Acknowledgments
I have many to thank for help on this book. After finishing my work as executive director of the staff of the Select Commission on Immigration and Refugee Policy in 1981, I was given an office and support as a guest scholar in the Program of American Society and Politics at the Woodrow Wilson Center of the Smithsonian Institution for several months, where I began this book. Additional support during the past eight years for my work on ethnic pluralism and the civic culture came from the Rockefeller Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, and the Exxon Foundation. The Jaffe Foundation has provided continuous support for secretarial assistance since 1984, and I am particularly grateful, as holder of the Meyer and Walter Jaffe professorship in American Civilization and Politics, to have received that generous assistance. I am also appreciative to the Rockefeller Foundation for my appointment as Scholar in Residence at the splendid Villa Serbelloni at Bellagio in Italy during the summer of 1985.
I am grateful to my secretaries in the American Studies Department at Brandeis, Grace Short and her replacement, Angela Simeone, for their patience. I am indebted to Debra Post, who provided secretarial help on the book during its early stages; I am especially grateful to Christine Stone, whose intelligence and skills and pungent editorial suggestions added a measure of assistance far beyond what should normally be expected in a secretary.
To my research assistants, all former students at Brandeis, I offer a special salute. Thank you: Anaya Balter, Christopher Bean, Alka Gurung, Jill Lennett, Shelly Tenenbaum, and Veljko Vujacic. Ms. Tenenbaum, who has become a scholar of ethnicity, was particularly thoughtful about many ideas in this book.
A slightly different version of chapter 16 appeared in The Tocqueville Review, Volume VIII, 1988/89, edited by Jessie R. Pitts (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1989), with my permission and that of Wesleyan University Press. Some of chapter 23 appeared in 1986 in a booklet published by the American Jewish Committee, Counting by Race.
I think the idea for the title of this book may have been planted when I first read John Higham’s series of essays, Send These to Me: Immigrants in Urban America (1975), where he writes of the United States as a “kaleidoscopic culture.” The concept was also used as a title for an exhibition on ethnicity at the Balch Institute in Philadelphia (1976–1987).
I appreciate the many helpful suggestions I received from several scholars: Elliott Barkan, Rodolfo O. de la Garza, Edwin Dorn, Victor Fuchs, Alan Kraut, Virginia Yans-McGlaughlin, David Reimers, Peter Rose, John Stack, Reed Ueda, Stephen Whitfield, and Myron Wiener. An extra tip of the hat to Professors Barkan, Kraut, Reimers, Rose, Stack, and Ueda for having read the entire manuscript. Professor Barkan made dozens of detailed suggestions.
I also thank the staff at Wesleyan University Press for thoughtful assistance. Jeannette Hopkins, one of the most experienced editors of books dealing with race and ethnicity, did not always agree with my interpretations or emphases. But I learned from her tough and thorough comments and queries. Of course, neither she nor any of the scholars acknowledged above should be blamed for errors of mine. John Anderson was a superb copy editor.
A word of thanks also to my agent and friend, the always helpful Gerard McCauley.
To my family, especially my wife, Betty, thanks for your good humor and support.
| LAWRENCE H. FUCHS | |
| Meyer and Walter Jaffe Professor of American Civilization and Politics | |
| Brandeis University, Waltham |
Preface
Since the Second World War the national unity of Americans has been tied increasingly to a strong civic culture that permits and protects expressions of ethnic and religious diversity based on individual rights and that also inhibits and ameliorates conflict among religious, ethnic, and racial groups. It is the civic culture that unites Americans and protects their freedom—including their right to be ethnic.
As a sophomore in college in 1947, recently returned from the U.S. Navy, I read two books that are the godparents of this book, Gunnar Myrdal’s An American Dilemma and Robert MacIver’s The Web of Government. By setting forth the case for an American national identity based on unifying political ideals and documenting the failure to live up to those ideals with respect to Negroes, Myrdal issued a call for justice for blacks, not just for their sake but to make our nation whole. That call ultimately led me to join the march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, in 1965. Myrdal, a Swede, had little to say about Jews or other religious or nationality groups in the United States (the word “ethnic” was not in use), probably because he assumed, like most liberals, their inexorable assimilation into dominant American culture. MacIver, an immigrant from Britain who had lived and worked in New York City for many years, was much more aware of the persistence of ethnic traditions and loyalties. Democracy, with all of its leveling and assimilating tendencies, he maintained, also allowed for ethnic diversity.
What I took from Myrdal principally was a better understanding of the American creed and of American racism and the too optimistic conclusion that if Americans applied their creed consistently they would overcome racism. What I took from MacIver primarily was the confident belief that racial and immigrant-ethnic group harmony was possible in the U.S., although rarely present elsewhere. The five books I have written on aspects of ethnicity and American unity were shaped in part by my understanding of Myrdal and MacIver. But my confidence in their teachings was shaken by books by three friends and colleagues, all published in 1975.
Warning against the destructive power of ethnic tribalism in The Idols of the Tribe: Group Identity and Political Change, Harold Isaacs challenged the view that ethnic mobilization in the U.S. was compatible with national unity. Isaacs wondered, in his last chapter, whether the ethnic patterns emerging in the 1970s—creating “new conflicts, new dilemmas”—would lead to a new pluralistic system, which, by emphasizing group rights, would destroy the very basis for American nationhood, the idea that “one is American only as an individual” and that “the American individual is free to associate with any kind of group to which he feels he belongs, and each such group is free to exist, to function, to live and to grow according to its own genius and its own vitality. It does so on its own … in the great private domain where every person retains his own individual freedom of choice.” At the end of Idols of the Tribe, Isaacs concluded, “The underlying issue is still: Can human existence be made more human, and if so, how? … How can we live with our differences without, as always heretofore, being driven by them to tear each other limb from limb?”
The same concern was raised in a different way by Nathan Glazer in Affirmative Discrimination. Glazer saw American society drifting away from a pattern in which government generally had abstained from forcing assimilation on newcomers or from attempting to establish some kind of parity among different groups. Of course, that was only one historical pattern of pluralism. There were others, in which government participated in enforcing not parity but inequality between individuals of different groups, usually on the basis of color. Glazer now was worried about the growing tendency to make public policy to compensate members of groups for past injustices to their forebears, a principle that “can be extended indefinitely and make for endless trouble.” Warning that “the gravest political consequence is undoubtedly the increasing resentment and hostility between groups that is fueled by special benefits for some,” Glazer saw a white backlash gaining momentum. “The implications of the new course,” he wrote, “are an increasing consciousness of the significance of group membership, an increasing divisiveness on the basis of race, color and national origin, and a spreading resentment among the disfavored groups against the favored groups.”
John
