The History of White People (63 page)

24
Adamic,
My America
, 135, 191.

25
Ibid., 188.

26
Louis Adamic, “Thirty Million New Americans,”
Harper’s Magazine
169 (Nov. 1934): 684, 694.

27
Immigrants as dung in Adamic,
Laughing in the Jungle
, 18–20, 104, 254, 292–93, 298, 320; the quote appears on 104. Adamic never lost sight of the tremendous toll of industrial accidents on immigrants’ bodies and lives. Workplace accidents also appear as a routine part in the work of Pietro di Donato. The opening scene of his
Christ in Concrete
, a 1937 novel of Italian immigrant bricklayers, describes a deadly industrial accident.
Christ in Concrete
succeeded wildly on its initial publication, then largely disappeared from the canon of immigrant literature. Thomas J. Ferraro, in
Feeling Italian: The Art of Ethnicity in America
(New York: New York University Press, 2005), 52–60.

28
Adamic, “Thirty Million New Americans,” 684, 687, 694.

29
Barbara Diane Savage,
Broadcasting Freedom: Radio, War, and the Politics of Race, 1938–1948
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999), 22–24. See also the “Inventory of the Rachel Davis DuBois Papers, 1920–1993” in the Friends Historical Library of Swarthmore College, http://www.swarthmore.edu/ Library/friends/ead/ 5035dubo.xml#bioghist.

30
Savage,
Broadcasting Freedom
, 24–26, 291.

31
Ibid., 61; Kennedy,
Freedom from Fear
, 761.

CHAPTER 26: THE THIRD ENLARGEMENT OF AMERICAN WHITENESS

1
Gary Gerstle,
American Crucible: Race and Nation in the Twentieth Century
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 188, 196, 203–4.

2
James N. Gregory, “The Southern Diaspora and the Urban Dispossessed: Demonstrating the Census Public Use Microdata Samples,”
Journal of American History
82, no. 1 (June 1995): 112, 117; Gerstle,
American Crucible
, 35, 196.

3
Norman Mailer,
The Naked and the Dead
(New York: Rinehart, 1948), 18–20, 63–67, 156–64, 222–35.

4
Thomas A. Guglielmo, “Fighting for Caucasian Rights: Mexicans, Mexican Americans, and the Transnational Struggle for Civil Rights in World War II Texas,”
Journal of American History
92, no. 4 (March 2006): 1215–16. After 1945, Native American Indians were included with Caucasians (1232).

5
Joseph Heller,
Now and Then: From Coney Island to Here
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1998), 152–53.

6
Ira Katznelson,
When Affirmative Action Was White: An Untold History of Racial Inequality in Twentieth-Century America
(New York: W. W. Norton, 2005), 101–2. See also John M. Kinder, “The Good War’s ‘Raw Chunks’: Norman Mailer’s
The Naked and the Dead
and James Gould Cozzen’s
Guard of Honor
,”
Midwest Quarterly
46, no. 2 (Winter 2005): 106, 187–202.

7
David M. Kennedy,
Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929–1945
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 760.

8
“Lindbergh Sees a ‘Plot’ for War,”
New York Times
, 12 Sept. 1941, p. 2; “The Un-American Way,” ibid., 26 Sept. 1941, p. 22. See also “Lindbergh Is Accused of Inciting Hate,” ibid., 14 Sept. 1941, p. 25.

9
Quoted in Gerstle,
American Crucible
, 173–74. See also 153, 170–75. Jonathan J. Cavallero, “Frank Capra’s 1920s Immigrant Trilogy: Immigration, Assimilation, and the American Dream,”
MELUS
29, no. 2 (Summer 2004): 27–53, reminds readers that Capra’s three films of the 1920s treat the American immigrant experience and criticize the materialism at the core of the American dream.

10
Gerstle,
American Crucible
, 166, 172.

11
Louis Adamic,
A Nation of Nations
(New York: Harper & Brothers, 1945), 7.

12
In Gary Gerstle, “The Working Class Goes to War,” in
The War in American Culture: Society and Consciousness during World War II
, ed. Lewis A. Erenberg and Susan E. Hirsch (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 118. Cynthia Skove Nevels,
Lynching to Belong: Claiming Whiteness Through Racial Violence
(College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2008), 1, 6–7, 36, 154–160, makes a similar point.

13
David R. Roediger, ed.,
Black on White: Black Writers on What It Means to Be White
(New York: Schocken, 1998), 19. In 1965 the noted African American theologian Howard Thurman contended, “The immigrant who comes to this country seeking a new home soon realizes…[that the] sooner he accepts the dominant mood, the sooner will he be accepted, not as a foreigner but as a white American…. That he may have been the victim of racial, religious, or political persecution in his homeland does not matter. The general tendency is for him to make his place in the new world secure by ingratiating himself to the white community as a
white
man in good standing.” Thurman,
The Luminous Darkness: A Personal Interpretation of the Anatomy of Segregation and the Ground of Hope
(New York: Harper & Row, 1965), 36.

14
Michael Novak,
The Rise of the Unmeltable Ethnics: Politics and Culture in the Seventies
(New York: Macmillan, 1972), 106–7.

15
Karen Brodkin,
How Jews Became White Folks and What That Says about Race in America
(New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1998), 10–11, 17.

16
Heller,
Now and Then
, 167.

17
Ibid., 167–68.

18
Richard D. Alba,
Italian Americans: Into the Twilight of Ethnicity
(Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1985), 75, 83–84.

19
See Rudolph M. Susel, “Slovenes,” in
Harvard Encyclopedia of American Ethnic Groups
, ed. Stephan Thernstrom (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1980), 941.

20
Theda Skocpol, “The G.I. Bill and U.S. Social Policy, Past and Future,”
Social Philosophy and Policy
14 (Summer 1997): 96–97.

21
Kenneth T. Jackson,
Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 206.

22
Katznelson,
When Affirmative Action Was White
, 112–15.

23
See David Kushner,
Levittown: Two Families, One Tycoon, and the Fight for Civil Rights in America’s Legendary Suburb
(New York: Walker, 2009). See also Tom Vanderbilt, “Alien Nations,”
Bookforum
15, no. 5 (Feb.–March 2009): 14.

24
The American Experience, “Miss America,” http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/ amex/missamerica/ peopleevents/e_inclusion.htm.

25
Michelle Mart, “The ‘Christianization’ of Israel and Jews in 1950s America,”
Religion and American Culture: A Journal of Interpretation
14, no. 1 (2004): 116–25.

26
Robert Zussman, “Review: Still Lonely after All These Years,”
Sociological Forum
16, no. 1 (March 2001): 157–58.

27
Carol A. O’Connor, “Sorting Out the Suburbs: Patterns of Land Use, Class, and Culture,”
American Quarterly
37, no. 3 (1985): 383.

28
Lizabeth Cohen,
A Consumers’ Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2004), 122–23.

29
Louise DeSalvo,
Crazy in the Kitchen: Food, Feuds, and Forgiveness in an Italian American Family
(New York: Bloomsbury, 2004), 9–13.

30
Cohen,
Consumers’ Republic
, 152–53.

31
Thomas A. Guglielmo, “‘No Color Barrier’ Italians, Race, and Power in the United States,” in
Are Italians White? How Race Is Made in America
, ed. Jennifer Guglielmo and Salvatore Salerno (New York: Routledge, 2003), 29.

32
Jonathan Rieder,
Canarsie: The Jews and Italians of Brooklyn against Liberalism
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985), 27–28.

33
See Douglas S. Massey and Nancy A. Denton,
American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993). Whereas the role of government was glaringly obvious and unpleasant in the creation and maintenance of public housing for the urban poor, e.g., Chicago’s depressing Robert Taylor projects, the crucial federal role in financing suburbanization was hidden, allowing home buyers to believe they had acquired their homes purely through their own virtuous, hard work. See David Freund, “Marketing the Free Market: State Intervention and the Politics of Prosperity in Metropolitan America,” in
The New Suburban History
, ed. Kevin M. Kruse and Thomas J. Sugrue (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 11–32, Thomas J. Sugrue,
Sweet Land of Liberty: The Forgotten Struggle for Civil Rights in the North
(New York: Random House, 2008), 201–7, and Thomas J. Sugrue, “The New American Dream: Renting,”
Wall Street Journal
, 14–15 Aug. 2009, W1–2.

34
James Loewen,
Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension of American Racism?
(New York: New Press, 2005), 6–17.

35
Katznelson,
When Affirmative Action Was White
, 114–15; Cohen,
Consumers’ Republic
, 167–72.

36
Herbert J. Gans’s pioneering study,
The Levittowners: Ways of Life and Politics in a New Suburban Community
(New York: Pantheon Books, 1967), notes racial restriction only in passing, and not until p. 185.

37
Restrictive covenants can be used for a variety of ends, from stipulating lot size to regulating where owners can cut down trees. However, the restrictive covenants in question here deal with race. When the Roosevelt administration created the FHA in 1934, its manual to sellers included a model racially restrictive covenant on the ground that “if a neighborhood is to retain stability, it is necessary that properties shall continue to be occupied by the same social and racial classes.” After the U.S. Supreme Court outlawed the enforcement of racially restrictive covenants in
Shelley v. Kraemer
(1948), the FHA and the VA continued to practice segregation, but not in writing. Their lending did not open suburban housing to African Americans until the 1970s. See http://www.developmentleadership.net/ current/worksheet.htm.