Paul Johnson writes in Modern Times:
The notion of a fusion of races in America was as old as Hector Crevecoeur and Thomas Jefferson. It was dramatized with sensational effect in Israel Zangwill’s play The Melting-pot, which was the New York hit of 1908. The new motion-picture industry, which was from its inception the epitome of multi-racialism, was obsessed by the idea, as many of its early epics testify. But with what proportions of ingredients should the pot be filled? By the time of the Great War, unrestricted immigration already appeared a lost cause. In 1915 an itinerant Georgian minister, William Simmons, founded the Ku Klux Klan as an organization to control minority groups which it identified with moral and political nonconformity. Its aims were powerfully assisted by the publication, the following year, of Madison Grant’s presentation, in an American context, of European ‘master-race’ theory, The Passing of the Great Race, This quasi-scientific best-seller argued that America, by unrestricted immigration, had already nearly ‘succeeded in destroying the privilege of birth; that is, the intellectual and moral advantages a man of good stock brings into the world with him’. The result of the ‘melting-pot’, he argued, could be seen in Mexico, where ‘the absorption of the blood of the original Spanish conquerors by the native Indian
population’ had produced a degenerate mixture ‘now engaged in demonstrating its incapacity for self-government’. The virtues of the ‘higher races’ were ‘highly unstable’ and easily disappeared ‘when mixed with generalized or primitive characters’. Thus ‘the cross between a white man and a Negro is a Negro’ and ‘the cross between any of the three European races and a Jew is a Jew’.
This fear of ‘degeneration’ was used by Hiram Wesley Evans, a Dallas dentist and most effective of the Klan leaders, to build it up into a movement of Anglo-Saxon supremacist culture which at one time had a reputed 4 million members in the East and Midwest. Evans, who called himself ‘the most average man in America’, asserted that the Klan spoke ‘for the great mass of Americans of the old pioneer stock … of the so-called Nordic race which, with all its faults, has given the world almost the whole of modern civilization’. A racial pecking-order was almost universally accepted in political campaigning, though with significant variations to account for local voting-blocks. Thus, Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, in private an unqualified Anglo-Saxon supremacist, always used the prudent code-term ‘the English-speaking people’ when campaigning. Will Hays, campaign manager for Warren Harding, comprehensively summed up the candidate’s lineage as ‘the finest pioneer blood, Anglo-Saxon, German, Scotch-Irish and Dutch’.
America’s entry into the Great War gave an enormous impetus to a patriotic xenophobia which became a justification for varieties of racism and a drive against nonconformity…
A more permanent consequence was the 1921 Quota law which limited immigration in any year to 3 per cent of the number of each nationality in the USA according to the census of 1910. This device, whose object was to freeze the racial balance as far as possible, was greatly tightened by the Johnson-Reed Act of 1924, which limited the quota to 2 per cent of any nationality residing in the USA in 1890. It debarred Japanese altogether (though Canadians and Mexicans were exempt) and not only cut the earlier quota but deliberately favoured Northern and Western Europe at the expense of Eastern and Southern Europe. With a further twist of the screw in 1929, based on racial analysis of the USA population in the 1920s, the legislation of the 1920s brought mass immigration to America to an end. Arcadia was full, its drawbridge up, its composition now determined and to be perpetuated….
There was an important point here: America, if it was anything, was a Protestant-type religious civilization…
In fact the East Coast highbrows were by no means helpless. Over the next sixty years they were to exercise an influence on American (and world) policy out of all proportion to their numbers and intrinsic worth. But they were ambivalent about America. In the spring of 1917, Van Wyck Brooks wrote in Seven Arts, the journal he helped to found, ‘Towards a National Culture’, in which he argued that hitherto America had taken the ‘best’ of other cultures: now it must create its own through the elementary experience of living which alone produced true culture. America, by experiencing its own dramas, through what he termed ‘the Culture of Industrialism’, would ‘cease to be a blind, selfish, disorderly people; we shall become a luminous people, dwelling in the light and sharing our light’. 11 He endorsed his friend Randolph Bourne’s view that the whole ‘melting-pot’ theory was unsound since it turned immigrants into imitation Anglo-Saxons, and argued that America ought to have not narrow European nationalism but ‘the more adventurous ideal’ of cosmopolitanism, to become ‘the first international nation’. 12 But what did this mean? D.H. Lawrence rightly observed that America was not, or not yet, ‘a blood-homeland’. Jung, putting it another way, said Americans were ‘not yet at home in their unconscious’. Brooks, deliberately settling into Westport, Connecticut, to find his American cosmopolitanism, together with other Twenties intellectuals whom he neatly defined as ‘those who care more for the state of their minds than the state of their fortunes’, nevertheless felt the strong pull of the old culture; he confessed, in his autobiography, to ‘a frequently acute homesickness for the European scene’. Only ‘a long immersion in American life’, he wrote, ‘was to cure me completely of any lingering fear of expatriation; but this ambivalence characterized my outlook in the Twenties.’ 13 In May 1919, hearing that a friend, Waldo Frank, planned to settle in the Middle West, he wrote to him: ‘All our will-to-live as writers comes to us, or rather stays with us, through our intercourse with Europe. Never believe people who talk to you about the west, Waldo; never forget that it is we New Yorkers and New Englanders who have the monopoly of whatever oxygen there is in the American continent.’
