies, Americans understood what breeding animals and crossing plants was all about; and now that the animal breeders were learning about genetics, the “like begets like” conviction made even more sense. And not only in popular culture; for among some in the world of high culture, including the small world of Darwinian evolutionists in their first three generations, the common sense notion of “like begets like” had long sustained Lamarck’s century-old reasoning. Some fifty years before the publication of Darwin’s On the Origin of the Species, Jean-Baptiste Pierre Antoine de Monet, Chevalier de Lamarck, the French evolutionist, had claimed as his own a concept about the inheritance of acquired characteristics that was in fact “so universally accepted from the ancients to the nineteenth century,” that there was “no need for … [him] to enlarge upon it.” 798; Sidhartha Mukherjee, “Same but Different,” New Yorker (May 2, 2016). But see also Nathaniel Comfort, “Genes are Overrated,” Atlantic Monthly 317, June 2016, 42–44. In the past decade, Science has carried many articles and reports on the subject. For example, Maurizio Meloni, “Interpreting Evolution,” Science 353, July 29, 2016, 451. Meloni is the author of Political Biology: Science and Social Values in Human Heredity from Eugenics to ­Epigenetics (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2016).

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He “simply” made it part of a complex explanation of evolution. His “paradigm was highly persuasive to the lay person, who held most of the beliefs of which it was composed. This is the reason,” writes Ernst Mayr, the distinguished historian of biological thought, “why some of the Lamarckian ideas continued to be accepted so widely [into the 1930s] … almost a hundred years” after the publication of Darwin’s Origin. Indeed, the concept of newly acquired characters “was so universally accepted … that when Lamarckians experienced a revival toward the end of the nineteenth century, most of those who had never read Lamarck in the original assumed that Lamarckism simply meant a belief in the inheritance of acquired characters.”30 There were all sorts of implications. By this light, a species’ capacity to hold its critical environment constant sustained its capacity to inherit its acquired characteristics. Such assumptions did not have to lead to pessimistic expectations. In line with the optimism of enlightenment thought, Lamarck had believed that “no race was eternally locked into its present characteristics.” Others, too, took an optimistic, even radically optimistic, reading of the days to come. Thus, the revolutions of capitalism, liberalism, and democracy could transform the environment that in turn could fashion a person with new desirable heritable characteristics. But, even though for Lamarck, “idleness, carelessness, and lack of success were not racial qualities;” he did recognize them as characteristics acquired as “the result of the habit of submitting to authority from early youth.”31 Amidst growing fears about the struggle for survival, Lamarckians focused on persistent training environments for the young among threatening peoplehoods, like Jews and their Talmudic studies. Sigmund Freud, just in his mid-forties, can serve as an example of the complex reactions to this kind of influence. He rejected much of the race thinking so popular with his fellow physicians, fellow Jews among them revealing in their writings the influence of folk hereditarianism. But Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi’s insightful observations illuminate the landscape. He suggested that “Freud’s Jewishness may … also have played a role in his Lamarckian predilections,” in the sense that, “its subjective dimension, … expressed by committed and alienated modern Jews alike, of the enormous weight, the gravitational pull, of the Jewish past, whether it be felt as an anchor or a burden.” Yerushalmi argued: “Deconstructed into Jewish terms what is Lamarckism if not the powerful feeling that, for better 30 Ernst Mayr, The Growth of Biological Thought: Diversity, Evolution, and Inheritance (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982), 457. 31 Ibid., 341–393, 681–731.

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or worse, one cannot really cease being Jewish, and this not merely because of current antisemitism or discrimination, and certainly not because of the Chain of Tradition, but because one’s fate in being Jewish was determined long ago by the Fathers, and that often what one feels most deeply and obscurely is a trilling wire in the blood.” However, in the same letter, to Jewish novelist and publicist Arnold Zweig, that Yerushalmi used for the “trilling wire,” Freud, in writing about the Land of Israel from the Jewish past, was more circumspect. He also wrote, “and [we] hail from there … our forebears lived there for perhaps a whole millennium … and it is impossible to say what heritage from this land we have taken into our blood and nerves.”32 This kind of thinking had all sorts of consequences for profiling. For example, Euro-American physicians among Freud’s contemporaries no longer assumed the Jewish male menstruated, but they still attributed to Jewish men and women all sorts of other peculiar characteristics and habits, in part because they ignored the contrary evidence being published by Jewish colleagues. In modes of comparison similar to American white construction of African Americans’ inherited predisposition to disease, experts continued to construct Jews as being impervious to the different climates and lifestyles in which the world’s Jews lived. Racial immunity, or “a hereditary aversion to liquor,” protected them from alcoholism; they also had not succumbed to plague and pestilence “to the same extent” as had non-Jews.” In similar fashion, but usually determined by the current events of their practice, doctors made all sorts of assumptions about the Jewish stranger or neighbor next door, widely believing all sorts of things: they were not as susceptible as Gentiles to typhus, tuberculosis, cholera, measles, scarlet fever, diphtheria, or croup; in proportions significantly higher than non-Jews, Jews did suffer from diabetes, lung and bronchial problems, cancer, “but neither penile nor uterine, due to male circumcision,” conjunctivitis, trachoma, and color

32 Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, Freud’s Moses: Judaism Terminable and Interminable (New Haven: Yale University, 1991), 32–33; John Efron, Defenders of the Race: Jewish Doctors & Race Science in Fin De Siècle Europe (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994) 6–27 and passim; Sander Gilman, The Case of Sigmund Freud: Medicine and Identity at the Fin De Siecle (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), 11–20; Peter J. Bowler, The Eclipse of Darwinism (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983), 3–140, Peter J. Bowler, Evolution: The History of an Idea (Berkeley: University of California, 1984), 233–274, 282–290; George L. Mosse, Toward the Final Solution: A History of European (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2020), 18; George W. Stocking, Jr., Race, Culture, and Evolution: Essays in the History of Anthropology, 2nd ed. (New York: Free Press), 234–269; Frank Dikoetter, “Race Culture: Recent Perspectives on the History of Eugenics,” American Historical Review 103 (April 1998): 467–478. For a summary of Freud’s Jewish background and its place in his life in the 1930s see William J. McGrath, “How Jewish Was Freud?” New York Review of Books, December 5, 1991.

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blindness. In fact, in Euro-America’s biomedical culture social c­ onstructions of disease and illness led to the general conclusion that Jews, though as individuals belonging to the white race, collectively constituted a separate race— pure, bifurcated, mixed, or racially separate by virtue of its unique religious community. Jewish physicians and Jewish publicists familiar with the literature about medical patterns among the “Jewish race” often sought to correct erroneous information, but at the same time, those Jews, eager to present their race in the best possible light, would make “Jewish” medical claims of their own. In fact, among Jewish publicists there were competing racial polemics not unlike those in the African American world: republican individualists, assimilationists, peoplehood enthusiasts, and dreamers of promised lands outside of the United States; there were also Socialist Party officials such as the immigrant Morris Hillquit—contrary to popular opinions in the Yiddish radical press, by his light, for the sake of the party and the American labor movement—sided with white racists when it came to America locking out the Chinese.33

33 Eric L. Goldstein, The Price of Whitenesss: Jews, Race, and American Identity (Princeton: University Press, 2006), 12–115; for Hillquit see page 82.

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CHAPTER 3

Promised Lands

In the flush of civil war victory, many patriots praise ideological traditions of republican imperatives, seemingly available to all classes, races, and religions— individualism, free markets, and the upward mobility of individuals and their families. Seemingly, but available only within the crystalizing hierarchy of opportunities within the marketplace. But Americans in their republican peoplehoods share and continue to express themselves in folk traditions derived from religious beliefs and practices about collective inheritances. With roots in an ancient and medieval past providing shelter, these convictions are usually unaffected by the scientific understandings that had been undergoing profound changes since the middle years of the nineteenth century. The transforming Atlantic revolutions of economy and politics had a profound impact on traditional cohesions. In their migrating masses, Jews began splintering their commitments to a canonized architecture and their detailed rules for daily conduct. With shards that could be made to fit each other, they went through periods of becoming, differentiated post-Talmudic Jews, moving toward quite different peoplehood futures of the kind so common in our day. They cleaved to Jewish fragments, even debris of “like begets like” and other widespread and biocultural convictions; and they held onto fragments from religious customs and texts. Their practices varied over time and depended on where they occurred:1 in one situation, by following family behaviour or traditions, an unlearned, all-but-illiterate Jew could be living a life of strict observance by observation and memory of ritual and practice; in another, she could enjoy a non-kosher breakfast without knowing the formal reasons why she insisted on not having bacon. Other kinds of a “muddied, multilayered process” also provided glue for those well-known bundles of Judeophobic debris that had begun to be embedded in Christian common sense from its founding time. They rested on Gospel stories 1 Halbertal, People of the Book, 128–134.

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about the death of Jesus and justifications for a history of persecution. Since the time of early Church Fathers, in the Jews physical absence, Judeophobic attitudes had been sustained by virtual “materialistic Jews.” These served as a basis for negative euphemisms hurled at fellow theologians by Christian polemicists claiming the banner of genuine “idealism.” All along, this phobia would include heritable characteristics, and then beginning in the eleventh century, came ever more intense charges of collective responsibility for Talmud-derived p­ atrimony.2 During most of its second millennium, the Church refused to accept on Jewish terms the Jews’ concept of Oral Law, of their entire Talmud corpus. Instead, the Church placed post-Biblical Jewry on a staircase into the void, into withering witnesses of the great Christian miracle. As such creatures Jews had no legitimate claims to their Jewish sources of truth and knowledge, except for the “Old Testament.” The Church and other Christians, and later, Protestants, in their many different languages, read anew Christian Scripture and maintained that each religious body politic, somehow including the withering Biblical Jew, was a “People of the Book.” In the early centuries of the second Christian millennium, these Christians shaped common sense associations between Jews and the Talmud: popular attitudes institutionalized the People of the Talmud as a special kind of public and private alien corpus, effecting in turn Jewish common sense understanding of the Christian whose official hostility was made so ­obvious. This well-known process deserves another brief telling here. It included popular energy and drives for converting Jews, or for constraining, containing, and killing or removing unconverted Jews.3 The process involved a long period of religious transformation that also brought a heightened sense of paranoia about Christian futures.4 In an era of significant material challenges, hot and cold wars 2 Jeremy Cohen, Christ Killers: The Jews and the Passion from the Bible to the Big Screen (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007)167–182. In 1962 Henry Nash Smith called special attention to Mark Twain’s awareness of Hall’s kind of observation: “when [in 1876–1884] he paraphrases … [Huck Finn’s] admonitions of his conscience they are incorporated into his own discourse. Thus although Hank is obviously remembering the bits of theological jargon from sermons justifying slavery, they have become part of his vocabulary.” Smith, “A Sound Heart and a Deformed Conscience,” in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, ed. Sculley Bradley et al., 2nd ed. (New York: Norton, 1977), 370–371. Smith could have written similar lines about Sholem Aleichem’s famous character “Tevye the Dairy Man” (1894), a creation made world famous in the 1960s by the musical Fiddler on the Roof. 3 Jeremy Cohen, The Friars and the Jews: The Evolution of Medieval Anti-Judaism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982), 89, 60–195, and passim; Langmuir, History, Religion, and Antisemitism, 295–297; Tyndale, Works, 679/2 quoted in OED, 3230. 4 David Berger, “From Crusades to Blood Libels to Expulsions: Some New Approaches to Medieval Antisemitism,” Second Annual Lecture of the Victor J. Selmanowitz chair of Jewish

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with Moslems, fear of lepers, and erupting groups of Christian heretics, profound spiritual changes enveloped rapidly growing numbers of Latin Christians, elites as well as popular masses. European Christian pioneers of the second millennium forged the links that bound the Jew and Talmud to their expectations about a complex transition period preceding the coming Apocalypse, in which they believed. One development led to the reorientation of perspectives about Jesus himself: David Berger, an important scholar of these events, has argued that worshipers now thought of him “not simply symbolically as a distant all-powerful divinity, but also historically as a poor suffering human on the cross.”5 This Jesus they integrated as part of their Christian religious identity here and now Jews from the deep Biblical past became one with the here and now Jews, who were being accused of being post Biblical Talmudic Jews.6 As such, they became a constructed changing objective reality which Christians harbored within their individual and collective mentalities: in other words unconverted Jews were enemies because even their unconverted passive presence threatened to annihilate private and public Christian identity.7 In practice, that perspective meant all Christian governments concerned with maintaining public peace were obliged at some level to suspect Jews as potential threats, conspiring to harm the body politic from within and without, within by alliances with lepers, heretics, and Satan, and without by alliances with infidel Muslims. In addition, at a time of widespread commonsense convictions about the Jew as Christ killer whose murder of Jesus had to be avenged in real time; so Christian pioneers mobilized four powerful fantasies among late medieval followers. “Jews ritually crucified Christian children, used human blood and flesh in their rituals, tortured the wafers of the Eucharist,” and, after 1350, “sought to destroy Christendom by sowing the Black Death. Jews, the People of the Talmud, had become a great menace to Christendom, hidden and visible, private and public. Centuries later, England’s William Tyndale put the point bluntly: “Jews had set up a boke of their Talmud to destroy the sense of scripture.” From the start of the American story about Jews as a People of the Talmud, the fusion of slavery with notions about “Negritude” had been in play. It had begun in the very fringe of the western Atlantic basin, where Sephardic and History Department, Touro College, March 6, 1997 (New York: Touro College, 1997), 1–29; Langmuir, History, Religion, and Antisemitism, 289–300. 5 Berger, “From Crusades to Blood Libels to Expulsions,” 1–29; Langmuir, History, Religion, and Antisemitism, 301–302. 6 Ibid. 7 Ibid.

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Ashkenazi Jewish merchants, sojourned, and settled. They had shared important memories. These people of the Talmud had been part of corporate p­ opulations living on the eastern fringes of the Atlantic Basin. Among them, influences of gender, language, and religious traditions manifested, between and within each of these groups. However, at least during the century or so after the 1740s, these influences did not preclude in mainland English colonies Sephardi and Ashkenazi cooperation and amalgamation. It occurred on institutional and administrative levels, and in time in marriage patterns. Yet, by the last third of the e­ ighteenth century, America’s few Jews remained comparable to European premodern Talmudic Jews. They would explain their beginnings and transitions to a post Diaspora home, albeit this time in a New World, to a new Yerushalaiim D’mata (Earthly Jerusalem) coexisting with Yerushalaiim D’Mala (Heavenly Jerusalem). They related events of their republican journey as a parochial story entwined with the emerging general appreciation of a God directed American exceptionalism.8 But the white racist common sense vocabulary in the world in which Jews lived routinely brought “­humiliation … and bestialization” to the enslaved, savagely degrading Africans and their ­children.9 This particular experience pointed to the fact that in the last millennium in Euro-America, no “other ethnic groups have suffered such prolonged persecution, oppression, and dehumanization as have blacks and Jews. Whether defined as the slayers of Christ, the cursed children of Ham, vermin to be exterminated, or ape like or apelike savages, Jews and sub-Saharan Africans were for Europeans the archetypal outsiders—outsiders who were frequently likened to pigs and maggots.” David Brion Davis, America’s premier historian of American slavery and its roots, also reminded that in medieval times the meanings of “Talmudic,” “Jew,” and “Blackness” usually related to “Devil” or “evil” or both. “Starting in 1290 many states and regions in Europe expelled Jews. Late Elizabethan England used a similar practice on black Africans. In 1777, France tried to prevent all blacks from entering the country; beginning in the 1790s, the young United States was more successful in keeping out free blacks.” Even a hundred years later, when post Talmudic Jewry had become a significant presence in Euro-America, “[d]espite dramatic differences between black and Jewish occupations and ways of life, the Eastern European pogroms of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century bore a haunting resemblance 8 Gerd Korman, “Jews as a Changing People of the Talmud”: 2001, passim; Eli Faber, A Time of Plenty: The First Migration 1654–1829 (Baltimore: John Hopkins, 1992), 1–3, 127–134. 9 Davis, “Jews and Blacks in America,” New York Reviewof Books, Deccember 2, 1999.

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to the roughly contemporary anti-black race riots, ­lynchings, and autos-da-fé in the United States.”10 For centuries an important popular belief had it that each people could lay claim to “promised lands,” a concept endowed with a kind of messianic truth. Perhaps because the founding white English Puritan people settling America’s New England had convinced themselves that they were settling down in God’s “Land of Promise,” or in God’s “Promised Land,” these beliefs veined other incoming peoples who had all sorts of connections to the Hebrews’ Bible or the Christians’ New Testament. For all their inconsistencies and variations, often depending on time, place, and their favorite fear of the moment, promised lands would embed themselves into the common sense of America’s flexible forms of ethnic hierarchy and citizenship11 The public squares of political cultures glorified individualism but retained different arrangements of those collective folk beliefs. For example, during Reconstruction, African Americans had become part of a powerful competitive striving that used rhetorical language for mass mobilizations filled with symbols of race, religion, peoplehood, and nationalism, all encapsulated by a “promised land” in song and rhyme and speech. In American ethnicking, promised land never stopped participating, if not in one quarter of sectarian rivals, then surely in another as those who worried about the well-being of their people always kept an ear cocked for threatening sounds from the public square. But more often, certainly among leaders, ethnicking involved comparisons with other people. Among African American leaders, Irish struggles with England had been a source of inspiration for many decades. So had Jews, as a collective. They were useful because those leaders were convinced that blacks had to “become a people worthy of recognition.” Davis writes: “From the pre-Civil War decades to the 1890s, when few American blacks had ever seen a Jew, such diverse figures as Douglass, [Martin R.] Delaney, Washington, and [Edward Wilmot] Blyden not only drew frequent parallels between the persecution of modern Jews and blacks but urged fellow blacks to emulate the Jews’ unity, pride, and quest for knowledge and achievement.”12 Ironically this was a striving, often encouraged by non-Jews laying out for Jews the pathways leading from the Talmudic prisons of the Middle Ages to the lighted gardens of enlightenment, a striving that growing numbers of Jews sought to internalize in the Christian West of the nineteenth and early twentieth century. 10 Davis, “Jews and Blacks in America,” New York Review of Books, December 2, 1999 11 For Africa Americans Hahn has called this mix “Garveyism.” 12 Davis, Age of Emancipation, 136.

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To African Americans, especially to their leaders, who usually ignored the realities of impoverished Jewish life, economic and financial achievements by relatively few Jews best demonstrated how a “despised” immigrant group, starting with the peddler’s cart, was able to acquire and then use wealth to blunt and overcome acts of discrimination: Jews purchased the property denied to them as renters. On the other hand, that pedagogical use of Jews went hand in hand with traditional anti-immigrant stereotypes and slogans. Two statements about Jews at the turn of the century were comprehensive: “By turning their attention entirely to trade they have been enabled to command respect by reason of their money solely … [and yet blacks are] the real producers of the wealth of the country.” In the South in particular, Blacks had a real advantage over “the Hebrews,” a people that does not produce anything, and instead strives “to control the business of the entire country.” In an appeal to Northern blacks to come South for economic opportunities, the other statement also used the stereotype of Jewish economic control: ”Come down and buy and sell to our people … and you will make money and have it, instead of the Hebrew having it as he has it now.13 It is surely significant that Booker T. Washington also shared and spread these stereotypes and the apparent ignorance of the Jewish condition; but he knew how to put a finer point on them. As had the Jew, the African American would also achieve recognition from the white man when he had “entwined himself about America in a business and industrial sense.”In Washington’s eyes, Jews had somehow become financiers, merchants, musicians, scholars, and statesmen of the entire world. To a Christian student of the Hebrew Bible, the conclusion was obvious: “If out of such material, God could create such people, what may he not do with our Southern Blacks.” In 1906, he asked the visiting H. G. Wells from England the ultimate question: “Why can we not also become a peculiar people like the Jews.14 In their ethnicking, there was a tenuous affinity between Jews and African Americans. Gospel accounts about Jesus had a profound influence on the 13 Litwack, Trouble in Mind (New York: Vintage, 1998), 356. Max Weber held related thoughts: kosher laws required “to this day in the United States [1919–1920] the concentration of orthodox Jews in the great cities (while the reform [sic] Jews were able to pursue the very profitable business of usuriously exploiting the rural Negro)”, in Hans Gerth, ed. and transl., Ancient Judaism (Glen Coe, IL: Free Press, 1952), 253. 14 The Future in America: A Search After Realities (New York: Chapman & Hall, 1906), 198. Wells, with streaks of English antisemitism, thought it a mistake: American Blacks deserved better. See also Leonard Dinnerstein, “The Historiography of American Antisemitism,” in Dinnerstein, Uneasy at Home: Antisemitim and the American Jewish Experience (New York: Columbia: 1987), 257–267.

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a­ ttraction of Biblical liberation texts and the hero figures of Moses and Joshua.15 Persuasive preachers and other leaders used stories about shared pasts of servitude, segregation, and persecutions. And some teachers were aware of shared connections in deep pasts, legacies of collective identities, in pre-Christian rules and rituals in African societies, as well as Jewish ones in pre-nineteenthcentury Central Europe. These rules and rituals treated the sacred and the profane as an indivisible whole, one that could help to mobilize individuals as part of a race, a people, a nationality, often what we might identify today as an ethnic society or group. These deep pasts can be associated with the world portrayed in 1864, in Fustel de Coulanges’ Ancient City.16 This was a classical world in which “religion constituted … the family, established marriage and paternal authority, fixed the order of relationships, and concentrated the right of property, and right of inheritance.” This same religion, “after having extended the family, formed still a larger association … and reigned in that as it has reigned in the family.” From it, “came all the institutions, as well as all the private law, of the ancients.” It was, “from this that the city received all its principles, its rules, its usages, and its magistrates.” But these kinds of attractions are misleading for appreciating the complexities of Washington’s invocation of “peculiar people.” He was really asking Wells about the Jews’ “Choseness” and their “Promised Land.” He was asking about Jewish religious sources of agency, as they were entangled with biocultural convictions in an American regime of ethnic hierarchy. Washington had rejected a white monopoly claim to an American promised land. Instead, he recognized other black and white peoplehoods that held onto a complex, second promised-land syndrome. Such groups had done so in the face of a long-lived insistence within America’s civil society, namely that the republic’s citizenship in the long term precluded a competing syndrome, an attraction to another land or people, or even in some decades to a religion different than Christian. However, in America’s one-hundred-year-old regime, just such a promised land syndrome had been ever present. Deeply rooted entanglements with biblical texts provided ambiguous inspirations and bonds of devotion, often expressed as a sacred, self-evident truth capable of generating the kind of debris ethnicking thrived on.

15 Davis, “Jews and Blacks in America,” New York Review of Books, December 2, 1999. 16 Fustel de Coulanges, The Ancient City: A Study on the Religion, Laws, Instiution of Greece and Rome (New York, [1864]), 13; Max Weber, Ancient Judaism, passim; and for one important meaning of “collective identity” see Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York, 1973), 259–277.

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One source of influence, about the promise of a special future in the New World, derived from conflicted New Testament readings of the Hebrew Bible; for the Biblical promise was made to fit different aspirations in the Euro-American world. On this side of the Atlantic, in an Englishman’s imagination, the pattern began in early settlement days in New England. Minister John Cotton, B. D. from Cambridge, rich in the history of Europe and his own England, saw his fellow “Puritans” as God’s new chosen people. Christian theological constructions had long before determined that God’s promise to the Hebrews was transferable to Christians living outside of the Holy Land. The question for Reverend Cotton was: did lands first inhabited by Native Americans of his “New World” in fact also constitute a Land of Promise for Christians like himself, people we now call Puritans? Cotton gave an answer in his sermon entitled “Gods promise to his plantation, 2 Sam.7.10.” With concepts derived from readings of the Hebrew text prefiguring the “promise” inherent in the biography of Jesus in heaven and on earth, Cotton turned to the second book of Samuel. There, from the tribal story of God’s chosen Hebrews and the land they conquered, he was inspired to find the appropriate typology for demonstrating the validity of his basic proposition: New England was a “Land of Promise.” The antecedents important to Cotton are revealing in appreciating the significance of that “promise” for all sorts of identity-conscious groups. In England during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, large numbers of people celebrated a new special national Protestant election in wars against Spanish-led Catholicism; many a parishioner believed that the island nation carried the divine mantle. On this side of the Atlantic, in the seventeenth century, the apparent American wilderness provided special opportunities for typology constructions based on the experiences of the ancient Israelites, an opportunity obvious to Cotton and many of his contemporaries. In fact, even at the time Cotton wrote his sermon about his “Land of Promise,” God’s mantle over the land in 2nd Samuel had acquired the designation, “Promised Land.” This nomenclature came from another line of antecedents that Cotton, however, did not use. When Martin Luther translated the Hebrew Bible, his understanding of the text made him turn to “Verheissenes Land,” a phrase in the German language implicated in the kind of land transaction that the Hebrew biblical passages invariably involved when God speaks of the future lands his Hebrew people would inherit. Luther’s phrase can translate into variants of “promised land.” When around the same time, William Tyndale translated a passage in Deuteronomy, writes David Daniell, his distinguished biographer, “Tyndale’s ‘the land which he promised them’ … [had not occurred] in English before him. … The Vulgate has ‘in terram, quam pollicitus est eis.’ Whether

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Tyndale’s translation reached America apart from the Geneva Bible is so far unknown, but in this case it doesn’t matter because Geneva simply reprints Tyndale.”17 Before the sixteenth century ended, the expression “Promised Land” had also found its way into English literature by way of individuals influenced by combinations of renaissance republicanism and long-held convictions about humanity’s utopian futures lying in the unknown West.18 Some writers, eager to modernize the English language, turned to translation of the Hebrew Psalms as a vehicle for that purpose. One of their leaders was Sir Philip Sidney. This influential Elizabethan writer, who died in the midst of his Psalm translation project, had a sister, Mary Sidney, the Duchess of Pembroke, who decided to complete the task. And before the century turned, it was she who demonstrated how easily the “Land of Promise,” or Tyndale’s version, could turn into the “promist land.” She did it while writing one of her translations. First she wrote “Land of Promise,” then she changed her mind and saved the record. After crossing out, “Land of Promise,” she wrote instead, “promist land.” Others may well have made similar changes for reasons of style. By the time Cotton was using “Land of Promise,” the great Milton had integrated “Promised Land” into his “Paradise Lost.”19 In fact, among the elites in the Empire, both expressions circulated, thus 17 David Daniell to Gerd Korman 13 April 1994. 18 Loren Baritz, “The Idea of the West,” American Historical Review 66 (April, 1961), 618–640. 19 On the complicated subjects of “Land of Promise” and “Promised Land” see the following: Garrett Mattingly, The Armada(Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1959), passim; John Cotton, B. D. “Gods promise to his plantation, 2 Sam. 7.10” in sermon[Anr.ed] W. Jone, F. J. Bellamy, 1634 in Microfilm; “The Epistle of St. Paul Unto the Hebrews” in David Daniell, ed., Tyndales New Testament, Tr. from the Greek by William Tyndale in 1534, New Haven: Yale, 1988); Daniell to Gerd Korman, 13 April 1994 where Daniell says about Deuteronomy IX/28: “Tyndale’s ‘the land which he promised them’ did not occur in English before him. … The Vulgate has ‘in terram, quam pollicitus est eis.’ Whether Tyndale’s translation reached America apart from the Geneva Bible is so far unknown, but in this case it doesn’t matter because Geneva simply reprints Tyndale”; Gabriel Josipovici, “The Epistle to the Hebrews and the Catholic Epistles” in Robert Alter and Frank Kermode, eds., The Literary Guide to the Bible (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987), 503–522; Rivkah Zim, English Metrical Psalms: Poetry and Praise and Prayer, 1535–1601 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), passim; The Psalms of Sir Philip Sidney and the Countess of Pembroke, (edited with an introduction by J. C. A. Rathmell (New York: Doubleday, 1963) [1823], Psalm 44, p. 88. Robert L.Wilken, The Land Called Holy: Palestine in Christian History and Thought (New Haven; Yale, 1992), 53; John Milton, Paradise Lost, Book 12 Line 172 and Paradise Regained, Book 3, Line 531 (New York:Columbia University, 1936); Moshe Weidenfeld, The Promise of the Land, Inheritance of the Land of Canaan By the Israelites (Berkeley: Berkeley University Press, 1993), passim; Sydney E. Ahlstrom, A Religious History of the American People (New Haven: Yale, 1972), 135–384; Savran Bercovitch, Puritan Origins of the American Self (New Haven: Yale, 1975),

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in time becoming available to any clergy or laity, as well as to any nonbeliever. In the years of the Revolution, many linked themselves and the new republic with these phrases and their sentiments anchored in religious texts. Obviously, these words could be read to mean the same thing, but anyone who took the Ur texts seriously could see profound differences. As a student of New England’s fragmenting “Puritan” tradition, the eminent Perry Miller offered helpful insights for comprehending complexities of this sort. In Errand into the Wilderness, Miller did not employ the “Land of Promise” or the “Promised Land” in his distinction between the “theocratic and psychological” engagements with New England. But those New Testament-driven metaphors also catch his meanings if, in an age of commercial capitalism’s dramatic geographic expansion, one allows for the subtle difference between them. The “Land of Promise” held out the possibility of righteous living and material bounty, if! inhabitants, living as they were on God’s land, conducted themselves according to God’s requirements. “Land of Promise” also held out the threat of punishment and exile if on that land God’s laws were not obeyed. This meaning is akin to Miller’s theocratic engagement, a fixed condition, resulting from John Winthrop’s reading of the errand by light of his Scripture and generating the Jeremiads about all sorts of disasters in the decades after initial settlement. That theocratic engagement, with its potential for living with a hovering “Angry God,” was different from the psychological one, which engaged the settlers with daily opportunities among the next-door strangers and neighbors of the American experience. It held out the promise of immediate and continuous success in land acquisition, merchant enterprise, and illicit fornication. This psychological engagement perceived New England not as a Land of Promise if, but as a Promised Land—a land that, by virtue of being settled, was exploited and developed under the wing of a permissive God and would reward those who joined the venture.20 In time, English settlers and their Anglo-American descendants associated themselves with the new phrase. It was a way to celebrate material achievement, exceptional spiritual election, and thus a justification by which they could continue to conquer and rule the Indian, as a primitive alien in his own land, and enslave African Americans. Together with other groups of white Christians who joined the American colonial and revolutionary enterprise, they identified with what appeared to them passim; Loren Baritz, City on a Hill; A History of Ideas and Myths in America (New York: John Wiley &Sons, 1964), 3–44. See also the following dictionaries for the concept “promise”: Robert Young, Analytical Concordance To the Bible (New York: Funk/Wagnalls, 1893); A ­Dictionary to the Bible, James Hastings, et al., eds. (New York: Scribner, 1903). 20 Perry Miller, Errand into the Wilderness (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1956), passim

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to be a God-directed freshness, making their individual and collective lives in the United States as special as their New World. It was not difficult for different groups of Pietists, Lutherans, or Catholics to make this kind of association. The Jews did it, too; but as an “Am Ha Torah,” a “People of the Talmud,” that had relied on the original Hebrew Bible, which did not contain such Christian concepts of expressions as “promise.” “Am Ha Torah”21 evoked a time, in Islamic and Christian societies, when almost all Jews had accepted the Talmud and the Halakha derived from it. Together, the two parts served as the closed canon of their lives.22 From the perspective of the colonial and revolutionary generations, Jews for hundreds of years had made that canon, which rested on the Hebrew Bible, the exclusive source for their truth and knowledge and for the rules conducting daily life. With these Jews had remained the persecuted collective with its millennial-old Christian designations. They participated in American promised land enthusiasm on their terms, a second one, in fact doing for themselves what other ethnic groups did for collective reasons of their own, thus early on contributing to the shaping of their complex American peoplehood identities. In the young republic, in 1806, Moses Myers of Charleston, South Carolina, was “so proud of being a sojourner in this promised land.” In an address to his town’s Hebrew Orphan Society, he invoked New Jerusalem for his kinfolk. From the time of the Declaration of Independence, “the Almighty gave to the Jews what had long been promised to them, namely a second Jerusalem.”23 This hopeful vision was as idealized as all other expressions of the Promised Land, often lending itself as a trope for a society full of symbiotic relationships. 21 In his battle with Karaites, R. Saadia Gaon (882–942) used “Am Ha Torah” to designate ­R abbanite Jewry, which was making the Talmudic corpus its governing source. R. Saadia “strongly held that the Jews were a people only through the Torah and hence the leadership should be vested in a man who had the authority to interpret the Torah [omtehnu ehnena omah ki am betorahtehnu].” Solomon Zeitlin, “Saadia Gaon–Champion for Jewish Unity Under Religious Leadership,” in Saadia Studies (Philadelphia: Dropsie College, 1943), 397. See also Henry Malter, Saadia Gaon His life and Works (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1942), 157; H. H. Ben-Sasson, et al., A History of the Jewish People (Cambridge, MA: ­Harvard University Press, 1976), 443–461; Moshe Halbertal, People of the Book: Canon, Meaning, and Authority (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), 9, 16–17, 58; Norman A. Stillman, The Jews of Arab Lands: A History and Source Book (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1979), xv, 31–39, 47–48, 52, 60–61, 189–191, 198–199, 208–210, 269; Jacob Katz, “Post-Zoharic Relations Between Halakhah and Kabbalah,” and Isadore Twersky, “Talmudists, Philosophers, Kabbalists: The Quest for Spirituality in the Sixteenth Century,” in Bernard Dov Cooperman, ed., Jewish Thought in the Sixteenth Century, Texts and Studies/ Harvard University Center for Jewish Studies (Cambridge, MA: ­Harvard University Press, 1983), 2:283–307, 431–457. 22 Halbertal, People of the Book, passim 23 Eli Faber, A Time of Plenty, 127–134.

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In fact, even as growing numbers of Jews obtained their history and knowledge from trusted secular sources, the Jews’ peoplehood sustained, and was sustained by, the long reach of the Talmudic canon, ever present, comingled, modified, and modernized. One of the treasured communal practices, the act of ritual circumcision, is revealing. In general terms, the Hebrew Bible invokes it a number of times, enunciating the requirement for an individual’s entry into the holy covenant between God and His Chosen People. In comparison to what to do, the how to do it instructions, however, are in the Talmud;24 but not only there. Rabbi Moshe David Tendler, a biologist who held the Rabbi Isaac and Bella Tendler Chair in Jewish Medical Ethics at Yeshiva University in New York City, explained: “The Talmud describes the process of removing the baby boy’s foreskin in three steps: The foreskin is cut, the mucous layer underneath is removed with a flick of the mohel’s fingernail and then the blood is removed through oral suction. … That is metzitzah b’peh. … In some parts of the Orthodox world—mainly but not exclusively among Chasidim—metzitzah b’peh is still practiced.” Other Orthodox Jews, however, consider metzitzah unacceptable; for more liberal Jews, it’s unthinkable. “There is a religious requirement to perform a brit milah painlessly, which means as quickly and as antiseptically as possible,” Tendler said. “This is a requirement of Jewish law, not of medicine only.” Metzitzah is strictly medieval medicine, and it should have given way to modern medicine. “We have a tradition that says that when it comes to medicine, you don’t look into the Talmud. You seek the most competent physician to tell you what to do.’” Today, among individuals who declare themselves Jews, religious or secular ethnic, ritual circumcision, that ancient tribal custom remains differentiated in practice but is as commonplace as many other institutionalized ethnic life cycles, rituals, or customs encrusted by all sorts of practice: baptism, communion, extreme unction; an Irish or Polish Wake, a band in African American funeral processions, or the saying of Kaddish in a Jewish setting. In colonial America, the history and context were different. Yet here is a compatible example from experiences in the “New World,” in studies of the records of a Christian missionary to the Delaware Indians. In 1772, this missionary tried to complete a business transaction with Joseph Simon, an observing Jewish merchant in Lancaster, Pennsylvania: “[Simon] said, ’Gentlemen, today is my Sabbath, & I do not do business in it; if you please to call tomorrow, I will wait

24 American Judaism, 25–26; Jerusalem Post, February 9, 2005. For references to earlier discussions of this issue by public health officials, starting in mid-nineteenth-century Paris, see Peter Baldwin, Contagion and the State in Europe 1830–1930 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 451–452.

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on you.’” They apologized and said they would return on Monday, because they observed Sunday the way he observed the Sabbath. “He replied, you are on a journey, & it may be inconvenient for you to wait. He went to call his neighbor, Dr. Boyd, & took from his Desk a bag, laid it on the table & presented the order to the Dr. The Doctor counted out the money and we gave a receipt. The Jew sat looking on to see that all was rightly transacted, but said nothing, & thus quieted his conscience against the rebuke of a violation of his Sabbath.” Clearly the missionary thought that Simon, “might well have done the business himself.”25 Simon, no matter where he was, conducted himself according to his understanding of the rules and interpretations of Talmudic and Halakhic practice. He knew what it was. But the Christian missionary probably would have attributed Simon’s conduct to one of two Christian sources: the biblical ordinances of his Old Testament, or, what he would have claimed, to the corrupted versions of them imposed on ignorant Jews by obstinate rabbis, or “Rabbins”—these, he would have “known,” were steeped in harmful anti-Christian medieval traditions and often seen at the time as major obstacles to converting Jews to Christianity.26 As did other migrants and settlers with their folk religion, so too did these traveling, sojourning, and settling Jews in colonial centuries engage their tasks often on an ad-hoc basis, with memories of customs and practices usually anchored in a dynamic religious culture. Based on experience, these, when perceived by Jews as well as non-Jews as some kind of cohesive whole, especially for purposes of group identification, could provide a sense of agency, an arsenal of criteria, tactics, and strategies. Kitsch it may have been, but it was sacred, as binding for those who believed and practiced as were canonical texts for those recognized as Judaism’s ­ orking on the Sabbath learned elites.27 In play was the Biblical ordinance against w that was the basis on which rabbis in the Talmudic Canon had worked through 25 Jonathan Sarna, a distinguished American Jewish historian, wrote about this eighteenthcentury event in an Atlantic outpost: “what made Jewish life among Gentiles so difficult was that every solution would likely have been wrong; often Jewish law and American life simply proved irreconcilable” (American Judaism, 24), but see all of 22–28; Faber, Time for Planting, 91; Korman, “Jews as A Changing People of the Talmud,” passim. 26 The literature on this subject is huge but see Peter Schaefer, Jesus and the Talmud (2007) and Jeremy Cohen, Christ Killers (2007) are among the most recent examples examining the ancient historical context. They demonstrate how and why rabbinic sages may have fought Jesus and early Christians because they saw them as heretics peddling dangerous potions and other “magic” conundrums. 27 In many periods of American history, alone and together, these were the enabling munitions for different groups deciding upon whose terms to encounter the pressures and tensions inherent in complex processes of acculturation. That is why, for example, German Lutheran or Catholic leaders in the nineteenth century often saw in public schools only “government schools,” that is, a threat to be fought with parochial education.

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different categories to determine the meaning of “work” and the relative importance of an injunction. For example, was it Biblical or was it Rabbinic, that is, Talmudic? In any event, it was common in this Talmudic canonical literature to provide exceptions often reflecting an appreciation of the practical considerations in situations of the kind faced by Simon or any other believer, then or later in the nineteenth or twentieth century. The purpose of such exceptions was to help an individual do as little damage to the Shabbat as was possible in each event.28 After the civil war, black citizens who as a people were bound to become powerful agents of change had their influence suppressed and channeled by the victors’ federal military decisions and the Supreme Court’s protection of segregating states. Frederick Douglass, and other activists among the new citizens, continued to take for granted the treasures of the promised land: republican individualism, civil rights, and civil liberties. And the new African American citizens also continued to commit themselves to dynamic and distinctive ideals of peoplehood, an inherent part of their understanding of the promised land in America. They did this within a caged society, with their unique racial, religious, and political experiences and with shared memories of enslavement, military service, and emancipation; and para-military engagements during Reconstruction. Anglo-Americans with their promised land beliefs ruled; the others, with theirs, mostly supported, acquiesced, or endured the regimes of hierarchy and citizenship that sustained each other. Significant demographic changes followed. First the stoppage of Chinese migration, followed by WWI, that all but ended the mass arrival of Europeans; and then in the 1920s, by America’s general quota restriction that for decades would sort by racial preferences embedded in American law. This last policy, with its impact on the size of the workforce available to a booming industrial economy in the Northeast, invigorated the ongoing great African American internal migration from the South. These major changes in the demography of a modernizing state helped intensify concerns about governing an ever expanding turbulent and diversified metropolitan population. Public health officials worried about the poor, especially about the alien. Before the war they had already seen each—Chinese in San Francisco, Jews and Italians in New York—as a potential carrier of threats to the nation’s well-being. At the same time, explicit civic coercion, including the use of militant racism and antisemitism, brought eruptions in the tensions 28 Faber, Time for Planting, 91. Faber says it was a “money order.” The UK only had money orders from 1792 and the US from the 1830s. Faber’s reference is probably to some kind of private “money order.”

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between sectarian devotees and enthusiastic republican idealists, as abroad, in crumbling old empires, revolutionary fervor intensified. In the meantime, there occurred violent explosions against African Americans; and elsewhere in the nation came very different kinds of mobilizations as some, in the case of suffragettes, labor unions, and socialists, also brought street violence in fights to reform their American promised land. Most events passed peacefully, some in support of the Balfour Declaration, of anti-Zionists against it, of anticlerical Yiddishists, of Garvey’s campaigns, and support rallies for Bolsheviks who, like Zionists and Garveyites, sometimes had a second promised land of their own, one that usually was not in competition with devotion to the republic. In the early twentieth century, these facts on the ground bespoke a permanent American condition of peoplehood life even as the public square remained inhospitable. Legal segregation of African Americans ruled in the South and most everywhere informally in the larger nation. Employers-as-citizens lived with segregated public employment which sometimes changed: the military, public education, and most other government occupations; in the US Post Office system, progressive southern Democrat President Woodrow Wilson brought segregation during his first administration. In most of the country, in an unregulated labor market and open shop, employers with their formal and informal ethnic labor contractors enforced who on a company payroll belonged to the “throwaway” working people: for example, “Niggers,” “Chinks,” “Micks,” “Wops,” “Polacks,” “Kikes,” and “Bohunks” if, as in the case of women, they employed them at all, even as temporary workers. These last constituted the largest portion of the urban industrial work force. Fortunately, in the extraordinarily expansive national capitalist economy, many, professionals or artisans, or laborers, often found more permanent work among their own people, usually in some sort of house work, small shop establishment, in urban retail employment, or in the case of doctors and lawyers, in their own clinics, hospitals, and law firms.29 This “promised land America” was enthusiastically justified and sanctified by the bipartisan politics of sitting presidents and wannabees. For example, in 1909, in his inaugural address, Republican President Howard Taft had declared “Reconstruction” a failure, which, fortunately, he said, the Southern ­segregationists had corrected by protecting themselves against “the

29 Gordon, Rise and Fall of American Growth, 1–318; Jerold Auerbach, Unequal Justice: ­Lawyers and Social Change in Modern America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976), p­ assim; ­Sorin, A Time for Building, 22, 24, 76–78, 106, 109, 138, 139, 154–155, 157, 109–169; ­Feingold, A Time for Searching, 126–30, 137–39, 144–45, 150–152, 125–154.

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domination of an ignorant, irresponsible element. … The danger of the control of an ignorant electorate has therefore passed.” Taft also praised America’s total immigration restrictions of Asians because, as the former governor general of the Philippines, he knew the republic could not absorb their alien culture. A few years later, Woodrow Wilson and his Democrats acted as if they supported or endorsed the southern region’s Democratic legal segregation practices. And in the presidential campaign of 1920, it was the Democratic candidate for vice president, Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Like his family and circle of friends, and for that matter like the nation’s peoplehood voters, he was also convinced that the republic’s citizenry had to protect itself against blood mixing of the wrong kind.30 A few months later, another Republican president, Warren G. Harding, provided historians with an instructive verbal portrait about ethnicking among his fellow citizens. Harding worried out loud about white and black Southerners impacting the Midwest and Northeast. The accelerating internal migration, “has brought the question of race closer to the North and West, and I believe it has served to modify somewhat the views of those sections on the question. It has made the South realize its industrial dependence on the labor of the black man and has made the North realize the difficulties of the community in which two greatly differing races are brought to live side by side.” He knew that there was an, “absolute divergence in things social and racial. … Men of both races may well stand uncompromisingly against every suggestion of social equality. It would be helpful to have that word ‘equality’ eliminated from this consideration; to have it accepted on both sides that this is not a question of social equality, but a question of recognizing a fundamental, eternal, and inescapable difference.” African Americans in particular, but all citizens needed to appreciate his understanding about the republic’s ethnic hierarchy: “I would inculcate in … [the colored race] the wish to improve itself as a distinct race, with a heredity, a set of traditions, an array of aspirations all its own. Out of such racial ambitions and pride will come natural segregation, without narrowing any rights, such as are proceeding in both local and urban communities now in Southern States, satisfying natural inclinations and adding notably to happiness and contentment.” The president of the United States had read the face of God. “The Providence … endowed men with widely unequal capacities.”31 30 Rafael Medoff, Roosevelt and the Holocaust: Breach of Faith (Washington DC: Wyman ­Institute, 2013), 4–6. 31 New York Times, 26 October 1921.

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Americans who shared these convictions knew only too well that many, all but locked up in in the hierarchies of Harding’s idealized promised land, read the face of God differently. The street demonstrations, separately or together, often mobilized large numbers of enthusiasts who transvalued older fragments of their collective identities.32 Vicious bigotry and racial persecutions, past and present were associated with entire peoples whose fragmented collective memories from antiquity connected Jews and Africans to different non-Christian religious practices. Zionism, yiddishkeit, and garveyism in particular gave voice to the modern secular Jewish and black expressions of rooted autonomy movements manifesting those connections. Fragments and debris from traditions of promised lands mingled with sporadic emigration campaigns and yearnings for self-governments, somewhere but preferably for Jews, usually in Palestine, and, for African Americans, in Santo Domingo, in Africa, but also in the United States itself. At the end of the nineteenth century, African American Edward Wilmot Blyden had made these connections in theological terms: Allied by divine guidance blacks and Jews in, “‘a history almost identical of sorrow and oppression’ were destined to become the spiritual leaders of the world.’” So, too, had Viennese Jew Theodore Herzl made those connections in his secular utopian novel of 1902, Alt Neuland: “Only a Jew could understand what blacks had endured or wish, having ‘lived to see the restoration of the Jews to pave the way for the restoration of the Negroes.’” Blyden made a similar secular connection: “There are few who, if the conditions were favourable, would not be glad to see … [ Jews] return in a body and take their place in the land of their fathers as a great—a leading—secular power.”33 Still, while these enthusiasms became prominent and expressed themselves in distinct mass organizations, as did reactions to the Kishinev Pogroms in 1903 and 1905, the majority of African and Jewish American citizens, in particular, perpetuated older fragments of beliefs and ideals.34 Marcus Garvey in the

32 Jonathan Frankel, Prophets and Politics: Socialism, Nationalism, and the Russian Jews, 1862–1917 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981), passim; Tony Michels, A Fire in Their Hearts: Yiddish Socialist in New York (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), passim; Collin Grant, Negro With a Hat: The Rise and Fall of Marcus Garvey (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), passim; Steve Zipperstein, Pogrom: Kishineve and the Tilt of History (New York: Liveright, 2018), 185–205. 33 David B. Davis, “Jews and Blacks in America,” New York Review of Books, December, 1999. See also Zipperstein, Pogrom, op. cit., where he discusses some African American responses to the Kishinev event in 1903. 34 Richard Wright recalls that Garveyites gave him “a glimpse of the political strength of the American Negro.” Black Boy: The Outsider (New York: The Library of America, 1991), 272–273. Henry Louis Gates noted the long reach of that past. “From Frederick Douglass

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p­ ostwar United States provided a good example in speeches that continued to echo an old African American practice of invoking the struggles of Zionists and Irish rebels for national independence. But there were other fragments as well. In 1921, he said: for centuries, in Europe, Jews had been a despised race, “buffeted worse than the Southern Negro today. … It was a disgrace to be a Jew,” even in the United States. “What did the Jew do?” In his answer, Garvey jumbled new and older well-known bits and pieces of sacred kitsch: The small number of Jews devised a master plan with which to conquer the financial world. Jews had brought on WWI probably as a profit-making venture. When promised possession of Palestine, they stopped the war. “The Jew has gone back to Palestine and the Jew it is that has the world in the palm of his hand.”35 However, older republican fragments continued to be associated with EuroAmerican traditions of revolution and enlightenment. Most African Americans mingled theirs with beliefs in Christian individual salvation. In the case of most Jews, those traditions mingled with post Talmudic collective beliefs often at odds with militant forms of Jewish nationalism or radicalism or both. An influential Jewish labor leader, a politician and manager of the daily Yiddish language Forward, expressed the durability of that ethnic regime succinctly. But not in Harding’s voice: Baruch Charney Vladeck, a class-conscious socialist, was part of the growing chorus pushing against the envelope of that American regime. In the midst of the depression, he told an International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union convention about his world’s “pecking order” in promised land America. We Jews, “are only one step higher than you. You are ‘niggers,’ and we are ‘kikes’ and [Luigi] Antonini,” the senior Italian union official and vice president of the ILG, “is a ‘wop.’ In the eyes of the world that is blind and deaf and dumb they have us graded.”36 The fragments persisted in the years of depression and war. They mingled, and remaining operational, were ready for instant ignition of deeply felt passions. to the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. perhaps the most fundamental assumption in the history of the Black community has been that Americans of African descent, the descendants of the slaves, either because of shared culture or shared oppression, constitute ‘a mighty race,’ as Marcus Garvey’s often put it.” New York Times, November 21, 2007; King, in the National Cathedral in 1968, refers to African Americans as alone among other ethnic groups in the United States in having been enslaved (speech delivered at the National Cathedral, Washington DC., March 31, 1968, Congressional Record, April 9, 1968; see https://www.wusa9.com/ article/news/local/dc/martin-luther-kings-final-sunday-sermon-delivered-at-national-cathedral-in-1968/65–534010866). See also: Martin Marty in Chronicle Review, April 11, 2008; David Brion Davis, “Jews and Blacks in America,” New York Review of Books, December 1999; George Frederickson, Black Liberation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), passim. 35 Davis, Age of Emancipation, 137–139; Lindsey Herbert, “Reasoning with Professor Robert A. Hill,” Callaloo (2003): 695–706. 36 Proceedings of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union Convention (1934).

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Horace Mann Bond, a historian and educator recalled what happened to him as a youngster, when a Jewish kid in Atlanta called him a “Nigger.” He responded with “Christ Killer.”37 As did millions of others, each, even in their youth, understood, if only in a subliminal way, that in “their eyes,” the other was really a barbarian or a creature that could revert to a barbarian: the “Nigger” was barely human, and the Christ killer, the killer of love and Jewish lover of vengeance, was obviously a barbarian only pretending to be civilized. This remembered exchange had come from a society in which segregation by law and custom had helped to shape stereotypes of peoplehoods with terrifying acts of bigotry especially directed at African America—they still included lynch mobs, race riots, criminalizing forced labor systems and organized killings. In these years, new kinds of antisemitism also combined with intensified old practices. The new was yet another Euro-American phenomenon: a cloudy mix came from postwar conditions and then was stimulated by economic depression. In Europe, it brought widespread sporadic but highly violent conduct, combined as it was with governmental policies of discrimination. If only because of traditions of anti-clericalism, many a metropolitan center witnessed the secularized political eruptions of religiously linked ethnic passions, including groups of anarchists and socialists, and later communists and fascists. In the regime of ethnic hierarchy, most of America’s citizens in their peoplehoods acquiesced, some even justified these extreme revolutionary eruptions beyond their own shores. There on a far different scale mass murder came; and the eruptions were quite different from anything happening in the United States. Abroad mobilizers spoke a different language, one derived from political theology, mixed with the peoplehood of nationalism. Their promised-land rhetoric was meant for all as it manifested in government policies in Turkey, Russia, Italy, Spain, and countries in Central Europe. In the era of the First World War, there had occurred the Armenian genocide, the killing and maiming of Polish and Russian Jews by warring armies and rioting neighbors; there were forced population transfers of Greeks and Turks, in which no one counted the dead on the road or upon arrival. In the interwar years of Bolsheviks and fascists, there came the secular tribal passions that turned against fellow citizens with campaigns of brutal peoplehood persecution. In Germany, a Nazi regime reconstructed the Jew as the new old mortal enemy, not only of its promised-land vision but also of its program for the salvation of civilized society everywhere. 37 Wright, Black Boy, 59–60; Litwack, Trouble in Mind, 21–22, 499n34; Wayne J. Urban, Black Scholar: Horace Mann Bond, 1904–1972 (Athens: University of Georgia, 1976), 10–12.

CHAPTER 4

Ethnicking

In decades after the civil war, Jews with their distinctive religious traditions and collective memories streamed into an incomplete republic where the presence of millions of encaged African American citizens was restructuring American ethnicking. The era’s constitutional amendments made them free citizens who manifest their own deeply rooted convictions of peoplehood. They turn many an important public conversation about American ethnicking and citizenship into national issues, if only because the very meaning of federal citizenship remains murky. In 1862, Lincoln’s Attorney General decided that “eighty years of practical enjoyment of citizenship under the Constitution, have not sufficed to teach us either the exact meaning of the word [citizenship], or the constituent elements of the thing we praise so highly.”1 Controversies over issues of suffrage are illustrative.2 In 1869 and 1870, debates over the Fifteenth Amendment make it obvious: legislators, in Congress and in the states, required to ratify understood full well what was happening. The vocabulary of choice is “race,” “white,” “black, and often “Christian.” In fact, all sorts of collective memories are engaged in the nation’s biocultural ethnic hierarchy as it is practiced in hamlet, town, city, and state. The unusual Republican Senator Oliver P. Morton, a civil war governor of Indiana who ­supported Lincoln, insists that his colleagues appreciate that larger context in their discussion of the proposals for the language of the Fifteenth Amendment 1 Quoted in Christian G. Samito, Becoming American Under Fire: Irish Americans, African Americans, and the Politics of Citizenship During the Civil War Era (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2009), 1. In 1866, while debating the Fourteenth Amendment, the Republican senator from Michigan had been certain that anyone who respected “the law of nature” knew for a fact that women and children were not the equal of men. Jill Lepora, “The History Test,” New Yorker, March 17, 2017, 71–72. 2 Alexander Keyssar, The Right to Vote: The Contested History of Democracy in the United States (New York: Basic Books, 2000), 93–104. For his helpful appendix “State Suffrage Laws 1775–1920,” see 338–413. “Much depended on local conditions and local episodes. New York City in 1908 took a swipe at Jewish voters, many of whom voted for Socialists, by holding registration on the Jewish Sabbath and on the holyday of Yom Kippur.” Ibid., 156–157.

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to the United States Constitution. He does not want an amendment limited to emancipation and “race;” for when the issue is joined by others with the question at hand, namely, “who shall create … the voter,” the states or the federal government, the stakes in the Amendment debate are clear. States should not be the “creator.” Voting qualifications based on a “white skin,” “property,” or “education” declared Morton, are “humbugs” because the right to vote in a republic is a “natural right” pointing to universal suffrage. Amendment language preoccupied with race and color would leave a state empowered with rights to capricious conduct. “‘While you shall not disfranchise a man on account of color, you may disfranchise him because he has not got property.’ … In regard to nativity … we say to the States, ‘You cannot exclude men because of their color, but you are still left at liberty to exclude them because of their nativity.’” In play were America’s peoplehoods, and within them, the individual republican ethnic citizens striving to “dispense with this idea that we are to get in somewhere. The main stream … [was] in oneself.” The question of “colored suffrage” had brought local hierarchies into the discussions; for the amendment process in different states focused on local priorities. Representatives invoked sacred kitsch from the past: African Americans constituted an “inferior race,” were more “indolent” than whites, and, therefore, encouragements of “crossing” the two races by a Fifteenth Amendment presented a danger to the moral fiber and longevity of whites. In California, the special focus was on Chinese immigrant workers and on Hispanic and Native American Mexican citizens acquired by war; in New York, on the Irish and Germans. In Rhode Island, where African Americans had been enfranchised since the 1840s, the old notion that the Irish constituted a distinct race was part of ratification discussions regarding the United States Constitution.3 Rhode Island was also the last New England antebellum state to grant Jews full citizenship rights. It is important to recall that Anglo Americans and their Anglo-Saxon sacred kitsch had left ethnicking footprints in the republic; they together with the enslaved and later antebellum immigrants. The white governing nation of Anglo Americans4 had ridden erupting Euro-American waves of post-Christian enlightened rationalism. But in the first decades after the Revolution, they also 3 Daniel Walker Howe, What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815–1848 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 809–811. 4 In writing about the seventeenth-century Dutch and English in colonial settlements, Baylin writes about some beginning patterns of American ethnicization becoming crystallized, and in the eighteenth century firmly established: Bernard Bailyn, The Barbarous Years: The Peopling of British North America: The Conflict of Civilizations, 1600–1675 (New York: Knopf, 2012), 504.

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nationalized and democratized earlier political beliefs and values and made Evangelical Protestantism the nation’s popular religion of choice, and Christian theism the touchstone of state citizenship guaranteed by a federal constitution.5 Their stamp of republicanism demanded from the relatively few arriving white ethnic Europeans quick expressions of assimilation. Conquered peoples and enslaved peoples presented complex problems for republicans in their promised land. For example, in the mid 1840s after the war with Mexico, in the Southwest, these dilemmas involved Hispanic and Native American citizens of Mexico who, with their institutions, had to cope with intense Anglo-American white xenophobia mixed with racism and anti-Catholicism. In 1854, the Supreme Court in the new state of California extended this sacred kitsch to Chinese residents. The legal prose might just as well have applied to those Mexican citizens who, by treaty rights following the end of the war, were granted American citizenship: “The anomalous spectacle of a distinct people, living in our community, recognizing no laws of this State, except through necessity, bringing with them their prejudices and national feuds, in which they indulge in open violation of law; whose me[n]dacity is proverbial; a race of people whom nature has marked as inferior.” The court stressed their “differing … language, opinions, color, and physical conformation,” and emphasized the biocultural forces at work: “between … [them] and ourselves nature has placed an impassable difference.”6 In the dark shadow of slavery, fellow citizens quickly turned the newly acquired citizens of California into a low category of ethnic citizen fit for dehumanization and exploitation. This orientation occurred in an expanding republic affected by earlier dramatic events engaging the enslaved. The United States had fought with French and English imperial troops against the successful revolution launched by enslaved and free black Haitians.7 Reports of Caribbean experiences—rumors also came into port cities, in bits and pieces of news—had remained embedded in memories making many a white citizen apprehensive about the future of slave collectives and their free compatriots, who celebrated black fighters for Haitian independence. To ethnic white peoples, the growing number of angry, emancipated African Americans had now become more threatening, a danger ever more lurking as forced deportations of thousands by slave owners spread into

5 Mark Kruman, Between Authority and Liberty: State Constitution Making in Revolutionary America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), 45–49. 6 The People, Respondent v. George W. Hall, Appellant. 7 Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation, 81–82.

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newly acquired territories in the South and West. For at the same time, in the early antebellum years, when anti-slavery mobilizations increased, republican politicians were also turning to brutal deportations in order to send defeated tribes to far away bounded Indian reservations beyond the Mississippi. These kinds of events had consequences. For example, in communities ensnarled with slavery, many became convinced that in their circumstances, a reliable public peace required a future republic with slavery. Feelings of apprehension and fear were too strong: apprehension of rebellion by the enslaved and the fear of living with millions of former slaves. At the time, to cope with this demanding diversity, many leading white Protestants, and some free black co-religionists, engaged in what has long been designated an antebellum “Benevolent Empire.” Its participants often masked interests in social control with Christian inspired programs of uplift, selfimprovement, and civic education. These were directed at the feared “unwashed.” For now, universal white male state suffrage laws had given them the vote, and they needed to be taught how to vote properly. In the meantime, Protestant missionary work was directed at Jews and pacified Native Americans; they had to be converted. Freed African Americans were also targeted, they with calls from an organized colonization movement pushing a back to Africa campaign. The intention, usually, was to rid the republic of free African Americans. It would be a massive deportation project in which true white believers could involve themselves with a kind of end of time vision. It projected a moment of redemption, providing whites with a “peaceful” solution for the feared “when” the nation would have to rid itself of an emancipated enslaved workforce. Nevertheless, the Colonization Society’s deportation effort had some success in recruiting African Americans eager to express what they knew to be their own fundamental truth: their own American peoplehood, sacred kitsch and all. These men and women wanted to own their free body politic, unfettered by a slaveholder’s command structure. That was why in the 1820s, thousands of free African Americans sailed to independent black Haiti hoping, in vain, to find their new promised land on “free soil” outside of the United States. That was why so many of the South’s enslaved rushed to become “contrabands,” and then soldiers, once the civil war brought Union troops to the borders of the Confederacy. And that was why, after emancipation, black activist citizens in particular continued to harbor expectations for full peoplehood participation in the republic of the United States. From that perspective, other antebellum ethnicking footprints also remain significant. After the 1830s, the Protestant and Catholic immigrants from Europe—Irish, German, Polish, and later Italian—and the Jews were particularly well marked, though often subdivided by social class. So were others. In

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this process, each was ranked by themselves and by their neighbors, who governed in towns and cities, the locals with long-time residencies. Most incomers and their families in the northeast where they would congregate often “kept to themselves,” or were made to do so, and were associated with particular patterns of conduct, occupation, residence, with economic enterprises, and with specific political ideas, even agendas. There were also other kinds of footprints. Soon after their arrival, German Catholics, Lutherans, Free Thinkers, and newborn socialists in the 1850s, especially in the Midwest, revealed their ethnic proclivities. They used their newspapers and political mobilization efforts to campaign for such issues as “Personal Liberty” on the drink question; and many of these individuals gathered in their respective urban voluntary organizations, as fire departments, choral societies, Turnvereine and other fraternal groups, insurance associations, or churches and synagogues, the last houses of worship often doubling as meeting halls to deal with their people’s public issues. Most of this activity occurred not only in the oceanic port cities of Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and the Gulf of Mexico’s New Orleans, but also in Cincinnati, St. Louis, and Milwaukee, in ports on Midwest’s great rivers or the Great Lakes. There, antebellum newcomers had become heavily concentrated. Impoverished Irish Catholics, many of whom presented especially challenging problems for resident Protestants, had to cope with specific biocultural stereotypes and had to endure exploitation, discrimination, physical attacks, and charges of being subject to a hierarchical command structure anchored overseas in the Vatican. Some students of the subject have sympathized with the resident population. Said one: “the famine Irish were, in fact, very scary—illiterate, unskilled, given to violence, fond of drink, and unfamiliar with the mores and morals of the emerging Protestant culture of revival, temperance, and propriety.”8 The civil war made a big difference in this ethnicking process, but the impact was different than it would be for African Americans. Like the participation of German Americans in the Union’s army, so, too, did Irish American military service demonstrate how the newcomers helped to defend the Republic. In fact, in the changing meanings of citizenship, Irish Americans in particular now insisted on, and won by treaty, clauses with Great Britain and federal protection of their American citizenship when they traveled to the United Kingdom to visit friends and relatives. In principle, other traveling Americans sought similar protection, though not necessarily by treaty arrangements. In fact, for Irish Americans, this 8 John Mclymer, professor of history, Assumption College, Worcester, MA, to author, July 2011.

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collective effort was part of a larger mobilization, for many were involved with organized efforts to win Irish independence from England; others had engaged in street demonstrations, riots, and urban politics. In New York in 1863, and again in the early 1870s, the Irish rioted in large numbers. As militant workers, they not only continued an antebellum tradition of public organization; now they were active in coalfields, some in secret. As with other religious groups, so, too, did they make clerical leadership and congregational ritual a battlefield. Throughout the nineteenth century, Irish and their fellow German Catholics competed fiercely to win Rome’s exclusive support for leadership in the United States. This happened even as German Catholic leaders worked hard to keep Poles in their German language parishes. In the meantime, as enfranchised Manhattan voters, Irish Catholics learned how to develop symbiotic relations with local political machines seemingly as if they were but undifferentiated working poor voters.9 For in the decades of the civil war and afterward, passions of peoplehood continued to intersect with a new world of contingencies and general public events.10 For example, national passions about war and experiences of massive human costs collided. A steam-powered technology was underway, enabling large-scale transportation and manufacturing projects, as well as the metropolitanization of urban life. In turn, these changes facilitated the start of ever-larger mass migrations, especially on Atlantic shipping routes. These were fed by rails edging more deeply into East Central and Southern Europe. Upon arrival, migrants traveled into America’s interior on a spreading American railway system, which in turn carried ever more southerners into the North. The nation, in its exploding metropolitan centers, was living with greater ethnic complexities and enduring its first modern industrial depressions. The rhythm of the business cycle seemed to govern the fluctuations of class adhesions and the challenges to market values of a capitalist political economy. But as significant as were these influences in the history of American peoplehood and its ethnicking, here the changes wrought by African American citizens deserve special attention. The end of the civil war had brought them into play as a unique force. Black citizens in such large numbers were the start of a different kind of body politic, not always properly understood at the time,

9 D. W. Meinig, The Shaping of America: A Geographical Perspective on 500 Years of History, 3 vols. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), 2:407–415; Handlin, Boston’s Immigrants, passim; Samito, Becoming American Under Fire, passim; Korman, Milwaukee, 41–60. I am grateful John McClymer for sharing thoughts about his work on Swedes in the ethnic context of Worcester. 10 HEAEG, passim, but especially the fine “Thematic Essays.”

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though it was clear enough that they alone had a special ­relationship to the federal government and to America’s history of enslavement fused to “Negritude.”11 In comparison with Native Americans in their Dependent Nations and to the European homeland cultures of potential citizens, the manifold differences of African Americans were obvious. After the adoption of the 13th Amendment, and in 1868, after the passage of the Civil Rights Act and the adoption of the 14th Amendment, hundreds of thousands of former enslaved men and women gained the right to marry and rear a family as fathers and mothers, and they were constitutionally empowered as voting citizens of the United States. After the spring of 1870, as such people, together with other African American men, who by some state decisions already had the right to vote, a million or more constituted influential and distinctive male voters with experiential memories and family networks of their own. These last included America’s Slaveland, an enforced homeland culture that had been affected by a white society’s biocultural obsession with “Negritude” and enslavement. It was an obsession that had pushed the South to legally separate or civilly segregate, in turn participating in the development of that African American homeland culture. It contained complex domestic collective memories mingled with those that had been passed on in oral traditions about forced migration experiences, about African and West Indian practices, here often entangled with Christian ritual.12 In Slaveland, African American men and women had not had rights to fatherhood, motherhood, and the intimacies of family life. “Male slaves had no paternal rights and female slaves were recognized as mothers only to the extent that their status doomed their children’s fate to servitude in perpetuity.” Many did marry publicly, but only through the capricious consent of owners. The “wedding vows they recited,” reports historian Tera W. Hunter, “promised not ’until death do us part,’ but ‘until distance’—or, as one black minister bluntly put it ‘the white man’—‘do us part.’” But somehow in their desperate lives, they had found ways to remain together, to stay in touch, to keep love and family alive. Somehow, in many instances, rejoined partners managed their lives after both

11 This great American event had equivalents in European history, with public policies of emancipation for Jews and, after 1870, for most serfs east of the “Oder” with the gradual endings of serfdom. 12 George Rawick, Sunup to Sundown (New York: Greenwood, 1974), passim; Hahn, Nation Under Our Feet, 1–61, and passim; Davis, Slavery In the Age of Emancipation, 45–82, 166–337; Stuckey, Slave Culture, 3–97; Ira Berlin et al., eds., Freedom: A Documentary History of Emancipation 1861–1867, series 1, vol. 1, Destruction of Slavery (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985), 1–56; Foner, Reconstruction, 1–34, 77–227, 239–261, 281–307, 316–333, 350–459, 602–612.

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knew that a master or overseer or whoever had used and abused her body for procreation of the workforce or capricious lust. Or, they had been enticed by an act of agency in a world of enslavement. Just as surely as the English, Germans, or Irish with their fragments and debris had mental connections to experiences of oceanic crossings, to languages, rites and rituals and intimate family experiences, African Americans were connected to a huge and variegated land and culture that served as American Slaveland.13 Even though, as a land of origin, this land of enslavement was perceived as functioning quite differently than did identification with other homelands, a past of mind and emotion for an African American peoplehood had grown in place. Euro-America’s elites, those who wrote about such issues usually did so from the perspective of an idealized modern nineteenth-century nation state. It was presumed to be organic, its founding population and descendants empowered naturally—usually this status was linked to assumptions of biocultural superiority articulated in terms of race and folk inheritance. Major civic institutions were especially responsive to signals of culture and political economy from the state’s governing nation, its empowered center. These elites in each of their respective countries also took for granted that there was one national identity, one national language, one literary canon, one cultural and political center, and one public calendar. Collectives that were not allowed in or did not want to assimilate to such an organic nation state, but that also could not successfully fight for one of their own on their historic territory, these were usually thought of as unique races, also with inherited patterns of conduct: dependent nations or wannabe states within a state. Such were the Welsh and Scots in the United Kingdom and, in the United States, native American tribes, for a while Mormons, and then Southerners in the Confederacy, whose white elites in fact began to see themselves as part of a race bioculturally superior to their Yankee enemies.14 Or, such dependents or wannabes were flotsam and jetsam, especially numerous in the great empires of Central and Eastern Europe where, in Western eyes, they were perceived as constituting parts of the great Asian hordes. “The Jews” belonged to them and were an identifiable race usually associated with all sorts of undesirable inherited characteristics of their own. 13 Tera W. Hunter, New York Times, August 2, 2011. She is the author of To “Joy My Freedom”: Southern Black Women’s Lives and Labors after the Civil War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard ­University Press, 1998); Marian L. Smith, “‘Any woman who is now or may hereafter be ­married  …’: Women and Naturalization, ca. 1802–1940,” Reginald Washington, “­Sealing the Sacred Bonds of Holy Matrimony Freedmen’s Bureau Marriage Records”—Prologue ­Magazine 30 (Summer 1998); vol. 37 (Spring 2005). 14 James McPherson, New York Review of Books, December, 2008.

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In the United States, the hierarchical regime had reserved one end of the spectrum for the conquered Native Americans and enslaved American families. They had been made strangers in a land that they believed belonged to them. In the first decade after emancipation, Frederick Douglass and most other leaders of the new African American citizens, treated tenderly in public enslavement’s powerful influences on collective identification.15 Instead of dwelling on the pain and suffering, on the brutal dehumanization inflicted by American republican whites, at the end of the conflict, with some ten percent of Union forces, African Americans embraced the civil war years as a second American Revolution. It was an experience of rebirth, and for the world of Anglo-American republicanism, a time that could transform the personal meanings of black and white experiences. With proclaimed complicated articles of faith, many an African American leader announced that in time the promises of the first Revolution, and those implicit in the civil war Amendments, would apply without a color line, in every region to every person. But not unlike other revolutions, and founding days, in the emergence of race conscious peoplehood fitted for the new citizens, there were competing understandings of those visions, about the near real-time and also about end-time beliefs. Often, they derived from traditions associated with America’s Promised Land discourse or with other messianic religious convictions. Some had room only for a free black life, that is, one where white people were not sovereign, or for an end-time the precondition of which required independent black lives here in America, or there, in Africa.16 More importantly, however, the daily experiences in the lands of the former Confederacy, in particular, continued to teach African Americans how different their lives as citizens would continue to be from those of everybody else in the republic—it was self-evident in comparison with the different lives they had lived as slaves of the white Americans with whom they were now to share in the promise of full citizenship. It was also the stuff to which the fragments and debris would adhere among ordinary folk. Their lives had been deeply rooted in Slaveland, and, between 1861 and the late 1870s, in many parts of the rural and urban South, African Americans were engaged in different moments of emancipation and enfranchisement; in fights against armed white insurgencies and in local confrontations and shootouts in defense of post-emancipation black politics and newly acquired civil rights. What’s more, these engagements were usually entangled with family members and neighbors, with churches and preachers, and with other a­ ssociations. 15 Blight, Race and Reunion, 1–30, 64–97, 301–337. 16 Ibid., 319–324; Davis, Slavery in the Age of Emancipation, 44–82.

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Starting with their unique family experiences, they were entangled with the organized civic and public affairs shaping modern peoplehood in the United States. In primitive ways, not unlike those used during days of enslavement, in threatening war times and reconstruction tumults, African Americans communicated with each other, at times over long distances, to mobilize on behalf of causes each knew were black causes of newly freed men and women. They knew who they were, what they had been, and learned quickly what they wanted from the land, the employer, politicians, and their governments. They knew what they wanted for their children. For each of them, these new African American citizens, their knowledge and emotional memory served as building blocks of a new and distinctive collective memory. And, as with the collective memories of other American ethnic groups, it was pervasive, permanent, and flexible; locally, it was also available for instant recall, ignition, and mobilization.17 In time, the celebration of a Second American Revolution gave way, or rather had to share the touchstone of identity with a new kind of realism; it comprehended enslavement, emancipation, and reconstruction as one critical experience in African American cohesion. In the gravely disappointing days after the Supreme Court held the postwar Civil Rights Acts unconstitutional, it is clear from a close reading of Douglass’ rhetoric that he understood he was part of a black people having to endure a “long meanwhile” before his republican vision could reach fruition. He recognized that his people would have to find the rural paths out of sharecropping fields to another messianic day in the history of the United States.18 Black leaders and many of their followers knew all about past potentials and about denied alternatives from their long meanwhile. As African American publicists so often insisted, according to place of birth, duration of residency, language, citizenship, and experience on American soil, including soldiering for the Revolution, the Union, and their own freedom, these free African Americans could lay claim to a legacy that had more in common with seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Dutch and English founding families than they had with other European foreigners, with those who had not started to arrive in large numbers in the Colonial America of the 1740s. Besides, the presence of free African American citizens with roots deep in the republic’s history should have dictated the obvious to fellow white citizens: yet as late as 1862, 17 James Cone, “Strange Fruit: The Cross and the Lynching Tree,” Ingersoll Lecture, Harvard Divinity School, October 19, 2006, The Cross and the Lynching Tree (New York: Orbis Books, 2011). 18 Blight, Race and Reunion, 300–337; Douglass [1883], “Why a Colored Convention,” in ­Nation Transformed: The Creation of an Industrial Society, ed. Sigmund Diamond (New York: Braziller, 1963), 386–400.

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even Lincoln seemed to have considered migration and deportation to Africa as a solution for solving the republic’s slavery problem. Among white peoplehoods, those indisputable facts about black and white founding families never had a chance to acquire legitimacy. After all, scientists in Europe and America had insisted for years what white persons had generally presumed—God had created different races of men and women and some were inferior to others.19 The vast majority of white residents North and South had been convinced that each white-skinned person and his or her society were the biocultural superior of a darker-skinned African American and his or her society. For most whites, each was a creature believed to be so close to the state of savagery that they, especially in the South, felt compelled to exercise constant discipline to protect themselves and their institutions. That legacy included a general opposition to allowing free African Americans to serve in state militias. In the presence of a heterogeneous white population in Northern states, the widespread opposition to universal male suffrage helped to explain why, after the civil war, a victorious Republican-controlled Congress adopted and sent forth for state ratification the empowering Fifteenth Amendment that used language allowing state governments to continue to circumscribe the voting privileges of their citizens. In early post-civil war military parades of civic celebration, when republican peoplehoods were represented, they could serve as filters for the national patriotism associated with military service. But African American veterans usually marched down a city’s streets much as they had fought on the battlefields: as black units led by white officers—different from some of the units composed of German Lutherans and Catholics and Irish Catholic state militia veterans, which were led by their own elected white officers.20 This fact of comparability was important, for by then, the United States was far along in becoming a different nation from the one many had anticipated before

19 Challenges to those assumption sometimes remained controversial into the twenty-first century. Stephen Gould’s famous “Unconscious Bias” in Science magazine and his The Mismeasure of Man were also attacked. The New York Times of June 14, 2011 reported news from a lab at the University of Pennsylvania that Gould had been wrong about Morgan, and quoted a former colleague of Gould’s at Columbia University who was convinced that Gould’s ideological devotions could trump his science; he called him a “charlatan.” 20 Early in the war, until 1863, in the Union army, regiments of volunteers elected many of their officers and governors appointed the rest. Companies and whole regiments often consisted of recruits from “a single township, city, or county.” The Sixty-Nineth of New York was one of many Irish regiments, the Seventy-NinethHighland Scottish, and there were others that were mostly German. MacPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom, 326, 606–61; Blight, Race and Reunion, 339–345; Nick Salvatore, We All Got History, 135–141.

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the 1840s—the federal census of 1880 even began to count “Hebrews.” Diversity had been part of colonial history (some in early New England had used Irish stereotypes from the language of Europeans as models for local Native Americans, while others, there and elsewhere in the colonies, applied that kind of language about Irish indentured servants to enslaved Africans). By the time of those parades, the war with Mexico and the migrations across the Atlantic and Pacific had brought much larger numbers of other new residents. These were diverse: Chinese, Catholic Irish, Germans, Poles, and Italians. Among the Continentals had also come Lutherans and a significant number of Jews. They traveled into the South and Far West, while hundreds of thousands arrived in the Northeast. Although it was not appreciated at the time, in that cauldron of peoplehoods, African Americans would become one of if not the nation’s most unique and influential ethnic society. Their leaders often identified themselves by comparisons, not only with ruling whites. They identified with other nationalities and ethnicities, with other peoples, with Hebrews in Biblical texts, and, in their own time, with other persecuted peoples, such as Haitians, Jews, and the Irish. That ethnicking among African Americans generated the fragments and debris that would adhere from republican values and daily circumstances. By the end of the century, the process began to include free domestic African American migration in an urbanizing America where, in particular, Catholic Italians and Poles, Jews from Eastern Europe, and Protestant Scandinavians were now arriving in large numbers.21 Each of their sacred kitsch congealed into the mythic chords of collective memory and into the hierarchical arrangement of all Americans. Different white and black versions of black experiences constantly participated in shaping and reshaping collective identities, including the white Anglo American one that claimed a unique organic birthright for the establishment and founding principles of the republic. At its most fundamental level, one set of white stereotypes and profiles infused all sorts of new distinctions in American ethnicking. By the end of the nineteenth century, social scientists had reoriented the ancient Greeks’ ethnos for designations of Native Americans, most of whom were now penned up in reservations, and of Pacific Islanders; increasingly, “ethnic group” was applied to incoming diverse migrants: the ever larger number of Mexican workers in the Southwest; the crowding in unprecedented numbers of Europeans into

21 Orlando Patterson commented on the controversy about President Obama because he had no American enslaved ancestors. New York Times, November 4, 2009. On the American middle classes, see Stewart M. Blumin, The Emergence of the Middle Class: Social Experience in the American City (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989), passim.

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metropolitan centers, some of which by century’s end were starting to serve as northern urban terminals for massive internal black migrations. In these circumstances, participants in white peoplehoods used deceitful profiles about each other’s collective identities. Generally, they ranked groups from primitive to civilized, from tribal to modern, if only because of fear for their capitalist society and its middle-class republican culture. Those peoplehoods required the proper discipline: they could threaten degeneration by political and biocultural influences, they and their working classes could endanger the political economy of promised land America.

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CHAPTER 5

Profiling

Men and women of American peoplehoods in the process of becoming republican ethnic citizens spawn and sustain profiling vocabularies. These begin in the colonial era. By the late eighteenth century, profiles of the other are often associated with emerging governing republicans, who live as middling classes and influential land-owning families in an Anglo American civic society. As such it has won sovereignty over embattled Native Americans, indentured servants, enslaved African Americans, and lower-class groups of Euro-American residents. Yet in revolution, that nation is also a new kind of republic with promises of economic opportunity, citizenship, and suffrage, for a while even to some of those who had been enslaved. But mostly it is an emerging Protestant republic, insisting on its seemingly permanent biocultural convictions and its institutions, and somehow promising a special future for individual adult males with European ancestries, including a small number of Catholics and a still smaller number of Jews.1 Conversion and ranking discourse, especially about real and potential threats and enemies, had long flitted from one group to another because fragments of obsessions were remarkably flexible. Formal theological proclamations notwithstanding, they easily attached themselves to religious beliefs and hierarchies. For example, from colonial beginnings, many, but not all, New England “Puritans” believed that there was a connection between the conversion of all Jews, invariably profiled as Christ killers, and the eventual triumph of the Puritans’ Christianity. In 1669, in the tradition of English Protestants employing 1 In 2006, John Hope Franklin talked to Duke University graduates about the “recrudescence of racism in this country.” He identified a number of causes. Among these, he said, may well have been “competition for the limited employment opportunities between recent immigrants and long-time citizens, such as African Americans who have been mistakenly regarded as immigrants … the resistance to racial equality that has been present at all levels of American life and in every period of American history and the mistaken belief by some that African Americans should be made to understand that their rightful place in American society is one of subordination.” New York Times, June 11, 2006.

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Jewish exegesis in their reading of Biblical texts, Boston’s young Increase Mather wrote his well-known apocalyptically oriented conversion treatises about the “Mysterie of Israel.” There, he expressed sensitivity to “Judaizing” influences even as he spoke of “Talmudic Jews” and their “Jewish Rabbies,” some of whom he cited for achieving textual clarity in his own work.2 But New England’s Puritans’ primary biocultural obsession was not with Jews; it engaged threatening tribal Native Americans. Especially in times of stress and war, Anglo American discourse constructed Native Americans into lethal enemies—“children of the devil.” It is helpful to recall that when war with Indian tribes had become a fact of New England life, Increase Mather’s illustrious son, Cotton Mather, wrote these lines about his peoples’ Indian voices. “The voices of Indians are these: they are very lying wretches, and they are very lazy wretches and they are out of measure indulgent into their children; there is no family government among them.” Framing his perceptions in constructs his colonial contemporaries had fashioned, many amidst apocalyptic expectations, Mather knew that his own people had been punished. “We have shamefully Indianized in all those abominable things. Now, the judgments of God have employed Indians’ hatchets to wound us, no doubt, by these our Indian vices.”3 The appropriate secular vocabulary followed, potentially ambiguous to be sure but clear enough: “degradation,” “extinction,” and “extermination:” by 1851, Govenor Burnett was certain that a “war of extermination” would last “until the Indian race became extinct.”4 For years to come, this kind of biocultural obsession remained entangled with real and imagined overlapping threats, to the federal system and to the emerging American civic culture giving shape to America’s peoplehoods. In Andrew Jackson’s America, Native Americans in the Southeast and Mormons in the Midwest had Christian enemies who used force to eliminate them as competitors for land, commerce, and souls. In that context of mortal threats, an order from the governor of Ohio should not surprise. Faced with local outbreaks of violence, the governor lost patience with white Americans from back East; and so the Christian elected head of state allowed his militia to “exterminate” local Mormons.5 Native tribes and Mormons in general were also distrusted 2 Korman, “Changing People of the Talmud,” op. cit. 3 Beth Norton regards the Salem witch-hunts as predicted on this kind of thinking and the passions entangled with it. Devils Snare: The Salem Witchcraft Crisis of 1692 (New York: Vintage, 2003), passim 4 Quoted in Howe, What Hath God Wrought, 810. 5 William Lloyd Garrison, in his new Liberator denounced the Colonization Movement by comparing it to the forced deportation of the Cherokees. Howe, op. cit., 426.

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for threatening to form “a state within a state,” something beyond “dependent nations” or autonomous nationalities, an entity against which preemptive measures had to be taken. In the event of an act of regional secession, only a civil war would do to save “the Union,” a fact and sacred abstraction. After the suppression of the Southern rebellion, in the country at large, the primary biological obsession of the Union’s ethnic conversation locked onto cultivated memories of Slaveland and the new African American citizens. These last, in the wake of withdrawal of Union troops, continued to strive for full citizenship. With their sense of peoplehood, they intended to move through America’s space, its markets and occupations, at least it appeared so to most whites who, in response, especially in the Deep South, intensified a constructed discourse and process that sooner or later made it possible to criminalize black Americans. The language of the Thirteenth Amendment was useful: involuntary servitude remained legal, “as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted.” Local vagrancy laws were one instrument of choice. In political economies, experiencing the business cycle and large-scale internal migration, such laws had long been popular throughout the country to protect local communities against “undesirable” white incomers. In the South, these laws in particular were used to arrest African Americans when the Union armies withdrew as occupiers of conquered territory. Especially in rural areas, where literacy was in short supply, it was all but impossible for any African American to prove with written evidence that one had a job, that one was not a vagrant, and therefore not subject to arrest and a sentence of months or years of convict labor. In Alabama, influential white ethnics, in time including a young United States Steel Corporation from Pittsburgh, institutionalized a long-lived system of deadly peonage. It was used on the land, in coal mines, and elsewhere in the industrializing economy that often created new good jobs for blacks and whites around the Birmingham area. Peonage also thrived elsewhere in the South. As historians have noted, many a businessman appreciated this forced labor as a kind of replacement for the enslaved labor of antebellum days. Around the turn of the century, Supreme Court decisions involving white ethnic workers ruled against parts of the system where the federal government had jurisdiction. Yet from the Depression of 1873 up to World War II, that same Supreme Court so effectively shielded states from the Fourteenth Amendment that peonage and related practices in Southern states in particular shaped the life of many African American citizens and their families. Those states integrated prison systems and labor camps with leased forced labor. In turn, enforcing officials could supply useful forced labor because state and local laws and ordinances made it easy to intimidate and arrest African Americans for minor or imaginary

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infractions. Over the decades, hundreds of thousands of black citizens in the South were trapped in this enduring forced labor world of the republic.6 But for African American republicans living in their peoplehood, the worst experiences consisted of the ferocious lynching campaigns in the Lower South; at their most intense, they lasted until the 1890s. Sometimes these events mobilized over a thousand unmasked light-skinned citizens for one public murder of a darker skinned American citizen. With the acquiescence of federal and state officials, and of those who voted them into power, self-appointed guardians of an idealized white society in the Deep South used what was nothing less than a terrifying crusade against fellow citizens identified as threatening black primitives. The guardians did it, they said, in order to defend Southern women, the head, the heart, and soul of their modern civilization. So, between 1890 and WWI, they murdered almost three thousand African Americans through ­lynching.7 Ironically, by this time, there had already emerged that dynamic African American civic society which would be so important in the history of American peoplehoods; for it had long played a major role in shaping the constitutional structure governing group life in the United States. As had been the case in discussions about the Fifteenth Amendment, about the rights and privileges of African American citizens, so, too, was their significant presence in other constitutional issues brought to the United States Supreme Court. At the core of important decisions by federal judges, especially by the majorities sitting on the Washington bench, they ruled in a regime of legal fictions, including on the concept of “dual federalism,” insisting that states were “co-equals” with the national government. The regime’s operational imperative dictated that only white male judges steeped in idealized American republican principles could interpret the United States Constitution properly. The majorities would insist that the great document was endowed with special congenital virtues with which they had to deprive African American citizens of the protection for which the civil war amendments had been intended. The Court also insisted that the same Constitution had no place for “class” or other kinds of group identities forming and changing as an exploding peoplehood population struggled with an undisciplined capitalist market economy.8 6 Litwack, Trouble in Mind, 138–149; Hahn, Nation Under Our Feet, 76–82; and the two Supreme Court cases: Bailey (1911) and Reynolds (1914); David M. Oshinsky, “Worse Than Slavery”: Parchman Farm and the Ordeal of Jim Crow (New York: Free Press, 1996), passim 7 Litwack, Trouble in Mind, 280–325; Blight, Race and Reunion, 334–337, 361–380; Hahn, ­Nation Under Our Feet, 426–431. 8 On “dual federalism,” see Kermit Hall and James W. Ely, Jr., The Oxford Handbook to the ­Supreme Court of the United States (Oxford: OUP, 2005); Jess Bravin, “Rethinking Original Intent,” Wall Street Journal, March 14–15, 2009.

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Between the 1870s and the 1890s, the Supreme Court’s decisions and dissents used concepts and vocabulary well suited to the ethnic hierarchies structuring American civil society. Instead of the later term “ethnic,” justices used “classes” and “races” in texts that made explicit references to the particular “race” of recently freed African Americans. In the mid-eighties, the Court’s oft cited case of Cruikshank, 92 U.S. 542 (1875)—a judicial response shielding the mass murderers of Easter Sunday in Colfax County, Louisiana—demonstrated the obvious, the justices understood the facts on the ground: “Inasmuch, therefore, as it does not appear in these counts that the intent of the defendants was to prevent these parties from exercising their right to vote on account of their race, &c., it does not appear that it was their intent to interfere with any right granted or secured by the constitution or laws of the United States. We may suspect that race was the cause of the hostility; but it is not so averred. This is material to a description of the substance of the offence, and cannot be supplied by implication. Everything essential must be charged positively, and not inferentially. The defect here is not in form, but in substance.”9 In famous dissents from his Supreme Court colleague’s majority, Associate Justice John Marshall Harlan, a former slave owner, caught many of the realities, as well as some of the ethnic flux embedded within them. “If a State can prescribe, as a rule of civil conduct … the separation of whites and blacks everywhere,” why, he asked in his dissent from Plessy v Ferguson, “if this statute of Louisiana is consistent with the personal liberty of citizens, why may not the State require the separation in railroad coaches of native and naturalized citizens of the United States, or of Protestants and Roman Catholics?” He acknowledged that some states still had, “a dominant race—a superior class of citizens, which assumes to regulate the enjoyment of civil rights, common to all citizens, upon the basis of race.” He understood perfectly well that his colleagues were proceeding, “on the ground that colored citizens are so inferior and degraded that they cannot be allowed to sit in public coaches occupied by white citizens.” As did his colleagues on the bench, Harlan also appreciated the historical American context in which this landmark case was being rendered. In his dissent, he wrote about the recent past, in which before the civil war his court, without him, had ruled: “The descendants of Africans who were imported into this country

9 Civil Rights Cases, 109 U.S. 3 (1883) for majority opinion and Harlan’s dissent; Oshinsky, Worse Than Slavery, 31–84 and passim; Douglas A. Blackmon, Slavery By Another Name: The Re-enslavement of Black Americans From the Civil War to World War II (New York: Anchor Books, 2009), 110–113, 147–148, 167–169, and passim

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and sold as slaves were not included nor intended to be included under the word ‘citizens’ in the Constitution, and could not claim any of the rights and privileges which that instrument provided for and secured to citizens of the United States.” But Harlan made explicit suggestions about the republic’s constructed tension between the civil society’s hierarchy of ethnic groups and the requirement imposed on Supreme Court justices by the United States Constitution. As he had done in the court’s Civil Rights Cases of 1883, he described a condition that among most white Americans would last until the era of World War II. “The white race deems itself to be the dominant race in this country. And so it is in prestige, in achievements, in education, in wealth and in power. So, I doubt not, it will continue to be for all time if it remains true to its great heritage and holds fast to the principles of constitutional liberty.” Harlan was also convinced that his people would continue to determine what he had called, in an earlier decision, “the social rights of men and races in the c­ ommunity.” In oft quoted lines, Harlan insisted on striving for change, toward new republican ideals made possible by the civil war and the constitutional amendments that followed. These changes were not shared by most of his fellow-citizens. He used the Constitution as a weapon, and no doubt hoped others would join him in his insistence that, “in view of the Constitution, in the eye of the law, there is in this country no superior, dominant, ruling class of citizens. There is no caste here. Our Constitution is color-blind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens. … The law regards man as man, and takes no account of his surroundings or of his color when his civil rights as guaranteed by the supreme law of the land are involved.” These lines in Harlan’s dissent reflected the circumstances of African American citizens who, with collective identities of their own, were being subjected to ethnic forming pressures from the outside. The laws and judicial decisions represented a society shaped by hierarchies of ethnicity, which included significant racial and religious components so often made up of fragments and debris expressed in terms easily associated with biocultural determinisms, folk beliefs about inherited acquired characteristics among ethnic groups. Harlan used his class and race vocabulary to locate the place being made for the African American citizens, for the new emerging ethnic society being institutionalized by his court. Everyone, he wrote, started with this fact of American life: “at the time of the adoption of the Constitution, [African Americans] … were considered as a subordinate and inferior class of beings, who had been subjugated by the dominant race, and, whether emancipated or not, yet remained subject to their authority, and had no rights or privileges but such as those who held the power and the government might choose to grant them.”

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As had his colleagues on the bench, Harlan had also thought in terms of the popular continuum from tribal to civilized; however, since 1883, in the Civil Rights Cases, his publicly stated perspective was different from his colleagues. In the wake of “Reconstruction,” when the foundations were being installed for flourishing ethnic hierarchies, he still hoped America’s civic society had the potential for another direction. For this is what he wrote in passages deserving long quotations: “The court says that congress did not, in the act of 1866, assume, under the authority given by the thirteenth amendment, to adjust what may be called the social rights of men and races in the community. I agree that government has nothing to do with social, as distinguished from technically legal, rights of individuals. No government ever has brought, or ever can bring, its people into social intercourse against their wishes. Whether one person will permit or maintain social relations with another is a matter with which government has no concern. I agree that if one citizen chooses not to hold social intercourse with another, he is not and cannot be made amenable to the law for his conduct in that regard; for no legal right of a citizen is violated by the refusal of others to maintain merely social relations with him, even upon grounds of race. What I affirm is that no state, nor the officers of any state, nor any corporation or individual wielding power under state authority for the public benefit or the public convenience, can, consistently either with the freedom established by the fundamental law, or with that equality of civil rights which now belongs to every citizen, discriminate against freemen or citizens, in their civil rights, because of their race, or because they once labored under disabilities imposed upon them as a race.” Harlan also demonstrated that “race” was a kind of synonym for “nationality,” “peoplehood,” or in today’s more common vocabulary, “ethnicity.” At the time, Chinese Americans were often subjected to brutal treatments by their neighbors in many local communities in which they lived. “There is a race so different from our own that we do not permit those belonging to it to become citizens of the United States. Persons belonging to it are, with few exceptions, absolutely excluded from our country. I allude to the Chinese race.” Harlan implied the obvious: race was a euphemism. By “the statute in question, a Chinaman can ride in

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the same passenger coach with white citizens of the United States, while ­citizens of the black race in Louisiana, many of whom, perhaps, risked their lives for the preservation of the Union, who are entitled, by law, to participate in the political control of the State and nation, who are not excluded, by law or by reason of their race, from public stations of any kind, and who have all the legal rights that belong to white citizens, are yet declared to be criminals, liable to imprisonment, if they ride in a public coach occupied by citizens of the white race.”10 In the meantime, the lynching crusade in the Deep South had sustained America’s extermination discourse from ethnicking in antebellum days. As then, Native Americans and African Americans were the common subjects of such conversation or of political proclamations. By 1873, President Ulysses S. Grant hoping, in vain, to turn his nation’s public opinion against the past tradition of ruthless Indian wars, in his Second Inaugural Address rejected “extermination” as a fit part of the country’s Indian policy. The great wartime leader laid out the choices facing the republic between his kind of “a humane course, to bring the aborigines of the country under the benign influences of education and civilization … [or a] war of extermination:” “Wars of extermination,” he warned, “engaged in by people pursuing commerce and all industrial pursuits, are expensive even against the weakest people, and are demoralizing and wicked.” He explained why: America’s “superiority of strength and advantages of civilization should make us lenient toward the Indian. The wrong inflicted upon him should be taken into account and the balance placed to his credit. The moral view of the question should be considered and the question asked, cannot the Indian be made a useful and productive member of society by proper teaching and treatment?” Grant appreciated the stakes involved. “If the effort is made in good faith, we will stand better before the civilized nations of the earth and in our own consciences for having made it.” However, perhaps without his knowledge, Grant’s generals continued their campaigns against the Modoc people in eastern Oregon using military orders permitting total war: “You will be fully justified in 10 Charles A. Miller, “Constitutional Law and the Rhetoric of Race,” Perspectives in American History 5 (1971): 178–200; 163 U.S. 537 Plessy v. Ferguson, Error to the Supreme Court of Louisiana, No. 210 Argued: April 18, 1896—Decided: May 18, 1896; for his dissent in the civil rights cases see Cornell 109 U.S. 3 LII Supreme Ct. Collection Website. John Hope Franklin, The Color Line: Legacy for the Twenty-first Century (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1993) 44–45 provides an important context: the case began when the conductor on the railway recognized the passenger who was not recognizable as a “Negro.” Albion Torque, the defense attorney before the Court in 1896, influenced Harlan’s linking of the law to the concept of “color blind”: “Justice is pictured blind and his daughter, the Law, ought at least to be color blind,” even if that was not true for American society at the time.

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their utter extermination,” thus revealing the potential genocidal richness of the common nineteenth-century word usage.11 That sort of question about “extermination,” but about African Americans, had been on Andrew Johnson’s mind in 1866. His sacred kitsch had convinced him “that damned Douglass; he’s just like any nigger, and he would sooner cut a white man’s throat than not.” The new post-civil war president in private talked about “extermination.” He had tried to dissuade Douglass and other African American leaders from fighting for the vote for emancipated slaves. Johnson was certain that black male suffrage would lead to catastrophe, to a fight to the death between poor whites and enfranchised freed plantation slaves who, by then, would so hate each other that the fight between them would “result in the extermination of one or the other. God forbid that I should be engaged in such a work.”12 In the mid 1880s, that same Frederick Douglass, in public, turned toward Johnson’s fear; but Douglass’ perspective, with the advantage of hindsight, did not share for African Americans the inner voice telling Grant that Native American peoples’ time may be running out. At an African American convention, Douglass expressed his astonishment that his people were still around to tell the tales of their post emancipation years: “The Government … left us completely in the power of our former owners. … It may have been best to leave us thus to make terms with those whose wrath it had kindled against us. It does not seem right that we should have been so left, but it fully explains our present poverty and wretchedness. The marvel is not that we are poor in such circumstances, but rather that we were not exterminated. In view of our circumstances, our extermination was confidently predicted. The fact that we still live and have increased in higher ratio than that of the native white people of the South are proofs of our vitality, and in some degree our industry.” In a white civic society, where it was generally believed that black citizens had all sorts of unique biological attributes, some of which whites thought explained black impoverishment and black high rates of disease and mortality, it was not surprising that belief in inherited predisposition to diseases helped to drive predictions of extermination.13 In the 1890s, many whites no doubt wished for such a future. South

11 Biography (New York: Norton, 1982), 304–331, and for continuing campaigns against Native Americans, 436–439, 441. My Italics. Chernow, Grant 656–659, 736–739; William S. McFeely, Grant: A. 12 James Oakes, The Radical and the Republican: Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, and the Triumph of Antislavery Politics (New York: Norton, 2007), 250, 255. 13 Douglass, “Why a Colored Convention,” 386–400; David W. Blight, Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2018), 643–649; Litwack, Trouble in Mind, 336–338; Stuart Galishoff, “Germs Know No Color Line: Black Health and Public Policy in

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Carolina’s senior politician, Ben Tillman announced that “extermination” was the fate of blacks if they did not stay in their place. Invariably this extermination discourse and the kinds of obsessions and memories that drove it had interacted with religious beliefs and practices associated with Slaveland and free African Americans, that is with the fragments and debris giving meaning to their peoplehood. This aspect of the ethnicking process was not unlike what happened in colonial America first with Native Americans. From the very beginning, “Heathen” and “Christian,” “primitive” and “uncivilized,” also freighted the language, as did fragments about West Indian and African rituals. They were linked to the enslaved and to conversion with baptism as the transforming experience into colonial Christian civilization. Not surprisingly, the perpetuation of that dichotomy in the decades following the civil war also occurred within the free African American world; for the difference between “primitive” and “civilized” strongly manifested itself as small black urban elites campaigned for a dignified and “civilized” African American clerical establishment.14 (It was an effort not unlike what happened among those “western” changing people of the Talmud, who as Jews were eager to share the mantle of disciplined enlightened modern Protestant citizens.) Together with Booker T. Washington, most of these African Americans did not appreciate being linked to black folk religion which, in fact, was a mix of nineteenth-century American Christian individualism with African and Caribbean strains of collective identity. Black American elites also did not always appreciate that the vast majority of emancipated people who lived in the South and were shut out of the republic’s body politic needed the black preachers and their tradition to maintain on slave soil their own American collective links to purposeful pasts. Washington had shifted his convictions away from such emotionally charged Black Baptists and their collective political theology when he decided that his people needed a new spiritual leadership, one more rational and disciplined, similar to the New England worlds of Presbyterianism and Unitarianism. Before he started to make peace with the Black Church in 1901, Washington could say this about those preachers: these “grand, faithful characters” of his people, with their “groans, Atlanta, 1900–1918,” Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 40 ( January 1985): 22–4; Davis, Boundaries of Slavery, 64–71. 14 See for example Booker T. Washington in Louis R. Harlan, Washington: The Making of a Black Leader, 1856–1901 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972), 254–324; Louis R. Harlan et al., eds. The Booker T. Washington Papers, 14 vols. (Urbana: University of Illinois, 1972) 1:332, 2:191–195, 442–443; Louis R. Harlan, “Booker T. Washington in Biographical Perspective,” American Historical Review LXXV (October 1970): 1581–1599.

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jumping, and trances” had “outlived their usefulness.” The “number found in the South would seem to indicate that we are not in very great need. One church near Tuskegee has a total membership of 200 and 18 of them are said to be ­preachers. … Most are unfit for the task,” Washington stated in April 1888 to an audience at Lincoln University in Pennsylvania. In short, he wanted a new spiritual leadership: “The call for ministers with trained heart and intellect is pressing and loud.”15 Of course, in this American ethnicking world, it did not much matter to most whites what African Americans did: to be African American meant to be biologically inferior, touched by Heathenism, not quite Christian; and therefore it meant African Americans were presumed to be always capable of reverting to primitive and barbaric conduct directed at white neighbors. Frederick Douglass had understood what these constellations meant for his people. In September 1883, at the Colored National Convention, in Louisville, Kentucky, in his “Address to the People of the United States,” Douglass spoke of “images of American imagination” and the realities of “American practices” of his day.16 “Though we have had war, reconstruction, and abolition as a nation, we still linger in the shadow and blight of an extinct institution. … Neither church nor court is … free from the all pervading atmosphere of color hate.” Racism was a “National Faith” that “hunts us at midnight, it denies us accommodations in hotels and justice in the courts, excludes our children from schools, refuses our sons the right to learn trades and compels us to pursue only such labor that will bring the least reward.” Within his republican tradition, Douglass called for the mobilization of his people: “You know that liberty given is never so precious as liberty sought for and fought for. … Depend upon it, men will not care much for a people who do not care themselves. … If the Republican Party cannot stand a demand for (justice) and fair play, it ought to go down. We were men before that party was born, and our manhood is more sacred than any party can be. Parties were made for men, not men for parties.” This was tough public mobilization rhetoric within the diversity of his country’s population: Although he could have turned to other ethnic groups to make his point, Douglass chose within the context of modernizing American ethnicity. He chose militant Irish Catholics, the very ones who, before and after the war, had engaged in the militant anti-British Fenian Movement, and more signifi­cantly, in relatively large numbers had rioted in 1863 in New York City, where some had launched brutal attacks in African American neighborhoods. “Men may combine to prevent cruelty to animals, for they are dumb and cannot speak for themselves, 15 Washington, Papers, 2:449. 16 Blight, Douglass, 645; Diamond, Nation Transformed, 390.

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but we are men and must speak for ourselves, or we shall not be spoken for at all. We have conventions in America for Ireland, but we should have none if Ireland did not speak for herself. It is because she makes a noise and keeps her cause before the people that other people go to her help.” And lest anyone underestimate his zeal, Douglass added this passage from American republican iconography: “It was the sword of Washington and of Lafayette that gave us Independence.”17 Douglass’s 1883 address to the National Colored Convention also manifested the tension between the folk’s collective identity and the pull of Christian individualism embedded in his hopeful republicanism. In these days, this troubling yet hopeful and patriotic sentiment was shared by many literate African Americans; they reflected at a profound level the intersection with African American history and the republic’s constitutional imperatives, including wars against Native American tribes. An American nationalist, Douglass owned a profound and elegant voice, he invoked fundamental republican principles from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, even as he assumed an African American collective identity that had to be respected as an integral part of America’s social fabric. “Happily for us and for the honor of the Republic, the United States Constitution is just, liberal and friendly. The [recent] amendments to that instrument … establish freedom and abolish all unfair and invidious discrimination against citizen on account of race and color, so far as law can do so. In their view, citizens are neither black nor white, and all are equal.” So, insisted Douglass, with “the voice of a whole people,” we “are asked not only why hold a convention, but with emphasis, why hold a colored convention. … [We answer:] The practical construction of American life is a convention against us. Human law may know no distinctions among men in respect of rights, but human practice may.” In that spirit, Douglass proclaimed that his people, “are a hopeful people. This convention is proof of our faith in … [white America], in reason, in truth, and justice—our belief that prejudice with all its malign accompaniments, may yet be removed by peaceful means; that, assisted by time and events and the growing enlightenment of both races, the color line will ultimately become harmless.” But that hope was also part of a kind of End of Days vision. So, in the long meanwhile, his people would live within their collective identities: “When this [End] shall come it will then only be used, as it should be, to distinguish one variety of the human family from another. It will cease to have any civil, political, or moral 17 Ibid., 390–393. Williams, who had disagreements with Douglass, also spoke of his “people” even as he spoke of the Negro “race,” a common African American association of the two words and concepts, sometimes expressed as a “race of people.” Franklin, Williams, 164–179.

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significance, and colored conventions will then be dispensed with as anachronisms, wholly out of place, but not till then.”18 Among new emerging African American leaders, it was left to W. E. B. Du Bois to make explicit what Douglass and Washington had left unsaid. As a young scholar with a PhD, Du Bois was brilliant and succinct about republican peoplehood among African Americans, about their emotional memory and psychology. He used his own concepts and the vocabulary of his age when, in 1897, Du Bois wrote about the “freedman” who had not yet “found in freedom his promised land.”19 The “shadow of a deep disappointment rests upon the Negro people—a disappointment all the more bitter because the unattained ideal was unbounded save by the simple ignorance of a lowly folk.” Du Bois spoke of particular experiences that shaped collective memories: “The holocaust [sic] of war, the terrors of the Ku Klux Klan, the lies of the carpet baggers, the disorganization of industry, and the contradictory advice of friends and foes [that] left the bewildered serf with no new watchword beyond the old cry of freedom.” And he wrote about republicanism, about the newly enfranchised African American’s self-empowerment: “As the decade closed, however, he began to grasp a new idea. The ideal of liberty demanded for its attainment powerful means, and these the Fifteenth Amendment gave him. … A million black men started with renewed zeal to vote themselves into the kingdom.” When they continued to meet suppression, they were able to turn to “book learning;” to “the curiosity, born of compulsory ignorance, to know and test the power of cabalistic [sic] letters of the white man, the longing to know. Mission and night schools began in the smoke of battle … and at last developed into permanent foundations. Here at last seemed to have been discovered the mountain path to Canaan.” Du Bois evoked the painful past to demonstrate how the African American citizen mobilized collective passions for a purposeful African American future. That citizen, “began to have a dim feeling that to attain his place in the world, he must be himself, and not another. … The red stain of bastardy, which two centuries of systematic legal defilement of Negro women had stamped upon his race, meant not only the loss ancient African chastity, but also the heridetary [sic] weight of a mass of filth from white whoremongers and adulterers, threatening almost the obliteration of the Negro home.” For Du Bois at the end of the American nineteenth century, this history and the collective consciousness of his people should bring a change of national attitudes and policies. “A people thus handicapped ought not be asked 18 Diamond, Nation Transformed, 390–393. 19 Du Bois, “Negro People,” 195–196.

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to race with the world, but rather allowed to give all its time and thought to its own social problems. … Work, culture, and ­liberty—all these we need, not singly, but together; for today these ideals among the Negro people are gradually coalescing, and riding higher meaning in the unifying ideal of race—the ideal of the American republic, in order that some day, on American soil, two world races may give each to each those characteristic which both so sadly lack.” A few years later, in his famed Souls of Black Folks, Du Bois expressed some of these sentiments in language that became classic passages: The American Negro is “born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American world. … It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in mused contempt and pity. One ever feels his two-ness—an American, a Negro, two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings, two warring ideals in our dark bodies, whose dogged strength alone keep it from being torn asunder.” Most African Americans, even as they found themselves pressured to strive for a better self, managed somehow to retain and pass on the fragments and debris that coagulated into a sense of an American Negro identity. “He would not bleach his Negro soul in a flood of white Americanism, for he knows that Negro blood has a message for the world. He simply wishes to make it possible for a man to be both a Negro and an American, without being cursed and spit upon by his fellows, without having the doors of opportunity closed roughly in his face.”20 In Euro-America’s second half of the nineteenth century, the treasured emotional memory of a people was shaped and reshaped by events. And ethnicking, with its blood metaphor, triggered predilections about inherited characteristics. Such perceptions usually subordinated emerging class feelings. The arguments among African American citizens about the proper designation for their enfranchised identity revealed as much: before the civil war, during slavery, it was “Africans” and “Colored American”; and afterward, “colored people,” “black people,” “Negroes,” “Afro-Americans.” Leon Litwack, the distinguished scholar of Southern African American history, places the discussions and divisions over this changing nomenclature into “shifts in racial consciousness,” or expressions of “racial pride,” affirmations of “Americanization,” “assimilation,” “American identity, or a subtle expression drawing on all, depending on time and place,” pride in “unmixed ancestry,” “black ambivalence towards Africa,” and the conduct of whites who often exploited these types of designations in terms

20 Ibid., 195–196.

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of vicious derision. Although these peoplehood associations did not preclude mass participation in working class movements by whatever label, peoplehood associations did not derive from class-consciousness. Most African Americans also did not derive their peoplehood meanings from a lexicon prepared by a republican enthusiast believing with perfect faith that the only significant difference between a white and black American was skin color. In Slaveland, and in the years of oppression and discrimination that followed, whites and blacks had created the dynamic identity that could often speak the language of peoplehood. In fact, the very terminology and controversy bore echoes in other ethnic groups striving to find the balance between American republican individualism and the collective essence of a people in the United States. Any self-conscious Jewish leader or Lutheran German American, to cite but two examples from before WWI, could have appropriately rephrased Sutton E. Griggs’s fear about his people’s future. This southern black clergyman was convinced that the Negro would sooner or later move into America’s mainstream. He would assimilate, skin color and all, and then, with the “loss of color might go the loss of special feeling of kinship. Feeling all this in every fiber of our soul, we cannot view with equanimity the forces at work to whiten the race.”21 Emerging modern American republican ethnicking manifested itself among literate and articulate engaged black citizens in a growing number of towns and cities, especially in the Northeast. Amos Webber, an African American living in Worcester during these years, demonstrated in his daily affairs what this meant on a personal level. His biographer tells us that Webber “demanded equality and developed connections with elite whites even as he remained rooted in the culture and in the institutions of the black community.” He was a “proud black man who was also a proud American … [who] worked incessantly to build organizations that transmitted to the next generation the values embedded in the history, rituals, and moral tales of the black American experience.” No doubt, many whites “thought that blacks as a people lacked a collective history or a social structure … [and] therefore assumed that a man like Amos Webber was just a janitor. He knew better.” He understood that in comparison to the white collectives, a black African American one differed from those of white Americans because, in the North, too, special barriers kept almost all black individuals and their families from economic and political opportunity, from intergenerational upward mobility, and from success in America’s capitalist political economy. That was why Webber, devoted to what has been identified as classic

21 Litwack, Been in the Storm so Long, 457–463.

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American middle-class values, knew he had no choice but to remain locked in the economic station usually associated with the working poor or working class. Webber was a proud middle-class janitor, an African American citizen, a civil war veteran whom, like most of his people, the nation could count on to support its military campaigns in later wars. These moments offered African Americans still again the “opportunities to display their military prowess,” even if it meant going to war against other nonwhites, such as Native Americans and Filipinos.22 In fact, as an internal migrant and first generation urban black American citizen, Webber, and in time millions of others like him, were helping to lay the foundation for a new American ethnicity. To be sure, before the civil war the relatively few freed black men and women and their families living in towns and cities had foreshadowed such developments; but that was at a time when slavery was thriving and even expanding. The turning of the century was in a different era. In the Northeast, blacks and whites were mostly first or second-generation urban migrants, whether of domestic or foreign origin. While they had their collective memories from the American South or East Central and Southern Europe, they also wanted, for themselves and their kinsfolk, accommodation and stability, and, if possible, the success that came with upward mobility. Of course, African Americans also knew that in comparison to every other white ethnic group, in their American liberal democratic society and its political economy, their collective opportunities were under different kinds of ethnic locks than all the others. In the South, they were being constructed bioculturally as a people well suited for legal segregation and prison. Few other members of an ethnic group went to war to die for the republic on the battlefield only to come home to wide spread attitudes expressed so well by a city prosecutor in Mason, Georgia. After the Spanish American War, he told a courtroom: “I am going to show a nigger soldier that he is the same as any other nigger.”23

22 Salvatore, Webber, 288–321. 23 Litwack, op. cit., 466.

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CHAPTER 6

Peoplehood Citizens

In that different American nineteenth century, Jews also have been changing, even rebelling, drawn and pulled by the force of economic and political opportunity, enlightened rationalism, and republican assimilation; some, and increasingly many more, reflect the cutting edge of that change in the direction of what would later be designated secular Jewry. All are part of a changing people of the Talmud; they lie at different points on the spectrum of change, but almost all are still part of the spectrum. Most have varying standards of observance, and there are enormous variations in their knowledge of classical Jewish sources. With these, and biocultural convictions of their own, their religious culture is like that, “river full of debris;” to restate Hall’s lines about early American “Puritans”; they are caught up in that “muddied … process by which culture was transmitted, one that functioned to preserve and pass along many bits and pieces of past systems of belief.”1 Late in that century, they are secularizing post Talmudic Jews; they are ethnicking as part of American republican peoplehoods. The canons’ fragments and debris intermingled in the daily lives of most Jews who, like earlier residents in America, also had relatively little knowledge about Judaism. But like them, except now in larger numbers, including the increasing newcomers from East Central Europe, they ate through a variety of different engagements with kosher food, selectively recognized and observed Shabbat, the arrival of the New Year, the Day of Atonement, Passover, or other special holydays. Jews attended to family lifecycle events—boys’ brith mila and the ­barmitzvah—a wedding, and finally ended life being certain that a child or a stand-in would recite the kaddish at a grave site that they could claim with their membership in a synagogue or a Landsmanschaft.2 That is to say, they gave Jewish shape to what they considered sacred, with which they became 1 Michael Kammen, Mystic Chords of Memory: The Transformation of Tradition in American Culture (New York: Knopf, 1991), passim; Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, passim 2 On the “Kaddish,” see Leon Wieseltier, Kaddish (New York: Vintage, 2000), 129–163.

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p­ ost-Talmudic Jews and with which they simultaneously engaged contemporary American peoplehood. These Jews, like immigrant forebears in the United States, did not belong to the classic canons’ learned elites, for as one leading historian has noted, the “vast majority of [their] Jewish children … never went beyond [the rudiments of Hebrew reading and Bible stories]: they neither studied biblical texts in a sophisticated way, nor did they learn anything of post biblical Judaism—the Talmud, Jewish legal codes, modern Jewish literature.”3 Their early American experiences had foreshadowed what would happen. In the years between the mid-seventeenth century and the early republic, the conduct of Sephardim and Ashkenazim demonstrated these changing engagements. They observe and don’t observe and yet seek ways to discipline those that do not follow the rules of congregations where they exist.4 In letters or diaries, they reflect deeds that obviously follow rules and practices for a Jewish kitchen, a Sabbath and Passover, and for other holidays in the Jewish calendar. Whether they observe or violate, they are acting within details of daily life shaped by a Talmudic corpus and the customs derived from it. On this side of the Atlantic, these Jews were changing in ways not all that different from accounts of conduct in the lands of emigration, especially in those parts relatively isolated from substantial, well-functioning organized Jewish communities.5 Mordechai Noah’s career is instructive. By the 1830s, he had become a famous spokesman for Jewish rights as well as an enthusiastic searcher for a distinct

3 Jonathan Sarna, American Judaism: A History (New Haven: Yale, 2004), 174–175ff. For treatments of the Talmud and its complex cultures in general historical studies of American religion see Sydney E. Ahlstrom, A Religious History of the American People (New Haven: Yale), 1972, 569–582, 967–984, 1130, 1155; R. Laurence Moore, Religious Outsiders and the Making of Americans (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 72–101; George M. Marsden, Religion and American Culture (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1990), 142–147, 219–224. Ahlstrom, who does not index “Talmud,” on 571 explains that “By 500 CE the huge Babylonian Talmud had taken definitive shape: the nature and rationale of Jewish isolationism and continuity were defined” and that subsequently “Judaism became more than ever a way of life according to the meticulously interpreted and rigorously applied provisions of the Torah.” On page 971, he says of Jewish ­Orthodoxy that until the end of the nineteenth century in the Russian Empire, “Here, where the gentile world did not intrude on Torah-centered living, the Sabbath could truly be a foretaste of heaven. The old system of nurture assured the raising up of new students of the Scriptures, the Talmud, and the rabbinic commentaries.” But for American religious history, the subject of his book, the Talmud is all but irrelevant for his understanding of religious history. Moore does index “Talmud,” but the references are to passing remarks involving Reform Jews (78) and to transfer of training in upward mobility (86–87). Marsden ignores the Talmud altogether. 4 Faber, op. cit., 57–60. 5 Ibid. In addition to pages cited see also 21, 34, 37, 42, 50–54, 60, 62–67, 84–85, 90–93, 112–116, 118, 128ff, 137–139.

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American peoplehood, very much like Protestant Christians, but comparatively different from them and capable of autonomous growth and survival. Noah said he wanted it done without Talmudic literature about which he knew little, certainly nothing directly. But like so many of his fellow Jews in America, Noah lived with fragments and debris, which in his case apparently were touched by influences from efforts to compare the Talmudic canon to the Catholic one. Perhaps those influences were tainted by old Catholic and Protestant polemics against the Talmud itself.6 Noah at this time was talking of the Talmudic canon as an “excrescence” filled with “many crudities,” which he was certain struck “at the pure principles contained in the Bible.” He told observant contemporary Jews to “shut the Talmud and open the Bible,” for it is God’s word and “our safest guide.” However, no matter how lax his own pattern of observance, Noah’s Jewish public policy insisted that traditional requirements remain “sacred and immutable.” These regulated ritual circumcisions, Hebrew, “the language used no doubt by Adam,” the Jewish Sabbath, the holidays, food preparation and consumption, the conduct of women, and intermarriage. While some contemporary reformers were prepared to turn away from some or most of those requirements, Noah trusted his fragments and debris, his shield against undisciplined assimilation, the source of his Jewish agency. So, while orbiting the Talmudic canon, Noah had convinced himself that he was following “pure principles in the Bible,” when in fact those traditional requirements of his were Talmudic.7 Noah’s modern biographer extends this conclusion to Diaspora Jewry in general: “Noah’s ritual practice typifies not only American Jewish religious observance in his day but also the Judaism practiced by a great many Diaspora Jews in all of the modern period. Jewish folk religion, as distinct from the Judaism laid out in rabbinic codes, has always mediated between the lure of the external world and the countervailing desire to identify with one’s own people.”8 Noah obviously had been in the midst of profound change, in part because of the American institutional efforts being made to change the basic relationships between Jews and their canon. When trying to resolve tensions between its fragments and newly enunciated republican rights, in the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights, competing advocates began their controversies within the regime of Talmudic culture not outside

6 Sarna, Jacksonian Jew: The Two Worlds of Mordecai Noah (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1981), 139. 7 Ibid., 139–141. 8 Ibid., 141–142.

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of it.9 And when the Republic extended the boundaries of religious beliefs to include Jews, those boundaries included the Talmudic canon, which in Europe was still under constant attack. Jefferson and Adams, who each supported “Jewish rights,” in the closing years of their lives corresponded about Judaism and the singular importance to it of the Talmudic canon and its parts, each of which they identified by name. While both former presidents applied their general anti-clericalism to discussions of Talmud-anchored Judaism, they differed dramatically in evaluating Judaism’s contribution to civilization: Adams thought it was positive, Jefferson sounded like one of his Central European contemporaries who often misrepresented the Talmudic canon.10 In those years, German-speaking Central Europe contained the lands of nineteenth-century Jewish emigration to the United States. There, most Jews would have understood those American presidents far better than fellow Jews such as Noah. Most were village Jews, speaking Yiddish, in different dialects, observing the rules of the canons—that is, until the era of German unification living in communities governed by Talmudic culture. To be sure, growing numbers had been pulling away, especially among the urbanizing Jewish middle classes, but having emerged within a world of Talmudic culture, they also remained engaged with fragments and debris in the larger cities of the German Laender, and after emigration, in the United States as well.11 In a manner of speaking, this emergence meant Jews were migrating from one mental space to another—from “ghetto” and its Talmudic culture—while also migrating, much more quickly, across a physical space—village to town and often across the Atlantic Ocean. For in the lands of emigration, especially in the first half of the nineteenth century, the evidence speaks to the strength of the half-life of that changing Talmudic culture. The Jewish calendar and the “sensory experiences” associated with it was long lasting. Money outlays were frequently associated with expenditures on the sacred religious occasions, the purchase of food and utensils, as well as on ritual objects satisfying aesthetic values. Shabbat observance continued to be meticulously observed. The sustained traditional role of the home as a place of prayer and the woman’s unchallenged authority in child rearing and sexual ritual observance. And the rabbinate had almost always been trained in yeshivot, that is, they had little or no formal secular education. What is more, 9 Sarna, American Judaism, 42–47. 10 Ibid., 41; Korman, “Jews as a Changing People of the Talmud”: 23–66. 11 Diner, Time for Gathering (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1992), 2–4.

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for the c­ entury as a whole, the links to Jewish settlements in Palestine remained in place.12 These characteristics intersected with growing intellectual challenges from militants emerging from the Haskala [the Jewish Enlightenment], as well as from sustained attack by Christian private and public authorities. Reformers insisted on the right to shape legal practices to fit their needs. Said one, the Bible and the Talmud had no divine origin and therefore could not lay a claim on human conduct. So, if a man and a woman wanted to do so, as a Jewish couple, without formal Jewish consent, they had every right to marry or divorce by the rules of the state in which they lived. In the nineteenth century, however, these challenges did not overwhelm the role of the canon’s fragments and debris, a failure providing easy opportunities for sustained private and public attacks on Jewish life. In any event, that was why German policymakers attached to political emancipation price tags trying to break links to Yiddish, Hebrew, and in general, to exclusive Jewish control over Jewish education. The Damascus Affair of 1840 illustrates important ramifications of these generalizations, because they engage the subject of peoplehood formation in European regions of emigration to the United States. The Damascus Affair involved a ritual murder accusation that attracted worldwide attention. To Jewish leaders the murder claims were dangerous for it was obvious from the start that the charges were against the Talmud—it was the accused source sanctioning ritual murder.13 The charge was also entangled with commonly held attitudes about presumed inherited traits among Jews. One type was akin to, “the universally accepted fact that Jews had a peculiar smell,” which even baptism could not remove.14 Another perspective, more intellectual and more formally presented, was comparable to notions about peoplehood formation: in German lands cultural gatekeepers constructed “Bildung” for shaping the “genuine” German character; Americans constructed the role of the frontier in the shaping of the American character; friend and foe alike, for good or ill, insisted that the Talmud experience shaped the Jewish character. Among Jews themselves, even as some of them mounted effective counter attacks, elements of the enlightened critique also manifested themselves. In the face of fierce religious opposition, itself divided in response to enlightened 12 Michael A. Meyers, German-Jewish History in Modern Times, 4 vols. (New York: Columbia, 1996), 4:90–97. 13 Jonathan Frankel, Damascus Affair: “Ritual Murders,” Politics, and the Jews in 1840 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 25–59, 439–445. 14 David Katz, The Jews in the History of England, 1485–1850 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), 108.

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thought and challenges to established leadership, a steadily increasing number of clerical and anti-clerical militants fought the practitioners of that traditional Talmudic world in a spirit Booker T. Washington could have appreciated. The militants also charged the traditionalists as medieval, stagnant, unenlightened, primitive, uncivilized practitioners. The Jewish critics were usually different from their Christian ones—as a group they prized the Talmud as a glorious achievement of the human spirit and used the rabbis of the classical Talmudic period as ideal types for undermining the leadership of rabbis and rebbes in their own time. So, the Damascus crisis had not prevented Abraham Geiger, already embattled in Breslau as a liberal Jewish rabbi, from denouncing the Damascus charges while establishing a radical distance between himself and the Talmudic corpus. He wrote about “the private views of Talmudists [who] do not enjoy any divine authority,” and insisted that within their ancient and medieval world, they obviously had made “inhumane pronouncements as much against Jews considered in Talmudic terms to be living irreligiously, as against non-Jews.”15 That Damascus affair also reverberated on politically active individuals such as Moses Hess, if not immediately then certainly by 1862, when he wrote about it in his famous Rome and Jerusalem.16 By then, new nation states were aborning, with especially dramatic events unfolding in Italy, Germany, and the United States. For Hess, the crisis of 1840 was a new starting point; and it provided him with a critical building block in the formation of his modern Jewish nationalism. He began with a formulation by a famous contemporary Jewish historian, Heinrich Graetz, the author of the distinguished multivolume History of the Jewish People: “The history of the post-Talmudic era still possesses national character: under no circumstances is it merely religious or ecclesiastical history.”17 For Hess, the Talmudic canon had been and remained crucial for the maintenance of that character: “What would have become of Judaism and of the Jews if they would not have wrapped themselves up, until the day of national rebirth, like a cocoon in their learning in order to appear again, at the end of a fully attained spiritual regeneration, as a butterfly next to all other liberated nations.”18 15 Frankel, Damascus Affair, 439–445. 16 Shlomo Avineri, Moses Hess (New York: New York University, 1985), 178, but see the entire chapter, pages 171–241; Rome and Jerusalem (New York: Block Publishing Company, 1945), passim. 17 Avineri, Hess, 180. Avineri puts his point this way: “While most Christian theologians and many Jewish Reformers identify Judaism with the Torah, and relegate the Mishnah and the Talmud to the status of legalistic quibbles and folk traditions, Hess follows [Heinrich] Graetz’s historical appreciation and vindication of post-biblical Judaism” (ibid., 214). 18 Ibid., 184.

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With a family memory of Talmudic learning and conduct, as well as his own accumulated trappings, Hess was a post-Talmudic Jew, unusual because, long before others, he was already well on the way to becoming a kind of modern secular peoplehood enthusiast, one with a contemporary nationalist vision for a people that then had no state. In the Rhineland under French occupation, his family had experienced the end of walled-in ghetto life; later, within a much more confining Prussian rule and then, in much more open Paris, young Hess, not unlike his friends, for example the different Heinrich Heine, in dramatic fashion continued to leave Talmudic culture’s mental walls, without abandoning its links to an emerging modern Jewish peoplehood identity. But now, in the 1860s, still as a radical socialist, Hess famously wrote about his instrumental approach to religious conduct: “If I would have had a family, I would, despite my dogmatic heterodoxy, publicly join an orthodox synagogue; even in my home I would observe meticulously all days of mourning and festivals, in order to keep alive in me and my descendants the Jewish national tradition.”19 This unusual instrumental post-Talmudic Hess of the 1860s illuminates a migration landscape of Jewish immigrants leaving for the United States. They usually identified with traditional Jewish life, that is to say in comparisons to the many kinfolks who stayed home, moved into towns and cities, and became post-Talmudic. After the American Civil War, notwithstanding the recurrent hard times brought on by market driven business cycles, emigration pressure shifted more significantly from West Central Europe’s German and Yiddish language areas to East Central Europe’s different Yiddish language areas. Increasingly, a much larger number of post-Talmudic Jews, including more of the likes of Hess, were now coming to a land where other kinds of post-Talmudic Jews had started to build their institutions, but where many of their contemporaries also preferred to live outside of institutional networks. As in the past, they could all identify with each other, even though the Americans had fashioned some important institutional changes in response to the political and religious cultures in which they lived. Among these were congregational arrangements manifesting a similarity to, perhaps a reflection of, an American Protestant trend in independent sectarianism. In other words, these were changes among the ranks of America’s post-Talmudic Jews occurring within a distinctive American republican peoplehood acculturation process.

19 Ibid., 1–7, 238. See also Ken Koltrun-Fromm, Moses Hess and Modern Jewish Identity (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001), passim. For Diner on Hess see a Time for Gathering, 20–21. For Heine, see S. S. Prawer, Heine’s Jewish Comedy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983), passim, but especially 431–528.

Peoplehood Citizens

In it, familiar non-Jewish perceptions of connections between Jews and the Talmudic culture were alive and well. Isaac Mayer Wise, who in the second half of the nineteenth century emerged as a leader of a rebellious religious Reform movement, certainly appreciated the antebellum connections, at least so he recollected toward the end of the century, about English missionary inspired antisemitism: “The Talmud, and incidentally, the Jews and Judaism were attacked … erelong … every pastor and every insignificant little preacher, every common jester, and every political rogue rained blows upon the Talmud and the Jews … and all this called forth not one word of protest from any source.” It is worth repeating, however, as elsewhere in Euro-America, post-Talmudic Jews continued to begin life with the celebration of b’rith Mila, ate through a variety of different engagements with kashrut, selectively remembered or guarded the Shabbat, Passover, and the high holidays associated with a new year; and finally, recited the kaddish in the cemeteries and synagogues of their choice. That was why much later, in 1913, Abraham Cahan’s fictitious David Levinsky could still know how he and other Jews in America engaged in unique peoplehood conduct; that was why when he passed by an independent Shul or Stiebel on the Lower East Side, the act stimulated his “Old Country” childhood memories of Talmud learning, by then all but fossils of his mind. To be sure, much had changed between the civil war and 1913. In these decades, the very nature of American peoplehood was experiencing its modern transformation. But consistently, American Jewish ethnicking had also continued to reflect the prismatic influence of the how-to-do-it Talmudic culture, including variations between a victorious North and a defeated South. Driven by the immediate passions of war and its wounds, Jews enlisted their religious calendars and patterns of observance in their changing identities. Jewish leaders, ever conscious to keep militant Christians at bay, mobilized kinsmen, and together they were quick to join fellow citizens in linking themselves to the changing goals of war and its devastating costs. In the North, they especially used the coincidence of Passover with Appomattox and the assassination; they gloried in victory and in the achievements of emancipation and mourned the martyrdom of President Lincoln and the other fallen men in blue, Jews as well Christians. Meanwhile, in the South, the passions of defeat and loss brought Jewish identification with the cause of the Confederacy. In this instance, Talmudic culture and its memories of the destruction of the First and Second Commonwealth were employed to give peoplehood meaning to the Jewish Southerner’s citizenship a newly found tragic sense of American life.20 20 Sarna, American Judaism, 122–124.

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REPUBLICAN ­D I S C I P L I N E

CHAPTER 7

Safeguarding the Public Square

Post-civil war ethnicking comprehends internal struggles among peoplehoods. Almost always they are conflicted about the best republican pathways to a successful collective future. Formal and informal challenges come from within the fabric of the modernizing nation state as it monopolizes citizenship, patriotism, and loyalty. For this republic incorporates the so-called private, unique, collective experiences of many a peoplehood. African American citizens face the worst: dependably, but yet unexpectedly, they always seem to be under mortal threat. At the same time, white ethnicking citizens with their so-called private activities have to deal with other kinds of informal threats and acts of intimidation as well; but though they often face an ad-hoc boycott, even a riot, they rarely experience deportation, as would two famous immigrants of the 1920s: Emma Goldman and Marcus Garvey. The decades turning into the twentieth century contained events in liberal Jewish circles that are instructive about those other kinds of threats and acts of intimidation facing white ethnicking citizens. In these circles, the well-known Andrew Dickson White could move comfortably even though he was a friend of another liberal, Goldwin Smith, a famous English academic and antisemitic public intellectual. White, president of Cornell University, had hired him in the founding years of the Ithaca campus. No doubt those Jewish circles could live with the kind of antisemitism White thus tolerated because they accepted as a given that the changing People of the Talmud also included the pious, or the so observant ones, that the Talmud and its rabbinic interpreters served as exclusive sources of truth and knowledge. But to Smith, White, and those liberal Jews, the heart and soul of Talmudic Jewry was in fact a primitive medieval orthodoxy; as such, self-evidently, it was in conflict with modern American life and its ­republicanism. This perspective went to the heart of a profound misunderstanding about American peoplehoods. To be sure, the Talmud engagement primarily involved contentious arguments among Jews. But at issue was also the perceived ­influence of medieval orthodoxy on modern life, the kind that Booker T. Washington

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engaged in his struggle to modernize the black clergy. The larger question at the time—what is fundamentally misunderstood about American p­ eoplehoods— erupted sharply when at the end of the nineteenth century, Theodor Herzl began to gain some public traction for his Zionist program. The story is well known but deserves restating, and in the context of the vocabulary being used by Central European Jewish intellectuals like Herzl. In his time, “Stamm” and “Stammesbewusstsein” were common German terms used to articulate “the idea of a specifically Jewish loyalty based on the fiction of a common origin,” to use the language of historian Till van Raden. “They thereby articulated an idea of membership that resembles contemporary conceptions” of ethnicity, community, or people. He quotes a “self declared ‘German loyal to the Empire and of Jewish confession’” in 1887 who “exhorted German Jews … to fight [radical assimilation and] antisemitism based on each one’s ‘reverence for his religion and his tribe.’” (After WWI, a “vaguely Zionist” encyclopedia writer explained: “Unlike the concept of a religious community … the term ‘tribe’ emphasized the ‘aspect of common descent and history.’”)1 Herzl, as a secularist respectful of Jewish traditions of faith, had experiences in Vienna that brought him into the orbit Moses Hess had traveled before him. Herzl also recognized what his liberal Jewish critics refused to see: Jews as a changing people of the Talmud retained in their secularizing ways a strong sense of collective identity and memory. It was an integral part of who they were, capable of accommodating to a modernizing nation state but with fragments and debris bonding them to a collective identity and its memory. He also recognized that in his European context, supporters of political emancipation, granted by governments with republican principles and tolerant of religious differences, expected Jews to abandon those identities and memories and to eventually let go of their Judaism. For Herzl, that tension in nationality, in bioculturally conscious European civic societies—the policy of admitting individual Jews to full rights of citizenship but denying them public loyalty to a peoplehood—­threatened, in time, to so aggravate existing passions of Jew hatred that only an international public act establishing a Jewish state would prevent a catastrophe, the kind of extermination Grant had feared for Native Americans and Douglass had spoken about to African Americans. But for Germans or French citizens of the Mosaic persuasion, as well as American Jewish republicans, it was ludicrous to conjure such a catastrophe.2 1 Till Van Rahden, Jews and Other Germans: Civil Society, Religious Diversity, and Urban ­Politics in Breslau, 1860–1925, trans. Marcus Brainard (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2008), 9. 2 Shlomo Avineri, Herzl, passim

Safeguarding the Public Square

To be sure, for them as well as white American republicans in general, peoplehoods—sans Anglo-Americans and sometimes German-Americans—were minorities, considered private, not fit for the public square. In the unique case of African American citizens, even as they were streaming out of the South and in fact sustaining and developing their own powerful sense of peoplehood, most remained more caged than ever: African American peoplehood was not only considered unfit for the public square; it was all but invisible. For American Jewish liberals, accepting White and his antisemitic connections was quite different. It was all about being part of the winning side in the modern battle against peoplehoods ruled by medieval orthodoxies. By then, many of these were being fitted into constructs of biocultural primitives, a category in the hierarchy that emerging social scientists were beginning to label “ethnics,” a term first applied to Pacific islanders, and long before that by ancient Athenians to peoples living between themselves and the “Barbarians.” For some in militant liberal Jewish circles, including White, Henry Adams’ famous Jewish passages may have screamed bigotry, but they surely shared fragments of his sacred kitsch.3 Between his “Virgin” and his “Dynamo,” the great American medievalist exhibited classic metaphors he and his contemporaries clearly understood. Two well-known examples suffice. In the early twentieth century, Adams did not have to explain to many of his readers why he was starting his autobiography with Israel’s Temple, circumcision ritual, and his, “uncle the high priest, under the name of Israel Cohen,” any more than why he was claiming that his sense of place in post-civil war America was threatened by Polish Jews, “still reeking of the Ghetto, snarling a weird Yiddish.” They were, it was well known, medieval, living in a traditional framework of conduct and beliefs derived from the Talmud.4 In 1906, he wrote his brother Brooks, “God tried drowning out the world once, but it did no kind of good, and there are said to be four-hundred-and fifty thousand Jews now doing Kosher in New York 3 Robert S. Wistrich, Antisemitism: The Longest Hatred (New York: Schoken Books, 1992), 117; Ernest Samuel, Henry Adams: The Middle Years (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1958), 168; Henry Adams: The Major Phase (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1964), 130–131, 243, 255, 356–357; Henry Adams (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 97–98, 315, 320. 4 J. C. Levenson, The Mind and Art of Henry Adams (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1957), 224–228, 354; Henry Adams, Esther (New York: Holt, 1886; New York: Francis Snow Compton, 1938; New York, 1984), ix, 2, 17, 28, 125; Washington Chauncy Ford, ed., Letters of Henry Adams, 1858–1918, 2 vols. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1930–38), 1:388, 2:620; Edward Chalfant, Better in Darkness: A Biography of Henry Adams, His Second Life, 1862–1891 (Hamden, Anchor Books: 1994) 391, 800–801n35.

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alone. God himself owned failure.”5 For such sentiments alone among the leaders of America’s Anglo-American intellectual elite, of which White was a member in good standing, Goldwin Smith’s antisemitism deserves a closer look. His anti-Jewish passions reveal not only how this kind of construction process occurred. Some of his attitudes may also help in gaining insight into the darker sides of White and his friends when they appointed themselves as guardians of the republic’s public square to discipline if not change threatening peoplehoods. Smith had joined the faculty as a nonresident professor of English and constitutional history. He stayed for three years before moving on to Toronto, where he continued his teaching and writing, and also his occasional correspondence with White.6 Smith had been Oxford University’s Regius Professor of History for eight years and had established a significant reputation as a liberal publicist opposed to religious orthodoxies, especially to those of the Jews. About them, he wrote on the basis of the kind of sources associated with the genre of European writings during the last third of the nineteenth century. In the late 1870s and early 1880s, Smith continued to believe Jews had not changed since the Damascus Affair, when he had been convinced that they had prevented England from conducting an independent foreign policy toward countries with large Jewish populations. Smith distinguished between “liberal” Jews and “genuine” Jews, insisting that the relatively few liberal Jews in enlightened countries “have virtually ceased to be Jews. … So rapid is the progress of [their Judaic] disintegration … as to render it probable that in a few generations Judaism will cease to exist [there]. One can hardly imagine,” he wrote in the pages of Nineteenth Century in 1878, “that anything palpably primeval and tribal would long resist the sun of modern civilization, when a wise and tolerant policy once allowed that sun freely to shine upon it.”7 Genuine Jews, in their migrating masses out of Eastern Europe, frightened him. That bright sun could not penetrate and therefore would not disintegrate what he, in “American slang,” called that Jewish “hard shell type.” Genuine Jews were not like Unitarians or Methodists, people having “merely a 5 Harold Dean Carter, Henry Adams and His Friends (Boston: 1947), 583. 6 Glenn C. Altschuler, Andrew D. White—Educator, Historian, Diplomat (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1979), 85, 101, 167, 201. 7 Gerald Tulchinsky, “Goldwin Smith: Victorian, Liberal, Anti-Semite,” The Whig Standard Magazine, September 22, 1990, 4–6; Steven J. Bayme, “Jewish Leadership and Anti-Semitism in Britain” (PhD diss., Columbia University, 1977), 120–128; Colin Holmes, “Goldwin Smith,” Patterns of Prejudice 6 (September–October 1972), 25–30; Michael N. Dobkowski, The Tarnished Dream: The Basis of American Anti-Semitism (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1979), 187; Goldwin Smith, “Can Jews Be Patriots?” Nineteenth Century, vol. 3 (May 1878): 875–878. The quotations are on 875–876. The article was in response to Rabbi Herman Adler’s “Can Jews Be Patriots?” ibid., April, 637–643 where Adler refers to Smith’s attitudes about Jews and English foreign policy.

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religious belief ” that in no way affected their “secular relations” with other citizens: “Judaism is a distinction of race, the religion being identified with the race as is the case in the whole group of primeval and tribal relations.” For Smith, the genuine Jew was a person, “with a special deity of his own race. The rest of mankind are to him not merely people holding a different creed, but aliens in blood.” By 1881, Smith could declare: “Israel is not a sect, but a vast relic of primeval tribalism, with its tribal mark, its tribal separation, and its tribal God. The affi­ nity of Judaism is not to nonconformity but to caste.” Goldwin Smith, perceived by contemporaries on both sides of the Atlantic as a modern, liberal, tolerant political activist and distinguished academic, represented himself as a general critic of all religious orthodoxies. In the kind of scholarly fashion he shared with Heinrich von Treitschke, the popular and famous Prussian historian to whom he was often compared, Smith was eager to expose the source of that Judaic primeval tribalism that so effectively shielded itself from the disintegrating rays of the modern sun. He buttressed his arguments with Biblical texts, especially passages about rituals of circumcision and injunctions against intermarriage. He described Jews in their ancient historical setting as a “community of husband men” who, even as they had demonstrated their capacity for intolerance, had produced “a great religion,” had “memorably contributed to the progress of humanity.” From there, Smith extended his remarks to post-Biblical Jewry and well beyond. He knew there was a connection between Biblical days and a much later Jewish priesthood. When rabbis wielded the “civil sword,” they rejected a posture of tolerance towards those whose expressions and deeds differed from the priesthood: Maimonides’ works burned in public. Excommunication choked freedom of thought. And in the Poland of his time, Smith claimed, “bigotry capable of anything is to be found among the zealots of the Jewish race.” Smith often relied on information obtained from James Laister, an English correspondent whom he paid for his services as a Talmud informant. Goldwin Smith apparently knew little or nothing about the subject. Laister, a Methodist minister, who aired his own views in Modern Thought, usually stressed the significance of the Talmud in linking Biblical Jewry to the present. He followed the argument that Dominicans and Franciscans had been advancing since the thirteenth century: “The Jews, whom we are now discussing have not given us the Bible, they have given us the Talmud,” which he insisted was the “modern application of Mosaic Laws in hostility to gentiles.”8 8 James Laister, “Why are Jews Persecuted?” Modern Thought 4 (1882): 145–51, 183–192, 5 (1883), 529–36, in Goldwin Smith Papers, microfilm reels, Cornell University Archives.

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With Smith, he saw Jews as people standing in the way of progressive civilization. Modern “genuine Jews” are not scriptural Jews at all. Laister explained: “Russian Jews are Talmudic.”9 Laister, also ignorant about the content of the Talmud eagerly pushed this campaign with Goldwin Smith. In the spring of 1882, he found a Talmud expert he could trust and use for their mutual needs, a Jewish convert to Christianity. “I am going to tell him … that what is most needed is direct evidence that the teaching of the Talmud is actually operative now. We know it is,” he wrote Smith, “but we want proof. We are met at present in two ways, first it is not in the Talmud, or else it means something different. … We know nothing of the Talmud,” he acknowledged, “it is a sealed book to all but a few Jews [sic].” The newly found Talmud expert seemed astonished at their ignorance when he realized, reported Laister, that Laister had no appreciation of the relation between the Talmud and Jewish conduct. The convert said: “It is true that to most Jews the Talmud itself is a sealed book, but its sayings, its proverbs, its maxims have eaten themselves into the daily life and conversation of the race. The Book is not read, but its spirit is everywhere.” Laister must have been astonished for other reasons as well. He reported on newly acquired information about the details of ritual circumcision and about something all “genuine Jews” wear: “a scarf fit with tassels (‘fringe’) … under the waistcoat (not to be confounded with the scarf worn at worship);” it is “called the ‘four corners’—Arba Can F[?]oth.” Laister also felt compelled to apologize to Smith for misleading him about one of the newly acquired details Laister had obtained: “I made a mistake when I told you that Jewesses wore wigs to conceal premature baldness. It is a fact that they fade very early, but the wig is explained in this way. When she marries (in orthodox countries) she is shorn of her hair the next morning, and ever afterwards wears a head covering peculiar to—that is to say it differs in different countries. … In England and America where the Jews are semi-gentiles as regards exteriors” a simple wig so as “not to look singular … generally … is worn only by foreigners of whom there are now a great number in London.”10 Goldwin Smith integrated this type of knowledge within the folk hereditarianism thought that framed so many responses to the mass migration of Jews out of the Old Polish Kingdom, that is from Russia, Austria-Hungary, and the Prussian Duchy of Poznan. They were primeval tribal people, dangerous, because Smith 9 Ibid., 16 December 1881. 10 Ibid., May 19, November 6, 1882. The F may have been an H. Laister to Smith, December 16, 1881.

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believed in the inheritance of acquired characteristics. That belief was a­ mbiguous enough to allow him to turn to fragments and debris, to capriciously identify as “Jewish” habits, instincts, occupations, or some other c­ haracteristics he found harmful: in Smith’s mind, that “hard shell” of Jewish particularity protected from the progressive forces of evolution and enlightenment. In 1881, one English contemporary expressed Smith’s kind of construction this way: “The fact that during a long period … [ Jews] were absolutely driven into money-dealing as their sole business, seems to have developed a heredity faculty of accumulation.”11 Laister also argued from remote causes. Whatever he found abhorrent in the conduct of Jews in the Old Polish Kingdom was a “logical outcome of their religious teaching and social training.” (In typical neo-Lamarckian fashion, he had identified a critical sustaining mechanism for that conduct by pointing to the institutionalized practices training the young of each generation.) Goldwin Smith agreed, in his way. The Jews, “have now been so long a wandering race, ‘preferring to earn their living with their heads,’ that the tendency is ingrained, and cannot be altered by anything that Christendom can do.” The condition was part of a general phenomenon: “The same thing would probably have befallen the Greeks had they, like the Jews been permanently converted into a race without a home. For such habits, whether formed by an individual or a race, humanity is not responsible, nor can it prevent them from bearing their natural fruits.” And there was this fact to consider: “Judaism is Legalism, of which the Talmud is the most signal embodiment. … In the competition of this world’s goods it is pretty clear that the legalist will be apt to have the advantage and at the same time that his conduct will often appear not right to those whose highest monitor is not the law.” Thus, the professor of political science and history could reach for this general conclusion: “in whatever camp the Jew is found, he will be apt for some time, unless the doctrine of heredity is utterly false, to retain the habits formed during the eighteen centuries of itinerant existence, without a country and under circumstances which rendered cunning, suppleness, and intrigue almost as necessary weapons of self defense in his case as the sword and the lance were in the case of the feudal soldier.”12 Jewish migration out of the East was dangerous. It was one thing for Smith, and those who concurred, that “men of Jewish descent who have put off tribalism altogether” are to be welcomed as citizens in the

11 H. M. Hyndman, “The Dawn of a Revolutionary Epoch,” Nineteenth Century 9 ( January 1881): 10–11. 12 Goldwin Smith Papers, February 22, 1882, Nineteenth Century 10 (October 1881): 501, 511–512. See also Smith, “New Light on the Jewish Question,” North American Review 152 (August 1891): 129–143.

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fullest sense of the term, and that the welcoming society should “rejoice in any good gifts, peculiar to their stock, which they may bring to the common store.”13 It was quite another to ignore deep bonds between “liberal” Jews and the masses of hard-shelled “genuine” Jews streaming west. “The common people know nothing about Lessing and “Nathan Der Weise;” and if they did,” Smith explained, “they might say with truth that the character of “Nathan Der Weise” is as fictitious as that of the Eastern sages of Voltaire.” Smith looked for ways to protect liberal political economies and their progressive civilizations from this legacy of the Middle Ages. General principles of Manchesterian economics required his opposition to restraints on migration within the Euro-American world. But this Jewish migration, coming out of the Old Polish Kingdom, required the special treatment demanded by a “case of absolute necessity.” The “land of every nation is its own,” explained Smith. “The right of self defense is not confined to those who are called upon to resist an armed invader. It might be exercised with equal propriety, though in a different way, by a nation the character and commercial life of which were threatened by a great irruption of Polish Jews. The Americans think themselves perfectly at liberty to lay restrictions on the immigration of the Chinese, though the Chinaman with his labourer’s shovel is nothing like so formidable an invader as the Jew.”14 Some of Smith’s devotions may have served as unspoken suppositions held by men such as White about Polish and Russian Jewry and its migration. For one, Smith’s misrepresentations of the Talmud are not all that different from European attackers and, by extension, from views Jefferson and Ralph Waldo Emerson helped to promulgate and sustain. For another, like them and John Adams, Smith held a republican animus toward all clerics. This one reached back to the post-Christian paganism of the Enlightenment, especially to the Deists who had attacked the ancient Hebrew of the Old Testament and the Jew of the eighteenth century. But White’s connections with liberal, believing Jews brought him into contact with Jewish convictions that were critical of the Talmud and of the Jew who uncritically conducted his or her life according to rules derived from it. These were especially well expressed by one of Smith’s English countryman, the illustrious C. E. Montefiore, a distinguished Jewish scholar who in England had long fought anti-Jewish prejudice of the kind Smith exhibited and in the non-Jewish circles in which White moved in the United States. Montefiore wrote: “Pharisaic, Rabbinic, Jewish are adjectives still not infrequently used as 13 Nineteenth Century 10: 495–496. 14 Ibid.: 510.

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s­ ynonymous, not only for narrow, intolerant, and obsolete, but also for everything and anything not in New Testament or early Christian literature which the particular writer happens to dislike. All that is noble and good is original and Christian and new; all that is crude or disagreeable is Jewish and Rabbinic and old. … I am a Liberal Jew,” explained Montefiore, “differing even far more widely than a modern orthodox Jew from the religion of the Rabbis; yet my Judaism comes to me through them, and is a development of theirs. … [M]uch of their religious teaching seems to me fine and noteworthy. It contains many ‘flowers.” But he read all with critical distance: “Some of it, even though we can no longer accept it, is yet striking and beautiful. Some of it is capable of adaptation, enlargement, and purification. Some of it is pathetic, showing the conflict between higher and lower impulses, or revealing a struggle of advancing thought against the bonds of a cruel dogma (namely the perfection and inspired character of every Old Testament utterance), which made progress in certain directions difficult or impossible.” After identifying the constituent and inter-related parts of the Talmud, Montefiore had this to say of Halakha, the part of the Talmud that had often been selected for attack and derision. The “legal discussions, all this ‘study of the Law’, all these elaborations and minutiae, were to the Rabbis the breath of their nostrils, their greatest joy and the finest portion of their lives.” He thought the “larger part of … [Halakha] seems a waste of mental energy and of time. If a very big percentage of the halakhik portion of the Rabbinic literature were destroyed, archaeology, comparative jurisprudence would be the poorer, but our modern religious life would hardly be affected.” His today was not their yesterdays: “A gulf separates us from the Rabbis, and this gulf has to be recognized. Their most absorbing interests were not ours. We have also to confess that religion meant, and was, more to them than to us. God was nearer to them in more senses than one, and heaven and hell were more definite and influencing realities.” In their halakhic mode, he too compared the rabbis “with the men of the medieval world.”15 When millions of Jews outside of the United States were still conducting their lives by the light of that Talmud-inspired governance, influential liberal German-American Jews constructed their own sacred sense of themselves. They took institutional steps to “distinguish modern Jews from their predecessors by casting off ‘excrescences.’” They obviously meant tacking to Christian republican individualism, cutting loose from Jewry’s constitutional f­oundations. At the end of the century, the Central Conference of American Rabbis set sail

15 Montefiore and Lowe, A Rabbinic Anthology, xvi–xvii, xxii.

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under a banner proclaiming “our relations in all religious matters are in no way authoritatively, and finally determined by any portion of our Post-Biblical and Patristic literature:” no institutional connection to a tradition when the corpus of Talmudic literature was the ultimate source of all truth and knowledge, nor to it as the source guiding Jewish conduct, and also no acknowledgment that the canon was the origin of most of the contemporary fragments and debris shaping and reshaping so many of the Jewish webs of collective identity. Learned Jacob Rader Marcus explained the heading of the reformers this way: “Like the Deists, American Jewish liberals tended to downgrade the Talmud and some of its teachings and upgrade the veneration of the Bible. Binding authority was denied to post biblical writings and rituals; the spirit is eternal but the forms are changeable.” It was the kind of change quite acceptable to men like White, for it was evidence of the successful modernization of the Jew in American life.16 In White’s race-conscious imagination, Jews as a changing People of the Talmud did not occupy a place like Native Americans, African Americans, and Filipinos. His was, however, part of a popular reform movement’s pessimistic side, whose participants spoke with an American Protestant anti-clerical voice.17 He was certain that Anglo Americans and Germans had developed the Christian civilization that was moving humanity ever closer to the kingdom of heaven on earth. Translated into practical terms, that outlook justified for White territorial conquest and the removal and containment of dark-skinned pagans. As a young man, in 1853, he had supported continental expansion to the South and West because it made inevitable the spread of republican Christianity.18 In 1902, when American soldiers occupied the Philippines, he wrote President Theodore Roosevelt: “I consider the destruction of a whole Indian tribe or a whole island full of low class half-breed Malays and other savages as of infinitely less account than the blotting out of a single God-fearing, hardworking, American pioneer family.”19 For the non-pagan population, White turned to the “correct” kind of education that antebellum white Protestant middle class reformers had urged as appropriate for laundering the political minds of unwashed men who were becoming voting citizens of the republic. As president of Cornell University, he insisted that the nation’s elite receive university training that made them

16 Jacob Rader Marcus, United States Jewry, 1776–1985, 4 vols. (Detroit: Wayne State Universty Press), 3:75. 17 Altschuler, Andrew D. White, 53–58, 184–185, 189. 18 Ibid., 29, 232, 238–239, 247. 19 Ibid., and White to Roosevelt, August 15, 1901 in ibid., 259.

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a­ ppreciate the importance of Christian values and military training. Both were essential for staying the course and protecting the republic against unruly and misled urban mobs. White espoused emancipation and integrated schools for the freed slaves and their fellow citizens. But by the 1890s, he, as did so many Northern influential whites, wanted ethnic citizenship only within a hierarchical regime. He had come to see “some beautiful relations” within slavery which were forever lost. Rapid, dramatic transformation of millions of blacks into full and equal participants of the republic was obviously beyond reach. They and the nation would have to wait. Instead of depending on the popular oral traditions within African American life, which, in fact, linked blacks to their pasts in Africa and slavery, he wanted for them an Americanizing education patterned after the white Protestants in New England. For that reason, White insisted upon literacy as a condition of extending suffrage rights to blacks.20 Immigrants also threatened the republic, because crowds of “illiterate peasants, freshly raked in from Irish bogs or Bohemian mines, or Italian robber nests,” undermined urban politics and the very security of America’s cities. White knew what he wanted, and it surely was not the “slobbering anxiety of pseudo-philanthropists”: the new challenges required tough-minded trainers. “It was as … if a man who finds his child bitten by a rabid dog would not cut out the affected part and cauterize it instantly, but should wash the wound with rose water and coddle the dog with a warm kennel and beefsteaks and insist on giving the cur his liberty.”21 In 1893, White had the opportunity to have his say about Jews coming out of the East. He had become America’s Minister to Russia, and in May, had received his State Department’s cable, asking questions about Jews as potential immigrants. “Representations have been [made] here that Russian Government is about to enforce edict … which will result in a large migration of destitute people of that class to the United States. If there is foundation for that,” the Department in Washington stressed, “you will please ascertain and report as speedily as possible terms of the edict and its probable effect.” White responded at once with a brief telegram and then set about the task of sending a long dispatch on the subject of “the present condition of Israelites in Russia.” A close reading of that dispatch reveals his enlightened reform-minded attitudes toward Russian Jewry in the full context of his larger views about Jews in general.22 In comparison 20 Ibid., 195–197. 21 Ibid., 185. 22 These and other dispatches are in the A. D. White Collection at Cornell University, where

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to what he had read earlier, White now appreciated what he saw with his own eyes: In Russia most of the “vast majority” lived “in poverty and a very considerable misery, just on the border of starvation.” Material circumstances had not changed since the early fifties, when as a young man attached to the Legation, he had spent seven days “on the outside of a post coach between St. Petersburg and Warsaw.” Jews then existed “for the most part in squalor, obliged to resort to almost anything that offers, in order to keep body and soul together. Even the best of them,” he recalled, “were then treated with contempt by the lowest of the pure Russians.” Now, in 1893, conditions were worse in the smaller towns, “in some of which they form the majority of residents, their poverty is so abject that they drag each other down making frequently a ruinous competition 8,000 to 10,000, Jews could face by a sudden demand to make room for another 6,000 ordered into a town from the surrounding countryside.” These conditions, combined with a maze of restrictions on occupations, residence patterns, property ownership and transfers, manufacturing activities, and hiring patterns of nonJews, made life for Jews precarious, even hazardous given the capricious behavior in the officialdom of the Russian Empire. This assessment squared with views of others in Europe and America who approached the Jews of Russia from a comparative vantage point that seemed to stress the impact of environment on conduct. For example, White again sounded a material note on the subject of occupations: “Jews once were an agricultural people. They have been made what they are by ages of persecutions which have driven them into occupations to which they are now so generally devoted.” Besides, he explained, claims about Jewish occupational patterns in Russia are often false. There were large numbers of Jewish manual workers in the Empire in Poland; he found a “very large body of artisans,” about one half of the Jewish adult male population: “almost every brand of manual labor is represented among them, and well represented, as stone masons they have an especially high reputation and it is generally conceded that in sobriety, capacity, and attention to work they fully equal their Christian rivals.” White used a similar approach with other charges against Jews in and out of Russia. No doubt they avoided military service, but who would not, considering the treatment they received in the Russian military? In any event, conscription in 1886 had pulled in some 40,000 Jews. Undoubtedly Jews did not share the patriotism of Russian enthusiasts: “The wonder is that any human being should expect them to be patriotic.” In comparison to Christian lenders and they are available on microfilm reels, organized by dates: 14, 15 November 1892, 9 March, 1893. See also Altschuler, Andrew D. White, 195.

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t­radespeople, Jews compared favorably in their dealings with the famous and numerous Russian peasants. But of course, even though both groups exploited the peasants in Russia, it was the Jew who was singularly targeted as the exploiter of the peasantry. And so far as the charge of anti-Czarist activities were concerned, White also stressed environmental pressures. The relatively large proportion of Jews among the “Nihilists” and other underground movements can be accounted for “by the mass of bitterness stored up during ages of oppression not only in Russia but elsewhere.” Invariably, White made comparisons with Western countries, where the number of Jews in the total population was in fact quite small. There the proportion of Jewish wealthy men was significant. There they had acquired respect and influence in important circles of society. Their patriotism and loyalty to crown or state had been demonstrated often. White claimed that he had experienced situations where Jewish members of the German imperial staff had placed patriotism “above all else.” He pointed to the Jews in political and financial circles who had “noble” careers in the history of their countries. “And there have been many others, in science, literature, philosophy, the arts,” including, he stressed, those in Russia, “in the past and today.” In other words, when environmental conditions were not especially hostile to Jews they have “always” shown themselves to be “grateful” to rulers who have “shown a kind regard to them.” For that matter, in the United States in the ranks of intellectuals and academics, Jews had also become enthusiastic supporters of the republic and its capitalist economy. “At a recent meeting of the American Social Science Association it had been Professor E[dwin] R. A. Seligman of Columbia University who had attacked the anti-social forces following the leadership of such men as Ferdinand Lassalle or Karl Marx!” This portion of the report reflected well White’s convictions about evolution and the role of education in moving his republican society towards eventual perfection. He identified himself with the Enlightenment of the Protestant West and within that framework had no difficulty in considering the Jews of the Russian Empire as individuals who in time and with the proper education would change into the sort of successful and acceptable Jews whom he had come to know in America, Germany, France, and England. But there was White’s other side, the darker one that enlightened reformers often manifested: opposition to the public legitimacy of American peoplehoods he found wanting bioculturally. He excluded “inferior Indians” from the beneficial impact of evolution and education; he had serious misgivings about blacks becoming fit citizens, ­without long periods of development; he was convinced that masses of groups of European immigrants arrived with the wrong kinds of social discipline for

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urban ­development. For the anti-clerical White the Talmudic canon was one of those wrong kinds of social disciplines. To be sure, after presenting the essence of the Russian government’s position on the subject of the Talmud, White seemed at first to take serious exception to it. The Russians claim, “Israelites are educated in bitter and undying hate of Christians, and taught not only to despise but to despoil them.” Beyond that, Russian officials are convinced that as a result of instructions Jews receive from the Talmud via their rabbis, “and by the simple laws of heredity they have been made beasts of prey with claws and teeth especially sharp, and that the peasant must be protected from them.” White categorically rejected these statements. When confronted by passages from the Talmud, which he knew were being published in Russia, Western Europe, “and even in the United States,” White insisted that it “seemed to be forgotten that the Israelites would be more than human if such passages did not occur in their sacred writings.” In the first place, some of the passages antedated Christianity. “Most of them have been the result of fervor under oppression and the appeal to the vengeance of Jehova in time of persecution.” Besides it is only fair to compare such passages to “the more kindly passages especially the broadly beautiful humane teachings which are so frequent in the same writings.” In Russia, however, reported White, such arguments fall on deaf ears: Russians insisted that they, not outsiders, had the personal experience required for really understanding their Jews. Their relation to Jews, White reported to Washington, was to the Russians what “our own peculiar institution” had once been to Americans, incomprehensible to outsiders who did not live with slavery. White’s apparent rejection obscured his agreement with a critical part of the Russian position. It nestled in policies about the education of Jews. In principle, as a professional American educator he rejected the quota concepts in admissions policies. So, it pained him to see them applied by the Russians. “The world over—as is well known—Israelites will make sacrifices to educate their sons and daughters such as are not made—save in exceptional cases—by other people; they are,” he noted, “as is universally recognized, a very gifted race but, no matter how gifted a young Israelite may be, his chances of receiving an education are small.” In the Russian context, however, White appreciated Russian insistence that the vast majority of Jews remain in their own schools. “The whole system at present in vogue is calculated to make Talmudic and Theological schools— which are so constantly complained of as the nurseries and hot-beds of antiRussia and anti-Christian fanaticism—the only schools accessible to the great majority of young gifted Israelite.” Such a policy did not simply deny Jews access to education, as White understood the meaning of the concept, but locked them

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into a world that he and the Russians insisted was at the root of the Jewish problem in Russia. When the Russians told him that they had no hatred of Israelites, only of Talmudic Jews, they were saying in effect that they wanted all of their Jews to become radically different. And so, they pointed to their Karaite Jews who had denied the religious validity of the Talmud: they lived without the detailed rites and rituals and did not lead lives that so differentiated them from non-Jews. Russians told him that they treated the Karaite Jews “with special kindness,” because they were not fanatics. White was convinced the Russians had it backwards. The reason Karaite Jews “are free from fanaticism” was because the Russians had treated them kindly for a long time; extend the same kind of treatment to all Jews, he thought, and in time they will also drop their fanaticism. White told Washington Russia’s approach to the Jews was “so illogical as to be incomprehensible,” because “great powers are given to the Jewish Rabbis and religious authorities.” Russians in fact sustained their fanaticism. “They are allowed, in the districts where the Israelites mainly live to form a sort of state within the state, and with power to impose taxes upon their co-religionists, and to give their regulations virtually the force of law.” White wanted to bring Talmudic Jewry to an end. It was no more acceptable to him than it was to the Russians, albeit as an American Protestant enlightened reformer, he wanted Talmudic Jewry gone for the sake of his own agenda. But like the Russians, White wanted it eliminated. As a diplomat, he wanted only the best for the Russians and for the Israelites. His solution was simple. Rid the Empire of “racial antipathies, remembrances of financial servitude, vague inherited prejudices, with myths and legends like those of the Middle Ages.” Go modern: substitute “instruction in Science, General Literature and technical branches” which are taught to the Russians for “instruction in the Talmud and Jewish Theology.” Then, in time, the Jews of Russia would become like the Jews of America and Western Europe. There, “invariably those darkest features of the Talmud have been more and more blotted out from Jewish teaching, and the unfortunate side of the Talmudic influence more and more weakened.” Obviously, when Jews did not live by the Talmud, “the more bitter utterances in the Talmud complained of do not necessarily lead Israelites to hate Christians.” Then they do not live in a state within a state. They become individuals infused with the noblest ideals of the Enlightenment. They become men such as Judah Touro in the United States, Sir Moses Montefiore in the United Kingdom, Nathan Rothschild or Baron Hirsch in France, or like the less well-known Jews in an American city who raised substantial funds in order to buy relief for antiJewish Russians struck by a devastating famine. In other words, without the

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Talmud and its collective world, the Jews’ peoplehood would end. They would become men and women comparable to the Karaites the Russians appreciated, or new sort of Jews whom White would consider fit for American citizenship and participation in America’s civic society. That development would happen if Russian authorities followed his advice. But he knew they would not do it, and in any event, even if they did the impact of the change on Russian Jewry would be too slow to impact those eager to take flight to a United States increasingly gripped by industrial conflict and what looked like class war. Perhaps that recognition was another reason explaining why White, “drained his passion in dispatches to the State Department,” to use biographer Glenn Altschuler’s insightful phrase,23 “instead of battling for change of Russian policy towards Jews.” All along, he worried that massive Jewish emigration from the Talmudic Kingdom would be full of unskilled illiterates, “ignorant indigents” who “lived on the edge of starvation;” for skilled, literate, educated better off kinds of Jews, he was convinced, “will stay put, or will be siphoned off by organizers of Jewish migration to Argentina.”24 American liberal Jews among White’s large and diverse circle of acquaintance agreed with much of what he wrote, for in their ethnicking, they were in open rebellion against the Talmudic canon as a medieval orthodox collective entity. Themselves part of the changing People of the Talmud, liberal Jews were especially apprehensive about the new Jewish immigrants’ capacity to oppose or delay the kindred processes of enlightened rationalism and republican assimilation. In the 1890s, influential and politically well-connected liberal leaders linked their concerns to a specific German-American Jewish agenda.25 At a time when typhus and cholera-conscious metropolitan America was just beginning to receive in New York and other Atlantic ports large numbers of “Russian Hebrews” from the Talmudic worlds of Eastern Europe, these self-appointed Jewish advocates, from a deferential posture but more aggressively than in the past, had tried to persuade White to improve America’s policy in addressing with Russian authorities Jewish conditions and needs. In their ethnicking efforts, they called for a kind of Jewish exceptionalism; for these Jewish liberals were economic liberals who supported an open door for Caucasians, yet joined with other anti-restrictionists opposing Chinese immigration. In their argument,

23 Ibid., 195–197. 24 Sorin, A Time for Building, 170–214; Barkai, Branching Out, 196–206. 25 Sorin, Time for Building, 170–214; Barkai, Branching Out, 196–206; Markles, Quarantine, passim, but especially 148–152.

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they employed the concept of “absolute necessity,” the very one that Smith had used in opposing Jewish immigration: Chinese lived in hardshelled collectives of their own. In the Chinese case restriction, “may be defended on the grounds of a broad public policy, with reasons which cannot logically be adduced with regard to any branch of the Caucasian race.” In Simon Wolfe’s The American Jew as Patriot, Soldier and Citizen, the anthology that published and applauded White’s report, Louis Edward Levy made the argument for treating Jews coming out of East Central Europe as Caucasions. Thanks to his abilities as an inventor and entrepreneur, by the 1890s, Levy whose Jewish parents had brought him from Bohemia during the last years of the German-Jewish migration before the civil war, had become a well-known publisher of a Democratic daily in Philadelphia and an influential figure in Jewish circles;26 it was his company that published The American Jew. He wrote: “the most cogent of the reasons and the one that has afforded the only rational basis for the exclusion policy adopted [by the United States] is not the economic element of the subject, not that Chinese live cheaply and work cheaply, but that their assimilation with the rest of the population is practically impossible.” But unlike White, and of course Smith, Levy and other publicly active liberal Jews belonged to the People of the Talmud: they owned the dynamic patrimony of collectivity from Talmudic Jewry, as a dowry, as a kind of natural endowment or gift from old fashioned forebears. So, Levy felt compelled to make the case for accepting bearded Russian Hebrews to America. Such political, “or perhaps ultimately ethnological reasons may here be considered as prompting a course which could not reasonably be adopted on any other ground.” Even though at the time anthropologists, physicians, and evolutionary biologists including Jewish ones in Europe and America were really confused about the subject of the Jewish race, in Levy’s mind, Jews conveniently belonged to the Caucasian race.27 Within that beneficent category, opposition to Jews could only rest on economic grounds, and these to a late-nineteenth-century liberal were simply unacceptable.28 Besides, he was optimistic about the capacity of Polish Jews to change from their folkways once Russia adopted White’s recommendations. America’s experience was proof positive: they “have all been assimilated. Those of them that survive, and their children, assuredly have become thoroughly Americanized

26 Dictionary of American Biography, 2:202–203. 27 Simon Wolf, The American Jew as Patriot, Soldier and Citizen (Philadelphia: Levytype Company, 1895), 556–557. 28 Ibid., 565.

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and effectually welded into the commonality of our Republic.”29 He was certain that if the Czar’s government adopted policies of enfranchisement and “unhampered domicility,” Russia would not only see an end to mass emigration by Jews, but would also witness their transformation into desirable post-Talmudic Jews, like himself. Levy predicted that association with the Talmud would become acceptable because ethnicking in America would bring a different kind of association than in the past. It would be one dominated by the “great” ideals of Judaism: in the United States association with the Talmud would be republicanized: “The universal fatherhood of God, the universal brotherhood of men, and the direct responsibility for every human being to the Maker of All.”30 At the time, others, perhaps even White, saw such a development as the beginning of the end for all of Jewish life. An English contemporary travel writer, John Foster Fraser, put the point directly in the Russian context. Should Russia remove the restraint on the Pale, from one half of the world’s Jews, “Judea” would pay a high price. In language that could easily have been written by a Talmudic Jew about all forms of post-Talmudic Jewry, Fraser said: “The last stronghold of Jewish thought and tradition is in Russia. Yet, just as in every country from which he has received freedom the tendency on his own initiative has been to be de-Judaised, the result of emancipation will be that he will become less a Jew and more a Russian, until in time the distinct Jew disappears.” Fraser thought this development a public good. He saw “no cause for repining at what the centuries hold in store. Judaism will go; it is going already in every land where the gentiles do not cabin it.”31 This kind of projection did not quite catch Levy’s voice about America’s Jewish future from the perspective of segmented post-Talmudic Jews in the United States. He and fellow liberal Jews shared many of White’s rationalistic anti-clerical views about Talmudic Jewry and its antimodern rabbinic leadership. However, in their ethnicking they also wanted appropriate safeguards within a policy of unrestricted mass immigration so that migrating Talmudic Jewry would not overwhelm the capacity of republicanism to change it—­selection screens and training programs applied to those Jewish applicants designated as potentially fit and appropriate for dispersal throughout the American body politic. But liberal Jewish leaders were obviously different from White, who, besides Smith, had

29 Ibid., 556–557. 30 Ibid., 556–557, 565. 31 John Foster Frazer, The Conquering Jew (London and New York: Funk & Wagnalls Company, 1915), 217.

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other associates who considered it appropriate to share with him their views about Jews as dangerous creatures conspiring to take over the world.32 Levy presented the potential of the right kind of immigrant Talmudic Jew by reproducing a report from the New York Sun. Last week, 10,000 to 12,000 Jewish tailors went on strike, the paper stated, “day after day they loitered in the street or congregated in their hall, or sat down anywhere to talk their jargon. But last Saturday morning the strikers … were not to be found at their usual places of rendezvous. Nearly all of them had gone to their synagogues where they prayed and listened to the rabbi.” Levy explained the conduct of the tailors. “They were following a custom established by Moses and kept up through all the ages since his time. In the hundreds of garrets, rear halls, and rickety old edifices which are used as synagogues in what is called the ‘ghetto’ on the east side of New York, the Jews on strike celebrated the everlasting name of ‘JAHVEH’ last Saturday forenoon, the holy Sabbath.” To the Sun this was “Judaism in New York and the world over.” Who ever “heard of any body of strikers other than Jews, giving heed to the ceremonies of their religion during the heat of a strike? We are told that nearly all of these Jewish strikers are orthodox, and all wore their hats in the synagogues. Many of them, we are assured, are familiar with the Torah and the Talmud, and can quote Iben Ezra and Maimonides.”33 For Levy this was an American story about the Talmudic Jew within his republican peoplehood beginning his journey into the modern America. As such, a Jew trained to an artisan skill or a Jew willing, able to labor for his livelihood, and a Jew mentally strong enough to challenge arbitrary authority, such a Jew was admissible to the societies that White and Levy and others of his contemporaries were trying to fashion in Europe and America. With White, Levy feared massive Jewish migrations into the United States, if the migration consisted 32 Jonathan Sarna points to the overlap between the work of the Jewish Publication Society, heir to the “Wissenschaft des Judentums,” with German currents in the emerging ­American profession of history. White, like his colleague and occasional correspondent at Johns H ­ opkins, Herbert Baxter Adams, was involved in these currents which expressed themselves in the publications committee of the JPS before the turn of the century. Sarna, Jewish Publication Society, 57. See also Altschuler, Andrew D. White, 98, 196. The hiring and firing of Felix Adler, notwithstanding White’s efforts to keep him at Cornell in Ithaca, is indicative of the antisemitic context in which White worked. White’s papers are in the A. D. White Collection at Cornell University. But see David A. Hollinger, Science, Jews, and Secular Culture: Studies in Mid-Twentieth-Century American Intellectual History (Princeton: University Press, 1996), 29, where he calls attention to the importance of an “informal alliance among liberal Protestants, ex-Protestants, religious Jews, and freethinking Jews” in changing the governance and leadership in American elite universities. 33 Wolf, American Jew, 563–564.

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of Talmudic Jews not prepared to participate fully in America’s economic and political life. But in a manner akin to the selective screening policy Prussians had been using in finding those Jews in the Dutchy of Poznan, which they had acquired from the Russians in 1815, Levy used economic criteria to support the “correct” kind of Jewish migration. Not surprisingly, he turned to categories of occupation or biological fitness for industrial work because those were the categories neo-Lamarckians were using to argue for or against admission of migrants from the “backward” regions of the world. Levy was involved with the Jews of Russia as a kinsman eager to perpetuate Judaism in a modern form, one where Jewish association with the Talmud would be transformed in terms of the end—of the century—theology and practice of the Central Conference of American Rabbis. Almost all of its members came from the large metropolitan reform congregations that belonged to a GermanAmerican Jewry which, in its first and second immigrant generation, was persuading its German-speaking doctrinaire-minded rabbis to give way to the congregational needs of more practically minded English-speaking American children. At the congregational level, this collective act foreshadowed and facilitated the worshipers’ capacity to transform their life with the Talmud. In that light, the story from the Sun may also have suggested to Levy something about the power of Talmudic Jewry’s rank and file to change entirely its relationship to the Talmud in the coming twentieth century—a modern union’s strike discipline could be adjusted to the Halakhic rules governing Shabbes observance. To Levy, the conduct of the striking tailors was a harbinger of things to come. Many other German-American Jews also noticed the change, to such an extent that after the turn of the century they manifested it not only in their congregational life within American liberal Jewry, but also in the very theological formulations about ritual conduct derived from the Talmud. In the 1880s and 1890s, when their views had become entangled with fear of mass immigration, industrial conflict, and emerging Zionism, influential rabbinic leaders had sounded more like Smith than White: they had railed against “Orientalism,” “Talmudism,” “Rabbinism,” and “Kabbalism.”34 In 1908, a decade after the desperate days of economic depression, in the midst of the large wave of Jews out of Lithuania, the changes in the rank and file were so manifest, that even such a fierce enemy as Rabbi Jacob Voorsanger had to pay attention. He had been to the immigrant’s heartland in Manhattan: The “processes of adaptation are already underway. 34 Allan Silverstein, Alternatives to Assimilation: The Response of Reform Judaism to American ­Culture, 1840–1930 (Hannover: Dartmouth University Press, 1994), passim.

Safeguarding the Public Square

Anyone who compares the Jewish East End of New York of even a decade ago with that of today will discern amazing changes and the unmistakable growth of tendencies in the direction of wholesome and loyal Americanism.” The most recent mass migration from Lithuania had included significant numbers associated with anti-clerical Jewish peoplehood movements and some of these were beginning to emerge as innovative leaders in urban trade unionism and politics. In his popular Yiddish-language anti-clerical Forverts, immigrant Abe Cahan responded by symbolically identifying with them and the emerging modern American world shaping their people. He did so with a cartoon that has since become famous: Uncle Sam welcomes a hatless, beardless, clean shaven, suit-dressed Socialist Meyer London to Congress: “Hello! Really A New Sort of Jew—I like you.” By 1908, Cahan’s nineteenth-century uncle from the public square had good reason. Jews within their American peoplehood neglected formal Jewish education, transformed the Shabbes, and with all sorts of references and allusion to Talmudic rules and rituals celebrated America’s urban secular Stadtluft in Americanized Yiddish song and theater. In his Yiddish Forverts—it was then the socialist daily newspaper with the largest circulation in United States—Cahan was not only speaking the language of Enlightenment revolutionaries, some of whose influential true believers had been so eager to bring forth new kinds of people who would transform the world. He was a Darwinian evolutionist struggling with contemporary folk hereditarians who sustained and added to the sacred kitsch that helped to shape pecking orders in the republic’s ethnic hierarchical regime. That is to say, he as well as many others, now engaged the ecological discourse impacting the nature of American peoplehoods. These groups of republicans had been shaped and reshaped by experiences, new migrations, stereotypes and other sacred kitsch; and, in the decades of the century’s turning and of WWI, by the swirling fragments and debris emanating from public health officials as they encountered the mortal threats from contagious disease. The biomedical world now worked with the germ theory of disease and its diagnostic power. That meant the nation’s public health services, guarding borders especially in moments of crises when killer epidemics threatened, made all sorts of punishing decisions about collectives, about incomers and their resident relatives between the 1890s and 1920s. A case in point was the engagement by government officials with returning American troops, from Cuba and Poland, and with migrating Jews from East Central Europe. The incomers had shared all sorts of uncertainties. They had also been victims of conflicting chains of command, incompetence, ignorance, capriciousness, corruption, and the snarls of bureaucracy. They had all suffered from indifference to or perhaps tolerance of

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human suffering by officials who masked ignorance and served under a cloak investing ethnicking with guardianship of the republic. In these circumstances, the encounter between heredity and the bacterium helped to intensify the darker sides of quarantine mentalities in America’s liberal democracy. To be sure, in 1915 experts considered typhus a louse vectored illness and after WWI, the more modern and professional public health service when in doubt insisted on testing rather than on imposing quarantine. All along, however, there had remained significant gaps between diagnoses and cure of threatening contagious diseases, the ideal circumstances for biocultural determinism to remain commonplace in the fragments and debris of modern American ethnicking. Notwithstanding the ubiquitous impact of clean water, modern sewer systems and personal hygiene, the gaps had been ready made for acts of biocultural politics. These would shield the returning soldier in the service of the republic, even as they were targeting Jews in anti-immigration campaigns and within legitimate structures of quarantine. While still believing in the inheritance of personal and collective characteristics, be they “natural,” or “acquired,” especially during times of emergency, in the name of the republic’s public good, the practitioners’ modern scientific eye fixed an incomer as potentially pathogenic, that is as a potential killer. With that gaze, local and federal American health authorities, at home and abroad, helped to shape not only anti-immigrant rhetoric but as well panicked conduct by public officials. It could be group specific, support enforced confinements, evictions, burning of private belongings, and when fearing dogs, enforce orders to kill them with gas.

CHAPTER 8

Screening and Quarantines

In the meantime, older convictions and practices are competing with the new concepts and bacteriological findings. In Philadelphia quarantine practitioners continued to treat ships from abroad as miasmatic vessels, that is, as the primary “source of disease” in comparison to individual passengers as the potential pathogenic agent.1 Even so, at the century’s turning, advocates of the new are demonstrating to their own satisfaction the effectiveness of applied bacteriological knowledge in efforts to control and even stop the spread of a dangerous epidemic; by World War I victory is in the hands of ever-new cadres of government bacteriologists working at a land border and ocean port with the ever growing conviction that typhus is a louse and nit vectored illness. Often influenced by new xenophobic suspicions obtained from wartimes, these now become available for use with older stereotypes and profiles. These include the bits and pieces of sacred kitch in the ethnicking inherent in the screening and quarantening practices of the United States facing migrants from Europe in the decades before WWI and in the years afterwards. Unfortunately, the new laboratory scientists, let alone the medical establishment, have failed to find reliable cures for the specific life-threatening contagious bacilli such as cholera, tuberculosis, or typhus now being observed under the microscope and diagnosed in the person migrating to the United States.2 Guardians of public health and national integrity may have adopted the new scientific discourse. But as emergency response teams in fear of killer ­epidemics, 1 Edward Mormon, “Guarding Against Alien Impurities: The Philadelphia Lazaretto, 1854–1893,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 108 (April 1984): 151. 2 William H. McNeill, “The Flu of Flus,” New York Review of Books 47, February 10, 2000, 29; Martin V. Melosi, The Sanitary City: Urban Infrastructure in America From Colonial Times to the Present (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University press, 2000), 103–204; Richard J. Evans, Death in Hamburg: Society and Politics in the Cholera Years, 1830–1910 (New York: Penguin, 2005), 262–284; Alan M. Kraut, Silent Travelers: Germs, Genes, and the “Immigrant Menace” (New York: Basic Books, 1994), 84–95; Howard Markel, Quarantine! East European Immigrants and the New York City Epidemic of 1892 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), passim.

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as guards standing at border crossings, or as campaigners for restrictive immigration legislation, these guardians followed a traditional rule of survival: safe is better than sorry, especially when the incomer or resident “foreigner” seemed to match a harmful or dangerous ethnic profile. New tools of diagnosis had clearly outstripped pharmacological efforts to cure infected patients and to eliminate contagious diseases. There was thus a significant gap leaving all sorts of decisions affecting public health to administrative and political “solutions.” These were reached often in the face of experience or of new scientific findings, especially in times of real or imagined panics about contagion. In fact, in an era when many in governing circles wanted to restrict immigration from “barbaric lands,” to use a phrase popular with labor leader Samuel Gompers,3changing biological concepts about contagion and quarantine were easily influenced by traditional assumptions of moral agency, race, nationality, class, and religion. For these were the constructed categories from which came the fragments and debris inherent in ethnic hierarchies. Experts still included biological determinists who, more often than not were influenced by popular forms of neo-­ Lamarckism. Howard Markel, a physician and historian of the typhus and cholera panics in New York City in 1892, put this point sharply when he wrote of a “mentality of quarantine” when “the infectious disease become[s] the enemy but so, too, do … human beings (and their contacts).” Such a mentality contains the driving energy to use police power “to do everything possible to prevent the spread of an epidemic, often at the neglect of the human or medical needs of those passengers contagious.” In 1911, the New York Yiddish version of London’s Punch, Der Kibbetzer, made that very point. On July 28, it published a cartoon showing cholera as an angel of death hovering between sky and water over New York Harbor, facing Ellis Island and the United States chief immigration control officer, who is alarmed at the prospect of losing his deportation work to the killer. It clutches an immigrant steamship in each of its bony hands and dumps passengers from one of them into the open mouth of a nearby overflowing crematorium—a crematorium in New York Harbor, chimneys belching black smoke in Liberty’s Bay! Obviously, Der Kibetzer spoke most directly to migrating Jews in steerage, who could hardly be expected to appreciate the concerns of officials guarding national borders from potential lethal enemies. Thirty-three years after the start of the American Civil War, cholera epidemics had again broken out, this time while on German railways Jews were migrating towards major North

3 Testimony, 1874, in Korman, ed., ILR Documents, I.

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Sea ports in Prussian heartlands. There the recently formulated germ theory of disease was being used to reshape public health perspectives about guarding the national border. This had led to intensified efforts for devising protective screens. With sealed railway carriages, Germans organized steam-powered Wanderstrassen, which included medical control points and ended at guarded overseas passenger terminals and kosher kitchens in Hamburg’s harbor. To migrating Jews and their justified sense of paranoia it was all but self-evident that Russian, Austro-Hungarian, and German officials and clerks, at border crossings, railway stations, and harbor facilities usually conspired to examine each person and each piece of Jewish baggage as if each was especially fit for a special quarantine. Mary Antin dramatically recalled her medical examination amidst hissing steam: She was stripped naked in front of strangers in white uniforms, apparently threatening her in German. This Russian Jewish girl, a firstgeneration migrant among her people en route to the American Promised Land, was so frightened she expected to be murdered. She then realized there was no German policy to do away with her. “Hurry, hurry or else,” she had heard, losing the crucial next phrase called out by the sanitizing attendant in white: “or else you’ll miss the train.”4 At the end of the journey across the Atlantic, the health service in New York’s harbor became the final threat. Its web of detection spanned the United States Marine Hospital Service, hospital ships, disinfection barges, outlying beaches, and harbor islands. When a steamer came into the Lower Bay flying the yellow flag, the signal that cholera victims were on board, physicians and their bacteria hunting helpers, with a “police boat patrol” hovering “about all day,” went to work protecting the republic from the threat in steerage. Now regarded as a potential killer each passenger was isolated for the duration of lethal potency. Some died on board ship or in quarantine. As reported by the New York Times years after the event, many remembered the cholera scare of 1893–94. “On Aug. 4, the “Karamania” arrived and reported three deaths from Cholera on the voyage. The passengers were quarantined on Hoffman Island. The survivors were released on Aug.24. There were 430 alive of the original list of 471.” Eighteen years later, the crematorium was still burning bodies “as a sanitary precaution,” to quote a small fragment in another New York 4 The cartoon comes from the collection of John J. Apple. It is housed in the John and Selma Apple Collection of Michigan State University Museum. Mary Antin, From Plotzk to Boston (New York: Markus Wiener, 1986 [1899]), 37–45; Gerd Korman, “When Heredity Met the Bacterium: Quarantine in New York and Danzig, 1898–1921,” Leo Baeck Yearbook XLVI (2001), 243–276; Alfred E. Cornebise, Typhus and Doughboys: The American Polish Typhus Relief Expedition 1991–21 (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1982), 101.

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Times story from 1911 about the delivery of two urns of ashes from Swinburne Island that was also controlled by public health officials.5 Jews had good reason to fear European and American public health policies. For centuries they had often been entangled in the biocultural obsessions of different times and places.6 The Kibbetzer cartoon appeared in 1911, its publication coinciding with commercially profitable mass transport linking Europe with the ports of the Atlantic basin. Jews, knowing full well that they were perceived as part of a particular people, migrated west in their hundreds and thousands, from the Dutchy of Poznan within the German Empire, from Galicia in Austro-Hungary, from the Russian Empire, especially from Lithuania, in the decade before the First World War. They crossed great divides, of nations, cultures, class, and the land border screens separating one state from another. The experiences could not help but reinforce their sense of peoplehood; for Jews encountered hostile stereotypes from among receiving populations increasingly nervous about the impact of the Jew on their society. There was also wide-spread apprehension among frustrated, upwardly mobile Jews whose families, decades earlier, had often come from Poznan and other western parts of East Central Europe: would the influx of poor Jews unlike themselves threaten their own status? In general, many fearful of killer epidemics also assumed that as migrants from the Asiatic East, Jews could be carriers of dangerous diseases.7 So, it is not surprising when in 1892, New York City, scared by fear of epidemics involving typhoid, typhus, and cholera, struck incoming Jews from Europe with special force. They were arriving in the city in much larger numbers than ever before. The sanitary inspectors, physicians, and a special police force in the city’s Division of Contagious Diseases in the Health Department, were mobilized to protect the metropolis from catastrophe. They were also Jew-conscious, 5 New York Times, August 6, 1893; July 29 and August 1, 1911. 6 John Block Friedman, The Monstrous Races in Medieval Art and Thought (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981), 31–32, 54–55, 69, 88; B. Netanyahu, The Origin of the Spanish Inquisition in Fifteenth-Century Spain 3rd ed. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999), 1082–1084, 1145; Henry Kamen, “The Secret of the Inquisition,” New York Review of Books 43, February 1, 1996, 4–6. David Nierenberg, Anti-Judaism (New York: Norton, 2013), passim, offers the latest coherent explanation for the enduring utility of Western “anti-Judaism” since its successful beginnings in ancient Egypt. 7 Jack Wertheimer, Unwelcome Stranger: East European Jews in Imperial Germany (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 14–15 and 24–26. See also Shulamit Volkov, “The Dynamics of Dissimilation: Ostjuden and German Jews,” Steven E. Aschheim, “The Myth of ‘Judaization’ in Germany,” in The Jewish Response to German Culture: From the Enlightenment to the Second World War, ed. Jehuda Reinharz and Walter Schatzberg (Hanover: University Press of New England, 1985), 195–241.

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germ-chasing officials with extraordinary powers, akin to the authority of a few state and federal officials who could impose martial law. It was the kind of empowerment and enforcement that caused panicky outcries in the Yiddish press comparable to Mary Antin’s fear of being murdered in Prussia or African American fears in the Deep American South.8 In fact, the screens and quarantines were applied for the proclaimed benefit of the public good. Health officials thus felt justified to routinely use all sorts of protective procedures. Cremation was one of them. The crematorium on the artificial Swinburne Island in the Lower Bay of New York Harbor had been authorized in 1888, when, under the impact of miasma theory, burial grounds still remained suspect of contagious virulence. New York’s health officials had managed to persuade the state legislature and governor to pay for “a crematory … for the incineration … of the bodies of persons dying at Quarantine for contagious or infectious diseases.”9 That vessel “Karamania” carried mostly Italians and so did two other ships that had actually contributed to the death toll of forty-one on board ship in quarantine. And those ashes were the remains of a former New York City Street Cleaning Commissioner who had died of Yellow Fever; “his body had been cremated as a sanitary precaution.” The oven had been busy, but not as a special weapon of public policy against Jews or any other group. New York law specified that the “health officer … shall cause to be incinerated … the bodies of persons dying at the quarantine hospital from the infectious diseases, except of persons whose religious views as communicated by them while living, or by their friends within twenty-four hours after their decease, are opposed to cremation.”10 8 Paul Boyer, Urban Masses and Moral Order in America, 1870–1920 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978), 123–283; Joel Williamson, “Wounds Not Scars: Lynching, the National Conscience, and the American Historian,” Journal of American History 83 (March 1997): 1236–1238; Litwack, Trouble in Mind, 179–341; Markel, Quarantine!, 50, 52. Reporting on the coerced removal by health inspectors, a New York World account talked of the Jewish “patients … ignorant and already cowed by oppression” as individuals “being hurried to execution for all they knew,” and the Yiddish-language Arbeiter Zeitung reported “alarming screams and outcries as if … children and relatives were being taken to the slaughterhouse. For a careful discussion of this complex subject in Germany see Paul Weindling, Health, Race and German Politics between Unification and Nazism, 1870–1945 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 11–269. 9 J. M. Hawley to Abraham Hewitt, 2 April 1888, NY Attorney General’s Office to F. L. Dallon, 25 May 1889, Folders: Health Department, 1888, OF-1892, Box 88-GH-21, NYC Municipal Archives (hereafter MA). 10 New York Times, September 4, 1892 and August 6, 1911; deed to the NY Quarantine ­Station and copy of passages of New York State law governing the activities of the station, in Hugh Smith Cumming, US Surgeon General to L. E. Cofer, February 25, 1921. The quarantine station’s correspondence for the period is part of the collection generated by the Treasury ­Department, Accession #65A-233, 330–8300, Box 509903, RG 90, National Archives, ­Bayonne, NJ (hereafter NA/B).

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Incineration of private property was another procedure. During the cholera scare of the spring and summer of 1892, as part of an emergency disinfection sweep, Manhattan’s health officials had the legal authority to take and destroy private belongings without restitution or compensation. So when a Mrs. McGrath was hit by typhoid fever the city burnt her “bed and Featherbedding.” A year later in vain she lodged a formal complaint to the Mayor for, she claimed, she was still without a “bed to sleep nor anything to cover.” Hermann M. Biggs, the distinguished Chief Inspector of Pathology, Bacteriology & Disinfection confirmed that her bedding had been exposed to infection and was “destroyed in accordance with the directions of the Board [of Health] governing such cases.” Therefore, the Board informed the Mayor’s Office, it “cannot approve of any claim for payment for the same.”11 And the city’s Dog Pound protected citizens from stray dogs suspected of rabies by gassing them, allegedly a less cruel method of killing than the shooting of captured animals. There is an “airtight Box made of Wood and lined with zink the size of 9 ft long 5ft wide and 3ft 6 in high into which a 11/2 in gas pipe is connected to supply the ordinary illuminating Gas, and the capacity,” reported the Keeper to Mayor Hugh J. Grant, “for holding about 120 Dogs … when they are put in. The gas is turned on allowing about Eighty feet of Gas to fill the box, which takes about four minutes, by that time the Dogs are asphyxiated, after which we allow them to remain in the box for about ten minutes, and then we draw off the gas by a 4in ventilating pipe and a draught valve on the bottom of the box.”12 In other words, even as fumigation and quarantine participated in shaping Jewish peoplehood stereotypes, they were common-place tools of the public health service. They were also enforced when the threat from germs did not come from foreign incomers, the comparison being instructive, for health officials revealed their normal emergency responses in their treatment of returning soldiers, who had served in battle under the American flag. At the close of the Spanish-American War, when segregated black and white American soldiers from abroad were believed to pose a health threat, including Theodore Roosevelt’s Rough Riders and young Harvard men who belonged to elite 11 M. Jackson, MD to Hon. Thomas Gilroy, August 28, 1893, Hermann M. Biggs to Chas. G. Wilson, September 1, 1893, secretary, Health Department, to William Holly Esq. September 5, 1893, Folder; Health Department, OF_1892, Box 88 GH21, MA. 12 July 5, 1892. The mayor had requested the information to answer a question put to him by the president of the Board of Commissioners in the District of Columbia. On June 30, 1892 he wanted to know how New York killed its impounded animals because he had complaints about the “alleged cruelty” in shooting them. Ibid., GHJ-8, MA.

Screening and Quarantines

f­ amilies, the public good was served by isolating them in Montauk, at the eastern end of Long Island.13 Some 22,000 of these soldiers, having been quickly evacuated from Cuba, were delivered into the hands of officials entrusted with the guardianship of the nation. From the start there were problems of organization and preparedness. In command of the assigned federal quarantine unit, doctors George M. Magruder and his deputy Joseph P. Kinyoun, had to navigate among competing authorities such as their own surgeon general in the Department of the Treasury, the army’s surgeon general, officials in the navy in charge of transports and patrol boats, the secretary and his assistant secretary of the War Department, the health officials in New York City, and the governor of New York. Initially, Magruder reported, “it was proposed to place the detention hospital in charge of officers of [his] Marine hospital [sic] Service, but to avoid complications which threatened and to prevent the unsatisfactory and inefficient work which too often attends division of authority, it was considered best to adhere rigidly” to the decision “that my authority over troops and vessels should terminate when the yellow flag was hauled down.” In fact, just before the transports began to land, issues of rank, jurisdiction, pride, prestige, and professional competition between ranking Marine Hospital Service doctors and army doctors all but dictated the arrangements that Magruder glossed over in his final report. His jurisdiction, however, would stop at the water’s edge.14 A harbinger about preparations had come a few weeks before the first transport arrived at Montauk’s Camp Wikoff. The “Concho” was quarantined for three days at Hampton Roads, Virginia with many typhoid victims on board, amongst them soldiers from the Cuban coast struggling with “exhausting malarial fever” and many others recovering from the yellow fever hospitals at Sibonay [in Cuba].” From there the transport sailed into quarantine in New York harbor, which meant the “Concho” would be handled like a vessel carrying immigrants diagnosed as suffering from illness or being suspected of carrying a contagious disease. Upon arrival the “Concho” was thoroughly disinfected. It was decided that “most of the

13 New York Journal, September 1, 1898, in, Bully: Colonel Theodore Roosevelt, The Rough Riders and Camp Wikoff, ed. Jeff Healy (Montauk:1998), 4, 196–200. See also: Elting E. Morison et al., eds., The Letters of Theodore Roosevelt (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1951), 2:842–843, 851–852, 854–855, 863; New York Times, August 4, 1898; Annual Report of the Supervising Surgeon-General of the Marine Hospital Service of the United States (Washington: GPO, 1899), 622–623. 14 Ibid., 625; George M. Magruder to Surgeon General Walter Wyman, August 1, 1898, MHS, RG 90, NA.

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officers and passengers might be landed later while all but fifty-nine of the others, too ill to be moved, should be taken to Hoffman and Swinburne Islands.” At Swinburne that day one of the soldiers died of typhoid fever. The Times reported that his “body will be encased in a hermetically sealed casket and brought to the city.” The vessel with its soldiers remained in quarantine but, unlike the very ill taken from immigrant ships, the soldiers on Hoffman and Swinburne were moved to new quarters at the quarantine station on Staten Island. The Times also reported the reactions of some of the quarantine employees. They described conditions comparable to steerage in summertime. “Emaciated men lay on hard bunks, burning with fever. Some had only an undershort or a pair of drawers.” In other words, the “Concho,” and later some of the other transports had not been properly equipped or staffed to transfer the returning soldiers, including some of the sons of the richest and most influential Americans. Dr. Monae Lessing of the Red Cross, although appreciating the military emergency, was appalled: “Everybody apparently supposed that the vessel had proper stores. But there were no medicines, no disinfectants, no ice, no fresh water, no mattresses, little covering. The men … were put between decks to sleep on hard bunkers, where little fresh air could reach them.” In other words, the vessel was a breeding box for the contagious diseases so feared by the quarantine service.15 Soldiers from a battle zone rife with malaria, yellow fever, typhoid, and typhus were arriving at a U.S army camp that did not have the necessary infrastructure in place. As happens so often with surges of contagion threatening to endanger public health, emergency response groups found themselves stretched well beyond their expectations; for besides incompetence, neglect, and capriciousness they had no or very little control over the infrastructures and the logistics required to fight such an emergency. The Long Island Rail Road eagerly extended its rail connections to a long-sought terminus in Montauk: The World and the New York Herald reported: “About three hundred men appeared on the scene yesterday, with horses and cart and picks and shovels. The railroad, which stops short eight miles before it reaches the tip of the Point where the troops were to be unloaded, sent down carloads of lumber and ties and railroad iron. The workmen had to bring food for themselves and their horses, for there was none to be had in the wilderness. These men have been rapidly laying down tracks, making roadways and putting up houses. … Linemen are [also] at work stringing wires between [nearby] Bridgehampton and this place. … There is now one direct

15 New York Times, August 1–3, 1898.

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wire between here and New York, but within two days there will be four wires in service.”16 But according to a summer resident from nearby Southampton, who at the time was a national senior official and field agent of the Red Cross, work on tent and store house construction, as well as on reliable water facilities was so far behind schedule that Camp Wikoff remained unprepared for days after the troops started to arrive. A few months after the closing of the camp, the Red Cross official was still appalled by what had happened to the general hospital: it was “constructed day after day, almost over the heads of the sick men;” work “was going on almost until the day when the order came to clear out the hospital.”17 By early September, many a local resident feared the camp was a veritable breeding ground for typhoid and typhus. So did doctors. Nicholas Senn, an army doctor criticized his colleagues and superiors: all the conditions for an epidemic were in place. Water pumps were failing even as doubts about the reliability of the well water itself remained. Poor discipline led to exposure to human and animal waste. Stagnant pools of water near the soldiers’ tents were filled with excrement from horses. Flies abounded. Wagons carried uncovered stacked loaves of bread through the dust-covered camp. And there was no working hospital laundry to prevent the accumulation of “foul linen”— in the end they had to be burnt.18 Another doctor, a visitor at Presbyterian and Bellevue Hospitals, after coming to the camp exploded to a reporter for the New York Times. Disinfection at the camp is a “farce. The whole camp is infected with disease.” Typhoid fever takes two weeks to develop. That’s why typhoid cases have shown up in the city’s hospitals; these were brought by soldiers from Montauk who had never been hospitalized or who had been furloughed, free to try to walk the streets of Manhattan. “Proper sanitation is what they don’t understand there.” The spread of typhoid fever “is perfectably preventable … just as much as cholera, and yellow fever.”19 Obviously, contagious diseases had been a serious problem at Wikoff. Yellow fever had not been the culprit; it had been the “other sick,” the “ordinary cases of sickness, such as malarial fever, typhoid fever, etc.” that had presented the danger to all those who feared them, especially typhoid fever and 16 Healy, op. cit., 25–27. 17 At the time Townsend was acting as volunteer field agent. American National Red Cross Relief Committee Reports, 1898–1899, 227–228. 18 Ibid., 226. 19 New York Times, September 2–5, 1898; Red Cross Report, 237. See also A. R. Tooth, a medical service worker in the camp, protesting to Wyman about standards of health and control: August 23, 1898, MHS, RG 90, NA.

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typhus. 98 out the 150 soldiers buried at Wikoff, had their cause of death listed as typhoid.20 Against this background the quarantine imposed on Jews a few years earlier had been part of the routine of quarantine but it also had been quarantined with a difference. In March 1892 victims of typhus in one Jewish residential quarter had been traced to a recently arrived vessel from Europe. Upon them, on other Jewish passengers, and on the nearby Jewish places they frequented, health officials swooped, quarantine officials, along with their ruthlessness, incompetence, and capriciousness so characteristic of the emergency response efforts. In no time at all, and given the prejudice towards impoverished recent arrivals living in unsanitary overcrowded conditions, all sorts of anti-Jewish language made its way into official reports. According to Cyrus Edson, Manhattan’s chief sanitary inspector and quarantine enforcer, Jews were “phlegmatic, dull, and stupid … sullen and suspicious.” When it “comes to a question of disease, they will … do anything … and lie with the most magnificent elaboration as to all matters touching their own sickness or those of their neighbors.” Markel, who studied this quarantine closely, reports that “the popular perception among many native-born New Yorkers was that the Lower East Side was a breeding ground for pestilential disease.”21 But the quarantines achieved a measure of success. In Spring of 1892, typhus in the Jewish Lower East Side remained contained. In 1898, Yellow Fever did not spread from Cuba to the mainland, and disease from the sick interned at Wikoff was also contained. Official control had helped. For example, around the troop carriers military discipline kept intruders out, even an eager patriotic physician from Springfield, Massachusetts. He had tried to bring food packages to “his boys,” the 2nd Regiment of Massachusetts Volunteers, on board the returning, now quarantined, troop carrier “St. Louis.” As his launch in the Long Island Sound started to come alongside, he faced rifles ready to fire at him if he did not turn away.22 This incident with the doctor pointed to three important differences between Wikoff and the way public health officials related to Jewish immigrants. The doctor, technically an agent of Springfield’s Auxiliary Branch of the Massachusetts Volunteers Aid Association, sent a long complaint to Washington about Wikoff ’s 20 Healy, op. cit., 499–508. 21 Markel, op. cit., 33. See also ibid., 50–59, 62–75, 113, 119, 132–133 for other anti-Jewish references during the following months and year. 22 David Clark, MD, Springfield, MA, to General Greenville M. Dodge, president of Commission for Investigation of Conduct of War, October 3, 1898; Magruder, Camp Hutton, LA, to Surgeon General Walter Wyman, October 14,1899, Marine Hospital Service, RG 90, NA.

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quarantine enforcements. Its senior quarantine officer responded with a pointby-point refutation: the physician’s treatment by the officer in charge was an act flowing from authorized public health policies designed to protect the republic. Secondly, albeit only on its own terms, the army had encouraged the doctor’s kind of care packages, and all sorts of other assistance from the “outside.” It eagerly sought and received the help of the American Red Cross for fresh water supplies and other perishables. The field commanders even accepted its female nurses and other personnel although the officer in charge “like all army surgeons of the old school … was prejudiced against them;” without them the camp would have been hard pressed to cope with the army’s unpreparedness to handle embarking troops from inspected ships. It also allowed the Red Cross to distribute care packages from friends and relatives of the encamped soldiers. In addition, there were many visitors, parents or siblings from afar and patriotic residents from nearby.23 These were important differences. In comparison to Jewish peoplehood immigrants associated with contagious diseases, the soldiers were not held responsible for their illnesses or circumstances, not in the camp, not in stations of the Long Island Railroad, and not on Manhattan’s streets, where some of them collapsed. They were not considered phlegmatic, dull, or stupid. Roosevelt made certain that he and his fellow-soldiers were perceived as heroes. President William McKinley who, having visited the site, launched an investigation of the Wikoff experience. (It found no evidence of unusual negligence or incompetence in the activities of any federal agency involved.) Blame was assigned to military officialdom and circumstances, or sometimes to incompetent doctors or the enforcers of quarantine rules.24 The different approach was not limited to the 1890s; it remained embedded in the quarantine structure. Events a few years later foreshadowed the future. Notwithstanding the experiences and criticisms of the quarantines on Long Island, under Surgeon General Wyman’s authority, the well-trained and respected bacteriologist, Dr. Joseph P. Kinyoun who had long been a deputy to Wyman and who had worked at Wikoff, imposed a punishing quarantine against Bubonic Plague on San Francisco’s Chinese and Japanese residents. Before a federal court order ended it, his successful cordon sanitaire was reminiscent of Edson’s emergency decrees for Jews of the Lower East Side.25

23 Report of the Supervising Surgeon-General, 621; Red Cross Report, 229–230. 24 Healy, op. cit, 61–72, 75, 138–140, 231–248. 25 Kraut, op. cit., 79–96; Paul Weindling, Epidemics and Genocide in Eastern Europe, 1890–1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 2–71.

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In 1911, the Kibbetzer’s cartoonist and his kinfolk had usually assumed that there was hostility among European and American officials towards Jews as a people. Since the end of the century, the proportion of all immigrants kept out for medical reasons had gone up, from less than two percent to fifty-seven percent in 1913 and up to sixty-nine three years later. More important still, especially from the perspective of the new incomer, there were the explosions of suspicion about distrusted immigrants and deadly contagious diseases understood in terms of germ theory. In this new perspective ghettos were seen as dangerous breeding grounds with a difference, presumed worst in San Francisco among the Chinese, but presumed present also in Philadelphia and New York among Italians and Jews. Still, the rise of modern political antisemitism notwithstanding, there were also many reasons Jews had for being hopeful about the impact of the newly congealed attitudes used in profiling them. By 1911, many more Jews had arrived and, together with older immigrants, they were acquiring more economic and political influence, especially in New York City where most of them were concentrated and where they shared with everyone else expectations about the control or even elimination of lethal epidemics.26 But the law of unintended consequences had also been at work. Within a few years after 1911, there were indicators of profound change for the worse, especially from the perspective of any individual not protected by their citizenship. In practice this meant a station in American life that compared to that of African Americans ethnic citizens who more often than not lived their segregated lives in the bottom ranks of the country’s ethnic hierarchy. So at Wikoff with their uniforms they had been the segregated, “Buffalo Soldiers” of the Ninth and Tenth Cavalry and of the Twenty-Fourth Infantry who invariably had to put up with the sort of slurs bandied about by their commander after in fact he and others had praised them, awarded medals to some of them, for their courageous actions in Cuba. Said Theodore Roosevelt: “Negro troops were shirkers in their duties and would only go as far as they were led by white officers.”27 In practice all such African American persons were akin to creatures in the wild, fair game to any predator.

26 Ibid., 66. 27 Tenth Cavalry Trooper Presley Holliday wrote in response: “His [Roosevelt’s] statement was uncalled for and uncharitable, and considering the moral and physical effect the advance of the 10th Cavalry had in weakening the forces opposed to the Colonel’s regiment, both at Las Guasima and San Juan Hill, altogether ungrateful and has done us an immeasurable lot of harm … not every troop or company of colored soldiers who took part in the assaults was led or urged forward by a white officer.” Willard B. Gatewood, Jr., “Smoked Yankees” and the Struggle for Empire, Letters from Negro Soldiers, 1898–1902 (Fayetteville: University of A ­ rkansas Press), 1987, 8, 96–97.

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Patriotic public health practices from the past persisted, becoming ever deeply enmeshed in the policies of the United States and of European countries preoccupied with the defense of perceived threats to national cultures. This preoccupation was especially pronounced in Germany. There in a constant progression into the 1920s—and then transformed by the Nazi regime into genocidal programs—biologists in the military and public health services pushed for ever more refined use of steam and poisonous gases against threatening pests, bacteria, and their human carriers in East Central Europe. Euro-American ethnicking became more charged. Profile screening continued to be used despite the advent of more reliable diagnoses of contagious diseases and of more experiences with fumigation and quarantine techniques. In the absence of reliable protective vaccinations, or the availability of sulfa drugs and antibiotics of a later generation, fear of diagnosed harmful bacteria mingled easily with rising tides of xenophobia, ethnic consciousness, and inflammatory metaphors. For in these years all sorts of hierarchies were emerging in European and American biological politics. Once the twentieth-century science of genetics started to explain biological mechanisms for inheritance, Robert Koch’s kind of campaign, to identify and contain, if not to control harmful bacteria in the human body, served as one influential model for achieving ideal states of public health for an envisioned national body politic. Programs of social hygiene and race institutes compared a “genuine nation” to a healthy human body and campaigned for policies that would protect a nation against minorities, particular groups of human organisms. Many called them alien peoplehoods.28 Between 1914 and 1921, war and revolution intensified such perspectives. Moments of triumph for self-determination in Central Europe, often in the aftermath of bloody battles, brought refugees in flight from regions associated with epidemics of contagious diseases, such as typhoid and typhus in Poland. These were ideal conditions for constructing and reconstructing public enemies, for propagating old and new metaphors with which individuals and peoples distanced themselves from each other: snakes and cattle, weeds and parasites mingled easily with bacteria, germs, and after 1917 with “nits and

28 Weindling, op. cit., 270–395; Stefan Kuehl, The Nazi Connection: Eugenics, American Racism, and German National Socialism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 13–48, 65–76; Michael Burleigh and Wolfgang Wippermann, The Racial State: Germany 1933–1945 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 23–43; Goetz Aly, Peter Chroust, and Christian Pross, Cleansing the Fatherland: Nazi Medicine and Racial Hygiene (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994), ix–xiii, and passim. See also the late Detlev J. L. Peukert in Thomas Childers and Jane Caplan, eds., Re-evaluatung the Third Reich (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1993), 234–249.

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cooties,” that is with lice and vermin often associated with Jewish migration out of the East.29 In the month following the WWI armistice, American sacred kitsch affected and was affected by these constructions of public discourse and policy. As in the case of Wikoff, detailed events connected with the port of New York and with the Baltic port city of Danzig demonstrated as much.30 For a brief moment Polish American soldiers, who as volunteers had fought under French aegis in Poland against German and Bolshevik soldiers, now on their way home, passed through the same United States port and quarantine jurisdiction of the United States as did Jewish immigrants coming from Warsaw heading for America. Once again there occurred the kinds of differences seen at Wikoff and in the quarantine in New York City; among whites the army uniform made all the difference, even though this time the soldiers were Polish Americans whose relatives in the United States were subjected to all sorts of discrimination and derogatory reputations as a people, especially during the Steel Strike of 1919 in the industrial heart land of the northeast. An American military intelligence report about these fighters said they “are not on the whole, a desirable element. Most of them have come from the large manufacturing [centers] such as Chicago, Buffalo, Pittsburgh, and are what we would consider in our own army a rough crowd.”31 Still their quarantine procedures were handled systematically, without a sense of panic about containing and controlling typhus. As in New York more than twenty years earlier, not so for

29 Like “vermin,” The word “verminous” has a long pedigree which includes the following uses. 1830: “Both in Russia and Poland I believe … [ Jews] are a verminous pop­ulation preying upon others”; 1899: “In ‘verminous persons’ the hair is sometimes matted together by pus, nits, scales and scabs.” The Compact Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971) 2:3614, 4084. For metaphors applied to humans and insects during World War I, see for example Edmund P. Russell, III, “’Speaking of Annihilation’: Mobilizing for War Against Human and Insect Enemies, 1914–1945,” Journal of American History 82 (March 1996): 1512–1513. Years earlier, “vermicides” were used to kill “intestinal worms.” After the First World War “verminicide” was on the market in England for killing “vermin.” For examples of the specific use of “verminous” with this meaning see comments about English conscripts to explain typhus in the trenches: “The continuance of lousiness evidently depends upon a low standard of life. … It has been stated that the infection was started by new recruits who came from verminous slums, and the crowding together­by troops and the limited facilities for bathing gave the parasites every condition favorable to multi­plying and spreading.” Folder Report 1–XXXJX, Box 35, in Strong Papers, “Infection with Vermin,” I. See also its use for Bolsheviks: Cornebise, Typhus and Doughboys, 136. 30 The following paragraphs to the end of the chapter are based on Gerd Korman, “When ­Heredity Met the Bacterium: Quarantine in New York and Danzig, 1898–1921,” Leo Baeck Yearbook XLVI (2001): 243–276. 31 Cornbise, Typhus, 101.

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Jews; and now it was after WWI—the Bolshevik specter was abroad. It was free to mingle on the ­international information networks of public health officials and Washington politicians. There it enhanced their sacred beliefs about Jewish people, especially when combined with the debris from the published “Protocols of the Elders of Zion” from Kishinev, and from the biocultural convictions about the Jews’ nits and cooties. Because so much of the postwar East European steerage migration headed for New York from battle zones in which typhus raged, the inadequate capacity of its port to handle the incomers reverberated throughout overseas medical control arrangements. The need for improvements had been obvious for some years but since 1916 the harbor’s quarantine station was caught in a transfer process between the state of New York and the federal government. The final arrangements were not completed until 1 March 1921. Until then, funds for expanding and modernizing the facilities were not available. In the event, the quarantine station, technically owned by New York but managed by Dr. Leland E. Cofer, a federal employee on loan to the station, was ill equipped for the task at hand. It was run down because New York, according to Cofer, had spent “very little money” on the station in “recent years.” The buildings “are all in poor conditions and require extensive repair.” The station had also found it hard to recruit personnel. According to Cofer, the rate of pay at the station was lower than at local hospitals even though the work was more “exposed and strenuous.” Fear of contagion was a constant problem: “[B]efore almost any kind of help will come to this station, the fear of quarantinable diseases must be quieted and a natural aversion to isolation on the Islands must be overcome. The result is that instead of having persons apply for position at this station we are continuously advertising for help in papers and in other ways hunting up persons for employment here.” On its two quarantine islands, there was just not enough room to meet the demand. “It is necessary that the capacity of the Station [one hundred sick with quarantinable disease and 1600 in detention for observation] should at least double throughout,” Cofer wrote in a report for the president of the New York Academy of Medicine. Experience had taught that when several vessels arrived at the same time, the station needed observation space for around 3,500 patients instead of the available 1,600. “In past winter when twelve ships arrived with typhus on board and eight with smallpox,” the station had to make “vessels … lie at anchor in Quarantine with their personnel aboard, which not only constituted faulty quarantine methods, but was a personal hardship to the passengers involved and a distinct financial loss to the steamship companies and the

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community in general on account of the withdrawal from regular schedule of passenger vessels.” Passengers had little choice and did not rebel. They were confined in rundown, inadequate quarantine facilities where personnel used procedures marked by incompetence and sloppiness. The Surgeon General was told that “lousy passengers were turning up in Ellis Island after having been inspected at Quarantine.” The problems were explained in detail: “Immigrants are caused to scrub up their bodies just before arrival at this port when they are caused to put on clean undershirts and then it would appear that the infested undershirt formerly removed is put back on the immigrant over the still clean undershirt and the immigrant naturally shows up lousy at the Ellis Island inspection.” Mattresses and blankets presented another problem for which neither the budget nor the facilities allowed obvious solutions: “It has been found that immigrants accounted for as clean from this Station after spending two or three nights on probably already infested mattresses and under infested blankets can show up an increased ratio of uncleanliness at Ellis Island. … It would be a big project to send them through steam chambers. It could be done,” Washington was informed, “but we are already overtaxed with 6–700 in quarantine. There is also the matter of time for tying up the vessel.” And, Cofer reminded his superiors, even though he was offering “125.00 [dollars] a month without quarters and subsistence,” he was unable to find additional men or women “to train in examining these people for body vermin.” In these circumstances, Cofer was also apprehensive about the streams of migrants now heading his way from Eastern Europe. They were returning to pre-war levels but with plague and typhus fever. These “were reported as existing especially in Russia and Poland to an alarming degree. Asiatic cholera was reported in the Crimean and other ports of the Ukraine.” While he did not expect an immediate problem in New York, he was nervous: “If the report was true that there were 250,000 cases of typhus fever in Poland and 40,000 cases existing in the City of Lomberg [sic], then it was not unlikely that the foreign ports of departure would become infected. The interaction of structural circumstances in New York, when combined with apprehension if not fear of the postwar migrations, especially of Jews from Poland, prompted the Public Health Service to install a rigorous control system. At ports of embarkation with hinterlands or contact with regions associated with contagious diseases, US quarantine officers were expected to quarantine and clear all passengers headed for the United States. At American ports, a “most rigid system of medical examination of arriving passengers from Europe and thorough fumigation of vessels was inaugurated. Not only were vessels quarantined and persons exposed to infection

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detained when actual quarantinable diseases were found on arriving ships,” reported Cofer in March 1921, “but extraordinary precautions were taken, as follows: In the first place, persons arriving from places suspected of infection with typhus were required to be deloused. Persons arriving from places where cholera was known to exist were required to submit to bacteriological examination of discharge prior to admission, and vessels from plague infected or suspected ports were required to be fumigated for rat destruction.” Clearly, the more effective and reliable the clearance procedures abroad the less pressure on the quarantine station in New York; and for that reason, conditions in New York radiated outwards throughout the entire quarantine system at foreign ports of embarkation.

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CHAPTER 9

At Work in Danzig*

In those circumstances, which in some ways are comparable to events associated with Wikoff and New York City in the years around 1898, thousands of returning soldiers and migrating Jews are heading for quarantine in or near Danzig. After 1917, and for different reasons, the Baltic port city receives special attention. Victorious diplomats and generals at Versailles in April and May 1919 and again in the summer of 1920 focuse on this old Prussian commercial center, its hinterland, and its rail connections to Warsaw, especially the section running from Thorn to Danzig. American and European immigration restrictionists also watch its affairs. As opponents of Southern and East European migrants, they fear the aftermath of war. Restrictionists are convinced it would bring a resumption of mass migration towards the west. Until Americans adopted a new immigration law with its ceilings and race-based quotas—these are expected to all but stop Polish Jews from emigrating after May 1921, when the new law is to go into effect—concern focuses on the intervening months on Danzig. The returning soldiers consisted of a special army unit which had been deployed in Poland. It was an odd collection of about 12,000 soldiers who shared one characteristic: they were all Polish-American residents of the United States who, once America had joined the war, had been encouraged by officials of an emerging Polish government to fight for the newly independent Poland as volunteers in a Polish Legion. With its distinctive uniform this force had been attached to the French army, but after the armistice the Legion served in Poland under General Joseph Haller in his campaigns against Germans, in disputed territory subject to plebiscites, and against Bolsheviks, who were fighting Poles for sovereignty over the western Ukraine. In late 1919, during a lull in the fighting, these “Haller men,” were discharged into limbo until early 1920 when a joint resolution of Congress authorized the “Secretary of War to use such army transports as may be available to bring back to the United States from Danzig, * This chapter is based on Korman, “… Quaranteen in New York and Danzig, 1898–1921,” Leo Baeck Yearbook (2001), 243–276.

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Poland, such residents of the United States of Polish origin as were engaged in the war on the side of the allied and associated powers.” By March, the US army’s ­transportation service, operating out of Antwerp, took charge of the men’s embarkation from Danzig and transfer to the United States, while in Poland the American Ambassador, his military attaché, and his consul in Warsaw handled citizenship verification, organizational procedures, and arrangements for quarantine control prior to the troops boarding ship. The quarantine control for the soldiers was assigned to the American Polish Relief Expedition. It consisted of another group of American soldiers who were in Poland as part of a larger effort to help the Polish government fight the widespread typhus epidemic in order to establish around Poland a cordon sanitaire. (The epidemic had been raging since 1916, when most Poles were, and would remain until the end of 1918, under German military occupation.) The American efforts had diverse elements to it, including the work of the Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, and, as part of the strategic goals of the relief program, that of a scientific Red Cross mission, staffed by Harvard biologists keen on studying the typhus vector. The quarantine unit, now also heading for the vicinity of Danzig, was part of an emergency response detachment which had been formed after the armistice agreement. Its French headquarters were in Paris, its Polish center of operations in Warsaw. It was led by Colonel Harry L. Gilchrist, a fifty-year-old physician with an MD from Western Reserve and training at the Army Medical School. Reminiscent of the difference between Camp Wikoff and the earlier treatment of Jews in New York City, their processing now was also different than it was for Polish-Americans at a Camp Gruppe near Danzig. In the wake of World War I, typhus, the cooties and nits to the American Public Health Service, had become the epidemic threatening from Eastern Europe. Between 1919 and 1921, fuelled by the forged “Protocols of Zion” and the immigration restriction campaigns in the United States, fear of Jews and typhus once again combined with special potency, now with greater clarity: potentially, Jews carried the identifiable bacterium invariably found in the feces of lice. Migrating Jews had also focused on Danzig, for until Riga was opened to commercial transport it was the nearest available oceanic port from which they could emigrate. Its strategic location in the months when the Allies blockaded German ports was coming to an end. During most of the period from late 1919 to May of 1921, Danzig, previously controlled by the defeated Central Powers, was the only former German port open to civilian shipping on the Baltic and on the North Sea. Until November 9, 1920 the city was under Allied control; then it turned into a Free City under the emerging authority of the League of Nations.

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In other words, the way out to America was through a city and across boundaries supercharged with metaphors derived from competing nationalisms and revolutionary zeal, intense antisemitism, and the biological determinism from pre-war years. Danzig’s hinterland was surrounded by the new controversial Polish Corridor and by a strip of territory that in a plebiscite in June 1920 chose overwhelmingly to remain part of East Prussia. In addition, internal politics in Danzig and nearby towns was in turmoil because of competing local German and Polish revolutionary militias and the interventions in their affairs by units of the German army. Responses to typhus fighting efforts invariably tangled with all sorts of experiences and stereotypes, including those brought from across the ocean and those from inflamed war-time Polish xenophobic passions. All impacted the ethnicking of the moment. Americans in Poland reported about Jews with the kind of detail and intensity usually missing from comments about ordinary Catholics in Poland. Catholics were Poles. Jews on the other hand were not identified as Jewish Poles or Polish Jews—they were seen as stereotypical figures along the lines of traditional stereotypes. One cool assessment of the Polish situation came from Richard P. Strong, Harvard’s leader of a Red Cross typhus mission: He thought it was difficult to mount an effective campaign against the epidemic because “not enough [Poles] have died to realize it is an emergency. … Indeed, the general attitude of many of the people in Poland is hostile to anti-typhus work, perhaps,” he suggested, thus echoing a widely held opinion, “because often during the German occupation the people were compelled to submit to the necessary delousing measures which were applied by the Germans with military severity.” Gilchrist had positive impressions about Poles in charge of the anti-typhus campaign; but field reports from Paris and those coming into Warsaw told a different story. Poles were “less than helpful,” “hopeless, helpless,” “dilatory,” “inefficient,” “thieving,” incapable of keeping promises, “always quarrel [ling] amongst themselves,” their trains were unsanitary, and no matter what they said, they were men who did not “really know what they are doing.” From Lvov came a report reflecting the general problem: strict rules and procedures on paper but “in practice things were carried out in a perfunctory manner, largely due to the low salaries paid to the various workers.” And in rural areas near Bedzin and Krakow doctors were often diagnosing typhus as influenza “to allay the fears of the people.” Then, in violation of modern practices, they treated their patients with alcohol and coffee. The American typhus fighter was ignorant of Jewish practices in life-threatening situations. Or, he was indifferent to the kinds of experiences Jews had had during the war and were having within the new xenophobic Poland and in its eastern border lands. Pogroms by belligerents were commonplace, particularly

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in the Ukraine. Still, there were differences and that meant by comparison, in particular instances, Soviet soldiers offered the best chance for survival. “On occasion, an entire settlement would follow retreating Red soldiers.” Much of this was known at the time. From Tarnopol and elsewhere came reports by American typhus fighters of doctors and other Jews working with the Bolsheviks, stripping Poles of hospital equipment and supplies when the Bolsheviks retreated, and then retreating en masse towards the East. From the town of Busko came news of Jewish distrust of medical institutions and authorities. “[There] is considerable Typhus in the town [of Busko], particularly among the Jews. They are afraid to go to the hospital and use all means to keep the disease among them hidden [because they believe] that at the hospital they would not be able to live according to their religion—that they would be required to eat what the others ate—that they could never eat with their hats on and that if one of them died there he could not be buried according to his religion. This belief is being overcome and the hospital now has ten Jews as patients.” The American official persuaded Busko to require a “fine of 500 rubles from anyone who hid or attempted to hide his case of typhus.” All to no avail: “It did not prove very effective as the Jews, who were afraid of the hospital, bribed the police and kept their sick hidden.” Perhaps the most revealing document, one deserving a lengthy quotation, came from Robert C. Snidow. He was a coastal artillery officer turned by Gilchrist into a typhus fighter who was insensitive to differences in lifestyle among the inhabitants, to extreme poverty, and to religious rules governing diet and ritual bathing. The report came from June 1920, when, as a test for operational planning, Gilchrist decided to send some of his men into a town which Polish authorities had identified as the “dirtiest” one in Poland. They chose the 7,000 residents of Garwolin, sevently percent of whom were Jewish: “In some of the small houses of from two to three rooms, as many as fifty people sometimes lived, cooking, eating, and sleeping as well as carrying on their industries in the same small room. Typically … the furniture would consist of a dirty table, one or two chairs, The pot, spoons, The washbowls, a couple of beds in the corners—during the daytime piled high with pillow and bedding which served for distribution over the floors at dusk,

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and the great flat tiled stove which served to heat and cook potatoes and water during the day and at night formed the base for the bedding and pillows of the patriarch and his wife who slept on the floor and warmest spot. One family or patriachate, was observed who served the repasts in [sic] the little brother of the conventional triangular pig trough of America pouring the potatoes and water into the trough after which [with the common spoon] the tribe took turns in helping themselves to a great mouthful retiring to the outskirts to chew and swallow it. … In almost all of the house areas would be found after much search an open latrine which they jealously guarded from us by all kinds of disguises and camouflage as the product therefrom would be used after the harvest to put on their small patches in the outskirts of town. Most of the drinking water was obtained from a sluggish creek at the edge of the town, which a mill dam rendered more sluggish and sometimes covered the yards of some of the houses, turning them into reeking swamp. … In the first preliminary council we were assured by the priest, the rabbi and mayor and later confirmed by two doctors that not a soul in the town had had a bath for over a year. This statement we considered conservative and I personally doubt if water had touched the persons of most of them since the departure of the Germans during whose occupation they were required to bathe at least once a week, when they could be caught.” In the very months when field reports were being filed by Gilchrist’s people, there were special investigations and regular press reports about all kinds of civilian attacks against Jews: in new Poland’s alleys, streets, and courtyards of towns; on railways running amongst them; about military pogroms in the places being contested by armies and roving bands. These could not but affect the quarantine procedures for the Jews coming through Danzig. But they were also affected by passions and policies being generated outside of Poland. American officials, themselves informed about Jews in Poland by information reported by Gilchrist and his men, were also in webs of information coming from Germany and the United States. At a time when their government placed all sorts of obstacles in the way of Polish Jews eager to cross the border, Danzig’s American officials read German claims and reports. These included the charge that Polish medical information regarding typhus and its control was unreliable, and that Jewish migrants from Poland and neighboring states occasionally brought “smallpox” across the border.

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On the face of it these claims and counter claim were all about the relative medical and scientific reliability of the German and Polish public health ­establishments. In fact, it was also a difference driven by legacies from the past of a united Germany: chauvinism, antisemitism, and restrictionist migration policies intersecting with public health policies of neo-Lamarckian orientated biomedical cultures. All had been intensified by the war and the upheavals in its wake: Poles were primitive; incoming Jews were carriers of cholera or typhus. Albeit in an unusual set of circumstances, Jews themselves revealed the hold of these kinds of convictions. Jews in Poland had constituted a problem not only for German authorities but, as was well known at the time, also for many German Jews who had reasons of their own for keeping the Polish Jew out of Germany: he was no longer like them, not Western, but primitive, a threat to their place in a Germany in convulsion. The Jewish migrants had often included war-time “guest” workers who at war’s end had been sent back to Poland. Now they wished to return, often to rejoin the family they had been forced to leave behind. German authorities insisted this return flow across the war-torn eastern frontier had to be stopped in order to protect the general public from typhus, cholera, and even smallpox. To some Jewish observers, however, the rational appeared tainted coming as it did in the midst of defeat, revolutionary turmoil, and a high tide of antisemitism, perhaps at a post-war peak between 1919 and 1921. Leading politically active German Jews, including Albert Einstein and others sympathetic to Zionism and other forms of Jewish peoplehood, opposed any kind of anti-Jewish discrimination by a German government. Besides, went one of their arguments, a majority of the Jews from Poland wanting to come into Germany were of “deutscher Abstammung,” that is, of German extraction. Another German-Jewish argument focused their campaign on typhus. The Jewish critics knew what the quarantine officials at Gruppe knew: typhus could be contained, managed, and stripped of its virulence before the migrants would be allowed to mingle with Germany’s residents. But at that point a group of German-Jewish physicians who were Zionists, and involved with this campaign, argued against such a public health effort. Colleagues among German physicians, including German-Jewish ones, could not be trusted to be scientifically honest when it came to making diagnoses about an incoming Jew from Poland; they would abuse public health arguments to keep those Jews out of Germany. Quarantine officials in Danzig received constant bulletins from their superiors in Washington then being bombarded by a veritable “nordomania” media blitz. Their attitudes usually resonated positively with those among Americans in Warsaw screening the flow of Jewish immigrants from Warsaw. This was especially the

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case between July and December when over 20,000 Jews, about ninety percent of all the emigrants then traveling from Warsaw went into and through Danzig. They had come as railway passengers, crossing the fluid national and city borders protected by suspicious guardians, observing or engaged in the war between Poland and Russia over future state boundaries. These guards were no less hostile than the capricious and officious Polish and American clerkdoms in Warsaw that had reluctantly approved the Jews’ departure in the first place; some, like John C. White, American charge d’affairs in the Polish capital, tried unsuccessfully to prevent American-Jewish organizations, such as the Hebrew Immigrant Aid and Sheltering Society (HIAS) from aiding Jewish immigrants in transit. On July 9, 1920 he put the point in classic diplomatic language: “In as much as practically all of the immigrants who pass through Danzig are of decidedly inferior types physically, mentally and morally and, because their insanitary habits, constitute a menace to the health of all with whom they come in contact, it is my opinion that efforts to stimulate their emigration to the United States should be discouraged.” These expressions were part of the contentious discourse in the corridors of the Department of State and in the halls of Congress during the hearings about the legislation designed to stop the very Jewish migrants trying to board ship in Danzig. In the spring and summer of 1920, at the height of the typhus epidemic and military crisis in Poland, consular survey reports had been sent to Washington about potential European migrants. In the fall and winter, the leadership in the House of Representatives, fighting for the new law in Senate hearings requested summaries of those reports and presented them to the senators. In the summaries Jews from Poland, whether in the new Poland or in its neighbouring countries and their Atlantic ports, received special attention by virtue of the dangerous attributes ascribed to them. They were the only group repeatedly identified with contagious diseases as well as threatening social, political, and economic characteristics. The timing of this presentation, at the end of 1920, was significant. Albeit not a demonstrable fact at the time, the presentation occurred after the typhus epidemic in Poland had started to ebb. It had climbed from 1916 to a peak in mid-1920, and dropped just as sharply as it had spiked a few years earlier when Germany had occupied the country. Here, from the spring of 1920, are summaries from Warsaw about emigrants expecting to travel to the United States. (There were similar ones from Romania, Austria, Germany, the Netherlands, and one from France about a form of cholera.) “[The emigrants are] physically deficient, wasted by disease and lack of food supplies … mentally deficient … socially undesirable.

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… Eighty five to ninety percent lack any conception of patriotism or national spirit and the majority of this percentage is mentally incapable of acquiring it. … At the moment 90 per cent may be regarded as a low estimate of the proportion representing the Jewish race among emigrants to America from Poland. The unassimilability of these classes politically, is a fact too often proved in the past to bear any argument. … Many of these persons have … quarantinable diseases and come from typhus infected areas. They are filthy and ignorant and the majority are verminous. Persons who come into contact with these prospective emigrants [in any European port] are obliged owing to their unsanitary conditions, to take the greatest precaution to avoid contamination. … Some emigrants are objecting to certain sanitary provisions such as removal of beards and clipping of hair.” The summer reports were similar. “Reports indicate 34,538 cases of typhus in Galicia and Poland in 1916, 43,485 in 1917, 97,082 in 1918, and 232,206 in 1919, and the first two month of 1920, 16,500. Typhus situation in Poland shows little improvement despite active campaign against it. Refugees from infected region in Russia are constantly pouring into Poland. … All emigrants who pass through Danzig are decidedly inferior type, physically, mentally, and because of their sanitary habits constitute a menace to the health of all with whom they come into contact. … Crowds collecting in Warsaw for the purpose of procuring necessary papers to enable them to emigrate are alleged to be a menace to the health of Warsaw.” A report from early fall sent a message about the coming dangerous tidal wave: It was alleged some 350,000 “Polish subjects of the Hebrew race” wanted to go to America—in the next three years five million of them. “It is impossible to overestimate the peril of the class of emigrants coming from this part of the world, every possible care and safeguard should be used to keep out the undesirables.” There were important differences between practices involving the returning Polish-American soldiers and Jewish immigrants. As in the case of Wikoff, at Gruppe, too, the governing assumption controlling quarantine procedures was one of ‘can do,’ with time, discipline, adequate staff and support, and with the cooperation of the troops and their commanders. In neither camp was there any doubt that typhus was containable and that, with quarantine, it was a contagion that could be stripped of its virulence. To be sure, Wikoff had all sorts of serious problems with its quarantine practices on the camp side of the shoreline, and at Gruppe too there were lapses. But among the enforcing public health authorities

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there was no doubt that the population of the American republic was secure in its hands. When there was needless suffering among the troops, or gaps in the quarantine screens, critics pointed to the army’s logistical incompetence or the incompetence of some of its officers in Washington or in the field. During the time of Wikoff, typhus-infected soldiers were not held responsible for collapsing in railway stations of the Long Island Railroad or on of the sidewalks of Manhattan; it was the army physicians at Wikoff who had not acted in line with public health knowledge about how best to control and contain the contagious disease. During Gruppe, the troops were Polish-Americans, whose kinfolk in the United States were subjected to all sorts of discriminations, especially in media campaigns by steel magnates struggling with post-war labor unrest—Poles in the work force, they proclaimed, were fodder for radicals organizing strikes. An American military intelligence report about these returning soldiers from Haller’s army said they “are not on the whole, a desirable element. Most of them have come from the large manufacturing [centers] such as Chicago, Buffalo, Pittsburgh, and are what we would consider in our own army a rough crowd.” When they filed past quarantine inspectors, it was obvious, that there was something about the soldier’s tunic and his American military service papers that served him well: both intersected to his benefit with medical information obtained from him in terms of the germ theory of disease. And more. The commander at Gruppe not only welcomed the Red Cross and YMCA, HIAS-like voluntary organisations, to help the army provide for soldiers’ personal needs. He also instituted special dental programs to assure the best of health for his Polish-American charges when they returned to civilian life in their home. Public authority in Danzig treated migrating Jews quite differently. To begin with, Poland did not cloak the migrants with the protective shield of citizenship. Jews had little if any recourse to any government when harassed or exploited. It was a radicalization of normal conditions experienced by most people engaged in long distance migration across foreign borders, especially at the places where they actually crossed national frontiers. Within the turmoil brought on by war and revolution, the formation of news states, and what some at times called “permanent pogroms,” hazards of travel and currency exchange threatened to strip Jews of their belongings, their beards and side locks, and often left them all but penniless by the time they arrived at the Baltic Port. For the exit through Danzig now involved new American procedures at designated US consulates or embassies and at ports of embarkation. In comparison to prewar days, migrating civilians needed a visa stamped into their passport and required the twelve-day quarantine which had become mandatory at Gruppe

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early on. Both requirements caused days of delay far from destinations, well beyond the control of the migrants. The delays themselves served as an important engine of exploitation. At the beginning of migration, when migrants had to “wait for steamers” the lodgings available to migrating Jews were in the hands of Danzig’s German landlords; and they charged unregulated rents by the day. In the late spring of 1920, Troyl, the very place that Gilchrist had ordered evacuated a few weeks earlier, became the site of the transit camp for Jewish migrants coming in from Warsaw. They and the various Americans who screened or worked with the immigrants had to somehow manage with the same public authorities from whose authority Gilchrist had removed himself. In practice this meant that American consular officials, public health physicians, and representatives of private organizations, such as the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Sheltering Society, had to improvise on an ad hoc basis and negotiate with competing local authorities, steamship and railway organizations, manufacturers and suppliers of delousing equipment. Sooner or later, quarantine drove everybody’s agenda because the isolation required each migrant to stay in one guarded place for twelve days. Once HIAS became engaged, it focused on the same jugular issues as had the military, transportation and housing officials, but first, in the Polish capital, together with the Joint Distribution Committee, it tried to break the passport and visa bottlenecks which were rife with antisemitism, graft, and corruption. (“The question of Polish clerks who don’t like Jews and mistreat our people terribly is one continuous problem.”) In Warsaw, HIAS representatives met the American consul whose “very small quarters,” could not possibly “handle with any degree of expedition the large and ever-increasing number of application for visas.” When the consul informed them that he was negotiating a lease for a bigger office, they were also told that the landlord demanded 10,000 percent increase, and rent in advance for three years, before signing a lease with the consul. The problem was that the Department of State had approved the lease but had funds for only the first year; and efforts to obtain a loan from a local banker had proved futile. So, the consul “applied to us [HIAS] for a loan of $5200 upon which he was willing to pay interest. We, of course, advanced the money without any interest at all. We felt it a privilege to be of assistance to our government in so great an emergency.” Still, six or eight weeks “elapsed before passports were issued to immigrants, sometimes only after heart wrenching decisions splitting migrating families. … We found that fully 90 per cent of the [newly required affidavits of support] which had been sent from America were lost in the mail never reaching the addressees.” In Rotterdam and Antwerp the bottlenecks were worse. HIAS was more successful in solving problems of transport and lodging. Its representatives managed to obtain from the Polish government special

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immigrant trains running from Warsaw to Danzig, a twelve-hour journey fraught with all sorts of problems but much shorter and safer than two weeks of “misery” to ports in Western Europe, where at journey’s end the immigrants, with their Yiddish, Polish, and German, arrived in places where they usually did not know the language. In the absence of constant, direct civilian passenger traffic between the Baltic port and the United States, HIAS arranged with the Cunard and White Star steamship companies to run “small steamers to English ports where they would be transferred to the big liners going to America”; a similar arrangement would send immigrants to the United States via Le Havre. Both options raised all sorts of complaints, against HIAS and about effective American quarantine control during these migration transfers from one European port to another. In the absence of the kind of military arrangements governing the establishment of Wikoff and Gruppe, HIAS moved into the vacuum by dealing with German, English and Polish public authorities regarding the use of the vacant facility that the Germans had used for prisoners during the war. No one seemed to own it. The Germans and English were each prepared to let HIAS rent it, so to speak, so long as the Poles were not involved; and the Poles for their part dealt with HIAS on those terms. “Everybody claimed to be the owners of the camp. Finally we came to an understanding with the [Polish] authorities of Danzig by which we could use the camp for Jewish immigrants.” Poles “were to manage the camp whilst we were to regulate prices. It was agreed that the immigrants should be charged 16 marks for a night’s lodging which included … transporting baggage from the railroad station to the camp and from the camp to the steamer. Food, including any medicine that may be necessary was charged at the rate of 22 marks a day per person.” In addition to these charges, the Polish Commission of Danzig, charged for the city a fixed fee of 20 marks for delousing. These fees were “to be paid by each immigrant,” that is by HIAS in the event the immigrants could not afford to pay the fees. These arrangements occurred in the shadow cast by quarantine officials of the American Public Health Service who in the face of the typhus epidemic went into an emergency mode. On 20 May 1920, Hugh Smith Cumming, its Surgeon General, notified Assistant Surgeon General Rupert Blue, in Paris, that John H. Linson, who had recently been transferred from Marseilles to Danzig, and others like him are to delouse emigrants and supervise fumigation of vessels. … Until there has been a material decline in the typhus rate in Central Europe, I think that all emigrants from European ports should prior to embarkation, be thoroughly deloused, and that steamship companies at the respective ports should provide adequate facilities in the way of barracks, bath houses, etc. to accomplish this purpose.”

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Cumming would send these types of warnings throughout the year. A few days later Linson himself went to Warsaw to discuss the typhus situation with Gilchrist, who had just returned from a general inspection tour. He told him that practically no delousing was being done: there were shortages of coal, no food for patients, sterilizers were rusting, hospitals were practically empty. Linson told Blue that medical officers were urging that removal of hair, “especially the whiskers, is an essential part of the delousing process.” For the Jewish ­immigrants this part of the delousing procedure was symbolically threatening and rife with indecent conduct. Militant “Westernized” Jews in Europe and America had long mocked beards and side locks; and in these weeks of pogroms and random hooliganism, physical attacks on Jews often included ripping out or cutting those facial hairs. There were repeated reports of women being photographed while taking delousing baths. But, of course, the formal quarantine procedure was onerous enough; HIAS officials, who compared “scientific requirements” in the quarantine procedures at Ellis Island thought Danzig’s requirements were “cruel. They are not civilized.” In Danzig the “American doctor has charge of it. He is very strict. He will not give a certificate to any man or women who has lice or who is affected by anything. In the examination he says cut off your hair or you cannot go.” Women acquiesced, reported a HIAS observer, “rather than go back to their home. They agree to cut their hair. The hair on the body was to be removed by a certain lime to boil off the hair. Many persons did not know how to stand while the lime was on. If the lime gets wet it burns the skin.” After September 4, women or religious men who objected to shaving apparently could opt for a treatment using a mixture of “equal parts kerosene and vinegar for at least one hour.” At the time, in the tense days of summer, the immigrants and HIAS related to quarantine in much the same spirit that merchants, concerned about their quarantined cargoes, had historically related to it. If they could not get rid of it entirely, they tried to reduce the length of the isolation, if only because each day locked up was one more day of expense and of all sorts of losses from collateral damage. “There is a great deal of bitterness among the people while in quarantine. When the people have to stay in quarantine for 12 days they want to go to the city. When they come back they are told that those five days you were away do not count at all. They are kept the same as prisoners. When they come back they are told your days start from now on.” To complicate matters, by late summer there was American pressure to shut down the Troyl camp. All sorts of problems existed and motives were mixed. Linson did not want to continue to sponsor a delousing establishment “in which sanitation, personal comfort and humane treatment are ignored;” for such

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conditions where both sexes “crowded together in dirty and uncomfortable barracks … [would] promote the spread of contagious diseases” and “immoral relations between the sexes;” and with winter coming, the “poorly clad and underfed” women and children, who at the time were the “majority of … immigrants constituted a special problem.” But Linson obviously recognized the impact of these conditions on the flow of migration: “It is not unreasonable to assume that the volume of immigration through Danzig will be greatly affected by the unpleasant experience through which so many immigrants are passing.” On August 30, the Public Health Service did temporarily withdraw its approval, thus holding up the delousing and disinfection process of 190 passengers in the camp. When it did recertify, for the sake of those immigrants, new rules were required of the city: Linson demanded and got “the assistance of … four persons because in the past the bathing and disinfection at the Troyl camp has been notoriously inefficient:” one record keeper for the clothing being processed, which now had to remain in steam sterilizers for forty minutes at 100 degrees Celsius; one man and one woman for supervising the bathing of each immigrant, who now had to stay in the shower for at least five minutes “using soap freely and paying special attention to hair”—this procedure included the use of acetic acid to “kill the nits” which were then removed with fine tooth combs and finger nails by friends of passengers or the woman hired to do so; and one examiner for patrolling the entire process. Linson also insisted that in future, after receiving their cleaned clothing, each immigrant go directly to the departing steamer. The tight sailing schedules of those steamers could intensify frustrations and anxieties as capricious conduct and control of departure permits by American doctors took its toll. “On the second day of July, Friday,” reported a HIAS official, “I went to the ticket office of … [a representative for the Cunard Line]. I was told tomorrow there will be a steamer going to England. The steamer will stay only two hours in Danzig. He said that if we had the immigrants that are through with the quarantine, we should have them ready and they will take them on. In order that they should be able to go, they have to get a certificate from the doctor. There was no doctor there since it was four o’clock. I was told the doctor was in his bathing place, about forty miles away. We hired an automobile and rushed over there. We found him in a hotel playing. … We told him the story. … He said his business hours are over. We explained that there is a shortage of steamers and now we can take away 250 immigrants. He said he cannot do anything. For the people to remain meant that the longer they stay the more they suffer. This man did not move from his place.” Even as the Public Health Service continued its high alert warnings, by year’s end, Linson was forced to admit that his Jews had not been verminous. In a note

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to an inquiring fellow physician in the Service, he wrote there was no typhus fever in Danzig. “We have had only two suspected cases since the opening of the camp. In fact, I must confess that I have never yet seen an authentic case of typhus fever.” In New York’s quarantine station, in the meatime, the tone about the migration out of Poland was also beginning to change. To be sure, in the spring of 1921, Blue is still pressing his officers in Europe to “secure cleaner ships” and in New York and other oceanic ports officials are asked to be prepared in the case of typhus for quarantining passengers for twelve days; for it was clear to him: “Absolute control … is not possible at foreign ports.” But, in line with Linson’s experience, Blue now “did not believe that any restrictions should be imposed against emigrants departing from Poland or the Baltic regions”; no cases had been reported since March. No doubt the epidemic had passed its peak—the medical charts were falling back to their pre-1916 levels. Yet two other factors were now in play. The Emergency Immigration Act was scheduled to go into force at the end of the month: it would stop all mass migration out of Europe in general, out of eastern and southern Europe in particular. And bacteriologists had closed in on typhus: Arthur Felix and Edmund Weil had described a diagnosis of typhus that used the patient’s blood serum, and within a few years the laboratory test was being used successfully for screening and confirming typhus in ways similar to diagnostic tests for cholera among passengers arriving at Atlantic ports. So, on June 22, 1921, the Medical Superintendent of the Department of Health, at Canada’s quarantine station at Gross Isle, in Montmagny, Quebec, could confirm, for the Medical Officer in Charge, at the United States Quarantine Station in New York, that yes, indeed there was typhus fever aboard the Oristano. His station had used the Felix-Weil test to prove that, “we had really to deal with cases of typhus fever. … [It] has given us entire satisfaction.” In comparison with returning troops, the quarantine treatments and experiences of migrating Jews from new Poland and old Russia had been similar but different. Both groups had shared all sorts of uncertainties brought on by the exigencies of war or postwar problems. They had also been victims of conflicting chains of command, incompetence, ignorance, capriciousness, corruption, and the snarls of bureaucracy. They had all suffered needlessly from indifference to or perhaps tolerance of human suffering by officials masking ignorance and serving under the cloak of guardianship of the republic. The obvious differences in the treatment between incoming soldiers and incoming Jews need not be restated. But some implications of these differences deserve to be teased out. In the absence of sulfa drugs or other antibiotics, the darker sides of quaran-

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tine mentalities in America’s liberal democracy had changed during a critical moment, when heredity had met the bacterium. Clearly, after WWI, the more modern and professional public health service insisted on testing when in doubt rather than on imposing quarantine. But all along, there had remained significant gaps between diagnoses and cures of threatening contagious diseases. In the neo-Lamarckian biomedical culture of these years the gaps had been readymade for acts of biological politics. These would shield the returning ­soldier in the service of the republic, even as they were targeting Jews in anti-immigration campaigns and within legitimate structures of quarantine. While still believing in the inheritance of personal and collective characteristics, be they “natural,” or “acquired,” especially during times of emergency, in the name of the republic’s public good, the practitioners’ modern scientific eye now fixed each traveler as potentially pathogenic, that is as a potential killer. With that gaze local and federal American health authorities, at home and abroad, helped to shape anti-immigrant rhetoric that could be group specific, enforce confinements, evictions, burning of private belongings, and when fearing dogs, enforce orders to kill them with gas. In late nineteenth and early twentieth century, in their totality these kinds of efforts by United States officials had important consequences, some certainly unanticipated. Especially while a typhus epidemic was raging in Poland, they may well have contributed to the complex process by which quarantine-connected health officials helped to build part of the platform on which American public officials responded to a German fascist regime reconstructing the Jew as the new old mortal enemy of modern civilized society. In the United States this context now also included Americanization campaigns, deadly urban riots, in the South and North, between whites and blacks, strikes and massive rallies, suspicions and persecutions of German speaking active residents, deportations of Jewish immigrant radicals, as well as restrictive immigration laws. Taken together, these events and policies were preconditions for what a later generation would designate as “ethnic cleansing.” Biological determinisms had remained firmly in the saddle. Even as modern public health programs, with growing number of vaccines, were becoming dramatically successful in fighting disease, they remained affected by ethnic hierarchies. They had been laced with apprehensions about peoplehoods as agents of dangerous contagious disease. Indeed, a regime’s physicians and clerkdoms had fed all sorts of fragments and debris about peoplehoods, seemingly scientific information, into the heartland of ethnicking taking place in the interwar years. Among America’s larger officialdom these kinds of efforts had important consequences, some certainly unanticipated. For in the wake of WWI, experiences with ongoing raging epidemics in Poland and the explosion of the worldwide flu pandemic yielded mixed signals about contagion and peoplehoods.

CHAPTER 10

Nationalizing Secular ­Peoplehoods

In the years of war and revolution, mass behavior helps to reshape American peoplehoods and their ethnicking. For then, the Wilson Administration turns toward becoming a “surveillance state,” suspicious of anarcho-syndicalists, socialists, labor organizers, antiwar militant hyphenates, suspicious of German Americans and of other ethnics perceived of acting differently than they had in the past. Diverse kinds of well-organized “Americanizers,” usually fear ­ethnicking outside of their own kind as threats to the cultural unity they had constructed. The republic’s “fighting faiths” target hyphenates. Nationalization pressures envelop republican peoplehoods. Federal agencies at times pursue intense campaigns. In response among German Americans, more often than not, silent acquiescence becomes the order of the day. Among Jews their secular contexts help to establish the basis of what many identify as American Yiddishkeit; in African American group conduct the new mobilizing phrase is “New Negroes” or “Garveyites.”1 In those months between 1917 and 1921, while deadly white rioting exploded against blacks—in East St. Louis, Chester and Philadelphia, Houston and Longview, Washington DC, Chicago, Omaha, Charleston, Knoxville, Elaine, Arkansas and Tulsa, Oklahoma—other popular expressions, quite different from the deadly white rioting, also erupted. These came under other banners of American patriotism: war enthusiasms, anti-war campaigns, and liberation

1 Irving Howe, World of Our Fathers (New York: Harcourt Brace anovitch, 1976), 16, 306–347; William Jordan, “‘The damnable dilemma’: African-American Accommodation and Protest During World War I,” Journal of American History 81 (March 1995): 1562–1583; Richard ­Polenberg, Fighting Faiths: The Abrams Case, the Supreme Court, and Free Speech (Ithaca: ­Cornell University Press, 1987), passim. The phrase “fighting faiths” is in Holmes’s famous Abraham dissent trying to explain why he had written a different kind of majority decision for the earlier Schenck case.

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movements, at home and abroad. Among post-Talmudic East European Jews in particular, popular mobilization occurred in the moments of the Russian revolutions and the publication of the British Balfour Declaration promising a Jewish homeland in Palestine. Now too among African Americans peoplehood tumult occurred. All along they had been essential participants of American ethnicking. This time significant numbers again demonstrated their traditions of American peoplehood, but now more so with secular kinds of enthusiasms: they responded to Marcus Garvey’s martial appeals, some for establishing black sovereignty in Africa but to most participants that sovereignty was a metaphor for their yearning to share in an idealized promised land here at home, more like in the promise they had conjured about “New York” or “Chicago” when many had started their journey in the Great Migration from the slave stained South.2 The ground for these events among Jewish citizens had been well prepared. America’s wars had long left their mark. Yiddish newspaper positions during the popular Spanish-American War had foreshadowed responses to “fighting faiths” twenty years later. The Yiddish press fractured, in part because war became a competitive issue between the Yiddish organ of the Socialist Labor Party—it opposed the capitalist war—and Cahan’s paper now aligning with the Socialist Party. He and most other Jewish immigrants from East Central Europe since the 1880s had experienced the depth of the terrible depression of the mid-nineties and the war against Spain. It was their first American war and as such presented the opportunity to demonstrate enthusiastic patriotism for the new promised land.3 Socialist Cahan from the Yiddish speaking worlds of Russia showed his people the English and American republican way that he had started to learn about, briefly first in Liverpool and then shortly after arriving in New York where he could read socialist newspapers without fear of imprisonment.4 From the start of his career as journalist, agitator, and politician, Cahan, a wellknown post Talmudic Jew, had mastered the task of meeting secular challenges within the institutional structures of an American capitalist society. Some of his writing illuminates this complex process. As did other talented white or black secular agitators for their audiences, so too did this great peoplehood teacher

2 Grossman, Land of Hope, 259–265, 352n10. 3 Irving Howe, World of Our Fathers, 1–147; Sorin, Time for Building, 12–108; Moses Rischin, ed., Grandmother Never Lived in America: The New Journalism of Abraham Cahan (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986) presents Cahan’s work in the Commercial Advertiser under the direction of Lincoln Steffens: for the Spanish-American War, 3–35; for Rischin’s introduction to Cahan and his articles, x–xliv. 4 Leon Stein et al., eds. and trans., The Education of Abraham Cahan [Bleter Fun Mein Leben], vol. 1, (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1969), 210–229.

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know exactly what he could take for granted among his Yiddish readers, who at the time belonged to one of the most literate immigrant population in the United States.5 In the Yiddish language Arbeter tsaytung he wrote his column as if he was a Jewish preacher or Sholem Aleichem’s fictional Tevye interpreting a passage in the Bible. Thus, for example, a few years after his arrival, this was his take on Hebrew lines from Exodus during an 1890 cloak makers’ strike in New York. “‘Va-yakel Moyshe’: Moses assembled the children of Israel and said to them, ‘Sheyshes yomim tasu melokho,’ you shall not work for the bosses more than six days a week, the seventh day you shall rest. … But what is actually the case? The children of Israel work eighteen hours a day … and have no Sabbath and no Sunday off. Ay, you may ask, can’t they die from exhaustion? Indeed, die they do. But there is one commandment they do: Moses tells them in today’s sedre [portion] that on the seventh day they shall not light fire. This they observe an entire week: there is nothing to cook, thank God, and no fire to cook with.”6 At that time, this instrumental use of sacred Jewish texts had been driven by a program derived from secular visions then held by small groups of socialist enthusiasts struggling with the impact of capitalism’s market economy and business cycle. Each tied it to their own fragments and debris—the Germans, the Poles, the Finns, the Italians, each to their own, using the Hebrew Bible or the Christian New Testament: Here, in 1895, in the midst of a severe industrial depression, out of New York’s Lower East Side comes Cahan’s secular Jewish voice with its peoplehood tensions: “The little Jewish soul, which five years ago was shrunken and pressed down in the narrow confines of the old, moldy little Jewish world, is today as broad as the entire world. It used to be engraved in old, faint letters: ‘The little Jews are my people, the Land of Israel is my small sliver of a world, and the Five Books of Moses is my religion.’ But now honest, large, golden letters sparkle: ‘Humanity is my people, the wider world is my fatherland, and helping everyone to advance toward happiness is my religion!’”7 5 On literacy among Jewish immigrants, see Tony Michels, “Speaking to Moyshe: The Early Socialist Yiddish Press and Its Readers,” Jewish American History 14 (2000): 51–82. At the end of the nineteenth century the original clauses in congressional legislation for the Literacy Act excluded Yiddish when imposing literacy requirements on immigrants wanting to enter the United States. 6 Quoted in Tony Michels, A Fire in Their Hearts: Yiddish Socialists in New York (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), 99. 7 Ibid., 1.

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In the next decades, mostly as editor of the influential Forverts, he retained this voice, but increasingly with a profound difference. War, revolutions, and news of atrocity-laden events in the European and Palestinian Jewish worlds reshaped his secular convictions more than once; and so did his changing Yiddish readers. They required his mass circulation daily to cater to the life of a changing people of the Talmud living in New York: after the dreams about new Russia ended, for like-minded socialists, and for many of his other readers, the Forverts contained ever less of hard and fast radical secular ideological polemics.8 By then, even as the national political culture came to contain more hostile voices about peoplehoods, American Yiddishkeit had been given an institutional basis. For besides a flourishing secular Yiddish press, the organized Jewish hinterland had grown substantially, in numbers and in political and economic power: the Arbeter Ring; the trade unions in the needle trades, the furriers and hatmakers; and the web of landsmanschaften and educational, cultural and social welfare activities. Here militant Yiddishists would find converts. On the eve of the Great War the Yiddish language press had been significant by criteria evaluating English language newspapers and magazines. There was Cahan’s Forverts, Der Morgen Journal, and Der Tog. The last two, each a daily with a nonsocialist or anti-socialist persuasion, catered to the religious orthodox or moderate secularizing middle classes, although it was well-known at the time that all of these newspapers and magazines had many cross-over readers. During the war years and into the twenties, this Yiddish-language press had a combined rising circulation, at its height in popularity probably reaching close to 400,000 considering that by 1920, the Forverts alone could count 200,000 estimated readers. Some of these publications helped to develop a genuine literary Yiddish culture giving militant Yiddishists for a time good reasons for optimism about some sort of autonomous Yiddishkeit, if not in the United States then at least in New York City.9 The Arbeter Ring had also grown apace from its tiny beginnings in an apartment on the Lower East Side where the few founders spoke German. But quite quickly this effort in social insurance for a few workers turned into a major New York fraternal enterprise for the emerging Yiddish speaking world in the neighborhoods where versions of English were making important inroads. In the two decades after Arbeter Ring’s founding, it had become a major national institution counting around 85,000 insured members. It worked closely with organizations of Jewish socialists and trade unionists and developed its own secular educational system. Theater parties, involving all three were often advertised in 8 Howe, World of Our Fathers, 287–359. 9 Ibid.

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the Yiddish language press. Among American peoplehoods, Jews were relatively well-organized. In these same years, the trade union activity of Yiddish speaking workers occurred mostly in expanding local organizations of national unions, such as the International Ladies Garment Workers Union, the Hatmakers of America, and the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America. Of these only the Amalgamated did not belong to the American Federation of Labor. Initially, because of their largely Jewish membership and leadership cadres, these unions were identified as Jewish unions, a popular designation that stuck even years after the number of Jews dwindled into a distinct minority. However, Jewish union leaders remained in place.10 Many of the Yiddish speaking members mingled with synagogue Jews in their local neighborhoods. They celebrated circumcision rituals. In their cemeteries, they said or heard the mourner’s kaddish. In the wake of the Triangle Fire in 1911 those occasions happened often.11 American ethnicking was complex. These unions within a capitalist society were labor unions striving to modernize American labor relations with collective bargaining and contracts: They were not organizations fighting for the well-being of Jewish peoplehood, nor, for most members and their leaders, for the agendas of Yiddishists. They also were not organizations fighting explicitly for the well-being of Bundists or labor unions in particular, although individual locals retained sufficient autonomy allowing them to associate with ethnic or political causes. Unions used Yiddish instrumentally, like the Yiddish press, and for that reason they printed union documents in Yiddish, just as they used English, Italian, Lithuanian or other languages for their literate membership. Still, in the midst of war, in New York in particular, East European Yiddish language achievements notwithstanding, revolutionary Russian passion had pulled Cahan, along with other New York Jewish social democrats and even Jewish anarchists. They became part of an initial fervor and maelstrom of ignorance about events abroad. Within the months of 1917 and 1918, they were into events associated with the Bolshevik Revolution. They shared with others the euphoria 10 By World War I and into the early twenties membership swelled so that at their height garment unions could claim around 250,000, but Jews by then were already becoming a minority among the multiethnic members. 11 In the local neighborhood, Yiddish used by the first- and second-generation immigrants varied enormously, ranging from excellent, often Lithuanian-schooled Yiddish, to fractured ­Yiddish mixed with fractured American-English.

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of Czarism’s demise, with fellow Jews the deep sense of relief that one of their long-lived oppressive regimes had come to an end. To be sure, there remained problems in making decisions about the capitalists’ war and in deciding which country to support, for after April 1917, the options included the United States. Most European socialists had turned into war socialists, leaving the anti-war American Socialist Party in splendid isolation and, initially after the Bolshevik triumph, its members susceptible to anti-war appeals. For the moment Lenin’s revolution was the force of history promising a new society for workers and Jews. It was a short-lived moment. The drivers of American peoplehoods had been steering in opposite directions. Antiwar positions collided with America’s war strategy and unsuccessful military campaigns to defeat Bolshevism. Together with France and Great Britain, the United States was set not only on defeating Germany and its allies. After the Bolsheviks’ takeover and its decision to pull Russia out of the war, all three countries put armies in the field that would support Russian opponents to the new regime. This military action continued after the formal end of World War I and mingled with the postwar struggles between new claimants on sovereignty in East Central Europe: the Soviet Union, the Ukraine, and Poland. As a result of the prolonged fighting in regions of dense Jewish populations and suffering, Jewish socialists supporting the Bolsheviks remained under intense scrutiny into the early twenties; and not only by American government agencies that turned their “alien” targets into “anarchists” to make them deportable by criteria used in American law.12 Feverish sectarianism in the midst of America’s war against Bolsheviks at home and abroad spawned much of the debris, many of the fragments that would produce the connections associated between American secular Yiddishkeit and hyper paranoia about anti-American international Jewish conspiracies. Some of the new communist publications prided themselves on attracting gifted writers and using their elegant Yiddish in comparison to Cahan’s Forverts popular street Yiddish using transliterated American English. One recent student of these events has stressed this Jewish context: “The emergence of a Jewish Communist movement brought debates about Jewish nationalism and internationalism into sharp focus once again. Some viewed 12 Federal legislation of 1903 had made it illegal for an anarchist to enter the United States, and in 1918 at the behest of the Department of Justice and Office of Immigration, Senator William P. Dillingham from Vermont, the experienced advocate of immigration restriction, moved to amend the Literacy Act. It expanded the use of “anarchist” so that it became easy for the Department of Justice to arrest many an alien on the charge of anarchism or related acts or attitudes toward the American republic. Those charged and arrested for “anarchism,” however, had to be reviewed by the Department of Labor. Most were released, including Garvey.

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Communism as a vehicle with which to transcend once and for all Jewish and all other national identities. They infused the old ideas of internationalism with a new degree of militancy. Yet others viewed the Communist movement as an opportunity to bring together two longed hoped-for goals: social revolution and a Yiddish cultural renaissance.”13 Bolshevik enthusiasms fostered ideological suspicions and sometimes fears especially once new organizations and institutions were in play. First came sustained federal and state government scrutiny, and even deportation—these included selected aliens almost always conveniently charged as “anarchists,” because of their perceived antiwar sentiments or conduct.14 Often this charge barely cloaked identification with Bolshevism, socialism, or the Industrial Workers of the World. Then, in the early twenties, with the formation of communist parties, came intense suspicion and attack from ideological opponents. These included Jewish and nonJewish organizations usually hostile to any group perceived as a threat to American democracy. They also included some anarchists, many social democrats, and, especially within labor unions of the needle trades, bread-and-butter trade unionists. Here all, as members, often fought each other for control of parts or all of a union, sometimes with violence and the use of organized hoods.15 In those months after World War I, perhaps more so than before, the fragments and debris continued to play important parts in republican peoplehood identity formation and continuities. American ethnicking was becoming more intense if only because zionists and garveyites were screaming at the same time; and so were their opponents. Old and new promised lands were in play. At the same time this American ethnicking was starting to demonstrate that the republic’s ethnic hierarchy though more rigid than before was retaining its historic flexibility. The links to religiously inspired icons remained powerful among militant secularists. Cahan’s use of Torah passages, or other militant secularists use of a Mezuzah to shield a campaign or strike continued, as on doorposts where it was expected to help guard a Jewish home. Thus, in Fall of 1921, a cartoon in Der groyser Kundes depicted the Jewish Socialist Federation’s split with the Socialist Party of America and its loyal practical minded Forverts. The cartoonist turned to an often-used Passover text and soup delicacy to make a polemical point: We

13 Michels, A Fire in their Hearts, 221–222. 14 Sometimes, as in the case of Emma Goldman, a genuine anarchist was apprehended and ­deported. 15 Frankel, Prophets and Politics, 510–551; Joseph Brandes, “From Sweatshop to Stability: Jewish Labor between Two World Wars,” Yivo Annual of Jewish Social Studies 16 (1976): 21–125.

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have the Hagada [the canon, that is the principle at stake]. You have the kneidlach [the perishable matzeballs] that is the “business” of the Jewish masses. World War I also created the circumstances for Great Britain’s government to issue the Balfour Declaration supporting on as yet unconquered Turkish lands “the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people.” Just as the revolutions in Russia triggered spasms of euphoria and suspicions, so, too, did this declaration. And not only among the small groups of older Zionist activists who, as a put down, had been labeled parochial Jewish nationalists by the socialist internationalists, Bundists, and Yiddishist cosmopolites—often critics on the left also accused labor Zionists of fearing seasickness. Most orthodox groups, patiently waiting for the messiah to return Jews to the Holy Land, thought of Zionists as heretical interventionists in the divine calendar. Jewish critics of American peoplehoods, focusing on hyphenated Americans, insisted that Jewish citizens of the United States were opposed to the kind of dual loyalty beckoning in mobilization campaigns for a Jewish homeland in Palestine; years earlier, Reform Jews had officially severed their religious bonds to Palestine and its Jerusalem. Nevertheless, when in 1921 two famous anti-clerical secularist Zionists—Russian Jew Chaim Weizmann, a president of the World Zionist Organization, and the famous scientist Albert Einstein, one of Weizmann’s recent supporters—together visited New York to raise funds for a new Hebrew University in Jerusalem, large mixed crowds came out to cheer; they came often in the tens of thousands, East European Jewish immigrants and their children, secularists and theists: potentially they represented the changing American peoplehood in action.16 For the moment, among Jewish secularists it was the Zionists, especially the socialist Zionists, who most threatened to make inroads to established American peoplehood devotions held by those identifying with the anti-Zionist Jewish labor movement. The competitors had long been at odds, usually sharing intense anti-clerical arguments as they fought each other, seemingly in life and death struggles, over the correct ways forward to a sound Jewish future. During the war and its aftermath, in size and enthusiasm, their demonstrations in Manhattan 16 Walter Isaacson, Einstein and His Universe (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2010), 290–301; Jehuda Rheinharz, Chaim Weizmann: The Makeing of a Zionist Leader (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 276–349; Melvyn I. Urofsky, Louis D. Brandeis: A Life (New York: Pantheon, 2009), 528–544. Many, no doubt, came to see and honor the famous scientist who now so publically identified with the Jewish people and the Zionist movement. But most seem to have come out for Weizmann, whom the demonstrators saw as the fellow Russian Jewish standard bearer of the Zionist movement, even though at the time the American Brandeis was its elected head. Weizmann was also coming to a Zionist convention where he would take back the leadership from Brandeis. Walter Isaacson, “How Einstein Divided American Jews,” The Atlantic 304, December 2009, 70.

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competed with others on its streets and in its halls, suffragettes, socialists, Bolshevik sympathizers, as well as the large crowds of Garveyites. Obviously, important new fragments and debris now beckoned. Bits from the more formal arguments of competing ideologues were sent broadcast through the press, in pamphlets and speeches at meetings and rallies. Some promulgated controversies engulfing promised lands outside of the United States, for some in the Soviet Union, for some in Palestine. But contrary to what militant Americanizers broadcast, most Jews in the United States also had no problem integrating fragments of such feelings and thoughts with their primary American promised land. In fact, at the time Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis and his supporters in the Zionist Organization of America insisted that being a Zionist was an expression by Jews of the best in American citizenship. As in the case of socialist and Yiddishists, a number of different kinds of Zionists and their opponents had emerged since the end of the nineteenth century. Like many of them Brandeis had been influenced by peoplehood experiences in family households or discrete local political cultures in which progenitors had been reared. Sometimes a dedicated ideologue or friend was the persuasive influence, such as Brandeis’s beloved and respected uncle who was deeply engaged in Jewish affairs; leading Zionists seeking Brandeis’ support and membership knew about that r­ elationship.17 Brandeis’ conversion was important and revealing about fragments and debris in American republican peoplehood identity formation. Brandeis had little to do with any kind of Jewish political or institutional affairs. But in 1910, this Jew and famous Boston attorney, as an invited arbiter, had participated in New York City’s Jewish labor turmoil and struggles for industrial democracy. By 1911, he was one of the many post-Talmudic Jews touched by those swirls of conflicting secular Jewish ideologies within America’s well-established republican practices of political expressions: riots, peaceful demonstrations, and at the ballot box during elections, in fraternal associations, union halls, and political events of the nation’s federal system. Now Brandeis was no longer like German Jewish Walter Lippman, the already famous correspondent of the New York Herald Tribune, or many like him who in public presented an indifference to Jewish affairs without discarding the fragments and debris preventing a denial of their Jewishness. Nor was he like Cahan, or Sidney Hillman, the powerful president of the of Amalgamated Clothing Workers Union. As did many with their kind of 17 Frankel, Prophets and Politics, op. cit; Gerd Korman, “Ethnic Democracy and Its Ambiguities: The Case of the Needle Trade Unions,” American Jewish History 75 (1986); “Labor Historians and Immigrants: A Review Essay,” American Jewish History 78 (1988).

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European post-Talmudic background, they chose one swirl without developing protective armor shielding them from another, a Jewish one like Zionism or American versions of Europe’s Bundism. In the years of the Balfour Declaration and the Russian Revolution, Cahan and Hillman chose the red swirl but unlike Lippman remained engaged with Jewish affairs and politics, especially Cahan, the great editor of the Forverts. Joseph Schlossberg, Hillman’s number two in the Amalgamated chose both, socialism and labor Zionism. So did Max Zaritsky, president of the Hat Makers Union. Brandeis was different, in that like Lippman or Alfred Stieglitz, the famed photographer, he was part of a first-generation German Jewish family. His parents had settled in segregated Kentucky and retained their connections with Germany, where young Brandeis went to high school. Then, and for some years later, like most other members of his family Brandeis opposed Zionism. That position put him in the anti-Zionist camp together with most wealthy and influential Jews. For his part, Brandeis had persuaded himself that for Jews in the United States, Zionism, as he understood the Herzlian movement, contained the kind of values that were in direct conflict with the best in American citizenship: on the subject of American nationalism and dual loyalty there was no daylight between him, Jacob Schiff, the leadership of the American Jewish Committee, many Jews like the liberal Lippman, and those who were socialists or trade union leaders. In fact, Brandeis identified with Theodore Roosevelt, the most famous of republican Americanization preachers. But between 1911 and 1914 Brandeis changed, in part because of conversations with Horace Kallen and some other leading Zionists. For the rest of his life, Brandeis remained convinced that Kallen’s understanding of American peoplehood was correct and made much more sense than the Americanization campaign against so-called hyphenates. The new perception of that context was Brandeis’ version of the so radically different context Du Bois had invoked in 1897. Brandeis’ interpretation meant for him that in the United States he and Jewish Americans in general should turn to Zionism, a secular movement that would give them a particular, a public secular republican Jewish association. As his latest biographer explains, his turn came within America’s actual peoplehood contexts. For Brandeis his Zionism meant a public identification as a secular Jewish American whose promised land was and forever would remain the United States of America. A Jewish Palestine would help the Jews of persecuting Europe. And in that small area of the Near East they would build with values Brandeis held dear as a pragmatic reformer in America. In the United States, Zionism would make Jews better Jews and better American citizens.

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Du Bois was quite different. But it is not unreasonable to note an important kind of equivalency. From within each of their changing secular minded American experiences, each insisted that their respective fellow Americans needed to identify with their unmistakable characteristics, those in harmony with best of America’s ideals and yet clearly associated with their respective people and its unique memories. It is worthwhile to repeat some of Du Bois’s words: “The ideal of liberty demanded for its attainment powerful means, and these the Fifteenth Amendment gave. … A million black men started with renewed zeal to vote themselves into the kingdom.” When they continued to meet suppression, they were able to turn to “book learning;” to “the curiosity, born of compulsory ignorance, to know and test the power of cabalistic letters of the white man, the longing to know. Mission and night schools began in the smoke of ­battles … and at last developed into permanent foundations. Here at last seemed to have been discovered the mountain path to Canaan. … Work, culture, and liberty— all these we need, not singly, but together; for today these ideals among the Negro people are gradually coalescing, and riding higher meaning in the unifying ideal of race—the ideal of the American republic, in order that some day, on American soil, two world races may give each to each those characteristic which both so sadly lack.”18 World War I would make more visible the public realities of peoplehood in a modernizing American nation state. Belligerents attracted support among competing immigrants and their leaders. It was a season of passions for an Irish Free State and national independence movements in Central Europe. President Wilson had trumpeted the ideal of self-determination for the different peoples of the world. Many immigrants, for example hundreds of Polish Americans, volunteered and fought for their peoples’ new independent state, the Poles while technically under the French high command. The Garvey Africa movement exploded, prompting in some African Americans the identifier “unhyphenated Americans.” In other words, many a person who identified with their peoplehood was touched by a promised land euphoria that inflamed politicized ­imaginations. But primary bonds usually remained connected to the United States, to American loyalty expectations, although some did return to Europe and among African Americans, in a few instances they went to Africa. For even at the height of these promised-land enthusiasms, immigrant ethnic groups beyond the first 18 Du Bois, “Negro People,” 195–196; Hahn, Nation Under Our Feet, 176–464; Litwack, ­Trouble in Mind, 281–496; Litwack, Been in the Storm so Long, 502–556; Foner, Reconstruction, 602–612.

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generation demonstrated that they had no intention of cleaving to the languages of the lands of emigration. Local pre-WWI campaigns in Wisconsin against formal public education efforts to teach German were well known, especially the campaign against German American Lutherans who linked the language to their worship rituals. Other languages also met with opposition; during the war they were targets of Americanization campaigns. But perhaps the most important form of opposition came from immigrants and their children themselves: most did not enroll in offered non-English public school classes teaching different immigrant languages.19 Similar signals came from Jews, including the Yiddish-language hinterland that had seemed so promising to militant Yiddishists. Fragments and debris from the rhetoric of Jewish ideologues participated in shaping negative attitudes towards Yiddish and Hebrew as public school subjects. All along there were critics, not only among the influential German Jewish families who had reared the likes of Lippman and Brandeis, but also among leading socialists in New York and Chicago, individuals like Morris Hillquit and even Cahan. These last were prepared to use Yiddish for mobilizing purposes and to help the transitions into an English-speaking society. Yet because they considered themselves enlightened, that is modern, they accepted much of America’s republican impulse: they identified Yiddish, Aramaic, and Hebrew as the language of European ghettos and the Talmudic canons. At the same time large numbers of the rank and file upwardly mobile Jews were eager to share in the flourishing metropolitan popular cultures even as they were especially sensitive to all sorts of assimilation pressures blocking their paths. For them, migration to America itself had also been a way out of the Ghetto, out of the webs in the Talmudic canon, to find other sources of truth and knowledge. They often found both in the retail markets, public schools, and other institutions of the public square. Obviously for most urban Jews neither Yiddish nor Hebrew or Aramaic was a proper language for the children.20 The World War I years and their immediate aftermath, much more so than before, also exposed the complex American root system of African American peoplehood. As in the case of Jews and other peoples, fragments and debris, often unknowingly, played important parts in fashioning particular bonds of association. This was especially true in moments of temporary public mobilization in metropolitan neighborhoods with large numbers of residents who could identify with each 19 Jonathan Zimmerman, “Ethnic against Ethnicity: European Immigrants and Foreign ­Language Instructions, 1890–1940,” Journal of American History (March 2007): 1383–1404. 20 Ibid.: 1383–1404.

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other’s past, daily experiences, or with each other’s parochial calendars and rites of passage. Such was the case for Jews when Weizmann and Einstein arrived; and such was the case in Harlem at a time when in the larger world publicists and politicians talked of Wilson’s self-determination of peoples, Zionism, Irish independence, and Central Europe’s battles for old new national sovereignties. Marcus Garvey and his organization successfully tapped into black peoplehood discourse. It was rich in fragments from “promised lands:” vocabulary from Douglass, Washington, Du Bois, Randolph and others—teachers, preachers, ministers, writers, editors—leaders who in their speeches and writings used “my” or “our” “people” often interchangeably with “race.” They had been frustrated and blocked at voting booths. Their public spaces had been violated by riots and lynchings. They lived and worked in the cages of private and state-enforced segregation. Their clustered employment opportunities were bounded by history, geography, and constant discrimination. And finally, African American citizens and their children shared seats and pews in segregated schools and worship services, where black buzz words helped them cope with the painful days of white American suzerainty. These and other fragments and debris had been obtained from centuries-old unique traditions and experiences of a distinctive African American peoplehood, regionally dispersed, but after the Depression of 1893 increasingly in motion towards metropolitan centers in the South and Northeast and then to the Far West. And with migrations came a veritable explosion of periodicals and newspapers rivalling in size and influence other medium-sized ethnic presses, such as the substantial number of Jewish and German-American ones; the Chicago Defender and the Amsterdam News would approach circulation figures pushing into the tens of thousands, no mean achievement considering the markedly lower literacy rates among African Americans. In 1916, when for the first time Garvey, the immigrant from Jamaica, had stood on Randolph’s street platform in Harlem, this complex discourse of peoplehood was still arriving in the neighborhoods of Manhattan and Chicago, especially from the sharecropping domains where thousands of migrants had bundled their post-slavery memories, some of which, as in the case of Jews in those years, pointed towards selfdetermination and peoplehood existence. Soon African Americans would have Garvey’s Negro World for access to his movement’s rhetoric, polemics, and relations with the United States government. By then the country was at war and the Wilson Administration was transforming its persuasive reform discourse into mobilization campaigns, including its efforts to nationalize, that is to say, to discipline peoplehoods with a secular bent. This

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challenge was entangled with the serious strains besetting the country’s capitalist society. There were industrial conflicts, easily identified with a strengthening organized labor movement if only because it had a threatening radical wing in the form of the Industrial Workers of the World. In addition, the Socialist Party had become a serious competitor at the ballot box. When the passions of revolutionary zeal obtained significant followers of immigrant workers, and employers in the coal and steel industry turned to African American workers as strike breakers, government efforts to nationalize and discipline the loyalties of black and white ethnic workers became part of the campaign to insure the productive capacity of the war economy. In particular, the campaign sought to protect those workers from militant organizers and polemicists perceived as agents taking advantage of those presumed to be ignorant of the ways of a free market economy and the American Way. One chilling effort permitted special agencies in the military, and new ones in civilian governments, to go into a surveillance mode of African American leaders. Telling examples inhere within experiences of Du Bois and of Garvey. These leaders, two of many in African America, like their compatriots, were different from leaders of German, Irish, Polish, Italian or Jewish America. During World War I, African Americans had no large numbers of friends and relatives in a warring European nation, as did Jews have associations of indebtedness to Germany for its relatively more enlightened policies towards its German Jews; African Americans also had no great expectations from East European revolutionary movements. Such white ethnic connections to enemy belligerents or to anticapitalist movements had brought government suspicion, even prosecutions. African American leaders did have serious problems with policies and practices in their own country, a federal republic that after the civil war had institutionalized the segregated societies of its citizens. It was still driven by fierce biocultural determinism. In many states, and in Washington, DC, the nation’s capital, governments enforced caste-like systems based on perceived characteristics, “seen” drops of blood, properly verbalized in the United States Census: “quadroon,” “octoroon,” (1890) “mulatto,” (1920) “one drop rule;” this last from 1930 when it meant any trace of Africa turned one into an African American.21 This sacred kitsch numerology served as the metrics used by public and private guardians of the republic’s ethnic hierarchy. Governments also continued to tolerate popular punishments by beatings, riots, and lynchings. It is worth repeating that the pattern reached new levels of popular violence in St. Louis in 1916, 21 People who were “white and Indian” also were generally to be counted as Indian. New York Times, January 30, 2011.

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in Chicago after the war, in 1919, and with 221 African American dead in Tulsa in 1921. William Totter and other important leaders continued to scream into the months of war, but Booker T. Washington, who died in 1915, and Du Bois and others, had realized all along that in their United States accommodation to white ethnic power had to be a constant policy alternative, a necessity of survival and reform. This background was part of Du Bois’ ethnicking experience as editor of Crisis, the organ of the NAACP. Then Jacob Springarn, chair of the Board but by mid 1917 also a major in the army’s Military Intelligence Division, returned to a subject he had raised with Du Bois in earlier days. He and his white Board did not want a strident militant editor representing the voice of the NAACP, especially during wartime. Du Bois complied, doing what he had done before, at times behaving like Washington in similar circumstances—deciding for accommodation with white authority in the hope of gaining more and losing less for African Americans. But what was it that Du Bois’ white ethnic Board wanted to discipline by a monthly review of his work? Du Bois’ right to choose to write or sound like peoplehood journalists and leaders who worked with African American cohorts. At the time, they advocated aggressively for social equality at home and, before the United States entered the war, they had opposed fighting abroad.22 In doing so, their language was shrill even when attacking Booker T. Washington. The white ethnic Board was apprehensive about the NAACP’s Crisis joining the fight for the black man’s right of self defense, for insisting on open protests, and for using dramatic antiwar rhetoric. That rhetoric included phrases such as: “German atrocities” were no worse than “southern lynch law;” first make the “South safe for democracy;” black men “think twice about enlisting.” Submarines attack without warning? White men lynch the same way. One particular flash point for Du Bois involved Springarn’s proposal to set up a segregated army camp under white officer leadership to train African American officers. Black opposition came quickly with charges of “Jim Crow training camp,” but Du Bois, editor of Crisis, supported the program as an act of positive accommodation: he also hoped that in time it would lead to important benefits for African Americans in war time and hopefully in the postwar years. Nevertheless, Du Bois’ Crisis was targeted by federal agencies; for the Wilson Administration’s turn towards surveillance had empowered Americanizers of the nation’s peoplehood citizenry. With federal anti-espionage and ­sedition

22 Jordan, “Damnable Dilemma,” op. cit.

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l­egislation on the books, part of national policy included active pursuit of groups and individuals, suspected of being harmful to the war republic’s political economy. Even as the Administration intervened to subordinate parts of the economy to the war effort, the free market was being incorporated into the patriotic propaganda language for the “American Way.” Claiming to be disciplining peoplehood loyalties and fighting anti-capitalist radicals, an emerging federal bureau of investigation and a unit of military intelligence claimed the mantle: they were the guardians of the republic. More often than not government agents ran wild, often amuck in their own sacred kitsch. This was especially revealing when it came to aliens such as Garvey, but government agents also came after other African Americans, including Du Bois. Inside the War Department there were filings that Du Bois’ Crisis aimed at “exciting the colored races to acts of violence against the whites;” in the Department of Justice there was an investigation to determine if Crisis “influenced riots.” The pressure was intense if only because it was part of a larger pattern, and not only against the NAACP. The disciplinarians held a mighty club that occasionally came out from behind their backs. As had Samuel Gompers, leader of the American Federation of Labor, publicly abandoned pacifism, so too had African Americans and other peoplehood leaders realized that they and their future—their movements, organizations, and media outlets—could also not risk being tainted by charges of disloyalty in opposing war or threatening institutions of government.23 The disciplinarians had the power to close down the mailing privileges of publishers and editors of newspapers and magazines catering to America’s white and black readers with peoplehood associations. The disciplinarians insisted that the readers more often than not were, or knew, important actors in the industrial work force, among potential strikers or strike breakers, or were themselves in the pool of young men who might enlist in the war effort. Among African Americans, Robert S. Abbott, publisher of the Chicago Defender, and Marcus Garvey became special targets. Abbott had to defend himself against all sorts of charges: his Defender was the “most dangerous of all Negro Journals;” the editor was disloyal; he opposed black enlistment; he inspired “the spirit of revolt;” he applauded black soldiers being court martialed. Like other 23 Colin Grant, Negro with a Top Hat: The Rise and Fall of Marcus Garvey (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 85–88, 125–176; Kevin Kenny, “Diaspora and Comparison: The Global Irish as a Case Study,” Journal of American History 90 ( Jun 2003): 134; George Bornstein, “The Colors of Zion: Black, Jewish, and Irish Nationalism at the Turn of the Century,” Modernism/Modernity 12 (2005): 369–384; Matthew Pratt Guterl, “The New Race Consciousness: Race, Nation, and Empire in American Culture, 1910–1925,” Journal of World History 10, no. 2 (1999): 307–352.

Nationalizing Secular P ­ eoplehoods

black leaders, he also became a target of rumors that turned him into a “tool of Germanists.” No wonder Du Bois wrote in a private letter of April, 1918: “THE CRISIS will never say anything that it does not believe: but there are a great many things which it does believe which it cannot say just now.”24 In the case of Garvey, the United States government, that is J. Edgar Hoover, finally, in the mid-twenties, brought him down for mail fraud. Hoover turned to this charge in part because he could not reel him in on the basis of wartime sedition connected with the government’s anti-peoplehood campaigns; the charge of anarchism had been thrown out by the Department of Labor, and therefore Hoover could not have him deported. (These kind of accusations against Garvey had been, and after the war still were used against ethnic leaders associated with the second promised-land syndrome). Emmett J. Scott, the African American government official who had worked on Du Bois and Abbott, called in Garvey after Armistice Day. In Garvey’s case, the campaign had gone into the mid-twenties. Its larger context was caught by headlines in the New York Times when, in January of 1923, one of its reporters in New Orleans covered a police raid of Garvey’s United Negro Improvement Association. By then, Hoover was near the end of his hunt, for he had Garvey in a New York jail charged with US mail fraud. By then, too, negative stories about Garvey had been widespread. Many told of the serious controversies he was having with other important African American leaders, such as Du Bois and A. Philip Randolph. As happened often among leaders of American ethnic groups, conflict occurred in the borderline issues involving peoplehood identities and economic and political nationalism. Some of these resulted from misunderstandings or acts of deception. But too often Garvey strayed or stormed across an invisible boundary, especially with his positive public comments about the Ku Klux Klan and his insistence that the “negro” had to be as militant for black segregation and power as the white activists was for white segregation and white power.25 The Times headline read “Raid Reveals Plot of Negro Radicals,” while the story told of agents finding incriminating evidence, of a “nation-wide anarchistic plot among negroes,” and of connections with a murder from the day before involving Garvey’s financial difficulties and the mail fraud.26 While fresh sacred kitsch from the war years dominated charges and headlines, interests of national political economy remained involved. Fourteen 24 Jordan, “Damnable Dilemma,” op. cit. 25 New York Times, August 7, 1922. 26 Ibid., January 26, 1923.

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months earlier, at a local semi-centennial celebration in Birmingham, Alabama, President Warren Harding had explained some of those interests to the people of the South. Media attention went to his remarks about new policies of the Republican party towards African Americans; for the president went out of his way to reassure white Southern voters African Americans would hold no special place in the party by virtue of joining up. Even as he embraced England’s imperial ethnic colonial policies as fit for the United States, he made a special plea for an end to “prejudice and demagogy,” to the old special interest politics of “class,” of “labor,” of the “Irish.”27 The speech offered important insights to the ways the president of the United States saw ethnicking within the larger political economy, which in that year witnessed the violent labor fight in West Virginia and mass killing of African Americans in Tulsa. During the war years, and then immediately thereafter, the dark side of fear about peoplehood groups had manifested itself with a vengeance—Germans after August 1914, Finnish socialist in the Midwest, Mexicans in the Southwest, but after April 1917 especially African Americans and Jews. In government agencies, hearings in state legislatures, in federal committees working on restrictive immigration legislation, in supreme court decisions, and among all sorts of self-proclaimed patriotic volunteers, ethnic groups were seen as having the potential of really doing harm to the white peoplehoods in the Anglo-American republic. The president must have assumed, that more than ever before, many ethnic groups were perceived by other Americans as having been newly empowered by second-promised-land enthusiasms; these could be perceived in the rhetoric flowing from foreign revolutionary uprisings, and in mobilization appeals from organized labor, socialists, and from the Industrial Workers of the World. As African American observers noted at the time, the president’s speech also reflected sacred kitsch about them not all that different from that expressed by most Supreme Court justices since the infamous Dred Scott decision. No wonder Marcus Garvey sent the president a congratulatory telegram agreeing with him about appropriate relations among American peoplehoods in general and between African Americans and white ethnics in particular.28 The president had spoken from a nationalist perspective concerned about public safety and fearful of congealing and conflicting group mentalities, especially between African Americans and everyone else. Influenced by the impact of World War I, on internal migration and the new restrictive immigration legislation, with its caps and quotas, on available unskilled and semi-skilled workers, he spoke about white 27 Ibid., October 27, 1921. 28 Ibid., October 27, 1921.

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and black Southerners impacting the Midwest and Northeast. The accelerating migration “has brought the question of race closer to the North and West, and I believe it has served to modify somewhat the views of those sections on the question. It has made the South realize its industrial dependence on the labor of the black man and has made the North realize the difficulties of the community in which two greatly differing races are brought to live side by side.” That great difference was the subject of his talk; for the president, like most of his contemporaries, remained trapped in the sacred kitsch of the nation’s biocultural ethnic conversation. There was, he said, an “absolute divergence in things social and racial. … Men of both races may well stand uncompromisingly against every suggestion of social equality. Indeed, it would be helpful to have that word ‘equality’ eliminated from this consideration; to have it accepted on both sides that this is not a question of social equality, but a question of recognizing a fundamental, eternal, and inescapable difference.” Even though by then Franz Boas and some other Euro-American scientists had long demonstrated the falseness of Harding’s kind of axiomatic pronouncement, the president had reiterated the implication of his fixtures. “We shall have made real progress when we develop an attitude in the public and community thought of both races which recognize this difference. … I would inculcate in … [the colored race] the wish to improve itself as a distinct race, with a heredity, a set of traditions, an array of aspirations all its own. Out of such racial ambitions and pride will come natural segregation, without narrowing any rights, such as are proceeding in both local and urban communities now in Southern States, satisfying natural inclinations and adding notably to happiness and contentment.” There were clear implications for educational ideals and programs. Insisting on “equal educational opportunity for both races” was one thing. But this “does not mean that both would become equally educated within a generation or two generations or ten generations. Even men of the same race do not accomplish such an equality as that. They never will.” In the meantime, Henry Ford’s antisemitic newspaper efforts had intensified the campaign against Jews who had also become special targets for officials in a new federal agency. Ford accused Jews with the fraudulent tract “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” which his Dearborn Messenger spread broadcast in the United States and abroad, helping to make his newly found sacred kitsch part of American popular culture. For example, the Military Intelligence Division (MID) officials were convinced that Jews with Bolshevik sentiments constituted a real danger to their republic. MID, headed by J. Edgar Hoover, would be a stepping-stone in the formation of Federal Bureau of Investigation.

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Hoover’s operation was in the Department of Justice under the direction of Attorney General Mitchell R. Palmer, a progressive Democrat appointed by President Wilson in the last months of his administration. Their clerks were also influenced by reports coming in from United States officials in post-war Jewish emigration areas in the new Poland fighting typhus epidemics: In turn, as they did in defeated Germany, so too did American public health officials entangle Jews with vermin, filth, inherited disease, group think, radicalism, bolshevism, linking them with destructive world-wide conspirators. Specific individuals in the MID focused the fragments and debris from this volatile mix into their own sacred kitsch and focused it within the nation’s anti-peoplehood campaign. In this instance they worked with an old “ethnic map” of lower Manhattan where ninety per cent of the population was identified as being Jewish and therefore potentially dangerous. The army needed to properly prepare with rifles, machine guns, and armed trucks for some sort of uprising. In the imaginations of agents in this particular intelligence unit of the United States Army, the Jewish ethnic group could easily mobilize around mixes of Bolshevism or some other revolutionary movement such as anarchism.29 Notwithstanding explicit in-house rejection of inflamed antisemitism, agents remained absolutely convinced that there was an international Jewish conspiracy seeking world domination; so some of the files kept track of Justice Brandeis and Harvard’s law professor Felix Frankfurter. Both were well known friends of the Democratic Party, important players in the American Zionist movement, and assumed to be well connected to associates of powerful Jewish banking establishments, the Rothchilds, Warburgs, Kuehn and Loeb. These kinds of imagined dangerous links in MID had been in the public domain since the start of America’s entry into war. Then the paranoia was directed against German Americans, especially the web of connections linking the brewing industry and the German enemy abroad. Xenophobia quickly generated its own fragments and debris, and it fed sacred kitsch associated with aliens and radicalism. As Alien Property Custodian, a wartime appointment by President Wilson, Mitchell Palmer had become passionate about finding German Americans aiding and abetting the enemy. By the time he served as attorney general, peoplehood aliens and their neighbors and relatives, especially the Jews among them, notably when connected to organized labor leaders, anarchists, socialists, had become the choice target of the super patriots in and outside of government agencies. 29 Joseph W. Bendersky, “The Jewish Threat”: Anti-Semitic Politics of the U. S. Army (New York: Basic Books, 2000), xi–xvii.

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Expert testimony to a congressional senate subcommittee investigating Bolshevism assured dramatic media coverage by providing anecdotal evidence. One witness was an American Methodist minister and senior official of the church in Russia and Finland. He had lived in Petrograd and had witnessed revolutionary events there. He reported that New York’s East Side Jews, together with German Bolsheviks in Russia had been significant actors. To receptive ears that news seemed realistic enough, given the general euphoria in lower Manhattan in the wake of revolutions in Russia; and, after all, in New York it was a communist conviction, that the movement’s success in the United States depended on Jews.30 In addition, and of equal importance, was this sacred kitsch of the day that provided the backdrop in public discussions about Jews as a collective: “Jewish power and influence” stalked the corridors of statecraft in the capitols of wartime belligerents. For example, in the hope that large numbers of Jews in Europe and America would support the respective cause of belligerents, London and Berlin each courted their Zionists with a promise of a post war Jewish homeland in part because belligerent government officials also hoped that such a homeland would drain off large numbers of European Jews.31 But all those who saw in these events evidence of larger international conspiracies of one kind or another conveniently ignored important realities within the worlds of Jewish peoplehood. There were intra-radical conflicts and, amongst most Jews in the United States and in Europe, general opposition to socialism, bolshevism, anarchism, and Zionism. Senator Lee Stanley Overton’s committee also heard from Herman Bernstein, a one-time New York Times correspondent and occasionally on the payroll of the American Jewish Committee. At the time of the minister’s testimony, he spoke to a New York Jewish congregation about his Russian experiences. The Methodist minister had testified: “These Yiddish agitators from the New York east side followed in the trail of [Leon] Trotzky, who was himself on the east side at the time of the Czar’s overthrow.” The minister had “met hundreds of these east siders,” some of whom came to his “home in Petrogard.” With that kind of claimed familiarity he could assure the senators about the reliability of his testimony. “Let me make it plain that these men are apostate Jews. I don’t like this unpleasant feature of the case, but it happens to be the truth, and must therefore come out.” Bernstein insisted that the minister, and others who spoke like him, were making up stories, fictions that had often been used by antisemites. Most Jews 30 Michels, A Fire in their Hearts, 221–222. 31 Isaiah Friedman, Germany, Turkey and Zionism, 1897–1918 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977), passim.

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opposed the Bolsheviks if only because among them were those also eager to suppress Jewish life in Russia. The Bolsheviks, “these men were not Jews in the real sense of the word. They are not in the least sympathetic to Jewish culture or Jewish ideals. Most of them have been converted to other faiths, and the word Jew has no particular significance to them.” For most Jews in Russia Bolsheviks are, “enemies to the race.”32

32 New York Times, November 19, 1917.

CHAPTER 11

Battling Citizens

The special needs of governments for national discipline are now used as criteria to defend the republic from militancy among peoplehood groups. Public and private guardians of the republic consider as divisive or dangerous sacred kitsch, such as a second promised land, especially when they make connections to parts of organized movements: garveyism, Zionism, anarchism, socialism, bolshevism, communism, or organized labor in general. Ethnicking is part of the security problem.1 And, after the “Fighting Faiths” of war and the paranoia of the first “Red Scare” waned, in the network of messages, within and among government agencies, officials persist in expressing anti-peoplehood sentiments about African Americans, Italians, and Poles, but, in part because of what is happening to them in Europe, especially about Jews. Jews were caught in the beginnings of a new Central European process that would in Germany convert them into old new mortal enemies, as individuals and as a collective people identified by geneology and bloodlines. The process had deep roots, that in its details was shaped by local events which American media outlets covered, not consistently or necessarily accurately, but well enough for readers to obtain an awareness about killings and corpses, maiming and plunder counting into the hundreds of thousand, casualties in the horrific events of war and revolution. News had come from war zones, starting in 1914, and extended into the early post war years. New belligerents still killed each other—for example, Poles and Soviets, Soviets and White Russians and Allied opponents. The press had also reported on forced transfer of minority peoples in the Ottoman world among others involving Turks, Greeks, and Armenians. In 1921 and 1922, news also came from the great famine in the new Soviet Russia, stretching from the Ukraine into western Siberia. This human disaster, when millions died in a Russia ruled by Lenin’s Bolshevik government beset by border wars and a civil 1 Merle Curti, Roots of American Loyalty shows how the war made capitalism an inherent part of “Americanism” and of the “American way.” See also Higham, Strangers in the Land, 217–199; Korman, Industrialization, 110–202.

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war, gained assured sustained publicity because Congress had authorized and funded relief efforts under the direction of famed food relief director, Herbert Hoover, now the president’s Secretary of Commerce. In the midst of these events occurred the most serious pogroms experienced by Jews living in East Central Europe, many scholars insisting the pogroms were the worst since the seventeenth century. The lead-in for a report in the New York Times from July 19, 1921, realized the worst fears: “Russia’s 6,000,000 Jews are facing extermination by massacre. As the famine is spreading, the counter-revolutionary movement is gaining, and the Soviet control is waning.” In fact, warring armies and roving bandits hit the Jews as collaborators of an enemy, sometimes three or four times as they came into or left a village or town in Poland or the Ukraine, reportedly with Bolshevik soldiers usually being less vicious than their enemies. Many Jews lost everything; many died or were injured.2 And after April 1921, escape via emigration became all but impossible as the United States joined Germany and other Western countries in ending the migration regimes prior to 1914. Notwithstanding occasional protest, rich sacred kitsch about Jews had contributed to this Central European process. Euro-Americans and their governments expressed themselves with xenophobic propaganda left over from war-born ideologies. They were also being influenced, by the latest findings in eugenics from Charles B. Davenport’s research laboratories in Cold Spring Harbor on the Gold Coast of Long Island. Claims of scientific legitimacy were obtained from studies about human inheritance patterns and germs harmful to national health and character. Moral justification for this turn came early from the American Supreme Court when Oliver Wendell Holmes and fellow justices endorsed sterilization, proclaiming the country’s “morons” had given birth to too many “imbeciles.”3 The contents of national peoplehood conversations were changing again. In these years while the war and ethnic-oriented restrictive immigration legislation had all but ended large-scale migration from Europe; African Americans were becoming an urban people in the Northeast and beyond. The American conversation was different from European ones. It always had been, although this time Central Europeans were beginning to more than match the darkest

2 Yisrael Gutman et al., eds., The Jews of Poland Between Two World Wars (Hannover: University of New England Press, 1989), passim; Peter Kenez, Civil War in South Russia, 1919–1920 (Berkeley: University of California, 1977), passim; “Polonization,” https://en.wikipedia.org/ wiki/Polonization. 3 Bendersky, Jewish Threat, passim; Polenberg, Fighting Faiths, 154–242.

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sides of American ethnicking, especially in the depression years of the 1930s in Germany, so rich in home grown sacred kitsch about Jews and past colonized Africans. With America treasuring the memory of segregationists, such as Woodrow Wilson and other well-known white progressive political reformers from the South, Randolph and Du Bois, among others, recognized a familiar pattern emerging abroad. Their country had established practices of peonage and labor camps used against their people in many a state that had no reason to expect federal restraint. Hitler’s central government in Germany imposed the start of its Nazi biocultural peoplehood discipline to gain for its nation, its Volk, an Aryan promised land of health, vigor, and moral purity. It legally identified blood lines enabling the Nazi regime to campaign against peoplehoods it had determined required criminalization: Overtime the state and its local governments deprived Jews of their drivers licenses, stripped an entire people of citizenship and physically forced segregation, prohibited intermarriage, denied them public education, removed them from professional occupations, increasingly prevented Jews from earning an honest living, beat or murdered them on the streets where adults walked and children played. The Nazi government began an educational campaign to persuade the German population of convictions that had appeared in literature, for example, in Bram Stoker’s Count Dracula and Kafka’s “Metamorphosis:” Jews were actually un-human, they only existed as fellow humans in the naive imagination of the uneducated. Nazis also sent Jews to newly established “concentration camps,” giving a different meaning to a term that a few years before had been used by officials housing African Americans driven out of their homes by the flood waters in the Mississippi Delta.4 In other words, with an ideology and with practices that pushed beyond the criminalizing of African American citizens in southern states, the Nazi regime was now criminalizing Jewish citizens of Germany for being part of the Jewish people. Some stark details of that earlier ethnicking in America, provide examples of those darker practices being applied to African Americans. In the decade of Tulsa, in 1927, in Greenville, on the overwhelmed levee of the flooding Mississippi River, local government used general local labor recruitment ordinances available for just such emergencies. But white officials commanded only black citizens. They alone were turned into forced laborers required to risk death. Maurice Isson remembered: “They just herded them up and drove them to the levee. Right down Nelson Street, that was the Negro drag at the time and 4 Richard Evans, The Third Reich in Power, 1933–1939 (New York: Penguin, 2005), 506–579. The first Nazi concentration camp appeared in Dachau, about twenty-five kilometers northwest of Munich.

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they just got them off the streets and just carried them right down to the levee, started them to work.” So too did David Cober who remembered with a sense of history: “You stayed on the levee unless you got a pass to be able to go into town. Your chest was full of tags. You don’t go anywhere unless you got permission to go. You had to have a tag on you. And it was just … it was really slavery.”5 In fact, it was an ugly example of forced labor practices imposed on African Americans living in southern states since at least the depression years of the 1890s. Within this political culture some screamed in protest while many others protested less aggressively. But all had little effect. In the interwar years the Supreme Court let stand Plessy vs. Ferguson, without formal public dissents from the bench from Holmes and Brandeis, nor from Black, Cardozo, Frankfurter or Douglas. Peoplehood ethnicking among Jews following the collapse of post war revolutionary euphoria, nevertheless enriched modern secular tribal fires, inflaming some of the swirling authoritarian passions about nation, class, and party. These in turn made visible a lurking darkness that could come with promised-land visions. Violence of political language was then moving towards the razor’s edge that divided discourse from eruptions of brawls. These occurred in meeting halls, on sidewalks and gutters, as formations of fighters sought to control the politics of party and organized labor, perhaps to “control” if not the “streets” than at least a sidewalk. In that flux of competing organizations, ideologies and visionary possibilities many an American Jew also became nervous about Zionism so recently legitimized by the Balfour Declaration, and by the League of Nations granting the United Kingdom a mandate to govern Palestine. There had been disappointments about ideals associated with the concept of self-determination, especially among East European Socialist Zionists generally opposed to classic liberal forms of nationalism. And at Versailles and Geneva, Switzerland, in corridors of power, related forms of ethnic sacred kitsch had been prominent as Du Bois, Garvey, and other advocates for racial equality had discovered all too easily. Anti-Jewish sacred kitsch remained self-evident among English officials when they had to deal with the many competing convictions chained to the Holy Land and its Jerusalem: for this was also the place where Jesus died and rose after his crucifixion; and where, at the remains of the Jews’ Temple, at their sanctified Western Wall, Mohammed tied his horse before ascending to heaven. Anti-Jewish sacred kitsch was also self-evident among representatives of the nations that victorious Allies had carved out of the German and Austro-Hungarian 5 “FatalFlood,” PBS American Experience, April 8, 2011, https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/films/flood/.

Battling Citizens

empires, and imposed on the new Soviet Union. With Minority Treaties the Allies imposed requirements on the new states that recognized peoplehood voting rights, their customs and practices as well as rites and rituals, such as those, for example, belonging to Greek Orthodox Ukrainians and Jews living in Poland. These treaties were also designed to protect minority people against the sovereign state itself. But during the 1920s the ideals of guardianship for an individual and a collective could not match realities on the ground. Empowered sovereign Polish Catholics remained angry. They destroyed many Greek Orthodox Churches, and institutionalized antisemitism in state policy. Ruling Poles also incorporated memories from the recent war and the German occupation. Then, for the Jews of Russian Poland—in Warsaw Yiddish had facilitated welcoming the invader as liberator, who in turn cultivated Jews—the occupation had created all sorts of tensions with their Catholic neighbors, who had treated Germans as the enemy. Later, in the Poles’ war against the Soviets, reportedly many a Jew found better treatment at the bloodied hands of the Bolsheviks and often cooperated with them during the Bolshevik moment. In the mid-twenties, ethnicking in Poland included convictions that in the wars Jews had been seditious.6 In the meantime, the ethnicized immigration policies highlighted the extent to which biocultural determinism in the United States had intensified conversations within and among peoplehoods. As Jewish monitors picked up sustained threatening signals from Poland some disillusioned responses were telling. For example, Kallen turned away from his idealistic and hopeful expectations about white peoplehoods in America. He seemed to have spotted unnerving hues among post-war fellow Zionists and also among Boston’s Irish Americans, whom he had studied as well.7 Besides, Kallen, as did other early advocates of peoplehood enthusiasms, had to cope with some harsh realities after WWI. Domestic crusaders included successful prohibitionists, that is to say, among some of Kallen’s onetime reformers were those who had split from the rest but had remained wedded to ideals of social justice and uplift work on behalf of the urban working poor. Among many of them were peoplehoods that in the gangland era were seen by

6 Gutman et al., eds., The Jews of Poland Between Two World Wars, passim; Kenez, Civil War in South Russia, passim; “Polonization,” passim. 7 William Toll, “Horace M. Kallen: Pluralism and American Jewish Identity,” American ­Jewish History 85, no. 1 (1997): 57–74; Stephen J. Whifield, “Introduction to the Transaction Edition”; Kallen, Culture and Democracy in the United States, ix–lxix; Shawn Kevin Taylor, “­Horace Kallen’s Workers’ Education … ” (PhD diss., Rutgers, 1997), passim; David Weinfeld, “­Horace Kallen, Alain Locke, and the Development of Cultural Pluralism in America” (PhD diss., New York University, 2014), passim.

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anti-drink reformers as unhealthy, even dangerous; in the prism of this kind of sacred kitsch, peoplehoods had become intwined with “anti-moral, anti-order, anti-high culture.” If only because gambling, the main activity of the crime syndicates at that time, “was not considered sinful in Roman Catholic doctrine, many a Catholic immigrant was associated with the lawbreaking” camp.8 By this time in the twenties, tension between individual and collective identity sustained serious uncertainties for ethnicking publicists. Kallen remains instructive. In 1924, at the end of his Culture and Democracy’s “Postscript—To Be Read First […] Culture And the Ku Klux Klan […],” he insisted: “Cultural Pluralism is possible only in a democratic society whose institutions encourage individuality in groups, in persons, in temperaments,” and, he wanted to believe, “whose program liberates those individualities and guides them into a fellowship of freedom and inspiration.”9 But, at the same time, Kallen’s reaction to Italian fascism and Communism suggests that he, the American pragmatist, was also prepared to risk, over there, seeing these new “experiments,” in dictatorial governance, carry on in efforts to subordinate the individual to the state. Clearly it was not the “liberal” way; but, as at the time, so would Charles Beard the historian: he too was prepared to live with uncertainty, hope for the best, and wait as collective ideals were tested in action, by the reality of everyday politics. “One begins to doubt,” wrote Kallen in the New Republic, “whether, in a world so mixed as this, there ever can exist the unmixed goods that liberalism requires, or the unmixed evils it rejects. … Italy has become a better country to live in since, through the accident that … [its] King refused to empower his ministry to disperse the historic ‘march on Rome,’ Fascismo replaced ‘democracy’ as the government of the Italian people.” Reaching into his experiences in an earlier decade, he realized that it is, “a curiously paradoxical revolution, as such events go, unusually bloodless and free from violence; especially free from the interruptions of the customary activities and pursuits of life such as occurred during the French and the Russian revolutions. … Fascismo as a philosophy must be seen in the light of socialism. It formulates in the extremist terms possible a doctrine of human differences against the socialist teaching of the sameness of men with one another. It formulates an extreme doctrine of authority against the socialist teaching of democracy.” Recalling a conversation in Rome, Kallen 8 John C. Burnham, Bad Habits: Drinking, Smoking, Taking Drugs, Gambling, Sexual Misbehavior, and Swearing in American History (New York: New York University, 1993), 1–85, 146. Of course, so were others, including Jews—of two of my relatives, one had a “still” in his basement in East New York, Brooklyn, the other was a lookout for a gang on the Lower East Side: the first was an Orthodox Jew; the second, the oldest son of an Orthodox Jew. 9 Kallen, Culture and Democracy, 1, 35.

Battling Citizens

wrote: “‘The state,’ Mussolini said to me, ‘must be paramount. The state above, for all, and if necessary, against all.’ He held Machiavelli’s view of the state as the correct one. … The point is that the spirit of Fascismo is continuous with the spirit of Mazzini’s Young Italy and Garibaldi’s army.” It will, Kallen thought, “result in a decent national self-respect. The point is that administrative reform, the educational program and economic enterprise all make for a safer, more comfortable and more vital Italy. In these respects the Fascist revolution is not unlike the Communist revolution.” Perhaps in Kallen’s mind, “in a world so mixed as this,” that was true as well of multifaceted Zionism in Palestine and of “cultural pluralism” in the United States, experiments of governance in a tumultuous and violent world. “Each is the application by force majeure of an ideology to a condition. Each should have the freest opportunity once it has made a start, of demonstrating whether it be an exploitation of men by a special interest or a fruitful search after the good life.”10 A few years later, while warning about Nazi Germany, he, like John Dewey, but unlike the Labor Zionist Jewish Frontier published in New York, still remained optimistic about Stalin’s Soviet Union, serious evidence of antisemitism notwithstanding.11 Ideological advocates became especially active at the very time when those kinds of devotions were out of control in state policies in Central Europe, but all along competing interest within labor organizations and radical political movements helped to transform collective ethnic sacred kitsch. Mirroring American ethnicking characteristics in general, it happened in the trade union movement with a significant Jewish membership. There American peoplehood citizens revealed in some detail how they understood themselves, including the shape

10 New Republic, January12, 1927. Kallen was not alone in these kinds of judgments. Besides historian Charles Beard, in these years there were others. Danilo Granchi, “Catholicism and the Modern World: Liberalism, Socialism, and Twentieth-Century Totalitarianisms in the Thought of Monsignor John A. Ryan” (Masters thesis, University of Wisconsin, 1955); John Patrick Diggins, “Comrades and Citizens: New Mythologies in American History,” American Historical Review 90 ( June 1985): 614–638 and “Power and Authority in American History: The Case of Charles A. Beard and His Critics,” American Historical Review 86 (October 1981): 701–730. It is also important to recall that Lewis Mumford would accuse Kallen of supporting the New Deal. This saving of capitalism had these implications: “The present administration, indeed, is pragmatism in action: aimless experiment, sporadic patchwork, a total indifference to guiding principles or definitive goals, and hence an uncritical drift along the lines of least resistance, namely the restoration of capitalism. When its confused and contradictory nostrums patently fail, it will be prepared to kill our democracy with a final dose of fascism—unless the workers exert a strong counter-pressure—rather than save the patient by the institution of communism. Mr. Kallen is not unaware of this possibility.” New Republic 80, October 3, 1934, 222–23. 11 Kallen, “Hopeful Journey,” New Republic, 1934; Jewish Frontier, 1934–1939.

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of an important prism that misunderstood Nazi sacred kitsch about Jews. To be sure, organizational imperatives of a national centralized party or a multi-ethnic national union helped to submerge as well as sustain peoplehood ethnicity. In the best traditions of nationalized republicanism and liberalism, in the rarely defined long run, white ethnic loyalties in general and Jewish ones in particular were expected to accommodate before being able to come into the public square as civic collective equals. That was the price to pay, not for individuals but for a peoplehood as a collective. This expectation was hardly ever available for citizens from the neighborhoods of black peoplehood; almost never did they have an individual pathway, leave alone for their peoplehood, for gaining entry into the public square. As an African American, Randolph remembered late in life just when he realized that his socialist devotions and party activities demanded too high a price from his American peoplehood responsibilities. He did not become a Garveyite, but Garvey’s campaigns made him realize that in the United States, socialism’s anti-peoplehood ideology would not soon, if at all, benefit his people. Instead, and in time, he became a great trade union leader empowered by and for African American workers: they institutionalized an organizational marker, an American peoplehood collective, for another kind of public square in the life of the republic.12 Around the same time, Schlossberg also realized that time was no longer on the side of his beloved international social democratic movement, but he reacted idiosyncratically. He had become a major trade union leader, serving for many years as the Amalgamated’s Secretary General. After WWI, and after his enthusiasm for the Russian Revolution and Lenin’s leadership, Schlossberg combined his trade union and socialist passions with a personal devotion to Labor Zionism and anti-Communism. Digesting the rise of Hitler’s Nazis at the Weimar polls in the late twenties, Schlossberg in 1930 recognized that it was now the tide of fascism that was the force in Europe ending the socialist victories following the war. One might have thought he would therefore on American soil fight the threat of fascism with the organized force he was helping to command, the Amalgamated Workers of America. He didn’t do it. Given his appreciation of Jewish peoplehood identity and memory, in those years his decisions point to interior features of Jewish American ethnicking, some of which remained manifest in public memories of the infamous Manhattan Triangle Fire. In multi-ethnic needle trade unions, they reflect 12 Grant, Negro with a Top Hat, 85–88, 125–176; Jervis Anderson, A. Phillip Randolph: A Biographical Portrait (New York: Harcourt, 1973), 111–134.

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t­ ensions ­involving an idealized element of private group citizenship. The official face of a union is usually stripped of ethnicity—it has to be “deracinated.” In 1911, and later in memorial events, the International Ladies Garment Workers Union and, after 1913, the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America, mostly wrote about the victims of the fire as undifferentiated working girls or union members. These were the leading garment workers unions, organizations with the largest number of Jewish and Italian members in comparison to any other organized group in the nation. When the workers were identified as immigrant working women, they were Jewish and Italian workers: hardly ever were they women from religious families, Jewish or Catholic; sometimes they were linked to incorrect percentages, 60 percent Jewish and 40 percent Italian. One had to go to the Yiddish press to realize that entire Jewish neighborhoods sat in mourning. Of course, with good reason the unions coopted the fire for the public good. But it was not really an event of unionism, working-class-ism, socialism, or reformism, although each had a big enough stake in the event to lay claim to it. In a society with particular ethnic understandings and hierarchy, the disaster of the Triangle Fire was a pre-WWI metropolitan event in which, in lower Manhattan, in that fire 70 percent of the dead immigrant workers were Jewish, their employers had been Jewish, and the leadership and most of the unionized garment workers were still Jewish. It was a New York Jewish tragedy which struck many Italian Catholic immigrant women who were consumed by the fire, and in their neighborhoods were also mourned religiously.13 That public face of the unions also misrepresented what went on within their organizations. These large unions gave peoplehood its head at the local level, came to publish their official newspaper in Yiddish and other foreign languages, and, like the socialists and later the communists, used Yiddish as a mobilization and propaganda tool. That is to say, ethnicking, without collective memory, was used instrumentally for the benefit of the organization. Invariably the unions played a dual role in relation to peoplehood loyalties. They sought to subordinate what they considered to be private parochialisms to union ideals and ­purposes. At the same time, however, unions sustained “parochialisms” in that subordinate position. Union leaders and many a member would insist that ideally a responsible 13 As late as 2011, the language of memorial events remained similar, but with a notable exception. Forward, March 26, 2011, translated ten articles from the day of the fire and the immediate days thereafter. These allowed a reader to see the Jewish side of the event through the eyes of its socialist editor. For accounts of the Triangle Fire, see John F. McClymer, The Triangle Strike and Fire (Fort Worth: Harcourt, 1998), passim; Leon Stein, The Triangle Fire (New York: J. B. Lippincott, 1962), passim.

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union member had to check all non-union loyalties and f­ eelings at the door. But as elsewhere in the nation, union ideals more often than not were honored in the breech. After all, in the interwar years, according to some of the reports in the Proceedings of the Amalgamated, locals of these national unions twice each year still often reported a treasury shortfall because the week of Passover and the days of the High Holidays in September or October required extra expenses in many a Jewish kitchen. Or. Post Talmudic secular Jews in such organizations could demonstrate the nature of their ethnicking when presenting the dinner menu of an annual union meeting. It was deliberately anti-clerical, perhaps intended to be anti-religious. Some would insist that when such a dinner occurred around Passover days the participants revealed themselves as culinary Jews, Americans who practiced a kind of “deracinated” ethnicking. In fact, such a dinner was symbolic of Jewish forms of identification subordinated to a much more comprehensive organization or movement, such as the Socialist Party or a particular labor union; for ideally speaking, within them men and women of all sorts of “private” faiths or cultures could soldier on as loyal citizens. Citizenship had constituent parts. Among most Jewish unionists and socialists, religious beliefs and rituals had long been considered “privat Sachen,” personal matters. In the 1890s, Philip Krantz, editor of the socialist Arbeter tsaytung, had called the anarchists’s Yom Kipper balls “stupid and boorish … a coarse and undeserved slap in the face to all those Jews who are accustomed, even though often many of them are not particularly religious, to think of Yom Kippur as an exceptional day, in which many things are simply not permitted.” Jewish socialists also overcame opposition to symbolic dishes associated with traditional Jewish holy days. So, in regard to a delicacy associated with Passover, an appropriate authority provided the required ruling allowing even a socialist to eat matzah balls. (“Men meg essen Kneidlach.”)14 More importantly, since the end of the nineteenth cen14 Lucy Dawidowicz, ed., The Golden Tradition (New York: Schoken, 1967), 37, 89; Peter Gay, The Enlightenment (New York: Norton, 1969), 2:38 and its note 7, 263–264, 385–407, 555–568; Shlomo Avineri, The Social Thought of Karl Marx (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1968), 43–47; Karl Marx, “On the Jewish Question,” in The Marx-Engels Reader, ed. Robert Tucker (New York: Norton 1972), 24–51. For a comparison to race-conscious nonsectarian Christian American labor unions, see John Jarrett, president of the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers of the United States, Report of the Committee of the Senate upon the Relations between Labor and Capital, New York, September 6, 1883, in Labor History Documents, ed. Gerd Korman (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1974), 1:3, 73–74; Herbert Gutman, “Protestantism and the American Labor Movement,” in his Work, Culture and Society in Industrializing America (New York: Knopf, 1976), 79–117; Mark Karson, American Labor and Politics, 1900–1918 (Carbondale: University of Illinois Press, 1958), 212–284; and Alexander Saxton, The Indispensable Enemy: Labor and the Anti-Chinese Movement in California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971), 221–225, 268–284; Aaron Antonovsky, The Early Jewish

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tury the changing people of the Talmud had mobilized many of their kindred into anti-clerical groups and into movements that had visions of the future antithetical to almost all of Orthodox Jewry. In Europe, but to a much lesser extent in America, Jews had started to transform their religious collective concepts by which they identified themselves. Radicals looking for followers among Yiddishspeaking workers now included Bundists and socialist Zionists who each declared secular Jewish peoplehood as constituting a permanent public good. Such an approach demanded a politics, and institutions, comparable to those that “Poles,” “Germans,” or “Americans” had established earlier. But in an ethnicking United States, these changes could make it awkward, especially among Jewish leaders of multi-ethnic organizations, if they responded to East European Jewish immigrant workers as if they were just another confessional group. “Privat Sachen” could not be limited to religious persuasions as heretofore understood, for Jewish ethnicity had become as changing, and as complex as the black and white Protestant and Catholic worlds with their distinctive patterns of peoplehood, and politics. Biocultural determinism remained active still, especially in the years between World War I and World War II, when the “right of self-determination” became an effective slogan among ethnic groups. Belief in the ideal of ethnic democracy required an attitude towards inherited characteristics that was then still unusual. It was hard to acquire. In 1940, after Nazi armies had already begun WWII, Henry Wallace expressed the ideal: “The science of genetics … will, I am sure, overthrow Germanic racism and serve as one basis for an enduring democracy.” The well-known corn breeder, who coined the phrase “ethnic democracy” in a visionary speech about “different races and minority groups,” and their “equal opportunities” in the republic, claimed that the “genetics of the future will … join the Lord in appreciating the possibilities of all people of the earth.” He was convinced that “on the average the children of the poor have just about the same potentialities as the children of the rich. In the same degree of latitude the people of one race,” said Wallace using the term with a meaning still widespread at the time, “have just about the same inborn ability as the people of another race. The differences in tradition, in religion, in education, and in food are tremendous. The group differences in inborn characteristics are far less.’”15 Labor Movement in America (New York: YIVO, 1961), 269; Joseph Schlossberg, “Labor and the Synagogue” (typescript, n.d.), 19, in Schlossberg Papers, Labor Archives, Tel Aviv (hereafter cited as Schlossberg Journals or Papers). This period has a rich literature, thanks to the work of Elias Tcherikower, and such other historians as Moses Rischin and Arthur Goren. For a thoughtful and spirited interpretation see Howe, World of Our Fathers, 101–115. 15 “The Genetic Basis of Democracy,” Menorah Journal (1940); Korman, “Ethnic Democracy and Its Ambiguities”: 406–426.

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By the time Schlossberg was coming to terms with the victories of European fascism, it was clear that Zionist Palestine might well become the refuge of last resort for Jews in Poland facing an antisemitic chauvinistic regime at home and closed borders elsewhere. He and a few American Jewish labor leaders as individuals had become activists on behalf of the Histadrut, Jewish Palestine’s labor organization, and together with some rank and file started to raise funds for it. To this lonely group belonged Max Zuckerman, General Secretary of the United Cloth Hat and Cap Makers, and later Max Zaritsky, who would serve as president of the Hat and Milinary Workers Union.16 But others also had little choice but to engage, differently and some no doubt reluctantly, as non-Zionist, anti-Zionists, or anti-Jewish Bundists. Disasters threatened Jewish working and middle classes elsewhere in Europe. Beginning in 1933, the danger of German fascism required a special response by virtue of Nazism’s radicalized antisemitism. And a year or so later the Communist Party’s formation of the Popular Front helped to forge antifascist coalitions. They, in and out of labor unions, tended to subordinate the fight against antisemitism at home and abroad to the fight against fascism.17 There had been harbingers of these kinds of responses. Fifteen years earlier, the problems for labor union citizens, presented by American peoplehoods’ 16 Schlossberg recalled his loneliness years later: “As I recall it Max Zuckerman, [General] Secretary of the [United Cloth Hat and] Cap Makers Union, was the only one besides myself, to sign the call for the Labor Congress for Palestine in 1918.” Schlossberg Journal, May 16, 1947. Zuckerman had also been alone in voting for the A. F. of L. resolution of 1917 because Schlossberg’s Amalgamated did not then belong to the A. F. of L. and Zaritsky, at the time assistant general secretary to Zuckerman had joined the Jewish leaders in the federation who had refused to participate in the vote endorsing the Balfour Declaration. Sheila Stern Polishook, “The American Federation of Labor, Zionism and the First World War,” American Jewish Historical Quarterly 60 (March 1976): 233; Zaritsky testimonial to Schlossberg (typescript, June 1, 1955), in Zaritsky Papers. See also Epstein’s recollections in Jewish Labor, 2:66. 17 Albert Waldinger, “Abraham Cahan and Palestine,” Jewish Social Studies 39 (Winter/Spring 1971): 75, 80–83, 87–88; Palestine Post, January 18, 1937; Vladeck to Cordell Hull, typescript, draft in Vladeck to Schlossberg, April 9, 1936; and Tygel to Schlossberg, March 17, 1937, in Schlossberg papers in the ACWU Archives, Catherwood Library, NYSSILR, Cornell University (hereafter Schlossberg, ACWU Archives); Ben Gold and W. Weiner, president and secretary of the Jewish People’s Committee for United Action Against Fascism and Anti-­Semitism, to Jacob Potofsky, January 20, 1937 in Potofsky Papers in ACWU Archives (hereafter Potofsky Papers); New York Times, January 25, 1936; Harvey Klehr, The Heyday of American Communism: The Depression Decade (New York: Basic Books, 1984), 381–383. For public conflicts between Communists, the Jewish Labor Committee, and the American Jewish Congress, see Moshe Gottlieb, “The Berlin Riots of 1935 and Their Repercussions in America,” Jewish Historical Quarterly 49 (March 1970): 313–317. For useful insights on the complexities of these and related issues see Zosa Szajkowski, “A Note on the AmericanJewish Struggle against Nazism and Communism in the 1930s,” ibid.: 272–289. See also Will ­Herberg, “The Jewish Labor Movement in the United States,” American Jewish Yearbook (1952): 55, and J­ oseph Brandes, “From Sweatshop to Stability”: 118–125.

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many forms of sacred kitsch, occurred in the debates over immigration restriction. Then there had been many reasons for being optimistic about Jewish life in postwar Europe, especially if one had great hopes for the Soviet Union, believed that new independent states like Poland would be different from Czarist Russia, and assumed that the pre-WWI American immigration regime would resume. But at the time, in the face of serious opposition, there was solid evidence that the restriction legislation being developed in the Congress would lock many Europeans into life-threatening situations. Settled immigrants from Central and Southern Europe knew of the trials and tribulations; and each knew how many in their American neighborhoods were waiting for loved ones. In light of their recent particular collective memories, life in Europe without America’s open gate was awesome to contemplate. Since 1914, war, famine, terrorism, and banditry had especially stalked Jewish regions of Poland and the Ukraine. At the time, Yiddish newspapers in the United States were full of the catastrophic news.18 And yet there were also economic facts to consider. More immigrants meant more competition for jobs in the needle trades; many of them might also become new members of unions, like the Amalgamated, Schlossberg’s union. Within this mix of choices, the Amalgamated decided to join with many others to oppose restrictionists and sent Schlossberg to Washington to testify on its behalf. But that was it. The year 1921 revealed that the immigrant groups of the needle trade unions would not take their unions into the streets in order to keep open America’s immigration gate. Immigrant union members, in the name of socialism, bolshevism, anarchism, or industrial democracy challenged central authority from the shop floor or competed amongst themselves for influence and power within the union. But without official union authorization, they were not prepared to fight for immigrant compatriots outside of the union.19 Union members also gave little indication that they wanted to move beyond relief and publicity campaigns, or beyond the resolutions and public testimony placing needle trade unions on record as 18 Kenez, Civil War in South Russia, 166–167; Forward, July–September 1920; Jewish Morning Journal, August 1920; New Yorker Staats Zeitung und New Yorker Herold, August, 1920; and New York Times, 1920–1921. 19 Higham, Strangers in the Land, 309–311. On shop floor militancy and the Amalgamated see Steve Fraser, ‘”Dress Rehearsal of the New Deal,” in Working Class America, ed. Michael H. Frisch and Daniel Walkowitz (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1983), 228–238. One kind of ethnic tension resulted from the use of Yiddish. Among the cutters of Philadelphia, the GEB of the Amalgamated was told in 1924 that the “Gentile members are antagonized by having meetings conducted in Jewish, etc.” Minutes of the GEB, ACWU, May 1924, in ACWU Archives. See also Arthur Liebman, Jews and the Left (New York: John Wiley, 1979), 272–277; and Brandes, YIVO Annual 16 (1976): 105–110.

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opponents of the new legislation. They did not strike and picket.20 Such aggressive measures would have been in direct opposition to union policies. In other words, union members, its good citizens, accepted as axiomatic a union objective well expressed in another context by one Jewish labor leader: “Our permanent activities are in the industrial field … nothing should interfere with our industrial unity, which is our most precious asset.”21 In principle, then, a kind of consociationalism incorporating peoplehood republicanism, a form of emergent ethnic democracy, determined the governing framework of the needle trade unions, Schlossberg’s framework.22 Jews, Italians, and other citizens with a peoplehood identity who wanted to help kinsmen outside of the union turned to resolutions and relief drives on behalf of compatriots at home and abroad. As long as actions in the name of their kinfolk’s interests did not purposefully interfere with policy decisions of the union’s general executive board, union members could appeal to the executive board and especially to the joint board and union local. These last named administrative units of nationwide unions were most sensitive to demands from the many big ethnic groups living in metropolitan areas such as New York City, Chicago, or Philadelphia.23 At the same time, within the union, Jews or Italians or Poles or Lithuanians, were not supposed to carry dual citizenship in the sense that they split their union loyalty with ethnic groups active outside of the union. In the House of Labor, 20 See, for example, Justice, February 8, 14 and June 28, 1919 and the ILGWU Proceedings, 1919, 139. As an officer of the Amalgamated, Schlossberg testified against immigration restriction. Schlossberg Journal, March 11, 1947. 21 ACWU Proceedings, 1936, 389. 22 On consociationalism, see Arendt Lijphart, Democracy in Plural Societies: A Comparative Exploration (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977), 25–52, 143, and Theodore Hanf, “Crosscutting Loyalties in a Deeply Divided Society: The Case of Trade Unions in Lebanon,” paper delivered at the Conference on “Ethnicity, Pluralism, and Conflict in the Middle East,” Tel Aviv University, May, 1984. 23 On the well-known relative importance of Jews and Italians and other non-Jews in the needle trade unions see Brandes, YIVO Annual 16 (1976): 105–107, 109–110; Epstein, Jewish Labor, 2:349–350, 420–424; Irwin Yellowitz, “American Jewish Labor: Historiographical Problems and Prospects,” American Jewish Historical Quarterly LXV (March 1976): 203; idem, “­Jewish Immigrants and the American Labor Movement,” American Jewish History 71 (December 1981): 188–217; Elsie Glueck, “Jewish Workers in the Trade Unions,” Jewish Frontier 2 (December 1935): 11–15. Jewish Frontier 6 (April 1939): 12–14, 29, 30, 31, a socialist Zionist organ, published a May Day greeting from many garment union organizations. For different responses by a national union’s general executive board and its local union governments, see: ACWU, Minutes of GEB Meetings, January 29 1920, May 4, May 14; August 10–12, 1922, June 20 1940, and June 21; and David Dubinsky to Schlossberg, May 16, 1935 and June 10 in ACWU Archives. See also David Dubinsky’s remark about the name United Hebrew Trades. It was, he said, traditional. Proceedings of the ILGWU, 1934, 167.

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citizenship was supposed to discipline the particular sacred kitsch expressed by a member, was supposed to preclude antisemitism or other forms of discrimination. No matter what one felt in private, no matter what one heard in passing, officially the fraternal spirit of the labor movement was supposed to rule all discussions, resolutions, and actions. Within these constraints Jewish labor leaders by their conduct revealed how they managed such demands; they also revealed some of the darker streaks of American ethnicking. Schlossberg was no Baruch Charney Vladeck, the American Bundist who in 1934 spoke at three labor conventions as a leader who fully appreciated the ethnicking facts of American life. At the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union convention delegates heard this general manager of the Yiddish socialist daily, Forverts, talk about some of the challenges that faced these peoplehood union members who now included African Americans—that is he faced the “pecking order” of the incomplete republic. We Jews “are only one step higher than you. You are ‘niggers,’ and we are ‘kikes’ and [Luigi] Antonini,” the senior Italian union official and vice president of the ILG, “is a ‘wop.’ In the eyes of the world that is blind and deaf and dumb they have us graded.”24 Vladeck also discussed related issues before other union convention audiences, the American Federation of Labor and the Amalgamated Clothing Workers. Within the ideological structure of a socialist cosmopolite, he was proud of immigrant workers. “One may dislike Irish stew, or macaroni or gefilte fish, but it is impossible to deny that workers of Irish descent laid the foundation of the American labor movement and fought many a great fight for its principles.” He also told the American Federation of Labor that Jews in the needle trades had won singular achievements in the fights for shorter hours and collective bargaining and that Italians among the dressmakers of New York City constituted the largest single local of the American Federation of Labor. “So there can be no question on this floor of racial superiority or racial inferiority.”25 He was sensitive to antisemitism, especially to its virulent form in the hands of Central European 24 Proceedings of the ILGWU, 1934, 251. For one important study about white ethnic relations, including some tensions between Jews and Italians, among the people represented in the ILG and other needle trade unions see Ronald H. Baylor, Neighbors in Conflict: The Irish, Germans, Jews and Italians of New York City, 1929–1941 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), especially 5, 20–21, 40, 79–80, 98, 418–420. On the anti-Zionist predisposition of Dubinsky, see Brandes, YIVO Annual 16 (1976): 116–117. On Vladeck see some examples of his attitudes towards Zionism in Vladeck to Judah Magnes, October 6, 1937 and Cyrus Adler to Vladeck, December 9, 1937 in Vladeck Papers, Tamiment Institute, NYU, (hereafter cited as Vladeck papers). 25 Proceedings of A. F. of L., 1934, 443–445.

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fascists. “You very often hear from anti-Semites that Jews don’t like to work. But in Eastern and Central Europe today at least half a ­million Jewish workers are anxious not only to work, but even to slave in order to maintain themselves. And in the United States,” Vladeck, as head of the recently formed anti-fascist Jewish Labor Committee, reminded the A. F. of L. delegates, “where the Jews comprise a little over 3 per cent of the population, they contribute nearly 10 per cent of your membership.”26 Schlossberg was also different from David Dubinsky who, at the ILGWU convention, struck similar notes. He celebrated his union’s great organizing accomplishments under his leadership. He was the Bundist from Polish Lodz who had become president in 1932. Many new members had streamed in. During the meetings of the convention they identified themselves and were all recognized, often in ethnic terms, Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, African Americans, along with the older members who had usually come from Jewish and Italian immigrant backgrounds. “I want at this moment to say a few words about this solidarity that prevails within our organization. There was an old prejudice in existence that the Negro workers were not [word missing]. That prejudice,” claimed Dubinsky, perhaps recalling the days when the same charge had been made against Jews, “is gone as far as we are concerned, because of the actions of the Negro workers in the shop, their actions on the picket lines, their actions in the unions. We are proud of this fine spirit,” said Dubinsky, “of the good material,” using a common expression of his day, “that the Negro race has given our union which is the best evidence that there is no need, no justification, for racial prejudice in the labor movement or anywhere. Its people are welcome in our parliament of labor.” The ILGWU was glad “to be able to open our doors and our places in this world where you are equal. … Both of us can work together. We can give the proper resistance against our common enemy, capitalism and the employers.”27 26 Ibid., 444. Vladeck in 1934, in comparison to others concerned about Jewish persecution in Central Europe, was seen as responding to the persecution as part of a larger campaign against fascism. Moshe Gottlieb, “The Anti-Nazi Boycott Movement in the United States: An Ideological and Sociological Appreciation,” Jewish Social Studies 35 (January 1973): 217. For brief general portraits shortly after his death see “Baruch Charney Vladeck,” American Jewish Year Book (1939): 79–93 and Palestine Post, November 4, 1938. See also Epstein, Jewish Labor, 2:384–388. 27 Ibid., 125. See also ibid., 77, 117, 124–126, 167–168. On relations between Blacks and whites in the needle trade unions see Brandes, YIVO Annual 16 (1976): 107–110. In 1905 Carroll D. Wright, the famed labor reformer and assimilationist from Massachusetts had put Dubinsky’s point in nationalistic Americanization terms. “It is true that the Americanizing [in the Amalgamated Meat Cutters’ Union] is being done as rapidly as the material to work on will permit, and very well indeed. … As the Irish in Chicago express it, ‘Association together and industrial necessity have shown us that, however it may go against the grain, we must admit that common interests and brotherhood must include the Polock and the Sheeny.’” Carroll

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But within an emergent ethnic democracy, it was Vladeck who most clearly demonstrated how a Jewish socialist, whose primary ideological enemy was fascism, justified his peoplehood republicanism and his ethnicking. At the ILGWU he was speaking to a union dominated by Jewish leaders, and by Jewish and Italian members who, even as they were conscious of pecking orders and ethnic distinctions within the union, were trying to practice ethnic democracy within their organization. A kindred spirit of Dubinsky and highly regarded by many union members, this popular Jewish socialist labor politician with an antiZionist predisposition, revealed the nature of social relations within the needle trade unions, and to the world outside. Rhetorically he asked: “Why bother with the “Old World’s problems?” Because, claimed Vladeck, the union member, “an Irishman, an Italian, a German or a Scandinavian or a Jew is engaged with those ‘Old World’ events whenever they occur. Ignore it and that involvement will be exploited on behalf of chauvinism. We tell the worker not Germany above all, not Italy above all, not Poland above all but Democracy and Labor rights above all!” Then why, asked Vladeck at the AFL convention “do Jews persist? Why not forget that you are a Jew?” For his answer he turned to collective memories, to the deep past and to recent American events. “I can assure you that this is no easy burden to carry this knowledge that the erosion of time has carved your face; that all the storms of history molded your mind; that the injustices of a thousand tyrannies have settled in your soul.” The Jewish upper portion of their people were cowards because for a Bundist leader of the Jewish working class it was reprehensible that they “tried to assimilate themselves by going back on their traditions, on their culture, and on their very religion for the sake of convenience, or profit!”28 As a participant in the Jewish working class in America he provided another kind of answer to his questions, one that reflected the impact of lessons learned since World War I. There was “no reason why one, in crossing the ocean, should be required to drop everything to the bottom.” He and his fellow immigrants had been wrong when they thought that all a foreign-born citizen needed to do in order to become one hundred percent American was to sound and appear as one. “We used to call this the ‘melting pot’.” But Vladeck now knew better. The pot has “produced more dross and ashes than precious metal. This superficial D. Wright, “Influence of Trade Unions on Immigrants,” Bulletin of the Bureau of Labor, no. 56 ( January 1905), 1–7. See also Benjamin Stolberg, Tailor’s Progress (Garden City: Doubleday, 1944), 125–126, 324. 28 In 1926, he had written in Forverts that the Zionists “are making the Jewish middle class proud of its Jewishness, just as the Bund has done for the Jewish proletariat.” Vladeck quoted in Waldinger, op. cit., 87–88. See also Valdeck to Magnes, October 6, 1937, in Vladeck papers.

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Americanism sent many of our children to jail and reformatories.” He had his version of Brandeis’ American republican reasons for committing to Zionism: Jewish workers persisted in remaining Jewish in the United States, he insisted, because in the fight to improve America, “you are not as much concerned with externals as with real values.”29 In that spirit, he returned to the ambiguity of his position as a peoplehood republican within the emerging ethnic democracy of the needle trades’ labor movement. Now, “I come to the most important point of all. And that is the fact that since the coming of the industrial age the Jews have been the true barometer for the Labor Movement.” He had come to the AFL for help in the Jewish labor movement’s fight against fascism and antisemitism. Since Jews served as a barometer, “organized Labor throughout the world, outside of sentimental reasons, is against anti-Semitism.” Vladeck spoke to current events. “I swear to you that Jewish Labor here and throughout the world will not give up, will not falter or weaken, until the last trace of tyranny is wiped from the face of the earth, and until Labor regains its unions, its cooperatives, its press, its liberty, its industrial, cultural, and political power.”30 In that same spirit, he spoke of harmful sacred kitsch by explaining what it meant to be a member of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers. “Outside we live in a world of strife and hatred, not an hour passes before we ask ourselves, what are you? You are a Jew; you are an Italian; you are a German; you are a Pole. Wherever you go you cannot get away from things that have no relation to life, that are built on the remnants of the old world. … I come here and say I don’t know, and I don’t care who you are, from wherever you come.” With collective memories of their own, your “members have one brotherhood of labor, have one labor union.” But sometimes “outside” smashed into that “brotherhood” and then a Jewish union leader of a multiethnic union could also stand revealed as a peoplehood republican and ethnic democrat. Also different from Schlossberg, Max Zaritsky’s conduct in the mid-thirties is a case in point. He was then president of the relatively small United Hatters Cap and Millinery Workers and an influential labor leader in the struggle for industrial unionism. He knew that mass society had arrived, that “the individual hasn’t any value, whatsoever, except as one of a group or movement.” In spring 1935, Zaritsky put momentous questions to the General Executive Board and New York locals of the Cap and Millinery 29 Proceedings of the American Federation of Labor, 1934, 443–445. 30 Ibid., 444.

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Departments of his union. “The political complexion of our country is undergoing change. … Will it be fascism of Italy transplanted to this country? Will it be another, broader form of fascism—the so-called National Socialism of Germany? Will it be Communism? Will it be the new-fangled form of [America’s] fascism preached by Father Coughlin? Or will it be another form?” He had no answer. All he could do was to issue a warning about the threat: “there is the danger, that something is coming upon us.” But he did have a political response to that fascist or Communist collective alternative. He embraced Roosevelt and his capitalist Democratic Party.31 Together they stood between the obvious threats and the public good Zaritsky and his fellow members claimed as their own.32 In the fall of 1936 at the convention of the American Federation of Labor, Zaritsky had to step forward; for suddenly on the floor of the AFL his vision of the fraternal spirit of the labor movement was being challenged. On Monday, November 23, on behalf of the powerful AFL’s Resolutions Committee, Mathew Wohl, the highly respected spokesman for those members who opposed the formation of new industrial unions, made a long and emotional appeal for unity in the House of Labor.33 To him the old unified house was the appropriate organization with which to achieve the dreams of American workers. He pleaded with deviant unionists, asking them to recall the help they had received from the American Federation of Labor. When he turned to the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union he broke the trip wire guarding the labor fraternity. “It is inconceivable that a people so charitable, so appreciative, so understanding of the suffering of labor should now question the abilities and sincerity of action of those who have struggled with them and rejoice in the attainments now secured by them.” Once across the patronizing momentum, derived from a perspective different from Zaritsky’s, it propelled Wohl forward, perhaps with special force because Jewish labor leaders were playing such powerful roles in the AFL’s Committee for Industrial Organization. “As for the organizations composed largely of Jewish workers, it can only be said, if we are to have the full truth, that we took them by the hand when there were few hands willing to greet them; and we have led them and builded with them, and protected them.” Wohl stayed with his patronizing history lesson. “When some of their leaders steeped in the ideas of the Old World from whence so many 31 Ibid. 32 Minutes of the Luncheon Conference with Montreal Millinery Manufacturers, Royal Hotel, Montreal, Canada, November 5, 1934, 6; Address to Banquet for GEB and NY Locals of the Cap and Millinery Department, April 13, 1935, in Zaritsky Papers. 33 Proceedings of the American Federation of Labor, 1936, 500, 508–510, contains the exchange involving Zaritsky.

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of them had fled in mortal terror of their lives, used our platform to preach [socialist] doctrines alien to our beliefs and convictions, we still led them and protected them. They are our equals in every respect. The story of those persecuted people is too long to tell here, too filled with the gripping emotions of a half century of affectionate relationship, of helpfulness and cooperation. Let them think it over in their hearts and in their homes.” As if to accentuate his rhetorical shift, Wohl then turned to the next union on his list in the style that had characterized most of his other remarks: “May we ask, where would be the Oil Workers, were it not for the help we have given and the prestige we have helped them build?” Zaritsky responded immediately, first to the large issue facing the Convention, the split over industrial unionism, in which he was one of the leaders opposing Wohl and his supporters. “I don’t know of any sportsman,” said the East European immigrant leader, “that will make new rules while the game is on. To my mind it is not cricket.” Then he turned to the challenge: “Why was it necessary for you to raise the Jewish question on the floor of the most liberal movement in the world, the labor movement, the movement that knows no nationality, no race, no color, no religion?” He asked about the rest of the trade unionists in the American labor movement: “What about the Welsh membership? What about the English membership? The French, Canadian, Irish. And what about the German membership, and the membership of so many nationalities which all together comprise the most wonderful combination of human beings, the American Federation of Labor? He knew the answer but controlled himself. Instead he replied with innuendo, a testimony to his dedication to labor’s fraternal spirit. “You had to go out of your way to bring shame, at least upon my head, not as a Jew, but as a member of the American labor movement. I protest with every fibre of my being against the injection of the Jewish question or of any racial or national question in the councils of the American labor movement. … I do not like and do not care to use a stronger term.” Then, after reminding the Convention of some Jewish labor history he implied again why he was crying shame. “These unions, which include in their membership Jewish people,” he said, had responded and contributed generously, in the thousands of dollars, to textile workers, miners, and steelworkers. “They have done so because of their loyalty, their devotion to and love for the great American labor movement. That you forgot to mention,” proclaimed Zaritsky, at that moment spokesman and advocate who knew only too well that all those Jewish unions had been excluded from the AFL’s executive board until 1934.34 “But you,” Wohl, and others “asked 34 Robert Asher, “Jewish Unions and the American Federation of Labor Power Structure, 1903–1935,” American Jewish Historical Quarterly 65 (March 1976): 219–222.

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them,” that is my people, “to go home and think it over! I join hands with you.” He said facetiously, “and I will tell these men, ‘Yes, you go home and think it over.’” Within a few months after the dramatic encounter in the American Federation of Labor, Zaritsky also demonstrated that socialist Zionism and Vladeck’s Bundist kind of public concerns about Jewish well-being constituted an integral part of his peoplehood republicanism. He had come to Palestine for three weeks, as part of a small delegation of American Jewish labor leaders important to the Histadrut’s efforts in the United States. In February 1937, as he sailed from Haifa to Marseilles and reflected upon what he had seen, he found himself arguing with those who had persistently denied to socialist Zionists the political right to solve their people’s problems on their own terms. Zaritsky had been active on behalf of a Jewish National Home in Palestine for some years, sharing with many other socialist Zionists a hopeful expectation about Arab workers: they would “ultimately rid themselves of the poisonous influences of the Mufties and Effendies” and join hands with the organized Jewish workers for their mutual economic interests. “The things I saw still seem unbelievable to me,” he wrote on the ship’s stationery. “I saw a new world in the process of creation and the reformation of a people engaged in redeeming a devastated, deserted land.” He waxed eloquent about Jewish urban and suburban accomplishments, but especially about the Histadrut. “It is not an ordinary labor organization in the accepted term as we know it in America. It is the builder of Palestine and the redeemer of the Jewish nation. … [It] is the backbone and nerve center of Jewish Palestine with its 400,000 population.” But most important of all he “found out that, given the opportunity and encouraged by necessity the Jew can be as good a farmer as a tailor, doctor, or ‘intellectual.’ I am thrilled not only because I am a Jew, but because, as a labor man and self-accredited economist, I have discovered that all of our so-called ‘sociologists,’ ‘economists,’ pseudo historians, logicians, academicians and above all the so-called Jewish labor leaders do not know what they are talking about when they discuss the eternal Jewish question only in connection with the inevitable social revolution which must be universal, if the Jewish problem is to be solved.” Socialist Zionism in Palestine had fused socialism and Jewish nationalism: “There you find socialism in practice and democracy in its highest form. Not a single … [execution] in order to maintain the socialist state.” Consequently, he concluded: “The Palestinian Jew has shown an example of what he can do, even under great restrictions and limitations, to build a socialist community and simultaneously to solve the Jewish question.”35

35 Zaritsky to “Jack,” February 11, 1937 and Headgear, September 14, 1929, in Zaritsky Papers.

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Subsequently, he continued to speak out on the allegiances to which he was devoted. At the convention, he had successfully forced Wohl to all but retract his remarks without rupturing the fraternal bonds that bound them both to the trade union movement. In fact, Wohl became a reliable supporter of the Histadrut efforts in America.36 Within his union, Zaritsky as president also spoke to his multiethnic membership about the way their shared perspective shaped his concern about the future. In October 1938, he reported on the anti-Nazi resolution adopted by the American Federation of Labor. “You may think that because I am a Jew—a Jew who makes no bones about it, a Jew who doesn’t say he is ashamed or proud of being one—my judgment may be affected or my sympathies may be aroused. It is possible. However, even in the convention I tried to be as objective on the question as possible, so as not to be led away by my own emotions.” Besides, he had no doubts that his Jewish world and his world of labor were all engaged in the same struggle. He put the point this way: “It was not just a Jewish question. It was a question concerning all of human civilization, if what we may find now in the world may be termed civilization.”37 By this time the ethnicking of emergent ethnic democracy had also affected union leaders who had thought of themselves as members of a kind of secular confession impervious to appeals from capitalist politicians. Depending upon individual unions, the process had differed, especially in the timing of endorsement, but during the interwar years even the Amalgamated had been prepared to turn to a capitalist presidential candidate.38 In 1924, the only year when the Socialist Party supported a candidate from outside of its membership, the Amalgamated, for all intents and purposes, had given its support to Robert M. LaFollette, the veteran middle class reformer from the dairy state of Wisconsin. With the advent of the Depression and FDR’s presidency, that exceptional event had turned into the norm: the Amalgamated and other needle trade unions became active campaigners for a capitalist politician and his program. The opposition by Joseph Schlossberg to these changes within his Amalgamated illustrates some of the subtler aspects of this union process and 36 See, for example, Zaritsky’s comments of appreciation about Wohl at a testimonial honoring William Green on June 26, 1940 in Zaritsky Papers. 37 Zaritsky’s report about the A. F of L. Convention to a Membership Meeting, Hotel Center, ­October 25, 1938 (typescript) in Zaritsky Papers. 38 Schlossberg noted the changes in his journals: July 17, 1940, March 31, 1944, June 7 and November 26, 1945. For historical studies of this shift, see Fraser, “Dress Rehearsal,” 228–238; Brandes, YIVO Annual 6 (1976): 67–68, 110–114; John Laslett, Labor and the Left: A Study of Socialist and Radical Influences in the American Labor Movement, 1881–1924 (New York: Basic Books, 1970), 126–136; and Liebman, Jews on the Left, 246–252.

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the plasticity of sacred kitsch. By his own estimate, he had not become a “dictator” nor what he called a “boss” or “yes man” in the union. Instead, he said, he had always followed his “conscience.” As a result, he found himself in circumstances that revealed the force of union rules and unstated preconditions governing ethnic democracy; for even though he did not in public speak words comparable to a Vladeck or Zaritsky, Schlossberg by then had come to consider his Zionist attachments as legitimate competing interests within the constitutional order of his union. The case in point was his relationship with Sidney Hillman, who, as president, had become the most influential figure in shaping the policies of the Amalgamated. Since the 1924 election campaign, he and Hillman had travelled away from each other for reasons that did not involve ethnic issues, although by then Schlossberg had become a socialist Zionist, a choice Hillman had rejected.39 Schlossberg had refused to join Hillman and the rest of the Executive Board in supporting Robert M. LaFollete’s campaign for president.40Schlossberg had insisted that he would not support a capitalist candidate even when the Socialist Party was prepared to endorse him. In 1936 Schlossberg again refused Hillman. He had not become what the “Maskilim,” teachers of the Enlightenment, had told nineteenth-century Jews: “Be a Jew at home and a man (Russian, German, or an American) outside.”41 So now he was not going to become a “Socialist at home and a man (non-Socialist) outside.” The moment of truth arrived on Saturday afternoon, April 18. By then, two major events had occurred. After the passage of the National Industrial Recovery Act, the Amalgamated and a number of other unions, including the United Mine Workers, had known how to take advantage of the law and its administrative machinery. Many in union circles recognized that moment as the real beginning for organizing the mass production industries.42 In 1935 the Supreme Court had 39 On La Follette see Schlossberg Journal, April 9, 1944. For needle trade unionists this election was especially complex because of their different kinds of engagements with the Soviet Union and American Communists who opposed LaFollette’s candidacy. Filene, Americans and the Soviet Experiment, 172–177; Josephson, Hillman, 268–271; Brandes, YIVO Annual 6 (1976): 45–46, 49–60. 40 This claim is repeated by Schlossberg in his journals. See for example the entry of April 9, 1944 about the result of his vote against supporting La Follette’s candidacy: “It was then that the opposition to me began.” In November, after the election Schlossberg reported that he had repeated his opposition at a meeting of the General Executive Board. “Hillman turned to me and said: ‘My mind is closed to what you say, and a little later, ‘Yours is closed to what I say.’” See also Minutes of ACWA GEB, May 6–20, 1924, ACWA Archives. 41 Schlossberg Journals, n.d., 1948. Irving Howe states his version of Schlossberg’s 1948 comment in 1976 in World of Our Fathers, 322–324. 42 On the significance of the National Industrial Recovery Act for new organizing drives by the ILG, ACW, the UMW, and other unions in 1933–1934, see Irving Bernstein, Turbulent Years

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declared NRA unconstitutional and unions quickly felt the force of employer efforts to recapture lost ground.43 But also in 1935 Congress passed the Wagner Act, which Roosevelt accepted as part of his program. That law and its administrative machinery, if upheld by the Court, would reshape basic legal assumptions about employer rights and about the status of labor unions. Now, in the spring of 1936—the Supreme Court would not declare for the Act until a year later, after FDR’s reelection—the Amalgamated’s Executive Board was to determine its position toward the upcoming presidential campaign.44 Hillman moved and obtained a second for endorsing the “candidacy of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt.” Schlossberg responded and then the Board—the union’s governing grand coalition—discussed the reasons for going with Hillman. “Some of us,” said Schlossberg, “may find ourselves in a difficult position in the present political set up. I am in the least difficult,” he said, with considerable presumption. “I am not a member of any party. I do not have to please any group and have only my conscience to guide me.” At age 61, his political philosophy had long been known. “I was drafted into my present position in the Amalgamated because of it. I have always supported a labor movement that would include all different opinions within it.” He had started out a socialist in the 1890s, when he belonged to Daniel DeLeon’s Socialist Labor Party, and had remained a socialist since then. “I have been a believer in a Labor Party—in a Labor party as distinguished from a Socialist party.” He still had no reason to change his mind. “I have no candidate or party to recommend.” But he did have an explanation for rejecting the motion. “If in this present unusual situation, there had been a Labor Party, and if that labor party would nominate for re-election a representative of one of the capitalist parties, from my own socialist point of view I would oppose it. I would,” he said, as he self-servingly justified long after the fact his opposition to LaFollete, “disagree with this action, even if taken by an organized labor party. My devotion to a labor party is no less than it ever was, and it is because of that that I am unable to endorse a candidate from a party that is a capitalist party.” The reasoning of other Board members, Jews, Italians, a Czech, a Pole, who supported Hillman, is instructive because it was the reasoning of men who took

(Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1970), 37–91; Walter Galenson, The United Brotherhood of Carpenters (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983), 239–240; Brandes, YIVO Annual 6 (1976): 70–71; Josephson, Hillman, 259–370. 43 The impact was swift. See for example the impact upon NY employers listed by Anna Rosenberg of the NRA’s office in New York City. Rosenberg to Donald Richberg, June 1, 1935 in Zaritsky Papers. 44 The following exchange is reported in the Minutes of the GEB, ACWA, April 18, 1936 in Schlossberg Papers.

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for granted that emergent ethnic democracy flourished in the Amalgamated. They had tried to “keep politics out of the union” but in the past few years “had seen the benefits that have been derived from a capitalist government.” Considering the crisis and the opportunity, the Board insisted that the luxury of a member’s personal commitment has to give way; if not, then, reluctantly, the Board would have to go ahead without those who disagreed. “Duty” called, demanding “support [of] this motion, if we have the fundamental interests of our people at heart.” Board members feared fascism and saw Roosevelt as a bulwark. “We have this man who is not a Fascist … we have to support him.” Some were influenced by events abroad and said so. They could not “afford to overlook what has happened in Germany or Italy, nor the tendencies that are apparent in this country. You don’t have to read between the lines of the newspapers to know that we are heading for just where Germany has gone … this organization with its power should not overlook anything that would keep fascism out.” One member admitted that it was time to acknowledge that the reasons so few fellow workers had followed the Red Banners had to do with the fact that there was something wrong with socialist ideas. In contrast, Roosevelt had “touched the problems closest to the heart of the labor movement” such as no president had ever done. “Roosevelt does not represent the labor movement, but he does represent the people of the United States and he was willing to give a little share of protection to labor.” Even the Board member who was an official spokesman for the Socialist Party had to agree with those who insisted that “there is in Washington, a check upon these forces … pressing toward fascism.” A longtime friend on the Board spoke to Schlossberg directly. He did so with arguments which Schlossberg himself might have made, had his “principle” not blocked the way. “What is a capitalist or socialist party? … Where necessity compels, experience tells us that the Socialist Party makes connections with other parties. In France—how many times? In Germany? In Italy? You know, Brother Schlossberg, what happened in Germany. Do you think that if the capitalists would work with the Socialists they would say no?” Within the ethnic democracy of the Amalgamated he told Schlossberg: “You as a Jew, I as an Italian, would be put into American concentration camps. … They prepare to send us to concentration camps and we should do nothing! Is this not a labor group Brother Schlossberg? Can we not start to build a Labor party? We are not too enthusiastic about Roosevelt but he is the best we can get.” His friend reminded Schlossberg about the Socialist campaign against Fiorello LaGuardia, who became mayor of New York City. “The New York Joint Board was surprised when I asked for an endorsement of LaGuardia. They then thought we must vote Socialist. … But now the Socialists want jobs. The Socialists were against

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LaGuardia but he is the best mayor we ever had. … If we had all had the scruples of a Schlossberg, we would not have LaGuardia, and our people would have to pay the price because we didn’t have him.” The conclusion was clear: “Endorsing and supporting Roosevelt does not mean voting Democratic or Republican, but a vote for the protection of my liberty and the liberty of my fellow workers.” But Schlossberg refused to change his mind. He cast the only “No” vote and then, at the Union’s Convention, explained his opposition to Roosevelt. It was conduct designed to further infuriate Hillman, and Schlossberg knew it. On this point they had long disagreed. Just before the General Executive Board meeting Hillman had come to see him, in his room, which was in fact “a very rare event” in the relations between the two men. Schlossberg was stunned to learn that Hillman had committed himself and the Amalgamated to support FDR. “The thing itself was not surprising … I knew that it was bound to come,” he recorded in his journal four years later. “What shocked was the statement that the Amalgamated had been committed to a policy before the matter was taken up with the General Executive Board.” He replied promptly: “And I am committed to the principle of the labor party.” Hillman left the room, in silence and in “great anger.”45 At the Cleveland Convention Schlossberg again broke rank. Numerous speakers had argued for the motion backing Roosevelt. “Then Schlossberg rose and went to the microphone. The delegates fell into deep silence.” They understood his remarks as a plea against Roosevelt. “When he sat down,” recalled one reliable observer many years later, “every person in the hall rose and applauded Schlossberg to the rafters for at least five minutes. It was a tremendous demonstration of admiration, affection, and nostalgia.” But then, after finishing the tribute to Schlossberg’s independent spirit, and listening to Hillman’s sharp criticism of Schlossberg’s views, “they proceeded to vote overwhelmingly for the motion.”46 Schlossberg had challenged Hillman once too often. The president of the Amalgamated pursued the future, for himself, his members, the labor movement, and the republic at large, in his way, his style, on his terms. Like Dubinsky and Zaritsky, Hillman was also the head of a grand coalition governing his labor union. When he and his coalition had made Roosevelt politics as integral a part of union policy as any of its bargaining agreements with employers, violators of such decisions by the grand coalition had to be put into their place, perhaps even ostracized. “I realized at the Cleveland Convention,” Schlossberg recalled four years later, “that I would be eased out of my office by means of the ­retirement 45 Schlossberg Journal, June 1, 1940. 46 Proceedings of the Amalgamated, 1936, 388–389; Maurice Neufeld to Gerd Korman, April 18, 1984. See also Josephson, Hillman, 393–401.

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plan as punishment for my Roosevelt stand.” But even in this controversy, that did not directly involve ethnic issues, ethnic democracy’s Jewish ambiguities had affected the relationship between these union officials. The meeting in Cleveland had been in May 1936. In June, Schlossberg became a grandfather who wanted to bring the important private news to his one-time friend. “I knew he was very bitter. He avoided me when we met. But I felt such news, the birth of my first grandchild, he should get from me direct, not second hand or indirect.” Instead of congratulations, Hillman attacked him on two counts. He accused him of wanting to break up the Convention, that is to say preventing Hillman and the convention from fulfilling aspirations through or with the help of Roosevelt. The other line of attack challenged the union’s emergent ethnic democracy with which Schlossberg identified. Hillman accused him of marching differently to the Zionist drum roll than to Hillman’s corps: at a Zionist convention Schlossberg would have sacrificed conscience for unanimity.47 This time it was Schlossberg who left the room in silence and in anger. Hillman knew better. He had become a non-Zionist member of the Jewish Agency in 1929 and throughout these years had good contacts with the larger world of Jewish politics. He had known that in 1934 Schlossberg had stayed with the recently formed Jewish Labor Committee after the walkout of the Poale Zion delegates. They represented the American branch of an international socialist political party within the larger Zionist movement and opposed the anti-zionist stance of the Committee. Schlossberg had never joined Poale Zion and fought its rigid approach towards organized Jewish workers in the United States. The truth was that within the union, emergent ethnic democracy had not precluded such conflicts among individuals and groups belonging to the same American peoplehood. As late as January 24, 1940, when German and Russian troops occupied almost all of the lands in which most Central European Jewry lived, Schlossberg also revealed that Hillman’s General Executive Board still had a different public agenda from Schlossberg. He wrote in his Journal that Hillman had informed two socialist Zionist leaders that the Amalgamated national leadership refused to support the Histadrut because the union was interested in “matters American” and because Jews only constituted 15 per cent of the union’s membership. For the moment Schlossberg ignored local union efforts on behalf of Jewish causes. These included those in Palestine, as well as the fact that union contributions to the Jewish Joint Distribution Committee’s

47 Ibid., June 1

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agricultural project in Russia in the 1920s were designed to help Soviet Jews. He wanted to d­ emonstrate that Hillman had not made the Histadrut a public cause of the General Executive Board; and so he listed approximations of union donations to other kinds of “non-American” public causes. 1920s: 300,000 dollars for the Russian American Industrial Corporation; 300,000 dollars for the German Clothing Workers’ Union; 10,000 thousand dollars for striking unions in the UK; 1930s: 50,000 dollars for Spain; “the other day” $1,500 for Finland; and “now collecting a large sum for building in Lithuania.” Within the year Hillman had forced Schlossberg into retirement.48 In the meantime, in the nation at large, minorities represented in the needle trades remained “graded.” Critics considered the public concerns of peoplehoods as private parochial ones: Palestine among Jews, Ethiopia among African Americans, and opposition to discrimination and persecution among all of the “outsiders.”49 And in the world at large, especially in Central Europe, the fascist enemy of the Popular Front, empowered as the governing regime of nation states, was revolutionizing its campaigns. By the mid-thirties the Polish and German states had caught up with, and in the case of Nazi Germany overtaken, many an American southern state in policies of biocultural criteria for segregation and bloody violence on the streets and alleys of cities, towns, and villages. Those foreign developments once again laid bare the limits of the capacity of American peoplehoods to affect public policy towards catastrophic events abroad. Rarely did significant numbers take to the streets among strangers in militant protest for the wellbeing of their people, for a threatened peoplehood as such. In the incomplete republic of the 1920s and 30s, many ethnic citizens were either intimidated by the civic society in which they lived, distrustful of state authority to protect their rights and privileges, or were confused about their obligations as citizens to peoplehood ideals, to friends and relatives abroad. More than a third of Jews polled in the late thirties did not want their republic to go to war against Nazi Germany.50 Among Jews the most important examples of these predilections came from needle trade unions, losing members and stumbling in the late twenties and

48 At the GEB of June 20–21, 1940, the Histadrut was given two thousand dollars. On the forced retirement, see Schlossberg Journal, July 17 and November 8, 1940. 49 On Ethiopia see John Hope Franklin, From Slavery to Freedom: A History of Negro Americans (New York: Knopf, 1974), 434–435; William R. Scott, “Black Nationalism and the Italo-­Ethiopian Conflict, 1934–1936,” The Journal of Negro History 62 (April, 1978): 119–122; Proceedings of the American Federation of Labor, 1936, 655–664, 780; Proceedings of the United Mine Workers, 1936, 1:218, 299–300, 4:13–14; NYSFL Proceedings, 1935, 149; Klehr, Communism, 342–343. 50 Feingold, A Time for Searching, 211–224.

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early thirties to be sure, but remaining standing and growing into ever more powerful institutions. These were the most competent to mobilize the largest numbers in the metropolitan areas of the Northeast and in Washington, DC, to take to the streets to protest restriction, war pogroms, and later in the thirties the policies and practices in Poland and Germany. For union-citizenship reasons trade unionist had not mobilized, although like Garvey’s followers in Harlem, Jews in their centers hit the streets in support of Zionists, women’s suffrage, socialists, and Bolsheviks. It was one thing to send a representative from the Amalgamated to testify to the Congress against bigoted forms of immigration restriction; it was quite another to turn out in large numbers for Jews or Italian Catholics as victims. But trade union citizenship was not the only reason for refusing to transform Jewish “private” issues into American public ones. The needle trade unions included a significant number of anarchists, socialists, and after the Russian Revolution, a significant number of communists. They were among the rank and file and certainly in the leadership ranks. That was one of the reasons why in their contracts these unions made certain that May Day was a holiday, Christmas and Sunday was a holiday, but neither Saturday nor Passover or the high holidays qualified: the Jewish calendar remained private in these contracts as it did in the public schools, post office, and banks. By the time Vladeck, Dubinsky, Zaritsky, Schlossberg, and Hillman dealt with these issues, “Popular Front” Communists, socialists, and many who called themselves liberals identified “fascism” as a stage of finance capitalism. In this perspective Italy and especially Nazi Germany had become the spearhead in a campaign aimed directly at the Soviet Union. That was why the Comintern had taken the lead in mobilizing anti-fascist support and had its cadres become enthusiastic coalition partners among its former enemies. To be sure Jews, and the African Americans in this coalition, campaigned against antisemitism and racism as expressions of the same cause albeit for different reasons. On the one hand, early on after Hitler’s triumph, in some intellectual and academic circles famous Franz Boas had intensified his efforts to educate against race inspired violence. At an international conference in Germany in a symposium about lynching he spoke about the fate of Jews in contemporary Leipzig while discussing the “Scottsboro Boys.” Alain Locke, another well-known figure in circles that included Ernestine Rose, praised Boas for ringing the “Nordic doctrines and their advocates round with an ever tightening scientific blockade”; and Du Bois, still entrapped by some of his older anti-Jewish sacred kitsch also moved towards Boas’ kind of thinking about biological determinism: he started to speak of “race” as a construct of class and culture. In comparison to many African American leaders and publicists, he and a few others appreciated earlier

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than most Americans the genuine distinctive danger posed by Nazi Germany for Jews and African Americans.51 On the other hand, the efforts of the Popular Front had another important consequence for American ethnicking: it helped to mute if not mask the central place of lethal biocultural antisemitism in Nazi leadership circles. It was relatively easy for many in and out of the Front to invoke part of their anti-Jewish sacred kitsch. It had power to intimidate popular Jewish identification, let alone activism on behalf of Jewish causes. Was it not “well known” that Jews invariably pleaded the special case of the “Chosen People” and of their peoplehood; did they not deny their real nationality, were they not guilty of dual loyalty, and did they not exaggerate evidence about their suffering abroad. And therefore it was wise to doubt “Jewish evidence” about Jewish persecution. The enemy was fascism and the stage of capitalism it manifested. Extreme forms of ­antisemitism—the atrocities—had to be fought; but that fight was a side-show in Euro-American hierarchical societies riddled with many variants of sacred ­ethnic kitsch. The country was changing and, as in the past, ethnicking of republican peoplehood with it. Older mobility patterns had left their mark. In some parts of the country, the election of first or usually second generation white ethnic citizens had come early, mostly from the ranks of Irish Americans, German Americans, in Manhattan sometimes a Jewish American, to local executive positions or to state legislatures, sometimes to the House or Senate: During Reconstruction, when in occupied southern states African Americans were elected in significant numbers for the first time, and then not again for decades to come; Germanborn Carl Schurz, a post war Union general, was elected United States Senator from Missouri; by the end of the nineteenth century in Minnesota and Montana Norwegian Americans were elected. Before World War I, constituencies in Milwaukee and Manhattan, respectively had sent a German-speaking Jew and a Yiddish-speaking Jew to Congress. Each was a Socialist.52 And yet. The regime of white ethnic hierarchy, its flexibilities not withstanding remained in place. Eugene V. Debs, born in the Midwest to immigrant parents from Alsace Lorain, ran five times for the presidency; mostly he lost badly as

51 Harold Brackman, “’A Calamity Almost Beyond Comprehension’: Nazi Anti-Semitism and the Holocaust in the Thought of W. E. B. Du Bois,” American Jewish History 88 (March 2000): 53–93. 52 Gleason,” American Identity and Americanization”; Edward R. Kantowitz, “Politics,” 31–58, 803–813; Goren, New York Jews and the Quest for Community, 186–252; Fred Somkin, “­Zion’s Harp By the East River: Jewish American Popular Songs in Columbus’s Golden Land, 1890–1914,” Perspectives in American History, new series (1985):183–220. Victor Berger, son of immigrant parents, in contrast to Meyer London of Manhattan, was a Milwaukee German American uninvolved in Jewish American politics.

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the Socialist Party candidate, his banner being associated by most Americans with a foreign, imported ideology. Al Smith was different. When he ran for the presidency, he had been a New York City Democratic machine politician and a successful governor of New York. But he was an Irish American to his fingertips and in his radio voice. In the election of 1928, he was defeated by Hoover, a Protestant, dry, by margins with which the Catholic, wet, and progressive Smith had defeated his opponents on the sidewalks of New York. This defeat happened to Smith the politician, who since the early twenties had been building and riding a new multi-ethnic coalition within the Democratic Party of New York; four years later in the midst of the Great Depression, it would help to bring New York’s Protestant patrician, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, to the White House. He would lead that coalition first fighting the depression and then fighting to protect his incomplete republic. Harbingers of Nazi brutality came soon enough but within the regime of ethnic hierarchy few had the clarity of vision to comprehend what those harbingers might mean. FDR told Chicago University historian William E. Dodd, his new ambassador to Germany not to officially engage in issues involving German Jews. Still, he also told Dodd, who at first was sympathetic to the new Nazi regime: “The German authorities are treating the Jews shamefully and the Jews in this country are greatly excited. … We can do nothing except for American citizens who happen to be made victims. We must protect them, and whatever we can do to moderate the general persecution by unofficial and personal influence ought to be done.” A few years later, in August 1941, symbolically speaking, FDR continued to straddle his pasts. On board the battleship “The Prince of Wales,” as the guest holding the hand of the prime minister, he helped Winston Churchill lead sailors from Great Britain and from a segregated United States Navy sing against a “heathen” foe. “Onward Christian Soldiers,” was a popular English Protestant hymn written in the era of their civil war. They were sharing a moment at sea much more in harmony with decades past than with decades to come. Then the national ethnic conversation would be different. So it is probable that in January, 1942, just weeks after Pearl Harbor, the president, perhaps in jest but nevertheless, could say to two of his senior advisors that he expected them to render special services, one as a Catholic and the other as a Jew: During a luncheon he told Leo T. Crowley and Henry Morgenthau, Jr. “you know this is a Protestant country, and the Catholics and Jews are here under sufferance. It is up to you … to go along with anything I want.”53 53 Erik Larson, In the Garden of Beasts (New York: Crown, 2011), 32. Without saying so Gestle assumes that his FDR, his Nordic pater familias, lived within an ethnic hierarchy, “with those here the longest … [having] the highest ranking as Americans.” Gestle, American Crucible, 185.

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Bending Hierarchies

Years of depression and war profoundly alter the nation without slowing down the century’s extraordinary material transformation. Changes continue into the 1970s, when the Civil Rights Revolution push the ethnicking of socalled private republican peoplehoods into the public square.1 To be sure, the 1930s and World War II significantly interfere with that momentum, yet in the postwar and Cold War years, the veritable revolution keeps on. However, notwithstanding the impact of automobiles, airplane seats, refrigerators, antibiotics, and many other consumer products on living standards, in the public square change comes much more slowly to the republic’s century-old ethnic hierarchy. The nation’s material largess certainly affected ethnic mobility patterns, but institutional grips on the republic’s privatized experiences and memories remained. Segregationist politicians held FDR’s Administration hostage by threatening to withhold needed votes for New Deal programs and wartime policies. During the Great Depression, the United States forcefully deported thousands of Mexican “wetbacks.” After Pearl Harbor, the government shipped more than sixty thousand nonwhite ethnic citizens—Japanese Americans living on the West Coast—to remote camps in the Southwest. And two years later, the Supreme Court, by a vote of nine to one, declared constitutional the wartime imposition of federal martial laws on a portion of California. Between 1942 and 1944, news of Nazi Germany’s deportations and genocidal Final Solution circulated, but in the official public domain, these events remained well-contained as wartime atrocity information. There were challenges to the nation’s ethnic hierarchy. Some came from organized labor and the larger labor movement, the noisiest instigated by Randolph’s organized African American workers; others came from advances in pharmacology and genetics. And there were important US Supreme Court decisions. 1 Gordon, Rise and Fall of American Growth, 326–328.

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All of these, in hindsight, pointed toward undermining the public square’s hold on American peoplehoods, especially the caged peoplehood of African Americans. Comprehending the larger purpose of the Nazi revolution in that context posed a serious challenge to the imagination and ethnicking of American Jewish peoplehood enthusiasts. Most made use of assumptions based on existing institutions and their respective collective memories. Even Schlossberg had yet to realize in the 1930s what hid within the inner sanctum of fascist Nazi ideology. He may have been more informed about values and beliefs than many of his compatriots and comrades, but Schlossberg was similar to them in the way he juggled his sacred kitsch, at any given moment choosing which part to trumpet with yesterday’s notes, which to emphasize, and which to mute. Schlossberg and his fellow social democrats had signed up, on their terms, to fight the depression and defend the wellbeing of the republic. Yet this complex, secular, post-Talmudic Jew insisted at the same time on being a proud, self-righteous, and devoted trade unionist, socialist Zionist, social democrat, labor party enthusiast, anti-Communist, and pacifist. In that mix of identities, Schlossberg found a justification for opposing Hillman and others who supported FDR as a bulwark against fascism. Until 1942, Schlossberg’s political idealism and pacifism obscured the greater danger facing his generation. For him and other Jewish activists, peoplehood memories from World War I may have interfered with a clear-eyed understanding of an emerging Nazi Germany. They remembered that German troops had occupied much of Russian Poland, where on the Eastern Front they had fought until the Bolsheviks withdrew from the war. That occupation liberated Jews from Czarist oppression and, in their sacred kitsch, strengthened Germany’s reputation as an enlightened and civilized nation. Antisemitism, even ugly outbursts of street violence, had not interfered with those perceptions. In collective memories, Wilhelmian Germany had remained the most popular European destination for Jewish migrants from the East. And in the United States, well-established German-Jewish families— the Lippmans and Brandeises—had held on to their fond memories of German connections, as did many other Americans in banking, commerce, and academic life. Until 1917, when the United States entered the war on the side of the Allies, most Jewish citizens wished their country to remain neutral, for they considered the German-Austro Hungarian alliance the force that would end the Russian oppression of Jews. Twenty years later, in Euro-America, the revolutionary imagination of leading Nazis continued to benefit from the memory of an earlier German society

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and its liberal Weimar Republic—or, perhaps, aggressive Nazis benefitted from deadened sensibilities. Too many, young and old, in stories and encounters, had been exposed to unspeakable horrors in their lifetime—besides suffering and dying from accidents, illness, and fatal contagious diseases, many had witnessed and heard of the deaths and maiming of civilians in battlefront trenches. In the thirties, during the depression, the term “extermination” no longer resonated among Americans with the same power as it had just a decade before, although some warned Jews, African Americans, and other “minorities” they would face a terrifying fate if German fascism triumphed. Writing about their kinsmen in Central Europe, many Jewish publicists sounded an alarm not unlike those heard concerning the mortal dangers to African Americans and Native Americans in the nineteenth century. And yet, in the Spring of 1939, the American government refused to grant asylum to Jewish passengers of the “St. Louis” who had been turned away from Cuba and, anchored near Miami, waited desperately for good news to arrive from Washington. After a week, the German captain reluctantly turned his ship east, back to Nazi Germany, where a few months earlier the regime had deported within twenty-four hours thousands of Polish Jews before orchestrating a national pogrom, remembered as “Kristallnacht.” In different forms the fear of catastrophe had long been a part of the darkest expectations in American peoplehood history. In the eight decades that followed 1861, conflicting opinions about republicanism and peoplehood remained yoked to founding national ideals, while a discourse of domestic Realpolitik was held hostage to rankings based primarily on race and religion. The very presence of free African American citizens presented a people with distinctive pasts and deeply rooted networks of churches and other voluntary organizations. They proclaimed, and collective memories sustained, the great revolutionary promise of the republic even as the post-civil war history of those darker-skinned citizens continued to embody the brutal violation of that promise. At the bottom of the hierarchical continuum, both promise and violation seared African American emotions, often to the blare of trumpets and the screams of silence that accompanied lynching festivals in the Deep South. Euro-American science also facilitated that yoking. Changes in claimed ­professional scientific knowledge gave rise to new state-sponsored measures, especially public health and immigration policies. These policies extended and intensified the driving forces behind the “humiliation, and bestialization” of such groups as the Chinese and Japanese and designated white populations, such as Mexican Americans and those “guilty” of carrying inherited diseases resulting in “imbecility.” For within a neo-Darwinian framework, while the revolution of

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the germ theory of disease was well underway, in the public health arena, as in biology and medicine, older convictions and practices still competed with new concepts and bacteriological findings. By World War I, victory had moved into the hands of the bacteriologists, the parasitologists, and their diagnostic tools. Unfortunately, new laboratory scientists and the medical establishment in general had failed to find reliable cures for the life-threatening contagious bacilli now observed and recognized under the microscope: cholera, tuberculosis, and louseborne typhus. New tools of diagnosis had clearly outstripped pharmacological efforts to supplement clean water, modern sewage systems, quarantines, and consistent personal hygiene. An equivalent experience occurred among a growing contingent of social scientists who were only too eager to compare elements of the demeaned for the benefit of public policy. In the rarified world of psychologists, heavily invested in mental testing, these experts carried substantial cultural weight, particularly among citizens eager to discipline the perceived volatility of peoplehood citizens. In the wake of WWI military testing programs, IQ could reasonably be considered an inherited trait. Repeated testing during the 1920s confirmed that ethnics, especially African Americans, scored lower. These results among nonwhites threatened the wellbeing of the American ­population.  Some investigators in this camp conducted one experiment too many. John C. Burnham, a well-known medical historian, reports that at “the end of the 1920s … excellent testing showed that Asian-American[s] … consistently scored decisively higher than ‘whites.’ This simply pulled the rug out from underneath racist interpretations of IQ. Just at the beginning of the 1930s … the psychologists (broadly speaking—there were always exceptions) became remarkably silent about race except as they began a new psychological study, the study of ‘prejudice,’ and now explicitly racial prejudice.”2 In a sense, Boas had won over the psychologists while the rest of the nation slept. Sulfa drugs came into common use during the Great Depression, but other antibiotics did not become generally available until after World War II.3 In other words, especially in early twentieth-century public and private policies and practices, a significant gap remained between diagnosis and cure, leaving all sorts of decisions affecting the nation’s health to administrative

2 Burnham to Gerd Korman, email, September 17, 2012. 3 Exceptions to the general trend remained for many years afterwards. One of the most egregious occurred in the infamous Tuskegee syphilis experiments sustained by the United States Public Health Service. Until the 1970s employees of the federal government allowed their bigotry to influence their science in work designed to protect the public from a harmful disease. Susan R. Reverby, Examining Tuskegee: The Infamous Syphilis Study and its Legacy (Chapel Hill: North Carolina Press, 2009). In 2011 she found the evidence in Guatemala demonstrating this kind of Public Health Service bigotry at work decades after WWII.

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and political “solutions”—and these usually remained stuck in collective memories, in popular forms of biological ­determinisms. In that context, crosscurrents remained ominous. To be sure, behind a new wall of immigration restriction, in the 1920s and in the 1930s, when New Deal Democrats and trade unionists competed with fascists, socialists, and Communists at home, evidence of “ethnic democracy” began to emerge. Yet to those fearful of peoplehoods, a dark reality remained within the turbulence that accompanied earlier foreign arrivals—Catholics, Greek Orthodox, and Jews— all from Southern and Eastern Europe. These differentiated worshippers were ethnicking with their expressed sacred kitsch, interacting with those in domestic motion: the many millions of black and white American citizens migrating from South to North and the millions of Mexicans crossing the long-land border. For peoplehood empowerment, there were consequences. These huge population transfers in the 1920s brought with them significant shifts in the accumulation of ethnic consumer spending power and political influence, especially in the metropolitan centers of the Northeast. Still, the tradition of ethnic hierarchy held firm. During the interwar years, elected or appointed officials in public and private organizations, including labor unions, continued to follow a pecking order based on assumed “legitimate” inequalities. Such officials also presumed that their private interests, those of the “insiders,” the “leading groups,” or “controlling minorities,” were the only appropriate considerations fit for determining public policy. Thus, in the 1920s, while republican administrations retained Wilson’s federal segregation practices, Chief Justice William Howard Taft and his court, including Brandeis and Holmes, in Gong Lum vs. Rice, kept in place decades-old anchors of dynamic ethnic hierarchies by affirming the decision of the Circuit Court of Mississippi. In the education of a youngster, a Chinese-American citizen attending a publicly segregated black school, Taft, a former governor of the Philippines and a former president of the United States, stood by Plessy vs. Ferguson. The chief justice thus affirmed lines that were included in his Inaugural Address of 1909: it is not the “disposition or within the province of the Federal Government to interfere with the regulation by Southern States of their domestic affairs;” and he echoed lines from one of Harding’s presidential addresses in 1921 delivered in Birmingham, Alabama. In that decade, despite significant opposition, quotas for and against select white Europeans had become the law of the land, and Henry Ford aggressively pursued his public hate campaign against Jews. Catholics remained under attack and were feared by many voters in the election of 1928; and in Queens, New York Klansmen marched a few miles before being stopped.

Bending Hierarchies

Elsewhere, white neighbors targeted African Americans in killing sprees, while in the states of the Deep South, systems of peonage and other forms of forced contract labor continued. These systems were consistently applied to African American citizens, thus sustaining the discourse and practice of their criminalization since at least the depression of the 1890s. This context included deadly urban riots among whites and blacks in the North and South. Jail terms and deportations also affected some post-Talmudic secular Jewish immigrant radicals, and Americanization campaigns were often designed to discipline the loyalties of foreigners. Such campaigns in private and public organizations expected newcomers and their children, in schools and factories, to shed within weeks their outward behavior, immigrant speech, values, and sometimes religion. Taken together, these events and policies became preconditions for what a later generation would term “ethnic cleansing.” In Tulsa, in the region where earlier campaigns of ethnic cleansing had occurred on Native American lands, that experience remained part of local active public memories. Young John Hope Franklin and his family also remembered—they had lived outside of the town and had missed the riot in which more than two hundred fellow African Americans were slaughtered. More than a decade later, conditioning embers remained scattered among citizens of wealth and influence: at the Long Island Railroad’s Wainscot station on the South Fork, black and white passengers still waited some sixty miles from New York City for the next train, in segregated facilities. That was in the Republican North. In the Democratic South, the entire region, embracing millions of ethnic blacks and whites, sent their “Southern Nation” politicians into Washington’s federal legislative chambers. After FDR’s election, their calculated support of the New Deal and wartime leadership, though steadily weakening after the start of his second term, all but guaranteed in the 1930s and 1940s the stability of Southern segregation and decades-old American ethnic hierarchies.4 Ethnicking, peoplehood turbulence, and its competing sacred kitsch were alive, well, surging, and changing. At home, a dynamic regime of ethnic hierarchy with its acts of discrimination remained in place even as ethnic citizens elected in increasing numbers ethnic representatives to important public offices. Much of the protest rhetoric spoken and action taking place during the Depression revealed mobilization moments affected by the bonds of the working class and militant unionism. In the South, there were fewer lynchings, but, as the Mississippi floodwaters

4 Katznelson, Fear Itself, 385–388, passim; Blackmon, Slavery, 325–403.

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had revealed just a few years before, just about everything else remained the same for African Americans. As in past economic depressions, the unemployment levels among blacks were at least double that of whites. These were terrifying numbers. For most American residents, temporary employment was the norm. The New Deal’s welfare state was just beginning to come into being, but it was being scrutinized by Southern politicians. Jews also experienced exaggerated rates of unemployment, as they struggled with the old-new forms of sacred kitsch that erupted in these economic hard times. Because of German Nazism, for Jews, these depression years carved a pattern of discrimination with a much sharper edge, in part because the campaigns of national discipline had also affected ethnicking. Compared with the years of WWI and afterwards, American citizens lost much of their organized ethnic militancy: their Irish Catholic Americanism, their African Americanism, and their post-Talmudic secular Americanism. Those mobilizations had become weaker. Earlier they were associated with the Irish Rebellion, Marcus Garvey, the Russian Revolution, and the Balfour Declaration. German Americans had been silenced altogether before some became vocal again in response to Nazi propaganda. Weakened mobilization occurred at the same time the passion and fervor for peoplehood’s sacred kitsch began to intensify under the national banner of Soviet Communism and the state fascisms of Italy, Spain, and Central European countries. That is to say, that abroad, and especially in Nazi Germany, the darkest sides of a people’s sacred kitsch were flourishing as never before in the twentieth century—and getting worse. The news was jarring to Americans; the stories coming from Central Europe were shocking to Jews especially. Still, in those years, it is important to appreciate an important fact: along with everyone else in the United States, the changing people of the Talmud lived in a society that allowed state and local governments in the Deep South to do what the centralizing dictatorial Nazi regime was now doing to its people—a first in modern Germany. In fact, Hitler’s state was harnessing Euro-American history and particular forms of ethnic hierarchy to institutionalize procedures criminalizing hundreds of thousands of JewishGerman citizens on the basis of the biocultural components of race and religion. For this reason, the Nazi regime, expecting enthusiastic support from ethnicking Southern political elites,5 had its officials remind the sympathetic new American Ambassador of that Southern history. As a North Carolinian and distinguished historian of the American South, Nazi officials expected professor William Edward Dodd to understand that for them, their Jewish problem was

5 Ibid., 281–291.

Bending Hierarchies

like “your Negro problem at home”—a domestic and local affair, permanent and hard to solve, even with criminalization. Yet in general, the region’s elite—and seemingly most of its white population—would have none of it, though comparing the numbers criminalized there with those criminalized by governmental practices in the South was striking. By 1930, Germany held between five hundred thousand and six hundred thousand Jews, or one percent of the entire German population; Alabama alone counted one million African Americans, about thirty percent of the state’s population. In the world of Southern sacred kitsch, the Nazi comparison made no sense at all, because Southerners and their segregation policies belonged to citizens of a liberal democratic republic. In general, Southerners could oppose Nazi racial policies even as they opposed opening the gates of immigration to the newly persecuted of Europe.6 Soon enough, though, Dodd became skeptical, and by 1938, a year after he returned home, the differences between his country and Germany grew stark. The trajectory of the Nazi regime was clear as it revealed its unique EuroAmerican character. When World War II began in Poland, Nazi-led Germans pushed into East Central Europe, where they constructed their genocidal abyss. Meanwhile, the republic’s New Deal agencies had begun to back away from criminalization and other decades-old practices harmful to, and in violation of, African American citizenship. Energized radicals and reformers,7 Communists, socialists, and trade unionists in parts of the South, often with home bases in northern cities, mobilized anti-segregationists on an integrated basis; often these campaigns intensified in the face of antisemitism. Different branches of government at the state and federal levels did respond more positively to the growing tensions inherent in American ethnicking. These tensions intensified as collective identities among republican peoplehoods crashed against the public square’s cherished ideal of individualism: a “blindness” to religion, color, class, nationality, peoplehood, and ethnicity protecting the freedom of American citizens.8 War preparations provided new opportunities. Asa Philip Randolph, with his organization of African American workers and links to the leaders of multiethnic industrial unions, now leveraged his power for the first time. Randolph did not act on behalf of organized labor, as needle trade union 6 Larson, Garden of Beasts, 82, but Dodd reflects this implication on many pages. 7 Historian Mac Swearingen at Tulane University and Frank Graham, president of the University of North Carolina, are examples. 8 Konvitz, Expanding Liberties, 55–85, 255–256. For Southerners’ defense of seperate but equal doctrines in the US Senate between 1946 and 1957, see Robert A. Caro, The Years of Lyndon Johnson, vol. 3, Master of the Senate (New York: Vintage, 2003), 685–710, 831–1012.

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leaders had done; he fought for his people. He persuaded FDR to use government contracts to desegregate federal employment and to target the forced labor practices criminalizing African Americans. Five years later, after the war, when new anti-discrimination legislation passed in select cities and states, Randolph and other like-minded Democrats helped persuade President Harry Truman to order the integration of the armed forces of the United States. Change was underway in the courts as well. More federal rulings in Texas insisted that Mexican Americans constituted a separate white nationality; and in 1937, during the Depression, a challenged and changing Supreme Court majority stopped fighting FDR’s New Deal. For the first time, the Supreme Court granted constitutional legitimacy to a collective identity—to organized workers and their right to collective bargaining as provided by the Roosevelt Administration’s 1935 Wagner Act.9 In fact, for that court in 1938, Chief Justice Harlan Fiske Stone issued his famous “footnote 4” with its third paragraph. During the second Roosevelt Administration, the Chief Justice openly worried about his Court’s new role dealing with legislatures in controversies over identifiable groups being denied equal protection under the Constitution: “Nor need we enquire whether similar considerations [as in this case involving commercial issues] enter into the review of statutes directed at particular religious … or national … or racial minorities … whether prejudice against discrete and insular minorities may be a special condition, which tends seriously to curtail the operation of those political processes ordinarily to be relied upon to protect minorities, and which may call for a correspondingly more searching judicial inquiry.”10 These developments foretold the constitutional possibility of legally recognizing other collectives besides labor unions—Stone’s “discrete and insular minorities,” possibly peoplehoods. To be sure, in the interwar years, Americans seemed locked in a civic society ranked by bioculturally driven dynamic ethnic hierarchies. Racism, antisemitism, and anti-Catholicism were popular pastimes. Many states legally segregated African Americans and Mexican Americans; California deprived Japanese and Chinese Americans of basic rights; and in New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, and other metropolitan areas, informal restricted covenants and closed doors or quotas in employment and education also discriminated against Jews. Hugo Black in Alabama considered it natural to join the Ku Klux Klan to gain

9 NLRB v. Jones & Laughlin Steel Corporation, (1937); Beauharanis v. Illinois, 343 U.S. 250 (1951); Hernandez v. State of Texas 347 U.S. 475 (1954). 10 U.S. vs. Carolene Products, 1938; Dean Alfange, Jr., “Footnote 4,” Hall, eds., The Oxford Companion to the Supreme Court of the United States, 306–307.

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a US Senate seat, and in 1937, that past membership did not prevent FDR from nominating nor the Senate from confirming Black to the Supreme Court. It was a period in the history of the court in which, on its bench, sat jurists attracted to competing thoughts about the history of republican ethnicking; these jurists would influence decisions on individual rights and group life in a society devoted to republican ideology. So, it bears repeating that it was in the mid-1920s that the modern transformation of the Fourteenth Amendment began into becoming a powerful instrument for systematically extending the Bill of Rights into the affairs of individual citizens across the Union. In Whitney vs. California, Justice Brandeis, with Holmes assenting, writes his famous concurring opinion about the place of the civil war Amendment in issues involving states, a citizen’s free speech rights, and Holmes’s “clear and present danger” doctrine. Later, in a majority opinion, James Clark McReynolds invoked the Fourteenth Amendment in decisions involving two state education cases. McReynolds belonged to the court’s “Four Horsemen”—conservative opponents of FDR—and was a known antisemite whose outspoken bigotry manifested itself in expressions against Jewish colleagues in the Court’s Chambers and in his choice of clerks. In 1937, a year before he died, Justice Benjamin Nathan Cardozo, who, by President Hoover’s appointment, had replaced Holmes in 1932, writing for a unanimous court, insisted that the Fourteenth Amendment applied to Connecticut in a case involving “double jeopardy.” In subsequent years, Black, and Douglas who replaced Brandeis, became aggressive champions of individual rights at the very time when the court began to recognize group rights. By insisting that the Fourteenth Amendment incorporated the Bill of Rights, thus extending their application from the federal government to state governments, these judges made the Amendment available for Thurgood Marshall’s challenge of Plessy vs. Ferguson in the mid-fifties. By then, the NAACP, like Jewish defense organizations before, had abandoned the fight for legal recognition of their respective group’s rights for reasons of legal strategy. Another aspect of the larger judicial context in which Marshall presented his challenge becomes clear in decisions written by Felix Frankfurter and Robert Jackson.11 (In early 1939, Frankfurter had replaced Cardozo, and in 1946, Robert Jackson, a 1941 appointee, returned to the court after serving as chief prosecutor in the Nuremberg trials). These justices also became engaged with important issues in the history of the public square. Within their frameworks 11 Steven L. Wasby, a political scientist, in ibid., 398–399 tracks the tension among the court’s justices between group rights and individual rights from the 1930s into postwar decades.

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of constitutional analysis, they tangled over republican ethnicking, peoplehood segregation, and citizens’ civil rights and civil liberties. Frankfurter, who seemed to have made his doctrine of “Judicial Restraint” tantamount to a part of his secular American religious belief—that is, to a part of his sacred kitsch—that put so much trust in American governments, refused to entertain any comparison with the totalitarian states attacking and coercing so many millions of innocent people. Frankfurter’s act of conversion also seemed to have affected his progressive activism into what, to him, was a more suitable liberalism for a supreme court judge to hold. To his critics, however, Frankfurter had become an inspired convert opposing much-needed reform. The conversion did something else as well. It seems to have prompted Frankfurter to fashion a Jewish legacy out of the court’s discourse in the midst of a war against Nazi Germany and later during the early years of the Cold War. Then he faced Justice Jackson who ruled differently when they encountered each other on acts of patriotism among fellow citizens; and also after the war, when through his experiences at Nuremberg, Jackson introduced into the courtroom the details of Nazi acts of ethnic cleansing and genocide. In 1943, the Supreme Court decided for a second time an issue involving the essence of republican peoplehoods: the right of sectarian children to refuse to salute the American flag, an act ordered by the local school board of West Virginia. Jackson wrote for the majority, overturning the previous decision, in which Frankfurter, then speaking for the majority, insisted all children salute the stars and stripes. Now Jackson claimed Frankfurter’s majority had it all wrong. His colleagues misunderstood republican peoplehood. Jackson’s decision pointed to the headwinds that were beginning to blow away from Frankfurter’s patriotic republican gospels. Jackson wrote: “The Fourteenth Amendment, as now applied to the States, protects the citizen against the State itself and all of its creatures—Boards of Education not excepted. These have, of course, important, delicate, and highly discretionary functions, but none that they may not perform within the limits of the Bill of Rights.” The Boards, he continued, “are educating the young for citizenship,” and that “is reason for scrupulous protection of Constitutional freedoms of the individual, if we are not to strangle the free mind at its source and teach youth to discount important principles of our government as mere platitudes. … The action of Congress in making flag observance voluntary and respecting the conscience of the objector in a matter so vital as raising the Army contrasts sharply with these local regulations in matters relatively trivial to the welfare of the nation.” In the midst of war, Jackson lectured Frankfurter, an American peoplehood Jew, a former

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professor of law at Harvard University, a respected authority on the Fourteenth Amendment, and the author of the earlier Gobitis court decision: “There are village tyrants, as well as village Hampdens, but none who acts under color of law is beyond reach of the Constitution. … The very purpose of a Bill of Rights was to withdraw certain subjects from the vicissitudes of political controversy, to place them beyond the reach of majorities and officials, and to establish them as legal principles to be applied by the courts.” Jackson shrouded his argument in the First Amendment: “One’s right to life, liberty, and property, to free speech, a free press, freedom of worship and assembly, and other fundamental rights may not be submitted to vote; they depend on the outcome of no elections.” Jackson was also worried about the growth of central authority in a United States at war, particularly with regards to American capitalism: “[The] task of translating the majestic generalities of the Bill of Rights, conceived as part of the pattern of liberal government in the eighteenth century, into concrete restraints on officials dealing with the problems of the twentieth century, is one to disturb self-confidence.” The past had to be understood correctly and properly adapted to the present: “These principles grew in soil which also produced a philosophy that the individual was the center of society, that his liberty was attainable through mere absence of governmental restraints, and that government should be entrusted with few controls, and only the mildest supervision over men’s affairs.” Jackson insisted: “We must transplant these rights to a soil in which the laissez-faire concept or principle … has withered, at least as to economic affairs, and social advancements are increasingly sought through closer integration of society and through expanded and strengthened governmental controls.” And Jackson appreciated the impact: “These changed conditions often deprive precedents of reliability, and cast us more than we would choose upon our own judgment. But we act in these matters not by authority of our competence, but by force of our commissions. We cannot, because of modest estimates of our competence in such specialties as public education, withhold the judgment that history authenticates as the function of this Court when liberty is infringed.” Jackson feared America might slide down a slope common to wartime governments in the twentieth century: “Struggles to coerce uniformity of sentiment in support of some end thought essential to their time and country have been waged by many good, as well as by evil, men. Nationalism is a relatively recent phenomenon, but, at other times and places, the ends have been racial or territorial security, support of a dynasty or regime, and particular plans for saving souls.” Jackson continued, explaining the process: “As first and moderate methods to attain unity have failed, those bent on its accomplishment must resort to an ever-increasing severity. As governmental pressure toward unity becomes

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greater, so strife becomes more bitter as to whose unity it shall be. Probably no deeper division of our people could proceed from any provocation than from finding it necessary to choose what doctrine and whose program public educational officials shall compel youth to unite in embracing.” Yet in the long run, failure will come, as surely as it will, too, to the tyrants of WWII: “Ultimate futility of such attempts to compel coherence is the lesson of every such effort from the Roman drive to stamp out Christianity as a disturber of its pagan unity, the Inquisition, as a means to religious and dynastic unity, the Siberian exiles as a means to Russian unity, down to the fast failing efforts of our present totalitarian enemies.” Jackson had proclaimed: “Those who begin coercive elimination of dissent soon find themselves exterminating dissenters. Compulsory unification of opinion achieves only the unanimity of the graveyard.” Frankfurter took Jackson’s majority decision as a personal affront. In his pointby-point rebuttal, his dissent sought to demonstrate that he, not Jackson, was master of the corpus, the thorough knowledge of which was required for rendering American justice in this second Gobitis case before the Supreme Court. Most revealingly, here in 1943, Frankfurter insisted on making explicit in his opinion his inherited connections to Jewry. In doing so, he reminded his colleagues on the bench and in America’s law schools—the readers of his dissent— of the fate of Jews in Nazi-occupied Europe. Frankfurter opened with: “One who belongs to the most vilified and persecuted minority in history is not likely to be insensible to the freedoms guaranteed by our Constitution. Were my purely personal attitude relevant, I should wholeheartedly associate myself with the general libertarian views in the Court’s opinion, representing, as they do, the thought and action of a lifetime.” Yet Frankfurter, the Supreme Court judge, did not see evidence of republican peoplehoods in the Constitution. He turned to the New Testament’s “Letter to the Galatians,” often attributed to St. Paul, for a way to paraphrase the idea that: “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus. And if you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham’s offspring, heirs according to the promise.” So, wrote Frankfurter, as judges: “We are neither Jew nor Gentile, neither Catholic nor agnostic. We owe equal attachment to the Constitution, and are equally bound by our judicial obligations whether we derive our citizenship from the earliest or the latest immigrants to these shores. As a member of this Court, I am not justified in writing my private notions of policy into the Constitution, no matter how deeply I may cherish them or how mischievous I may deem their disregard.”12 12 West Virginia State Bd. of Educ. vs. Barnette, 319 U.S. 624 (1943).

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The experience of war and the Allies’ triumph introduced these ethnicking issues into the Court’s discourse. Horrors embedded within twentieth-century biocultural determinisms—also nestled deeply within the republic’s regimes of ethnic hierarchy—had been exposed through the raging ethnic bigotries mobilized and militarized by the war’s belligerents.13 When President Harry Truman’s Chief Prosecutor arrived in Germany for the first of the Nuremberg trials, Jackson brought with him not only his experience from the Supreme Court. To his office, he attracted Europeans who had been preoccupied with the subject of peoplehood protection in a modern sovereign state. These private encounters were enlightening. Jackson engaged three remarkable European Jews, since then identified as being among the most influential minds to develop new competing concepts in international law. Jacob Robinson, a member of the World Jewish Congress and other Jewish nongovernmental organizations, sought to demonstrate that the court should make Jews and the Final Solution its primary focus. Hersch Lauterpacht, a distinguished professor of international law at Cambridge University, worked officially with the English prosecution team and campaigned to make the “individual,” according to the professor’s understanding of “crimes against humanity,” the court’s primary focus. And Raphael Lemkin, like Robinson, was associated with nongovernmental organizations. Lemkin, an experienced attorney in Poland, who had struggled to make the League of Nation’s Minority Treaties effective, was now, after WWII, fighting to protect “the group”—European peoples such as Jews, Gypsies, and Poles—from persecution by sovereign states. Lemkin campaigned for the Court to focus not only on Jews, but also on peoplehoods against whom a sovereign Nazi state had committed what he called “the crime of genocide.”14 Jackson treaded carefully in these encounters, representing as he did a nation 13 John W. Dower, War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War (New York: Pantheon, 1986), 178; Marc V. Tushnet, “Equal Protection,” in Hall et al., Oxford Companion To the Supreme Court, 257–259; Terminiello v. City of Chicago 337 U.S. 1 (1949). 14 Michael Marrus, “The Holocaust at Nuremberg,” Yad Vashem Studies 26 (1998): 5–41; Phillip Sands, East West Street (New York: Knopf, 2016), 65–117, 143; Korematsu v. United States, 323 U.S. 214. In retrospect, the differing primary efforts of these three individuals, who after all sought protection for the world’s civilian peoplehoods from criminal acts by sovereign states, foreshadowed many of the swirling arguments and ideological confrontations about the place of the Holocaust in changing Jewish American peoplehood identification. For one contentious interpretation of these arguments and confrontations, see Peter Novick, The Holocaust in American Life (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2000), passim; see also Feingold, Time for Searching, 225–265; Sorin, A Time for Healing, 195–228; Zeev W. Mankowitz, Life Between Memory and Hope: The Survivors of the Holocaust in Occupied Germany (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), passim; Leon Dinnerstein, America and the Survivors of the Holocaust (New York: Columbia, 1982), passim.

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ruled by a regime of ethnic hierarchy, a regime in which many of its states had long practiced the segregation of African American peoplehood. Yet Jackson also stepped cautiously because, as a senior government official and supreme court justice, he represented a nation in which elected and appointed officials had made the American “individual” a primary subject of reference. In fact, Jackson acted as if one could not compare segregated African American citizens in the republican United States to Jews and other peoples in a Europe that had produced a Nazi state. Like the other national prosecutors at Nuremberg, Jackson, too, had to protect the interests of his home country and its Allies. Together, they limited the international court’s jurisdiction to crimes committed during WWII, thus avoiding the thorny issue of past histories in the American South and in the English and French overseas colonies, as well as in the Soviet Union. Jackson’s earlier dissenting opinion, about his government’s removal of Japanese American citizens from California’s Pacific coast, may have foreshadowed his sensitivity to the concept of “crimes against humanity” used by the Allied prosecution at Nuremberg. For in the name of a sovereign state, the Roosevelt Administration had coerced each Japanese American man, woman, and child to leave home because of racist peoplehood associations derived from the Japanese empire. In Nuremberg, Jackson advanced the discourse using this new concept. Embracing it, he identified Jews as victims of the special “Final Solution” organized by the Nazi state: during the years of war, Jackson insisted, the men in the dock had committed “crimes against humanity,” a formulation legal authorities tied to familiar American constitutional constructions, namely “Natural Law” and the “Individual.” In Nuremberg, Jackson did not explicitly incorporate the other formulation that was also being proposed and discussed: Lemkin’s crime of “genocide.” Yet other prosecutors did in passing, and Jackson, when speaking about Jews, implied its meaning. The judges, when they read their verdicts from the bench, did not, remaining committed to the formal framework of Nuremberg. The term “genocide” placed the focus directly on a peoplehood—that is, on a group requiring international legal standing comparable to the standing of individuals. Genocide described perfectly the goal of the Nazi state in its planned Final Solution. No doubt, that was the reason why, starting in 1946, sustained campaigns by Lemkin and his supporters succeeded in pushing for the use of “genocide” in the General Assembly of the new United Nations. Three years later, after prosecutor Jackson returned to the bench, the trials of Nurenberg could be felt resonating in the Supreme Court. They can be traced in Jackson’s 1949 dissent from a majority decision written by Justice Douglas

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c­oncerning the free speech violations committed by Arthur Terminiello, a Catholic priest whose rally in Chicago caused an ugly riot. “As this case declares a nationwide rule that disables local and state authorities from punishing conduct which produces conflicts of this kind,” Jackson wrote, “it is unrealistic not to take account of the nature, methods and objectives of the forces involved. This was not an isolated, spontaneous and unintended collision of political, racial or ideological adversaries. It was a local manifestation of a worldwide and standing conflict between two organized groups of revolutionary fanatics, each of which has imported to this country the strong-arm technique developed in the struggle by which their kind has devastated Europe.” Recalling his experience at Nuremberg, Jackson continued: “Increasingly, American cities have to cope with it. One faction organizes a mass meeting, the other organizes pickets to harass it; each organizes squads to counteract the other’s pickets; parade is met with counter-parade. Each of these mass demonstrations has the potentiality, and more than a few, the purpose, of disorder and violence. We need not resort to speculation as to the purposes for which these tactics are calculated, nor as to their consequences. Recent European history demonstrates both.” Jackson then quoted an infamous text: “Hitler [in Mein Kampf] summed up the strategy of the mass demonstration as used by both fascism and communism: ‘We should not work in secret conventicles, but in mighty mass demonstrations, and it is not by dagger and poison or pistol that the road can be cleared for the movement, but by the conquest of the streets. We must teach the Marxists that the future master of the streets is National Socialism, just as it will someday be the master of the state.’” Jackson went on: “First laughed at as an extravagant figure of speech, the battle for the streets became a tragic reality when an organized Sturmabteilung began to give practical effect to its slogan that ‘possession of the streets is the key to power in the state.’ The present obstacle to mastery of the streets … is the authority of local governments which represent the free choice of democratic and law-abiding elements of all shades of opinion. … The fascist and communist groups, on the contrary, resort to these terror tactics to confuse, bully and discredit those freely chosen governments.” Here in the Court was a case in point: “[The] people lose faith in the democratic process when they see public authority flouted and impotent, and begin to think the time has come when they must choose sides in a false and terrible dilemma such as was posed as being at hand by the call for the Terminiello meeting: ‘Christian Nationalism or World Communism—Which?’ This drive by totalitarian groups to undermine the prestige and effectiveness of local democratic governments is advanced whenever either of them can win from this Court a ruling which paralyzes the power of these officials.”

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This language calls to mind the prosecutorial charges at Nuremberg, invoking the phrases “crimes against humanity” and “crimes of genocide.” At the trials, Jackson had called attention to the juridical problem faced by judges on both sides of the Atlantic concerned with determining the legal standing of a “group” and an “individual.” During the Great Depression, there were some federal efforts to loosen the legal grip of state and local governments over punishing criminal conduct in lynching; in the Supreme Court, there was Frankfurter’s majority decision upholding a union’s right to collective bargaining and Stone’s famous footnote 4; in Congress, there were some phrases incorporated into the National Labor Relations Act; and there had been and continued to be presidential executive orders, beginning with the Roosevelt Administration, regarding the use of quotas in the federal public employment of African Americans. In the 1950s, Supreme Court justices still wrestled with their American versions of the problems Robinson, Lauterpacht, and Lemkin had exposed at Nuremberg: before 1939, they had presented well-known evidence from cases involving Minority Treaties enforced by the League of Nations; and in later years, lawyers and courts produced horrendous evidence from the captured records of the German Nazi state. In a decade’s time, with segregation still in place and acceptable in the United States, the two worlds of the courts each appeared as if on a different planet. The group lives of peoplehoods in that American public square were still privatized, even as in the Supreme Court, that group life for African and Mexican Americans was beginning to obtain legal standing. Charges of crimes against humanity and genocide had to wait for a Civil Rights Revolution; symbolically speaking, for when the ABC television network aired the film Justice at Nuremberg (1961) at the same time it broadcast one of Martin Luther King’s Selma demonstrations.15 Later Supreme Court responses to three important cases continued to engage these complex tensions emerging from World War II. They issued from the Court in the 1950s, involving justices who had engaged personally with the radical bigotry contained in the cases before the court: Warren, the Attorney General of California who had enforced the Japanese American expulsion orders; Jackson, who served at Nuremberg; Frankfurter, the Jewish-American who had made his Jewish heritage part of the court’s discourse but who, in 1944, could not or would not comprehend what reliable witnesses told him about 15 Louis Menand, “Color of Law,” New Yorker, July 8, 2013; John T. Elliff, “Aspects of Federal Civil Rights Enforcement: The Justice Department and the FBI, 1939–1964,” Perspectives in American History 5 (1971): 605–673.

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Auschwitz; and Justice Black, who had been a member of the KKK but also for some years the driving force behind the Supreme Court’s incorporation of the Bill of Rights into the Fourteenth Amendment. The first of these decisions was written by Frankfurter in 1952, in a response to a case that had been introduced into the federal system through a 1917 hate crime law in Illinois. The decision would badly split the bench over the place of group rights in the protection of individual rights. Frankfurter concluded with these words: “Group-protection on behalf of the individual may, for all we know, be a need not confined to the part that a trade union plays in effectuating rights abstractly recognized as belonging … to its members. It is not within our competence to confirm or deny claims of social scientists as to the dependence of the individual on the position of his racial or religious group in the community.” Yet Frankfurter’s court could not “deny that the Illinois legislature may warrantably believe that a man’s job and his educational opportunities and the dignity accorded him may depend as much on the reputation of the racial and religious group to which he willy-nilly belongs, as on his own merits.” Frankfurter’s conclusion was obvious: “Speech concededly punishable when immediately directed at individuals cannot be outlawed if directed at groups with whose position and esteem in society the affiliated individual may be inextricably involved.”16 Who would have predicted such acknowledgements of group life, potentially of peoplehoods, as late as the interwar years? Who could have anticipated such an effect of events abroad on America’s Supreme Court discussions of domestic peoplehood affairs? For even then, and for some years to come, the American regimes of ethnic hierarchy had endured, even as they reproduced traditional peoplehood ethnicking in new contexts. In 1944, when the New York Times and other papers reported delayed accounts of the annihilation of Jewish life in Warsaw from the year before, public opinion polls registered a high point in antisemitism; and right after the war, that old-young phobia still stalked the halls of Congress as it passed its first “displaced persons” immigration legislation. Yet in 1947, the first African American athlete played white major league baseball in a risky integration experiment. Wisely, he did so for the Dodgers. Their home park was Brooklyn’s Ebbets Field, the part of New York City that, among white ethnics, had the largest urban concentration of Jews anywhere in the world. Since the late 1920s, these Brooklynites had also numbered among them anti-fascist activists supportive of integration campaigns. By the end of the war, Jews were deeply affected by news from abroad, which helped reshape the nature of their 16 American Foundries vs. Tri-City Council, 257 U.S. 184 (1921); Beauharnais v. Illinois 343 U.S. 250 (1951).

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ethnic politics in the United States: the murder of European Jewry and the fight for a Jewish state in Palestine. The Dodger organization knew that many of those Jews were Dodger fans who, as a matter of principle and as customers (but not as nextdoor neighbors), would welcome Jackie Robinson and identify with his heroic efforts to help end segregation in major league baseball.17 That Brooklyn, with Robinson playing in it, was not the United States, not in 1947, nor later—nor even in the new Levittown housing development rising just a few miles east. This borough attracted some of the city’s tens of thousands post-Talmudic Jews, whites hoping to move away from the African Americans streaming into Crown Heights and East New York. With formal or informal restrictive covenants, Jews had also been locked out of Queens and other Long Island rentals and property ownership: to them, east of Brooklyn was gentile country. As did most New York City neighborhoods, Levittown also refused to rent or sell to African Americans. Earlier in North Carolina, John Hope Franklin was forced to sit in a segregated baggage railroad wagon while watching German prisoners of war riding in the all-white passenger car that was “integrating” former enemies of war; around the same time, as a Harvard graduate student visiting North Carolina archives, Franklin could only gain access by entering a side door at night!18 And his friend Thurgood Marshall, then the NAACP’s special legal counsel, who, opposing “direct action,” addressed America’s realities, especially in the South, at his organization’s youth conference in New Orleans in November of 1946. The New York Times quotes him as saying: “[A] disobedience movement on the part of Negroes and their white allies, if employed in the South, would result in wholesale slaughter with no good achieved … any non-violence or disobedience movement,” echoing tactics used in India, “would bring violence on the part of local and State police which would result in the imprisonment of hundreds of young people and the death of scores, with nothing achieved except a measure of publicity which we are now getting for our struggles with a minimum of suffering.” 17 Korman, “New Jewish Politics for an American Labor Leader: Sidney Hillman, 1942–1946,” American Jewish History 82, no. 1/4 (1994): 195; on Brooklyn Jews and baseball, see Peter M. Rutkoff, “Jackie Robinson: Baseball, Brooklyn, and Beyond,” in The Cooperstown Symposium on Baseball and American Culture 1997, ed. Peter M. Rutkoff et al. (New York: McFarland & Company, 2000), 3–24, esp. 15–16; John Kelly, “Exclusionary America: Jackie Robinson, ­Decolonization and Baseball Not Black and White,” International Journal of the History of Sport 22 (November 2005): 1036–1059. The words “These guys [from the Lincoln Brigade] were all Dodger fans … [The fight for integration] was a way to carry on the struggle” were ­attributed to Milton Wolf, the ninth and last commander of the US contingent of the Lincoln Brigade (New York Times, January 17, 2008). 18 Franklin, Autobiography; and as told by Franklin to the author, OAH Convention, 1999.

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These years also saw a different kind of ethnicking interacting with World War II. At a time when some academics were wondering if African Americans could be likened to America’s European Jews, the term “black ghetto” gained traction, likely due to news of Nazi Germany’s “ghetto” publicity against Jews. This publicity masked enforced residential confinement and brutal deportations. First in 1938, and then during the war, the Nazi regime applied its propaganda to hide the deportations and mass killings that were taking place in the lands German armies occupied, starting with the invasion of Poland in September of 1939. In practice, these soldiers staked out for Jews a radically new kind of vast prison system with its own death houses. In Nazi reports, these were the “ghetto” activities that compared to everyday life in Jewish ghettoes from the days of medieval European Catholicism. In America’s metropolitan cities, this propaganda, when read in the press, may well have initiated a kind of black ghetto miasma that transvalued Germany’s militarized Jewish ghetto language to describe Harlem, parts of Chicago, and other urban concentrations in the segregated South. After the war, in 1952, Du Bois demonstrated why that miasma was so misleading. Writing in Jewish Life, he recounted his visit to Warsaw three years prior. Du Bois brought with him not only the horrors of African American experiences in his lifetime but also the memory of a former student at the University of Berlin: “Nothing in my wildest imagination was equal to what I saw. I would have said before seeing it that it was impossible for a civilized nation with deep religious convictions and outstanding religious institutions, with literature and art, to treat fellow human beings as Warsaw had been treated. … Then one afternoon, I was taken out to the former [ Jewish] ghetto. I know all too little of its story. … Here there was not much to see. There was complete and total waste, and a monument. And the monument brought back again the problem of race and religion, which so long had been my own particular and separate problem.” In fact, Du Bois also wrote the result of the visit: “Was not so much a clearer understanding of the Jewish problem in the world as it was a real and more complete understanding of the Negro problem.19

19 Duneier, Ghetto: The Invention of a Place, the History of an Idea, 22–84, 217; W. E. B. Du Bois, “The Negro and the Warsaw Ghetto,” Jewish Life (May 1952): 14–15.

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CHAPTER 13

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Not until the Eisenhower years do the experiences and revelations of World War II begin to turn into a new kind of political awareness in growing elements of the American population. During the Cold War, that does make a difference, although admittedly the weight of that influence is difficult to evaluate, for the years of Eisenhower’s presidency also demonstrates the vigor of ethnic hierarchy in American life. In a local middle-class Brooklyn neighborhood, a white Jewish American and African American Protestant family each had a dramatic “aha” moment when they discover a shared annoyance at a common neighbor. Crown Heights has acquired a large Hassidic population, which in the Fall celebrated the festival Simhat Torah with street dancing and shouting under the night sky. The parents of my friend, George Rawick, could not stand the noise any more than these white Jewish neighbors could stand what they feel is a threatening middle-class black family that has just moved in next door. When a window opens and the new neighbor shouts into the darkness, “if you want to behave like that why don’t you go back to Africa,” the Rawick’s black threat dissolved in laughter.1 President Eisenhower was more complicated. On the one hand, the former commanding general of the Allied forces had witnessed racial discrimination on the battlefields and had seen evidence of genocide in the death camps. In the Battle of the Bulge, he overruled his chief logistics officer by sending African Americans into the lines of defense, thus, in a moment of near panic, temporarily integrating them. And after the camps were liberated, Eisenhower insisted on publicizing the horrors to German and American audiences. So, when in 1954, in the second year of his administration, the sitting Supreme Court Chief Justice died before the Brown decision had been issued, the president had the opportunity to appoint a new chief justice. He chose the popular liberal Republican Earl Warren, the former governor of California who had lost the republican party’s 1 This was the story George Rawick told me at the time.

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nomination to Eisenhower, who many at the time believed also belonged to the moderate wing of the republican party. In fact by then, liberal Warren had come to regret deeply his role as California’s attorney general in the expulsion of Japanese-Americans in the early days of WWII; this experience no doubt helped explain why as chief justice he worked so hard to unite the court in overturning Plessy vs. Ferguson, the landmark case protecting the republic’s regime of ethnic hierarchy. Warren had to persuade Frankfurter and Jackson, as well as other colleagues, to let go of the constitutional scruples that had sustained Plessy for more than five decades. At the end of a difficult process, Warren succeeded. In Brown vs. Board of Education, the court in a unanimous decision overturned Plessy vs. Ferguson and its racist assumptions about the biological inferiority of African Americans. It was a momentous event, but Warren’s efforts to assure victory for Marshall and his team also demonstrated the power the ideology of ethnic hierarchy had on the judges, especially Frankfurter and Jackson, who had grasped the connections between radical bigotry and genocide. Eisenhower was surprised and politically furious, in part because of entrenched Southern segregationists. Even in the face of a unanimous decision, he feared what others expected: a sustained and ever more heated campaign of disobedience by subterfuge and outright violence.2 Now he seemed to regret his appointment of Warren, for instead of identifying with the decision, as the country’s chief administrative officer the President urged civil rights campaigners to move slowly in dismantling segregation in the South. Others in the nation turned in opposite, militant directions, using expressions and symbols such as “Nazi,” “Gestapo,” “Hitler,” “Auschwitz,” “extermination,” and “genocide.” They were not alone, for as this language entered the propaganda discourse, opposing belligerents shared their expressions. In 1957, Eisenhower sent federal soldiers to Little Rock, Arkansas, prompting some segregationists to rally against “Hitler’s Storm troopers.” New forms of ethnic relations did, however, seem possible. Perhaps they might even have emerged from the realities of republican peoplehoods in America’s past. In the public square, black and white groups, with their identities and memories, had to defend against pressure cookers that sustained miasma like the envelopment of Cold War American individualism. For after World War II, those earlier ethnicking decisions by Stone, Frankfurter, and Jackson pointed toward a different appreciation of Kallen’s and Bourne’s peoplehoods—Americanized

2 New York Times July 1, 2007; Franklin, Mirror, 156–159.

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as they were, infused with the republic’s ideals of individual civil rights and civil liberties, of an American peoplehood increasingly stripped of biocultural ­determinism—at least, seemingly, on the bench.3 In these years, Americans had good reason to be optimistic about the future. United Nations membership included a growing number of states created by former colonial peoples, particularly occupied Palestine Jews, who in 1948–1949 won for themselves the new state of Israel. Those fighting for the “crime of genocide” in the legal codes of the international community assumed time was on their side, even in America, with its segregated republican black peoplehood in states where slavery had once flourished. Though the US Senate withheld approval for decades, President Truman and his successors signed on to a UN declaration, as did the senate’s Committee on Foreign Relations, Justice Jackson, and, in time, other colleagues, including Chief Justice Earl Warren.4 A. Phillip Randolph would have known of those signatures from the start. Besides, as the century that followed the end of the civil war was coming to an end, important material changes in the republic’s standard of living continued to have a profound effect. International communication and transportation technologies advanced. Germ theory’s victory and the general genetic discoveries of biology transformed the field’s understanding of inherited characteristics. Led by penicillin, the pharmacological revolution was well underway, constantly closing the gap between the diagnosis and cure of killer diseases so often associated in the past with the assumed inheritance patterns of “inferior” or “dangerous” people. And Texas Senator Lyndon B. Johnson, the Democrats’ new Majority Leader, for reasons of his own, found the means, among his state’s oil men and elderly senior senators, to loosen the stranglehold on new civil rights legislation imposed by his fellow Southerners.5 Some of the republic’s postwar civil rights campaigners had been busy years before, including metropolitan Jewish ones fighting for theirs. In 1946 Samuel Margoshes had asked about his future Jewish civil rights with pointed questions about future republicans. Born in Galicia, and holding advanced degrees from Columbia University and the Jewish Theological Seminary, Margoshes

3 Wasby, in Oxford Companion to the Supreme Court of the United States, 398–399. 4 Michael Marrus, “The Holocaust at Nuremberg,” Yad Vashem Studies 26 (1998), 5–41; Phillip Sands, East West Street: On the Origins of ‘Genocide’ and ‘Crimes Against Humanity’ (New York: Knopf, 2016), 65–117, 143–190. 5 Caro, Johnson, 3: 831–1012.

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worked as a senior correspondent and editor of the Yiddish-language newspaper, Der Tog. With Horace Kallen in mind, he presented his reading of American assimilation at a symposium titled “Wither American Jewry,” held at the FortySixth Annual Convention of the Rabbinical Assembly of America, the national organization of the Conservative Movement in the United States. “American thought accepts religious differentiation;” but “it does not as yet admit of differentiations based on language and culture … we still do not have the sanction for continued separate existence as a group in America despite all our efforts so far.” And, he argued, Kallen’s theories “are invalid here whatever their validity may be” in Central Europe. In fact Margoshes made the case for American republican individualism being in constant tension with peoplehoods in the United States. He believed Jews as individuals had to be “accepted by the non–Jewish world with the same ease and totality,” as had been extended to Swedes and GermanAmericans. Without that acceptance, he declared, “we do not have full equality.” This argument by a Jewish Zionist activist focused on Jews, but the future Margoshes identified in his convention speech also lent insight to the experiences of “minorities” subject to the republic’s regimes of hierarchy. He was pointing to the commonsense verities enveloping him and all other Americans with their peoplehood associations. Margoshes said what he felt: “The right to lead a full Jewish life and the right to leave the Jewish community entirely are but the obverse and reverse of the same coin of national equality. When these two rights will be sanctioned by American public opinion—the right to exist and the right to cease existing—they will lead to a third right—the right of the individual Jew to choose between continued existence and complete assimilation.” Margoshes had the right target; but for his America, he used the wrong groups as models for change. The destruction of European Jewry had no place in America’s public square; Jewish dead counted among war’s atrocities, there mourned in private by friends and relatives. In postwar America, fundamental change to a hierarchical regime could not begin with nibbling white citizens trying to straighten hard edges of structures thriving in the afterglow of victories and their new role as leaders of the Free World. It could not come from them as a Jewish American peoplehood. As a collective, together with most other white ones. they were still locked out of the nation’s public square, together with African American collective memories of enslavement, black memories of the civil war and Reconstruction, and the experiences of long-living legal ­segregation. For after the war, the regime’s sources, its taproots continuing to control the public square, had remained all too visible—perhaps not to Margoshes, but surely to John Hope Franklin. Franklin knew why his people lived with the past’s cruel inequalities: “Even as Hitler sought to create an Aryan race in Germany,”

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Franklin wrote late in life, describing the interwar years from a Euro-American perspective, “there were those in the United States who competed with him in the search for racial purity. They did so by seeking to define the blood composition of a Negro. Sixty years after the end of slavery and thirty years into the twentieth century the state of Virginia defined a Negro as any person in whom there is ascertainable ‘any quantum whatever of Negro blood.’” In such a republic, “where the interest in the blood content of human beings would serve as the basis for privilege and equality its people could hardly have been seriously interested in democracy.”6 In such a republic, the kind of changes Margoshes hoped for Jews, could only be made possible through a civil rights challenge led by other republican citizens. The revolution had to issue from actions that developed within an African American peoplehood: from republicans who demanded equal standing for themselves and their collective past; from mobilized fellow black citizens who could persuade white citizens to admit to the ethnicking years of racial segregation imposed on a privatized republican peoplehood; and from American republican ideals, militarized to overcome the anxious, often fearful, and quite angry citizens facing a fundamental change in the public square. Among activist scholars and other experts, there were material reasons for being optimistic about the future of such a change. The century since the civil war was coming to an end with important improvements apparent in the nation’s collective standard of living. International communication and transportation changed. Germ theory’s victory and the general genetic transformation of biology transformed the field’s understanding of inherited characteristics and of the racism that was still gripping the nation. Headlined by penicillin, the pharmacological revolution was well underway. It was constantly closing the gap between diagnosis and cure of killer diseases so often in the past associated with assumed inheritance patterns of “inferior” or “dangerous” people. To be sure, black and white groups, with their identities and memories, would have to defend against republican assimilationists proud of their modern pressure cooker—for them it had replaced the smelting and melting pot—that sustained a miasma like envelopment of triumphant individualism. Yet new forms of ethnic relations did seem possible. For after the Great Depression and World War II, earlier ethnicking decisions by Stone, Frankfurter, and Jackson pointed towards a different appreciation of Kallen’s peoplehoods: that they were being stripped 6 “The Lessons of History,” Prometheus Online, December 6, 2006, www.prometheus6.org/ node/14812.

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of their biocultural determinism, at least in the language coming from the bench; and that they were becoming infused with the republic’s ideals of individual civil rights and civil liberties. Two weeks before Brown, in a case involving Mexican Americans in Texas, Chief Justice Warren had written a plainspoken decision for his court that said as much. He declared that the Fourteenth Amendment protected the jury rights and privileges of all sorts of identifiable ethnic groups in a community. The larger implications were clear, for, as he wrote: “Throughout our history, differences in race and color have defined easily identifiable groups which have at times required the aid of the courts in securing equal treatment under the laws. But community prejudices are not static, and, from time to time, other differences from the community norm may define other groups that need the same protection. Whether such a group exists within a community is a question of fact.” Chief Justice Warren meant objective fact, not a truth derived from ethnic storehouses of sacred kitsch. “When the existence of a distinct class is demonstrated, and it is further shown that the laws, as written or as applied, single out that class for different treatment not based on some reasonable classification, the guarantees of the Constitution have been violated.”7 In those months, however, most Americans still had good reason not to hear or see the end to the hundred-year-old regime of ethnic hierarchies. After WWII, there had been too much noise for clear signals to break through foretelling the future; but soon perhaps, most of the nation’s white citizens could begin to leave Depression fears behind. For in the fifties, with the latest of international comparative statistics, Americans learned they now belonged to the greatest economic and military power on earth. Perhaps this good white news masked the threatening meanings thrumming throughout the new sounds from many a neighborhood. Segregated African American troops had come home to a country in which the consequences of Plessy vs. Ferguson still reigned, and United States senators from the South still made it difficult for Congress to pass comprehensive civil rights legislation. News had arrived from abroad announcing the formation of national liberation movements in Africa and the exploits of such fighters as Cypriots and, in Palestine, Zionists; these postwar freedom fighters against colonialism were transforming marginalized peoples from a previous era into proud campaigners for their own new nation states. And everywhere the threats of an escalating Cold War intruded, fueling another Red Scare in the United States, this time driven by a fear of spies w ­ orking for a powerful Soviet Union and of entrenched Communists who, with their fellow-travelers, 7 Wasby, in Kermit and Hall, eds., The Oxford Companion to the Supreme Court of the United States, 398–399.

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may be infiltrating labor unions and civil rights o­ rganizations. Demands from organized labor had already threatened to jeopardize a possible smooth transition to a stable postwar political economy. Black labor leader Randolph’s influence remained significant in Washington and elsewhere in the nation. In July of 1948, President Truman ordered the armed forces to integrate African Americans in all ranks and services. A few years later when, to enforce the Brown decision of the Supreme Court, President Eisenhower finally decided to federalize Arkansas’ state militia and send paratroopers into its capital, it was one of Senator Johnson’s allies, the powerful Senator Richard Brevett Russell of Georgia, who publicly denounced the act by comparing Eisenhower’s soldiers to Hitler’s Storm Troopers. The late 1950s and early’ 60s saw new pressures against segregation in the South reach their height. African Americans stirred differently than before the war, seeking to end segregation everywhere, to end voter-empowered arbitrary and capricious acts of discrimination, brutality, and incarceration; in street and riot control; in schools and on trains and buses; in housing and restaurants; in public and private workshops; in labor unions; and across rural landscapes. Martin Luther King, Jr. began to raise his civil rights voice, which, from the start of his public life, echoed notes from the writings of the would-be disciplinarians of capitalism. Then, through strategic organizational links to Randolph’s network, which included contact with the brilliant though controversial labor leader and pacifist Bayard Rustin and his connection to the disciplined militants Leon Davis and Morris (Moe) Foner from New York City’s Union 1199, King mobilized African American ethnic citizens into peaceful street protests in New York on a scale not seen in the United States since the days of Garvey’s campaigns. Now the caged private worlds of African Americans’ peoplehood erupted, across the country with claims on the nation’s century-old public square, especially its discriminatory impact on a dynamic economy and its industrial and labor relations. Those charged events brought more radical changes to America’s ethnicking and to ethnic conversations which, in comparison to the past, perhaps were more profound than many a participant realized. In 1963, King and fellow marchers on Washington made it clear to President John F. Kennedy and the rest of the nation that they were placing their claims to full citizenship on the Great Lawn of the Washington Monument. The republic owed them, King preached that day, an end to segregation, a fair criminal justice system, equal access to jobs, and an end to the privatization of the memory and history of “my people … the Negro community.” For King, America’s peoplehoods consisted of “black men and white men, Jews and gentiles, Protestants and Catholics.” This was why he claimed at the outset that: “I am happy to join with you today in what will go down in ­history as the greatest demonstration for freedom in the history of our nation.”

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In the wake of the president’s assassination a few months later, and with an experienced and wily Texan politician sitting in the White House, large portions of the body politic changed. Now, living room television screens in the North broadcast pictures of urban rioting and historically familiar scenes of police dogs attacking African-American citizens in Southern cities, which could be read as harbingers of open rebellion meant to defend segregation as the Southern way of life. Many may have remembered King’s warnings from the Mall, which echoed the words of Douglass decades earlier: “Those who hope that the Negro needed to blow off steam and will now be content will have a rude awakening if the nation returns to business as usual. There will be neither rest nor peace in America until the Negro is granted his citizenship rights. The whirlwinds of revolt will continue to shake the foundations of our nation until the bright day of justice emerges.” This had also been the message communicated by a young John Lewis, chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. By 1963, as a leader of militant peaceful demonstrators, he had been beaten often enough: by a state trooper in Albany, Georgia, or by another white Southerner upon his arrival as a Freedom Rider on an interstate Grayhoud Bus; for him to ask–“I want to know what side is the Federal government on?” In the conclusion of his prepared remarks for the Washington March, he wrote: “We won’t stop now. All of the forces of [Senator] Eastland, [Governor] Barnett, [Governor] Wallace and [Senator] Thurmond won’t stop this revolution. The time will come when we will not confine our marching to Washington. We will march through the South, through the heart of Dixie, the way Sherman did. We shall pursue our own ’scorched earth’ policy and burn Jim Crow to the ground. We shall fragment the South into a thousand pieces and put them back together in the image of democracy.”8 By invoking Sherman’s 1864 march through Georgia, Lewis expected to send out a rallying cry from the same podium on the Mall; but in this effort he was blocked by white clergy supporting the march because they threatened to leave the Mall if Lewis used those words from the podium. However, the Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 did follow. For on the nation’s streets, in King’s

8 John Gottheimer, Ripples of Hope: Great American Civil Rights Speeches (New York: Civitas Books, 2003), as quoted at https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/1963-johnlewis-we-must-free-ourselves/; Patterson, Grand Expectations, 3–38, 375–406.

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era of public protest, hierarchies of the past were being challenged, far beyond the white boundaries that had constrained Kallen and Bourne. The Supreme Court did reject second-class citizenship for naturalized citizens, holding with Bourne, who, in the heat of World War I, had argued for the concept of dual citizenship. Traditional biocultural agendas also stood unmasked and came undone, as congressional legislation for African American citizens sought to make real the right to vote and other fundamental civil rights. Legislation also stripped immigration laws of their racial quotas and began to address gender inequalities as well. Now, during the worsening war in Vietnam, African Americans marched with Martin Luther King, some more militantly than others before his death, and often colliding with Jews and Zionism. Ethnicking had reached high tide. As a result, many black and white Catholic and Protestants changed, along with many Jewish Americans, for Jews had become engaged in the Zionist liberation movement in Palestine. In the aftermath of World War II, they also began to change important commonsense convictions. Reliable news in Jewish circles began to transform the German campaign of genocide into what we call today the “Holocaust” of Jewish peoplehood identity. In the meanwhile, that changing Jewish American collective, privatized in the republic’s public square, had also absorbed the domestic reports of antisemitism in Congressional discussions of Displaced Persons legislation as well as in news accounts about murderous behavior in campaigns in Poland and in the Soviet Union. And during those early postwar decades, for the first time in two thousand years, the establishment of a sovereign Jewish Israel became a reality for the Jewish people. King responded publicly to these changes, some of them fraught with political controversy.9 In 1956 he addressed a gathering of the liberal American Jewish Congress: “My people were brought in America in chains. Your people were driven here to escape the chains fashioned for them in Europe. Our unity is born out of our common struggle for centuries, not only to rid us of bondage, but to make oppression of any people by others an impossibility.” Elsewhere, King wrote of four hundred years of slavery and of Hitler’s murder of six million Jews; and after the Six Day War he considered visiting the Holy Land.10 9 Saul Jay Singer, “Martin Luther King and the Jews,” The Jewish Express, January 14, 2015 also has quotations from King defending Israel and Zionism at a time when both were coming under attack by the Black Power Movement. 10 Martin Kramer, “In the Words of Martin Luther King,” in The War on Error: Israel, Islam, and the Middle East (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2016) and “Why Martin Luther King Never Visited Israel,” https://martinkramer.org/2013/01/13/why-martin-luther-­kingnever-visited-israel/. He decided not to visit Israel after the war.

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Together these experiences all but eliminated the Jewish Diaspora’s post-­ Talmudic anti-clerical Jewish enthusiasms, as well as its faith in Christian nation states to protect Jewish citizens and their Judaism. “Auschwitz” began to serve as a euphemism manifesting the full potential of older Euro-American sacred kitsch and its hierarchies, and perhaps so too did “Hiroshima.” In the next few years the American media payed attention to Jewish events: the Eichmann Trial in Jerusalem, the first Auschwitz trials in West Germany, and to Pope John XXIII’s Vatican II in Rome. The recalled furies of WWII’s race wars stalked the subtexts of many a media story and legislator’s oratory. They also stalked many a young Jewish volunteer who went South in civil rights campaigns to participate in a nation’s righteous cause and to lose part of themselves in a black and white civil rights coalition. Some individuals went South as public Jewish figures, in the manner of rabbis Abraham Heschel and Joachim Prinz or folk singer Theodore Bickel, all refugees from Central Europe; some students on university campuses stayed home as members of “Chavura” support groups. Weighty pasts burdened silently. Within white privatized republican peoplehoods, a citizen’s claim to individual legal standing usually shared common sense convictions about the here and now. These convictions invariably engaged with what has been called “valorized” constructed sovereignty. Together, they had become a presumed singular American peoplehood whose white, patriarchal elites and fellow travelers had structured the nation’s hierarchies and public square and who often tended to monopolize the republic’s political economy and ideals of white assimilation. In the meantime, in their republican peoplehoods, Americans continued to use differing Euro-American pasts to influence collective common sense. Muteness was often the default, making it difficult to track in detail certain convictions, but their half-lives were evident in the segregated 1950s and 1960s. Then, African American militants mobilized the nation’s longtime privatized black republican peoplehood, demanding the recovery of stolen rights and privileges: all already enshrined in African America’s equal collective standing in the Constitution of the United States. All envisioned by Frederick Douglass in the first years following the end of the civil war, when the republic adopted the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments to the Constitution of the United States.

CHAPTER 14

US in the Public Square

In the changing fifties and sixties, one hundred years after the civil war, Chief Justice Warren’s court began to grant identifiable groups of ethnic citizens a legal standing. During the century before that, unlike African Americans, white Americans who could and would claim collective standing in the public square had of course taken for granted that their individual standing before the law was included in the jewel of citizenship. It was not necessarily so within white privatized republican peoplehoods. There a citizen could also claim it, so to speak, but could not always evoke a citizen’s hoped-for common sense response when facing officers of the law. Even so, after WWII, during the Cold War, some observers thought the republic’s citizenry was coming “together:” they perceived a singular American peoplehood whose white, often Anglo-American patriarchal elites and fellow travelers had structured the nation’s hierarchies, public square, political economy, and ideals of white assimilation. In practice, as the years of counterfeit “Reconstruction” had brought to the nation the South’s systems of legal segregation, generations of black militants struggled to keep alive memories of the original Reconstruction. During the tumultuous 1960s, mobilized citizens of the nation’s long-time privatized black republican peoplehood demanded in their lifetimes the recovery of African Americans’ precious political treasure: equal collective standing among the peoples of the republic—for each black citizen, a new beginning in the public square. Now, as reformers morphed into civil rights revolutionaries, academics and other kinds of neutrally minded experts behaved in ways similar to many other rank-and-file American citizens. Like them, next door, in the concert hall, or in sports stadiums, public intellectuals and technical experts had few if any special strategies for meeting the immediate challenges of the Revolution; for ever increasing number of citizens its demands were understood as being good for the public and requiring the enthusiastic support of a republican patriot. These scholars were similar to earlier groups of American academics and technical

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experts in the twentieth century, who, in the early days of mid-western economic reform, embraced the “Wisconsin Idea,” which pushed to modernize the dairy state; who followed Woodrow Wilson into war, to make the world safe for democracy; who welcomed the New Deal during the Great Depression, which provided relief to embattled unemployed and supported newly organized mass production workers; who fought Italian Fascism, German Nazism, and Stalinist Communism; and who took up the fight for American liberal democracy during the Cold War. This self-mobilization during the Civil Rights Revolution facilitated all sorts of interactions among ethnicking groups that embodied the ideals proclaimed in the battles against segregation and for the principles of American freedom preached by Martin Luther King and other African American leaders. American Jews, young ones and established leaders who came South to stand and walk with King, constituted one such significant group. Into the struggle and media consciousness, into the biocultural turmoil, they brought the bits and pieces of memories and sacred kitsch; from the killing fields of the Holocaust, which Vatican II was also incorporating into the painful discourse unfolding among Christian clergy and laity, many of whom participated in the marches of the Revolution. The passions that recruited scholars to the civil rights revolution, increasingly as participants in conferences organized by the American Jewish Committee and Dadedalus, require the kind of scrutiny recommended at the time by Peter Gay. Himself a child of a German Jewish refugee family but by then a distinguished and much-admired political scientist and historian, he knew full well what could interfere with scholarly discipline, with what he called science: “The historians’ private neurosis, social location, and historical epoch.” When he gives into those, Gay wrote, the historian ends up saying too much about his own time. In this way, scholars can and often do carry fragments and debris, as did other citizens of the republic. Like them, scholars used and taught bits of sacred kitsch, thus providing insights to the citizenry’s convictions and expressions of common sense, especially to allusions to collective memories and biocultural endowments. To again quote insightful passages from the anthropologist Geertz and the historian Hall, “Wisdom is shamelessly and unapologetically ad hoc. It comes in epigrams, proverbs, obiter dicta, jokes, anecdotes …—a clatter of gnomic utterances—not in formal doctrines, axiomized theories, or architectonic dogmas;”1 minds and practices that were “full of debris,” wrote Hall, all caught 1 Clifford Geertz, Local Knowledge: Further Essays in Interpretive Anthropology (New York: ­Basic Books, 2000), 73–93, quoted in Brown Through the Eye of a Needle, 55; anthropologist Scot

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up in a “muddied, multilayered process … by which culture was transmitted, one that functioned to preserve and pass along many bits and pieces of past systems of belief.” For as late as the 1950s, bigotries thrived in the hierarchies of America’s republican education, explaining why some graduate school professors appreciated that they lived in a republic where they had to make certain that their white Jewish male students also did not underestimate the place of discrimination in a world of higher education where acts of bigotry against blacks and women were taken for granted.2 In 1964 Benjamin Halpern, a professor of history at Brandeis University, was unusual among the presenters at the American Jewish Committee. He was sensitive to silent peoplehood burdens and complex tensions, especially those generated by the war and subsequent trials at Nuremberg. Together, with two other historians, John Higham and a Brandeis colleague, Halpern, too, confronted ethnicking republican peoplehoods in America’s challenged public square, at an event organized by the American Jewish Committee called “Jews in the Mind of America.” The purpose of this conference was to discuss polling data ­concerning a new generation’s views on antisemitism, gathered by Rutgers sociologist Charles H. Stember. The primary focus of the talk was important quantitative issues, such as the purported two-decades-long decline in Americans’ bias against Jews. Among the controversial issues discussed was the role of a historic event that took place at the start of this moment of decline. It was 1944, and not only did the general Jewish public begin to learn the extent of World War II’s slaughter of Jews, but they also became acquainted with the horrific cost of American casualties during the invasions of occupied France. From 1945 to 1947, Jews then campaigned to bring war refugees to the United States. (Some Americans were thinking of 1939, when the US government refused to accept ten thousand European children as temporary aliens and when, in May, it denied safe haven to hundreds of passengers on the German Hapag steamship liner SS St. Louis, anchored outside Miami, after having been turned away by the Cuban government. And in 1948, the founding of the state of Israel, which, it was believed, would take Jewish war refugees, thus relieving the United States of any moral obligation to do so). Atran, letter to the editor, New York Times, August 21, 2014 reminded Paul Krugman that “­sacred values” are an important cause for mobilizing violence, revolution, and war; Hall, Worlds of Wonder (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990) 11. 2 At the University of Wisconsin, Professors Selig Perlman in the Department of Economics, Howard Beale in the Department of History, and Professor Hans Gerth in the Department of Sociology each in their own way tried to inform their students about these facts of life.

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Fully aware of private republican peoplehood struggles to obtain equal standing in the public square, Benjamin Halpern was not persuaded by much of the “antisemitism” polling. Halpern pointed to shallow historical contexts, insufficient knowledge and understanding, and a common human failing among investigators, presumptuousness about the “other” in times past. In the case of recent American Jewish history, Halpern had no doubt at all about his colleagues’ problems: they almost always found the sources of hostility toward Jews overshadowed by material circumstances or processes; and, if not those, they found other sources having little to do with Jews or Judaism per se. Second, there was a failure of historical imagination concerning the years of the Great Depression, World War II, and its aftermath. “American Jews since 1940 were not simply American Gentiles who happened to attend synagogues;” he wrote. People change. Halpern implied that Jews in America had experienced close encounters of “a third kind,” comparable to the effect on many Americans of seeing for the first time the blinding flash of a nuclear bomb, detonating in faraway Hiroshima. In time, insisted Halpern, “the facts about the annihilation of European Jewry were … accepted as true, even though they went far beyond the limits of Americans’ prior experience with Jews and thus left the public without a ready pattern of responses. Later … the emergence of Israel was widely noted and followed with interest, although this historic event, too, was without precedent in traditional status patterns and beyond the range of pre-existing gentile responses.”3 Halpern had delivered his paper in the framework of early twentiethcentury historians. These scholars usually wrote from the position of republican proponents of assimilation: in the “long run,” Mexicans, European and Asian immigrant groups, as well as caged, emancipated African Americans were distinctive people who had no permanent influence on the white social history of the republic; except, perhaps, for the kind of positive influence historian Samuel E. Morison had attributed to Native Americans: they made the settlers tougher fighters for American independence and liberty. Usually in the history accounts Americans read, particularly those found in textbooks, middling Protestant Anglo Americans were portrayed as having withstood challenges, often from angry working-class people living in rural and urban settings: these included German and Scandinavian Lutherans; Germans; Irish, Polish, Italian, and Mexican Catholics; Continental Jews; and African Americans. Ostensibly white middling classes and their allied elites

3 Higham, Jews in the Mind of America, 289–290.

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had retained the republic’s authenticity all by themselves. In their southern states and cities, and elsewhere in the nation, whites had successfully walled off African American neighborhoods and had forced Native Americans to reside on Reservations. In the case of white, polyglot, unwashed masses, they had forged not so “benevolent empires” to fashion republican absorption techniques, with debris of civic bigotries, and when necessary, instructed local police and state militias to enforce them. For short- and long-term protection, whites restricted or ended immigration from Europe—for four months in 1894 due to a Cholera outbreak—and for many years, from Asia. With the help of a municipal judge’s lectures from the bench, superior court decisions, especially injunctions, legislators’ voting restrictions and office holding requirements, and executive orders from governors and presidents, the fundamental institutions, capitalism’s markets, and social mores remained intact. Implicitly, American historians all but shared the mythical trust of fellow citizens that, in the long run, transformed into stable, “ethnic understandings” of America’s liberal democracy and civic society.4 American assimilation worked. During the interwar years, in the constructed mainstreams of American history, migrants and their children, African Americans, Native Americans, and working people began to gain significance at the hands of scholars. Yet with the racist Dunning School of Reconstruction riding high, and African American and other “minority” scholars and their publications still marginalized, the situation did not change significantly in historical writings until after World War II. To be sure, the general subjects of social, cultural, and economic history had been waiting on the periphery, which also explained some of the neglect. However, except for treating each of these topics as belonging to a greater concern addressing problem areas, such as minorities, discrimination, or sources of conflict and riots, the avoidance of these larger subjects also made it easy for Clio’s pastors to essentially tell the American story without having to include those “different” men and their families. Up to this moment, American historians often still derived important judgements from the nineteenth century “rational” visions about the inevitable decay of “irrational” militant nationalism and ethnic passions.5 In the 1950s, when John Higham and his peer group began to publish, an older framework still 4 On voting restrictions, see Keyssar, The Right to Vote, passim; I take the phrase “ethnic understanding” from Juergen Habermath, New York Times, October 29, 2010. 5 Gary Gerstle, “The Protean Character of American Liberalism,” American Historical Review 99 (October 1994), 1043–1073 associates this kind of thinking about the “irrational”with leftleaning liberals in the wake of WWI. He stresses the impact of William James, Sigmund Freud, and of the writings and teaching of John Dewey.

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h­ overed over mainline historical studies involving “minorities;” this was the designation in public discourse for white and nonwhite ethnic groups increasingly studied by specialists. Famed sociologist Louis Wirth explained that minorities were “those who because of physical or social and cultural differences receive differential treatment and who regard themselves as a people apart. Such groups characteristically are held in lower esteem, are debarred from certain opportunities or are excluded from participation in national life.”6 In bringing this brief lesson in historiography to a close, it is helpful to consider the measured passages in the famous preface to Kenneth Stampp’s Peculiar Institution. Implicitly, these quotes explain why, in general, American historians and their readers did not include African Americans in smelting pots, middleclass melting pots, or post-WWII cultural pluralism. It is why they were excluded from a professional understanding of the public square. Not explicitly denying the possible cultural differences between whites and blacks, Stampp wrote: “We are learning much from the natural and social sciences about the Negro’s potentialities and about the basic irrelevance of race, and we are slowly discovering the roots and meaning of human behaviour. All this,” he announced, “is of immense value to the historian when, for example, he tries to grasp the significance of the Old South’s ‘peculiar institution.’” Stampp could now assume “that the slaves were merely human beings, that innately Negroes are, after all, only white men with black skins, nothing more, nothing less. This gives quite a new and different meaning to the bondage of black men; it gives their story a relevance to men of all races which it never seemed to have before.”7 In the mid-1950s, such complex responses had pointed to the existence of bundled issues concerning republican peoplehood memories in the life of a citizen and in the life of the larger body politic. Historians often gave voice to common sense convictions among the citizens they studied, and among many a contemporary citizen they valued in the public square. Just as surely, events themselves engaged the personal lives of historians helping to shape views about the collective memories of African Americans and other ethnic groups, such as Jews. For these reasons, it is helpful to turn to some influential historians and their birds-eye views of a changing public square as it begins to integrate republican peoplehood memories belonging to all of its citizens. John Higham was one of these; he was also one of the other two American historians at the conference. Both disagreed with Halpern, believing the 6 Quoted in Wesley Morris, “Really Just a Matter of Numbers?” New York Times Magazine, ­January 27, 2019. 7 Kenneth Stampp, preface to Peculiar Institution (New York: Vintage, 1989 [1956]).

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­ uro-American Jewish experience of World War II and the establishment of E Israel to be relatively insignificant events for American Jews and the larger American public. Higham’s paper was the more expansive. Raised in Queens in New York City and now a professor of history at the University of Michigan, Higham had become an emerging and respected social and intellectual historian. In his paper, he explained why he and his fellow historians had such little interest in the subject of antisemitism. It was not a “subject of major importance” to them, because, in the United States, no “decisive event, no deep crisis, no powerful social movement, no great individual is associated with, or significant chiefly because of, antisemitism. Accordingly, historians have shown scant interest in studying it. I myself,” he explained, “became intrigued with the subject only in the course of examining the larger theme of nativism, and after I thought I understood the relation between the two, my attention turned elsewhere.”8 He claimed one exception, going for it with gusto and validating Halpern’s criticism of presumptuousness. Higham insisted the exception was not complicated. Some historians between 1944 and 1962 engaged antisemitism because of a “fierce little academic quarrel” concerning the democratic “integrity” of agrarian reformers in the ranks of the Populist movement in the late 1880s and early 1890s. “Young historians born and bred in the city were re-evaluating the ‘agrarian radicalism’ that an older, less urbanized generation had fondly chronicled, and the charge of antisemitism lent a melodramatic touch to the new criticism of the rural, Midwestern mind.”9 In fact, those particular scholars could have been influenced by the new memory scars of their generation. Millions of murdered Jews.10 In 1964, Higham’s perspective reflected pre-WWII rooted sacred kitsch about republican peoplehoods, especially the ethnicking taking place among Jews. Halpern’s trail had gone back to the 1950s, for his criticism would have applied to Higham’s first book, the classic Strangers in the Land. There, Higham ignored religious traditions and passions when discussing antisemitism, traditions and passions he had considered thoroughly when introducing readers to Protestant American nationalism and its strains of nativism. The prosecutors at Nuremberg had not ignored the traditions and passions of anti-Judaism in Christian societies; but, within the decade, early dramatic events in the Civil Rights Movement began to monopolize the attention of

8 Higham, Jews in the Mind of America, 237. 9 Ibid., 237. 10 See above page 34.

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Americans, especially those actively engaged in the “republican integration project.”11 Perhaps most, for the longest time after the war, they seemed not to have comprehended that the Shoah also took the lives of victims’ friends and relatives; and that the disappearance of their friends and relatives, and theirs—all the would-be mourners—was surely one of the reasons for the supposed Jewish “silence” in Europe after the war. In any event, Americans in the 1950s and early 1960s usually glorified republican traditions of assimilation which were hostile to American peoplehoods in general and to Jewish republican peoplehood, with its connections to Israel’s Zionist nationalism, in particular. In this context, most Americans in the aftermath of World War II used the term “atrocities” to encompass all forms of wartime carnage. Many publicists wrote about the Jewish experiences in ways similar to the constructed index of the New York Times during and shortly after WWII. It was a project that in an era after Nuremberg, but before Jewish life under Nazi occupation and the Final Solution was designated as a “Holocaust:” the killings constituted a large-scale mass murder, another major atrocity, easily comparable to other atrocities abroad, during centuries of forced labor, persecution, inquisitions, wars, insurrections, rebellions, and revolutions. Until the early sixties, such concepts as Shoah, Holocaust, or the Yiddish “Hurben” had limited or no value. Then, for a few years, the Civil Rights Revolution overwhelmed public reputations of the catastrophe. First it changed the discourse, said Higham: “Recent events should help us put anti-Semitism and assumptions that have governed its study into clearer historical perspective. During the last decade, the Negro revolution has so vastly overshadowed the remnants of antisemitism in America that it is no longer easy to regard the latter as the representative type of prejudice;” which is why he could also write that: through “most of America’s history, ethnic tensions had been relatively discreet, and the prevailing theory of nationality had been consonant with that fact.”12 Then came the impact of Israel’s wars on the making of Jewish-American republican peoplehood. Sensing another possible annihilation event, this time in Israel, Jews with their American peoplehood flags flying, responded intensely to the Six Day War, and, six years later, to the Yom Kippur War. Meanwhile, new militants in the American South marched chanting the “Black Power” slogan. Others, located more in the Northern cities and mostly teenagers, joined the Black Panthers in their community service and gun-toting demonstrations calling for a secure black freedom and an end to capitalism and imperial oppression, which they identified with Israel and Zionism. These forms of militant black 11 Frances S. Qusan, Jewish Political Studies Review 19 (Spring 2007): 1–2. 12 Higham, Jews in the Mind of America, 238–241.

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African-American peoplehood flags scared J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI into a major and successful anti-black counterinsurgency operation. In fact, as the Civil Rights Revolution began to erode the foundations of the decades-old regime of ethnic hierarchy in America, and as African-American peoplehood gained legitimacy in public opinion, so, too, did the two new dramatic experiences: they would come to rest as new collective memories at the core of the changing American Jewish identity: the Holocaust and the state of Israel. This impact brought a fundamental change best symbolized by a catalogue innovation made in a small office in Washington, DC. Over objections made by some historians to a critical committee in 1969, the Library of Congress made “Holocaust” a major subject entry. International usage by authors and publishers left the library no choice. Even Irving Howe, active literary critic, writer of Jewish history, socialist, and ideologic critic of Zionism before the Yom Kippur War, changed his mind after 1973. At least for a while, he seemed to agree with many other scholars and the American media in general that the nature of American Jewish identity, including the bits and fragments of its collective memory, had been changed by the events of the Holocaust and the presence of the state of Israel.13 However, older strains, with half-lives of their own, lived on, sustained in the aging public square that was beginning to pass on.14 Higham was not alone in failing to properly appreciate the pasts’ collective memories, the fragments and the debris. He often spoke for most of his colleagues, though they did not always reach the same conclusions. Together, they belonged to Clio’s US officer corps, shaping a professional discourse that served the public square’s past, a time when African and Jewish-American republican peoplehoods were considered privatized collectives by scholars tending to be engaged in each of their own kind of professional ethnicking. Biographical details can serve as guideposts for following, in later decades, the half-lives of influential convictions about our pasts. For together, these scholars mirrored the kind of approaches taken by most Americans to the complex, pregnant subject tied to the future of the republic: individual and group identities in an ageing hierarchical regime threatened by the civil rights revolution striving to open the public square to an African American republican peoplehood coming with equality claims a century old. 13 Gerald Sorin, Irving Howe: A Life of Passionate Dissent (New York: New York University Press, 2002), 221–272. 14 That was why the publication of The Strange Career of Jim Crow was such an electrifying event. C. Vann Woodward had studied with Howard Beale when both were at Chapel Hill, North Carolina. On the eve of its publication he sent Beale, by then in Madison, Wisconsin and my major professor, a typescript copy which George Rawick and I read in his office in one sitting.

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For example, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. was not only a liberal nationalist but also a famous historian and devoted public servant who saw himself as a scholar and observer able to distinguish between ethnic and cultural “emotions” that were not “organic” but “manufactured.”15 These distinctions could have easily reminded citizens of those late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century perceptions, when the republic’s elite wrote about the organic in contrast to the flotsam and jetsam, genuine, as opposed to something less so. In his writings, Schlesinger ignored the historical contexts in which his parents and grandparents lived and the actual world in which his family had lived before moving East, a vibrant, German-America with a public, collective identity of its own. Nor does he allow for the existence of a Jewish peoplehood within that German-American world, one that might be comparable to the kind experienced by Louis Brandeis in Louisville, Kentucky. Of course, Schlesinger’s family may have been quite different from other families in the Old Northwest Territory, where, after the 1830s, many immigrants from German Laender had settled, including a fair number of Jews traveling from German or Polish and Yiddish-speaking parts of Central Europe, such as East Prussia. In 1890, Xenia was located a few miles northeast of Cincinnati, in which US Census recorders counted some forty percent of the total population as German. Schlesinger’s family lived in Xenia, Ohio, in the heartland of the Midwest’s proud Deutschthum. Schlesinger does talk a bit about his grandparents, but then mention of the German-Jewish and Catholic backgrounds of his grandparents disappears. His grandfather on his father’s side was Bernhard Schlesinger, who belonged to an East Prussian Jewish family and who in Newark, New Jersey, after arriving in 1860 at age 14, engaged in the leather business. Following the civil war, Bernhard moved to Ohio, settling in Xenia. “There he fell in love with Katherine Feurle, an Austrian girl from the village of Kennelbach in the Tyrol.” Her family was Roman Catholic, and the “young people resolved whatever religious dilemma there may have been by turning Protestant and joining the German Reformed Church.” The couple married in 1873, he at twenty-seven and she at twentythree: “They had two daughters and two sons before my father was born fifteen 15 Wall Street Journal, April 23, 1990. Schlesinger, Jr. probably the most well-known among these historians, had once characterized America after the civil war with a few well-chosen words: “We’ve always been a multiethnic country. … In the past there was a high degree of ethnic diversity, but the nation was mostly white and mostly European. At the turn of the century the Indians were on reservations, the Blacks were segregated, and the Asians kept to themselves.” American Heritage 48, February 1 1997; Limba Wicks, “Arthur Schlesinger Jr. Hip to History,” Washington Post, November 28, 2000.

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years later.” Junior turned three in June of 1920, when his seventy-four-year-old grandfather died. Except for photographs and comments from his father, Junior has “no memory of him.” They and memories of them, and of the people in whose midst they lived, remained silent in print. Schlesinger, Jr., and his professional colleagues excelled in that kind of writing, and the scholar remembered personally witnessing that process. As a boy reading the classics, Schlesinger was oblivious to genteel antiblack and antisemitic attitudes, and, he said he had no reason to explore them. In 1934, when he was seventeen, the family traveled to Nazi Germany. One paragraph opens with a reference to the British Air Marshall Sir Arthur Harris: “From the pre-Bomber Harris glories of Dresden we moved on to Nuremberg.” There, the “gate to the holy ground around the church of Saint Catherine (see the first act of Die Meistersinger) bore the notice ‘Juden kein Eintritt’—the first sign of that sort we had seen. I went to the movies.” Yet, as he writes many years later about 1934, “pre Bomber Harris glories,” and his choice to go to the movies, Schlesinger remains silent on Nuremberg’s Jews and the fact of family life that had been with him all along: his grandfather, had he been alive, could not have entered the country before being converted; and, a few years after ‘34, he couldn’t pass even as a convert.16 In his published autobiography and diary,17 Schlesinger chose not to say what he knew about immigrant family life in the peoplehood-conscious Midwest in which his family lived. A Life in the Twentieth Century and his published Journals speak about a son of a family that has assimilated to the ways of his WASP contemporaries, young and old, in the elites of the Northeast. There is no evidence of any talk with his father about his grandfather, nor of thoughts about them both, as he, Arthur Jr., comments on Jewish classmates during his private prep school and Harvard education. Throughout the autobiography, it never occurs to Arthur Jr. that there may be Jewish relatives about, especially in a post-WWI

16 For comparisons with his account see Katharine Graham, Personal History (New York: Knopf, 1998), who also is silent about her father’s Jewish family; and Hillary Clinton, then US senator from New York, who, in her autobiography, goes out of her way to identify with a Jewish grand-stepfather to help her understand the Holocaust and, though she does not say so, perhaps her Jewish voters. 17 Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., A Life in the Twentieth Century: Innocent Beginnings, 1917–1950 (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2000); and his published Journals, 1952–2000 (New York: Penguin, 2007), edited by his sons, Andrew and Stephen. He hardly mentions his family, and when he does he is silent on these sort of subjects, except once when he recalls his Ohio childhood admiration for Frederick the Great of Prussia; he says Hitler’s Germany destroyed it. In his review of the Autobiography, Robert Kagan raises some of these “delicate” issues as well. Commentary 111 (March 2001): 58–64).

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Europe gripped ever more tightly by government sponsored antisemitic policies. His distinguished father, an American historian teaching at Harvard, like most of his academic colleagues wrote letters of recommendation for Jewish students and colleagues that reflected a WASPish sacred kitsch; yet, apparently, Schlesinger senior knew and did something about some Jewish relatives.18 Schlesinger’s engagement with the Holocaust lacks any interest in exploring his grandfather’s Jewish family. The author is preoccupied with questions of the 1980s and 1990s: many Americans wondered how the Allies could be ignorant of what was happening to the Jews during the war. So, having been part of OSS, Schlesinger asks how those in the organization did not know—that is, fully comprehend—what the Germans were doing to the Jews under their control. The answer: Schlesinger and his associates were like the others who had comparable yet limited information about the war zones, including the targeted Jews themselves. They were all immersed in a world war with wartime agendas, a world of horrible wartime atrocities. In that world they, like everyone else, could not make the leap to a German Nazi Final Solution.19 In order to appreciate fully Schlesinger’s muting of republican peoplehoods, it is important to note that, not only are his explanations made without implicit or explicit reference to the relevant Shoah corpus that began even before the end of WWII; but it is also based on an examination of the revealed self, which held no memory of a Jewish grandfather and showed no interest in the possible Jewish relatives caught up in the firestorm. (When Schlesinger talks about the intensification of American antisemitism in the 1930s and 40s, he does so in terms of FDR’s policies and calculations toward the Jewish condition). Schlesinger’s passages are crafted by a historian persona that treats different kinds of antisemitism in Europe and America as being part of an accepted way of life, which includes his own experiences outside of the immediate family circle. In his passages about the Holocaust, Schlesinger never made an observation, even in passing, about the role of antisemitism in the wartime military circles in which he moved in England (he knows how to do it, but he writes nothing comparable to the fragment “the pre-Bomber Harris glories of Dresden”). Instead, his passages are

18 Novick, Noble Dream, 340–341; Shapiro, A Time for Healing, 195–217. I recall receiving an email from one of Schlesinger, Sr.’s relatives about his help. 19 Schlesinger, David Wyman, Arthur Hertzberg, and Allan Brinkley, interview by Charlie Rose, Charlie Rose, “America and the Holocaust,” https://charlierose.com/videos/13875#. In the discussion, Schlesinger did not associate himself with Brinkley’s insistence on America’s general moral failure to comprehend the information available about the mass killings of Jews; he also treated Wyman and Hertzberg as individuals who just did not properly appreciate the context FDR faced politically at home and during the war as commander in chief.

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explicitly framed by cool knowledge and a single controversial study by Peter Novick arguing that, in the eighties and nineties, American Jewish organizations mobilized sentiments to institutionalize the Holocaust. Herbert Gutman was another leader associated with the integrationist project who also did not write directly about the subject of republican peoplehoods and their collective memories. Yet the younger Gutman, in direct response to Moynihan’s work on “The Black Family,” made important contributions to those memories and their constructions when he turned to the study of enslaved black family life and, later, to African American family experiences in a comparative setting.20 Gutman was a self-identified socialist historian who, along with others, often underestimated and muted biocultural determinism, the changing nature of American nationalism in general, and distinctive republican peoplehoods in particular. He saw ethnicking as a temporary condition of American society—in time, class criteria would displace basic patterns of American identity.21 Where Schlesinger, Jr., had worked challengingly within existing, professionally constructed mainstreams of American history, Gutman had worked hard as a social and economic historian to change the content of those streams. Among small groups of ethno-cultural historians, studying immigrant groups and African Americans, Gutman echoed the scholars’ work but challenged their arguments by adhering to E. P. Thompson’s approach to ethnicity. Thompson’s remarkable The Making of the English Working-Class was acclaimed as a brilliant book of Marxian scholarship. In response to commercial and industrial capitalism which, in discrete historical moments, demanded the destruction of ethnic collective purpose and meaning, Gutman insisted that ethnic workers, including the African Americans belonging to the “neo-peasantry” in the South, successfully shaped working class cultures that, on their own terms, were comparable to purposeful cultures of American republican ideology. In time, these working class cultures would—at least should—also trump race, religion, and ethnicity, and trump republican peoplehoods.22 Like-minded historians remained 20 Herbert G. Gutman, The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, 1750–1925 (New York: ­R andom House, 1976), passim, but see 465 and note 3. Steven Whitfield to Gerd Korman, email, December 7, 2012 linked Higham to the “integrationist project.” 21 “Socialist historian” is not my term. It has been the term some American historians applied to themselves, as in the letter section of the New York Review of Books and in posts to H-Labor on H-Net. 22 Gerd Korman, review essay of Gutman’s “Work, Culture and Society,” Administrative Science Quarterly, 26 (December 1979): 666–674, and “Labor Historians and Immigrants: A Review Essay,” American Jewish History 78 (December 1988): 289–301. David Brion Davis, “White Wives and Slave Mothers,” New York Review of Books, February 20, 1997, where in the context

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preoccupied with issues of class and republicanism—and, later, with “gender” and “whiteness”—but, in these camps, they also left unanswered important questions.23 In general, for a given time and place, these scholars did not often enough ask what must change and what does not have to change and for whose collective purpose the change must occur. Often they underestimated or ignored the place of religion and the transnational mental worlds of many of this country’s citizens.24 It was also significant that the conduct of first- and secondgeneration immigrants or of emancipated slaves, on their own terms, received little if any attention before the 1960s. Gutman wanted to help change that: he paid attention to religion and, with his remarkable study, to African American families. Family life had surely been one of the main institutions engaging strains with half-lives of their own: peoplehood endowments and agency, with the purposeful generational transfer of culture. By the time pioneering Rawick had started writing his articles about these sources of African American agency in the midst of enslavement, others were wrestling with the profound questions about its long-term impact upon the fabric of African American life after emancipation. But in the perspective of the 1960s and ‘70s, these issues took radical turns during the Civil Rights Revolution and the reactions to it. The black family became a different kind of subject than before in the hands of an Ulrich Bonnell Phillips and even in the pathbreaking work of Stampp. Black collective agency, or the absence of it, manifested in scholarly studies and policy papers, such as Moynihan’s controversial publications. Gutman’s study, claiming the importance of the nuclear family among the enslaved, was an explicit response to the arguments he read in Moynihan’s work: it ascribed a pathological condition to the phenomenon of large numbers of single mothers heading African American households. of the historiography at the time of Gutman’s studies, and in light of later publications, he makes a careful examination of Gutman’s work on Black families; he does not mention George Rawick. But in my appreciation of the scholarship that helped to uncover republican peoplehoods, it is not unimportant to know that in those years Rawick and Gutman had not only been graduate students at Wisconsin, but had started “talking to each other” ideologically in the wake of the Hungarian Revolution and during the days of the Civil Rights Revolution, when Gutman also turned his attention to the study of African American history. See also Deborah Gray White, Ar’n’t I A Woman?: Female Slaves in the Plantation South (New York: Norton, 1985), 149–160n14, 189n15, 193n2–3. 23 See the review essay by Peter Kolchin, “Whiteness studies: The new History of Race in America,” Journal of American History 89 ( June 2002): 154–173. Higham also had his reservations, expressing them in a critique at the OAH Convention in Toronto in 1999. David Roediner identified himself as a Marxist. H-Labor, April 2009. 24 Clifford Geertz, Peddlers and Princes (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963), 143.

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Like Rawick and other scholars who recognized the agencies inherent in African American peoplehood, Gutman’s work made a significant contribution to understanding the importance of family life, any kind of reasonably predictable family life, and in sustaining agencies in America’s republican peoplehoods. To be sure, just what kind of family life—coerced, subject to normal strains and stresses, and variable—African Americans managed to maintain during their enslavement remained controversial from the start, especially in the details spawned by the circumstances of enslavement in which men, women, and children found themselves. Still, what should not be controversial is that Gutman and like-minded scholars contributed to understanding a critical institutional scaffolding in collective memory, though not necessarily on the terms of their ideological assumptions and dreams. In the past, that scaffolding made it possible to create, transmit, and sustain the collective and common sense of it, people associated with their respective republican peoplehoods. Militant African American historians did not necessarily appreciate Gutman’s work. As they did with other class-oriented white scholars during the Civil Rights Revolution, these militants were, in the full flush of their campaigns to bring their republican peoplehood into the public square. They treated Gutman as an “outsider” who could not possibly intrude on their African American subject.25 For them, and for a few other scholars sensitive to the significance of collective memories, Stampp’s “innately only white men with black skins,” especially when quoted without “innately” but including the intellectual framework that went with it, had set off alarms that lingered over the next years; in 1963, reverberations made their way into the Melting Pot Mistake by Glazer and Moynihan. To be sure, in that decade, concepts and nomenclatures also began to change, not only among and about African Americans26 but among and about Jews as well. Some historians and other scholars, such as those attending the conferences of ’64 and ’65, acknowledged or were told of their ignorance and ideological bias as so-called objective students. They had muted the collective memory of African Americans, their enslavement and segregation. They had muted the collective memory of Jewish Americans, their Holocaust and the establishment of Israel. Now new critics, especially black nationalists, used not only Karl Marx and Max Weber, but also Jean-Paul Sartre, Frantz Fanon, and, beginning in 1966, the film Gillo Pontecorvo made called “The Battle of Algiers.” 25 Benjamin Quarles, “Black History,” Daedalus 103 (Spring 1974): 1–16, 163–178; Gary ­Gestle, American Crucible, 327–345. 26 Quarles, “Black History”: 1–16, 163–178.

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These last influences added a contemporary dimension to peoplehood ethnicking and the circulating sacred kitsch, bits and pieces of it leaving marks on the growing number of historians eager to participate in the Civil Rights Revolution. Benjamin Quarles, a distinguished American historian and important student of this historiography, noted the potency of some of Fanon’s passages, among them the lines, “White America [was] an organized imperialist force holding black people in colonial bondage,” perhaps being the most important. Quarles explained: “The black revolutionaries address themselves to the task of decolonizing America, including her history.” They used Fanon, for he “gave to violence an aura of romance suggesting it had a cleaning, releasing effect.” Quarles concluded: “Thus disdaining the doctrine of reconciliation and determined not to forget white America’s massive assault upon the humanity of blacks, the revolutionary nationalists consciously choose to imprison themselves in the castle of color.” Quarles appreciated that, “[the] construct of the White Man dominates their thinking, much as the Devil was once the central figure in some Christian theologies.”27 In the mid-sixties, most white experts did not yet know or care about the unique memories existing outside of the public square; for in it, in common convictions, they were expected to degenerate over time. Those with patriotic devotions to ideals of republican individualism and political democracy found it difficult to comprehend the historic validity of African American republican traditions, mingled as they were with the solidarity and self-determination of peoplehood. Most experts were wedded to aging individualism and its power of assimilation over white groups of citizens with privatized collective memories. Like many others, presumptuous experts also often knew little of the details, of the fragments and debris, of the sacred kitsch nestling in those memories; after all, he or she assumed they had a short half-life. In other words, at a time when most experts were being challenged to comprehend the black citizen differently than before, they had yet to acknowledge that each of the nation’s black and white peoplehoods had, for decades, experienced differentiated American republican lives with distinctive memories and convictions. Among activist experts were American historians now also working as public intellectuals and striving, each in their way, to bring change to a segregated society. As did John Hope Franklin, C. Vann Woodward, Oscar Handlin, and John Higham, so, too, did others advance the issues of the day through their contact with leading politicians and leaders of the Civil Rights campaign. They

27 Ibid.: 167.

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often wrote articles in the recently founded New York Review of Books and in the older magazines, such as the Atlantic Monthly, the Nation, the New Republic, and Commentary. White Americans and their experts often had not been aware nor paid attention to critics such as Kallen, or, for that matter, Du Bois. In the era of WWI, Du Bois had described Frederick Douglass as “a humane, learned race man” (decades earlier, he had eulogized Douglass by quoting him, saying, the immortal American stood “outside mere race lines … upon the broad basis for humanity.”).28 Besides, the xenophobic storms of WWI had left legacies and may well have been reason enough for why white citizens were so unprepared for the larger implications of the upheavals of the Civil Rights Revolution. In any event, by the mid-sixties, those white republican Americans largely accepted the standing of their own respective peoplehoods. This was probably why so many scholars in the changing public square also missed the awakening to the phenomenon of the Holocaust, to Jewish America’s so-called privatized memory and history. Oscar Handlin treaded lightly as he wrote about Jewry during the decades between the great wars. Handlin was an unusual member of the historians’ officer corp. Before WWII, Handlin’s family background looked nothing like those of his colleagues in Harvard’s Department of History. He was Jewish and a graduate of Brooklyn College, and so, The Henry Adams Club, a history graduate student organization, denied him membership when he and his fellow graduate student and friend applied. John Hope Franklin, who was admitted, recalled that somebody in the club had said: “He may be a good Jew, but he’s still a Jew.” Seventy years later, the club awarded “G[raduate] S[chool] A[rts] S[ciences] alumnus Oscar Handlin a posthumous honorary Vice President’s post.” The event provided an occasion for comments about Handlin, the Harvard historian of fifty years, and his engagement with antisemitism. His daughter, Joanna, had said the event “amazed her [because] … never did I ever hear my father mention anti-Semitism. … We all knew my father as someone who did not believe that the wrongs of history could or should be righted many decades later.” His one-time student and long-time colleague at Harvard, Bernard Bailyn, a fellow Jew, was quoted as agreeing “that being Jewish was not a defining characteristic of Handlin’s career at Harvard.” He recalled his close collaboration with other professors such as Samuel E. Morison—who Bailyn described as

28 Blight, Frederick Douglass, 758.

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“‘a Brahmin of the Brahmins.’ They merged in the work they were doing together at the history department.” Indeed, in that context, as an officer among Clio’s leadership cadre, in most of his publications Handlin did not write about Jews as a professional Jewish historian. Some might insist that Handlin wrote as an assimilated second generation East European Jew writing about Jews as if they were one of America’s many minority groups: Irish Catholics or German Lutherans, Puerto Ricans, or African Americans. Yet to leave Handlin in those pages would be misleading. He wrote books about the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee and Jews and Their Adventure in Freedom in American history. He wrote about antisemitism, publishing some of his work in the journals of the American Jewish Publication Society, the Leo Baeck Historical Society, and under the imprint of the AntiDefamation League. He was different than his peers, and yet: It is important to appreciate that republican individualism and the regime of ethnic hierarchy had also shaped this leader among Clio’s devotees and as an American Jew. Handlin published with the American Council of Judaism and in the AJC’s Commentary magazine. In these last two venues, in 1961 and in 1962, Handlin wrote in a way that suggested he would have disagreed with Ben Halpern. Handlin, a product of the old American ethnic regime, implicitly spoke to the then commonly expressed anti-Jewish charges of “double loyalty” and “parochialism.” One official voice of American Zionism claimed Handlin considered the “abduction and [Eichmann] trial an attempt by Israel to impose its views on the Diaspora,” meaning he did not want Israel to speak for American Jewry. In 1962, writing about “Jewish Resistance to the Nazis,” Handlin wrote from a universal perspective: “If there is a lesson to be salvaged from the Nazi period, it is that all of us are potential victims and all of us potential executioners.”29 Perhaps, then, readers should not have been surprised by his book The Americans: A New History of the People of the United States. There, even where Handlin mentioned Jewish

29 “Oscar Handlin addressed an A[merican] C[ouncil For] J[udaism] group in Philadelphia; he is against ‘Jewish centralization,’ i.e., one overall group to speak for U.S. Jewry.” Mimeo of AZC Bi-Monthly Report Department of Information and Public Relations, November–­December 1961, https://www.irmep.org/09101961AZC.pdf. See also Oscar Handlin, “Group Life within the American Pattern: Its Scope and Its Limits,” Commentary 8 (November 1949): 411–416 and “Do Israeli Ties Conflict with U.S. Citizenship? America Recognizes Diverse Loyalties,” Commentary 9 (March 1950): 220–226, Oscar Handlin, “Jewish Resistance to the Nazis,” Commentary (November 1962); Franklin, Mirror, 65, 80–81; Katie Zawadski, “­Oscar Handlin Wins Honorary Post” The Harvard Crimson, November 7, 2011; Hsia Diner, “­Oscar Handlin: A Jewish Historian,” Journal of Ethnic History (Spring 2013): 53–61. Handlin came to have close relations with the Hebrew University’s Americanists, such as Professors ­Yehoshua Arieli and Arthur Goren in the Department of American Studies.

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Americans on many a page of sophisticated narrative, he remained silent about them in his chapter on WWII, entitled “Holocaust,” part of the book’s last section: “The Threat of Totalitarianism 1939–1962.” When he used “Holocaust” in that chapter, this use of the word, to represent a unique Jewish catastrophe in Jewish publications, was no more than three or four years old. It was not until the early 1980s that the Organization of American Historians focused on the Holocaust. It did so in response to membership protests for the sale of OAH address labels to the new Journal for Historical Review, a publication of an organization of Holocaust deniers. Now, the executive secretary of the OAH established a special three-person committee of American historians to evaluate the scholarly authenticity of the publication and the claims of the deniers.30 After all, as with the history of African Americans, the evidence from experience was available and certifiable. Supreme Court Justice Jackson, serving as America’s chief prosecutor, along with other Allied prosecutors at Nuremberg, consistently sought to persuade the Tribunal that the Nazi state followed its premeditated plans to annihilate the Jewish people when it murdered five to six million of Europe’s Jews. Michael Marrus, a distinguished European historian, has written about this conclusion with sensitive lines: “After Nuremberg, the murder of European Jewry could be authoritatively argued to be an established fact of great historical importance. It began the removal of the Jewish catastrophe from the wartime Jewish isolation of inner Jewish suffering, of lobbying and beseeching the wider society to recognize, to intervene, to rescue, to acknowledge the Jews’ private agony.”31

30 Richard Kirkkendall was the executive secretary. Henry Feingold was one of these historians. He is the pioneering American Jewish historian who examined the role of antisemitism among State Department officials administering immigration legislation and executive orders during the 1930s. At the time, I asked Kirkendall if he intended to investigate the truth of claims that the Allied had firebombed Hamburg and Dresden. The first Holocaust program at an annual meeting of the American Historical Association had occurred in 1971. It was organized by YIVO and a new journal in the field of social history Societas. In its second volume (1972), it printed the delivered papers, including mine. See also Deborah Lipstadt’s Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory (New York: Free Press, 1993), passim; letters to the editor column, “AHA Failures on Holocaust Denial,” Perspectives, September 1994; and Korman, Nightmare’s Fairy Tale, 149–168. 31 Michael Marrus, “The Holocaust at Nuremberg,” Yad Vashem Studies 26 (1998): 5–41.

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CHAPTER 15

Ethnicking in Plain Sight

In 1965, during the first months of the Vietnam War, Americans begin to sense a shift in African American demands for their rights as a collective, republican peoplehood. Their claims address more than the legal standing of an individual citizen seeking the constitutional right to vote and the individual right to equal treatment in the realm of employment. To American whites either ignorant or dismissive of Kallen’s kind of lesson, it may seem as if all groups of citizens, in their individual collectives, already have equal standing before the law; or, that American citizens did not need to fear the loss of their republican rights as individuals. Yet for their part, as King, Lewis, and the sociologist Gordon make clear, black citizens come to insist that their equal standing, as a collective and as individual citizens, must return from the early days of Reconstruction, when it was taken from their citizen forebears: the republican peoplehood of African Americans has been denied for one hundred years to make possible regimes of segregation and private acts of white discrimination. During this moment of transition from the old public square to the new, conferences abound where participants can serve as vocal proxies for rank-and-file citizens in the mid-sixties; for the scholars and other experts who participate are also bringing their experiences and fears to gatherings of their peers.1 One of these was organized by the American Jewish Committee. Another of important ones is the Daedalus conference of 1965. It is organized by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and entitled “The Negro Americans”; its papers and a transcript of part of the proceedings allow catching some of the cross currents of contention that passed among the influential scholars and bureaucrats of the day. For during this moment of transition from the old public square to the new, the integration projects of conference participants hover in the ­discussions. 1 Helpful relevant public opinion polls about a public square in turmoil are available online. See for example, Gallup Poll for 1961, ’64, ’65; Harris Survey for ’65, ’66, ’67, ’69 Dataset: U.S. AIPO 1961–1969.

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These cannot help but remind of what the Civil Rights Revolution evokes from America’s enslaved past, all but commanding one ear cocked for the “Aha” moment experienced by Mark Twain’s Huck Finn, as he comes to realize the truth about Jim, the runaway slave: “His wife and children, away up yonder, and he was low and homesick; because he hadn’t ever been away from home before in his life; and I do believe he cared just as much for his people as white folks does for their’n. It don’t seem natural, but I reckon it’s so.”2 John Hope Franklin is one of the participants. He is about to deliver a brief introduction to what he calls the “The Two Worlds of Race.” Franklin, the chair of the Department of History at the University of Chicago, had become the dean to growing number of younger historians, who, following him and others, older black pioneers, such as Williams and Du Bois, belonged to an emerging new generation of professionals insisting that reliable accounts of the African American past had yet to be written.3 With his Harvard Ph.D., Franklin had started to do just that since the start of his career at black colleges. In the ten years between the mid-fifties and sixties, he had become an influential student of Southern history, within which he integrated his modern studies of the African American past. In those same years, Franklin had been invited to take on tenured positions and chairmanships of history departments at distinguished “white” institutions. Now, he was giving his fellow participants a brief introduction to what he called “The Two Worlds of Race.” Franklin opens with important historical context for his audience, demonstrating the kinds of comparisons between whites and blacks that had been a structural fact of life since 1619. For then, “the enormous task of rationalizing and justifying the forced labor of people on the basis of racial differences” began. “[Even] … after legal slavery was ended, the notion of racial differences persisted as a basis for maintaining segregation and discrimination.” Yet revolutionary criteria in daily conduct, for equality and for novel standards of humanity, also appeared as, “the effort to establish a more healthy basis for the new world social order was begun.” This juxtaposition, insisted Franklin, launched “the continuing battle between two worlds of race, on the one hand, and the world of equality and complete human fellowship, on the other.” Within this kind of a framework

2 Samuel Langhorne Clemens, in Twain, The Adventures of Huckelberry Finn, 125. 3 These included historians Stanley Elkins, Kenneth Stammp, Leon Litwack, Eugene ­Genovese, David Brion Davis, George Rawick, George Washington Williams, William Edward Burghardt Du Bois, and Carter Goodwin Woodson; Elkins et al. were also following the older African American Franklin.

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Franklin demonstrates the ubiquitous conduct that kept African Americans out of the “main stream of American life.” Before the civil war, in the South they were mostly enslaved. In the North, where “slavery was dying,” but where the “Negro church and school” had emerged, “it may be said that the free society believed almost as strongly in racial separation as it did in racial freedom.”4 Afterwards, neither the civil war nor the era of Reconstruction made “any significant step toward the permanent elimination of the “two worlds of race.” Indeed, insists Franklin, “the apparatus for keeping the worlds separate was elaborate and complex,” segregating by law and custom public and private life in caste and class. Within this world, organized African American activities developed apace, including newspapers, which the white press ignored: “Negro churches of virtually every denomination,” were “the answer for a people who had accepted the white man’s religion even as the white man rejected his religious fellowship;” and, after 1882, when George Washington Williams published his History of the Negro Race in America, a growing number of African American historians now “challenged the white historians’ efforts to relegate Negroes to a separate, degraded world.” The following decades all but sanctified that apparatus. The wake of World War I brought “the wholesale rejection” by white Americans: “returning Negro soldiers were lynched by hanging and burning, even while still in their uniforms.” As a result, Garvey’s movement exploded, but not because African Americans wanted to go to Africa”—they joined the movement by the hundreds of thousands to indicate their resentment of the white racial duality that seemed to be the central feature of the American social order.” Franklin identifies with the relatively few who said no to that entire order. “More realistic and hardheaded were the Negroes who were more determined than ever to engage in the most desperate fight of their lives to destroy racism in the United States.” In the twenties and thirties, the writer and activist Alaine Locke identified “The New Negro.” Locke usually failed in his battles, but “he made it quite clear that he was unalterably opposed to the un-American character of the two worlds of race.”5 That mantra evoked a mass militancy as World War II approached. “Negroes … were unwilling to see the fight against Nazism carried on in the context of an American racist ideology.” It was they, along with the growing support of fellow white citizens—the two so essential to ending the regime of two races—“who dramatized American inconsistency by demanding an end” to segregation in the military and in defense industries. Franklin thinks the successful campaign of 1941, to persuade FDR to act on employment 4 Daedalus (Fall 1965), 2 vols. 5 Ibid., 1:912–3.

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through an executive order for change in hiring practices, was “a significant step toward the elimination of the two worlds.” In Franklin’s reading of events, in the years of World War II and its aftermath, the order brought that goal ever closer as millions of African Americans moved to northern and western employment opportunities. By 1965, more than six million people lived in twelve “metropolitan centers” and, because of the civil rights upheavals since the mid-fifties, African Americans and their supportive fellow citizens were now fighting to end permanently the republic’s world of two races. Against this backdrop, each conference participant shared individually in the moment’s ignorance, fear, and hope. There were disagreements and controversies. Like other leading names who thought in comparative terms, famed social scientist Talcott Parsons, in his paper “Negro American,” uses the fractured character of American citizenship as his organizing principle. Parsons earned his Ph.D at Heidelberg during the closing years of the Weimar Republic. He was now a professor in Harvard University’s Department of Social Relations, which he had recently founded after many controversial years serving in other departments. Through theoretical frameworks of his own creation, Parsons illustrates the nature of the changing American public square and demonstrates the complex nature of pluralism in American life. He is conscious of its enmeshed components of heredity, ethnicity, religion, and law, within which African Americans are battling for “full” American citizenship. He expects the group to achieve “full inclusion in the societal community … that is continually changing over time.”6 As did others, Parsons had followed closely the “changes in the composition of … [American society’s] membership through the inclusion of groups previously excluded, more or less unambiguously, from full membership. The Negro, both because of slavery and because of Southern regional isolation, was long kept insulated from the forces of inclusion.” Thus the “present crisis of the Negro in the American community has unique features besides its immediacy, but it does not stand alone.” Immigrants, Parsons insists, are in a “different situation.”7 He focuses on diverse groups of Jews and Catholics to envision the “problem of inclusion.” For especially in the interwar years, America’s WASP majority especially stigmatized both Jews and Catholics as “foreign.” They had ties that extended beyond the founding of the republic, presumed ties of religion and community solidarity ascribed to first- and second-generation immigrants residing in America. Parsons then showed how the process of inclusion worked 6 Ibid.: 1:1009–1021. 7 Ibid.: 1:1021.

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for Jews and Catholics, noting in particular that, in the case of Jews, the process had been helped by the decline in the number of self-isolating Orthodox Jews and by the growth of the Reform Jews so eager to integrate through their Jewish kind of Protestantism. Parsons also demonstrates how well the long process of assimilation had worked by calling attention to John F. Kennedy’s election to the United States presidency and to President Lyndon Johnson’s attendance at the first public funeral outside of Washington for New York’s Jewish Senator Herbert Lehman. Indeed the “other,” often Parson’s Jews, served as a common preoccupation or standard of comparison for understanding the republic’s response to the black challenge. President Johnson’s Assistant Secretary of Labor, Harvard University’s Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who had come from Manhattan’s “HellsKitchen,” then contributes as a contemporary analyst, raising as his formal subject the tension between liberty and equality inherent in troubling issues. By focusing on the problems experienced by the black family, Moynihan starts to move this subject to the center of aggressive popular cultural debates. This prompts the introduction of challenging social engineering remarks from the University of Chicago’s rising star, anthropologist Clifford Geertz. Geertz talks about the need for “reconstructing” the “Negro family.”8 Psychiatrist and historian Erik H. Erickson, also in Harvard’s Department of Social Relations, then elaborates on his decade-long study on the nature of human “identity,” which includes studies of Hitler, his followers, and those of Jews, and its application to contemporary African Americans. The child psychiatrist Robert Coles, a well published author with articles in the Atlantic and the New Republic, and, in the mid-sixties, a researcher at Harvard Medical School, presented new and provocative findings derived from his experiences in the South. In response, the highly regarded historian C. Vann Woodward, now at Yale, made clear his intention to “rethink” his “conceptions of the capacity” of the Negro; in the mid-fifties, Woodward had published Strange Career of Jim Crow, a work greatly appreciated by Martin Luther King and others in the Civil Rights movement. In fact, Woodward says, he is amazed by what Cole has discovered with regard to current behaviors: “Even in the oppressed parts of the South … [Cole] finds Negroes endowed with spontaneity, gaiety, light-heartedness, courage, and indomitable optimism. These people have hope, perhaps because they have such a low level of expectation. … The type of leadership they have produced in the last ten years has indicated that they have great

8 Ibid.: 2:203

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potentiality.”9 Sociologist St. Clair Drake—who, in his Black Metropolis, argued that the experience of Jews in German-occupied Poland allied America’s Jews more closely with Negroes in the United States—presented his evidence regarding the changing content of African American identity in the South, North, and in urban ghettoes. Joseph H. Fichter, a student of Roman Catholicism, surveyed religious denominations, including some that, in later decades in Chicago, would come to inform the militant black congregation to which Senator Barack Obama belonged while running for the presidency. Participants invariably touched on issues that were of interest to their work. There are many references to “class,” “poverty,” and Asian and European immigrants. Jews are ever-present as comparative markers. Many social scientists, such as Parsons and the social psychologist Thomas F. Pettigrew, both of whom attended earlier American Jewish Committee conferences on antisemitism, focused on Jews and their American ethnic problems to better understand discrimination in the United States. Indeed, this focus stoked serious controversy, and Moynihan signaled exactly why. This Irish American from Manhattan quotes his friend, Andrew Sullivan, a kinsman and well-known independent thinker, addressing the study The Melting Pot Mistake that Moynihan had just published with Nathan Glazer: “What am I going to say about a book that goes on for three hundred pages complaining that Negroes are not Jews?”10 (Implicitly, Sullivan was invoking the assumption that began to be popular among academics at the end of World War II: that the plight of “Negroes” should be equated with that of America’s Jews.) Max Lerner, historian and newspaper columnist, offers his take: “I really do not think we want the Negroes to be like Jews. What some of us may be driving at is that, in the American experience, the Jews managed to do two things; one, to retain a subcultural identity and, two, to achieve an impressive measure of access to life chances in the larger culture. This is also true of several of the other cultural minorities. The problem is to what extent these twin objectives can be maximized in the case of the Negro Americans.” Yet Lerner also asks the conferees not to be glib about Jews, insisting that it is a mistake to use Jews in the United States uncritically as an ideal type for solving the problems of the Negro American.11

9 Michael O’Brien, ed., The Letters of C. Vann Woodward (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013), x–xiii, xv–xx, xxiv–xxix, xxx–xxxi, xxxiv–xlii, 77, 172, 10 Daedalus (Fall 1965), 2 vols.: 2:410. 11 Ibid.: 2:413–414.

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That issue, the use of Jews as a helpful ideal type, which a few years before had occurred in immigrant historian Oscar Handlin’s book The Uprooted and which critics had questioned, hung over other exchanges at the conference. One participant stated bluntly: “We must remember our history[.] Jewish culture existed.” American Negroes, “just did not exist. … [They] are an American ­creation. They might want to be different, but that certainly is not the same thing as maintaining a two thousand-year-old culture.” To which Talcott Parsons replies: “Who says it is the same thing? It may, however, be an important thing and not non-existent. A culture does not have to be 2000 years old.”12 In his paper, Handlin concerned himself with the drive to integrate African Americans without its advocates having a proper understanding of the paradigm of middle-class American pluralism in which African Americans are owed their equal place. His paradigm and the comparative requirements Handlin insisted upon incurred strong, negative reactions as he spoke of the “disorderly” characteristics of the African American family. Handlin insists those characteristics “have been too readily associated with the effects of slave heritage.” Instead, he observes “the extent to which sound family life developed among Negroes between 1865 and 1915 is impressive as is the extent to which it still prevails in the rural South closest to the slave setting.” He is more persuaded by “the effect of rural urban migration with low income and slum housing at its destination. That correlation … conforms also to the experience of earlier groups of migrants to American cities. Less than half a century ago, the foreign-born residents of Irish, Jewish, or Polish slums faced comparable problems of matriarchal households and delinquency.” There is an important difference. “It was not alone the tradition of solidarity and discipline that contained the damage among these peoples,” Handlin writes, “but also the fact that their families were encased in social and cultural institutions which imposed restraints upon recalcitrant individuals, established norms of behavior, and disposed of weighty sanctions for conformity. Negroes have been slower to develop similar institutions,” because of such unique external conditions as segregation and brutalization. “Yet they have comparable voluntary institutions in their press and churches,” Handlin believes, “and should be encouraged to use them “to act on their own behalf.” Handlin is convinced that the struggle for equality raging in the republic is fraught with a misunderstanding of America’s pasts: “To confuse segregation, the function of which is to establish Negro inferiority, with the awareness of separate identity, the function of which is to generate the power for voluntary action, hopelessly confuses the struggle for equality.”

12 Ibid.: 2:414.

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Handlin fears “integration” could take a wrong turn in the hands of those who want to invigorate republican assimilationism to undo the achievements of middle-class American cultural pluralism. He writes: “Those who desire to eliminate every difference so that all Americans will more nearly resemble each other, those who imagine that there is a main stream into which every element in the society will be swept, are deceived about the character of the country in which they live. As long as common memories, experience, and interests make the Negroes a group, they will find it advantageous to organize and act as such. And the society will better be able to accommodate them as equal on those terms than it could under the pretense that integration would wipe out the past.”13 Handlin also insists that the African American experience, though distinct, is not so unique that it precludes any comparison with other groups. By definition, all are comparable to each other.14 Yet to his critics, the tradition of republican assimilation, within the existing regime of ethnic hierarchy, is essential for achieving an integrated society of blacks and whites. That goal, critics seem to hope, could best be achieved by a “random distribution of opportunities” for all of the republic’s citizens. Handlin worries about that goal; even in the face of denials, he believes it will require the enforcement powers of government. In response to these and similar remarks, comparative judgments and the sacred kitsch embedded within them come to the fore. Philip M. Hauser, director of the US Census Bureau, provides some support for Handlin’s approach. In a discussion of the meaning, intensity, and uniqueness of the “Negro stigma” he says: “Having in mind the history of three and a half centuries, I doubt very much if this so-called stigma for the Negro today evokes more passionate, cat13 Ibid.: 2:283–284. Handlin’s emphasis on family life touched sensitive issues. William Foote Whyte, of Street Corner Society (1943) fame, had criticized Handlin for ignoring family life in his Boston’s Immigrants, and Rudolf J. Vecoli, an American historian, who had studied Chicago’s Italian immigrants before World War I, criticized Handlin for presenting immigrant family life in The Uprooted (1951) as insensitive to the diversity of immigrant families: Whyte, American Journal of Sociology 48 ( January 1943): 519–520; Rudolph J. Vecoli, “Contadini in Chicago: A Critique of the Uprooted,” Journal of American History 51 (December 1964): 404–417. On the other hand, a few years later David Brion Davis wrote these lines: “We have come a long way from the 1950s, when Elkins’ concentration camp analogy seemed to explain the anomie and cultural disorientation which probably had less to do with slavery than with the Negroes’ later migration to the ghettos of racially volatile cities. It is now at least conceivable that the share-croppers’ ‘voluntary’ move to Chicago or New York was at least as traumatic as the original slave trade.” David B. Davis, “Slavery and the Post-World War II Historians,” Daedalus 103 (1974). 14 John Higham would write about a three-tier American ethnic regime—settler, conquered, and immigrant. In an article published posthumously, he also wrote: “Examining the three tiers more largely as ethnic groups than as racial may offer a fresh perspective on American History.” Higham, “Amplitude of Ethnic History,” 62.

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egoric, prejudicial response than the response, let us say, of the Pole who spat on the ground when a Jew was mentioned because a Jew was a Christ-killer. A Jew was never a slave, but he was a Christ-killer.” Hauser also points to other examples: “It is clear that the Italian was never a slave, but the Italian was a gangster. If we went right down the list of possibilities, I doubt that we would find that the stigma with which the Negro lives is worse than, say, of papism in the mind of the primitive fundamentalist Baptist.” Yet the opposition stands firm. Edwin C. Berry, executive secretary of the Urban League in Chicago, spoke bluntly insisting on black difference. Given the history of slavery and segregation, he argued, it remains surprising that African Americans remained a part of society at all. So was Jim Tobin, a distinguished economist, who insisted that: “It is much harder to find anything in the culture, tradition, and history of the Negro group to support them in a pluralistic role in society. The Jews, Irish, Italians, and other groups had cultures, language, and perhaps even religions of their own.” To Tobin, it seemed that: “Negroes do not have the same degree of independent tradition and culture to support them in any kind of full participation in the society, except complete integration into an America that is color blind.” For that reason, he was persuaded African Americans would not be able to “follow the pattern of the Jews or of the other groups which were mentioned.”15 Berry proclaimed his agreement with a policy recommendation: “In order to achieve the color blindness that you seek, for a period of time we shall have to be positively and affirmatively color conscious.”16 Vann Woodward, author of the treasured Origins of the New South, remained certain Handlin failed to appreciate sufficiently the uniqueness of the African American experience in the nation’s history: “I am afraid this analogy with the various immigrant or ethnic groups does violence to my sense of the history of the problem. We forget that, except for the Indian, the Negro is the oldest ethnic group in this country. … [He] has largely descended from eighteenth-century Americans. … Italians, the German groups, and all the rest of them have never had, relatively speaking, the impediments of marriage or in opportunities, the slavery experience, and the segregation experience.” As did many another colleague in the history profession, Woodward came to these positions with old encounters. As an American ideal, Vann Woodward is more attracted to republican assimilation than to what Handlin finds in his reading of the American past. Woodward’s published letters—he wrote them 15 Daedalus (Fall 1965), 2 vols.: 2:410, 2:350–351. 16 Ibid.: 2:350.

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until his last years in the 1990s—often reacted to the dramatic historical periods he experienced in those decades of war and depression; they are also revealing about his peer groups’ engagements with some of the dramatic domestic and international crises of the day. For example, those letters preceding 1964, including some from the 1930s and 1940s, reflect what the editor of his letters ­identifies: “Woodward himself, like many of his immediate friends, was an isolationist who mistrusted Britain and capitalism’s combats and, upon his own account, was made ‘physically as well as emotionally sick’ when Pearl Harbor turned the prospect of war into a reality.” These pre-war letters were influenced by his early ideological sympathies with goals of Stalinism, his critiques of the New Deal, and his beliefs that the United States would have to come to terms with a Nazi Germany defeating the United Kingdom after the Fall of France; the fate of Jews in that Germany were of no account. But after WWII there were exceptions, as in Woodward’s 1957 critique of a Stanley M. Elkins book manuscript. By using the “Final Solution” in the writing of American History Elkins had been a pioneer. But Woodward had not recognized that intellectual insight. He focused on what Elkins had gotten wrong: the misrepresentation of the institution of slavery and ignoring what a later leading American historian made explicit in a different context: In language quite different from Woodward’s, David W. Blight stressed what the Klan did not do, by comparing its murderous campaigns against individual African Americans in the month following the civil war to Nazi Germany’s genocidal policies towards Europe’s Jews.17 There is another possible explanation for Woodward’s post war discussion of Nazi Germany in the years before Pearl Harbor; perhaps it was affected by the terrible price the Allies had paid to defeat Nazi Germany. In the early 1960s Woodward was convinced that the seventy-year-old complex structure of segregation remained secure as ever, echoing John Hope Franklin from 1956: “The wall of segregation had become so formidable, so impenetrable, apparently, that the entire weight of the American tradition of equality and all the strength of the American constitutional system had to be brought to make the slightest crack in it.” And no doubt, Franklin was recalling some of the words from his friend Thurgood Marshall who ten years earlier had warned against a campaign of civil disobedience. “[A] disobedience movement on the part of Negroes and their white allies, if employed in the South, would result in wholesale slaughter with no good achieved.”18 17 O’Brien, ed., The Letters of C. Vann Woodward, xxii, xl, 89; Blight, Race and Reunion, 111–118. 18 New York Times, November 22, 1946; Franklin, Mirror to America, 156–159; Wright, Sharing the Prize, 278n17; O’Brien, Letters of Woodward, 166–67.

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Ralph Ellison disagreed with the approach he heard from Handlin and what he read in Glazer’s Commentary articles, a publication of the American Jewish Committee—but then he disagreed with much of what he heard from the other participants. The acclaimed writer of Invisible Man, the novel that educated an entire generation about the roiling interior lives of African Americans, had his own voice. Ellison engaged the issue that beset the conference from the perspective of his experience as a creative writer: “I feel subcultures are basically American, regardless of where they come from, whether they are Jewish or Negro, whether they are urban or rural.” Ellison rejects the concept of a “main stream of American culture—which is an exact mirroring of segregation and second-class citizenship.” He instead stressed the “interaction among the diversified cultural groups that “helped to shape whatever it is we are who call ourselves Americans.” Ellison illustrates the point well: “I learned certain things, not because I embraced … [ Judaism] and not because of my blood components, but because I was in cultural contact with a group of people who were very expressive. This is America, as far as I know. I know of no way of defining this reality out of existence.” It is in the folk stories that “Negroes” tell each other in one place and “Jews” tell each other in another, he believed. “There is a basic unity of the experience, despite all the other stuff. … [There] are many idioms of American culture, including, certainly, a Negro idiom of American culture in the South: It is in speech, manners, dress, cuisine. … It is American, and it has existed a long time. It has refinements and crudities. It has all the aspects of cultural reality.”19 Ellison never loses sight of the larger picture confronting the participants at this conference. Each “minority group, including Negroes, tries to impose its sense of the total experience upon everyone else.” He did not see this as scary; it could be a creative opportunity for everyone. Ellison pleads for humility when faced with the other: “I think we owe something to the total experience. I think each of us has no special grasp upon reality but that each of us lives a special part of it. It is owed to the rest. We all must learn from it.” Ellison held a “working assumption” about the ways “we actually work: … I learned to walk in a certain way because I admired Milton Lewison, who ran a clothing store in Oklahoma City. It was not just that I liked his walk. I liked his principles. He happened to be a Jew. But I know that much of Milton Lewison is Ralph Ellison. I know other people from whom I have taken certain attitudes of thought, interest in certain foods, certain literature, certain myths, and so on.”20 He defends the subculture, “because it is precious to me, because I believe it is a vital contributing part of

19 Daedalus (Fall 1965), 2 vols.: 2:415. 20 Ibid.: 2:435.

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the total culture. I do not want to deny that. If I did, then I would have to throw away my typewriter and become a sociologist.” Finally, Ellison strips away the sacred kitsch embedded in many of the comments at this conference, embedded because for so long it had been an inherent part of the American regime of ethnic citizenship and hierarchy. No two races for him. Without mentioning it, Ellison provides a deeper American meaning of “Ballad for Americans.” John Treville Latouche wrote these lyrics in 1937, naming the song “Ballad for Uncle Sam.” Paul Robeson made the tune famous in a radio broadcast in 1939, and it was used to open the Republican Presidential Nominating Convention in 1940. The ballad identified, as American men and women, the “Irish,” “Negroes,” “Jews,” “Italians,” and other ethnics; and among the many religious denominations, “Roman Catholics,” “Mormons,” and “Orthodox Jews.” These, the circumcised Orthodox Jews, like the others, were also listed as having been baptized.21 As an alternative, Ellison comprehends American ethnicking with these words: “I wish that we would dispense with this idea that we are to get in somewhere. The main stream is in oneself. The main stream of American literature is in me, even though I am a Negro, because I am a Negro I possess more of Mark Twain that many white writers do.”22 At the Daedalus conference, Ellison’s passages about bits and fragments point to their congealed significance, but peoplehoods or collective memories, as an explicit subject for historians, were not a focal point—not even for Franklin, Woodward, and Handlin. To be sure, Lerner, the journalist and acclaimed writer of American history, made allusions, in his case to Jewish collective memories. He warned the conferees not to be glib about Jews, who knew all too well that their past accomplishments were hard won. He also drew attention to the fact that, among Jews, tremendous anxiety about their subculture’s identity, its potential “obliteration,” hovered.23 Meanwhile, during these cauldron years, in their publications and classrooms, general American historians participated in their own kind of professional ethnicking engagements. No doubt self-interest played a role in the defense of what constituted the mainstream of an American historian’s research and teaching agenda, as growing critiques from different “specialists” sought to move their subjects into mainstream.24 The challenges came from students of African 21 Kennedy, Freedom From Fear, 761, 22 Pages 108–121—on 108–109 he calls attention to Franklin; Daedalus (Fall 1965), 2 vols.: 2: 437. 23 Ibid., 2:413–414. 24 See for example Herbert Gutman et al., eds., “American Social History Project” and early publications from this project following his death: Who Built America: Working People and the ­Nation’s History, 2 vols. (New York: Bedford/St. Martin and Graduate Center of CCNY, 2007).

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American, Jewish American, and women’s studies. They also came from students influenced by Thompson, Rawick, Eugene Genovese, and Gutman, as well as from students focused on other ethnic and religious groups and from historians studying ethno-cultural subjects, including pluralism, integration, and assimilation. Yet there were other factors, such as historians’ fashioning of “endings,” which, when undisciplined, risked seeing an American ethnic group on its own terms and in its own times. These endings were influenced by the sacred kitsch derived from the old-new discourse about American assimilation, and newer rhetoric about anti-colonialism, anti-imperialism, and critiques of capitalism, or some mixture of each.25 In the end, though, it was John Higham’s career as a professional American historian that best suggested why knowledge of American republican peoplehoods remained elusive to many Americans, to scholars, to public intellectuals, and to so many ordinary citizens. Ignorance left most Americans confident about the future but ill prepared for the Civil Rights Revolution. Their larger context included the unexpected new face of legal and illegal immigration, which was bound to ring alarm bells among observers paying attention to the republick’s ethnicking. In 1965, congress ended the race-based quota system of immigration but exempted family reunifications from an annual cap on the total number of immigrants allowed entry into the United States. The act also elevated a number of preferred groups in the visa allocation process. Among many policymakers, this change occurred because of a shared the optimism about the future, engendered by the continuing revolution in the American standard of living. During the heyday of the Johnson Administration, the marketplace freely provided guns and butter not only for a nation at war, but also for a nation striving to change its black citizenship rights and economic opportunity. America’s social and economic problems were now seen as solvable independent of the need for quota controls. But optimistic advocates of the new act proved to be wrong. They expected few newcomers as a result of the legislation.26 Higham, the republican integrationist, turned apprehensive, worrying as he did that “endowment” rights and privileges were pushing concerns for the working class to the margins at a time, in the mid 1960s, when labor unions weak25 Davis, “Slavery and the Post World War II Historians”; Benjamin Quarles “Black History Unbound, “Daedalus 103 (Spring 1974): 1–16, 163–178. The special issue of the Journal of American History on the anniversary of 9/11, and Gerd Korman’s letter in response, illustrates the influence of skewed anti-colonialism among American historians: “Letters to the Editor,” Journal of American History ( June 2003): 341. 26 Moore, American Growth, 458–497.

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ened and the war in in Vietnam distracted public opinion. Using social scientific methods, Higham sought national policies that sustained the assimilation of individuals from minority groups; and he urged the selection and distribution of immigrants in keeping with the needs of the nation’s political economy. He was apprehensive because he had failed to appreciate the longtime presence of white peoplehoods and the collective terms on which they had integrated republican influences encouraging individual assimilation. That was why Higham came to oppose continuing efforts to bring together relatives separated by the oceans. He was apprehensive about thriving ethnic collectives that seemed to pose invigorated threats to the national union. With Schlesinger, Jr., and later with C. Vann Woodward and other historians, and with labor economists such as Ray Marshall and Vernon Briggs, Higham worried aloud about the republic’s ability to assimilate newcomers and their children. In his vision of the American republican past, the steady assimilation of individuals on his terms was the irreplaceable public good necessary for national cohesion—such people needed to “move beyond their origins and make themselves over.”27 In Selma in 1965, Higham marched with Martin Luther King. He later supported other efforts to ensure the success of a larger “integrationist project.”28 But in retrospect, at least by implication, during King’s final months, Higham did not yet understand or did not wish to explore the changing ethnicking worlds in which African Americans and he lived. In September of that year, King planned to tell a union audience in New York City’s District 65 how he viewed the future from within the civil rights movement: “The North by now should have been well on its way to dissolution of ghettoes; unemployment should have been eliminated, tensions with the police should have been modified or eradicated by long-tested institutions and interracial relationships should have become a commonplace fact of life.” He pointed to one of the major reasons that had not happened: a failure to weld “a true alliance” between the Civil Rights and larger labor movement. King’s associates had benefitted from the organizational knowhow of District 65 and from 1199. Yet now, for the North, there had to be more: “The dynamism labor once had [in the thirties and forties] is now to be found in the civil rights movement. We want to affect a unity for a noble goal that will infuse labor with the vitality that has made the significant reforms” of the past.29 27 John Higham, “Multiculturalism,” American Quarterly 45 ( June 1993): 200–201; “The ­Future of American History,” Journal of American History 80 (March 1994): 1289–1309; Otis ­Graham, “The Unheeded Second Thoughts of John Higham,” V DARE, February 26, 2004. 28 Alan Lessoff to Gerd Korman, email 24 February 2013. 29 Martin Luther King, Jr., All Labor Has Dignity, ed. Michael K. Honey (Boston: Beacon, 2011 [1986]) xiii–xxxix, 104–109, and passim.

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King was devoted to the historic moment of this African American campaign: to mobilize African Americans in their peoplehood to become a potential change agent in the public square. Higham, writing with hindsight about these months of civil rights upheavals, acknowledged that he had pursued a different agenda. King’s people were fighting their way back from one hundred years of being privatized, to the establishment of republican peoplehoods and integration into public collectives with full equal standing. Higham, a star among American historians, shared with many profound convictions about the importance of a monolithic republican ideology for a coherent United States. He had difficulty accepting the historic reality of American pluralism that was revealed by the civil rights revolution. He was not prepared to think of the nation’s long-lived collective identities as republican peoplehoods, as the kind of collectives now being presented in demand for a rightful place in the public square. In the case of African Americans, it was a demand that had pulsed in the rhetoric of leaders long past. Most recently, all could hear it in the voices of Randolph and King. Wherever he spoke, King the minister and leader of mass demonstrations, stood within an African American peoplehood and its horrific collective memories from the slave country, from its later segregation cages and lynchings, and from collective memories of its heroic republican ethnicking. King understood himself as belonging to America’s public square, which included organized workers and the unorganized poor. It was a square in which he hoped his fight would end the hierarchy of all minorities writ large.30 As the leader of the Southern civil rights campaign, King came to recognize, as he did in Chicago, the details of Northern neighborhoods. There, people insisted that his movement cope with the deeply depressing consequences African Americans had experienced over the decades as segregated Northern blacks contending with long-entrenched issues of poverty and racial discrimination in housing and employment. King responded with speeches that called to mind rooted republican ideals and fears of drummed-up chauvinism. A minister of his church, he felt obligated to acknowledge the nation’s poor and was a deeply committed practitioner of peaceful civil disobedience. King long feared the negative influence of militarism on the nation’s moral values and on public policy decisions. And so, facing 30 King, All Labor, 112–136; W. J Michael Cody, “King at the Mountain Top: The Representation of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Memphis, April 3–4, 1968,” University of Memphis Law Review 41 (Summer 2011): 701–709; Susannah Heschel, “God and Society in Heschel and King,” Shalom Center September 8, 2001; King interview on NBC, May 8, 1967; King, “I Am a Man,” speech, “I’ve Been to the Mountain.” See speeches at https://www.youtube. com/watch?v=uCyNCUSiWi4&list=PL30RAv-0lkxFTL_HvMAsrH2U8MjD_mVtf.

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Vietnam, he joined antiwar coalitions even if it meant splitting with Randolph, Rustin, and the leadership of the NAACP—though in 1967, after June, King did consider visiting the Holy Land before rejecting the idea. Still, in his world, Higham joined with those critics who faulted King for not mobilizing blacks and whites for the benefit of the republic’s working classes, a campaign that would also bring an end to segregation and racial discrimination in the nation’s public and private governments.31 Yet a generation later, Higham did come to acknowledge the fact that ethnic groups live as communities of memory: “Partly real and partly imagined, memory is what binds an ethnic group together, assigning its tasks and maintaining its identity. Memory recalls and fixates a particular origin, from which it projects a continuity of subsequent experience.”32 To be sure, he stressed the importance of discrete historical periods in determining the complex ways class and ethnicity shaped collective identities in nineteenth- and twentieth-century America. This recognition of American peoplehoods, of the importance of what Higham called communities of memory, took a long time to develop. Together with many Americans, Higham had held on to his devotions: in his case, that meant holding onto republican individualism, to class-sensitive democratic universalism, and, perhaps as well, to some sacred kitsch of his own making. In 1993, when writing about endowment claims, Higham expressed his concern this way: “In the academic left simply acknowledging that supporters of ‘endowment’ issues—such as racism, sexism, abortion, gay rights, defense of Israel, and protection of the environment—have won significant victories in recent years, while class-oriented demands have only stiffened resistance to change now.” What was the “defense of Israel” doing in that kind of an endowment registry?33 The answer is complicated, but no doubt reveals much about a significant portion of American citizens: their sacred kitsch, fragments and debris, and the ageing convictions that could remain fixed for decades. Even as his writing retained important tropes, some of Higham’s convictions mutated. He was referring to the publication of his Strangers in the Land, when, at the Toronto meeting of 31 King, All Labor, 137–195, especially 182–195 for 1968 in Memphis. In public, Randolph, the son of a Methodist minister, said he understood why King, the minister, felt he had to oppose the war on moral grounds, just as Randolph himself in his Messenger had done during WWI. Simon King, “The Response of the Moderate Wing of the Civil Rights Movement to the War in Vietnam,” The Historical Journal 46, no. 3 (2003): 669–701; the relevant passage is on 681. 32 Higham, “The Amplitude of Ethnic History.” 33 Higham, “Future of American History”; John Higham, “Muticulturalism and Universalism: A History and Critique,” American Quarterly 46 ( June 1993): 195–219, “Rejoinder,” ibid.: 249–255; Gary Gerstel, ibid., in response.

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the Organization of American Historians, Higham reflected on a subject he had raised in the epilogue of a new edition of that work, featured in its last chapter.34 Now, Higham said, he believes he had misjudged America’s body politic. During the first decade of the Cold War and in the McCarthy Era, he should have realized that “good forces” could reform the republic’s political culture and public policy. He should have appreciated the backlash that had begun in the 1930s and 40s. In other words, Higham should have ended Strangers with the decade that followed the end of war in 1945. Months later, when his comments appeared in print, my second thoughts about some of his remarks at the conference still left room for some criticism. Namely, his assumptions about WWII’s effect on the cultivation of America’s domestic peoplehood affairs and on events abroad that took the Allied victory for granted.35 Historian Higham held a deep faith about the United States and what, by then, he called its democratic universalism: America had been and therefore could become again an instrument for “good” at home and abroad, as in WWII. But Allied victory was not ordained in 1945. The war might have ended earlier or later, and differently. If it had ended earlier, with Nazi Germany still powerful, what would have happened to those “good forces”? To that question, Higham had a response: “Yes the world was really up for grabs in 1945, and everything could have turned out terribly different. But isn’t that just an intensely dramatic example of the problems of all historical periodization and interpretation? External events could have dissolved the webs we spin, but the absence of such intrusions gives the web a certain significance in the shaping of what was to come.”36 Perhaps that was so if one agreed with the basic proposition; or, for that matter, with his older conviction that without republican assimilationist demands and universalist ideals, divisive particularism would run amuck. Earlier, Higham had also linked this conviction 34 He critiqued papers presented in a session entitled “Creating and Crossing Racial and E ­ thnic Categories in Immigration History.” Strangers in the Land was published by Rutgers in 1955. The new edition came out in 1984. On Higham, see OAH Newsletter 31, November 9, 2003, 22–23 by Carl J. Quarneri, St. Mary’s College of California; see also the letter from Kenneth Kusner, Temple University, in the NYRB, October 23, 2003, and the eulogies by J. M. Bergquist, editor, in Immigration and Ethnic History Newsletter, November 2003 and Michael Kammen in Reviews in American History. A student of Arthur Lovejoy and Merle Curti (who directed the dissertation version of his fine Strangers in the Land), Higham by the 1970s, as an influential American historian in his own right, “deplored the fragmentation and the extreme anti-nationalist views that seemed to overtake American society and historiography.” He stressed the “quiet connections that joined Americans together and the heritage of ‘universalist’ ideals that he hoped would inspire them.” 35 Towards the end of his life, Higham admitted to a deep disappointment about the trajectories of American society and public policies. Kenneth Kusman, letter, New York Review of Books, October 23, 2003. 36 Higham email to Korman, September 22, 2000.

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to the criticism of Herbert Gutman’s turn toward appreciating the importance of black and white ethnicity among American workers. To Higham, it had become clear that Gutman’s f­ ollowers had moved away from those historians with a hardedged focus on working class history: these last, to their credit, maintained passionate concern about class and class consciousness—in their labor history, they kept alive the flame of American democratic universalism.37 Higham’s private and public convictions also affected his judgments about international policy decisions, some of which reflected important strands of public opinion. They may well have also affected his perspective on ethnicking in American republican peoplehoods. One of yesteryear’s major decisions by the young United Nations General Assembly profoundly influenced politics in the United States, especially Jewish American politics. In response to a claim made by Halpern in 1964, namely that the new Israel, by taking Jewish Holocaust survivors, may well have helped to reduce antisemitism in the United States, Higham insisted that Israel had not done so. And decades later, he wrote in a personal email that the establishment of Israel in 1948 had been a mistake. Jews in Palestine and in the rest of the world, and the United States government, should have known better. Jewish sovereignty in Palestine ran against the forces of history that were bringing an end to the Euro-American colonizers of the past.38 Higham was subtle and nuanced, a brilliant historian with a special gift of detecting, earlier than most, changes within a maze of interdisciplinary monographic studies. He also engaged in good faith critical challenges to his claims in Strangers, such as his use of “mere ethnocentrism” in comparison with “ideologically charged nationalism.” In 1986, Higham responded to these critiques with “The Strange Career of Strangers in the Land,” an article published in American

37 “Critique,” American Quarterly 46 ( June 1993): 195–219, “Rejoinder,” ibid.: 249–255; Gary Gerstel, ibid, in response. 38 Higham email to Korman, November 14, 2001. Perhaps these views were part of his deep disappointments towards the end of his life, but I doubt that they were new. It is troubling to consider Higham’s statements in light of historian Henry Elmer Barnes’s review comments of 1921 about Horace Kallen’s book about Zionism. Barnes said it was absurd to expect only Jews to forego the right to establish a state of their own. He also tipped his hat to the irrational in human affairs: he ended his review by asking his readers of New Republic to turn to “Revelation X:1–3” for instructions for the coming of a better world. New Republic (1921). In Barnes’s review, he quoted Kallen’s lines that without a state Jews would face catastrophies in Europe and would be overwhelmed in an American Diaspora. See also Shulamit Volkov, “Readjusting Cultural Codes: Reflections on Anti-Semitism and Anti-Zionism,” The Journal of Israel History 25 (March 2006): 51–62; Goren, HEAEG, 596. After the General Assembly of the United Nations passed Resolution 3379, equating Zionism with racism, Moynihan predicted Higham’s kind of private reaction to world problems. “Israel surely would be blamed: openly by some, privately by most.” Israel would be regretted. Gil Troy, Moynihan’s Moment: America’s Fight Against Zionism as Racism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 397.

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Jewish History that explained his concepts and stood by his evidence supporting some of his earlier generalizations about antisemitism. Higham also reflected upon the dimming effect of four decades of protection of peoplehood life in Nuremberg’s “crimes against humanity,” and in the United Nation’s genocide convention. Additionally noteworthy was this: all the while, in “Strange Career,” Higham ignored facts of American ethnicking: the intensifying impact of the Holocaust on American Jewish collective identity at a time when republican peoplehoods were beginning to nestle within a changing public square. Devotion to his “democratic universalism” may have made Higham receptive to some “anti-colonialist” arguments, even as he attacked some theories fashioned by “multiculturalists.” Higham also underestimated the subject of religion in his work, perhaps helping to explain a particularly critical moment at the session of the American Jewish Committee, when he compared immigrant Jews to other immigrants and pointed to Jews’ enthusiastic push to join the gentile American middle classes as a major generator for antisemitic discrimination, for other immigrant groups did not encounter equivalent obstacles. Higham believed that social scientific interest in antisemitism after WWII was the result of a rush of Jews into fields like political science, psychology, and sociology, singling out the work of Theodore W. Adorno and his colleagues, titled The Authoritarian Personality.39 He did not fault their Marxism and hostility to America’s capitalist society. Higham faulted their focus on the 1930s and 1940s, on the “holocaust in Germany” and the “destruction of Jews.” As a result, he wrote, Jews and their European experiences played too large a role in these investigations, misshaping the study of discrimination in the United States. 39 T. W. Adorno, E. Frenkel-Brunswik, D. J. Levinson, and R. N. Sanford, The Authoritarian Personality (New York: Harper and Row, 1950). Higham did not like the book. In hindsight, he said, it was “ponderous, pretentious, and confusing.” Its extraordinary success seemed “grossly disproportionate to its scientific merit.” (Send These To Me, 174). Interestingly, Higham did not call attention to a different kind of criticism leveled at Adorno and his colleagues from the Frankfurt School living in the United States: that their Marxism and critique of capitalism misshaped their understanding of fascism and, therefore, their understanding of American society. Edward S. Shapiro, “John Higham and American Anti-Semitism,” American Jewish History 76 (December 1986): 201–213. Compare preface and acknowledgement of Authoritarian Personality for the names of academic institutions and investigators involved in this project that can be said to have begun between 1939 and 1944. Robert Merton was an advisor and the Social Science Research Council helped fund the project. The volume was one of a series about prejudice, including Messing’s Hitler’s Professors. Louis E. Guttman’s F-Scale played a significant role in the project. The scale was developed by Guttman when he was a professor at Cornell University. His subjects were American soldiers during WWII. For a general evaluation of The Authoritarian Personality’s changing reputation, see Martin Roisier and Carla Willig, “The Strange Death of the Authoritarian Personality: 50 Years of Psychological and Political Debate,” History of the Human Sciences 15 (2002): 71–96.

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At times, Higham took risks with his commitments to Clio, as any historian would who was convinced that “historical analysis had no intellectual value unless it was infused with some contemporary civic concern.”40 Here is the complete text of what he wrote: We all know that for decades the Israel Army had been defending the enlargement and extension of those remorseless encroachments on Arab land and the US has been quietly tolerating the use of its military backing in that project. Now we are all confronting a spreading jihad of young Muslims in many countries, and I don’t know how they can be prevented from overthrowing some of the Arab governments. The US has completely lost credibility as a force for good. Why could we (i.e., the Americans) not see that the entire Zionist project ran against the grain of history: it was a new incursion of European imperialism into the 3d world at the very moment when imperialism was crumbling everywhere else.” He added: “I recently saw an extraordinary Italian film, ‘The Battle of Algiers.’ You should get it. The Jews in the British Mandate were so like the French in Algeria, so heedless of the long-term consequences of what they were doing.41 Higham approached the Shoa as a self-identified outsider.42 That was the kind of historian Yehuda Bauer, the pioneering and master Israeli scholar of the Holocaust, must have had in mind when he said, in private, that he had become convinced for most US historians the Holocaust was and would remain “a Jewish subject.”43 This could also mean for Higham that the “Jewish subject” after WWII internally resonated for Jews in Palestine, where, under a British mandate government, most and their supporters heeded the lessons of the catastrophe by entrusting their collective future to a Zionist Israel. Here in 1984 is one of Higham’s few comments on the Shoah: “In the 30s and 40s, the Holocaust in Germany [sic] threw a blazing light on every sort of bigotry,” thus explaining the “traumatic impact of Hitlerism on the consciousness of the Western World.” Movements for ethnic and religious tolerance in the United States came later,

40 Alan Lessoff to Gerd Korman, email 24 February 2013. 41 Higham to Korman, November 14, 2001. 42 Higham called himself an outsider when reviewing the last book written by Arthur Hertzberg, a historian and rabbi, about his take on American Jewish history. New York Review of Books, April 12, 1990. 43 Conversation with Bauer at Brandeis conference, 2002.

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“only as the war drew to a close and the full horror of the Nazi concentration camp spilled out to an aghast world.” To appreciate what is missing from this reasonable passage and his other writings, a few words from Saul Bellow, spoken in the 1980s, may help d­ emonstrate what Higham and other like-minded Americans leave unsaid about the Holocaust and the peoplehood that harbored its memories in those decades. First, the Nobel Laureate quoted from Lionel Abel’s memoir Intellectual Follies, in which Abel’s mother reacts to the first newsreels of liberated Buchenwald: “I don’t think the Jews can ever get over the disgrace of this.” He continues: “She said nothing about the moral disgrace to the German nation … only about a … more than moral disgrace and one incurred by the Jews. How did they ever get over it?” The son replied: “By succeeding in emigrating to Palestine and setting up the state of Israel.” Bellow then shares his artistic sentiments. These are different, he says, “from the philosopher or scientist who cannot tell an artist what it means to be human.” Bellow remembered his reactions to those newsreels of 1946. They were similar to Mrs. Abel’s: “A deeply troubling sense of disgrace or human demotion, as if by such afflictions the Jews had lost the respect of the rest of humankind, as if they might now be regarded as hopeless victims, incapable of honorable self-defense, and, arising from this, probably the common instinctive revulsion of loathing of the extremities of suffering—a sense of personal contamination and aversion. The world would see these dead with a pity that placed them at the margin of humanity.” But for survivors and other Jews, Israel made a profound difference: “What was certain … was that the founders of Israel restored the lost respect of the Jews by their manliness. They removed the curse of the Holocaust of the abasement of victimization from them, and for this the Jews of the Diaspora were grateful and repaid Israel with their loyal support.” Bellow also offered a kind of history lesson: “The formation of Israel was a response to the nihilistic rage of the two powerful European states that began the war, and the complicity of the rest who could not or perhaps would not protect their Jews, and Israel’s founders were aware of this.” In 1988, he also added: “But the Western world now exhibits a certain unwillingness to sanction the Israeli solution—in other words to let the Jews get away with it.”44 Higham had become appreciative of what Bellow was talking about, but not in the case of the ever-changing people of the Talmud. In 1980, in an essay on ethnic leadership, he casts African Americans and other nonwhites as being part of a changing American nationality. Here are some passages about competing 44 Bellow gave this talk in1988. New York Review of Books, November 10, 2011, 28–29. Higham, “The Amplitude of Ethnic History,” 62.

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status claims within and among ethnic groups: “Another type of cultural society that reflects the social aspirations of ethnic elites is the historical association: the American Jewish Historical Society (1892), the American Irish Historical Society (1897), the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History (1915), The American Indian Historical Society (1964), the American Italian Historical Association (1966), to name just a few. Nevertheless, status goals are not necessarily elitist in spite of their special attraction for elites.” Writing about all of America’s ethnic groups, Higham now clearly acknowledged the capacity for ethnic coherence—elsewhere he would argue that, depending on the material circumstances, in some periods “class” was a dominant form of solidarity while in others “ethnicity” was king. Once again, Higham revealed his sensitivity and capacity for succinct nuanced expression: “While status claims may divide an ethnic group along class lines, they may also unify it if the entire group experiences humiliation.” His example: “The unparalleled moral authority of Frederick Douglass (c.1817–1895) in the mid-nineteenth century and of Martin Luther King (1929–1968) a century later flowed from their espousal of a status revolution desired by every technically free black person.” Obviously, that is exactly the kind of change Bellow evoked when connecting the Holocaust to the founders of Israel and to American Jews.45 There is a hint in Higham’s final article, published posthumously, that his understanding of American ethnic groups had begun to change, or perhaps had changed in comparison with what was reflected in his earlier writings. Now, in the midst of the peoplehood ethnicking of the Civil Rights Revolution, there were modernized echoes from some Austro-Hungarian socialists and from a young Horace Kallen writing in the Nation in 1915. But Higham had also been using his own tools to weed out an old assimilationist creeper. At the end, he entertained the notion that in the life of a peoplehood, collective memory could have an extended half-life. He wrote that a “means of generalizing about American ethnic groups, and distinguishing amongst them, lies at hand, surprisingly neglected. It lies in the recognition that all such groups arise from, or must create a community of memory. Partly real and partly imagined, memory is what binds an ethnic group together, assigning its tasks and maintaining its identity. Memory recalls and fixates a particular origin, from which it projects a continuity of subsequent experience. … Now” in the twenty first century, “it is recognized as a force and a major source of collective identities and public policies. Today the documentation of memory supplies much of our ethnic history with a vividness that reached burning intensity in the rediscovery[sic] of the Holocaust.” That conclusion led Higham to write: “If memory is at the core of ethnic identities, historians of the making of modern America might do well to take the promptings of memory as seriously as the coercions of race.” 45 Ibid.

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Years after WWII, perhaps most Americans did come to realize a successful national integrationist project required tried and true American common sense, its selfevident truths derived from republican assimilation and democratic universalism. But it took the work and thought of Black studies enthusiasts to help shift political attention toward collective memory—that is, toward the fact of republican peoplehoods. By arguing that the engine of this integration project included “Anglo assimilation,” their interpretation can be read to mean that the engine had been built in the Southern Nation. In 1974, Quarles implied that the Civil Rights Revolution had unmasked the true meaning of “American assimilation.” So long as republican individualism commanded assimilation, person by person, to “move beyond their origins and make themselves over,” America’s past cohesion and enlightened progress remained assured. Now, white ethnic groups could constitute themselves as being eligible for group admission to the changing public square so that they could take part in the founding entitlements in the American republic.46 This insight remains instructive about American ethnicking in the century after the civil war, if only because it evokes what Kallen and others had said in their time. The “truths” of most peoplehood Americans had been formed by a privatized endowed group. In the public square, Anglo-American white Protestant elites and their fellow travelers moved. These individuals were usually self-enlightened, with a mixture of fragments and debris influencing their biocultural convictions and class sensitivities about themselves and other citizens in a capitalist political economy. Those millions of others, black and white citizens navigating a structured hierarchy of race and religion among them, segregated and privatized, or just privatized in their republican peoplehoods, lived with these convictions and sensitivities.47As they participated in the nation’s ethnicking, all carried many of their bits and pieces, remaining fundamentally connected to their endowments of republican peoplehood. 46 Daedalus 103 (Spring 1974): 165–67. 47 Higham, “Multiculturalism and Universalism”: 205–206. For a while such fellow travellers included Norwegian ethnic immigrant historian Theodore C. Blegen, who later, in World War II, served as president for the Mississippi Valley Historical Association. From 1938, came Marcus Lee Hansens’ famous reminder about historical collective memory, his three-generation rule about the deeds of grandparents, the intentional forgetfulness of children, and the grandchild’s urge to recover what grandpa and grandma had done. Peter A. Munch, “Norwegians,” HEAEG, 750–761. Smith, “Religion and Ethnicity in America”: 1155–1185, and footnote 2 and his comment on 1162; Higham, “Hanging Together”; Quarles, “Black History”: 165; Higham, “Rejoinder”: 249–255. See also Nell Irvin Painter, “What Whiteness Means in the Trump Era,” New York Times, November 13, 2016. One larger context for these historians is presented in Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The “Objectivity Question’ and the American Historical Profession (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988). I am indebted to Stephen Whifield for the phrase “integrationist republican project.” Whitfield to Korman, email, February 2013.

Epilogue

The contexts enveloping gathering scholars, and what they said in the mid1960s, help to explain how the country could sustain the Civil Rights momentum, however unevenly and at a much slower pace than many advocates wished. Among the public square’s symbols, the fight for a federal Martin Luther King, Jr. Day continued until 1986, when President Reagan signed into law the legislation that turned the day into a national holiday. And in 2016, the old and new campaigns for a national museum of African American History finally ended when, on the nation’s Washington Mall, President Obama established the institution as part of the Smithsonian. These events belonged to the Civil Rights Movement’s powerful message about the nation’s need to erode all hierarchies, including those involving gender, deeply embedded in biology and family life. Early on, congress subsidized all sorts of ethnic cultural organizations. Jewish Americans certainly noted the change. President Jimmy Carter, a Baptist minister, lit a Hanukkah menorah, and ever since, subsequent presidents have done the same. American jurisprudence incorporated case law involving Holocaust perpetrators illegally residing in the United States. In a badly split decision, the Supreme Court would rule that the Christmas tree could no longer monopolize the public square—it had done so since Calvin Coolidge had lighted one outside of residential quarters of the White House. The Court recognized that the menorah, like the tree, could be seen as a secular symbol: it celebrated liberty in the winter season and remained an ancient symbol of Jewish peoplehood. In 1985, on national television, Elie Wiesel, Nobel Laureate and first chairman of President Jimmy Carter’s Commission on the Holocaust, would plead with Ronald Reagan not to visit the German Bitburg Military Cemetery: “May I, Mr. President, if it’s possible at all, implore you to do something else, to find another way, another site? That place, Mr. President, is not your place. Your place is with the victims of the SS.” The president would keep his promise to German Chancellor Helmuth Kohl by visiting, having two of his generals lay wreaths in the SS cemetery, but he would also visit Dachau.1 And three years later, after the Senate’s long-delayed approval, Reagan signed on to the United Nation’s Genocide Convention, first adopted 1 George P. Shultz, Turmoil and Triumph (New York: Scribners, 1993), 339–360.

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in 1946, giving formal weight and recognition to what happened to the Jewish people during the Holocaust. By 1993, the privately funded Holocaust Museum would stand on congressionally granted federal land, adjacent to the National Mall in Washington, DC. In the meantime, academics and publicists argued over new meanings for Kallen’s cultural pluralism, especially when they discovered what they believed to be more optimistic future trajectories. As demographers released new statistics regarding sustained rates of intermarriage, some scholars came to revise their understanding of “cosmopolitan” and “solidarity.” In these decades, Daniel Kahneman and other economic behaviorists would also rise to positions of influence among students of ethnic groups: with objective sounding vocabulary, these scholars would describe Americans as carrying “group endowments” or as participating in “communities of descent,” thus using terms that became vital for integrating findings among geneticists and epigeneticists in the twenty-first century.2 As so often occurs in the past, our present came to include opportunities to read anew the different sources of human diversity. These changes were challenging. Hierarchies remained powerful, requiring new coping skills for coercive institutional webs ensnarled with endowments of biology, race, and religion. In striving to accommodate a changing republican individualism, most Americans in their peoplehoods held onto variations of their self-evident truths and sacred kitsch—the collective memories, identities, aspirations, and idealizations of class and promised lands. By the time Barack Obama arrived on the stump, in 2008, it seemed as if Americans had required half a century to think about changing the traditional criteria of hierarchies in the election of a president, for taking a chance on the kind of American ethnicking beckoning in the wake of the Civil Rights Revolution.3 To be sure, the old biocultural determinism had been receding. For years, a pharmacological transformation had been underway, closing the gap between diagnosis and cure, of killer diseases so often in the past associated with assumed inheritance patterns of “inferior” or “dangerous” people. Germ theory’s victory and the general genetic transformation of biology had brought to the field of research voices belonging to Salk and Sabin, to Joshua Lederberg, pioneer in

2 John Higham, “Muticulturalism and Universalism”: 205–206; David A. Hollinger, Postethnic America: Beyond Multiculturalism, rev. ed. (New York: Basic Books, 2005), 220. In the past decade the journal Science has carried many articles on the subject of epigenetics. 3 School Dist. of Abington Tp. v. Schempp, 374 U.S. 203 (1963).

Epilogue

the transformation of bacterial genetics, and to James D. Watson, Frances Crick, Maurice Wilkin, and Rosalind Franklin, who together demonstrated a new understanding of DNA that would modernize our knowledge of inherited characteristics. In time, geneticists would transform their studies into an experimental laboratory science in which they could slice into a gene and think about modifying its genomic expressions.4 As in the past, these kinds of leaps threatened millions fearful of change in their daily lives. Old and new regimes found all sorts of militant devotees, from those types who decades earlier had participated in lynch mobs and racist festivals, to later bureaucrats who, within their hierarchies routinely discriminated, as when some manipulated the authorization of research in the United States Public Health Service. In the early 1970s, investigators continued to use nonconsenting African Americans in experiments with syphilis. Most recently, extreme-minded individuals have again turned to mass murder, today in a black church, yesterday in a synagogue. These killings cast their own shadows over the nation’s experimental accomplishments, joining the darkest memories about enslavement, about segregation, about the Holocaust. Each in their own way holds in check runaway optimism about our future ethnicking as equal citizens in the American project.

4 Francois Jacob, The Statue Within (Cold Spring Harbor: Laboratory Press, 1995 [Basic Books, 1988]), 206–321.

317

Index

Abbott, Robert S., 202–3 Abel, Lionel, 312 acculturation, 86n27, 128 Adams, Henry, 135, 289 Adams, Herbert Baxter, 151n32 Adams, John Quincy, 22, 125, 140 Adorno, Theodore W., 310 Albany, Georgia, 270 Aleichem, Sholem, 26, 75n2, 189 Amery, Jane, 27 Anglo-Saxonism, 17, 31 Antin, Mary, 157, 159 antisemitism, 2, 7, 15n10, 49, 51, 72, 79n14, 87, 92, 129, 133–34, 136, 166, 174, 177, 181, 206, 213, 215, 220, 223, 226, 237–38, 241, 247–48, 257, 271, 275–76, 279–80, 284, 289–90, 291n30, 297, 309–10 Antwerp, 173, 181 Atlantic revolutions, 74 Auschwitz, 2, 27, 257, 264, 272 Austria, 178 Austria-Hungary, 138 Bailyn, Bernard, 289–90 Baltic Sea, 173 Bauer, Yehuda, 311 Beard, Charles, 50n33, 214, 215n10 Bell, Daniel, 53–54 Bellow, Saul, 312–13 Berlin, Ira, 60 Berry, Edwin C., 300 Bickel, Theodore, 272 Biggs, Hermann M., 160

Birmingham, 108, 204, 244 bits and pieces, 15, 17–18, 33, 42, 46, 69, 91, 122, 155, 274–75, 288, 314 Black, Hugo, 212, 248–49 blacks, 5–6, 10–16, 24, 61, 68–70, 77–79, 90, 108, 110, 115, 120–21, 143, 145, 186–87, 204, 245–46, 275, 278, 282n15, 288, 293, 299, 306–7 Blassingame, John W., 58 Blight, David W., 23, 27, 67, 301 Boas, Franz, 38n10, 205, 237, 243 Bond, Horace Mann, 92 Boston, 60, 97, 107, 213, 232 Bourne, Randolph Silliman, 37–40, 52, 55, 264, 271 Brandeis, Louis, 195–96, 198, 206, 212, 226, 244, 249, 282 Bridgehampton, 62, 67, 162 Briggs, Vernon, 305 business cycle, 5, 20, 98, 108, 128, 189 Cahan, Abraham, 129, 153, 188–93, 195–96, 198 California, 60, 94–95, 210, 240, 248–49, 254, 256, 263–64 Cardozo, Benjamin Nathan, 212, 249 Carter, Jimmy, 315 Charleston, 13, 84, 187 Chicago, 20, 56, 160, 168, 180, 187–88, 198–99, 201, 222, 248, 255, 259, 297, 299n13, 300, 306 cholera, 19, 43, 69, 72, 148, 155–58, 160, 163, 170–71, 177–78, 185, 243, 277

320

Index

Christians, 32, 75–76, 78, 81, 83, 86n26, 124, 129, 146–47 Cincinnati, 13, 97, 282 Civil Rights Revolution, xiii–xiv, 1–3, 5, 7–8, 10, 15, 20, 22, 24, 31, 36–37, 39, 49, 51–53, 57, 240, 256, 273–74, 280–81, 286–89, 293, 304, 306, 313–14, 316 class, 6n4, 7, 16, 21, 32, 39, 42, 45, 57–58, 59n10, 60n12, 61, 65, 91, 96, 98, 105–6, 109–111, 119–21, 142–43, 148, 156, 158, 179, 204, 212, 217, 225, 230, 237, 245, 247, 263, 268, 271, 276, 285–87, 294, 297–99, 302, 304, 307, 309, 313–14, 316. See also working classes Cober, David, 212 Cofer, Leland E., 159n10, 169–71 Coles, Robert, 296 collective identities, 7n5, 9, 11–12, 14–17, 19, 32, 34, 39, 51, 80, 90, 104–5, 111, 117, 247, 306–7, 313 Columbia, 31 common sense, 19, 34, 42, 50, 52, 74, 78, 272, 274, 287 Confederacy, 5, 10, 16, 21, 34, 96, 100–101, 129 Coolidge, Calvin, 315 Cotton, John, 81–82 Crick, Frances, 317 Crowley, Leo T., 239 Cuba, 46n26, 53, 153, 161, 164, 166, 242 cultural pluralism, 9–10, 22, 38–39, 56, 214–15, 278, 299, 316 Cumming, Hugh Smith, 159n10, 182 Daniell, David, 81, 82n19 Danzig, 168, 172–74, 176–85 Darwin, Charles, 70 Davis, David Brion, 13, 77–78, 90, 293n3, 299n13 Davis, Leon, 269

debris. See fragments and debris Debs, Eugene V., 238 DeLeon, Daniel, 232 depressions, 34, 46, 47, 98, 246 Detroit, 60 Dodd, William E.,239, 246–47 Douglass, Frederick, 45n25, 87, 101–2, 114, 116–18, 134, 270, 272, 289, 313 Drake, St. Clair, 297 Du Bois, William Eduard Burkhart, 25, 38n10, 40, 63, 67, 118–19, 196–97, 199–203, 211–12, 238, 259, 289, 293 Dubinsky, David, 222n23, 223n24, 224–25, 234, 237 Ebbets Field, 258 Einstein, Albert, 177, 194, 199 Eisenhower, Dwight, 263–64, 269 Elkins, Stanley M., 293n3, 299n13, 301 Ellis Island, 156, 170, 183 Ellison, Ralph, xiii–xiv, 302–3 emancipation, 4, 6, 32, 44, 46, 49, 67, 87, 94, 96, 99n11, 101–2, 114, 126, 129, 134, 143, 150, 286 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 140 England, 13, 15, 33, 41, 76–79, 81, 98, 136, 138, 140, 145, 168n29, 184, 204, 284. See also United Kingdom Erickson, Erik H., 296 ethnic group, xiii, 3, 11, 35–36, 39, 44n23, 47, 53n37, 57n6, 63, 77, 84, 91n34, 102, 104, 111, 116, 120–21, 197, 203–4, 206, 219, 222, 268, 278, 299n14, 300, 304, 307, 313–14, 316 ethnic history, xiv, 54, 313 ethnicity, 51–52, 68n28, 111–12, 116, 121, 134, 216–17, 219, 247, 285, 295, 307, 309, 313 Euro-American history, 4, 6, 12, 24, 91, 246, 272 Euro-American vocabulary, 52 Euro-American world, 81, 140

Index

Fanon, Frantz, 287–88 Ferkiss, Victor C., 54 Fichter, Joseph H., 297 Foner, Morris (Moe), 269 Ford, Henry, 205, 244 Forced Labor, 48, 92, 108–9, 212, 248, 280, 293 fragments and debris, 18, 32, 69, 74, 90, 100–101, 104, 111, 115, 119, 122, 124–26, 134, 139, 142, 153–54, 156, 186, 189, 193, 195, 198–99, 206, 274, 288, 307, 314 France, 22, 41, 77, 145, 147, 178, 192, 233, 275, 301, 317 Frankfurter, Felix, 206, 212, 249–50, 252, 256–57, 264, 267 Franklin, John Hope, 3, 48, 57, 106n1, 245, 258, 266, 288–89, 293–94, 301, 303, Franklin, Rosalind, 317 Fraser, John Foster, 150 Frazier, E. Franklin, 38n10, 57 Freud, Sigmund, 71–72, 277n5 Galicia, 158, 179, 265 Garfield, James A., 43 Garvey, Marcus, 41, 55, 62–64, 66, 88, 90–91, 133, 188, 192n12, 199–200, 202–4, 212, 216, 237, 246, 269, 294 Gay, Peter, 274 Geertz, Clifford, 274, 296 Geneva, 82, 212 genocide, 19, 22–23, 92, 250, 253–54, 256, 263–65, 271, 310, 315 Genovese, Eugene D., 57n7, 58, 293n3, 304 German Americans, 21, 97, 135, 187, 206, 238, 246, 266 Germany, 21–22, 23n19, 41, 92, 127, 145, 159n8, 167, 176–78, 192, 196, 200, 206, 209–211, 215, 225, 227, 233, 236–42, 246–47, 250, 253, 259, 266, 272, 283, 301, 308, 310–11

ghetto, 13, 21, 54n38, 59, 125, 128, 135, 151, 166, 198, 259, 297, 299n13, 305 Gilchrist, Harry L., 173–76, 181, 183 Glazer, Nathan, 287, 297, 302 Goldman, Emma, 133, 193n14 Gordon, Milton, 36, 57–58, 292 Graetz, Heinrich, 127 Grant, Hugh J., 160 Grant, Madison, 65 Grant, Ulysses S., 43, 113 Griggs, Sutton E., 120 Gross Isle, 185 Gutman, Herbert G., 57n6, 58, 285–87, 304 Haiti, 96 Hahn, Steve, 56–58, 78n11 Haller, Joseph, 172, 180 Halpern, Benjamin, 275–76, 278–79, 290, 309 Handlin, Oscar, 23–27, 54, 288–90, 298–300, 302–3 Harding, Warren G., 89–91, 204–5, 244 Harlan, John Marshall, 16, 110–12, 113n10 Harlem, 36, 39–40, 57, 59, 61–64, 66–67, 199, 237, 259 Harrison, Hubert,63 Hauser, Philip M., 299–300 heredity, 89, 139, 146, 154, 186, 205, 295 Herzl, Theodore, 90, 134 Heschel, Abraham, 272 Hess, Moses, 127–28, 134 hierarchical regime, 101, 143, 153, 266, 281 Higham, John, 54, 275, 277–81, 286n23, 288, 299n14, 304–313 Hilberg, Raul, 25 Hillman, Sidney, 195–96, 231–32, 234–37, 241 Hillquit, Morris, 21, 61, 73, 198

321

322

Index

Hirsch, Baron, 147 Hitler, Adolf, 24, 54n38, 211, 216, 237, 246, 255, 264, 266, 269, 271, 283n17, 296 Hofstadter, Richard, 54 Holmes, Eugene, 1n1, 187n1, Holmes, Oliver Wendell, 244, 249 Holocaust, 2, 6, 22–27, 32, 35n7, 36, 49, 50n33, 53–54, 67, 118, 253n14, 271, 274, 280–81, 283n16, 284–85, 287, 289, 291, 309–313, 315–17 Hoover, J. Edgar, 203, 205–6, 210, 239, 248, 281 Howe, Irving, 281 Hughes, Langston, 63 Hunter, Tera W., 99

Kahneman, Daniel, 17, 316 Kallen, Horace Myer, 9, 37–41, 52–53, 55–56, 62–63, 66–67, 196, 213–15, 264, 266–67, 271, 289, 292, 309n38, 313–14, 316 Katznelson, Ira, 44 Kennedy, John F., 269, 296 Kilson, Martin, 36, 37n9, 57–58 King, Martin Luther, Jr., 36, 91n34, 256, 269, 271, 274, 296, 305, 313, 315 Kinyoun, Joseph P., 161, 165 Kishinev, 24, 169 Kishinev Pogroms, 90 Kohl, Helmuth, 315 Krantz, Philip, 218

Israel, 1–2, 32, 35n7, 50, 53, 72, 107, 189, 265, 271, 275–76, 279–81, 287, 290, 307, 309, 311–13 Italy, 41, 92, 127, 214–15, 225, 227, 233, 237, 246 Ireland, 117

LaFollette, Robert M., 230–31 Lamarck, Jean-Baptiste, 70–71 Latouche, John Treville, 303 Lauterpacht, Hersch, 253, 256 Lederberg, Joshua, 316 Lehman, Herbert, 296 Lemkin, Raphael, 253–54, 256 Lenin, Vladimir, 192, 209, 216 Lerner, Max, 297, 303 Levine, Lawrence, 58, 68 Levinsky, David, 129 Levy, Louis Edward, 149–52 Lincoln, Abraham, 2, 42, 45n25, 93, 103, 129 Linson, John H., 182–185 Lippman, Walter, 195–96 Litwack, Leon, 119, 293n3 Liverpool, 188 Locke, Alain LeRoy, 37, 55, 63, 237, 294 London, Meyer, 21, 153, 238n52 Long Island, 161–62, 164–65, 180, 210, 245, 258 Louisville, Kentucky, 116, 282 Luther, Martin, 81

Jackson, Andrew, 107 Jackson, Robert, 49, 249–56, 264–65, 267, 291 James, William, 37, 277n5 Jamestown, Virginia, 6 Jefferson, Thomas, 125, 140 Jerusalem, 2, 12, 35, 77, 84, 194, 212, 272 Jewish Americans, 1n1, 6–9, 12, 14, 25, 35–36, 41, 43n20, 49–50, 53, 196, 271, 287, 315 John XXIII, Pope, 50, 272 Johnson, Andrew, 114 Johnson, James Weldon, 61 Johnson, Lyndon B., 10, 265, 269, 296, 304 Judaism, xiii, 7, 13, 31, 49, 51, 86, 122–25, 127, 129, 134, 136–37, 139, 141, 150–52, 272, 276, 290, 302

Index

Madison, 56 Madison, James, 33 Magruder, George M., 161 Manhattan, 21, 24, 36, 56, 59, 61–64, 98, 152, 160, 163–65, 180, 194, 199, 206–7, 216–17, 238, 296–97 Margoshes, Samuel, 265–67 Markel, Howard, 156, 164 Marshall, Ray, 305 Marrus, Michael, 291 Marshall, Thurgood, 3, 48, 249, 258, 301 Marx, Karl, 145, 287 Marxism, 310 Marxists, 255 Mayr, Ernst, 71 McKinley, William, 165 McReynolds, James Clark, 249 Mexican Americans, 5, 32, 242, 248, 256, 268 Mexico, 95, 104 Miller, Perry, 83 Milton, 82 Milwaukee, 35, 97, 238 minority, xiv, 1, 3, 7, 9, 12, 19, 21, 36–37, 39–40, 50, 52, 191, 209, 213, 219, 252–53, 256, 277, 290, 302, 305 Missouri, 4, 238 Montefiore, C. E., 140–41 Montefiore, Moses, 147 Morgenthau Henry,, 239 Morison, Samuel E., 276, 289 Morton, Oliver P., 93–94 Moynihan, Daniel Patrick, 285–87, 297, 309n38 multiculturalism, 10, 14–15, 22–24 Myers of Charleston, Moses, 84 nationalism, xiii, 5, 11, 35, 40, 78, 91–92, 127, 174, 192, 196, 203, 212, 229, 251, 255, 277, 279, 280, 285, 309

nationality, 3, 5–7, 11–12, 15, 39–40, 52, 65, 67, 80, 112, 134, 156, 228, 238, 247–48, 280, 312 Negro, xiii-xiv, 1n1, 3, 14n8, 37, 41, 43–44, 48, 55, 57–58, 61–66, 90–91, 118–120, 166, 187, 197, 202–3, 211, 224, 247, 258–59, 267, 269–70, 280, 292, 294–303 New England, 10, 33, 54, 78, 81, 83, 94, 104, 106–7, 115, 143–45, 158 New Orleans, 21n16, 48, 97, 203, 258 Noah, Mordechai, 123–25 North Sea, 173 Nuremberg, 1n1, 9, 22, 49, 250, 253–56, 275, 279–80, 293, 291, 310 Nuremberg Trials, 249, 253 Obama, Barack, 104n21, 297, 315–16 Old Polish Kingdom, 138–40 Palestine, 12, 41, 53, 55, 90–91, 126, 188, 194–96, 212, 215, 220, 229, 309, 235–36, 258, 268, 271, 311–12 Palmer, Mitchell R., 206 Panama Canal, 31 Paris, 85n24, 128, 173–74, 182 Parsons, Talcott, 295–98 Patterson, Orlando, 104n21 Pearl Harbor, 21, 239–40, 301 Petrograd, 207 Pettigrew, Thomas F., 297 Philadelphia, 13, 37, 40, 97, 149, 155, 166, 187, 221n19, 222, 248, 290n29 Philippines, 31, 89, 142, 244 Pittsburgh, 60, 108, 168, 180 Plessy v Ferguson, 16, 48, 110, 212, 244, 249, 264, 268 pogroms, 12, 77, 90, 174, 176, 180, 183, 210, 237 Poland, 33n5, 137, 144, 153, 167–68, 170, 172–80, 185–86, 192, 206, 210, 213, 220–21, 225, 237, 241, 247, 253, 259, 271, 297

323

324

Index

Polish Americans, 168, 173, 180, 197 Pontecorvo, Gillo, 287 Portugal, 13 Poznan, Prussian Duchy of, 138, 152, 158 Prinz, Joachim, 272 privatized nationalism, 5, 11 privatized peoplehoods, 23, 33 Prussia, 35, 159, 174, 282, 283n17 public life, 7n5, 14, 16–17, 269 Puritans, 33, 81, 106–7, 122 Quarles, Benjamin, 288, 314 Raden, Till van, 34 Randolph, A. Philip, 61–63, 199, 203, 211, 216, 240, 247–48, 265, 269, 306–7 Rawick, George, 57–58, 263, 281n14, 286–87, 293n3, 304 Reagan, Ronald, 315 Reconstruction, 4, 6, 10, 12–13, 16, 27, 31–32, 37, 43–46, 78, 87–88, 112, 238, 266, 273, 277, 292, 294 republican peoplehood, xiii, 8, 17–19, 23, 31–32, 35, 40–42, 44, 46–47, 49–51, 53, 67, 74, 103, 118, 122, 128, 151, 187, 193, 195, 238, 240, 247, 250, 252, 264, 267, 272–73, 275–76, 278–81, 284–87, 292, 304, 306, 309–310, 314 Rhode Island, 94 Riesman, David, 68 Riga, 173 Romania, 178 Rome, 31, 98, 214, 272 Roosevelt, Franklin Delano, 5, 23n19, 89, 227, 232–35, 239, 248, 254 Roosevelt, Theodore, 142, 160, 165–66, 196 Rose, Ernestine, 39–40, 62–67, 237 Roth, Henry, 61 Roth, Philip, xiv Rothschild, Nathan, 147 Russell, Richard Brevett, 269

Russia, 22, 41, 53, 54n38, 92, 138, 143– 147, 149–50, 152, 170, 178–79, 185, 188, 190, 192, 194, 207–9, 221, 236 Russian empire, 13, 123n3 Rustin, Bayard, 269, 307 Sandford, Ann, 62n18 Santanya, George, 37 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 287 Schlesinger, Jr., Arthur, 24, 282–85, 305 Schlesinger, Bernhard, 282, 284 Schlossberg, Joseph, 61–62, 196, 216, 220–24, 226, 230–37, 241 Schomburg, Arthur, 63 Scott, Emmett J., 203 Shannon, David, 53–54 Sidney, Mary, 82 Sidney, Philip, 82 Simon, Joseph, 86 Slaveland, 99–101, 108, 115, 120 Smith, Al, 239 Smith, Goldwin,133, 136–40, 149–50, 152 Smith, Henry Nash, 75n2 Snidow, Robert C., 175 Southern Nation, 31, 34, 37, 42–44, 46, 49, 52, 245, 314 Soviet Union, 10, 192, 195, 213, 215, 221, 231n39, 237, 254, 268, 271 Spain, 13, 92, 188, 236, 246 St. Louis, 97, 187, 200 Stampp, Kenneth, 278, 286–87 Steffens, Lincoln, 188n3 Stember, Charles H., 275 Stieglitz, Alfred, 196 Stone, Harlan Fiske, 248, 256, 264, 267 Strong, Richard P., 174 subculture, xiii-xiv, 11, 302–3 Sullivan, Andrew, 297 Sumner, William Graham, 42–43 Supreme Court, 9–10, 16–17, 31, 46, 50, 87, 95, 102, 108–111, 195, 204, 210, 212, 231–32, 240, 248–50, 252–54, 256–57, 263, 269, 271, 291, 315

Index

Talmud, 41, 51, 68, 75–77, 84–85, 115, 122–27, 129, 133–35, 137–42, 146–52, 190, 219, 246, 312 Taft, Howard, 88–89 Taft, William Howard, 244 Tarnopol, 175 Terminiello, Arthur, 255 Thaler, Richard, 17 Thompson, E. P., 285, 304 Tillman, Ben, 115 Tobin, Jim, 300 Touro, Judah, 147 Treitschke, Heinrich von, 137 Triangle Fire, 50, 191, 216–17 Truman, Harry, 253, 265, 269 tuberculosis, 69, 72, 155, 243 Turkey, 92 Twain, Mark, xiii, 75n2, 293, 303 Tyndale, William, 76, 81–82 typhus, 69, 72, 148, 154–56, 158, 162–64, 167–71, 173–180, 182–83, 185–86, 206, 243 Ukraine, 35n7, 170, 172, 175, 192, 209–210, 221 United Kingdom, 22, 97, 100, 147, 212, 301. See also England Vatican, 97 Vatican II, 31, 50, 272, 274 Versailles, 172, 212 Vietnam, 51, 271, 292, 305, 307 Vladeck, Baruch Charney, 91, 223 Wald, Lillian, 61, 63 Wallace, Henry, 219 Warren, Earl, 256, 263–65, 268, 273 Warsaw, 144, 168, 172–74, 177–79, 181–83, 213, 257, 259 Washington, Booker T., 15, 66, 79, 115, 127, 133, 201

Washington DC., 22, 281, 316 Watson, James D., 317 Webber, Amos, 120–21 Weber, Max, 14n8, 79n13, 287 Weimar Republic, 242, 295 Wells, Herbert. G., 15, 79 Wendall, Barret H., 37 White, Andrew Dickson, 133, 135–36, 140, 142–52 White, John C., 178 White Supremacy, 31 Wiesel, Elie, 315 Wikoff, 161, 163–66, 168, 170, 173, 179–80, 182 Williams, George Washington, 117n17, 293–94 Wilkin, Maurice, 317 Wilson, Woodrow, 33, 40, 88–89, 206, 211, 274 Wirth, Louis, 21 Wise, Isaac Mayer, 129 Wisconsin, 21, 35, 56, 198, 230, 274, 281n14, 286n22 Wolfe, Simon, 149 Woodward, C. Vann, 2–3, 26n24, 57n7, 281n14, 288, 296, 300–301, 303, 305 Worcester, Massachusetts, 35, 98n9, 120 working classes, 50, 105, 307 Xenia, Ohio, 282 Yerushalmi, Yosef Hayim, 71–72 Zaritsky, Max, 196, 220, 226–31, 234, 237 Zionism, 90, 152, 177, 196, 199, 207, 209, 212, 215–16, 223n24, 226, 229, 271, 280–81, 290, 309n38 Zweig, Arnold, 72 Zuckerman, Max, 220

325