3-31-09, 11:53 am
Editor's Note: Gerald Meyer is the co-editor of The Lost World of Italian-American Radicalism and the author of Vito Marcantonio: Radical Politician, 1902-1954. In this interview, Meyer discusses his article 'The Cultural Pluralist Response to Americanization: Horace Kallen, Randolph Bourne, Louis Adamic, and Leonard Covello,' which appeared in the recent issue of Socialism and Democracy.
PA: In your article “The Cultural Pluralist Response to Americanization,” you talk about how the first advocates of cultural pluralism resisted the early 20th century concept of Americanization and the concept of America as a melting pot. Please explain for us what the melting pot idea was all about, its origins and how it was used as a class ideology.
GERALD MEYER: Very briefly, the whole theory of cultural pluralism can be defined as a belief – a conviction – that the cultures of immigrants, particularly their languages, should be encouraged, sustained and developed, and not looked upon as something that should be erased and denigrated in any way, and that that would create a more varied and democratic culture. That was the basic concept, that there was no valid reason to assault the cultures of the immigrants. Americanization failed to see the benefits and values that were embedded in these various cultures.
Cultural pluralism did not develop so much on its own, I think, as much as in reaction to Americanization, which developed as a response to the mass immigrations that occurred starting around 1880. Until the end of World War I, there were mass influxes of European immigrants from Eastern Europe and Italy. That number of immigrants had never arrived in America before, except for the Irish around the time of the Famine. Other than that, immigration to United States was really remarkably gradual and mostly consisted of people similar to the “old-stock,” white population, that is Protestant and northwestern European, including a great many Scotch Irish (the Scots who settled in Northern Ireland), enormous numbers of them, as well as British people, and of course the Irish starting with the Famine, as well as Germans. These were all people who resembled the white population culturally, linguistically, and religiously – at least in two out of those three categories and very often three.
For these groups, the process of adjustment in America wasn’t too disjunctive, and it didn’t create a very big reaction, except again for the Irish when they arrived, but with that exception immigration wasn’t something that produced a lot of conflict. But with the new immigration, starting in 1880, there was really an incredible reaction to it. Here were people, very few of whom were Protestant – they were either Roman Catholic or Eastern Orthodox, or Jewish, and they were culturally very different. They were poorer. They didn’t speak English. They were Slavs or Italians or Yiddish-speaking Jews, and quite a few of them were radical. Also they arrived in very large numbers. They represented a qualitative and quantitative phenomenon that disturbed the native population and caused them to react in hostile ways.
Because of this, what developed in America was the doctrine of Americanization, which branched out into every aspect of American life, but it was particularly centered in the public schools, using the public schools as a mechanism for acculturating the immigrants and coercing the immigrants to abandon and deny their original cultures and adopt the American culture. What that meant was English only – that there would only be a single language, and that in all kinds of areas, whether it be food or culture, or whatever it might be, where American standards would prevail. After that process, really the only aspects of their cultures that would be retained were their religions and some food customs. This does account, I think, for the very great degree of religiosity in the United States, which is far greater than any other similar country. This has to do, I think, with the process of Americanization we are talking about.
PA: But, as you argue in your article, people didn't accept this push to conformity without resistance. Please explain.
MEYER: Starting around World War I, for the first time you begin to see a reaction to this. It starts with an individual who has been fairly forgotten, Horace Kallen, whose name has pretty much disappeared from view, wrote a very apt two-part article in The Nation magazine on democracy in the America (“Democracy Versus the Melting Pot”) in which he challenged Americanization root and branch. It was quite unusual for a single magazine article to undertake such a deconstruction – as some would call it today – of a whole ideological structure supported by the country's most powerful institutions.
What Kallen points out are a couple of remarkable, perhaps even obvious truths, that were there in plain sight, but I think he was one of the few who really saw and articulates them. Kallen wrote that, in fact, the United States was a cosmopolitan society, that in almost all the major cities and even entire states, particularly in the upper Midwest (such as Minnesota, Wisconsin and North Dakota) at least half the population was first and second generation, with large amounts of their original cultures intact and operating. So the question was why should that be eliminated? How could they be eliminated?
In these two articles, Kallen really begins to question the idea of Americanization. What he says is very insightful. For instance, he observes that when immigrants move from a newspaper in their language of origin to an American newspaper, they move from a newspaper where there is culture, interest in science, and discussion of world politics, to a tabloid which is filled with scandal and really nothing of any substance. There is a kind of debasement that occurs at the cultural level, and there is no gain in this for the immigrants and their children. They are not gaining anything from this. They are losing their original culture, but they are entering American culture at the lowest level imaginable. Kallen saw, without using the term himself, the importance of cultural rights and the value of a cosmopolitan society, a multi-ethnic society, but didn't go much beyond this.
PA: Another person you discuss at length is social critic Randolph Bourne, who really began to emphasize the 'melting pot' concept as a class ideology. Can you explain his views?
MEYER: Kallen’s ideas are picked up and brought to a much different level by Randolph Bourne, who is a fascinating figure and arguably one of the greatest essayists in American history, and who unfortunately died young. Bourne was very radical and moving towards Bolshevism before he died in the influenza epidemic in 1918. He supported the Bolshevik revolution and had a very radical antiwar position, which isolated and hurt him professionally a great deal. Bourne picks up from where Kallen left off, who later became a Zionist and Social Democrat, and was never terribly radical.
But Bourne is really radical: culturally radical, politically radical. Bourne really takes this all to another level. He proposes a couple of theses, which are very meaty and very provoking, and also very important for the left. He says, for the first time, I think, that Americanization is really a rightwing ideology, and that the purpose of Americanization is to corral the immigrants into the dominant culture, to disempower them, to neuter them, to prevent them from asserting themselves. Kallen didn’t present it in that way. Bourne really identifies the basic thrust, the energy behind Americanization – that it serves the purposes of the ruling class, who are threatened by the immigrants, because the immigrants, after all, were almost universally working class. There was now this great mass of workers and proletarians in the cities. They felt threatened by them, and they felt they could not be controlled if they were outside the general culture. Bringing them into the general culture linguistically and otherwise would allow the dominant group to gain control.
Bourne does something else, because he is really a cultural critic. He makes a very brilliant attack against American culture. He says there really isn’t an American culture – it doesn’t exist. Therefore, the idea of acculturating immigrants is an absurdity, because there is no culture for them to be acculturated into. Fundamentally what the United States had, at that time, was a culture in the South, which no one would want to suggest anyone should be acculturated into – the culture derived from slavery – or the Anglo-Saxon culture of New England – Boston, Emerson and the rest – which really was dying out. There was really no authentic American culture that met the new conditions of the new America that had developed out of industrialization and the influx of immigrants. Bourne felt that a true American culture – a great culture – could only develop out of a multicultural, culturally pluralist America. I think that is really the most startling statement. And then he dies.
PA: You address the role of the left and working-class movements in promoting cultural integrity as a means of building class solidarity. How did this develop?
MEYER: What is critical to see here is that the ideology of Americanization was completely and organically linked to anti-radicalism and particularly to targeting foreign-born radicals. There is a very long history of this in America, going to back to the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798. To a remarkable extent the Palmer raids were directed almost entirely against foreign-born radicals. That continued apace throughout the 20s. What is noteworthy, however, apart from the, problem of xenophobia and nativism, is that this period of repression was in response to something that has been a little difficult for radicals in America, communists and socialists, to pay a lot of attention to. But the fact of the matter is that to an amazing extent the radical movement in America was made up of foreign-born people.
This was most true the Communist Party, where 90 percent of its membership in the 1920s was foreign-born, 9-out-of-10. Something similar to that was happening with the Socialist Party and the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). I think there is a big misunderstanding about that – of assuming, that the IWW was somehow a nativist radical movement, but that the Communists and Socialists were somehow brought in from Europe. That is really not so. The mass base of the IWW was actually largely composed of foreign-born workers, and the Socialist Party was too. So that was a mass base of socialism and communism, and that doesn’t change much really even going into the 1930s. It is not until the late 1930s that even half the membership of the Communist Party was native-born. Something very similar was true for the Socialist Party – of course it was much smaller, and by that time the IWW was not really a factor anymore because it had no mass presence.
Cultural pluralism, which was under tremendous attack and became very marginalized in the 1920s, was resuscitated in the 1930s around the Popular Front. This is something which has obviously not been studied much, but I think you can identify it in the revival of cultural pluralism in the US the part that the concepts of nationality and minority rights played in the Communist movement worldwide. The concepts of nationality and minority rights, I think, came out of Stalin’s writings on the national question. It really comes from that – the question of what constitutes a nation. A nation must have territory, among other things, a common history, and a common culture, etc. But for those people that don’t have territory, but have a history and a culture are deemed minorities with cultural rights. This theory became part of the politics of the Communist movement. This policy was in fact implemented in the Soviet Union. I think one of the greatest accomplishments of the Soviets was the recognition of minorities, and all the ethnographic, linguistic and educational work that was done, all of which was institutionalized and brought into the legal structure and the social and cultural life of the Soviet Union. A lot of the Soviet Union’s nationality policy was transferred to other parts of the world.
It is true that in the Treaty of Versailles, with the creation of the new states, there were protocols for the protection of minorities. But it also became part of the political mission of the Communist Party. I think that is among the greatest accomplishments of the Communist Party here. They saw that a key part of the radical agenda was the protection of the foreign born legally and politically, but also as groups having cultural rights. This became institutionalized with the very large fraternal organizations that the Communist Party fostered and led, such as the International Workers Order, which coalesced 14 different nationality and one General (that is, English-speaking) sections. There were also some nationality groups outside the IWO which were connected to the Communist Party. And then there were all the foreign-language newspapers that the Communist Party sponsored.
The individual most associated, I think, with all of this is again a figure that really deserves a great deal more attention, Louis Adamic. He was Slovenian and a very fine and prolific writer, a speaker and an organizer, and someone much associated with the initiatives made by the Communist Party. Later he became president of the Pan-Slav Congress during World War II. Louis Adamic wrote “30 Million New Americans,” which was a very important piece in Harpers in 1934. From 1940 onwards he served as editor of the magazine Common Ground. Adamic’s My America went through as many as 10 English-language editions each. A Native’s Return was chosen as a Book of the Month Club selection. But Adamic was a victim of McCarthyism and committed suicide as a result of losing everything in the McCarthy era. He is not someone who is remembered today as much as he deserves, because his ideas on immigrant culture and cultural pluralism are still very relevant.
In an article I recently wrote on the question of cultural pluralism and multiculturalism, I look at the forerunners of this movement, and the final person I wrote about is someone I feel very close to, Leonard Covello. Leonard Covello was an immigrant from Southern Italy and whose family came to America in about 1890, when he was nine, and settled in Italian Harlem, which was the largest Little Italy in the United States in that period. He is very dear to me because he was the mentor of Vito Marcantonio, the great radical congressman. Marcantonio was his student in high school, and they developed a lifelong relationship. Covello didn’t have any children and Marcantonio’s father died when he was in high school, so they had a very very close relationship. They lived in row houses side-by-side on the main street of Italian Harlem. Covello is a great figure. He was the founding principal of Benjamin Franklin High School in East Harlem, which was based on his educational philosophy of community-centered education. But as a part of community-centered education, Covello was also a cultural pluralist, and an advocate of the integration of their first languages and cultures into the curriculum of the high schools in immigrant communities. Both Covello and Adamic connected theory with practice. They were both theoreticians and practitioners. While Covello was implementing these concepts in Benjamin Franklin High School, he was also writing and speaking and living in the community, which I think is very important – as Marcantonio also did. He never left the community.
What both Adamic and Covello were very concerned about in terms of multiculturalism, aside from the question of rights and culture, was that it is very necessary for the relationship between the first- and second-generations to continue, and that with Americanization there is an implicit message that the original cultures are inferior. This creates a conflict between the parents and the children, with the parents losing authority and the children either becoming in a way deracinated and decultured, or chauvinistic and not really able to play a healthy, progressive role in the nation.
Adamic and Covello are really marvelous figures, and they are not honored, they are not noticed, and I think their work and the general concepts of cultural pluralism and their connections with the left have been severed, have been attenuated, and to a very large extent lost.
PA: In your article you also compare and distinguish cultural pluralist theory and practice with what became popular in the 1980s and 1990s and is known as multiculturalism. Could you talk a little about that – about what distinguishes the two in your mind and why the distinction is important?
MEYER: Cultural pluralism was a casualty of the McCarthy era. It really became very much identified with the left. It came under heavy attack and the manifestations of cultural pluralism begin to disappear. There was a very specific attack on the foreign born in the McCarthy era, which I think has not been examined closely enough or understood well. It occurred alongside the deportations and threats of deportation that took place in the McCarthy era against foreign-born leftists in this country. It is obvious that as the Cold War intensified more chauvinistic nationalistic movements developed in some of the immigrant communities. Overall, a spirit developed which was antithetical to cultural pluralism.
In the 1960s all of that begins to end very rapidly. There was now a movement of opposition again on a mass basis in the United States, and this coincides with a renewal of mass immigration. The previous mass immigration into America took place from 1880 until the end of World War I, when immigration laws were passed based on nationality quotas. From 1920 to 1924, there were a series of immigration laws which limited the numbers of immigrants based on their numbers in the United States. It was an incredibly rigged system, because the statistics used for establishing the quotas were based on the census of 1890, which was before the vast majority of the new immigrants, as they were called, arrived, the Slavs, the Jews, the Italians, and so on. For Italy the quota was now something like 6,500 or 8,000 annually. For Greece it was 800 annually. And that was it. Therefore the numbers of immigrants coming into the country began to dwindle year by year.
Those laws were on the books until John Kennedy was elected. It was a major goal of the Catholic Church to get those laws changed, because people were being barred from immigrating by quotas based on the presence of their nationality group in the United States before most of them had arrived. This was not true of the Irish, but for all the other groups it was true. With the election of Kennedy, the new political clout of the Catholic Church enabled a new set of immigration laws to be enacted which abolished nationality quotas. But what now happened was not so much that there was a huge influx of immigrants from Eastern Europe and Italy – there was a backlog of Europeans (mostly from Italy) who wanted to come here. Once that had exhausted itself, immigration from Europe slowed to a trickle. What occurred is what we have had ever since, this tremendous influx of Latinos and Asians, so that there is now a whole new mix. There was an incredible increase, starting with Latinos and then later with Asians. This constitutes a new mass immigration, which in many ways mirrors what had occurred between 1880 and 1920, with vast numbers, millions of new immigrants, coming into the country. This new wave of immigrants ignited the movement for multiculturalism. However, I don't think there was any detailed awareness of the cultural pluralists among the multiculturalists. Multiculturalism developed on its own, I think it developed in a way which was progressive, but it certainly lacked the clout of the cultural pluralists.
In the case of cultural pluralism, because of the involvement of the Communist Party and the left, there was generally a strong political thrust to cultural pluralism, It really was a two-sided movement. One purpose was to defend the cultural rights of immigrants – seeing them as a progressive force – and defending their right to preserve their own languages, to make decisions about what parts of their original culture they wanted to sustain and continue to develop, etc. The other side of cultural pluralism was the fight for the right of immigrants to become American citizens and to fully participate in the political life and wider cultural life of this country.
So there were really two sides to cultural pluralism, and they were not antithetical at all – they were both part of the picture. In other words, the same movement that advocated cultural pluralism was the movement that fought for the CIO, that was the left wing of the New Deal. You can see this in the cultural outpouring of movies and novels, and their children are depicted as being part of America as they were, not as people somehow laundered and worked over to become something else, something other than what they were.
Something like that happens in the 60s, but I think that what was missing is that there was nothing really there to draw it all together. In other words, there was no common goal of radical democracy, no ideological element, which was supported politically and institutionally. That did exist with the cultural pluralists. You can see it in the pictures of May Day, where a huge percentage of the marchers were from cultural societies that were based on the concept of cultural pluralism. There was little or none of that around multiculturalism. It was depoliticized. The various groups to some degree achieved recognition of their languages and their contributions to America, and the importance of their history outside America. But while that occurred, there was nothing really happening laterally or politically, that I am aware of, that coalesced them around a common program as foreign-born immigrants, that helped them defend themselves against Nativism and fight for a specific agenda, or saw them as part of a working class moving toward some type of social democracy.
PA: Given the continuing anxiety today over the issue of immigration, as expressed in our so-called “culture wars,” what do you think is the role of cultural pluralism in the program of the Left?
MEYER: Cultural pluralism is really about the intrinsic rights of people, and as leftists, I think, we are always interested in that. I think there has been a tendency in the movement for us to become “workerist,” but if you look at the literature and the history of the left, including the communist left, I don’t think that that has generally been the case, that it has been so exclusively focused on a kind of workerism or primarily concerned with the immediate needs of the working class. For instance, in What Is to be Done Lenin said that the Social Democrats (as the communists were called at the time), had to fight for the rights of the Old Believers. Now that is amazing. These were people who were analogous to the Amish in our own society, people that crossed themselves the other way – left to right rather than right to left – and became schismatic from the Russian Orthodox Church and were persecuted. Lenin says that the Social Democrats have to fight for the rights of Old Believers and all of the people, and that they also have to fight against anti-Semitism – he specifically stated that. It is part of the Social Democratic (viz. Bolshevik) program.
For people on the Left, it’s not enough just to be right, or that we have the best theory or a winning strategy – which may be true – but I think where we can win and accomplish something very important, is if we actually embody the most progressive aspects of society. I think that was understood during the Popular Front period in the 1930s, when humanism and the great accomplishments of the bourgeois period were really absorbed into the Communist movement. Some of that centered on the kinds of questions we are talking about now – the right of people to maintain whatever is necessary for them to continue as a group, to maintain their ties to other people in their family, to their traditions, and to pass that on so that grandchildren could talk with their grandmothers, and participate in something wider and bigger than themselves.
I also think there are hugely practical reasons for the left to do this. As was true in the past, I think it is still largely true that foreign-born workers and their children are much more likely to become radicalized than native-born Americans, specifically if they are white. The overwhelming the tendency for whites, I think, except under duress or extremely harsh conditions, is to identify with the dominant culture. If that becomes an option, as false as the reality of it may be, many will choose that. The effect of this tendency is to cause huge sections of the white working class to move to the right
In the last election, only 43 percent of the whites voted for Obama in this country. The number of white males that voted for Obama was under 40 percent. If you subtract the gays from that figures, it would be further reduced. The immigrant workers are less likely to gravitate to the right. With the immigrant population, there is a cultural identity involved, in addition to membership in the working class, that is a much more radicalizing formula than for a native-born worker who does not have a separate cultural identity. For instance, there is a lot of practice of solidarity within the immigrant community. They learn the practice of solidarity within their own communities, based on a lot of mutual help and a sense of being connected to a group. And when they are workers, especially if there is a trade union connection, they are much more likely to become radical than white workers. I am quite certain of that and I think history indicates it. African Americans and the first- and second generations of immigrants elected Roosevelt. The native-born workers in upstate New York, for example, continued to vote Republican in huge numbers, majorities of them did.
These are issues that very often are uncomfortable for many on the Left to talk about. We would rather it not be that way perhaps, but I think that it is factually so. I think that for a left that is interested in really developing a mass movement, paying attention to this makes great sense. When immigrants come to a society they lose a lot. They lose social status, something which is very important to understand. They almost always face discrimination of some sort, and they almost always, by the way, come from countries where there is a left, something which we don’t have. We have no large-scale organized left in this country. But for most immigrants, from wherever they come, there is an organized left. So the ideas of the left, the language of the left, the concepts are not strange to them. There are many examples of this. Certainly it is true for the Dominicans and for Mexicans – the list is very long. In the countries of origin from which mass immigration occurs in America, in most of those countries there is a very large presence of an organized left, or there is at least the left has a strong history. So people from those countries coming here are aware of the left and the symbols of the left.
I was delighted when three years ago the great mass rallies for immigrant rights occurred on May Day. Nobody seemed to notice this – that May Day had been reestablished on a mass basis in America for the first time in probably 50 years! That's because May Day is a national holiday in Mexico, as it is in many other countries. So for the left there is a lot to work with within the immigrant communities. There doesn’t have to be a whole reorientation of people towards something strange and new, something which, unfortunately, in this country has not had a chance to develop on a mass basis because of repression and other reasons.
