Of all the new European groups, the Jews provided the sharpest refutation of those who argued that American identity was based on one kind of religion and/or culture. In the U.S., Jews would build hospitals, orphanages, cemeteries, schools, fraternal societies, and communal institutions just as they had in Poland, Russia, and other European countries. But now there was a difference. For the first time in the history of their diaspora they experienced not mere toleration as a group but the protection of equal rights as individuals. Often they felt the sting of anti-Semitism, and many drifted or wrenched themselves away from the older Orthodox practices and from the Yiddish language, partly because of the pressures they felt to be culturally like most Americans. Those who maintained a fierce pride in their Jewish identity illustrated Tocqueville’s principle that “patriotism grows by the exercise of civil rights.” Jewish leaders who in 1916 filed a complaint against the School Committee of Boston because Jewish children were forced to sing Christmas carols in the public schools argued on grounds of patriotic civic culture principles, including the First Amendment.72
Old-world traits were transplanted, to borrow from the title of the first major sociological analysis of immigration, but the authors of the study argued that assimilation was inexorable in the United States.73 Robert Park and Herbert Miller were right with respect to political assimilation. But they underestimated the ability of ethnic-Americans to nurture, sustain, and re-create their religious and cultural inheritance in new forms of ethnicity in an ever-changing kaleidoscope. Horace Kallen, the son of a rabbi from Germany, not only saw that possibility but argued its merit in a 1915 article in the New York weekly, The Nation.74 Even Kallen at first did not understand the totally voluntary nature of ethnic-Americanism when he argued that it was necessary for the U.S. to become “a federation or commonwealth of nationalities” in order to ensure cultural democracy.
Such a federation was out of the question. If it had occurred, the very basis of American unity—equal rights of individuals—would have been vitiated for the more traditional approach of other nations to group pluralism in which the identity and rights of the individual are derived from his or her membership in a group. That Kallen did not grasp the essence of voluntary pluralism—no one used the phrase—as a diversity based on the free choice of individuals united by a common civic culture was hardly surprising, since it had never existed in his or anyone else’s experience before. But Kallen, influenced by the criticism of John Dewey, whose commitment was to individuality and diversity, quickly backed away from the appeal for a “federal republic” of nationalities or “a federation or commonwealth of national cultures.” By 1924, he was using the term “cultural pluralism” and defining it as a “fellowship of freedom and cooperation” that would result in a “national fellowship of cultural diversities,” describing, in effect, what is here called voluntary pluralism.75
The eastern and southern European immigrants answered Jefferson’s question as to whether the country would become “more turbulent” because of massive immigration. The U.S. was not notably more turbulent because of their arrival. Most of the major episodes of internal violence in American history—Shay’s Rebellion, the Whiskey Rebellion, Dorr’s Rebellion, and the Civil War itself—occurred long before they came, and most of the labor and racial violence of the twentieth century would have occurred without them. Their presence actually helped to make Americans more aware of the civic basis of their national identity. In the period of heaviest migration from eastern and southern Europe (1881-1924), the Washington Monument was dedicated (1884), the centennial of the adoption of the Constitution was celebrated (1887), the pledge of allegiance to the American flag was adopted (1892), and the Lincoln Memorial was dedicated (1922).
Entry into the U.S. had been made much more difficult with the passage of the Immigration Law of 1924 based on a new version of the old Massachusetts idea of excluding people thought to be difficult to assimilate because of their nationality and religion. But the gates were kept open long enough to prove that the Pennsylvania idea worked for the nation. Immigrants actually helped to strengthen and more sharply define the civic culture, encouraging a voluntary ethnic pluralism within the framework of civic unity that was different from anything the world had ever known.
Part Two
OUTSIDE THE CIVIC CULTURE
The Coercive Pluralisms
The American minorities can be placed on a kind of color wheel. For example, when we think of the American boy, we don’t usually think of a Spanish, Turkish, a Greek or a Mexican type, still less of an Oriental type. We usually think of someone who is kind of a cross between the Teuton and the Celt.
—JAMES BALDWIN
European immigrants and their children, most of whom enthusiastically embraced the civic culture and its system of voluntary pluralism, kept non-Europeans from membership in the American polity by maintaining other systems of pluralism. The first such system was tribal pluralism. Euro-American settlers regarded native American Indians as different and lesser creatures, living in different societies, worshiping different gods, embracing different myths. Sometimes Indians were receptive to the European newcomers: Indians* along the Carolina coast were friendly in their first encounters with the Europeans. Other Native Americans were hostile, as when Powhaton captured John Smith near Jamestown in 1607. Some whites were assimilated into Indian tribes, and some Native Americans assimilated into Euro-American society. But, generally, the boundaries between them were rigidly maintained by mutual desire.
Indians often resisted the presence or incursion of whites, and most of the whites believed the Indians were savages. With Euro-Americans gaining in numbers and power, they were in a position to decide whether tribal pluralism would be based on mutual accommodation and negotiation or on force, and they increasingly opted for force. Native Americans, with few exceptions, did not seek admission to the Euro-American civic culture. Whites could not enslave the Indians or otherwise compel their labor, and they did not want them to mix in their own society.
One of the most fundamental constants in human history is the desire of insiders to arrange for outsiders—“outside” usually marked by ethnicity, language, religion, or some combination of these—to do the most menial work. Euro-Americans imported African slaves, thereby creating a coerced labor force of blacks* and their descendants throughout most of American history under a system of slavery, of involuntary caste pluralism. Spokespersons for African-Americans, who had lost their ancestral African cultures, talked repeatedly with bitterness of their exclusion from the civic culture and, for the most part, claimed their right to belong to it. Native Americans, while defeated and oppressed, remained in their own cultures. Caste pluralism, in the form of slavery, was maintained in the South up to Emancipation and in the form of severe segregation up to the Second World War and beyond. Its effects lingered even after systematic segregation was substantially dismantled everywhere.
Sojourner