The American Kaleidoscope. Lawrence H. Fuchs

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

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

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

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

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

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

      In the very year in which DeMeo began taking his citizenship course, 1930, President Herbert Hoover responded to a criticism from Italian-born mayor Fiorello LaGuardia of New York by telling him, “you should go back to where you belong and advise Mussolini on how to make good honest citizens in Italy. The Italians are predominantly our murderers and boodeggers … like a lot of other foreign spawn, you do not appreciate the country which supports and tolerates you.”⁴⁷ It was an outrageous expression of bigotry against a man who, in addition to being a distinguished mayor of the largest and most important city in the country, had flown in the