The Columbia Documentary History of Race and Ethnicity in America

It was an era of emergence for ethnic minorities. Between 1900 and 1930, immigrants and their children continued to constitute roughly one-third of the U.S. population, as they had since the late 1800s. But their absolute numbers were impressive. During those three decades the number of people whom the Census Bureau classified as foreign-born white (mostly European and Canadian), or native white with at least one foreign-born parent, climbed from 26 million to 38 million. (America’s total population increased from 76 million to 122 million in those decades.) In addition to this large population of immigrants, native-born African Americans increased from 9 million to 12 million between 1900 and 1930. The Native American (Indian) population, after three centuries of demographic catastrophe, stabilized at around 240,000 in 1900 and climbed to 340,000 in 1930. (Population figures are given in round numbers.)

The largest wave of immigrants in this period came from Eastern and Southern Europe: Jews, Slavs, and Italians. Together these three groups produced roughly 10 million immigrants, and more than half of these newcomers remained in the U.S. In addition, nearly 800,000 Mexicans entered the country, at least half of whom settled there. Approximately 350,000 French Canadians, 250,000 Greeks, and 170,000 Japanese came to stay between 1900 and 1930, as did tens of thousands of West Indians, Syrians, and Armenians. Smaller numbers arrived from other parts of Asia, Latin America, and Africa. Though not technically immigrants, Filipinos and Puerto Ricans also came to the mainland U.S. as members of the American commonwealth established in 1898. By 1930 approximately 100,000 Puerto Ricans were living in New York City, and no fewer than 45,000 young Filipino men dwelled in California, Oregon, and Washington. Large populations of Japanese and Filipinos also settled in Hawai‘i. (The rates of reemigration varied enormously from group to group. Among Jewish and Irish immigrants, very few returned to the homeland, where they faced extraordinary religious persecution; immigrants from the Balkans, on the other hand, reemigrated at the very high rate of approximately 87 percent. For all immigrants, the median rate of return was probably around 25 percent.)

Immigrants from England, Scotland, Ireland, Germany, Scandinavia, and English-speaking Canada continued to arrive as well; more than 5 million from these lands settled in the U.S. between 1900 and 1930. However, these peoples were culturally much more similar to the American population than were the newcomers from Eastern and Southern Europe, Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean, most of whom were not English-speaking, not Protestant, and not at all familiar with the values and way of life of Americans.

One way of interpreting these statistics of immigration and race is to say that two out of five American residents were in a position of political or social disadvantage as a result of their ethnic or racial background. Who enjoyed which rights and privileges depended on a number of factors, especially skin color, citizenship, religion, and ethnicity.

Whether one was a man or a woman also mattered enormously. Before 1920 women lacked complete voting rights. This limitation circumscribed not only their citizenship but also the political power of the ethnic groups to which many of them belonged. In addition, immigrant women and black migrant women carried special burdens. The prejudicially low wages received by black men obligated their wives to work outside the home, which black women did in much higher proportions than white women. Most immigrant men came to America ahead of their families, and this created serious problems of desertion and marital estrangement. Husbands spent months and sometimes years adapting to America before the arrival of their wives, who suddenly seemed foreign to them. Japanese women crossed the Pacific as “picture brides,” often to discover that their new husbands were much older than they expected.

All immigrants had to deal with the greater freedom enjoyed by women in America. Italians, for example, found this to be a nerve-racking challenge to their traditional way of life, which enshrined women in the home. On the other hand, Irish women and Eastern European Jewish women were accustomed to greater independence and thus adapted more easily to the ideal of modern womanhood. Because Jews and Irish Catholics came to America with the intention of settling down, unlike most immigrants who initially planned on repatriating, the women in these groups immediately played an important role as Americanizing agents. It was their responsibility to set up new homes as quickly as possible, which meant incorporating American goods and styles even as they maintained ethnic customs.

It is important to remember that in the families of all immigrants and black migrants, women faced the unique pressure of having to buttress husbands who were challenged by the rigors of work in a strange industrial world and by the loss of patriarchal authority over their Americanizing children. As mothers they were expected to transmit the culture of their native regions, but they also had to adapt home life to meet American standards (or Northern ones, for Southern blacks). Women living on Indian reservations west of the Mississippi, the domain of the once “Wild West,” faced a unique type of culture shock, because their husbands and fathers were often traumatized by the loss of the physical mobility and independence they had formerly enjoyed.

In the years 1901–1929, ethnic minorities entered into American culture and politics more conspicuously than ever before. Given the universality of ethnic prejudice, it was probably inevitable that the emergence of such a wide variety of peoples provoked antagonisms. Southern whites tried to subordinate blacks with comprehensive laws of racial segregation and rituals of intimidation. Northern whites kept blacks at a distance with restrictive housing arrangements and by limiting their ability to advance in the workplace. Natives tried to control the number of newcomers by lobbying for federal laws to restrict immigration. Christians objected to the increase of Jews, Protestants to the increase of Catholics. Immigrants competed with one another, as well as with native whites and blacks, for control of jobs and neighborhoods. Despite these formidable antagonisms and tensions, “ethnic Americans” in this era established the cultural, political, and intellectual foundation for a cosmopolitan pluralist nation.

Sandwiched neatly between the depression of the 1890s and the Great Depression of the 1930s, the 1901–1929 period was prosperous, except for short recessions in 1907–1908, 1913–1914 and 1921–1922. Prosperity attracted immigrants and also offered new opportunities to migrating groups within the nation’s borders, such as the hundreds of thousands of Southern blacks who steadily moved north. Real wages of urban laborers remained much higher than in other countries, and much higher in the North and West than in the American South. By crossing the border into the United States, Mexicans could earn ten times what they received for field work at home. The leap in wages was comparable for immigrants from other lands. Letters from America back to the Old Country typically boasted of the finery enjoyed in the New World, and periodic visits from well-dressed emigrants proved to be a powerful advertisement of American wealth to those who had not yet come to “the Golden Land.” “All of Ayn Arab rushed to America,” a Syrian immigrant recalled, “It was like a gold rush.”

In the hands of immigrants, American wealth had enormous impact on the home countries. Whether they intended to repatriate or settle in the United States, newcomers mailed millions of dollars a year to relatives back home. The comparative wealth of Americans turned immigrant communities into treasuries for humanitarian and political aid abroad. Immigrant leaders stressed the monetary obligations of the Americanized to their poorer and politically oppressed countrymen in the Old World. Furthermore, they emphasized the basic compatibility between loyalty to America and loyalty to the homeland. In the words of Ignace Paderewski, who personified the Polish national movement in America during World War I: “The Poles in America do not need any Americanization. … Be therefore the best Americans, but also help the Polish community.” In 1912, after the outbreak of war between Turkey and Greece, hundreds of Greeks paraded in Los Angeles with Greek and American flags and with placards praising both American and Greek democracy: “Hail Sweet Land of Liberty.” Greek immigrants not only contributed money for the war in the Balkans but tens of thousands left to fight, and then returned to the United States, believing that America, too, preserved the republican legacy of ancient Greece. The Irish and the Jews, who adjusted to American life fairly quickly, similarly equated Irish and Jewish nationalism with American ideals of freedom. Without the funds and encouragement of Irish and Jewish Americans, the struggles for an independent Ireland and a Jewish state in Palestine would have been far more difficult.

In addition to the attractiveness of the American economy, poor conditions abroad stimulated people to leave their homelands. Since the 1840s population explosions throughout Europe had given rise to a steady stream of emigrants, and overcrowding got worse as country folk with dwindling chances to live by the land moved to cities in search of a living as industrial laborers. Some kept to farm work by becoming seasonal migrants, crossing borders both within Europe and across the Atlantic in the off-season and returning to their native lands when planting time came again. Beyond the demographic problems that afflicted Europe, political oppression and chaos caused millions to seek a better fate elsewhere. The anti-Semitism of Tsarist Russia produced an exodus of more than 2 million Jews, most of whom came to the United States. Millions of Poles, Lithuanians, and other East Europeans also fled the Tsarist regime that had absorbed their countries in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 ended Tsarist oppression, and World War I reestablished the sovereignty of Poland and the Baltic states, but the Bolsheviks and the war created another set of human problems that hundreds of thousands sought to solve by coming to America in the early 1920s. Squirming under British rule, the Irish continued to emigrate in large numbers until they achieved a measure of sovereignty in 1921 with the creation of an independent state in southern Ireland. Mexicans suffered from the political chaos of their own government after the Revolution of 1910, which sparked an unprecedented flight north of the border into the American Southwest and California.

Within the boundaries of the United States, the Southern black population suffered afflictions that paralleled those of the Jews and the Irish abroad. Throughout this period, but especially after 1915, when war production created a great demand for labor in Northern factories, several hundred thousand black Americans fled the South hoping, very much as immigrants hoped, to find a “promised land” of new opportunities.

The most important and disturbing legal development in the United States during this period was racial segregation. Between 1890 and 1914 every Southern state established laws that prohibited Negroes from attending the same schools; sitting in the same seats on trains, streetcars, and buses; and enjoying the same public services (from theaters to water fountains) as their white neighbors. This system of racial segregation, nicknamed “Jim Crow,” created a degrading caste system. Laws determined who was “white” and who was “colored” based on bizarre ratios of white to black “blood” (often one thirty-second, meaning that one Negro great-great-grandparent marked a person as “black”). These dangerously absurd legal conceptions of race anticipated the notorious anti-Jewish laws of Nazi Germany.

Their purpose was somewhat different, however. Whereas Nazi law aimed at removing Jews from German society, American segregation law aimed at fixing Negroes in an inferior position as servants to whites. Jim Crow reminded Southerners every day in every social situation that “white” people were more moral, more refined, and more intelligent than “black” people. Black Americans understood the absurdity of this social system, but they could not protest for two reasons: terrorism and injustice. To violate the rules of racial deference (e.g., failing to step off the sidewalk when a white person approached, or looking defiantly at a white person) would invite swift punishment and possibly murder by an armed mob of angry whites, who usually attacked Negroes at night, burning their homes and assaulting and sometimes murdering men, women, and children. Second, Southern juries included only whites, which corrupted the entire justice system. Juries rarely convicted whites on the testimony of blacks, even in cases of cold-blooded murder. How was it possible for states like South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi, with large black populations, to implement such a system? By eliminating the black vote. In this period, states passed laws with peculiar clauses designed to disqualify black voters.

The rural South was the poorest region in the country, and racial discrimination made southern blacks poorer yet. At the turn of the century life expectancy at birth was 48 for white males and 51 for white females, compared with 32 for black males and 35 for black females. A white male who, in 1900, had already survived to age 20 could expect on average to reach 62, and a white female, 64; the corresponding figures for black men and women were 55 and 57. Life expectancy improved significantly for all Americans in the next three decades, but the racial gap persisted, with whites living about 10–12 years longer than blacks. White men and women born around 1930 could expect on average to live to 59 and 63; black men and women, to 48 and 50. Whites who reached the age of 20 by 1930 would live on average to the ages of 66 (men) and 69 (women); the corresponding figures for blacks were 56 and 57. Probably because so many black Americans moved North after 1915, their rate of infant mortality dropped more quickly than that of whites. Still, it remained 60 percent higher. By 1930 around sixty of every one thousand white infants died at birth, compared with one hundred of every one thousand babies classified as nonwhite.

This legal code stigmatized Asians, making them the only group ineligible for citizenship until Congress reformed U.S. naturalization law in the 1940s and 1950s. (Local courts did naturalize a few thousand Asians despite the federal ban.) The odd stigma attached to Asians was highlighted by the 1923 Supreme Court decision in Thind v. United States, in which the plaintiff was a high-caste Hindu from northernmost India, and thus of Aryan descent. Frankly denying the biological and cultural subtleties of race, the Court argued that white meant whatever white people thought it meant: “the words of familiar speech, which were used by the original framers of the law, were intended to include only the type of man whom they knew as white.”

Although Latin Americans were often viewed as nonwhite, the federal government granted them eligibility for citizenship. Immigrants from Western Asia, most of them Arabs and Jews from Syria and Palestine, or Armenians, generally attained citizenship. For a brief period (roughly 1910–1915) several contradictory rulings confused their situation, but the courts ended up classifying them as members of “the Semitic branch of the Caucasian race” and therefore eligible to become naturalized citizens.

As important as citizenship was for full civil and political equality, many immigrants disregarded or delayed the process of naturalization. With the conspicuous exception of the Jews and Irish, for whom America was a final haven from religious persecution, most newcomers intended to return to their native lands. Therefore, they initially had no intention of becoming U.S. citizens. By 1930 roughly 60 percent of white immigrants were naturalized citizens. According to the U.S. Census from that year, one of every two Italians, and one of every two Poles remained an alien. Mexicans had an extremely low rate of naturalization; in 1930 only 24 percent (about one in four) were citizens. Immigrants from the Balkans and Iberia, who had high rates of repatriation, also balked at citizenship. World War I accelerated the rate of naturalization, as immigrants felt tremendous pressure to show their loyalty to the nation and to conform to the credo of 100 percent Americanism that dominated the wartime and postwar era. In the period 1907–1911, immigrants filed an average of 41,000 petitions for naturalization per year, whereas in the 1920s the annual average climbed to 188,430! The upsurge in citizenship after World War I meant millions of new voters who, as we shall see, changed the course of American politics.

The several hundred thousand members of the Native American tribes, the American Indians, endured a very complex and costly ordeal of citizenship. In the period between 1887 and 1934, federal Indian policy aimed to break up tribal lands and turn Indians into individualist citizen-farmers by assigning a standard homesteader’s plot of land (160 acres) and full citizenship to the head of each household. This policy had dubious results. The tribes that cooperated with the government’s plan lost 60 million of their 138 million acres of land to Congress (this was the “surplus” left over after the distribution of family allotments). Those Indians who became citizens by federal law sometimes found that individual states did not grant them voting rights, and tribes that voted against the individual-allotment plan stagnated on poverty-stricken reservations with virtually no legal rights. In 1924 Congress granted citizenship to all Indians born in the United States, but, like African Americans, they remained in many respects second-class citizens.

The most dramatic break in the history of American immigration occurred in the 1920s. After the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, Congress had begun to restrict and monitor immigrants, but after 1900 a campaign developed to close the country’s borders to a whole range of nationalities. Anti-Asian sentiment in California, born out of a desire to ban Chinese laborers, spread virulently to the Japanese. In 1907–1908 public pressure led President Roosevelt and the State Department to conclude the Gentleman’s Agreement with Japan, whereby Japan agreed to limit the emigration of its workers, especially to the American mainland. (Despite the new limits, well over one hundred thousand Japanese immigrants arrived in the next twenty years, many settling in Hawai‘i.) Not satisfied with the sizable reduction of Japanese immigrants, Californians lobbied fiercely until the state government in Sacramento—in 1913 and again in 1920—produced laws prohibiting aliens from purchasing and leasing land. Confronted with an immigrant group, the Japanese, that admirably fulfilled the American work ethic and succeeded as farmers, Americans struck a devil’s bargain. Logically, they should have lobbied for citizenship for these newcomers who helped build the rural economy of California. Instead they sought the opposite: total exclusion of the Japanese and all Asians. This movement in California merged with a national campaign directed against the great multitude of poor immigrants—most of them Catholic and Jewish—from Italy, Poland, Russia, Rumania, and Austria-Hungary. In 1921 and 1924 the restrictionists in Congress passed laws that drastically reduced the annual quotas of these targeted European groups and banned further immigration from Asia. Fueled by a nativist desire to restore America’s “racial balance” and prevent the dilution of the so-called Nordic elements, these laws ended the national custom of welcoming European immigrants.

The two large immigrant groups not affected by the new law were the Canadians and the Mexicans, who continued to augment the American Catholic population. In the 1920s nearly a million Canadians, around a third of whom were French-speaking Catholics, and nearly five hundred thousand Mexicans emigrated to the Northeastern and Southwestern regions of the United States.

In response to discriminatory laws and acts, a number of ethnic minorities created legal defense organizations that became a vital part of the American civil rights tradition. The first important associations were the American Jewish Committee (1906), the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP, 1909–1910), and the Anti-Defamation League (1913). A number of well-established Jewish leaders formed the American Jewish Committee after an awful wave of anti-Jewish massacres in Tsarist Russia. The Committee organized public rallies and petitioned the U.S. government to make formal diplomatic protests against Russia’s anti-Semitic policies. The Jewish fraternal organization B’nai B’rith formed the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) during the Leo Frank affair, in which a Jew was unfairly convicted of murder and later lynched by a bigoted mob in Marietta, Georgia. The ADL aimed to expose and combat racial and religious prejudice in America.

African Americans supported the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, a biracial organization set up to protest and attack the Jim Crow system. The NAACP published a dynamic monthly, The Crisis, under the editorship of W. E. B. DuBois. An impressive thinker and writer, DuBois used this publication to lambaste lynching, segregation, and the hypocrisy of such customs within an allegedly free society. In addition to vocalizing the deep discontents of African Americans, the NAACP successfully attacked discriminatory laws in the courts. Participating in Supreme Court cases of the 1910s and 1920s, it helped overturn the use of “grandfather clauses” that disfranchised black voters in the South (Guinn v. United States, 1915), defeated a law enforcing racial segregation in the Louisville housing market (Buchanan v. Warley, 1917), and secured federal intervention against mob-dominated state trials (Moore v. Dempsey, 1923). The timeliness of the NAACP was proved by the fact that more than four hundred branches of the organization appeared in the first decade of its existence.

Other organizations followed these forerunners. In 1914, the Society of Syrian National Defense organized in Charleston, South Carolina, in response to a court’s denial of citizenship to a Syrian immigrant. Its protest produced a successful legal appeal (Dow v. United States), authorizing citizenship for Arabs from Western Asia. In the 1920s Mexican Americans, their numbers enlarged by hundreds of thousand of immigrants and their confidence boosted by participation in the war effort, formed a number of political associations that merged into LULAC, the League of United Latin American Citizens (1929). Like other such organizations, LULAC maintained two mutually supportive goals: 1) the integration of Mexicans into American society through citizenship and voting, and 2) the defense of both the dignity and legal rights of Mexican Americans through protest of degrading stereotypes and discrimination in the use of public services and in the selection of juries. The 1920s also witnessed the first effective defense against the government’s disreputable Indian policy. In 1923 the American Indian Defense Association, organized by a (non-Indian) reformer, John Collier, rallied enough humanitarian interest to stop the reckless exploitation of Indian lands and promote a new, more humane policy in the 1930s.

The new ethnic self-defense organizations were but one of many products of the ethnic communities that sprang up across America. Immigrants and black migrants from the South clustered in distinct regions of the country and neighborhoods of major cities. In the 1901–1929 period, more than 80 percent of America’s foreign-born lived in the states of the Northeast and Midwest. Nearly three-fourths of the Irish immigrants concentrated in New England and the Middle Atlantic states. New England also housed roughly two-thirds of the French Canadians. More than one-third of the Germans settled in the eastern part of the Midwest (Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and Missouri), and almost half of the Norwegians resided in the western part (Minnesota, Wisconsin, Iowa, and the Dakotas). The vast majority of the Jews concentrated in the middle Atlantic region and especially in New York City, where they comprised 28 percent of the population by 1915. Most Italians also gravitated to the New York-New Jersey-Pennsylvania area, and a third of them settled in the state of New York. Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Illinois became home to a large percentage of Polish and Slavic newcomers. Asians and Mexicans congregated in the West. Nearly half of the Chinese and more than three-fourths of the Japanese immigrants lived in California; nearly all Mexicans (88 percent) lived in Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and California.

The new concentrations of immigrants altered the human geography of American cities. In 1910, 41 percent of the residents of New York City were foreign-born; in Chicago, 36 percent; Boston, 36 percent; Cleveland, 35 percent; Detroit, 34 percent; San Francisco, 34 percent; Providence, 34 percent; Newark, 32 percent; Seattle, 28 percent; Philadelphia, 25 percent. In the smaller Massachusetts city of Fall River, roughly four of every ten residents were French Canadians; in Milwaukee more than half of the city’s population was of German ancestry. One of the most colorful demographic events of the early twentieth century was the appearance of ethnic neighborhoods in cities like these. The “Frenchvilles” or “Little Canadas” of Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Maine, and Rhode Island; the “Polonias” (Polish colonies) of Chicago and Buffalo; the “Little Italys” in cities throughout the Northeast; the Puerto Rican colonias of East and South Harlem and Brooklyn; the great Japantown of Los Angeles; and San Francisco’s Chinatown stamped these places with a variety of languages, with the smells of ethnic markets and restaurants, and with the spectacle of public celebrations, honoring occasions such as the Chinese New Year and Catholic Saints Days. The Lower East Side of New York City, the densest urban neighborhood in the world, housed hundreds of thousands of Yiddish-speaking Jews; New York City was known as the New Jerusalem. The barrio of East Los Angeles had enough Mexican residents (more than ninety thousand in 1930) to rival cities in Mexico itself. On the upper part of Manhattan, Harlem emerged as the nation’s most populous and distinctive Afro-American neighborhood. In the 1920s it became a kind of cultural capital, a gathering place for the rising stars of American jazz and blues, as well as the writers—Alain Locke, James Weldon Johnson, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, to name a few—whose work earned the title “the Harlem Renaissance.”

None of these areas were actually ghettos, a term that referred historically to parts of cities in Europe where Jews were literally locked in. Yet they harbored enough poverty and crime to seem like traps for neglected humanity. This was most true of black neighborhoods, Chinatowns, and Japantowns, where racial prejudice prevented easy exit into surrounding neighborhoods. Despite the problems of inner-city ethnic neighborhoods, they usually nourished a rich cultural life, generating exciting fusions of ethnic and American music, theater, literature, and art.

Without question, the most conspicuous and destructive form of conflict in the United States during this period was the “race riot.” In addition to the gruesome practice of lynching, which ended the lives of more than one thousand black victims between 1900 and 1920, mob action against black Americans erupted frequently. Triggered by hysterical allegations or actual incidents of black-on-white crime, ugly crowds driven by deep fears of black power committed murders and burned buildings in Negro neighborhoods, In Statesboro, Georgia (1904), Springfield, Ohio (1904), Atlanta, Georgia (1906), Springfield, Illinois (1908), and East St. Louis, Illinois (1917), there were riots of varying severity, culminating in the “Red Summer” and Fall of 1919, when approximately twenty-five such outbreaks occurred. The worst such riot in American history took place in Chicago in July 1919. Sparked by the stoning of a black boy who had drifted into the “white” section of the beach on Lake Michigan, mobs of black and white men sprang up quickly and began a conflagration that lasted thirteen days. Fifteen whites and 23 blacks died in the conflict; 178 whites and 342 blacks sustained injuries. (Seventeen other murder victims were not racially identified.) Destruction of property left more than one thousand families, most of them black, homeless. Two years later Tulsa, Oklahoma, erupted, after an alleged assault upon a white woman by a black man. Nine whites and twenty-one blacks died, hundreds were injured and large tracts of the city were burned out and reduced to rubble.

The causes of these bloody events varied in each case. Sometimes, as in the Chicago riot, masses of blacks collided with white immigrants in labor battles in the city’s huge meat-packing industry. Labor unions, which typically excluded or discriminated against black workers, appealed to the immigrants to stand as one against the “bosses,” while black laborers often worked as strikebreakers, believing that big employers such as Armour and Swift would give them a better deal than the unions had to offer. Labor conflicts and racial antagonisms formed a volatile mixture, easily ignited by the summer heat of a crowded industrial city.

In the South, riots served less as an outlet for tension between competing ethnic groups and more as a means of maintaining a racial caste system. The Atlanta riot of 1906, the worst in the South prior to World War I, followed a campaign in the press against the rising aspirations of Negro residents. In one of the great works of American documentary journalism, Following the Color Line (1908), reporter Ray Stannard Baker traced the arc of tension in Atlanta, a city with a large black population that enjoyed rising levels of prosperity and education.

Baker suggested an interesting parallel between Southern hysteria about potential racial equality and Northern reactions against immigrants: “Does democracy really include Negroes as well as white men? Does it include Russian Jews, Italians, Japanese? Does it include Rockefeller and the Slavonian street-sweeper?”

These questions acquired special importance in the 1920s, when American nativism reached full tide. World War I precipitated an anti-German hysteria of surprising proportions. The nation’s largest white ethnic group, German Americans, suffered severe persecution during 1917 and 1918, as their neighbors mobbed, harassed, and ridiculed them. A 1918 federal law required all states receiving federal funds to guarantee that English be the primary language of instruction in both public and private schools. Under intense pressure to show their loyalty, German Americans drastically curtailed their distinctive cultural practices. American fears of political subversion spread from Germans to radicals in 1919, when the federal government deported hundreds of foreign-born socialists and anarchists. The restrictive immigration quotas of 1921 and 1924 were part of a larger reaction against foreign “elements” that allegedly weakened the native stock of America.

There was a soft and a hard side to the national perspective on immigrants in the 1920s. The soft side came from Americans who were neither xenophobic nor nativist but wanted to see immigrants assimilate into the larger society as quickly as possible. During World War I, nearly one million immigrants of nearly fifty nationalities served in the American army. This mobilization combined with a massive patriotic campaign to encourage the foreign-born to put their native lands in the backs of their minds and cultivate an uncomplicated loyalty to America and its values. Since 1917, then, the country had been vigorously espousing an ideal of unhyphenated Americanism. However, the line between Americanism and chauvinism was never a clear one. On the other side of that line, the hard side of American public opinion included outright hostility toward ethnic minorities.

Revived in 1915, the Ku Klux Klan symbolized the ugly mood that waxed with the nation’s isolationism and disillusionment after World War I. Unlike its predecessor of the 1860s, the new Klan combined anti-Negro racism with nativism and evangelical Protestantism. Branding Catholics and Jews as subversive foreign elements, terrorizing blacks who showed any signs of discontent with racial segregation, and punishing fellow white Protestants for adultery, gambling, drinking, and other licentious acts, the Ku Klux Klan enjoyed a brief period of social dominance in the early 1920s, especially in the Midwest and South. By the end of the decade scandal and internal conflicts weakened the Klan, state governments began to crack down on its vigilantism, and other Americans started to clash publicly with the white-robed bullies. In the summer of 1923, for example, a crowd of six thousand people, primarily Jews and Catholics, attacked and dispersed five hundred Klansmen who were meeting in the central New Jersey town of Perth Amboy. Despite the brevity of the Klan’s terrorist reign, the notorious organization set an example of white supremacist militance for like-minded Americans in the decades after World War II.

The rough tactics of the Klan were complemented by the pseudoscientific racism of university professors and other members of the social elite. Relying on spurious theories of racial genetics, natural scientists, psychologists, and sociologists offered up evidence to support an idea that humankind broke down into several racially determined groups of varying intelligence. Nordics or Aryans, representing the Northern European, stood at the top of this hierarchy, Africans occupied the bottom tier, and everyone else fell somewhere in between. The founders and early advocates of intelligence testing, which became popular in the 1920s, subscribed to these genetic theories. Stanford psychologist Lewis Terman, who created the Stanford-Binet intelligence test; Harvard psychologist Robert Yerkes, who headed the U.S. Army’s intelligence testing program during World War I; and Princeton psychologist Carl Brigham, author of the influential 1923 book A Study of American Intelligence, all added intellectual fuel to a nativist campaign whose most sensational books carried titles such as The Passing of the Great Race and The Rising Tide of Color. Elitist xenophobia hit Jews with particular force because Jews were entering prestigious colleges and universities in disproportionate numbers. To stem this academic tide, the nation’s elite schools instituted quotas to minimize the number of Jewish students who were admitted. In some cases new psychological tests were used to support the claim that Jewish students were too intellectually intense and insufficiently balanced to mix in with the Ivy League set.

Although academic racism enjoyed a triumph in the passage of the highly restrictive immigration act of 1924, it faded away surprisingly quickly in the late 1920s and 1930s as a result of a powerful shift in American social science. Two of the most significant figures for that shift were professors at Columbia University: the philosopher John Dewey and the anthropologist Franz Boas. The most influential American philosopher of the era, the Vermont-born Dewey delighted in the excitement and ethnic diversity of New York City. His distinctive, future-oriented philosophy of pragmatism made no room for old-fashioned views of racial heredity; instead it emphasized the idea that all human beings were capable of dynamic growth and self-realization. The anthropologist Franz Boas attacked racist theories directly. More than any other scholar, Boas changed the way Americans thought about race by replacing it with the concept of culture. A German Jew who immigrated to the United States in the 1880s, Boas assaulted the myth of a “pure” European or American race and the corollary claim that intermixture with immigrants and blacks would cause some sort of national degeneration. Although he had been producing studies on the subject since the early years of the century, Boas and an impressive group of scholars who had been his students finally achieved a position of intellectual dominance in the late 1920s and 1930s. Their research suggested that ethnic traits (including intelligence as measured by tests) were determined primarily by environmental factors and not by collective genetic differences. By the late 1930s culture was well on its way to replacing race as the primary way of describing ethnic differences.

Nevertheless, in day-to-day life, prejudices remained strong enough to make the 1920s a decade of egregious stereotypes of Jews and Italians. As a result of notorious gangsters like Al Capone and headlines about crime families in American cities, Italians acquired the reputation of being criminals by nature. In the summer of 1920 mobs brutally attacked Italians in the southern Illinois town of West Frankfurt, on the pretext of crimes attributed to a Sicilian criminal association. The famous murder case of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, two Italian anarchists who were convicted in 1921 and executed over mass protests in 1927, mixed the associations of Italian criminality and foreign radicalism and so made a fair trial nearly impossible. In the early 1920s the famous automaker Henry Ford shocked the country by publishing a series of anti-Semitic articles on “The International Jew” in his newspaper The Dearborn Independent. Reflecting both age-old prejudices and newer stereotypes of Jews as rootless revolutionaries, Ford disseminated the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a notorious piece of Russian propaganda claiming that a Jewish conspiracy was busily achieving world-wide domination. On a more prosaic level, Jews had to deal with the fact that many white-collar jobs were closed to them—job advertisements frequently stipulated that applicants be Christian.

One of the most interesting responses to the intolerance of the 1920s was that of black nationalist Marcus Garvey, a Jamaican immigrant who settled in Harlem. Deeply moved by the plight of black people in Africa, Europe, and the Americas, Garvey dedicated himself to the cause of a grand return to Africa. There his people, like the Zionists who were settling in Palestine, would establish their own government and possess the dignity that went along with political independence. Garvey was a charismatic leader who appealed like no other to the masses of African Americans in northern cities. His Universal Negro Improvement Association included elaborate ranks, rituals, and regalia that generated feelings of pride among its thousands of members. With its belief in black superiority and racial separation, and its anti-Semitic and nativist undertones, Garvey’s nationalism reflected some of the decadence of America’s racial order. His Black Star Line, an ambitious shipping company that was designed to prove both that blacks could successfully operate their own businesses and that they would one day return to Africa, ultimately failed because of Garvey’s dubious business practices, for which he was arrested and deported. A model for later expressions of black nationalism, Marcus Garvey tapped a deep current in the psyche of African Americans. Though he misjudged the desire of people to return to Africa, Garvey ingeniously stimulated the collective pride that helped sustain life in America.

The “new ethnicity” of American politics in this period had two primary elements, one symbolic and the other institutional. Symbolically, the rise of ethnic leaders to public importance and the celebration of ethnic holidays and occasions—such as the 1910 unveiling in Washington, D.C., of statues of Thaddeus Kosciusko and Casimir Pulaski, Polish heroes who served in the American Revolution—gave minorities a feeling of pride and acceptance. Institutionally, the influx of minorities into the Democratic Party radically altered the political system.

Another institutional component that must be mentioned, at least in passing, was the disproportionate involvement of immigrants in radical political parties and movements. Many ethnic mutual-aid societies were socialist in spirit, as was the nation’s largest foreign-language newspaper, the Yiddish Forverts (Forward). Many prominent socialists and anarchists were immigrants (especially German, Jewish, and Italian), and after World War I the two most important black leaders, aside from Garvey, were both socialists—W. E. B. DuBois and A. Philip Randolph, who unionized Negro railway employees in the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters. In the 1920s roughly 80 percent of the members of the American Communist Party were Jews and other East Europeans and Finns.

The new century started with a rush of political symbolism during the presidency of Theodore Roosevelt (1901–1909). One month after taking office, upon the assassination of William McKinley by a foreign-born anarchist, Roosevelt invited Booker T. Washington to luncheon at the White House, the first such invitation ever extended to a black American. Grasping the symbolic implications of this event, Southern racists exploded in anger over what they considered the president’s irresponsible approval of “social equality” between the races. Roosevelt’s political prudence led him to avoid repeating this kind of public act, and he later alienated many black Americans when he rashly dismissed several companies of Negro soldiers after the Brownsville (Texas) riot of 1906. But he did rely on Booker T. Washington as a key broker of political appointments in the South. Furthermore, even though he displayed a prideful bias toward the Anglo-American heritage, Roosevelt believed that individuals should be judged according to merit rather than race or religion. Cognizant of the political symbolism of the act, he appointed the first Jewish and Catholic cabinet members in the nation’s history. Unlike most Americans at the time, Roosevelt believed that Asians should not be excluded from citizenship (a belief he expressed privately). He condemned the ignorant prejudice of those who abused Asian Americans, and he had a much more respectful attitude toward the Japanese than most Americans did, even though he felt that anti-Japanese prejudice was so strong as to make it necessary to limit immigration from Japan. Well traveled, internationally minded, and highly inquisitive, Roosevelt was the first cosmopolitan president of the modern era. In spite of his brusque patriotism and blunt roughrider persona, he inaugurated a new approach to ethnic minorities. He wanted to Americanize them as quickly as possible, but he recognized that they belonged to the body politic.

Of the presidents who came after Roosevelt in this period (Taft, Wilson, Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover), only Woodrow Wilson (1913–1920) had an important record vis-à-vis ethnic minorities, but one that was more ambiguous than Roosevelt’s. The first Southerner to occupy the White House since the Civil War, Wilson originally displayed both nativist (anti-immigrant) and racist attitudes. In respect to race relations, he was culpable for allowing segregation into the federal government for the first time, in the departments of the Post Office and the Treasury, both of which were headed by Southern compatriots of his. In addition to importing the Southern caste system into the nation’s capital, he accepted the invitation of Thomas Dixon, author of the viciously racist novel The Clansman, on which the famous film “Birth of a Nation” was based, to screen the movie in the White House. For Jews, however, the Wilson administration brought good tidings. Wilson succeeded in placing the eminent attorney Louis Brandeis on the Supreme Court, despite the opposition of anti-Semites both on and off the Court, and he supported the rising Zionist movement. Jews also appreciated Wilson’s introduction of the Minorities Treaties at the Paris Peace Conference of 1919; these were designed to protect Europe’s ethnic minorities from state-sponsored persecution. The Irish, however, rejected Wilson for his pro-British position; they helped thwart his campaign for the League of Nations and the Democratic Party’s bid for the presidency in 1920. In sum, race, religion, and ethnicity played an important symbolic and practical role in national politics after 1900.

Accordingly, minorities began to deploy political strategies to affect both the policies and the symbolism that emanated from their government. The most important tactic was “getting out the vote” for candidates who supported various ethnic causes, especially in heavily immigrant cities such as New York, Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, Boston, Philadelphia, Milwaukee, Buffalo, Pittsburgh, Baltimore, and Providence. Once sufficient numbers of immigrants became citizens and voters, political campaigns in American cities responded like barometers. St. Patrick’s Day had long been an occasion for pro-Irish politicking, and in the early 1900s Italians lobbied successfully for Columbus Day. In these and other more local celebrations of ethnic heritage, politicians worked overtime amid the parades, extolling the virtues and achievements of immigrant Americans and suggesting how they might vote on the issues of the day.

Irish Americans were especially driven, as one of their leading historians explains, by an “addiction to and love of politics.” By the 1890s they pioneered a distinctive style of urban politics, based on familiarity with the ethnic customs of city residents. Both takers of graft and givers of charity, ward politicians such as Big Tim Sullivan in New York City and Bathhouse John Coughlin of Chicago knew a smattering of foreign phrases, attended religious ceremonies different from their own, and gave their constituents a feeling of being protected and cared for in an impersonal and intimidating urban world. The diary of one day in the life of an Irish American boss, George Washington Plunkitt, included the following activities:

To be sure, Irish domination of city politics generated conflicts with other ethnic groups, a striking example of which was the Italian challenge to Chicago potentate John Powers in the 1921 election for alderman. Three months after the election ended with a victory for Boss Powers, his opponent, Anthony D’Andrea, an alleged crime boss, was killed by a shotgun blast. We should also note the rise of a very different kind of politician from immigrant America, personified by Fiorello La Guardia, whose father was Italian and whose mother was Jewish. A reformer who rebelled against machine politics and championed the underprivileged (who were exploited by the same ward politicians who helped them), La Guardia enjoyed one of the most brilliant careers in the history of American urban politics, serving with remarkable effect as Congressman (1917–1919, 1923–1933), President of the Board of Aldermen (1919–1921) and Mayor of New York City (1933–1945).

Like immigrants, black Americans entered a new world of urban politics after the Great Migration from the South and produced their own bosses and reformers. But they faced unique conditions as well. In cities and states with significant black populations, political parties often pandered to the “whiteness” of European immigrants. For example, in Baltimore in 1905 and 1909, politicians tried unsuccessfully to pass a law that would disfranchise Maryland’s Negro residents. They lobbied for the immigrant vote by emphasizing the racial differences between immigrants and Negroes. The city’s foreign-born population appeared to accept this racial categorization whether or not they voted for the legislation. The vast majority of newcomers did not live in the South and did not usually vote on such explicitly racist proposals. But even in the North and West, European immigrants quickly recognized that they had moved into a society divided along a color line. When that line appeared in elections they saw little benefit in siding with blacks and substantial rewards in identifying with the white majority.

Black Americans joined in the new urban politics despite the ever-present problem of racism, which made political power all the more vital to their future. While immigrants steadily gained political strength in the years before World War I, black residents of Northern cities had to deal with a decline in their position. As long as they had been a small percentage of a city’s population, black Americans in the Northern states, despite racial prejudice, often lived in integrated neighborhoods and participated in municipal politics and society. Yet once their numbers swelled with thousands of Southern migrants, they faced two new realities: residential ghettos and more frequent discrimination in public places. In response to these unfortunate realities, black urban leaders developed a social and political philosophy of black self-sufficiency by promoting black businesses and politicians, so that the ghettoized population might gain economic and political power. Politicians built “little black Tammany Halls” that were part of a city’s larger political machine but relied on the black vote and handled the problems of the black community. No different from their counterparts in immigrant neighborhoods, these machines benefited from the naiveté of poor, uneducated constituents and received a substantial amount of money from saloons, prostitution, and gambling rackets, all of which demoralized hard-working residents of the inner city. And yet, despite these blotchy trademarks of city politics, black Americans found their first nucleus of political power in the metropoles of the North. In Cleveland, for example, the black population increased from nine thousand to thirty-five thousand between 1910 and 1920 (an increase of nearly 300 percent compared to a 38 percent increase of the white population). Cleveland had its classic black “boss,” a man named Thomas Fleming, but it also saw a new kind of political figure emerge in the late 1920s. As a result of dissatisfaction with the status quo in the black community, voters elected two new leaders, E. J. Gregg and Clayborne George, to join Fleming on the Cleveland City Council. Gregg and George refused to cozy up to a political party as Fleming had done with the Republicans. Instead, they held out until both political parties showed “a new respect for the Negro vote” by delivering valuable political appointments to black Clevelanders. On this political foundation Cleveland would elect the first black mayor of a major American city several decades later.

The new northern black electorate also made its presence felt in national politics during the 1920s. Traditionally partisans of the “party of Lincoln,” Negro voters began to break ranks with the Republicans in 1924, when both the Democratic and the Progressive Party candidates for the presidency declared that race should not be a factor in American governance. The trend continued in 1928 when the Republican Party, in an effort to secure the Southern vote, refused to seat Negro delegates at their national convention. By 1932 the black vote swung to the Democratic Party and was not disappointed, as the Roosevelt administration gave a new prominence and dignity to African American leaders.

Nineteen twenty-eight was a turning point for another reason, too. For the first time since 1901 a Negro, Oscar de Priest of Chicago, won election to Congress. Like so many black Americans in this era, de Priest started life in the South (Alabama) and moved North. He arrived in Chicago in 1899 and instantly took to politics. Working his way up the Republican hierarchy, he became the first black alderman in Chicago. When he was sent to Washington as Representative of the First Illinois Congressional District, he leaped another hurdle, for no Negro from a Northern state had ever sat in the U.S. Congress. Echoing what happened over the Booker T. Washington invitation to the White House in 1901, white Southerners flew into a rage when Mr. and Mrs. De Priest attended a tea for the families of Congressmen. (In Birmingham, Alabama, the Ku Klux Klan burned him in effigy.) On the other hand, an Afro-American newspaper spoke for millions when it said De Priest’s election gave his people “new hope, new courage, and new inspiration.”

In the presidential campaign of 1928, racial and ethno-religious issues loomed larger than at any time since the Civil War. The Democratic Party’s unprecedented nomination of a Catholic, Al Smith of New York City, evoked strong anti-Catholic prejudices. Yet paradoxically, the large contingent of southern Protestants who disliked Smith’s Irish Catholicism had to abandon the one political party—the Democrats—that fought for white supremacy in the South. In New York State, where Smith was governor, he had been building a coalition of immigrant and black supporters, and this new political mix would quickly become the national norm of a new, more urban Democratic Party. In 1900 the Democratic Party spoke for rural people, especially in the South. Yet throughout the 1920s, when millions of foreigners emerged as naturalized voters, the party appealed strongly to them. And as we have seen, urban black voters also began to leave the Republicans. By the election of 1932 the new coalition of urbanized ethnic minorities had remade the Northern wing of the Democratic Party in their own image. For the remainder of the century the Republicans lost the cosmopolitan flavor that Theodore Roosevelt had given them. His distant cousin Franklin, the Democratic nominee for president in 1932, inherited that legacy.

American music developed from the dynamic interplay of native and immigrant and white and black talent. Some of this interplay grew out of pathetically racialized styles such as black minstrelsy, which thrived on white performers wearing blackface makeup (“blacking up”), grossly mimicking Negro servile gestures, and acting out with an emotionalism that was considered inappropriate in normal life. Around the turn of the century, however, the emotional excitement and spontaneity associated with African American music and dance started to appear in revolutionary new forms that reshaped Western music.

The blues-and-jazz revolution dates to the years before World War I. Although music styles rarely result from the genius of a single person, historians have found it convenient to recognize W. C. (William Christopher) Handy as the “father of the blues,” because he was the first to publish and promote the music. In 1909, Handy wrote “Memphis Blues” as a campaign song for a mayoral candidate. The tune caught on like wildfire among whites and blacks, making Handy’s band the top band in that city. In 1912 Handy wrote the classic “St. Louis Blues.” A few years later the Alabama-born musician moved to New York City, where he became the primary popularizer of the blues and an influential creator of other popular songs. Handy’s business partner, Harry Pace, went on his own to start the first Afro-American recording company; his first huge success came with the 1921 recordings of “Down Home Blues” and “Oh, Daddy” by Ethel Waters, who rose to stardom on Broadway and in Hollywood. As Handy’s and Pace’s careers illustrate, the rising music industry created an important new avenue of financial and artistic success for African Americans.

Further illustration may be found in the story of the discovery of Louis Armstrong in the 1920s. Fletcher Henderson, an accomplished musician who worked as an arranger for Harry Pace’s record company, heard Armstrong play in New Orleans. Struck by the young trumpet player’s virtuosity and stage presence, Henderson brought Armstrong to New York City to join his band at New York City’s most prestigious dance hall, the Roseland Ballroom. That moment marked a turning point in the history of American music, for Armstrong turned out to be a musical pioneer, who popularized the solo and many of the nuances of singing and playing that defined the new music of jazz. Although a big-band music called jazz appeared before 1917, it was after World War I that “the Jazz Age” truly arrived, heralded by Louis Armstrong, blues singer Bessie Smith, and bandleader Duke Ellington. Radio, a new medium launched in the 1920s, brought these and other stars into living rooms across the country, and sales of phonograph records soared at the same time.

The formative role of African Americans in American popular music was matched by that of Jewish songwriters. During this era many of the nation’s best-loved songs came out of Tin Pan Alley, the area in downtown Manhattan where a number of talented Jews, led by Russian-born Irving Berlin, busily worked at writing catchy melodies and lyrics. Such favorites as “White Christmas” and “God Bless America” flowed from Berlin’s pen. The other towering figure to come out of Tin Pan Alley and a Russian Jewish background, George Gershwin, electrified the Broadway stage in the 1920s and created a powerful new fusion of jazz and symphonic music when he composed his brilliant Rhapsody in Blue in 1924.

Jewish immigrants also played an unusual role in the development of the American movie industry. After breaking a monopoly of early film companies that stultified the business, Jewish entrepreneurs founded the great Hollywood studios—Metro-Goldwyn-Meyer (MGM), Paramount, Universal, Columbia, and Warner Brothers. Although most movies did not focus on immigrant themes, it was more than a coincidence that the first successful “talking” picture, The Jazz Singer (1927), told the story of an immigrant cantor’s son torn between the Jewish religious tradition of his father and the lure of stardom in American show business. The movie featured Al Jolson, who had made this very transition—from the world of his father, an immigrant cantor, to American stardom.

Even though most entertainment was simply entertainment, the huge presence of immigrants and minorities in American show business made for interesting challenges to social conventions that excluded them. In his silent pictures Charlie Chaplin portrayed the downtrodden but persevering “little guy,” who might easily represent the ordinary immigrant, and who did so explicitly in the 1917 movie The Immigrants. Where Chaplin created poignant characterizations, the Marx Brothers introduced a distinctive kind of raucous comedy that shattered the snobbish pretensions of American patricians who disdained Jews and other outsiders. The groundbreaking musical and film Show Boat (based on Edna Ferber’s 1926 novel) was authored, adapted, and produced by Jews, and it gracefully intertwined an indictment of racism and a conventional love story. Similarly, Louis Armstrong’s stirring rendition of “Black and Blue” poignantly described the pain of racial prejudice.

More sentimental ethnic elements permeated American popular culture as well. The 1908 play The Melting Pot, by British Jewish writer Israel Zangwill, created one of the most enduring metaphors for America as a society of immigrants, a melting pot in which ethnic and religious differences disappear and a new American people emerges. The story is about two Russian immigrants, a Jew and a Christian, who fall in love despite severe family conflicts; it ends with their marriage and closes at the Statue of Liberty, with the lovers feeling sure that the varied races and nationalities in America will ultimately unite and create a new Republic of Man. Abie’s Irish Rose, one of the longest-running plays of the 1920s, tells of another unlikely union, this time between a Jewish boy and an Irish girl. After predictable conflicts between the fathers, Solomon and Patrick, and bemused observation by their respective rabbi and priest, the couple weds in a Christian ceremony and has twins. This makes everyone happy, for the Jewish grandfather wanted a grandson and the Irish one a granddaughter! What made the sentimentality of these two popular plays particularly interesting was the fact that Jews had an extremely low rate of intermarriage. The dramas therefore reflected not a predominant fact but rather a grand vision of human compatibility and harmony across ethnic lines.

With the rise of radio in the 1920s a new genre of entertainment was born—the situation comedy—and some of the most popular early sitcoms focused on racial and ethnic themes. The groundbreaking show Amos ‘n’ Andy, launched in 1926 as Sam ‘n’ Henry but renamed in 1928, enjoyed unparalleled success and lasted through the 1950s. Played by two white entertainers, the characters Amos and Andy formed the nucleus of a daily story about African Americans from the South trying to make a life in New York City. Andy was unscrupulous, but Amos was sincere and portrayed with real humanity, despite the stereotyped buffoonery that marked most of the male characters on the show. African Americans split in their reactions to the show; some protested that it perpetuated degrading characterizations, while others appreciated the show as comedy, the only comedy featuring African American characters at all. Had African Americans possessed any real control over the content of radio shows, Amos ‘n’ Andy would have been a very different production, more akin to The Goldbergs. Launched in 1929, this sitcom about a New York Jewish family achieved almost as much success as Amos ‘n’ Andy, and without purveying objectionable stereotypes.

The dilemma of dual identity affected every group in a distinctive way. Each one had its “assimilationists” and “traditionalists.” the former promoted Americanization at the expense of many traditional customs, and the latter, though not necessarily rejecting Americanization, insisted that many ethnic customs be preserved. Yet within the general framework of new ways versus old, there were many nuances. Mexicans, for example, retained a very strong tie to Mexico, which was just over the border and easy to return to. As a result, and because of historic grievances dating to the Mexican American War, most Mexican Americans considered themselves “essentially Mexican.” Nevertheless, they could not help but change many of their ways, as other immigrants did. The most settled Mexican Americans looked down on the new arrivals, whose foreignness, they thought, jeopardized their reputation among Americans. In turn, the newer immigrants disdained the condescension of Americanized Mexicans and criticized them for losing Mexican culture.

Most European immigrants, once they decided to settle in the United States, did not endure the intense ambivalence felt by Mexican Americans. Still, they oscillated between feelings of gratitude for the freedoms they enjoyed and feelings of nostalgia for their homelands. As the characters in Abraham Cahan’s stories of Jewish immigrants were wont to say in moments of frustration, “a pox on Columbus.” Such evocations did not imply distrust of America—the Jews, in particular, saw America as a kind of beloved homeland—but rather a sense of being caught between two worlds. In 1915 Horace Kallen, an American Jewish thinker, developed the concept of “cultural pluralism” as a resolution of the two-worlds problem. According to Kallen’s theory, Americanization did not require ethnic minorities to reject their ethnic customs. Rather, those ethnic differences might enrich American society.

Indian voices sounded a poignant note in the problem of reconciling new and old, American and ethnic identities. A landmark event in the history of American Indian relations was the publication of Geronimo’s autobiography in 1906. Although living as a prisoner of war from 1886, when the U.S. Army captured him, until his death in 1909, the Apache leader attained fame in the early years of the century. Once he ceased to be a military threat, Americans converted him into a celebrity. Geronimo toured regional expositions, appeared as a guest of honor at Fourth of July celebrations in Oklahoma (where he lived), and rode in Theodore Roosevelt’s inaugural parade in 1905 at the President’s invitation. Having secured the president’s permission to publish his autobiography while he remained technically a prisoner of war, Geronimo gave a fairly candid critique of the U.S. government’s treatment of his people. A pragmatic leader, Geronimo counseled the Apaches to adapt to American ways for their own benefit, but he also retained a proud attachment to the tribal homeland. “I think that my people are now capable of living in accordance with the laws of the United States,” the old warrior stated, “and we would, of course, like to have the liberty to return to that land which is ours by divine right.”

Will Rogers, of mixed Cherokee and white background, brought the Indian predicament into public view once he rose to become America’s favorite humorist in the 1920s. “The Navajo Indians held a conference and decided that they could get along without the services of about twenty-five white office holders that had been appointed to help look after them. The Indians said they were doing it to save the white man money. Who said the Indians didn’t have any humor?” This barb typified Rogers’s wit, which reflected the irony of living simultaneously as a celebrity and a descendant of a tribe that had been tragically herded into Oklahoma two generations before his birth there. He was the first such public figure to remind Americans that even the “most native” among them were not quite as native as they liked to think. “My ancestors didn’t come on the Mayflower,” Rogers mused, “but they met the boat.” Mapping out a new approach to the question of who belonged in America, Du Bois, Kallen, and Rogers pointed toward a more self-aware and cosmopolitan country than the one into which they had been born.

Reliable historical surveys of immigration, ethnicity, race and religious minorities include: Leonard Dinnerstein and David M. Reimers, Ethnic Americans: A History of Immigration (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999; orig. 1975); Alan M. Kraut, The Huddled Masses: The Immigrant in American Society, 1880–1921. (Arlington Heights, Ill.: Harlan Davidson, 2001); Thomas J. Archdeacon, Becoming American: An Ethnic History (New York: Free Press, 1983); Roger Daniels, Coming to America: A History of Immigration and Ethnicity in American Life (New York: HarperCollins, 1990); John E. Bodnar, The Transplanted: A History of Immigrants in Urban America (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985); and James Olson, The Ethnic Dimension in American History (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999; orig. 1979). An older classic work, written in an epic rather than textbook mode, is Oscar Handlin, The Uprooted (Boston: Little, Brown, 1951). Another, older book that offers an interesting view of immigrant contributions is Carl Frederick Wittke, We Who Built America (Cleveland: Press of Western Reserve University, 1939).

Surveys on African Americans, Native Americans, and Asian Americans include the following: John Hope Franklin, From Slavery to Freedom: A History of African Americans (New York: Knopf, 2000; orig. 1947); Jacqueline Jones, Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow: Black Women, Work, and the Family from Slavery to the Present (New York: Basic Books, 1985); Rayford W. Logan, The Betrayal of the Negro: From Rutherford B. Hayes to Woodrow Wilson (New York: Collier, 1965); Leon F. Litwack, Trouble in Mind: Black Southerners in the Age of Jim Crow (New York: Knopf, 1998); Francis Paul Prucha, The Great Father: The United States Government and the American Indians (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1984); John R. Wunder, “Retained by the People”: A History of American Indians and the Bill of Rights (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994); Sucheng Chan, Asian Americans: An Interpretive History (Boston: Twayne, 1991); and Ronald T. Takaki, Strangers from a Different Shore: A History of Asian Americans (Boston: Little, Brown, 1989).

Specialized studies on racism, nativism, and anti-Semitism include John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 1860–1925 (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1955); Barbara Miller Solomon, Ancestors and Immigrants (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1956); David M. Chalmers, Hooded Americanism: The First Century of the Ku Klux Klan, 1865–1965 (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1965); Kenneth T. Jackson, The Ku Klux Klan in the City, 1915–1930 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967); Kathleen M. Blee, Women of the Klan: Racism and Gender in the 1920s (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991); Nancy MacLean, Behind the Mask of Chivalry: The Making of the Second Ku Klux Klan (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994); Leonard Dinnerstein, Anti-Semitism in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994); Allan M. Kraut, Silent Travelers: Germs, Genes and the “Immigrant Menace” (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994); Frederick C. Luebke, Bonds of Loyalty: German-Americans and World War I (Dekalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1974); Roger Daniels, The Politics of Prejudice: The Anti-Japanese Movement in California and the Struggle for Japanese Exclusion (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1962); Sucheng Chan, Entry Denied: Exclusion and the Chinese Community in America, 1882–1943 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1991); Matthew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998); Ian F. Haney-Lopez, White by Law: The Legal Construction of Race (New York: New York University Press, 1996); Thomas F. Gossett, Race: The History of an Idea in America (Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press, 1964); Elazar Barkan, The Retreat of Scientific Racism: Changing Concepts of Race in Britain and the United States Between the World Wars (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992); Michael M. Sokal, ed., Psychological Testing and American Society, 1890–1930 (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1987); and George W. Stocking, Jr., Race, Culture, and Evolution: Essays in the History of Anthropology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968).

On East European Jews, Moses Rischin, The Promised City: New York’s Jews, 1870–1914 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1962); Deborah Dash Moore, At Home in America: Second Generation New York Jews (New York: Columbia University Press, 1981); Andrew R. Heinze, Adapting to Abundance: Jewish Immigrants, Mass Consumption and the Search for American Identity (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990); Susan A. Glenn, Daughters of the Shtetl: Life and Labor in the Immigrant Generation (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990); Ewa T. Morawska, Insecure Prosperity: Small-Town Jews in Industrial America, 1890–1940 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996); Daniel Soyer, Jewish Immigrant Associations and American Identity in New York, 1880–1939 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997); and Arthur A. Goren, The Politics and Public Culture of American Jews (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999).

On Italians, Virginia Yans-McLaughlin, Family and Community: Italian Immigrants in Buffalo, 1880–1930 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977); John W. Briggs, An Italian Passage: Immigrants to Three American Cities, 1890–1930 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978); Dino Cinel, From Italy to San Francisco: The Immigrant Experience (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1982); Humbert S. Nelli, From Immigrants to Ethnics: The Italian Americans (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983); Donna R. Gabaccia, From Sicily to Elizabeth Street: Housing and Social Change among Italian Immigrants, 1880–1930 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1984); Robert A. Orsi, The Madonna of 115th Street: Faith and Community in Italian Harlem, 1880–1950 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985); and Donna R. Gabaccia, Militants and Migrants: Rural Sicilians Become American Workers (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1988).

On East Europeans, Peter Paul Jonitis, The Acculturation of the Lithuanians of Chester, Pennsylvania (New York: AMS Press, 1986; orig. 1951); Victor R. Greene, The Slavic Community on Strike: Immigrant Labor in Pennsylvania Anthracite (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1968); Victor R. Greene, For God and Country: The Rise of Polish and Lithuanian Ethnic Consciousness in America, 1860–1910 (Madison: State Historical Society of Wisconsin, 1975); Ewa T. Morawska, For Bread with Butter: The Life-Worlds of East Central Europeans in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, 1890–1940 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985); M. Mark Stolarik, Immigration and Urbanization: The Slovak Experience, 1870–1918 (New York: AMS Press, 1989); John J Bukowczyk, And My Children Did Not Know Me: A History of the Polish Americans (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987); June Granatir Alexander, The Immigrant Church and Community: Pittsburgh’s Slovak Catholics and Lutherans, 1880–1915 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1987); and Dominic A. Pacyga, Polish Immigrants and Industrial Chicago: Workers on the South Side, 1880–1922 (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1992).

On Mexicans, Albert Camarillo, Chicanos in a Changing Society: From Mexican Pueblos to American Barrios in Santa Barbara and Southern California, 1848–1930 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1979); Ricardo Romo, East Los Angeles: History of a Barrio (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1983); George Sanchez, Becoming Mexican American: Ethnicity, Culture, and Identity in Chicano Los Angeles, 1900–1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993); Camille Guerin-Gonzales, Mexican Workers and American Dreams (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1994); David G. Gutiérrez, Walls and Mirrors: Mexican Americans, Mexican Immigrants, and the Politics of Identity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995); Juan R. Garcia, Mexicans in the Midwest, 1900–1932 (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1996); and Douglas Monroy, Rebirth: Mexican Los Angeles from the Great Migration to the Great Depression (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999).

Comparative studies of ethnic groups include Josef J. Barton, Peasants and Strangers: Italians, Rumanians, and Slovaks in an American City, 1890–1950 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1975); Thomas Kessner, The Golden Door: Italian and Jewish Immigrant Mobility in New York City: 1880–1915 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977); Caroline Golab, Immigrant Destinations (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1977); John Bodnar, Lives of Their Own, Blacks, Italians, and Poles in Pittsburgh, 1900–1960 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1983); Melvin G. Holli and Peter d’ A. Jones, eds., Ethnic Chicago (Grand Rapids, Mich.: W. B. Eerdmans, 1984); Judith E. Smith, Family Connections: A History of Italian and Jewish Immigrant Lives in Providence, Rhode Island, 1900–1940 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1985); Gary R. Mormino and George E. Pozzetta, The Immigrant World of Ybor City: Italians and Their Latin Neighbors in Tampa, 1885–1985 (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1987); and Hasia R. Diner, Hungering for America: Italian, Irish, and Jewish Foodways in the Age of Migration (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001).

Studies of immigrants within the contexts of religion, education, and labor include Randall Miller and Thomas Marzik, eds., Immigrants and Religion in Urban America (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1977); James Hennesey, S. J., American Catholics: A History of the Roman Catholic Community in the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981); Jay P. Dolan, The American Catholic Experience (New York: Doubleday, 1992); Bernard J. Weiss, ed., American Education and the European Immigrant, 1840–1940 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1982); Paula S. Fass, Outside In: Minorities and the Transformation of American Education (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989); James R. Barrett, Work and Community in the Jungle: Chicago’s Packinghouse Workers, 1894–1922 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987); and Gary Gerstle, Working-Class Americanism: The Politics of Labor in a Textile City, 1914–1960 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989).

On black migration from the South, immigration from the West Indies, labor, the formation of “ghettos,” and the Harlem Renaissance, see Nicholas Lemann, The Promised Land: The Great Black Migration and How It Changed America (New York: Vintage, 1991); James R. Grossman, Land of Hope: Chicago, Black Southerners and the Great Migration (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989); Florette Henri, Black Migration: Movement North, 1900–1920 (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Press, 1975); Ira de Augustine Reid, The Negro Immigrant (New York: Columbia University Press, 1939); Eric Arneson, Brotherhoods of Color: Black Railroad Workers and the Struggle for Equality (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001); Kenneth L. Kusmer, A Ghetto Takes Shape: Black Cleveland, 1870–1930 (Chicago: Illinois University Press, 1976); Allan H. Spear, Black Chicago: The Making of a Negro Ghetto, 1890–1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967); Gilbert Osofsky, Harlem, the Making of a Ghetto: Negro New York, 1890–1930 (New York: Harper and Row, 1966); Nathan Irvin Huggins, Harlem Renaissance (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971); and Jervis Anderson, This Was Harlem: A Cultural Portrait, 1900–1950 (New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1982).

On aspects of cultural creativity, see Lawrence W. Levine, Black Culture and Black Consciousness (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977); Irving Howe, World of Our Fathers (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976); Burton Peretti, The Creation of Jazz: Music, Race, and Culture in Urban America (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1992); James Lincoln Collier, Jazz: The American Theme Song (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993); James Lincoln Collier, Louis Armstrong, an American Genius (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993); Jeffrey Melnick, A Right to Sing the Blues: African Americans, Jews, and American Popular Song (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999); Richard M. Ketchum, Will Rogers (New York: American Heritage, 1973); Kenneth Aaron Kanter, The Jews on Tin Pan Alley (New York: Ktav, 1982); Neal Gabler, An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood (New York: Crown, 1988); Melvin Patrick Ely, The Adventures of Amos ‘n’ Andy: A Social History of an American Phenomenon (New York: Free Press, 1991).

On major political figures and trends, see Victor R. Greene, American Immigrant Leaders, 1800–1910: Marginality and Identity (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987); Angie Debo, Geronimo: The Man, His Time, His Place (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1976); Ronald H. Bayor, Fiorello La Guardia: Ethnicity and Reform (Arlington Heights, Ill.: Harlan Davidson, 1993); Thomas Kessner, Fiorello H. La Guardia and the Making of Modern New York (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1989); Oscar Handlin, Al Smith and His America (1958); David Levering Lewis, W. E. B. Du Bois (New York: Henry Holt, 1993, 2000), 2 vols.; Judith Stein, The World of Marcus Garvey (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1986); Jervis Anderson, A. Philip Randolph (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1973); David Burner, The Politics of Provincialism: The Democratic Party in Transition, 1918–1932 (New York: Knopf, 1967); James J. Connolly, The Triumph of Ethnic Progressivism: Urban Political Culture in Boston, 1900–1925 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998); Gwendolyn Mink, Old Labor and New Immigrants in American Political Development: Union, Party, and State, 1875–1920 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986); John M. Allswang, A House for All Peoples: Ethnic Politics in Chicago, 1890–1936 (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1971); Edward R. Kantowicz, Polish-American Politics in Chicago, 1888–1940 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975); Paul Avrich, Sacco and Vanzetti: The Anarchist Background (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991).

For a sample of the many illustrative primary sources relevant to the 1901–1929 period, see Hutchins Hapgood, The Spirit of the Ghetto (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1902); W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (Chicago: A. C. McClurg, 1903); Thomas Dixon, The Clansman: An Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan (New York: Doubleday, Page, 1905); S. M. Barrett, ed., Geronimo’s Story of His Life (New York: Duffield, 1906); Upton Sinclair, The Jungle (New York: Doubleday, Page, 1906); Ray Stannard Baker, Following the Color Line (New York: Harper and Row, 1908); Israel Zangwill, The Melting Pot (New York: Macmillan, 1909); Emily Greene Balch, Our Slavic Fellow Citizens (New York: Charities Publication Committee, 1910); Margaret F. Byington, Homestead: The Households of a Mill Town (New York: Charities Publication Committee, 1910); United States Immigration Commission, Reports (1911); James Weldon Johnson, The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (Boston: Sherman, French, 1912; Reissued by Dover Publications, 1995); Mary Antin, The Promised Land (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1912); Edward Alsworth Ross, The Old World in the New (New York: Century, 1914); Madison Grant, The Passing of the Great Race (New York: Scribner’s, 1916); Abraham Cahan, The Rise of David Levinsky (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1917); William I. Thomas and Florian Znaniecki, The Polish Peasant in Europe and America, 2 vols. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1918–1920); Robert F. Foerster, The Italian Emigration of Our Times (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1919); Philip Davis, Immigration and Americanization (Boston: Ginn and Company, 1920); Anzia Yezierska, Hungry Hearts (Salem, Mass.: Ayer Company, 1920) and Bread Givers (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1925); Robert E. Park and Herbert A. Miller, Old World Traits Transplanted (New York: Harper, 1921); Robert E. Park, The Immigrant Press and Its Control (New York: Harper, 1922); Chicago Commission on Race Relations, The Negro in Chicago: A Study of Race Relations and a Race Riot (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1922); Jean Toomer, Cane (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1923); Horace Kallen, Culture and Democracy in the United States (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1924); Edith Abbot, Immigration: Select Documents and Case Records (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1924); Alain Locke, The New Negro (New York: A. and C. Boni, 1925); Louis Wirth, The Ghetto (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1928); Emma Goldman, Living My Life (New York: Knopf, 1931); Manuel Gamio, The Mexican Immigrant: His Life-Story (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1931); Yamoto Ichihashi, Japanese in the United States (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1932).

The following editorial from the New York Times expresses a Northern liberal point of view on the famous luncheon of Booker T. Washington and President Theodore Roosevelt at the White House in October 1901. Note the significance of the phrase social equality, which meant mixing of the races in social situations, or what a later generation of Americans would call integration. This phrase was a bugaboo in the South, where the vast majority of whites understood it to mean the subversion of the proper social order (i.e., white supremacy). According to prevailing ideas, if blacks and whites socialized together, sharing the same public facilities and recreations, they would inevitably have sexual relations. Interracial sex, especially between Negro men and Caucasian women, was the single greatest fear of white southerners, for it threatened the delicate structure of the racial caste system. Roosevelt had both southern and northern ancestors, he was aware of the South’s preoccupation with racial mixing, and he believed that, as a group, whites were culturally superior to blacks. Yet he did not accept the classic racist belief in immutable genetic differences making one people inferior to another, and he staunchly upheld the American value of individual self-improvement and advancement that Booker T. Washington, born a slave, personified. As a result his luncheon with Washington brought out a complex of issues about race, politics, and individualism in American society.

Does it not occur to these harsh and often insulting crities of Mr. Roosevelt not only that they are mistreating one of the best friends of their section, but that they are abusing him for the exercise of precisely the quality that makes him so sincere and so helpful a friend? Do they not perceive that the manly impulse of independence and of fairness which prompted Mr. Roosevelt to take the action he took in regard to Mr. Washington is the same impulse that prompted him to insist on worthy Democrats for Southern offices of importance when worthy Republicans were not provided? They threaten him with loss of political support in the South. That was exactly the threat that was used to dissuade him from doing justice to the South. He disregarded it. He certainly will not pay much heed to it from them, and for the same reason, that his acts are not shaped with reference to that consideration. Do they really imagine that it would be better for the South, the white South, if you please, to have a President in Washington who did so shape his acts?

They talk about his trying to break down the social barrier that exists in the South against intercourse with negroes. Is that barrier, then, so fragile that the example of one Northern gentleman, who is a white, sitting down with one Southern gentleman who is black, can go far toward undermining it? Clearly Mr. Roosevelt never had any intention of producing such momentous consequences. He undoubtedly gave no thought to it at all, and the Southern men who abuse him might understand this if they could get it into their heads that he acted not as President of the United States, but as Theodore Roosevelt. As President, Mr. Roosevelt has shown that he is a wise, honorable, and courageous defender of the essential rights of the South as an integral part of the Union. Really it would seem that appreciation of that fact should determine the attitude toward him of all sensible and self-respecting Southerners.

From the 1890s through the 1910s Mr. Dooley ranked as one of America’s most well-known people. Martin Dooley was a fictional character created by Finley Peter Dunne (1867–1936), a newspaperman who emerged as one of the country’s greatest satirists. Born into a middle-class Irish American family in Chicago, Dunne came of age at a special time in the history of Irish Americans. The Irish were no longer the newest of the nation’s immigrants and they were attaining political power in the nation’s cities, yet they remained a stigmatized ethnic and religious minority. Dunne’s Mr. Dooley, a saloonkeeper with a heavy Irish accent and a somewhat dimwitted sidekick named Hennessy, raked his keen wit over every section of American society. He spared neither the unscrupulous Irish ward politician nor the wealthy businessman whose corruption was papered over with testimonials and philanthropies. Dunne’s wit was reminiscent of that of his friend Mark Twain, yet it had definite roots in Irish America. “He was an Irishman,” writes historian William Shannon, “at a time when the American Irish community was reaching a new level of self-consciousness and self-confidence.… Mr. Dooley’s comments reflect both the experience of power at one level and the sharp insights of the ambitious but largely powerless outsiders at the higher level.” In the following essay from 1902, Mr. Dooley skewers the pretentiousness of those Americans, both native and foreign-born, who indicted the moral character and intelligence of the “new” immigrants.

“The Lord save us fr’m harm,” said Mr. Hennessy.

“Yes, sir,” said Mr. Dooley, “Congress has got to wurruk again, an’ manny things that seems important to a Congressman’ll be brought up befure thim. ’Tis sthrange that what’s a big thing to a man in Wash’nton, Hinnissy, don’t seem much account to me. Divvle a bit do I care whether they dig th’ Nicaragoon Canal or cross th’ Isthmus in a balloon; or whether th’ Monroe docthrine is enfoorced or whether it ain’t; or whether th’ thrusts is abolished as Teddy Rosenfelt wud like to have thim or encouraged to go on with their neefaryous but magnificent entherprises as th’ Prisidint wud like; or whether th’ water is poured into th’ ditches to reclaim th’ arid lands iv th’ West or th’ money f’r thim to fertilize th’ arid pocket-books iv th’ conthractors; or whether th’ Injun is threated like a depindant an’ miserable thribesman or like a free an’ indepindant dog; or whether we restore th’ merchant marine to th’ ocean or whether we lave it to restore itsilf. None iv these here questions inthrests me, an’ be me I mane you an’ be you I mane ivrybody. What we want to know is, ar-re we goin’ to have coal enough in th’ hod whin th’ cold snap comes; will th’ plumbin’ hold out, an’ will th’ job last.

“But they’se wan question that Congress is goin’ to take up that you an’ me are intherested in. As a pilgrim father that missed th’ first boats, I must raise me claryon voice again’ th’ invasion iv this fair land be th’ paupers an’ arnychists iv effete Europe. Ye bet I must—because I’m here first. ’Twas diff’rent whin I was dashed high on th’ stern an’ rockbound coast. In thim days America was th’ refuge iv th’ oppressed iv all th’ wurruld. They cud come over here an’ do a good job iv oppressin’ thimsilves. As I told ye I come a little late. Th’ Rosenfelts an’ th’ Lodges bate me be at laste a boat lenth, an’ be th’ time I got here they was stern an’ rockbound thimsilves. So I got a gloryous rayciption as soon as I was towed off th’ rocks. Th’ stars an’ sthripes whispered a welcome in th’ breeze an’ a shovel was thrust into me hand an’ I was pushed into a sthreet excyvatin’ as though I’d been born here. Th’ pilgrim father who bossed th’ job was a fine ol’ puritan be th’ name iv Doherty, who come over in th’ Mayflower about th’ time iv th’ potato rot in Wexford, an’ he made me think they was a hole in th’ breakwather iv th’ haven iv refuge an’ some iv th’ wash iv th’ seas iv opprission had got through. He was a stern an’ rockbound la-ad himsilf, but I was a good hand at loose stones an’ wan day—but I’ll tell ye about that another time.

“Annyhow, I was rayceived with open arms that sometimes ended in a clinch. I was afraid I wasn’t goin’ to assimilate with th’ airlyer pilgrim fathers an’ th’ instichoochions iv th’ counthry, but I soon found that a long swing iv th’ pick made me as good as another man an’ it didn’t require a gr-reat intellect, or sometimes anny at all, to vote th’ dimmycrat ticket, an’ befure I was here a month, I felt enough like a native born American to burn a witch. Wanst in a while a mob iv intilligint collajeens, whose grandfathers had bate me to th’ dock, wud take a shy at me Pathrick’s Day procission or burn down wan iv me churches, but they got tired iv that befure long; ’twas too much like wurruk.

“But as I tell ye, Hinnissy, ’tis diff’rent now. I don’t know why ’tis diff’rent but ’tis diff’rent. ’Tis time we put our back again’ th’ open dure an’ keep out th’ savage horde. If that cousin iv ye’ers expects to cross, he’d betther tear f’r th’ ship. In a few minyits th’ gates ’ll be down an’ whin th’ oppressed wurruld comes hikin’ acrost to th’ haven iv refuge, they’ll do well to put a couplin’ pin undher their hats, f’r th’ Goddess iv Liberty ’ll meet thim at th’ dock with an axe in her hand. Congress is goin’ to fix it. Me frind Shaughnessy says so. He was in yisterdah an’ says he: ‘’Tis time we done something to make th’ immigration laws sthronger,’ says he. ‘Thrue f’r ye, Miles Standish,’ says I; ‘but what wud ye do?’ ‘I’d keep out th’ offscourin’s iv Europe,’ says he. ‘Wud ye go back?’ says I. ‘Have ye’er joke,’ says he. ‘’Tis not so seeryus as it was befure ye come,’ says I. ‘But what ar-re th’ immygrants doin’ that’s roonous to us?’ I says. ‘Well,’ says he, ‘they’re arnychists,’ he says; ‘they don’t assymilate with th’ counthry,’ he says. ‘Maybe th’ counthry’s digestion has gone wrong fr’m too much rich food,’ says I; ‘perhaps now if we’d lave off thryin’ to digest Rockyfellar an’ thry a simple diet like Schwartzmeister, we wudden’t feel th’ effects iv our vittels,’ I says. ‘Maybe if we’d season th’ immygrants a little or cook thim thurly, they’d go down betther,’ I says.

“‘They’re arnychists, like Parsons,’ he says. ‘He wud’ve been an immygrant if Texas hadn’t been admitted to th’ Union,’ I says. ‘Or Snolgosh,’ he says. ‘Has Mitchigan seceded?’ I says. ‘Or Gittoo,’ he says. ‘Who come fr’m th’ effete monarchies iv Chicago, west iv Ashland Av’noo,’ I says. ‘Or what’s-his-name, Wilkes Booth,’ he says. ‘I don’t know what he was—maybe a Boolgharyen,’ says I. ‘Well, annyhow,’ says he, ‘they’re th’ scum iv th’ earth.’ ‘They may he that,’ says I; ‘but we used to think they was th’ cream iv civilization,’ I says. ‘They’re off th’ top annyhow. I wanst believed ’twas th’ best men iv Europe come here, th’ la-ads that was too sthrong and indepindant to be kicked around be a boorgomasther at home an’ wanted to dig out f’r a place where they cud get a chanst to make their way to th’ money. I see their sons fightin’ into politics an’ their daughters tachin’ young American idee how to shoot too high in th’ public school, an’ I thought they was all right. But I see I was wrong. Thim boys out there towin’ wan heavy foot afther th’ other to th’ rowlin’ mills is all arnychists. There’s warrants out f’r all names endin’ in ’inski, an’ I think I’ll board up me windows, f’r,’ I says, ‘if immygrants is as dangerous to this counthry as ye an’ I an’ other pilgrim fathers believe they are, they’se enough iv thim sneaked in already to make us aborigines about as infloointial as the prohibition vote in th’ Twinty-ninth Ward. They’ll dash again’ our stern an’ rock-bound coast till they bust it,’ says I.

“‘But I ain’t so much afraid as ye ar-re. I’m not afraid iv me father an’ I’m not afraid iv mesilf. An’ I’m not afraid iv Schwartzmeister’s father or Hinnery Cabin Lodge’s grandfather. We all come over th’ same way, an’ if me ancestors were not what Hogan calls rigicides, ’twas not because they were not ready an’ willin’, on’y a king niver come their way. I don’t believe in killin’ kings, mesilf. I niver wud’ve sawed th’ block off that curly-headed potintate that I see in th’ pitchers down town, but, be hivins, Presarved Codfish Shaughnessy, if we’d begun a few years ago shuttin’ out folks that wudden’t mind handin’ a bomb to a king, they wudden’t be enough Anti-Impeeryal S’ciety,’ says I. ‘But what wud ye do with th’ offscourin’ iv Europe?’ says he. ‘I’d scour thim some more,’ says I.

“An’ so th’ meetin’ iv th’ Plymouth Rock Assocyation come to an end. But if ye wud like to get it together, Deacon Hinnissy, to discuss th’ immygration question, I’ll sind out a hurry call f’r Schwartzmeister an’ Mulcahey an’ Ignacio Sbarbaro an’ Nels Larsen an’ Petrus Gooldvink, an’ we ’ll gather tonight at Fanneilnoviski Hall at th’ corner iv Sheridan an’ Sigel sthreets. All th’ pilgrim fathers is rayquested f’r to bring interpreters.”

“Well,” said Mr. Hennessy, “divvle th’ bit I care, on’y I’m here first, an’ I ought to have th’ right to keep th’ bus fr’m bein’ overcrowded.”

“Well,” said Mr. Dooley, “as a pilgrim father on me gran’ nephew’s side, I don’t know but ye’re right. An’ they’se wan sure way to keep thim out.”

“What’s that?” asked Mr. Hennessy.

“Teach thim all about our instichoochions befure they come,” said Mr. Dooley.

William Edward Burghardt Du Bois (1868–1963) was born in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. Unlike most African Americans, his ancestors had been free since the time of the American Revolution. Describing his own ethnicity as deriving from “a flood of Negro blood, a strain of French, a bit of Dutch, and thank God! no ‘Anglo-Saxon,’” Du Bois was the only African American child in his elementary and secondary schools, and he mixed easily with his white peers. His sense of difference grew as he matured, and from this inner awareness would blossom one of the most eloquent articulations of the problem of dual identity in the history of American literature. The first student of African descent to receive a Ph.D. from Harvard (1895), Du Bois expressed a grand intellect through a number of classic works of sociology, history, and literature, the most important of which was The Souls of Black Folk (1903). An inspiration for countless African American writers, this book interweaves Du Bois’s reflections on the political, cultural, historical, and psychological predicament of black Americans. The excerpt that follows is the book’s first chapter, which contains a particularly moving paragraph on being “both a Negro and an American.”

And yet, being a problem is a strange experience—peculiar even for one who has never been anything else, save perhaps in babyhood and in Europe. It is in the early days of rollicking boyhood that the revelation first bursts upon one, all in a day, as it were. I remember well when the shadow swept across me. I was a little thing, away up in the hills of New England, where the dark Housatonic winds between Hoosac and Taghkanic to the sea. In a wee wooden schoolhouse, something put it into the boys’ and girls’ heads to buy gorgeous visiting-cards—ten cents a package—and exchange. The exchange was merry, till one girl, a tall newcomer, refused my card—refused it peremptorily, with a glance. Then it dawned upon me with a certain suddenness that I was different from the others; or like, mayhap, in heart and life and longing, but shut out from their world by a vast veil. I had thereafter no desire to tear down that veil, to creep through; I held all beyond it in common contempt, and lived above it in a region of blue sky and great wandering shadows. That sky was bluest when I could beat my mates at examination-time, or beat them at a foot-race, or even beat their stringy heads. Alas, with the years all this fine contempt began to fade; for the words I longed for, and all their dazzling opportunities, were theirs, not mine. But they should not keep these prizes, I said; some, all, I would wrest from them. Just how I would do it I could never decide: by reading law, by healing the sick, by telling the wonderful tales that swam in my head—some way. With other black boys the strife was not so fiercely sunny: their youth shrunk into tasteless sycophancy, or into silent hatred of the pale world about them and mocking distrust of everything white; or wasted itself in a bitter cry, Why did God make me an outcast and a stranger in mine own house? The shades of the prison-house closed round about us all: walls strait and stubborn to the whitest, but relentlessly narrow, tall, and unscalable to sons of night who must plod darkly on in resignation, or beat unavailing palms against the stone, or steadily, half hopelessly, watch the streak of blue above.

After the Egyptian and Indian, the Greek and Roman, the Teuton and Mongolian, the Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American world—a world which yields him no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world. It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his twoness—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.

The history of the American Negro is the history of this strife—this longing to attain self-conscious manhood, to merge his double self into a better and truer self. In this merging he wishes neither of the older selves to be lost. He would not Africanize America, for America has too much to teach the world and Africa. He would not bleach his Negro soul in a flood of white Americanism, for he knows that Negro blood has a message for the world. He simply wishes to make it possible for a man to be both a Negro and an American, without being cursed and spit upon by his fellows, without having the doors of Opportunity closed roughly in his face.

This, then, is the end of his striving: to be a co-worker in the kingdom of culture, to escape both death and isolation, to husband and use his best powers and his latent genius. These powers of body and mind have in the past been strangely wasted, dispersed, or forgotten. The shadow of a mighty Negro past flits through the tale of Ethiopia the Shadowy and of Egypt the Sphinx. Through history, the powers of single black men flash here and there like falling stars, and die sometimes before the world has rightly gauged their brightness. Here in America, in the few days since Emancipation, the black man’s turning hither and thither in hesitant and doubtful striving has often made his very strength to lose effectiveness, to seem like absence of power, like weakness. And yet it is not weakness—it is the contradiction of double aims. The double-aimed struggle of the black artisan—on the one hand to escape white contempt for a nation of mere hewers of wood and drawers of water, and on the other hand to plough and nail and dig for a poverty-stricken horde—could only result in making him a poor craftsman, for he had but half a heart in either cause. By the poverty and ignorance of his people, the Negro minister or doctor was tempted toward quackery and demagogy; and by the criticism of the other world, toward ideals that made him ashamed of his lowly tasks. The would-be black savant was confronted by the paradox that the knowledge his people needed was a twice-told tale to his white neighbors, while the knowledge which would teach the white world was Greek to his own flesh and blood. The innate love of harmony and beauty that set the ruder souls of his people a-dancing and a-singing raised but confusion and doubt in the soul of the black artist; for the beauty revealed to him was the soul-beauty of a race which his larger audience despised, and he could not articulate the message of another people. This waste of double aims, this seeking to satisfy two unreconciled ideals, has wrought sad havoc with the courage and faith and deeds of ten thousand thousand people—has sent them often wooing false gods and invoking false means of salvation, and at times has even seemed about to make them ashamed of themselves.

Away back in the days of bondage they thought to see in one divine event the end of all doubt and disappointment; few men ever worshipped Freedom with half such unquestioning faith as did the American Negro for two centuries. To him, so far as he thought and dreamed, slavery was indeed the sum of all villainies, the cause of all sorrow, the root of all prejudice; Emancipation was the key to a promised land of sweeter beauty than ever stretched before the eyes of wearied Israelites. In song and exhortation swelled one refrain—Liberty; in his tears and curses the God he implored had Freedom in his right hand. At last it came—suddenly, fearfully, like a dream. With one wild carnival of blood and passion came the message in his own plaintive cadences:—

The first decade was merely a prolongation of the vain search for freedom, the boon that seemed ever barely to elude their grasp—like a tantalizing will-o’-the-wisp, maddening and misleading the headless host. The holocaust of war, the terrors of the Ku-Klux Klan, the lies of carpet-baggers, the disorganization of industry, and the contradictory advice of friends and foes, left the bewildered serf with no new watchword beyond the old cry for freedom. As the time flew, however, he began to grasp a new idea. The ideal of liberty demanded for its attainment powerful means, and these the Fifteenth Amendment gave him. The ballot, which before he had looked upon as a visible sign of freedom, he now regarded as the chief means of gaining and perfecting the liberty with which war had partially endowed him. And why not? Had not votes made war and emancipated millions? Had not votes enfranchised the freedmen? Was anything impossible to a power that had done all this? A million black men started with renewed zeal to vote themselves into the kingdom. So the decade flew away, the revolution of 1876 came, and left the half-free serf weary, wondering, but still inspired. Slowly but steadily, in the following years, a new vision began gradually to replace the dream of political power—a powerful movement, the rise of another ideal to guide the unguided, another pillar of fire by night after a clouded day. It was the ideal of “book-learning”; the curiosity, born of compulsory ignorance, to know and test the power of the cabalistic letters of the white man, the longing to know. Here at last seemed to have been discovered the mountain path to Canaan; longer than the highway of Emancipation and law, steep and rugged, but straight, leading to heights high enough to overlook life.

Up the new path the advance guard toiled, slowly, heavily, doggedly; only those who have watched and guided the faltering feet, the misty minds, the dull understandings, of the dark pupils of these schools know how faithfully, how piteously, this people strove to learn. It was weary work. The cold statistician wrote down the inches of progress here and there, noted also where here and there a foot had slipped or some one had fallen. To the tired climbers, the horizon was ever dark, the mists were often cold, the Canaan was always dim and far away. If, however, the vistas disclosed as yet no goal, no resting-place, little but flattery and criticism, the journey at least gave leisure for reflection and self-examination; it changed the child of Emancipation to the youth with dawning self-consciousness, self-realization, self-respect. In those sombre forests of his striving his own soul rose before him, and he saw himself—darkly as through a veil; and yet he saw in himself some faint revelation of his power, of his mission. He began to have a dim feeling that, to attain his place in the world, he must be himself, and not another. For the first time he sought to analyze the burden he bore upon his back, that deadweight of social degradation partially masked behind a half-named Negro problem. He felt his poverty; without a cent, without a home, without land, tools, or savings, he had entered into competition with rich, landed, skilled neighbors. To be a poor man is hard, but to be a poor race in a land of dollars is the very bottom of hardships. He felt the weight of his ignorance—not simply of letters, but of life, of business, of the humanities; the accumulated sloth and shirking and awkwardness of decades and centuries shackled his hands and feet. Nor was his burden all poverty and ignorance. The red stain of bastardy, which two centuries of systematic legal defilement of Negro women had stamped upon his race, meant not only the loss of ancient African chastity, but also the hereditary weight of a mass of corruption from white adulterers, threatening almost the obliteration of the Negro home.

A people thus handicapped ought not to be asked to race with the world, but rather allowed to give all its time and thought to its own social problems. But alas! while sociologists gleefully count his bastards and his prostitutes, the very soul of the toiling, sweating black man is darkened by the shadow of a vast despair. Men call the shadow prejudice, and learnedly explain it as the natural defence of culture against barbarism, learning against ignorance, purity against crime, the “higher” against the “lower” races. To which the Negro cries Amen! and swears that to so much of this strange prejudice as is founded on just homage to civilization, culture, righteousness, and progress, he humbly bows and meekly does obeisance. But before that nameless prejudice that leaps beyond all this he stands helpless, dismayed, and well-nigh speechless; before that personal disrespect and mockery, the ridicule and systematic humiliation, the distortion of fact and wanton license of fancy, the cynical ignoring of the better and the boisterous welcoming of the worse, the all-pervading desire to inculcate disdain for everything black, from Toussaint to the devil—before this there rises a sickening despair that would disarm and discourage any nation save that black host to whom “discouragement” is an unwritten word.

But the facing of so vast a prejudice could not but bring the inevitable self-questioning, self-disparagement, and lowering of ideals which ever accompany repression and breed in an atmosphere of contempt and hate. Whisperings and portents came borne upon the four winds: Lo! we, are diseased and dying, cried the dark hosts; we cannot write, our voting is vain; what need of education, since we must always cook and serve? And the Nation echoed and enforced this self-criticism, saying: Be content to be servants, and nothing more; what need of higher culture for half-men? Away with the black man’s ballot, by force or fraud—and behold the suicide of a race! Nevertheless, out of the evil came something of good—the more careful adjustment of education to real life, the clearer perception of the Negroes’ social responsibilities, and the sobering realization of the meaning of progress.

So dawned the time of Sturm und Drang: storm and stress to-day rocks our little boat on the mad waters of the world-sea; there is within and without the sound of conflict, the burning of body and rending of soul; inspiration strives with doubt, and faith with vain questionings. The bright ideals of the past—physical freedom, political power, the training of brains and the training of hands—all these in turn have waxed and waned, until even the last grows dim and overcast. Are they all wrong—all false? No, not that, but each alone was over-simple and incomplete—the dreams of a credulous race-childhood, or the fond imaginings of the other world which does not know and does not want to know our power. To be really true, all these ideals must be melted and welded into one. The training of the schools we need to-day more than ever—the training of deft hands, quick eyes and ears, and above all the broader, deeper, higher culture of gifted minds and pure hearts. The power of the ballot we need in sheer self-defence—else what shall save us from a second slavery? Freedom, too, the long-sought, we still seek—the freedom of life and limb, the freedom to work and think, the freedom to love and aspire. Work, culture, liberty—all these we need, not singly but together, not successively but together, each growing and aiding each, and all striving toward that vaster ideal that swims before the Negro people, the ideal of human brotherhood, gained through the unifying ideal of Race; the ideal of fostering and developing the traits and talents of the Negro, not in opposition to or contempt for other races, but rather in large conformity to the greater ideals of the American Republic, in order that some day on American soil two world-races may give each to each those charactristics both so sadly lack. We the darker ones come even now not altogether empty-handed: there are to-day no truer exponents of the pure human spirit of the Declaration of Independence than the American Negroes; there is no true American music but the wild sweet melodies of the Negro slave; the American fairy tales and folklore are Indian and African; and, all in all, we black men seem the sole oasis of simple faith and reverence in a dusty desert of dollars and smartness. Will America be poorer if she replace her brutal dyspeptic blundering with light-hearted but determined Negro humility? or her coarse and cruel wit with loving jovial good-humor? or her vulgar music with soul of the Sorrow Songs?

Merely a concrete test of the underlying principles of the great republic is the Negro Problem, and spiritual striving of the freedmen’s sons is the travail of souls whose burden is almost beyond the measure of their strength, but who bear it in the name of an historic race, in the name of this the land of their fathers’ fathers, and in the name of human opportunity.

And now what I have briefly sketched in large outline let me on coming pages tell again in many ways, with loving emphasis and deeper detail, that men may listen to the striving in the souls of black folk.

Born in the 1820s in the mountainous country of southwestern New Mexico and southeastern Arizona, Geronimo was a member of the Bedonkohe, a subgroup of the Apache tribe known as Chiricahuas. Fierce and mobile warriors who often raided settlements for cattle and guns, the Apaches had been at war with the Spanish and Mexicans since the seventeenth century. Geronimo lost his first wife and children to Mexican forces in the 1840s, an experience that left him with a permanent hatred of Mexico, of which he spoke freely in his autobiography. When the Southwest came under U.S. sovereignty in 1848, a new era of conflict began between Apaches and Americans. After years of pursuit the U.S. Army captured Geronimo in 1886, and he spent the remaining thirteen years of his life as a prisoner of war, living primarily in Oklahoma. Despite his official status as a prisoner, Geronimo became a kind of celebrity. He was invited to participate in Fourth of July parades, in expositions such as the 1904 World’s Fair in St. Louis, and in Theodore Roosevelt’s inaugural parade in 1905. A tourist trade developed around him; he sold buttons off his coat for a quarter each, and one visitor paid him five dollars (the equivalent of several days’ wages) for a common feather from his hat. With the help of a young relative who acted as his translator, Geronimo dictated his autobiography to reporter S. M. Barrett, who published it in 1906. It is noteworthy that President Roosevelt authorized the publication of Geronimo’s story, since the old warrior had given a critical account of the U.S. Army and its treatment of the Apaches. However, the president would not allow him to return to the Apache reservation in Arizona for fear that Geronimo retained enough power to incite a mass exodus.

If the Indians’ cause has been properly presented, the captives’ defense clearly stated, and the general store of information regarding vanishing types increased, I shall be satisfied.

I desire to acknowledge valuable suggestions from Major Charles Taylor, Fort Sill, Oklahoma; Dr. J. M. Greenwood, Kansas City, Missouri; and President David R. Boyd, of the University of Oklahoma.

I especially desire in this connection to say that without the kindly advice and assistance of President Theodore Roosevelt this book could not have been written.

I have suffered much from such unjust orders as those of General Crook. Such acts have caused much distress to my people. I think that General Crook’s death was sent by the Almighty as a punishment for the many evil deeds he committed.

Soon General Miles was made commander of all the western posts, and troops trailed us continually. They were led by Captain Lawton, who had good scouts. The Mexican soldiers also became more active and more numerous. We had skirmishes almost every day, and so we finally decided to break up into small bands. With six men and four women I made for the range of mountains near Hot Springs, New Mexico. We passed many cattle ranches, but had no trouble with the cowboys. We killed cattle to eat whenever we were in need of food, but we frequently suffered greatly for water. At one time we had no water for two days and nights and our horses almost died from thirst. We ranged in the mountains of New Mexico for some time, then thinking that perhaps the troops had left Mexico, we returned. On our return through Old Mexico we attacked every Mexican found, even if for no other reason than to kill. We believed they had asked the United States troops to come down to Mexico to fight us.

South of Casa Grande, near a place called by the Indians Gosoda, there was a road leading out from the town. There was much freighting carried on by the Mexicans over this road. Where the road ran through a mountain pass we stayed in hiding, and whenever Mexican freighters passed we killed them, took what supplies we wanted, and destroyed the remainder. We were reckless of our lives, because we felt that every man’s hand was against us. If we returned to the reservation we would be put in prison and killed; if we stayed in Mexico they would continue to send soldiers to fight us; so we gave no quarter to anyone and asked no favors.

After some time we left Gosoda and soon were reunited with our tribe in the Sierra de Antunez Mountains.

Contrary to our expectations the United States soldiers had not left the mountains in Mexico, and were soon trailing us and skirmishing with us almost every day. Four or five times they surprised our camp. One time they surprised us about nine o’clock in the morning, and captured all our horses (nineteen in number) and secured our store of dried meats. We also lost three Indians in this encounter. About the middle of the afternoon of the same day we attacked them from the rear as they were passing through a prairie—killed one soldier, but lost none ourselves. In this skirmish we recovered all our horses except three that belonged to me. The three horses that we did not recover were the best riding horses we had.

Soon after this we made a treaty with the Mexican troops. They told us that the United States troops were the real cause of these wars, and agreed not to fight any more with us provided we would return to the United States. This we agreed to do, and resumed our march, expecting to try to make a treaty with the United States soldiers and return to Arizona. There seemed to be no other course to pursue.

Soon after this scouts from Captain Lawton’s troops told us that he wished to make a treaty with us; but I knew that General Miles was the chief of the American troops, and I decided to treat with him.

We continued to move our camp northward, and the American troops also moved northward, keeping at no great distance from us, but not attacking us.

I sent my brother Porico (White Horse) with Mr. George Wratton on to Fort Bowie to see General Miles, and to tell him that we wished to return to Arizona; but before these messengers returned I met two Indian scouts—Kayitah, a Chokonen Apache, and Marteen, a Nedni Apache. They were serving as scouts for Captain Lawton’s troops. They told me that General Miles had come and had sent them to ask me to meet him. So I went to the camp of the United States troops to meet General Miles.

When I arrived at their camp I went directly to General Miles and told him how I had been wronged, and that I wanted to return to the United States with my people, as we wished to see our families, who had been captured and taken away from us.

General Miles said to me: “The President of the United States has sent me to speak to you. He has heard of your trouble with the white men, and says that if you will agree to a few words of treaty we need have no more trouble. Geronimo, if you will agree to a few words of treaty all will be satisfactorily arranged.”

So General Miles told me how we could be brothers to each other. We raised our hands to heaven and said that the treaty was not to be broken. We took an oath not to do any wrong to each other or to scheme against each other.

Then he talked with me for a long time and told me what he would do for me in the future if I would agree to the treaty. I did not greatly believe General Miles, but because the President of the United States had sent me word I agreed to make the treaty, and to keep it. Then I asked General Miles what the treaty would be. General Miles said to me: “I will take you under Government protection; I will build you a house; I will fence you much land; I will give you cattle, horses, mules, and farming implements. You will be furnished with men to work the farm, for you yourself will not have to work. In the fall I will send you blankets and clothing so that you will not suffer from cold in the winter time.

“There is plenty of timber, water, and grass in the land to which I will send you. You will live with your tribe and with your family. If you agree to this treaty you shall see your family within five days.”

I said to General Miles: “All the officers that have been in charge of the Indians have talked that way, and it sounds like a story to me; I hardly believe you.”

He said: “This time it is the truth.”

I said: “General Miles, I do not know the laws of the white man, nor of this new country where you are to send me, and I might break their laws.”

He said: “While I live you will not be arrested.”

Then I agreed to make the treaty. (Since I have been a prisoner of war I have been arrested and placed in the guardhouse twice for drinking whisky.)

We stood between his troopers and my warriors. We placed a large stone on the blanket before us. Our treaty was made by this stone, and it was to last until the stone should crumble to dust; so we made the treaty, and bound each other with an oath.

I do not believe that I have ever violated that treaty; but General Miles never fulfilled his promises.

When we had made the treaty General Miles said to me: “My brother, you have in your mind how you are going to kill men, and other thoughts of war; I want you to put that out of your mind, and change your thoughts to peace.”

Then I agreed and gave up my arms. I said: “I will quit the warpath and live at peace hereafter.”

Then General Miles swept a spot of ground clear with his hand, and said: “Your past deeds shall be wiped out like this and you will start a new life.”

In forty days they took me from there to Fort Pickens (Pensacola), Florida. Here they put me to sawing up large logs. There were several other Apache warriors with me, and all of us had to work every day. For nearly two years we were kept at hard labor in this place and we did not see our families until May, 1887. This treatment was in direct violation of our treaty made at Skeleton Cañon.

After this we were sent with our families to Vermont, Alabama, where we stayed five years and worked for the Government. We had no property, and I looked in vain for General Miles to send me to that land of which he had spoken; I longed in vain for the implements, house, and stock that General Miles had promised me.

During this time one of my warriors, Fun, killed himself and his wife. Another one shot his wife and then shot himself. He fell dead, but the woman recovered and is still living.

We were not healthy in this place, for the climate disagreed with us. So many of our people died that I consented to let one of my wives go to the Mescalero Agency in New Mexico to live. This separation is according to our custom equivalent to what the white people call divorce, and so she married again soon after she got to Mescalero. She also kept our two small children, which she had a right to do. The children, Lenna and Robbie, are still living at Mescalero, New Mexico. Lenna is married. I kept one wife, but she is dead now and I have only our daughter Eva with me. Since my separation from Lenna’s mother I have never had more than one wife at a time. Since the death of Eva’s mother I married another woman (December, 1905) but we could not live happily and separated. She went home to her people—that is an Apache divorce.

Then, as now, Mr. George Wratton superintended the Indians. He has always had trouble with the Indians, because he has mistreated them. One day an Indian, while drunk, stabbed Mr. Wratton with a little knife. The officer in charge took the part of Mr. Wratton and the Indian was sent to prison.

When we first came to Fort Sill, Captain Scott was in charge, and he had houses built for us by the Government. We were also given, from the Government, cattle, hogs, turkeys and chickens. The Indians did not do much good with the hogs, because they did not understand how to care for them, and not many Indians even at the present time keep hogs. We did better with the turkeys and chickens, but with these we did not have as good luck as white men do. With the cattle we have done very well, indeed, and we like to raise them. We have a few horses also, and have had no bad luck with them.

In the matter of selling our stock and grain there has been much misunderstanding. The Indians understood that the cattle were to be sold and the money given to them, but instead part of the money is given to the Indians and part of it is placed in what the officers call the “Apache Fund.” We have had five different officers in charge of the Indians here and they have all ruled very much alike—not consulting the Apaches or even explaining to them. It may be that the Government ordered the officers in charge to put this cattle money into an Apache fund, for once I complained and told Lieutenant Purington that I intended to report to the Government that he had taken some of my part of the cattle money and put it into the Apache Fund, he said he did not care if I did tell.

Several years ago the issue of clothing ceased. This, too, may have been by the order of the Government, but the Apaches do not understand it.

If there is an Apache Fund, it should some day be turned over to the Indians, or at least they should have an account of it, for it is their earnings.

When General Miles last visited Fort Sill I asked to be relieved from labor on account of my age. I also remembered what General Miles had promised me in the treaty and told him of it. He said I need not work any more except when I wished to, and since that time I have not been detailed to do any work. I have worked a great deal, however, since then, for, although I am old, I like to work and help my people as much as I am able.

Many people in St. Louis invited me to come to their homes, but my keeper always refused.

Every Sunday the President of the Fair sent for me to go to a wild west show. I took part in the roping contests before the audience. There were many other Indian tribes there, and strange people of whom I had never heard.

When people first came to the World’s Fair they did nothing but parade up and down the streets. When they got tired of this they would visit the shows. There were many strange things in these shows. The Government sent guards with me when I went, and I was not allowed to go anywhere without them.

In one of the shows some strange men with red caps had some peculiar swords, and they seemed to want to fight. Finally their manager told them they might fight each other. They tried to hit each other over the head with these swords, and I expected both to be wounded or perhaps killed, but neither one was harmed. They would be hard people to kill in a hand-to-hand fight.

In another show there was a strange-looking negro. The manager tied his hands fast, then tied him to a chair. He was securely tied, for I looked myself, and I did not think it was possible for him to get away. Then the manager told him to get loose.

He twisted in his chair for a moment, and then stood up; the ropes were still tied but he was free. I do not understand how this was done. It was certainly a miraculous power, because no man could have released himself by his own efforts.

In another place a man was on a platform speaking to the audience; they set a basket by the side of the platform and covered it with red calico; then a woman came and got into the basket, and a man covered the basket again with the calico; then the man who was speaking to the audience took a long sword and ran it through the basket, each way, and then down through the cloth cover. I heard the sword cut through the woman’s body, and the manager himself said she was dead; but when the cloth was lifted from the basket she stepped out, smiled, and walked off the stage. I would like to know how she was so quickly healed, and why the wounds did not kill her.

I have never considered bears very intelligent, except in their wild habits, but I had never before seen a white bear. In one of the shows a man had a white bear that was as intelligent as a man. He would do whatever he was told—carry a log on his shoulder, just as a man would; then, when he was told, would put it down again. He did many other things, and seemed to know exactly what his keeper said to him. I am sure that no grizzly bear could be trained to do these things.

One time the guards took me into a little house that had four windows. When we were seated the little house started to move along the ground. Then the guards called my attention to some curious things they had in their pockets. Finally they told me to look out, and when I did so I was scared, for our little house had gone high up in the air, and the people down in the Fair Grounds looked no larger than ants. The men laughed at me for being scared then they gave me a glass to look through (I often had such glasses which I took from dead officers after battles in Mexico and elsewhere), and I could see rivers, lakes and mountains. But I had never been so high in the air, and I tried to look into the sky. There were no stars, and I could not look at the sun through this glass because the brightness hurt my eyes. Finally I put the glass down, and as they were all laughing at me, I, too, began to laugh. Then they said, “Get out!” and when I looked we were on the street again. After we were safe on the land I watched many of these little houses going up and coming down, but I cannot understand how they travel. They are very curious little houses.

One day we went into another show, and as soon as we were in, it changed into night. It was real night, for I could feel the damp air; soon it began to thunder, and the lightnings flashed; it was real lightning, too, for it struck just above our heads. I dodged and wanted to run away, but I could not tell which way to go in order to get out. The guards motioned me to keep still, and so I stayed. In front of us were some strange little people who came out on the platform; then I looked up again and the clouds were all gone, and I could see the stars shining. The little people on the platform did not seem in earnest about anything they did; so I only laughed at them. All the people around where we sat seemed to be laughing at me.

We went into another place and the manager took us into a little room that was made like a cage; then everything around us seemed to be moving; soon the air looked blue, then there were black clouds moving with the wind. Pretty soon it was clear outside; then we saw a few thin white clouds; then the clouds grew thicker, and it rained and hailed with thunder and lightning. Then the thunder retreated and a rainbow appeared in the distance; then it became dark, the moon rose and thousands of stars came out. Soon the sun came up, and we got out of the little room. This was a good show, but it was so strange and unnatural that I was glad to be on the streets again.

We went into one place where they made glassware. I had always thought that these things were made by hand, but they are not. The man had a curious little instrument, and whenever he would blow through this into a little blaze the glass would take any shape he wanted it to. I am not sure, but I think that if I had this kind of an instrument I could make whatever I wished. There seems to be a charm about it. But I suppose it is very difficult to get these little instruments, or other people would have them. The people in this show were so anxious to buy the things the man made that they kept him so busy he could not sit down all day long. I bought many curious things in there and brought them home with me.

At the end of one of the streets some people were getting into a clumsy canoe, upon a kind of shelf, and sliding down into the water. They seemed to enjoy it, but it looked too fierce for me. If one of these canoes had gone out of its path the people would have been sure to get hurt or killed.

There were some little brown people at the Fair that United States troops captured recently on some islands far away from here.

They did not wear much clothing, and I think that they should not have been allowed to come to the Fair. But they themselves did not seem to know any better. They had some little brass plates, and they tried to play music with these, but I did not think it was music—it was only a rattle. However, they danced to this noise and seemed to think they were giving a fine show.

I do not know how true the report was, but I heard that the President sent them to the Fair so that they could learn some manners, and when they went home teach their people how to dress and how to behave.

I am glad I went to the Fair. I saw many interesting things and learned much of the white people. They are a very kind and peaceful people. During all the time I was at the Fair no one tried to harm me in any way. Had this been among the Mexicans I am sure I should have been compelled to defend myself often.

There is a great question between the Apaches and the Government. For twenty years we have been held prisoners of war under a treaty which was made with General Miles, on the part of the United States Government, and myself as the representative of the Apaches. That treaty has not at all times been properly observed by the Government, although at the present time it is being more nearly fulfilled on their part than heretofore. In the treaty with General Miles we agreed to go to a place outside of Arizona and learn to live as the white people do. I think that my people are now capable of living in accordance with the laws of the United States, and we would, of course, like to have the liberty to return to that land which is ours by divine right. We are reduced in numbers, and having learned how to cultivate the soil would not require so much ground as was formerly necessary. We do not ask all of the land which the Almighty gave us in the beginning, but that we may have sufficient lands there to cultivate. What we do not need we are glad for the white men to cultivate.

We are now held on Comanche and Kiowa lands, which are not suited to our needs—these lands and this climate are suited to the Indians who originally inhabited this country, of course, but our people are decreasing in numbers here, and will continue to decrease unless they are allowed to return to their native land. Such a result is inevitable.

There is no climate or soil which, to my mind, is equal to that of Arizona. We could have plenty of good cultivating land, plenty of grass, plenty of timber and plenty of minerals in that land which the Almighty created for the Apaches. It is my land, my home, my fathers’ land, to which I now ask to be allowed to return. I want to spend my last days there, and be buried among those mountains. If this could be I might die in peace, feeling that my people, placed in their native homes, would increase in numbers, rather than diminish as at present, and that our name would not become extinct.

I know that if my people were placed in that mountainous region lying around the headwaters of the Gila River they would live in peace and act according to the will of the President. They would be prosperous and happy in tilling the soil and learning the civilization of the white men, whom they now respect. Could I but see this accomplished, I think I could forget all the wrongs that I have ever received, and die a contented and happy old man. But we can do nothing in this matter ourselves—we must wait until those in authority choose to act. If this cannot be done during my lifetime—if I must die in bondage—I hope that the remnant of the Apache tribe may, when I am gone, be granted the one privilege which they request—to return to Arizona.

Educator Leonard Covello (1887–1982) was the first Italian American high school principal in New York City. Covello spent most of his career at the Benjamin Franklin High School in East Harlem, located in a predominantly Puerto Rican and Italian neighborhood. He helped make Benjamin Franklin High one of the first public schools in the nation to focus on the distinctive needs of immigrant children rather than follow the predominant model of simple Americanization. In its sensitivity to the demands of a multiethnic urban environment, Covello’s 1958 memoir The Heart Is the Teacher became a classic in the history of American public education. In the excerpt that follows, Covello reminisces about his family’s arrival in the United States and about some of the emotional struggles that came with children’s entrance into American schools at the turn of the century.

As a boy of nine, the arduous trip in an old freighter did not matter very much to me or to my younger brothers. A child adapts to everything. It was the older people who suffered, those uprooted human beings who faced the shores of an unknown land with quaking hearts.

My mother had never been further from Avigliano than the chapel just a few kilometers outside the town, where we went on the feast days of La Madonna del Carmine. Suddenly she was forced to make a long and painful trip from Avigliano to Naples, through interminable mountain tunnels where choking black smoke and soot poured into the railroad carriages. Then twenty days across four thousand miles of ocean to New York.

When the sea threatened to engulf us, she did not scream and carry on like the rest, but held us close with fear and torment locked in her breast—voiceless, inarticulate. And when finally we saw the towering buildings and rode the screeching elevated train and saw the long, unending streets of a metropolis that could easily swallow a thousand Aviglianese towns, she accepted it all with the mute resignation of “La volonta di Dio,” while her heart longed for familiar scenes and the faces of loved ones and the security of a life she had forever left behind.

We spent two days at Ellis Island before my father was aware of our arrival. Two days and two nights we waited at this dreary place which for the immigrant was the entrance to America. Two days and two nights we waited, eating the food that was given us, sleeping on hard benches, while my mother hardly closed her eyes for fear of losing us in the confusion. Once during a physical examination men and boys were separated for a short time from the women. My mother was frantic as the guard led me and my two younger brothers away. When we ran back to her, she clutched us convulsively. Still in her eyes there was the disbelieving look of a mother who never expected to see her children again.

But her nightmare finally came to an end. We were on a small ferry boat crossing the lower bay of New York, going away from Ellis Island. My mother was standing at the railing with my father, and both of them happy—my father taller, more imposing than I remembered him, but still with his heavy mustache and short-cropped hair in the style of Umberto I. He held my younger brother by the hand and every once in a while glanced at me affectionately. The sunlight shone upon the water and upon the skyline of the city directly in front of us. I was standing with my brother Raffaele and a girl several years older than I who had accompanied my father to Ellis Island. She was dressed differently from the women of Avigliano, and her voice was pleasant and warm, and she could switch from our Italian dialect to English as she chose.

“You will like America,” she chattered in Italian. “There are so many things to see. So many things to do. You will make many new friends. You will go to school. You will learn and maybe become somebody very important. Would you like that?”

My brother nodded vigorously. I was older. I only smiled. The girl now addressed herself to me. “Wouldn’t you like that?”

“Yes or no?” she teased.

“Oh, but no! You must say it in English. Y–E–S, yes. Say it after me. Yes.”

“Good! Bravo!” the girl laughed. “It is your first word in English and you will never forget it.”

“Because I told you, foolish one! Because I told you, you will never forget the word and you will never forget me.”

It was true. Mary Accurso was her name. It might have been possible for me to forget how I learned to say “yes” in English. But Mary Accurso—never.

Our first home in America was a tenement flat near the East River at 112th Street on the site of what is now Jefferson Park. The sunlight and fresh air of our mountain home in Lucania were replaced by four walls and people over and under and on all sides of us, until it seemed that humanity from all corners of the world had congregated in this section of New York City known as East Harlem.

The cobbled streets. The endless, monotonous rows of tenement buildings that shut out the sky. The traffic of wagons and carts and carriages and the clopping of horses’ hoofs which struck sparks in the night. The smell of the river at ebb tide. The moaning of fog horns. The clanging of bells and the screeching of sirens as a fire broke out somewhere in the neighborhood. Dank hallways. Long flights of wooden stairs and the toilet in the hall. And the water, which to my mother was one of the great wonders of America—water with just the twist of a handle, and only a few paces from the kitchen. It took her a long time to get used to this luxury. Water and a few other conveniences were the compensations the New World had to offer.

“With the Aviglianese you are always safe,” my father would say. “They are your countrymen, paesani. They will always stand by you.”

The idea of family and clan was carried from Avigliano in southern Italy to East Harlem. From the River to First Avenue, 112th Street was the Aviglianese Colony in New York City and closest to us were the Accurso and Salvatore families. My father had lived with the Accursos during the six years he was trying to save enough for a little place to live and the money for l’umbarco. In fact, it was Carmela, wife of his friend Vito Accurso and mother of the girl who met us at the boat, who saved his money for him, until the needed amount had accumulated. It was Carmela Accurso who made ready the tenement flat and arranged the welcoming party with relatives and friends to greet us upon our arrival. During this celebration my mother sat dazed, unable to realize that at last the torment of the trip was over and that here was America. It was Mrs. Accurso who put her arm comfortingly about my mother’s shoulder and led her away from the party and into the hall and showed her the water faucet. “Courage! You will get used to it here. See! Isn’t it wonderful how the water comes out?”

Through her tears my mother managed a smile.

In all of her years in America, my mother never saw the inside of a school. My father went only once, and that was when he took me and my two younger brothers to La Soupa Scuola (the “Soup School”), as it was called among the immigrants of my generation. We headed along Second Avenue in the direction of 115th Street, my father walking in front, holding the hands of my two brothers, while I followed along with a boy of my own age, Vito Salvatore, whose family had arrived from Avigliano seven years before.

My long European trousers had been replaced by the short knickers of the time, and I wore black ribbed stockings and new American shoes. To all outward appearances I was an American, except that I did not speak a word of English.

Vito kept chanting what sounded like gibberish to me, all the while casting sidelong glances in my direction as though nursing some delightful secret.

“Mrs. Cutter cut the butter ten times in the gutter!”

“What the devil are you singing—an American song?” I asked in the dialect of our people.

“You’ll meet the devil all right.” And again, in English, “Mrs. Cutter cut the butter ten times in the gutter! Only this devil wears skirts and carries a stick this long. Wham, and she lets you have it across the back! This, my dear Narduccio, is your new head teacher.”

Was it possible? A woman teacher! “In Avigliano we were taught by men,” I bragged to my friend. “There was Maestro Mecca. Strong? When he cracked your hand with his ruler it went numb for a week. And you are trying to scare me with your woman teacher …”

I spoke with pride. Already “yesterday” was taking on a new meaning. I was lonely. I missed the mountains. I missed my friends at the shoemaker shop and my uncles and the life I had always known. In the face of a strange and uncertain future, Avigliano now loomed in a new and nostalgic light. Even unpleasant remembrances had a fascination of their own. Who had felt the blows of Don Salvatore Mecca could stand anything.

The Soup School was a three-story wooden building hemmed in by two five-story tenements at 116th Street and Second Avenue. When Vito pointed it out I experienced a shock. It appeared huge and impressive. I was ashamed to let him know that in Avigliano our school consisted of only one room, poorly lighted and poorly heated, with benches that hadn’t been changed in fifty years. However, at this moment something really wonderful happened to take my thoughts from the poverty of our life in Avigliano.

Before entering the school, my father led us into a little store close at hand. There was a counter covered by glass and in it all manner and kinds of sweets such as we had never seen before. “Candi!” my father told us, grinning. “This is what is called candi in America.”

“C-a-n-d-y!” know-it-all Vito repeated in my ear.

We were even allowed to select the kind we wanted. I remember how I selected some little round cream-filled chocolates which tasted like nothing I had every eaten before. It was unheard-of to eat sweets on a school day, even though this was a special occasion. Anyway, the only candy I knew was confetti, the sugar-coated almond confection which we had only on feast days or from the pocket of my uncle the priest on some very special occasion, and for which we kissed his hand in return. But today my father was especially happy. He ate a piece of candy too. The picture of us there on the street outside the Soup School eating candy and having a good time will never fade.

The Soup School got its name from the fact that at noontime a bowl of soup was served to us with some white, soft bread that made better spitballs than eating in comparison with the substantial and solid homemade bread to which I was accustomed. The school itself was organized and maintained by the Female Guardian Society of America. Later on I found out that this Society was sponsored by wealthy people concerned about the immigrants and their children. How much this organization accomplished among immigrants in New York City would be difficult to estimate. But this I do know, that among the immigrants of my generation and even later La Soupa Scuola is still vivid in our boyhood memories.

Why we went to the Soup School instead of the regular elementary public school I have not the faintest idea, except that possibly the first Aviglianese to arrive in New York sent his child there and everyone else followed suit—and also possibly because in those days a bowl of soup was a bowl of soup.

Once at the Soup School I remember the teacher gave each child a bag of oatmeal to take home. This food was supposed to make you big and strong. You ate it for breakfast. My father examined the stuff, tested it with his fingers. To him it was the kind of bran that was fed to pigs in Avigliano.

“What kind of a school is this?” he shouted. “They give us the food of animals to eat and send it home to us with our children! What are we coming to next?”

By the standards I had come to know and understand in Avigliano, the Soup School was not an unpleasant experience. I had been reared in a strict code of behavior, and this same strictness was the outstanding characteristic of the first of my American schools. Nor can I say, as I had indicated to Vito, that a blow from Mrs. Cutter ever had the lustiness of my old teacher, Don Salvatore Mecca. But what punishment lacked in power, it gained by the exacting personality of our principal.

Middle-aged, stockily built, gray hair parted in the middle, Mrs. Cutter lived up to everything my cousin Vito had said about her and much more. Attached to an immaculate white waist by a black ribbon, her prince nez fell from her nose and dangled in moments of anger. She moved about the corridors and classrooms of the Soup School ever alert and ready to strike at any infringement of school regulations.

I was sitting in class trying to memorize and pronounce words written on the blackboard—words which had absolutely no meaning to me. It seldom seemed to occur to our teachers that explanations were necessary.

“B-U-T-T-E-R–butter–butter,” I singsonged with the rest of the class, learning as always by rote, learning things which often I didn’t understand but which had a way of sticking in my mind.

Softly the door opened and Mrs. Cutter entered the classroom. For a large and heavy-set woman she moved quickly, without making any noise. We were not supposed to notice or even pretend we had seen her as she slowly made her way between the desks and straight-backed benches. ‘B-U-T-T-E-R,” I intoned. She was behind me now. I could feel her presence hovering over me. I did not dare take my eyes from the blackboard. I had done nothing and could conceive of no possible reason for an attack, but with Mrs. Cutter this held no significance. She carried a short bamboo switch. On her finger she wore a heavy gold wedding ring. For an instant I thought she was going to pass me by and then suddenly her clenched fist with the ring came down on my head.

I had been trained to show no emotion in the face of punishment, but this was too much. However, before I had time to react to the indignity of this assault, an amazing thing happened. Realizing that she had hurt me unjustly, Mrs. Cutter’s whole manner changed. A look of concern came into her eyes. She took hold of my arm, uttering conciliatory words which I did not understand. Later Vito explained to me that she was saying, “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it. Sit down now and be a good boy!”

Every day before receiving our bowl of soup we recited the Lord’s Prayer. I had no inkling of what the words meant. I knew only that I was expected to bow my head. I looked around to see what was going on. Swift and simple, the teacher’s blackboard pointer brought the idea home to me. I never batted an eyelash after that.

I learned arithmetic and penmanship and spelling—every misspelled word written ten times or more, traced painfully and carefully in my blankbook. I do not know how many times I wrote “I must not talk.” In this same way I learned how to read in English, learned geography and grammar, the states of the Union and all the capital cities—and memory gems—choice bits of poetry and sayings. Most learning was done in unison. You recited to the teacher standing at attention. Chorus work. Repetition. Repetition until the things you learned beat in your brain even at night when you were falling asleep.

I think of the modern child with his complexes and his need for “self-expression”! He will never know the forceful and vitalizing influence of a Soup School or a Mrs. Cutter.

I vividly remember the assembly periods. A long narrow room with large windows at either end, long rows of hard benches without backs, and the high platform at one end with a piano, a large table, several chairs, and the American flag. There were no pictures of any kind on the walls.

Silence! Silence! Silence! This was the characteristic feature of our existence at the Soup School. You never made an unnecessary noise or said an unnecessary word. Outside in the hall we lined up by size, girls in one line and boys in another, without uttering a sound. Eyes front and at attention. Lord help you if you broke the rule of silence. I can still see a distant relative of mine, a girl named Miluzza, who could never stop talking, standing in a corner behind Mrs. Cutter throughout an entire assembly with a spring-type clothespin fastened to her lower lip as punishment. Uncowed, defiant—Miluzza with that clothespin dangling from her lip …

The piano struck up a march and from the hall we paraded into assembly—eyes straight ahead in military style. Mrs. Cutter was there on the platform, dominating the scene, her eyes penetrating every corner of the assembly hall. It was always the same. We stood at attention as the Bible was read and at attention as the flag was waved back and forth, and we sang the same song. I didn’t know what the words meant but I sang it loudly with all the rest, in my own way, “Tree Cheers for de Red Whatzam Blu!”

But best of all was another song that we used to sing at these assemblies. It was a particular favorite of Mrs. Cutter’s, and we sang it with great gusto, “Honest boys who never tread the streets.” This was in the days when we not only trod the streets but practically lived in them.

Three or four years after we had established ourselves in our first home in America, word got around that the city was going to tear down several blocks of tenements to make way for a park. The park took a long time in coming. Demolition was slow and many families stayed on until the wrecking crews were almost at their doors.

The buildings had been condemned and turned over to the city, and together with Vito and my other companions, I played in a neighborhood of rubble and debris and abandoned buildings. We stole lead from the primitive plumbing to sell to the junk man. We stole bricks and chipped off the old mortar and sold them again. And in order to do this, we had to scour around the area for old baby-carriage wheels to make carts in which to carry off the stuff that we stole.

My father worked as general handyman in a German tavern or cafe on 22nd Street. Downstairs there were bowling alleys, and during the winter he was kept pretty busy setting up pins along with his other work, but in summer business slackened and he was often without work for weeks at a time. When he did work he made seven or eight dollars a week and extra tips. But work or no work, money in our house was scarce. My mother kept saying, “What are we going to do?” and my father would always answer, “What can I do?” If there is no work there is no work. You’ll have to do the best you can.”

It was a curious fatalistic attitude among our people in America that while they deplored their economic stuation they seldom tried hard to do anything about it. Generations of hardship were behind them. Life was such. “La volonta di Dio!” For them the pattern could never change, though it might, perhaps, for their children.

Our kitchen table was covered by an oilcloth with a picture of Christopher Columbus first setting foot on American soil. It was the familiar scene of Columbus grasping the flag of Spain, surrounded by his men, with Indians crowding around. More than once my father glared at this oilcloth and poured a malediction on Columbus and his great discovery.

One day I came home from the Soup School with a report card for my father to sign. It was during one of these particularly bleak periods. I remember that my friend Vito Salvatore happened to be there, and Mary Accurso had stopped in for a moment to see my mother. With a weary expression my father glanced over the marks on the report card and was about to sign it. However, he paused with the pen in his hand.

“What is this?” he said. “Leonard Covello! What happened to the i in Coviello?”

My mother paused in her mending. Vito and I just looked at each other.

“Well?” my father insisted.

“Maybe the teacher just forgot to put it in,” Mary suggested. “It can happen.” She was going to high school now and spoke with an air of authority, and people always listened to her. This time, however, my father didn’t even hear her.

“From Leonardo to Leonard I can follow,” he said, “a perfectly natural process. In America anything can happen and does happen. But you don’t change a family name. A name is a name. What happened to the i?”

“Mrs. Cutter took it out,” I explained. “Every time she pronounced Coviello it came out Covello. So she took out the i. That way it’s easier for everybody.”

My father thumped Columbus on the head with his fist. “And what has this Mrs. Cutter got to do with my name?”

“What difference does it make?” I said. “It’s more American. The i doesn’t help anything.” It was one of the very few times that I dared oppose my father. But even at that age I was beginning to feel that anything that made a name less foreign was an improvement.

Vito came to my rescue. “My name is Victor–Vic. That’s what everybody calls me now.”

“Vica. Stricka. Nicka. You crazy in the head!” my father yelled at him.

For a moment my father sat there, bitter rebellion building in him. Then with a shrug of resignation, he signed the report card and shoved it over to me. My mother now suddenly entered the argument. “How is it possible to do this to a name? Why did you sign the card? Narduccio, you will have to tell your teacher that a name cannot be changed just like that.…”

“Mamma, you don’t understand.”

“What is there to understand? A person’s life and his honor is in his name. He never changes it. A name is not a shirt or a piece of underwear.”

My father got up from the table, lighted the twisted stump of a Toscano cigar and moved out of the argument. “Honor!” he muttered to himself.

“You must explain this to your teacher,” my mother insisted. “It was a mistake. She will know. She will not let it happen again. You will see.”

“It was no mistake. On purpose. The i is out and Mrs. Cutter made it Covello. You just don’t understand!”

“Will you stop saying that!” my mother insisted. “I don’t understand. I don’t understand. What is there to understand? Now that you have become Americanized you understand everything and I understand nothing.”

With her in this mood I dared make no answer. Mary went over and put her hand on my mother’s shoulder. I beckoned to Vito and together we walked out of the flat and downstairs into the street.

“She just doesn’t understand,” I kept saying.

“I’m gonna take the e off the end of my name and make it just Salvator,” Vito said. “After all, we’re not in Italy now.”

Vito and I were standing dejectedly under the gas light on the corner, watching the lamplighter moving from post to post along the cobblestone street and then disappearing around the corner on First Avenue. Somehow or other the joy of childhood had seeped out of our lives. We were only boys, but a sadness that we could not explain pressed down upon us. Mary came and joined us. She had a book under her arm. She stood there for a moment, while her dark eyes surveyed us questioningly.

“But they don’t understand!” I insisted.

Mary smiled. “Maybe some day, you will realize that you are the one who does not understand.”

George Kennan (1845–1924) was one of America’s preeminent journalists from the 1880s to the 1920s. The country’s first expert reporter on Russia, Kennan also turned his hand to other subjects of international and domestic interest, including the imbroglio between America and Japan that resulted from an attempt to segregate Japanese schoolchildren in San Francisco in 1906. In the article that follows, Kennan gives an excellent description of what happened in California and why. Like President Roosevelt, who was drawn into an unwanted predicament with Japan as a result of this local controversy, Kennan expressed dismay at the illiberalism and intolerance of Californians, many of whom were themselves of immigrant background, toward their Japanese neighbors.

Soon after the almost complete destruction of San Francisco by earthquake and fire, in April, 1906, the Government of Japan telegraphed to the Government of the United States assurances of its sympathy and condolence, and a little later forwarded to the San Francisco Relief Committee and the American National Red Cross the sum of 492,000 yen ($246,000 gold) to be used in relieving the sufferings of the homeless people in the stricken city. Judged by American standards of wealth and charity, the amount thus sent was not so great as to be especially noteworthy but it exceeded the contributions of all the other foreign peoples of the earth put together, and, in view of the fact that it came from a comparatively poor nation, struggling to meet its financial obligations at the close of a great war, it was not only a generous gift, but a striking evidence of friendliness and good will.

A few weeks after the receipt of this money, and while the San Francisco Relief Committee was drawing checks against the fund of which it formed a part, Professor Omori, an eminent Japanese scientist—a man who enjoyed in his own country a reputation corresponding to that which the late Professor Langley had in ours—was stoned by hoodlums in the streets of the very city to which Japan had extended a friendly hand of sympathy and help and on the 8th of July his face was slapped by a labor union man in the California town of Eureka. In May Professor Nakamura, a member of Professor Omori’s party, was personally assaulted by hoodlums in Golden Gate Park, San Francisco, and on the 8th of June he was covered with dust and ashes thrown at him by boys in the burnt district, where he was making scientific observations. In the months that immediately followed, attacks were made upon Japanese in many parts of San Francisco, and, in one case at least, upon Japanese Christians who were going peaceably to church. So far as I have been able to ascertain, such cases of violence were exceptional and sporadic, rather than general; but if American Christians had been assaulted, and if Alexander Graham Bell and Simon Newcomb had been stoned, slapped, and covered with dust and ashes by Oriental hoodlums in the streets of Sendai, just after we had sent a generous contribution for the relief of sufferers from famine in northern Japan, we should have been surprised, to say the least, and should have regarded the violence as an extraordinary return for American sympathy and help.

On the 11th of last October, less than six months after the San Francisco Relief Committee had accepted with thanks the Japanese contribution of $246,000, the San Francisco Board of Education adopted a resolution directing the principals of all the primary and grammar schools of the city to exclude Japanese pupils, and to segregate them in a so-called “Oriental School,” established, originally, for the Chinese, under the provisions of a law enacted thirty-four years ago.

At first sight there would seem to be a certain strangeness and incongruity in this sequence of events. The Japanese send to the San Franciscans $246,000 as a token of helpful friendliness and sympathy, and the San Franciscans reciprocate by stoning eminent Japanese scientists in the streets, by attacking Japanese Christians who are on their way to a Sunday church service, and by excluding Japanese scholars from primary and grammar schools which they have attended for years and which are open to Italians, Germans, Scandinavians, Russians, Poles, Armenians, Mexicans, Greeks, Jews, and representatives of nearly all the nationalities of the Old World. What are the reasons for this intolerant hatred of the Japanese, which not only effaces remembrance of courtesy and kindness, but seems, in some of its manifestations, to overstep the bounds of decency and law? It must be a very strong feeling, and it must rest upon elemental facts and emotions of human nature. It is my purpose, in this article, to give the results of such study as I have been able to make of the Japanese school question on the Pacific Coast.

As the exclusion of Japanese children from the white public schools brought about the clash between the Federal authorities and the San Francisco Board of Education, I shall take up that subject first. It is, in itself, a comparatively trivial episode, but in it are involved all the factors of the Japanese problem, and it may properly serve, therefore, as an introduction to the larger and more important questions of economic competition and race antipathy.

The law under which the San Francisco Board of Education acted, when it barred the Japanese out of primary and grammar schools attended by whites, was enacted March 12, 1872, and was aimed exclusively at the Chinese. There was no Japanese immigration at that time, and the words “separate schools for children of Mongolian or Chinese descent” were evidently intended to apply only to immigrants from the Asiatic mainland. The “segregation” school established under the provisions of this law was situated in the heart of Chinatown, and was officially known, for many years, as the “Chinese School.” When Japanese immigrants in considerable numbers began to arrive in San Francisco, their children were not “segregated” in the Chinese School, but were admitted, without question or objection, to the schools attended by whites; and, so far as I have been able to ascertain, it was not until 1901, when the labor unions obtained control of the city government, that any concerted action was taken against the Japanese, in the schools or out of them. After that time there slowly grew up a feeling of hostility to the Japanese, based partly upon their alleged untrustworthiness, partly on a fear of economic competition, and partly upon a feeling of race antipathy; and the Board of Education began to receive letters from the parents of white scholars, complaining of the enforced association of their children with the children of Japanese immigrants in the public schools. The Board, which was the creation of a labor union administration, sympathized, apparently, with these complaints, but was unable to take action upon them, owing to the fact that the Chinese School was already full, and there was no money available for a second school of segregation.

In the early part of 1905 the Board made an effort to secure an appropriation for the opening and maintenance of a distinctively Japanese school, but, on account, apparently, of the indifference of the municipal administration, which was busily engaged in grafting, this effort had no result. It attracted the attention, however, of the Japanese Consul, and in March, 1905, that officer, learning that the chief objection to Japanese scholars in the primary and grammar schools was their advanced age, suggested to the Japanese newspapers of the city that they advise the voluntary withdrawal of the older pupils. The papers acted upon this suggestion, and most of the older pupils did withdraw. I refer to this incident only as a proof that the Japanese were amenable to reason, and were willing to act in a friendly way on a complaint that seemed to be well founded.

On the 7th of May, 1905, a number of trades union leaders founded the “Japanese and Corean Exclusion League,” and this organization, by means of its meetings and its literature, soon increased the feeling of hostility to the Japanese, not only in San Francisco, but to some extent in the State. The earthquake and fire of April 18 destroyed the Chinese quarter of San Francisco, and drove so many of its residents to Oakland and Alameda that, when the Chinese School was reopened, there was room in it not only for all the Chinese scholars who presented themselves, but also for the Japanese, who at that time were distributed among twenty-three other schools. The Board of Education thereupon changed the name of the Chinese School, called it the “Oriental School,” and attempted to segregate in it the Japanese scholars of the city, who for years had been attending primary and grammar schools on terms of perfect equality with children of American and European descent. When this discrimination against Japanese led to an international complication and forced the Federal Government to interfere, the Board of Education attempted to justify its action by pleading, first, that the provisions of the State law of 1872 were mandatory and gave the Board no discretion; and, second, that an overwhelming majority of the so-called Japanese “school-boys” were grown men, who ought not to be allowed to sit beside young children, and especially young girls, in primary schools. In the public and private discussion of the subject that immediately followed, the Board of Education, the California delegation in Congress, the San Francisco newspapers, the Exclusion League, and trade union leaders without exception, laid most stress upon the age of Japanese “boys” in the primary schools. Nobody attempted to ascertain the facts, but all declared, without inquiry or investigation, that the association of Japanese men with school-girls of tender years in the intimacy of school life was an intolerable evil which could no longer be endured. President Altmann, of the Board of Education, said: “We do not care to have our little children mixing with adult Japanese.” (San Francisco Chronicle, December 7.) Senator Perkins declared that there were “not forty Japanese children of school age in San Francisco.” (San Francisco Examiner, December 7.) Representative Hayes said: “Most of the Japanese pupils are youths from fifteen to twenty-five. It is nothing more than right and just to prohibit their attending school with young children.” (San Francisco Chronicle, December 4.) The San Francisco Call said (December 4): “It is deemed inexpedient that adults should associate with little children in the intimate relations of school life.” According to the San Francisco Newsletter (December 8): “A city ordinance eliminating all children, of whatever race or color, from the primary schools, when over sixteen, would eliminate ninety-five per cent. of the Japanese.” Alfred Roncovieri, Superintendent of Schools, declared that “these so-called Japanese children are, ninety-five per cent. of them, young men. We object to an adult Japanese sitting beside a twelve-year-old girl. If this be prejudice, we are the most prejudiced people in the world.” (San Francisco Examiner, December 5.) Misled by these confident assertions, the usually accurate and well-informed correspondent of a prominent New York journal said: “It will be news to most Easterners that almost none of the Japanese school-boys are boys. Practically without exception, they are full grown men, between the ages of twenty and thirty. Yet Japan expects them to be allowed to sit side by side, day after day, with American boys, and, more extraordinary yet, girls of tender years.” (New York Sun, December 13.)

Persons and newspapers hostile to the Japanese, however, did not base their opposition to the presence of the latter in white schools solely upon age. Without investigation or inquiry, they began to attribute to “adult” Japanese “schoolboys” a low moral standard and corrupting influence. The Berkeley Gazette, for example, asked: “Is there a power lodged anywhere in the universe that may oblige our young children to associate with men, in or out of school, who are not up to our standard of morals?” It might pertinently be asked, perhaps, whether the standard of morals referred to is that of the municipal administration which has excluded the Japanese from the white schools, and whether the record of graft, frauds, assaults, hold-ups, burglaries, rapes, and murders, which has recently given San Francisco unenviable fame, could have been paralleled in Japan at any period of its history.

Taking practically the same view of “adults” in primary schools that is taken by the Berkeley Gazette, the conservative Sacramento Union said: “We will not consent that our little ones shall suffer infection, in mind, in morals, or in manners, to please anybody.” The idea that an American boy might deteriorate mentally, or lose his good manners, as a result of associating with Japanese of any age, strikes an American who has lived in Japan as somewhat ludicrous; but I do not wish to be hypercritical.

Adopting, apparently, the view of the California papers with regard to the character of Japanese scholars, the Chicago Inter-Ocean inquired: “How would people in the East like to have their little daughters forced to associate in school with grown men, whose morals may be doubtful and whose moral ideas are certainly not American?” The San Francisco Call said: “We regard the public schools as part of the home, and we are not willing that our children should meet Asiatics in intimate association. This is ‘race prejudice,’ and we stand by it. If the Japanese want to fight about trifles, they can be accommodated.” The Call does not say who is going to accommodate them—the United States or the State of California; but the latter is by no means lacking in self-confidence. P. H. McCarthy, President of the San Francisco Building Trades Council, declared, at a mass-meeting of the Exclusion League, that “the States west of the Rockies could whip Japan at a moment’s notice.” He had perhaps forgotten, in the heat of oratorical excitement, the boasts of Russia in January, 1904.

Now, what conclusion would a disinterested and dispassionate reader draw from the statements, interviews, editorials, and speeches above set forth? Would he not be forced to believe that Japanese scholars swarm in the primary and grammar schools of San Francisco; that they are all males; that ninety-five per cent. of them are full-grown men; that they sit in the class-rooms beside “twelve-year-old girls” and “children of tender years;” that their ethical standard is low, and that their influence, generally, is demoralizing and corrupting? I do not see myself what other conclusion he could draw, when the President of the Board of Education, the Superintendent of Schools, the San Francisco newspapers, the Exclusion League, and the California delegation in Congress are all in substantial agreement as to the alleged facts. Now what are the real facts?

I talked with the Superintendent of Schools and every member of the Board of Education; I interviewed the Japanese Consul; I obtained and compared statistics from the Board of Education on one side and from the Japanese Association on the other, and availed myself, generally, of every source of information open to me. I found that the situation when the Japanese were excluded from the primary and grammar schools was as follows:

The total number of pupils in the San Francisco public schools was 28,736 (December 8, 1906). Judging from their names, they comprised representatives of almost every nationality in Europe. The Superintendent of Schools, Mr. Roncovieri, was an Italian, and the President of the Board of Education, Mr. Altmann, was a Jew—a representative of a race that is still excluded from schools, wholly or partially, in one of the greatest Empires of the Old World. Of the 28,736 school-children in San Francisco on the 8th of last December, there were, in primary and grammar schools, just 93 Japanese, or a little more than one to a school building. Of these 93 Japanese nearly one-third were born in the United States, and 28 were girls. Of the 65 boys 34 were under fifteen years of age. Of the 31 who were over fifteen only two had reached the age of twenty, and the average age of the remainder was 17.2. Twenty-five of them were in grammar schools, so that the number “sitting beside children of tender age” in primary schools was six, as follows:

Six Japanese over fifteen years of age, attending primary schools, in a total school population of 28,736, would not seem to constitute a very serious menace to American morality, even if they were all depraved, and even if it were not possible to seat them at a distance from infant girls; but are Japanese schoolboys depraved, or morally objectionable in any way? In an interview with a reporter of the San Francisco Chronicle, Mr. Altmann, President of the Board of Education, admitted that “nothing can be said against the general character and deportment of Japanese scholars.” (San Francisco Chronicle, December 9.) In reply to a direct and comprehensive question on the subject Mr. Alfred Roncovieri, Superintendent of Schools, said to me personally: “No complaint of bad conduct, on the part of a Japanese scholar, has ever come to my knowledge.” In a private letter now in my possession, one of the oldest and most experienced teachers in the San Francisco public schools says: “The statement that the influence of the Japanese in our schools has a tendency toward immorality is false and absolutely without foundation. From all I have ever heard in conferences with other school men, as well as from my own continuous and careful observation, there has never been the slightest cause for a shadow of suspicion affecting the conduct of one of these Japanese pupils. On the contrary, I have found that they have furnished examples of industry, patience, unobtrusiveness, obedience, and honesty in their work, which have greatly helped many efficient teachers to create the proper moral atmosphere for their class-rooms. Japanese and American children have always been on good terms in my classrooms, and in others concerning which I was informed. They work side by side without interference or friction, and often a Japanese student would be a great favorite among his American classmates. In all my years of experience there has never come to me, orally or in writing, from the parents whose children have attended my school, one hint of complaint or dissatisfaction concerning the instruction of their children in the same school or in the same rooms with Japanese; nor has there ever been complaint or protest from teachers with regard to this coeducation.”

Mr. E. C. Moore, Superintendent of Schools in Los Angeles, says, in another private letter: “Replying to your inquiry as to the status of Japanese pupils in the schools of Los Angeles, I beg to say that during all the time I have been in the office of Superintendent of Schools here I have not heard a single word of protest against them. They are given every opportunity to attend school that American boys and girls have. We find them quiet and industrious in their school work, and such good students that our principals and teachers believe them to have a most helpful influence upon the other pupils with whom they associate. As a California school man, I bitterly regret the action of the San Francisco school authorities. It was wholly unnecessary, in my view, and is, I am glad to say, not representative of public opinion in California.”

Judging from my own observation of Japanese school-boys in Japan, I should say that the more American school-boys associate with them, the better for the latter’s morals and manners. I once asked an Englishman, of mature years, who was teaching in a middle-class school in Kyoto, why there was so little misconduct in Japanese class-rooms. “I have been through dozens of schools,” I said, “of all grades, and have listened to recitations in hundreds of class-rooms; but I have never seen any inattention, whispering, throwing of spit-balls, making of faces, or disorder of any sort. What is the reason?” He looked at me searchingly for a moment, as if to take my measure, and then replied quietly: “The Japanese are born civilized.”

“Do you mean to suggest that we Westerners are not born civilized?” I demanded.

“Exactly that,” he replied. “We, Englishmen and Americans, are born barbarians. Most of us become civilized, but we elevate ourselves, in youth, by effort and struggle. Japanese boys inherit the results of centuries of civilized training, and they have better control of themselves and are far more amenable to discipline than our boys are. At least that’s my explanation of the fact that you have noticed.”

When the English teacher made this reply to me, in January, 1906, I little thought that, before the end of the year, I should hear the exclusion of Japanese scholars from the San Francisco schools defended on the ground that they were likely to “infect the minds, morals, and manners” of American children. I should have said that the infection was far more likely to proceed in the opposite direction.

In scholarship the Japanese pupils have everywhere taken high rank. In a letter written on the 29th of December, 1906, to the Electrical Workers’ Union of Oakland, the Secretary of the San Francisco Board of Education said: “You are doubtless aware that Japanese pupils, coming to this city partly educated, have been able so successfully to compete with our white children as to win from the latter the class medals that were intended for the children of our taxpayers.” In other words, the Japanese, coming to America with an imperfect knowledge of the English language, or with no knowledge of it at all, have been so studious and diligent as to carry off most of the honors; and this is urged as a reason for their exclusion!

Although the ninety-three Japanese scholars in San Francisco were distributed among twenty-three schools, forty-two of them, or nearly one-half, were in two schools, viz., the Redding Primary and the Pacific Heights Grammar. In the former their average age was 9.6 years and in the latter 16.5. Most of the grammar school Japanese were probably older than the majority of their associates; but as the Board of Education could not give me age statistics of the latter in detail, I am unable to say how much older. The difference may have amounted to two or three years at the time of graduation. If, however, this difference was undesirable, and if there was objection to the six Japanese who were more than fifteen years old in the primary schools, the Board of Education had two simple and perfectly effective remedies: viz., first, the opening of a separate school for pupils of all nationalities who were advanced in age and backward in scholarship; and, second, the establishment of an undiscriminating age limit for all scholars in primary and grammar schools. Neither of these remedies would have raised a question of race or nationality, and neither would have given offense. Non-discriminating restriction, however, would not have met the approval of parents who objected to the association of their children with Japanese of any age (if there really were any such parents), nor would it have satisfied the Exclusion League and the labor union leaders, who feared the economic competition of Japanese adults, and who saw in the school question an excellent opportunity to excite feeling against the Japanese as a race, by appealing to the love of parents for their children, and by drawing imaginary pictures of immoral Japanese men “sitting beside twelve-year-old girls.” There may possibly be schools, in some part of the world, where teachers allow “men,” moral or immoral, to sit beside twelve-year-old girls; but in my tolerably varied experience I have never happened to come across such a school in Europe, Asia, or America. Everywhere and always I have found boys and girls at separate desks or in separate seats. The cry of “Asiatic men sitting beside immature American girls,” however, was well calculated to fire the heart of the populace in California, and even to wake up the indifferent East. Tens of thousands of parents in San Francisco, and perhaps hundreds of thousands on the Pacific Coast, were deceived and excited by this unfair presentation of the case, and the Board of Education and the San Francisco newspapers are largely responsible for the state of feeling thus brought about. They declare, with much vehemence, that the President was chiefly to blame for the excitement over the school question, because he “meddled” with a matter that was none of his business; but it seems to me, upon a fair judgment of the case, that a far more potent cause of excitement was the reckless—not to say dishonest—method of dealing with the question which was adopted by the Board of Education, the Exclusion League, and the San Francisco press; the failure to investigate, the suppression of some facts and the exaggeration of others, and, above all, the constant holding up of imaginary pictures of full-grown Japanese men sitting beside American children, and especially “girls of tender years.”

The San Francisco papers say: “It is a strange but instructive fact that in the miles and miles of editorials that we have seen in the Eastern papers, not one of the writers has taken the slightest pains to ascertain the facts.” But can these journals seriously affirm that they have taken any pains to ascertain the facts? I read them carefully for several months, and if I had not had other sources of information, I might have supposed that there were hundreds, if not thousands, of Japanese in the public schools of San Francisco; that most of them were grown men; that there were great numbers of these “adults” sitting beside infant children in the primary schools; and that their morals were doubtful, if not certainly bad. Up to the present time, no paper in San Francisco, so far as I am aware, has ever obtained and published detailed statistics of Japanese scholars in the primary and grammar schools, with the number in each grade, the average and maximum age in each grade, the age by grades as compared with that of American scholars, the number and distribution of adults, and the reports of teachers with regard to the character and deportment of Japanese pupils in general. All of this information might have been obtained, and it would have seemed the most natural thing in the world to get it and publish it, so that the people of the city, the State, and the United States might have a few definite and specific facts upon which to base a reasonable judgment. Such, however, is not the course of procedure in a community dominated by labor unions, when the subject in hand relates to an Asiatic race. It would be impossible to make an effective labor union weapon out of the school question if it were once admitted that Japanese scholars are studious, diligent, and moral, and that, in a school population of 28,736, only six Japanese boys above the age of fifteen are enrolled in the primary grade.

The anti-Japanese agitation in California, which came to a head in the 1906 San Francisco public school controversy, placed President Theodore Roosevelt in a difficult political and diplomatic position. Angry at the San Franciscans for the hysterical intolerance of their effort to remove and segregate the small number of Japanese students in the public schools, and aware that their action would create an international incident with Japan, the president prevailed upon them to revoke the plan. In order to achieve this goal, however, Roosevelt had to negotiate the “Gentlemen’s Agreement” with Japan (completed in 1908), by which Japan agreed to stop the emigration of Japanese laborers to the mainland United States. The following excerpts from a letter of Roosevelt’s to the incoming Secretary of State Philander Knox illustrate the subtlety of Roosevelt’s understanding of the Japanese American situation. The president was astute about the strategic importance of Japan, realistic about the prejudices of many Americans toward the Japanese, yet respectful toward both Japan and the Japanese. (Because Roosevelt respected power, his attitude toward China, then a weak nation, was much less charitable.)

It is utterly impossible to foretell as regards either foreign or domestic policy what particular questions may appear as at the moment of most engrossing interest. It may be that there will be no ripple of trouble between Japan and the United States during your term of service. It may very well be that you will have acute trouble about Cuba, or with Venezuela or in Central America, or with some European power; but it is not likely that grave international complications—that is, complications which can possibly lead to serious war—can come from any such troubles. If we have to interfere again in Cuba, or take Possession of the island, it will be exasperating, and we may in consequence have to repeat our Philippine experiences by putting down an annoying but unimportant guerrilla outbreak. But this would represent merely annoyance. The same would be true of anything in Central America or Venezuela.

I do not believe that Germany has any designs that would bring her in conflict with the Monroe Doctrine. The last seven years have tended steadily toward a better understanding of Germany on our part, and a more thorough understanding on the part of Germany that she must not expect colonial expansion in South America. As for England, I cannot imagine serious trouble with her. The settlement of the Alaskan boundary removed the one grave danger. The treaties now before the Senate are excellent, and all we have to fear is some annoying, but hardly grave, friction in the event of the failure of the Senate to ratify them.

But with Japan the case is different. She is a most formidable military power. Her people have peculiar fighting capacity. They are very proud, very warlike, very sensitive, and are influenced by two contradictory feelings; namely, a great self-confidence, both ferocious and conceited, due to their victory over the mighty empire of Russia; and a great touchiness because they would like to be considered as on a full equality with, as one of the brotherhood of, Occidental nations, and have been bitterly humiliated to find that even their allies, the English, and their friends, the Americans, won’t admit them to association and citizenship, as they admit the least advanced or most decadent European peoples. Moreover, Japan’s population is increasing rapidly and demands an outlet; and the Japanese laborers, small farmers, and petty traders would, if permitted, flock by the hundred thousand into the United States, Canada, and Australia.

Now for our side. The events of the last three years have forced me to the clear understanding that our people will not permit the Japanese to come in large numbers among them; will not accept them as citizens; will not tolerate their presence as large bodies of permanent settlers. This is just as true in Australia and Colombia as in our Rocky Mountain and Pacific states; but at present the problem is more acute with us because the desire of the Japanese to come here has grown. The opposition to the presence of the Japanese, I have reluctantly come to feel, is entirely warranted, and not only must be. but ought to be, heeded by the national government in the interest of our people and our civilization; and this in spite of the fact that many of the manifestations of the opposition are unwise and improper to the highest degree.

To permit the Japanese to come in large numbers into this country would be to cause a race problem and invite and insure a race contest. It is necessary to keep them out. But it is almost equally necessary that we should both show all possible courtesy and consideration in carrying out this necessarily disagreeable policy of exclusion, and that we should be thoroughly armed, so as to prevent the Japanese from feeling safe in attacking us. Unfortunately, great masses of our people show a foolish indifference to arming, and at the same time a foolish willingness to be offensive to the Japanese.

Labor unions pass violent resolutions against the Japanese and almost at the same moment protest against strengthening our military resources on land or sea. Big corporations seek to introduce Japanese coolies so as to get cheap labor, and thereby invite agitation which they are powerless to quell. The peace societies, and senators and congressmen like Burton of Ohio, Perkins of California, Perkins of New York, Tawney of Minnesota, McCall of Massachusetts, and Bartholdt of Missouri blatantly or furtively oppose the Navy and hamper its upbuilding, while doing nothing whatever to prevent insult to Japan. The California legislature is threatening to pass the most offensive kind of legislation aimed at the Japanese, and yet it reelects a wretched creature like Perkins to the Senate although he has opposed, with his usual feeble timidity and so far as he dared, the upbuilding of the Navy, following Hale’s lead.

We are therefore faced by the fact that our people will not tolerate, and ought not to tolerate, the presence among them of large bodies of Japanese; and that so long as they are here in large bodies there is always chance either of violence on the part of mobs or of indiscreet and improper action by the legislative bodies of the Western states under demagogic influence. Furthermore, in Hawaii the Japanese already many times outnumber the whites, and have shown on more than one recent occasion a spirit both truculent and insolent.

In Hawaii the trouble is primarily due to the shortsighted greed of the sugar planters and of the great employers generally, who showed themselves incapable of thinking of the future of their children and anxious only to make fortunes from estates tilled by coolie labor. Accordingly, they imported, first masses of Chinese laborers and, then masses of Japanese laborers. Throughout my term as President, I have so far as possible conducted our policy against this desire of the sugar planters, against the theory of turning Hawaii into an island of coolie tilled plantations, and in favor of making so far as possible the abode of small settler.

With this purpose, I have done everything I could to encourage the immigration of southern Europeans to the islands, and have endeavored so far as I could in the absence of legislation to restrict the entrance of Asiatic coolies. So far as possible our aim should be to diminish the number of Japanese in the islands without any regard to the fortunes of the sugar planters, and to bring in Europeans, no matter of what ancestry, in order that the islands may be filled with a white population of our general civilization and culture.

As regards the mainland, our policy should have three sides and should be shaped, not to meet the exigencies of this year or next but to meet what may occur for the next few decades. Japan is poor and is therefore reluctant to go to war. Moreover, Japan is vitally interested in China and on the Asiatic mainland and her wiser statesmen will, if possible, prevent her getting entangled in a war with us, because whatever its result it would hamper and possibly ruin Japan when she came to deal again with affairs in China. But with so proud and sensitive a people neither lack of money nor possible future complications will prevent a war if once they get sufficiently hurt and angry; and there is always danger of a mob outbreak there just as there is danger of a mob outbreak here.

Our task therefore is on the one hand to meet the demands which our own people make and which cannot permanently be resisted, and on the other to treat Japan so courteously that she will not be offended more than is necessary; and at the same time to prepare our fleet in such shape that she will feel very cautious about attacking us. Disturbances like those going on at present are certain to occur unless the Japanese immigration, so far as it is an immigration, for settlement, stops. For the last six months under our agreement with Japan it has been stopped to the extent that more Japanese have left the country than have come into it. But the Japanese should be made clearly to understand that this process must continue and if there is relaxation it will be impossible to prevent our people from enacting drastic exclusion laws; and that in such case all of us would favor such drastic legislation.

Hand in hand with insistence on the stopping of Japanese immigration should go insistence as regards our own people that they be courteous and considerate, that they treat the Japanese who are here well; and above all that they go on with the building of the Navy, keep it at the highest point of efficiency, securing not merely battleships but an ample supply of colliers and other auxiliary vessels of every kind. Much of the necessary expense would be met by closing the useless Navy yards. By the way, the fighting Navy should not be divided; it should be kept either in the Pacific or in the Atlantic, merely a squadron being left in the other ocean, and this in such shape that, in the event of war, it could avoid attack and at once join the main body of fighting ships.

All this is so obvious that it ought not to be necessary to dwell upon it. But our people are shortsighted and have short memories—I suppose all peoples are shortsighted and have short memories. The minute we arrange matters so that for the moment everything is smooth and pleasant, the more foolish peace societies, led by men like ex-Secretary of State Foster and ex-Secretary of the Navy Long, clamor for a stoppage in the building up of the Navy. On the other hand, at the very moment when we are actually keeping out the Japanese and reducing the number of Japanese here, demagogues and agitators like those who have recently appeared in the California and Nevada legislatures work for the passage of laws which are humiliating and irritating to the Japanese and yet of no avail so far as keeping out immigrants is concerned; for this can be done effectively only by the national government.