Nationalism - Nativism and "americanization"

If nationalism in the twentieth century recoiled from the problems of assimilation abroad, it could not avoid those problems at home. The rise of Anglo-Saxon racism coincided with massive emigration from non–Anglo-Saxon eastern and southern Europe, which raised questions about the dilution not only of the race but also of the institutions of America. Not all the nativist reactions were hostile. Some were patronizing and even melioristic. The Daughters of the American Revolution and other patriotic societies recognized their duty to "Americanize" the foreigner, to teach him proper speech and manners as well as values. The public school would be the instrument, according to Josiah Strong, by which "the strange and dissimilar races which come to us are, in one generation, assimilated and made Americans." American Catholic and Jewish historical societies, accepting the importance of Americanization, were organized in the 1880s and 1890s to show the nation their own ties with the American past. Their objective was to justify themselves as Americans, different in background but sharing in the creation of a new people. The constitution of the American Irish Historical Society expressed the hope that "in the days to come, that lie in the womb of the future, when all the various elements that have gone and are going to make the republic great, are united in the American,—the man who in his person will represent the bravest elements of all the old races of earth,—we declare that the deeds and accomplishment of our element shall be written in the book of the new race, telling what we did and no more; giving us our rightful place by the side of the others."

Such modesty of aspiration on the part of an immigrant group and such generous impulses on the part of the patronizing older stock were balanced by less edifying side effects of the racist component in nationalism. Ethnic and religious communities vied with each other in claiming credit for contributions to the national history or character, while the Anglo-Saxon elite, under the impact of war and depression in the twentieth century, blamed immigrants for the nation's troubles. War inevitably stokes nationalist passions, and World War I was no exception. The case then was not simply undifferentiated immigrants. German-Americans were identified as enemies with dangerous attachments to the ancestral country. Such manifestations of nationalism at its worst were seen in the banning of Beethoven, the conversion of sauerkraut into liberty cabbage, and the removal of German language instruction from schools. The vehement denunciation of the "hyphenated" American by Woodrow Wilson and Theodore Roosevelt during the war assumed that hyphenation applied to the Irish and Germans, not to the British. The latter's heritage was indistinguishable from the Americans' in 1917.

The revival of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s, with its particularly ugly brand of national exclusiveness, was another manifestation of the Anglo-Saxon tradition translated into a self-conscious white Protestant ascendancy. Immigration restriction rather than immigrant amelioration was a consequence of this mood in the period of disillusionment that followed World War I. It is ironic that a generation later, in the aftermath of another world war, the followers of Senator Joseph McCarthy, many of them from ethnic backgrounds that could not meet the test of Americanism in the past, led a nationalist assault on the loyalty of the older elite.

In the struggle with Soviet communism after World War II, McCarthy's unprincipled attacks on putative American communists numbered among their victims not merely the principles of civil liberties but also the American eastern "establishment," mostly Anglo-Saxon, which was accused of negligence and worse in the struggle of the nation against external enemies. The emotions of the time evoked the xenophobia of earlier crises, except that the "American" embraced a wider constituency. Nonetheless, the nationalism that was demonstrated in the 1950s, as much as in the 1920s or in the 1890s, was a narrow and self-centered view of the nation's interests.