Italians and Jews Claim Their American Identity
LaGuardia was thoroughly assimilated. No one would necessarily know that he was foreign born. But there were some who actually claimed an American identity even though they were fresh off the boat. What accounted for the fact that foreign-speaking and -acting newcomers felt a direct relationship to the founding fathers? Lincoln had already given that answer in 1860 when he pointed out that though immigrants could not claim ancestors who made the Revolution or founded the republic, they “felt a part of us” because those who wrote the ideals expressed in the Declaration of Independence meant them for all people for all time. That is why the newcomers had the right to claim them as forefathers “as though they were the blood of the blood and flesh of the flesh of the men who wrote the Declaration.”48
Perhaps Lincoln understood so well because he wanted German votes, or perhaps because of his friendship with Carl Schurz, who had spoken on “True Americanism” at Faneuil Hall only a year earlier, or because of his own wisdom. Whatever the reason, Lincoln understood that generations of newcomers from all parts of the globe spoke of “our forefathers, who brought forth this nation” as if they were truly related to the heroes of the Revolution and the early republic, just as Jews and non-Jewish guests speak on Passover of coming out of Egypt from slavery as if they were physically there in the desert about fifteen hundred years before Christ’s birth. American ideals and principles were universal and could be claimed by anyone, as could the symbols, rituals, and heroes connected to those ideals. Crèvecoeur had written of “our alma mater.’” An Irish immigrant marveled at “our glorious Constitution.” Schurz spoke of “our institutions.”
The eastern and southern Europeans claimed American heroes and legends as theirs, too. The scions of Brahmin families in New England often looked at the newcomers and thought that they could not possibly understand all that had gone into the making of free American institutions. To Henry Adams in 1911, a new society was being formed, and he felt powerless to deal with it “and its entire unconsciousness that I … or George Washington ever existed.”49 Adams totally misunderstood the power of the ideas of his New England ancestors. But only a few years later, a young Jewish immigrant woman, Mary Antin, wrote of “our forefathers” in a series of articles in the Atlantic Monthly. Writing that “George Washington himself could not mean more than I when he said, ‘my country’ after I once felt it,” she explained that “for the country was for all citizens, and I was a citizen, and when we stood up to sing ‘America!’ I shouted the words with all my might.”50 Antin would walk the steps of the Boston public library, not far from her tenement home, lingering to read the carved inscription: Public Library—Built By The People—Free To All. Calling it her “palace” because she was a citizen, she would say to herself repeatedly as she watched the scholars and the “fine-browed women” and their children going in and out of the library, “this is mine … this is ours.”51
Probably Antin did not know that Asian immigrants were ineligible for citizenship, although she wrote of the boys in her neighborhood making fun of a “Chinaman.” Perhaps she did not know of the decimation of the Indians, and that those who lived on reservations were still ineligible for citizenship, or of the misery of many native Hawaiians following annexation of the islands by the U.S. She must have been aware that most blacks were denied even the most elemental of rights, including the right to vote, through systematic oppression and intimidation throughout the South and even in many places in the North. But she did not mention blacks. She certainly had knowledge of the mounting opposition of Anglo-Americans to immigrants and immigration, and of the deep resentment they felt against such upstarts as herself, a Jew, no less, a member of the hated tribe, claiming to be an American on equal terms with others.
Only six years after publication of Antin’s book, another Russian Jewish immigrant, Jacob Abrams, when questioned about his anarchist beliefs by Judge Henry Delamar Clayton, Jr., a fifth-generation American, began his reply, “When our forefathers of the American Revolution—” At that point, Judge Clayton exclaimed, “Your what?” Again, Abrams said, “My forefathers,” whereupon the judge asked incredulously if he meant to refer “to the fathers of this nation as your forefathers?”52
Clayton did not believe that the First Amendment was for naturalized citizens. Two years before the Abrams case, when he empaneled a grand jury in New York City, the judge had declared that “naturalized citizens who unfairly criticize the government should get off the face of the earth, or at least go back to the country they left…. I have no sympathy with any naturalized citizen who is given to carping criticism of this Government.”53 But Abrams was not even a citizen. How dare he speak of “our forefathers”! Twice Clayton asked, “Why don’t you go back to Russia?”54 Later in the trial, the judge recalled Abrams’s use of the term “our forefathers”: “I said, What? You were born in Russia and came here four or five years ago and not a citizen, an anarchist, who can never become a citizen. Our forefathers … why, just look at it.”55 Abrams undoubtedly sensed that the forefathers’ ideals were his.
The ardent patriotism of immigrant Mary Antin became commonplace, as Jewish, Greek, Polish, and other ethnic organizations sponsored naturalization classes and “I Am an American Day” and encouraged newcomers, especially their children, to participate in the civic life of their communities. But the claiming of America was much less dramatic for the vast majority of eastern and southern European immigrants, a large portion of whom were too busy surviving to even apply for naturalization.
Salvatore DeMeo was more typical of most immigrants than Mary Antin, although DeMeo also began acting like an American even before he became a citizen, despite his trips to and from Italy. Having made deposits regularly in the Waltham Savings Bank during the 1920s, he had accumulated nearly four thousand dollars in 1929, only three months after his last return from Italy. After the onset of the Depression and the closing of the banks, he quickly discovered that he had rights under Massachusetts law to recover some money from the Waltham Trust Company, another bank in which he had funds, and then in liquidation. He joined other depositors in a legal struggle and recovered $408.60, or 74.4 percent of his original balance, facts I discovered from papers found in the cigar box with George Washington’s profile stamped on its cover. DeMeo and millions like him quietly went about the business of becoming Americans, even as they maintained some of the religious practices, culinary preferences, and family values of the old country. In that respect, they were no different than the Anglo-Americans themselves, with their Presbyterian and Anglican rites, scones, puddings, and English and Scottish music and dance. Cultural and religious prejudices were commonplace among all groups, but the prejudices of the Anglo-Americans had greater significance because they had more power of all kinds, including cultural power.
Randolph Bourne, a rebellious descendant of English settlers, wrote in 1916, at a time of growing hostility toward newcomers from southern and eastern Europe, that “the truth is that no more tenacious cultural allegiance to the mother country has been shown by any alien nation than by the ruling class of Anglo-Saxon descendants in these American states. English snobberies, English religion, English literary styles, English literary references and canons, English ethics, English superiorities, have been the cultural food we have drunk in from our mothers’ breasts.”56
Strengthening the Civic Culture Through Voluntary Pluralism
Those who thought of themselves as charter members could not logically have their political ideology and deny cultural diversity too. The ideology that led to First Amendment freedoms and Fourteenth Amendment protections ensured the development of cultural diversity. Even amid the ethnic and religious bigotry of what John Higham called “the tribal Twenties,”57 as in the mining town of West Frankfurt in southern Illinois, where crowds rushed into the Italian district, “dragged cowering residents from their homes, clubbed and stoned them, and set fire to their dwellings,”58 a white and essentially Anglo-Saxon U.S. Supreme