E pluribus duo?: Thoughts on "whiteness" and Chicago's "new" immigration as a transient third tier

Journal of American Ethnic History

Volumn 23, Issue 4, 2004, Pages 7-44

  Hirsch, Arnold R ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 34247670962     PISSN: 02785927     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: None     Document Type: Review

References (68)

1. Gunnar Myrdal, An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy (NY, 1944), Vol. 2, 603
2. and William M. Tuttle, Jr., Race Riot: Chicago in the Red Summer of 1919 (NY, 1970)
3. A more recent rendering that brings a sophisticated ethnic perspective to this incident is Dominic Pacyga, "Chicago's 1919 Race Riot: Ethnicity, Class, and Urban Violence" in Raymond a. Mohl, ed., The Making of Urban America (Wilmington, Del., 1997), 187-207
4. A vast literature on the construction of "whiteness" and "white" identity has been generated in the last decade, and there are few signs of any surcease. Two insightful historiographical essays offer detailed critiques of the first wave of such studies. Eric Arnesen, "Scholarly Controversy: Whiteness and the Historians' Imagination," International Labor and Working-Class History 60 (Fall 2001), 3-32, is highly critical of the genre and doubts its utility
5. The second is Peter Kolchin's "Whiteness Studies: The New History of Race in America," The Journal of American History 89 (June 2002), 154-73; it, too, is critical, but more willing to see some potential value in the approach. Arnesen's article is the centerpiece of a symposium that includes six additional comments from a variety of scholars, as well as his own rejoinder. The most recent work highlights the "new" immigration from southern and eastern Europe, the twentieth century, and a wide range of cultural concerns
6. Among the more important of these efforts are James R. Barrett and David Roediger, "Inbetween Peoples: Race, Nationality, and the 'New Immigrant' Working Class," The Journal of American Ethnic History 16 (Spring 1997), 3-44
7. Matthew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (Cambridge, MA, 1998)
8. Thomas A. Guglielmo, White on Arrival: Italians, Race, Color, and Power in Chicago, 1890-1945 (NY, 2003)
9. Matthew Pratt Guterl, The Color of Race in America, 1900-1940 (Cambridge, MA, 2001)
10. Karen Brodkin, How Jews Became White Folks and What That Says about Race in America (New Brunswick, NJ, 1998)
11. and Paul Rosenberg, New Orleans Dockworkers: Race, Labor, and Unionism, 1892-1923 (Albany, NY, 1988)
12. see also James R. Grossman, Land of Hope: Chicago, Black Southerners and the Great Migration (Chicago, 1989)
13. For Charleston alone, see E. Horace Fitchett, "The Free Negro in Charleston, South Carolina," (Ph. D. diss., University of Chicago, 1950)
14. Marina Wikramanyake, A World in Shadow: The Free Black in Ante-Bellum South Carolina (Columbia, SC, 1973)
15. Michael P. Johnson and James L. Roark, Black Masters: A Free Family of Color in the Old South (NY, 1984)
16. Johnson and Roark, eds., No Chariot Let Down: Charleston's Free People of Color on the Eve of the Civil War (Chapel Hill, NC, 1984)
17. The most recent treatment is Bernard E. Powers, Jr. Black Charlestonians: A Social History, 1822-1885 (Fayetteville, AK, 1994), 36-72
18. For New Orleans, a place to begin is Arnold R. Hirsch and Joseph Logsdon, eds., Creole New Orleans: Race and Americanization (Baton Rouge, LA, 1992)
19. See also the sources cited in note 24, below. More generally, see Leonard P. Curry, The Free Black in Urban America, 1800-1850 (Chicago, 1981)
20. and Loren Schweninger, Black Property Owners in the South, 1790-1915 (Urbana, IL, 1990)
21. Handlin, Race and Nationality, 74-110
22. John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 1860-1925 (NY, 1968), 264-99. Barrett and Roediger's characterization of the "new" immigrants, collectively, as "inbetween peoples" also places them somewhere between black and white, but leaves open the question of their status as a distinct third group or whether they are simply ranked individually within a continuum between the extremes
23. See also, Caryn Cosse Bell, Revolution, Romanticism, and the Afro-Creole Protest Tradition in Louisiana, 1718-1868 (Baton Rouge, LA, 1997)
24. Kimberly S. Hanger, Bounded Lives, Bounded Places: Free Black Society in Colonial New Orleans, 1769-1803 (Durham, NC, 1997)
25. Virginia R. Dominguez, White by Definition: Social Classification in Creole Louisiana (New Brunswick, NJ, 1986)
26. H. E. Sterkx, The Free Negro in Ante-Bellum Louisiana (Rutherford, NJ, 1972)
27. and Judith Kelleher Schafer, Becoming Free, Remaining Free: Manumission and Enslavement in New Orleans, 1846-1862 (Baton Rouge, LA, 2003)
28. Stephen J. Ochs, A Black Patriot and a White Priest: Andre Cailloux and Claude Paschal Maistre in Civil War New Orleans (Baton Rouge, LA, 2000), 40-66 and passim
29. For an older, traditional view of New Orleans's free people of color, see David C. Rankin, "The Forgotten People: Free People of Color in New Orleans, 180-1870" (Ph.D. diss., Johns Hopkins University, 1976)
30. Donald E. Everett, "The Free Persons of Color in New Orleans, 1803-1865" (Ph. D. diss., Tulane University, 1952)
31. Anna Lee West Stahl, "The Free Negro in Ante-Bellum Louisiana," Louisiana Historical Quarterly, XXV (April 1942), 301-96
32. Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color, 91-135, speaks of a "pattern of Caucasian unity" replacing one of "Anglo-Saxon exclusivity" in the 1920s, and, more specifically, notes that the passage of the Johnson Act restricting immigration in 1924 marked "the beginning of the ascent of monolithic whiteness."
33. Similarly, Matthew Pratt Guterl, The Color of Race in America, 1900-1940 (Cambridge, MA, 2001), 55 claims that the popular culture of the 1920s "masked" or "erased" the "older divisions between ethnic groups ... in favor of a strictly white-over-black racial calculus."
34. See also, Gary Gerstle, American Crucible: Race and Nation in the Twentieth Century (Princeton, NJ, 2001)
35. Alex Gottfried, Boss Cermak of Chicago: A Study in Political Leadership (Seattle, 1962), 40
36. An Italian Chicagoan perhaps best captured this development in the comment that he did not care who owned the property adjacent to his "as long as he was Caucasian." See Guglielmo, White on Arrival, 39
37. See also John T. McGreevy, Parish Boundaries: The Catholic Encounter with Race in the Twentieth-Century Urban North (Chicago, 1996) and
38. Gerald Gamm, Urban Exodus: Why the Jews Left Boston and the Catholics Stayed (Cambridge, MA, 1999)
39. Hirsch, Making the Second Ghetto, 185-98
40. Thomas L. Philpott, The Slum and the Ghetto: Neighborhood Deterioration and Middle-Class Reform, Chicago, 1880-1930 (NY, 1978), 233
41. Jane Addams, "The Housing Problem in Chicago," The Annals 20 (July-December, 1902): 99-107
42. Labor difficulties are especially well treated in William M. Tuttle, Jr., Race Riot: Chicago in the Red Summer of 1919 (NY, 1972)
43. James R. Grossman, Land of Hope; a keen eye for ethnic nuances is also demonstrated in Pacyga, "Chicago's 1919 Race Riot," 187-207
44. Philpott, The Slum and the Ghetto, 192-95
45. Edward R. Kantowicz, "Cardinal Mundelein of Chicago and the Shaping of Twentieth-Century American Catholicism," The Journal of American History 68 (June 1981): 52-68
46. Joseph John Parot, "The American Faith and the Persistence of Chicago Polonia" (Ph.D. diss., Northern Illinois University, 1971), 298-347
47. Alan Ehrenhalt, The Lost City: Discovering the Forgotten Virtues of Community in the Chicago of the 1950s (NY, 1995), 113
48. See also Lizabeth Cohen, A Consumer's Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption Postwar America (NY, 2003)
49. See, especially, George Lipsitz, The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: How White People Profit from Identity Politics (Philadelphia, 1998)
50. Addams, Second Twenty Years, 263-64
51. Madison Grant, The Passing of the Great Race (NY, 1922), 209
52. For the racialization of immigrants under the National Origins Act, see Mae M. Ngai, "The Architecture of Race in American Immigration Law: A Reexamination of the Immigration Act of 1924," The Journal of American History 86 (June 1999): 67-92
53. This dynamic is also described in Gerstle, American Crucible, 120-22
54. See Stefan Kuhl, The Nazi Connection: Eugenics, American Racism, and German National Socialism (NY, 1994)
55. Douglas Bukowski, Big Bill Thompson, Chicago, and the Politics of Image (Urbana, IL, 1998), 179-85
56. Allswang, A House for all Peoples, 145
57. Alex Gottfried, Boss Cermak of Chicago: A Study of Political Leadership (Seattle, 1962), 223
58. Bukowski, Big Bill Thompson, 235-36
59. see also Arnold R. Hirsch, "Chicago: The Cook County Democratic Organization and the Dilemma of Race, 1931-1987," in Richard M. Bernard, ed., Snowbelt Cities: Metropolitan Politics in the Northeast and Midwest since World War II (Bloomington, IN, 1990), 63-90
60. see also John Allswang, A House for All Peoples: Ethnic Politics in Chicago, 1890-1936 (Lexington, KY,), 111-38
61. Hirsch, "Cook County Democratic Organization," 63-90
62. Roger Biles, Big City Boss in Depression and War: Mayor Edward J. Kelly of Chicago (DeKalb, IL, 1984)
63. For Kelly's committee, see Hirsch, Making the Second Ghetto, 44, 177
64. See Ralph, Northern Protest: Martin Luther King, Jr., Chicago, and the Civil Rights Movement (Cambridge MA, 1993), 74, 146-47, 285n13, 289n52
65. See also, McGreevy, Parish Boundaries
66. and Alan B. Anderson and George W. Pickering, Confronting the Color Line: The Broken Promise of the Civil Rights Revolution in Chicago (Athens, GA, 1986), 106
67. see also John LaFarge, S. J., No Postponement: U. S. Moral Leadership and the Problem of Racial Minorities (NY, 1950)
68. Thomas C. Holt, "Marking: Race, Race-Making and the Writing of History," American Historical Review 100 (February 1995): 1-20