"Each 'Race' Could Have Its Heroes Sung": Ethnicity and the History Wars in the 1920s

Jonathan Zimmerman

In a classic 1924 essay, the philosopher Horace M. Kallen sketched two alternative pathways for the American future. One was "Kultur Klux Klan," the "social and intellectual conformity" symbolized by the hooded hoodlums of the Ku Klux Klan (KKK). The other was "Cultural Pluralism," a term Kallen coined to celebrate "variations of racial groups" and "spontaneous differences of social heritage, institutional habit, mental attitude, and emotional tone." Nativist sentiment dominated the United States in the 1920s, Kallen admitted, citing drives for immigration restriction and what contemporaries called "one-hundred-percent Americanism." Yet this impulse "has never existed unopposed," he emphasized. Beneath the American "compulsions toward conformity" lay a more liberal tradition of ethnic tolerance, respectful of "differentiated communities" and "the free flow . . . of spiritual values between them."1	1
A few months before Kallen's essay appeared, the New Jersey legislature debated a bill that would have barred "treasonous" history textbooks from the state's classrooms. The bill's sponsors targeted works by such authors as David S. Muzzey and Charles A. Beard, whose "new methods" of socioeconomic analysis seemed to diminish the Founding Fathers. Invoking the liberal tribune John Dewey, Kallen condemned such legislation as the epitome of America's homogenizing heritage. "The fact is, the genuine American, the typical American, is himself a hyphenated character," wrote Dewey, in a passage that Kallen quoted. "And this means at least that our public schools shall . . . enlighten all as to the great past contributions of every strain in our composite make-up." Rather than capitulating to the narrow demands of Anglo-Saxon patriots such as the American Legion and the Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFW), Kallen concluded, schools should highlight the talents and achievements of the nation's entire ethnic panoply.2	2
Unbeknownst to Kallen, however, the same ethnic minorities that he celebrated often supported the school history laws that he despised. In New Jersey, for example, backers of the textbook bill included not just the legion and the VFW but also the German American Steuben Society, the Catholic Knights of Columbus, and the Jewish Alliance. To these ethnic groups, any diminution of America's grand national story would erode—not enhance—their special contribution to it. As one Newark citizen reasoned, a text that downplayed the heroic deeds of George Washington would effectively discount the "German, Polish, and French generals" who assisted him. It would also place their English enemies in a far more favorable light, a German activist emphasized. "Friends, there has never been a dearth of Tories in our midst," he warned, "of men who regret the great achievements of the past and would bring us back to the British fold."3	. . .