The History of White People (43 page)

Fig. 24.2. “Most people in the world have in-between-color skin,” in Ruth Benedict and Gene Weltfish,
Races of Mankind
(1943).

As if the peoples of the Western Hemisphere did not exist and belonged to no races, the map omits them entirely. A further explanation does not help: “American Indians are Mongoloid, though they differ physically both among themselves and from the Mongols of China. The natives of Australia are sometimes called a fourth primary race. They are as hairy as Europeans, and yet they live in an area where other peoples have very little body hair.”
⁴¹
These glaring contradictions existed beside the pamphlet’s main points: “All Peoples Much the Same,” “Customs Not Racial,” “Character Not Inborn,” “Civilization Not Caused by Race,” and “Race Prejudice Not Inevitable.” Today the contradictions would seem to consign Benedict and Weltfish to the dustbin of racism. But such a judgment is too hasty. Within the context of their times, their antiracist main points needed badly to be made and even raised some hackles.

Another main point—“What About Intelligence?”—created a brouhaha that got the pamphlet banned from USOs. To disprove the racial character of intelligence, Benedict and Weltfish include two pages from Otto Klineberg’s work and a table showing the much higher IQ scores of northern black men compared with those of southern white men. The aim was to illustrate a lesson—the crucial influence of environment on intelligence.
⁴²
But this lesson fared badly in Congress.

Representative Andrew J. May of Kentucky, chair of the House Military Affairs Committee, barred the pamphlet’s distribution to the Army, because the Klineberg table assigned whites from his state of Kentucky lower scores than northern blacks. Here May spied “communistic” influence. But the publicity following his censorship made the pamphlet much more widely known. It sold almost a million copies in a decade and was translated into French, German, and Japanese and inspired a comic book, a little movie, and a children’s book entitled
In Henry’s Backyard
(1948). Benedict admitted not having enjoyed the work on the two books on race, for both had called for synthesis rather than original scholarship. But they nevertheless made her—a nonspecialist in this field—an authority on race in America along the lines of the economist William Z. Ripley almost half a century earlier.

Benedict’s books were meant to deny scientific legitimacy to the “races of Europe,” but other scholars still leaned the other way. In 1939, the Harvard anthropologist Carleton S. Coon (1904–81) published a successor volume to Ripley’s classic. In 1934 Coon’s former professor and now Harvard colleague Earnest Hooton had suggested an update, and the flattered Coon, then an assistant professor, took on the plum assignment after speaking with Ripley, who was still teaching economics at Harvard and up to his ears in analysis of railroads.
⁴³

It was a weird undertaking. Coon began by trivializing Ripley’s taxonomy, dismissing him as “a lumper, not a splitter,” and one with only three criteria: cephalic index, stature, and pigmentation. This would not do for a twentieth-century physical anthropologist like Coon. The task took five years, and when finally published in 1939, Coon’s version of
Races of Europe
included a near-infinity of measurements and photographs of Europeans shown frontally and in profile, arrayed in categories called “Carpathian and Balkan Borreby-like types,” “Upper Palaeolithic Survivals in Ireland,” “The Alpine Race in Germany,” “Aberrant Alpine Forms in Western and Central Europe,” “Long-Faced Mediterraneans of the Western Asiatic Highlands,” etc., etc.

Coon’s ideas about classification were more aesthetic than scientific, which he confessed in an anecdote about his rejection of one subject because the fellow did not look right. The person in question, a “consul of a European nation,” had “hardly any chin.” That would not do for the type he was supposed to represent. And so it went. Realizing that the book was ridiculous, Coon’s publisher tried unsuccessfully to suppress it before publication. The book remains an embarrassing, old-timey artifact.
⁴⁴

A
FTER ITS
heyday among race theorists in the 1910s and 1920s, Anglo-Saxonism declined during the Great Depression and the Second World War. A new generation of social scientists had outgrown such blather on race. Now scholars were questioning the very meanings of any and all concepts of race and studying the troubling fact of racial prejudice.
⁴⁵
*
Ruth Benedict, along with Franz Boas and their like, were beginning to carry the day.

Both Boas and Benedict supported the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War, and they battled for academic freedom at Columbia in the late 1930s, where an association with the American Committee for Democracy and Intellectual Freedom, which Boas chaired, got them accused of harboring communist sympathies.
⁴⁶
Boas died before Benedict, holding a glass of wine and a freshly lit cigarette in his hands. He was about to announce “a new theory of race” when he keeled over dead at lunch in the Columbia faculty club in 1942.

Benedict went on, using her knowledge of non-Western peoples in the Office of War Information during the Second World War, to explain foreign cultures to officials assigned to deal with them when peace returned. Her study of Japan led to
The Chrysanthemum and the Sword
, a book analyzing Japanese culture that became her third best seller, in 1946. She died of a heart attack right at the start of the academic year in September 1948.

Benedict’s role had been significant in popularizing new scientific views of race, altering, if not obliterating, the notion that Europeans belonged to different races and that the children of European immigrants posed insurmountable social problems. Hers was a critical transition away from “the race
s
of Europe,” reinforced by fundamental changes in American life.

T
hough gratifyingly sensible, the fact that scholars changed their minds about the number of white races did not transform society as a whole. While anthropologists like Ruth Benedict were modifying the science of race, changes were occurring outside the ivory tower, even in the race-obsessed twenties. After publication of Henry Ford’s second “international Jew” article in 1920, for instance, Louis Marshall, a prominent German Jewish lawyer in New York, seconded by other well-educated, well-respected German Jews, telegraphed Ford that his articles constituted libel.
¹
The American Jewish Committee circulated a pamphlet by Marshall in November 1920 refuting Ford’s allegations. The English-born socialist John Spargo published a book-length refutation,
The Jew and American Ideals
, and a statement in newspapers across the country in January 1921. Under the banner “President Wilson Heads Protest against Anti-Semitism,” a shining list of Americans signed their names: William Jennings Bryan, Clarence Darrow, W. E. B. Du Bois, the settlement movement leader Jane Addams, the Columbia historian Charles A. Beard, the muckraking journalist Ida Tarbell, the Stanford University president David Starr Jordan, and many others.
²

Even more important, immigrants and their children were speaking for themselves, telling stories of their transit from outsider to American in picturesque terms. Mary Antin’s
The Promised Land
(1912) and Abraham Cahan’s
The Rise of David Levinsky
(1917) came early. Many other autobiographies humanizing immigrants followed, including Samuel Ornitz’s
Haunch, Paunch and Jowl
(1923) and Anzia Yezierska’s
The Bread Givers
(1925). True, collegiate English departments were still loath to invite American writing of any sort into the canon of English literature, and these immigrants’ works did remain marginal as “minority” literature. But popular culture knew no such divide. America’s best-known immigrant in the mid-1920s was a movie star, Rodolfo Valentino. Though Valentino, born in the southern Italian Puglia region, the home of many an immigrant to the United States at the turn of the century, died at thirty-one in 1926, he remains an iconic figure.

E
VEN IN
politics, a silver lining peeped through. While a Democratic Party fight over the 1924 anti-Klan plank had been long and hard, many a delegate, even from the South, had proved ready to denounce the Klan by name. The effort had failed, but by only one vote. The 1920 Democratic candidate for vice president, Franklin Roosevelt of New York, had coordinated the Smith forces, struggling about the floor of Madison Square Garden on crutches after a bout with polio. Four years later, Democrats did nominate the Catholic Al Smith. Fiction, as we have seen, also faced the question of “alien races,” as in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s
The Great Gatsby
.

But Tom Buchanan is no hero. He is nothing but a boor whose Nordic chauvinism signals his boorishness. The year after Lothrop Stoddard’s appearance in
The Great Gatsby
as “this man Goddard,” Fitzgerald’s friend and rival Ernest Hemingway published a novella entitled
The Torrents of Spring: A Romantic Novel in Honor of the Passing of a Great Race
, quoting the title of Madison Grant’s book. But once again the meaning pokes fun, for the quotation appears as parody. Race hysteria has become the sign of the weak-minded. Or of hypocrites.

Racists did their part to bring themselves down. David Stephenson, grand dragon of the Ku Klux Klan so powerful in Indiana, kidnapped and raped a white schoolteacher in 1925, mauling her to death—this atrocity after the Klan had made its reputation by attacking race mixing, loose women, Catholics, and Jews in a self-proclaimed moral crusade. Stephenson went to prison, and the Klan began to sputter out, weakened by increasingly effective opposition by antidiscrimination organizations like the Anti-Defamation League and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, creations of the same decade that had seen the refounding of the Klan.
*
The crisis of the Great Depression of the 1930s shook things up even more.

T
HE CHANGE
from 1920s hysteria to 1940s cultural pluralism occurred simultaneously in politics and in culture. As the Irish experience had illustrated, voting played a crucial role in the making of Americans out of the despised race of Celts. Though now snuggled into the Nordic race fold, Irish Americans continued to face discrimination as Catholics. But their difference no longer seemed as intrinsic and permanent as when they were disdained as members of the Celtic race. Indeed, voting made all the difference in the world.

Overall voting participation had fallen steadily since its high point in 1896, when about 80 percent of all eligible voters had cast their ballots. After the turn of the century, none of the political parties—Republican, Democratic, or Socialist—mobilized voters at the grass roots. Immigrants and, increasingly, their children hardly voted at all. The effect of the 1920 Nineteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, allowing women to vote, was simply to aggravate low voter participation by doubling the number of eligible voters without mobilizing women to come to the polls. Poor and working-class women outside of college suffrage clubs seldom overcame social obstacles to their voting. In 1924, only about 49 percent of eligible voters actually voted.
⁴

People who did vote were more likely native-born of native parentage and economically prosperous. Since both Republicans and Democrats in Congress supported immigration restriction and prohibition, political parties, as the journalist Walter Lippmann noted, remained “irrelevant.” Consequently, as immigrants from southern and eastern Europe gradually naturalized (a process that usually took a decade or more) and their American-born children came of age, they lacked motivation to go to the polls. Only the Irish and their children took full advantage of politics, being well acquainted with the distribution of patronage jobs.
⁵
In
Laughing in the Jungle
(1932) the Slovenian-born journalist Louis Adamic describes the immigrant state of political consciousness even after settling permanently in the United States: “the Bohunks…had little interest in American events, institutions, and politics…. Saturday evenings and Sunday afternoons, when they came together, the talk was largely about affairs in their native villages. Their newspapers devoted a good part of their space to clippings from the small-town sheets of southeastern Europe.”
⁶
But things began to change in the late 1920s.

The 1928 presidential race of New York’s Democratic governor, Al Smith, created much controversy, dividing the citizenry over prohibition and religion—especially Protestant versus Catholic. While the losing Smith campaign brought more voters to the polls in immigrant neighborhoods, the victory of the cold-fish, ultra-Anglo-Saxon Herbert Hoover hardly kept them mobilized. The outcome might have been different if the colorful, down-to-earth Smith had won, but his Catholicism and immigrant background proved too great an obstacle, given the shape of the electorate in 1928.
⁷
For working-class voters of all backgrounds, only the policies the New Deal made politics engaging.

T
HE
N
EW
D
EAL
policies of the first hundred days in 1933, notably the Civilian Conservation Corps and the Works Progress Administration, did bring new voters out in droves. For the first time, the federal government was addressing the crisis facing working people, so many of them from immigrant backgrounds.
⁸
In 1934 and, especially, in 1936, masses of young voters flocked to the polls. People who had not voted, voted now, and they voted Democratic. In Chicago, for instance, the electorate was 100 percent larger in 1936 than in 1920.
⁹

The New Deal coalition supporting Franklin D. Roosevelt was solidly working-class. During the First World War hundreds of thousands of black southerners had moved to jobs in industrial centers of the North and Midwest, and they represented one of the four members of the coalition. Well-educated, middle-class intellectuals of progressive politics represented the second. White southerners who traditionally voted for the Democratic party of the Solid South were a third, and last came a coalition of immigrants and their children, often oriented toward organized labor.

Organized labor reaped enormous benefit from the New Deal, with an upsurge of industrial (as opposed to skilled) organizing that brought millions into the labor fold in the mid-1930s, under the aegis of the surging new Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO). Emboldened unions meant labor power, in the form of protection from arbitrary shop floor management and, potent in the long run, increased wages. For the immigrant working class—and outside the South the working class consisted overwhelmingly of immigrants and their children—better wages laid the groundwork for economic mobility. This is not to say that the whole New Deal coalition was prolabor. Not at all.

The New Deal coalition, in fact, was as lumpy as could be, with certain parts working against the interests of others. The needs of working-class northern black voters, for instance, took a backseat to the powerful southern Democrats’ obsession with white supremacy and abhorrence of labor unions.
¹⁰
Southerners in Congress kept the New Deal segregated, so that black people were largely excluded from policies regarding labor, housing, education. The newly created Social Security Administration, for example, excluded the two largest categories of black workers, those laboring on farms and in domestic service. The military, of course, remained either segregated (Army, Navy) or exclusionary (Marines, Air Force). African Americans got the worst of it, and President Roosevelt also balanced the interests of his Jewish constituencies against the preferences of his Catholics, as in the case of the radio priest Father Charles Coughlin.

C
OUGHLIN BROADCAST
from Royal Oak, Michigan, a former Klan stronghold not far from Henry Ford’s Dearborn, both near Detroit. In the late 1920s Ford, in his seventies, had folded his newspaper and largely withdrawn his anti-Semitic crusade, handing his mantle to the nationally popular Coughlin, with whom he lunched monthly.
¹¹
At first Coughlin supported the New Deal, and Roosevelt envisioned Coughlin as a conduit to Catholic voters. Two influential Irish Catholic intermediaries smoothed Roosevelt’s approach to Coughlin: the wealthy Joseph P. Kennedy of Massachusetts (father of John, Robert, and Edward Kennedy) and Frank Murphy, the mayor of Detroit.
¹²
The approach did not yield lasting fruit, however, for Coughlin soured on the New Deal and stepped up his anti-Semitic broadcasts.
¹³
Anti-Semitism increased in visibility in the United States with the National Socialists’ seizure of power in Germany in 1933.

German Nazis did not lack supporters in the United States, although the Nuremberg Laws of 1935, which expelled Jewish Germans from a wide range of jobs and institutions, made pro-German sentiments increasingly controversial. Prominent Americans such as William Randolph Hearst, who had extolled Benito Mussolini, Italy’s Fascist dictator since 1922, did back away from Hitler’s more toxic Germany, with its internecine violence, negative eugenics, Jew-baiting, and illegal rearmament.
¹⁴
Nonetheless, Henry Ford and another hero of American technology found ways to admire Germany. Charles Lindbergh had soared into legend in 1927 as the “Lone Eagle” by flying across the Atlantic alone in a tiny airplane. He remained a hero in the 1930s—indeed, he remains a hero today, thanks to his amazing feat of individual skill and bravery.

After his triumphant return from France, Lindbergh had taken Ford, then sixty-four, on a plane ride in August 1927. Ford, in turn, made Lindbergh a technological consultant, and the two stayed in close touch until the Lindberghs left the United States in 1935 after the highly publicized kidnapping and murder of their son. Ford remembered later, “When Charles comes out here, we only talk about the Jews.” As a resumption of the European war loomed in 1939, Lindbergh published a screamingly racist article in
Readers’ Digest
, in which he cited aviation as “another barrier between the teeming millions of Asia and the Grecian inheritance of Europe…priceless possessions which permit the White race to live at all in a pressing sea of Yellow, Black, and Brown…. We, the heirs of European culture, are on the verge of a disastrous war, a war within our own family of nations, a war which will reduce the strength and destroy the treasures of the White race…. [I]t is time to turn from our quarrels and to build our White ramparts again.”
¹⁵
Ford nodded in agreement.