A Renegade History of the United States Read online

  INOFFENSIVE

  In 1917 an investigator for the Juvenile Protective Association attended a “largely Irish” dance at the Thirtieth Ward Woodrow Wilson Club in Chicago. The investigator witnessed a considerable amount of drinking and some “kissing and hugging,” “but nothing unseemly in the dance hall.” The dancing, he reported, was “inoffensive.” The “style was modern,” a fox trot, but with a “clog effect.” This movement away from offensive, sexually suggestive dancing appears to have been widespread. Irish youth were noticeably underrepresented on the floors of the commercial dance palaces that became the rage in the 1910s and 1920s.* Many instead attended clubs in which only “traditional Irish music” was played. These clubs were part of the movement led by the Gaelic League, which had branches in all major U.S. cities, to rid the American mind of Irish stereotypes and reinvent Irish culture as genteel, placid, and respectable. The league claimed with fury that true Irish dancing was never “vulgar,” that it was “superior in grace, science, modesty, life and mental effects,” and that any dance resembling “the fleshpots of Egypt” was “alien” to the Irish people. Branches of the league were instructed to ban “the Cat Walk, the Cake Walk and all foreign monstrosities” at their social functions. League members vowed to stop the Irish from practicing “pure music-hall dancing,” an “un-Irish style [that] should not be tolerated.” What the Irish were doing in commercial, unregulated dance clubs “is buck-jumping [a dance associated with Irish sailors and black slaves in America]. It is fiercely vigorous, but in its execution there is no attempt at gracefulness; no attention to positions, of which the old dancing-masters told us there were five; there was little attempt at step—it was simply ‘jigging’ or as sometimes called clog dancing.” (In Irish clog dancing, the wooden footwear is used by striking the heel or toe against the floor to create percussive, syncopated, “off-beat” or “downbeat” rhythms. It was taken up by many African Americans in the nineteenth century and is the basis of both tap dancing and “stepping” in black fraternities.)

  Sadly and ironically, the vigorous jigs and reels denounced by the Gaelic League were, according to Irish dance historian Helen Brennan, “the real local traditional dance” in the villages of the old country. In their place, writes John P. Cullinane, another chronicler of Irish dance history, the league instituted “A strict, almost regimental, approach to the performance” of group dances. “Prior to that, these dances were performed with more individual, nonprescribed spontaneous footwork” and were “robbed of enjoyment and spontaneity and becoming regimental in both footwork and hand movements.” And so, when “traditional Irish” bands in the early twentieth century such as the Four Provinces Orchestra in Philadelphia or O’Leary’s Irish Minstrels in Boston played jigs and reels, they played them with a lovely elegance rather than in the ragged and pounding rhythms of the early immigrant taverns.

  Similar changes were taking place in depictions of the Irish in American popular culture. William H. A. Williams, in ‘Twas Only an Irishman’s Dream: The Image of Ireland and the Irish in American Popular Song Lyrics, 1800–1920, finds that “the clusters of words referring to the combination of drinking, fighting, dancing, and singing—all part of the stereotype of the stage Irishman—decline from an average of 26 percent of the songs for the last two decades of the nineteenth century to an average of 8 percent for the first decades of the new century.” Williams concludes, “Whereas ‘Irish’ had once signified people who were considered wild, rowdy, and undisciplined, by the turn of the century the word was beginning to suggest attitudes that were conservative and old-fashioned… . The old negative elements that had once accompanied the image of the gregarious, fun-loving Irish were gone.”

  In 1916 a book written by a “naturalist” named Madison Grant redefined the racial status of immigrants in America and established the racial hierarchy that would guide public policy in the United States for much of the twentieth century. The Passing of the Great Race: or, The Racial Basis of European History placed Europeans into three distinct races: the “Mediterraneans” from southern Europe, the “Alpines” from central Europe, and the “Nordics” from northern Europe. The Nordics were the superior race; what Grant called “the white man par excellence.” The Alpines had some potential for achievement but would never reach the greatness of the Nordics due to their biological deficiencies. The Mediterraneans were only slightly better than Asians and Africans and would never rise above a primitive agricultural state. The book argued for the exclusion of non-Nordic races from the United States. As for the Irish, they came to America as “ferocious gorilla-like living specimens of the Neanderthal man … easily recognized by the great upper lip, bridgeless nose, beetling brow and low growing hair, and wild and savage aspect.” In the first Irish to land in America, one could see that “the proportions of the skull which give rise to this large upper lip, the low forehead, and the superorbital ridges are clearly Neanderthal characters. The other traits of this Irish type are common to many primitive races. This is the Irishman of caricature, and the type was very frequently in America when the first Irish immigrants came in 1846 and the following years.”

  But lo and behold, an amazing thing happened to the Irish gorilla. “It seems, however, to have almost disappeared in this country.” In less than seventy years, Irish Americans had vaulted to the very top of the racial scale. Grant saw that in 1916, “the Irish are fully as Nordic as the English.” They were made up of “precisely the same racial elements as those which enter into the composition of the English.” Eight years later, when Congress passed the National Origins Act severely limiting immigration by all non-Nordic people, the Irish were allowed continued free entry.

  The most famous Irish American during the ascendancy to Nordic status was George M. Cohan, the father of the Broadway musical. Though he was born July 3, 1878, Cohan’s parents were so eager to prove their patriotism that they insisted he was “born on the Fourth of July.” By the end of his life, Cohan was such a cultural icon that in 1942 Warner Brothers produced a film dedicated to his life story, Yankee Doodle Dandy. James Cagney, who succeeded Cohan as the most prominent Irish American, won the Academy Award for Best Actor for his performance in the lead role. Both the film and Cohan’s life illustrate the fate of Irish American rhythm. When Cohan was still in diapers, he appeared on stage with his parents and sister as “the Four Cohans,” a touring vaudeville act that presented black-Irish hybrid entertainment. Each show included one “authentic Irish” act, in which the members of the family dressed in leprechaun outfits and danced a jaunty jig. After a short intermission, they reappeared in the Irish alter ego, with painted faces, as black dancers.

  As a young man, Cohan appeared frequently in blackface and became one of the country’s most skilled performers of tap dance. Cagney, too, was an exceptional tap dancer, having learned to dance on the streets around the Five Points, a short walk from where he grew up. But Cohan and Cagney became great Americans by merging tap dancing with marching. In the 1900s, Cohan began writing some of America’s most enduring patriotic songs, including “You’re a Grand Old Flag,” a march first performed as the finale of his 1906 Broadway hit George Washington, Jr. During the closing act, which is reenacted at the end of Yankee Doodle Dandy, the lead performer tap-danced solo, then fell in line with a grand, patriotic, military-style, one-two procession.

  During World War I, Cohan penned “Over There,” which became the most popular marching song among U.S. soldiers—and, in American popular culture, the theme song for the war. In 1936 President Franklin Roosevelt presented Cohan with the Congressional Gold Medal of Honor for his contributions to World War I morale. In the final scenes of Yankee Doodle Dandy, Cohan receives the medal from Roosevelt in the White House, then joins a military march as it proceeds down Pennsylvania Avenue.

  This is not to suggest that the Irish American renegade disappeared entirely. During the dance crazes of the 1910s and 1920s, a few were spotted in the nightclubs. And some even used the occasion
of Saint Patrick’s Day to let loose some of the older, degraded customs. This caused the Brooklyn Tablet, the borough’s leading Irish newspaper, to declare in 1915 that “the Saint would have been the first to repudiate levity and dancing on the eve of the Sabbath,” and that “Saturday night dances for Catholics are an abomination.” In Boston, Archbishop William Henry O’Connell forbade not only the new forms of dancing but also sexually suggestive literature, immodest dress, cosmetics, card playing, and “degenerate singing.” Jazz, the archbishop rightly pointed out, was “a sensuous, luxurious sort of paganism.”

  The results of this aggressive assimilation are twofold. First, Irish Americans not only shed their status as a race apart from other whites, but are now rarely even considered as “ethnics.” The second result is what is found in Irish American bars all over the country: Guinness on tap, sports on television, and more fistfights than dancing on the dance floor.

  7

  THE JEW WAS A NEGRO

  In the 1890s, there was wide agreement among scholars that while the Irish were no longer black, the Jews were certainly of African origin. The University of Pennsylvania archaeologist and ethnologist Daniel G. Brinton argued in 1890 that the dark continent was “the cradle of the Semites.” Nine years later, William Z. Ripley’s widely influential The Races of Europe popularized Brinton’s claim. After the turn of the century, according to historian Eric Goldstein, “Jews, ancient Israelites, and Semites were all linked to Africa with increasing frequency,” and there was an “increasing tendency of government officials to classify Jews racially as ‘Hebrews.’” Moreover, a congressional commission began compiling statistics on the “racial” characteristics of southern and eastern Europeans in order to justify restrictions on immigration, and the Census Bureau planned to add new categories for European immigrant “races,” including Jews, on the 1910 census. In Philadelphia, public schools required students to fill out questionnaires on their racial makeup and did not allow Jewish students to identify themselves as American. A 1910 book by Arthur T. Abernethy established in print what many Americans believed. Here is the conclusion to The Jew a Negro:

  Thousands of years of effort to throw off their nigrescence have failed to eradicate those race characteristics, and the Jew of to-day is essentially Negro in habits, physical peculiarities and tendencies… . Their pitiable disregard—especially among the men—for the finer conventionalities of social life, as well as for the regularities restricting sexual indulgencies, has become a by-word. The Jews, like the Negroes, whom this mania often drives to crimes against womanhood, are equally abnormally full-blooded… . In music the Jews excel—and in this exceptional case are equally similar to the Negroes who, also, are a musical people by nature and so far as opportunity will permit.

  THE JEW IS NOT A NEGRO!

  A number of American rabbis responded angrily to such claims. Rabbi Martin A. Meyer of San Francisco acknowledged that “the Jews who came out of the desert to settle Canaan were Semites,” but insisted “today but little of that original Semitic blood will be found in the veins of any of us.” Rabbi Samuel Sale of St. Louis looked to the “science” of phrenology—racial claims based on cranial dimensions—as proof that Jews were no longer African. “We can not get away from the bald fact, based on anatomical measurements, that only about five percent of all the Jews bear the characteristic mark of their Semitic origin on their body.” Cyrus Adler of the American Jewish Committee declared in 1909 that it was time for Jewish scholars to issue “a very strongly worded declaration as to the practical identity of the white race” that made Jews unarguably white.

  Anthropologist Maurice Fishberg answered the call. In a series of articles and a 1911 book, The Jews: A Study of Race and Environment, Fishberg declared that “the African origin of the ancient Hebrew, and even of the Semites generally, is not an established fact”; concluded from skull measurements that Jews in Europe and the United States held “no relation at all” with Africans; and moved the cradle of the Semites to “the mountainous regions of the Caucusus.” And thus it was quite possible for Jews, unlike blacks, to become fully American. “It is clear that certain strata of the population cannot assimilate merely by adopting the language, religion, customs, and habits of the dominant race,” he explained. “Negroes in the United States cannot be rendered white merely by speaking English [or] becoming Christians.” Yet “the Jews, as whites, are by no means debarred from assimilating with their fellow men of other faiths.” These findings “explai[n] our optimism as regards the ultimate obliteration of all distinctions between Jews and Christians in Europe and America.”

  After Booker T. Washington compared the lynching of blacks with pogroms against Jews in a 1906 speech, the Jewish newspaper the Modern View complained that he drew a “poor parallel” between African Americans, “who by carnal crimes bring their people into disrepute,” and Jews, who are “thought to be too acquisitive and too able commercially, professionally, and otherwise.” Though African Americans experienced less oppression than Jews in Russia, the paper claimed, blacks were marked by “ignorance and idleness that makes for criminality in the Negro,” while Russian Jews managed to remain “peaceful, industrious, free from crime,” and devout. The New Orleans Jewish Ledger rebuked Washington for his uppity claims: “To compare the Jew, who occupies the highest pinnacle of human superiority and intellectual attainment, with the Negro who forms the mud at its base, is something only a Negro with more than the usual vanity and impudence of his race could attempt.” Similarly, Philip Cowen, the editor of the American Hebrew, claimed in 1900 that in American race riots sparked by claims of rapes committed by Jews or blacks, “there is not even one [Jew] who is guilty” but typically “one wicked Negro” responsible for bringing on the attack.

  Of course, many Jewish leaders not only rejected such racist attacks but also committed much of their lives to the cause of black civil rights. Yet many such leaders were guided by a belief in Jewish cultural superiority and a paternalistic impulse to help the unevolved. Several prominent Jews used the claim of Jewish strength under adversity to argue for a moral duty to care for African Americans. Felix Adler, founder of the New York Society for Ethical Culture, declared in 1906 that Jewish aid to African Americans indicated “what manner of men we are, [and] how far we ourselves have progressed along the road of moral knowledge and moral development.” Rabbi Max Heller, a leader of American Reform Judaism, wrote in 1911 that Jews, as “men who have been steeled in the furnace of persecution … ought to lend an uplifting hand to the weak fellow-man.” Rather than dwell at the bottom with the “backward” race, Jews should “lift the younger brother as speedily as possible to our own level.”

  In popular culture, many Jews moved swiftly to distance themselves from blacks. The Melting-Pot, a 1909 play written by the Jewish immigrant Israel Zangwill, remains the most famous expression of immigrant assimilation into American culture. “More than any social or political theory,” writes the cultural critic Werner Sollors, “the rhetoric of Zangwill’s play shaped American discourse on immigration and ethnicity.” Less well known is that The Melting-Pot told immigrants that to become American meant to become white. The play’s protagonist is a young Jewish violinist who seeks to write a “symphony” that will define “the” culture of America. The music must not show the influence of “comic operas” or the “popular classics” favored by “freak-fashionables” who are “vulgarizing your high heritage” and “undoing the work of Washington and Lincoln.” It will resist the popular demand for “the ‘rag-time’ and the sex-dances” of “the ex-African,” as Zangwill put it in the afterword to the play. Rather, America’s symphony will be derived from the high classics of Europe and written by “a Jew who knows that your Pilgrim Fathers came straight out of his Old Testament.”

  ABNORMALLY TWISTED

  Despite the efforts of assimilationist Jews to convince themselves and the nation that they were one with white America, anti-Semitism actually escalated during the 1910s and 1
920s. Universities established quotas limiting Jewish admissions. Similar barriers were erected in the job market. By the end of the 1920s, according to one study, Jews were barred from 90 percent of white-collar jobs in New York City. Jewish bankers were widely blamed for financing and profiting from the disastrous world war. After 1918, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a pamphlet allegedly produced by a Jewish cabal bent on establishing a world dictatorship, circulated among large portions of the American reading public—including several congressmen and officers in the Intelligence Division of the United States Army—and was assumed by many to be evidence of such a conspiracy. Lower-class Jews were considered (with some justification) to be little more than carriers of foreign, radical “Bolshevist doctrines.”