Revolution, the National Security League, and the American Legion, the movement castigated immigrants for retaining their cultures. In addition, it also branded working-class unionism, which it often conflated with communism and anarchism, as un-American. This deployment of Americanism as an ideology to extinguish diversity and neutralize working-class activism demarcated the boundaries of whiteness in relation to Americanness, understood as uncompromising cultural and political conformity to the middle-class values of 100 percent Americanism. A state-sponsored “class vigilance” (Jacobson 1998, 72) endorsed by Congress and the media culminated in the arrest and eventual deportation of alleged foreign immigrant radicals, in violation of their civil rights and due process of law (Archdeacon 1983, 169).
This discourse of whiteness challenged immigrant narratives of continuity like the one performed at the U.S. Treasury. Greek exceptionalism, the claim that the Greeks were heirs to the ancient Greek civilization and, as such, were distinct from their southeastern counterparts (Anagnostu 1999), was dismissed by racist nationalists:
The modern Greeks like to have visitors believe that they are descended straight from the true Greeks of the days of Pericles; but if they are, then every Greek bootblack in New England is descended straight from Plymouth Colony. The Greeks of to-day—except on some of the Greek islands, which have been comparatively free from invasion and immigration—are descended from Asiatic and African slaves, Italians, old Bulgarians, Slavs, Gepidæ, Huns, Herulians, Avars, Egyptians, Jews, Illyrians, Arabs, Spaniards, Walloons, Franks, Albanians, and several other races. History has an unfortunate but incurable habit of repeating itself—and a word to the wise ought to be better than a jab with an eight-inch hatpin. (Roberts 1922, 232)
Popular classifications similarly placed the Greeks as undifferentiated members of a racially inferior Mediterranean race. “The driver mounted his quickly emptied wagon, with a curse upon the ‘Dagos,’ and the crowd informally discussed for a while the immigration question; its verdict being that it is time to shut our doors against the Greeks, for they are a poor lot from which to make good American citizens” (Steiner 1906, 283). The racialization of the new immigrants was convenient for those racists who appropriated anthropological typologies of European morphological variations and turned them into racial hierarchies. The strict morphological classification of the European people into three races—the Teutonic, or Nordic, race (which included northern Europeans), the Alpine race (which included southern Germans, Celts, and Slavs), and the Mediterranean race (which included the people of southern Europe) produced by the “scientific gospel” of the era, Ripley’s The Races of Europe (1915)—was appropriated by racist thinkers to reflect inherent racial inequalities (Bendersky 1995, 137). Thus, in the terminology of the era, the Nordic “long-headed dolichocephalic races from the zoological zone of Northern Europe” were posited as the superior type of all European races (ibid.).
While the narrative of progressive racism provided a location, albeit an ambiguous one, for southeastern European immigrants in the political economy of whiteness, nativist racism, in contrast, systematically denied them one. Racist nationalists drew immutable boundaries between racialized citizenship and the immigrants, barring the latter from participation in the polity. Access to whiteness here became a utopian impossibility, for the immigrants were seen as organically alien substances to the national body: “An ostrich could assimilate a croquet ball or a cobble-stone with about the same ease that America assimilated her newcomers from Central and Southeastern Europe” (Roberts 1922, 4). Racist nationalists dehumanized Greek immigrants, fixing them outside whiteness, even outside common humanity. The following announcements, which appeared in restaurants and newspaper advertisements, speak volumes to the extent of Greek humiliation: “No sailors, dogs, or Greeks allowed” (Akrotirianakis 1994, 26) and “John’s Restaurant, Pure American. No Rats, No Greeks” (Leber 1972, 104).
The link between whiteness and citizenship has been central to constructions of American identity. While this complex connection has been historically contested and, in the process, transformed, racial understandings of citizenship dominated the political establishment of the young nation and remained a preoccupation well beyond the arrival of successive waves of European immigration in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Though implicit in colonial discourse and framed in opposition to the alleged savagery of the Indians, the relationship of whiteness to citizenship was enshrined in the laws of the new republic. As codified in the 1790 naturalization law granting citizenship to “all white free persons,” whiteness increasingly came to be understood not solely in terms of citizenship but most importantly in relation to moral and cultural values. An understanding of citizenship as practice, rather than mere political ascription, defined civic participation as the performance of certain related duties. Self-reliance, rationality, self-discipline, the ownership of property, temperance, and restraint, were essential ingredients of the civic contract between the state and a new type of republican citizen. Unlike the submissive, docile subjects associated with the monarchical dynasties that republicanism sought to replace, the new citizen was a reflective participant whose rationality and self-reliance were necessary for the proper functioning of the democratic process. Unlike feudal peasants, whose actions depended on royal decrees, custom, superstition, kin, and community obligations, the modern citizen was encouraged to act as an autonomous individual, exhibiting rational initiative in the making of the society over compliant submission to the traditional status quo.
Forgetting the vernacular past, then, a past that was understood in evolutionary terms as inferior premodern irrationality, debasement, dependency, backwardness—in short, as antithetical to American modernity—functioned as a necessary condition for the making of immigrants into citizens of the republic. The following recollection illustrates the connection between coerced cultural amnesia, whiteness, and Americanization:
[In the American Hellenic Progressive Association] you met people your age who had the same goals. To become American. You became American by giving up your parents’ ways because they also had to give them up so they wouldn’t stand out like a sore thumb. By giving up the Old World ways. We ran away from being Greek. We married non-Greek blonde women…. We made a conscious effort to forget Greece. (Anonymous interviewee quoted in Karpathakis 1999, 62)
In its association of forgetting the ancestral homeland, abandoning tradition, and embracing blondness—the icon of whiteness—the above passage illustrates immigrant acquiescence in the discourse of Americanization as total cultural, political, and racial assimilation. Because the immigrants’ past is understood as a source of pollution, the immigrants themselves were expected to undergo a profound transformation by surrendering their past to a new historical location. They were asked to abandon their memories and bury their ancestral ties in the landfills of history in order to cultivate new identities.
This vocabulary of radical rupture and discontinuity, pervasive in political discourse as well as in narratives of personal transformation, indelibly marked the immigrant encounter with American modernity in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Academic monographs, popular magazines, immigrant diaries, research reports, immigration policies, and political speeches repeatedly refer to the forgetting of ethnicity as a condition necessary to reconstitute immigrants as American subjects. National belonging required de-ethnicization: the liberation of newcomers from ancestral ties, loyalties, and obligations through a process of social amnesia. Forgetting, as Ernest Renan’s (1990) often cited statement makes clear, “is a crucial factor in the creation of a nation” (11).
I have analyzed one specific Greek American response to the foregoing conditions in more detail elsewhere as a reflexive project of disembedding the self from traditional structures in order to claim full participation in modernity (Anagnostou 2004a). There, I showed that political and racist nationalism worked dialectically to make race and cultural forgetting crucial components of immigrant Americanization. In response to this predicament, a sector of Greek America’s middle class embraced whiteness as an institutional policy of racial exclusion as well as an everyday practice that sought to obliterate habits of thought and conduct that could be traced to the immediate Greek past. At the forefront of this emerging configuration was the American Hellenic Progressive Association
