In a series of three landmark decisions, Justice J. C. McReynolds made it clear that although he sympathized with the cultural conformists, it was his and the Court’s responsibility to uphold the principles of freedom that led to expressions of ethnic and religious diversity. In 1919, Nebraska passed a law forbidding the teaching of modern foreign languages to children between eight and sixteen. The special intention of the law, like others passed in South Dakota and Iowa, was to eliminate the German language, particularly in church-related schools run by German-Americans, but the overall effect of the law would have been to disparage the foreign languages and cultures of several other immigrant groups as well. Although the supreme courts of Iowa, Ohio, and Nebraska upheld such acts as constitutional on the broad ground that the legislature could decide what the common welfare demanded, McReynolds, speaking for the U.S. Supreme Court, said that the states had acted unconstitutionally.
The Court was sympathetic to the desire of the legislature “to foster a homogeneous people with American ideals, prepared readily to understand current discussions of civic matters….” It was cognizant of the fact that “the foreign born population is very large, that certain communities use foreign words, follow foreign leaders, move in a foreign atmosphere, and that the children are thereby hindered from becoming citizens of the most useful type.” However, while a law to prohibit the teaching of foreign languages in the schools would have been fine in ancient Sparta, where the education of males to be ideal citizens was entrusted to official guardians, it was not for the U.S. McReynolds asserted that Spartan ideas on “the relation between individual and state were wholly different from those upon which our institutions rest.” “The protection of the Constitution,” the Court insisted, “extends to all, to those who speak other languages as well as to those born with English on the tongue.”59
Two other decisions also strengthened the idea that Americans were united by their loyalty to a civic and not a religious, linguistic, or other characteristic of a tribal culture. In 1922, Oregon passed a law requiring all students to attend public schools; the intent was to stamp out Catholic and other parochial religious schools. Sued by the Society of Sisters, a Catholic order, the plaintiffs, having lost their case in the Oregon Supreme Court, appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court; they were supported by, as amici curiae, the American Jewish Committee, the Seventh-Day Adventists, and the Domestic and Foreign Missionary Society for the Protestant Episcopal Church. Justice McReynolds, and the majority opinion, upheld the right of Americans to send their children to private or parochial schools. In what are essentially private matters, the Court ruled, diversity is protected by the Constitution. The freedoms given all Americans prevent the state from taking actions “to standardize its children.… The child is not the mere creature of the state; those who nurture him and direct his destiny have the right, coupled with the high duty, to recognize and prepare him for additional obligation.”60
The conception of American identity as based on membership in a civic culture had an even more difficult test three years later, in 1926, when the Court heard arguments on a law in the Territory of Hawaii on whether private language schools were free to shape their own curricula if they complied with the requirements of the public schools. Even some empathic social workers and teachers in Hawaii were worried that Nisei children, by the mid-1920s more numerous than Caucasian children in the public schools, might resist Americanization. A large proportion of Japanese-American children continued to speak Japanese in their homes; a majority attended Japanese-language schools, sometimes getting up as early as four a.m. to go to schools that also taught Japanese values, customs, and history; some were even taught to venerate the emperor of Japan as a semideity.
The Hawaii legislature attempted to regulate the language schools through strict examinations for teachers and oversight of curricula. After several years of litigation in the territorial and federal courts, the U.S. Supreme Court held that the laws regarding the language schools were unconstitutional. After noting that there were 163 foreign-language schools in the territory (nine Korean, seven Chinese, and the remainder Japanese), Justice McReynolds found, this time under the Fifth Amendment, that an action by the territory to deprive parents of the right to raise their children through special language schools could not be sanctioned even though such schools encouraged an understanding and love of foreign ancestral languages and cultures.61 The practical effect of these three decisions was to encourage American patriotism not by stamping out old-culture sensibilities, as the cultural conformists wished and as many of the children of immigrants actually tried to do, but by giving legal permission to immigrants to carry on their ethnic traditions.
When the Danish immigrant journalist Jacob A. Riis concluded his autobiography in 1902 with a panegyric to the American flag and the ideals for which it stood, he also wrote of his love for the Danish countryside and of the Danish king. But as a Scandinavian he had not faced the attacks of the cultural conformists as did immigrants from eastern and southern Europe one or two decades later.62
Explaining how the hyphen unites an old identity with a new one, Slovenian-born journalist Louis Adamic said that the chemistry of the hyphen intensified both feelings. In his autobiography, My America, Adamic told of returning to the village in which he was born and being asked, “Do you consider yourself an American or a Slovenian?” The answer came swiftly that Adamic believed himself to be an American, “not only legally and technically but actually,” adding, “I sometimes think I am more American than a great many of them.” Then Adamic must have confused many of the villagers when he remarked, “I am also a Slovenian … and I would say that I am an American of Slovenian birth; but, if you like it better, you can consider me as a Slovenian who went to America when he was not quite fifteen and became an American.… there is no conflict in me between my original Slovenian blood or background and my being an American.”63 Even though he lost fluency in his mother tongue, slovenstvo (which means deep love for and loyalty to Slovenian traditions) had become a powerful part of his being. It was the genius of America, he said, to give room for him to find and give “the essentials of it [slovenstvo] wider and fuller expression than I could probably ever have found had I remained at home.”64
The hyphen had triumphed, not in defiance of Americanism but as an expression of it. Paradoxically, the arrival of millions of immigrants from Europe and hundreds of thousands from Asia strengthened the Jeffersonian idea that Americans are held together by common beliefs and practices in self-government. The cultural and racial conformists kept looking to Europe for models of national identity and not to the American experience itself. When Henry Pratt Fairchild argued in 1926 that the melting pot had been a huge mistake, he also insisted that the Americanization movement was bound to fail because it was based on the idea that assimilation could be produced by a program of citizenship. Because he did not understand that the civic culture was the unifying culture of Americans, he was certain that the newcomers would, when put to the test, revert to an atavistic allegiance to their ancestral nations. To make his point clear, he asked:
Suppose that you, John Smith, native American of old New England stock … had received an attractive offer of a business position in Germany.… you soon became fluent in the language … attended German opera, read German books, took part in religious services in German churches, spent your evenings in German beer gardens, and by every means got as near to the heart of the German people as possible. Your children, born in Germany, went to German schools, played with German children, spoke German more readily than English, were never taken to visit the United States.65
Then Fairchild asked, suppose war broke out between the U.S. and Germany. Would your children fight for the Germans? To Fairchild, the question was rhetorical. Of course, he insisted, John Smith would not urge his children to enlist in the German army. He would expect his children to feel allegiance to the homeland of their ancestors, “and however painful the act of turning their backs upon friends and associations, to respond unreservedly to the ultimate appeal of nationality.”66
It did not work that way in the U.S. Crowding into their own ghettoes, some Italian immigrants wore horns of gold or coral along with a religious medal under their shirts.67 But that did not keep them from participating in citizenship classes given by the Sons of Italy