As Gunther Peck (2000) has shown in his impressive work on racial categories in the early twentieth-century American West, immigrant racial status was far from stable or permanent. Immigrant laborers, as well as established communities, were caught in shifting racial locations. While participation in labor unions, such as the Western Federation of Miners, could render immigrants white (220), discrimination in residential accommodations through city covenants refuted their whiteness. Transience “was almost always a marker of nonwhiteness in the West in 1900,” although “being a member of a residentially persistent community did not guarantee one whiteness” (166). Conversely, middle-class respectability bestowed the privileges of whiteness, though these rights were withdrawn to punish immigrants belonging to politically active nationalities. Whiteness, therefore, functioned as a coveted social space whose boundaries were tightly regulated:
There is much similarity between the case of the negroes and that of the modern immigrants. To be sure, the newcomers are for the most part white-skinned instead of colored … yet in the mind of the average American, the modern immigrants are generally regarded as inferior peoples—races he looks down on, and with which he does not wish to associate in terms of social equality…. The business of the alien is to go into the mines, the foundries, the sewers, the stifling air of factories and work shops, out on the roads and railroads in the burning sun of summer, or the driving sleet and snow. If he proves himself a man, and rises above his station, and acquires wealth, and cleans himself up—very well, we receive him after a generation or two. But at present he is far beneath us, and the burden of proof rests with him. (Fairchild 1911, 237)
Incorporating racist assumptions in assimilationist thought, this passage is paradigmatic of the kind of “progressive racism” (Michaels 1995) that was directed against turn-of-the-century southeastern European immigrants. Moreover, by linking race, class, gender, and the nation, this commentary underlines the pervasiveness of social Darwinism in narratives of assimilation. The assimilation of the immigrant is framed generationally, as a test to biological fitness. The author builds on a central motif of what Werner Sollors (1986) calls the “genetics of salvation.” According to this concept, American identity is “safely and easily received” by the native-born by virtue of birth and descent, “but [it is] something that foreign-born workers would have to strive long and hard to achieve” (88). Here, the labor conditions of industrial capitalism test racial immigrant fitness. The transformation of wage labor, a class location associated with nonwhiteness, into middle-class respectability, a sign of republican whiteness, mirrors racial inclusion. Not unlike the Protestant covenant with God, material wealth guarantees immigrant national salvation.
The making of usable ethnic pasts at the time constituted a precarious cultural project, one undertaken in the face of severe constraints imposed by the dominant society. This was especially true in the turbulent years following the First World War, when the volatile contingency of racial meanings and the fluidity of cultural and political immigrant affiliations in the early years of immigration turned into rigid patterns of identity ascription. American nationalism increasingly turned to militant strategies of conformity and racist policies of exclusion. Confronted with an acute domestic economic crisis, the rise of communism abroad, an increasingly powerful domestic unionism, vast cultural diversity, extensive urban riots, and homegrown terrorist acts, the federal government politicized ethnic identity. Appointing directors of Americanization to the Bureau of Education and the Department of the Interior and establishing a National Americanization Committee, the state launched a “crusade” of “intense Americanism” known as 100 percent Americanization (King 2000, 90). Aggressively embraced by such civic and patriotic organizations as the Daughters of the American Revolution, the National Security League, and the American Legion, the movement castigated immigrants for retaining their cultures. In addition, it also branded working-class unionism, which it often conflated with communism and anarchism, as un-American. This deployment of Americanism as an ideology to extinguish diversity and neutralize working-class activism demarcated the boundaries of whiteness in relation to Americanness, understood as uncompromising cultural and political conformity to the middle-class values of 100 percent Americanism. A state-sponsored “class vigilance” (Jacobson 1998, 72) endorsed by Congress and the media culminated in the arrest and eventual deportation of alleged foreign immigrant radicals, in violation of their civil rights and due process of law (Archdeacon 1983, 169).
This discourse of whiteness challenged immigrant narratives of continuity like the one performed at the U.S. Treasury. Greek exceptionalism, the claim that the Greeks were heirs to the ancient Greek civilization and, as such, were distinct from their southeastern counterparts (Anagnostu 1999), was dismissed by racist nationalists:
The modern Greeks like to have visitors believe that they are descended straight from the true Greeks of the days of Pericles; but if they are, then every Greek bootblack in New England is descended straight from Plymouth Colony. The Greeks of to-day—except on some of the Greek islands, which have been comparatively free from invasion and immigration—are descended from Asiatic and African slaves, Italians, old Bulgarians, Slavs, Gepidæ, Huns, Herulians, Avars, Egyptians, Jews, Illyrians, Arabs, Spaniards, Walloons, Franks, Albanians, and several other races. History has an unfortunate but incurable habit of repeating itself—and a word to the wise ought to be better than a jab with an eight-inch hatpin. (Roberts 1922, 232)
Popular classifications similarly placed the Greeks as undifferentiated members of a racially inferior Mediterranean race. “The driver mounted his quickly emptied wagon, with a curse upon the ‘Dagos,’ and the crowd informally discussed for a while the immigration question; its verdict being that it is time to shut our doors against the Greeks, for they are a poor lot from which to make good American citizens” (Steiner 1906, 283). The racialization of the new immigrants was convenient for those racists who appropriated anthropological typologies of European morphological variations and turned them into racial hierarchies. The strict morphological classification of the European people into three races—the Teutonic, or Nordic, race (which included northern Europeans), the Alpine race (which included southern Germans, Celts, and Slavs), and the Mediterranean race (which included the people of southern Europe) produced by the “scientific gospel” of the era, Ripley’s The Races of Europe (1915)—was appropriated by racist thinkers to reflect inherent racial inequalities (Bendersky 1995, 137). Thus, in the terminology of the era, the Nordic “long-headed dolichocephalic races from the zoological zone of Northern Europe” were posited as the superior type of all European races (ibid.).
While the narrative of progressive racism provided a location, albeit an ambiguous one, for southeastern European immigrants in the political economy of whiteness, nativist racism, in contrast, systematically denied them one. Racist nationalists drew immutable boundaries between racialized citizenship and the immigrants, barring the latter from participation in the polity. Access to whiteness here became a utopian impossibility, for the immigrants were seen as organically alien substances to the national body: “An ostrich could assimilate a croquet ball or a cobble-stone with about the same ease that America assimilated her newcomers from Central and Southeastern Europe” (Roberts 1922, 4). Racist nationalists dehumanized Greek immigrants, fixing them outside whiteness, even outside common humanity. The following announcements, which appeared in restaurants and newspaper advertisements, speak volumes to the extent of Greek humiliation: “No sailors, dogs, or Greeks allowed” (Akrotirianakis 1994, 26) and “John’s Restaurant, Pure American. No Rats, No Greeks” (Leber 1972, 104).
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