of transnational connections but also a reflective ethnic process that was mediated by powerful national (American) discourses on the proper place of foreign pasts in the nation. To put it succinctly, narratives of national belonging in the United States shaped the content and boundaries of what could be counted by the immigrants as usable Greek pasts. To illustrate how immigrant folkness was understood and performed under these conditions, I now turn to another point of rupture: the racialization of the Greek immigrants in the United States. The following section shows how the making of transnational usable pasts in Greek America in the early 1920s took place in response to a social discourse that relegated immigrants outside proper whiteness.
Racial Pasts: The Rewriting of Transnational Pasts in the 1920s
“[T]he descendants of the undesirable Greeks may become loyal and useful American citizens,” asserted a 1907 editorial in the San Francisco Chronicle. Unlike “the Asiatics,” it added, Greek immigrants “do not differ from us so radically in all essential particulars as they can never assimilate, but must always remain a race apart” (quoted in Karampetsos 1998, 66). In its succinctness, this passage crystallizes the racialized logic of its era, identifying the Greek “new immigrants” as a distinct race and subsequently locating the newcomers within the hierarchical racial fault lines of American society (Almaguer 1994). Placed between unmarked American whiteness and “the Asiatics” commonly demonized as the “yellow peril,” the immigrants are relegated to an ambivalent position of simultaneous privilege and exclusion. Occupying a racial space higher than that of immigrants from Asia, they are deemed potential national subjects, their phenotype (the likeness in “all essential particulars”) conferring on them the privileges of citizenship from which Chinese immigrants were barred. Classified within the underbelly of whiteness, the undesirable immigrant is subjected to the disciplinary gaze of the dominant, his coevalness with American modernity denied, his national inclusion set tentatively in a remote future.
During the early twentieth century, Greek immigrants occupied a marked and unstable location, a potential component of the racialized nation yet outside it. The unmarked enunciation “us” naturalizes whiteness as the racial center and regulates national belonging. If whiteness, understood in contrast to blackness and to Native American “savagery,” stood as an undifferentiated monolithic category in the early years of the republic, the immense waves of immigrant laborers in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries challenged those fixed racial categories. Largely a source of cheap labor for America’s burgeoning industrial capitalism, immigrants occupied an ambiguous racial location. Their phenotypical whiteness enabled their entrance into the polity as “free white persons,” making them eligible for citizenship under the reigning naturalization law. In this sense, “[i]t was their whiteness, not any kind of New World magnanimity, that opened the Golden Door” of immigration (Jacobson 1998, 8). Beneficiaries of racialized citizenship, the immigrants also partook in the privileges of whiteness, for example, becoming eligible under the 1905 homestead law to acquire property in what formerly had been Ute Indian reservation territory in Utah (Papanikolas 2002, 114).
Yet the immigrants also posed an anomaly in the political space of whiteness. Although they were legally white, their status as distinct national groups undermined their full inclusion in whiteness. As “in-between peoples” (Barrett and Roediger 1997), or “probationary whites” (Jacobson 1998), these Greek, Italian, Jewish, Polish, and Slovak immigrants fractured whiteness into a hierarchical plurality of races, fuelling debates over their capacity to participate in the racialized polity. Were southeastern European immigrants fit for the rigors of democratic government? Were they capable of exercising self-discipline? Did they posses the moral character necessary for making a constructive civic contribution to the republic? Or did their allegiance to ancestral ties and Old World political traditions threaten the smooth functioning of the polity? Did custom undermine modernity? Even worse, was it not the case that immigrant biological inferiority posed a genetic threat to the nation, promising nothing short of racial degeneration and chaotic disorder? How was it possible to test the immigrants’ fitness for self-government? Popular magazines and prestigious research centers, congressional debates and political speeches, immigration laws and civic institutions all generated a discourse classifying, assessing, measuring, evaluating, and predicting immigrants’ fitness and potential for assimilation. Phenotypes, genotypes, customs, habits, health, appearance, intelligence, cranial capacity, and work habits were all factors in locating immigrant groups in relative proximity to or distance from the center of whiteness, which in turn determined degrees of national exclusion and inclusion.
As Gunther Peck (2000) has shown in his impressive work on racial categories in the early twentieth-century American West, immigrant racial status was far from stable or permanent. Immigrant laborers, as well as established communities, were caught in shifting racial locations. While participation in labor unions, such as the Western Federation of Miners, could render immigrants white (220), discrimination in residential accommodations through city covenants refuted their whiteness. Transience “was almost always a marker of nonwhiteness in the West in 1900,” although “being a member of a residentially persistent community did not guarantee one whiteness” (166). Conversely, middle-class respectability bestowed the privileges of whiteness, though these rights were withdrawn to punish immigrants belonging to politically active nationalities. Whiteness, therefore, functioned as a coveted social space whose boundaries were tightly regulated:
There is much similarity between the case of the negroes and that of the modern immigrants. To be sure, the newcomers are for the most part white-skinned instead of colored … yet in the mind of the average American, the modern immigrants are generally regarded as inferior peoples—races he looks down on, and with which he does not wish to associate in terms of social equality…. The business of the alien is to go into the mines, the foundries, the sewers, the stifling air of factories and work shops, out on the roads and railroads in the burning sun of summer, or the driving sleet and snow. If he proves himself a man, and rises above his station, and acquires wealth, and cleans himself up—very well, we receive him after a generation or two. But at present he is far beneath us, and the burden of proof rests with him. (Fairchild 1911, 237)
Incorporating racist assumptions in assimilationist thought, this passage is paradigmatic of the kind of “progressive racism” (Michaels 1995) that was directed against turn-of-the-century southeastern European immigrants. Moreover, by linking race, class, gender, and the nation, this commentary underlines the pervasiveness of social Darwinism in narratives of assimilation. The assimilation of the immigrant is framed generationally, as a test to biological fitness. The author builds on a central motif of what Werner Sollors (1986) calls the “genetics of salvation.” According to this concept, American identity is “safely and easily received” by the native-born by virtue of birth and descent, “but [it is] something that foreign-born workers would have to strive long and hard to achieve” (88). Here, the labor conditions of industrial capitalism test racial immigrant fitness. The transformation of wage labor, a class location associated with nonwhiteness, into middle-class respectability, a sign of republican whiteness, mirrors racial inclusion. Not unlike the Protestant covenant with God, material wealth guarantees immigrant national salvation.
The making of usable ethnic pasts at the time constituted a precarious cultural project, one undertaken in the face of severe constraints imposed by the dominant society. This was especially true in the turbulent years following the First World War, when the volatile contingency of racial meanings and the fluidity of cultural and political immigrant affiliations in the early years of immigration turned into rigid patterns of identity ascription. American nationalism increasingly turned to militant strategies of conformity and racist policies of exclusion. Confronted with an acute domestic economic crisis, the rise of communism abroad, an increasingly powerful domestic unionism, vast cultural diversity, extensive urban riots, and homegrown terrorist acts, the federal government politicized ethnic identity. Appointing directors of Americanization to the Bureau of Education and the Department of the Interior and establishing a National Americanization Committee, the state launched a “crusade” of “intense Americanism” known as 100 percent Americanization (King 2000, 90). Aggressively embraced
