"Each `Race' Could Have Its Heroes Sung": Ethnicity and the History Wars in the 1920s

Abstract

In a classic 1924 essay, philosopher Horace M. Kallen sketched two alternative pathways for American future. One was Kultur Klux Klan, and intellectual conformity symbolized by hooded hoodlums of Ku Klux Klan (KKK). other was Cultural Pluralism, a term Kallen coined to celebrate variations of racial groups and spontaneous differences of social heritage, institutional habit, mental attitude, and emotional tone. Nativist sentiment dominated United States in 1920s, Kallen admitted, citing drives for immigration restriction and what contemporaries called one-hundred-percent Americanism. Yet this impulse has never existed unopposed, he emphasized. Beneath American compulsions toward conformity lay a more liberal tradition of ethnic tolerance, respectful of differentiated communities and the free flow . . . of spiritual values between them.' A few months before Kallen's essay appeared, New Jersey legislature debated a bill that would have barred treasonous history textbooks from state's classrooms. bill's sponsors targeted works by such authors as David S. Muzzey and Charles A. Beard, whose new methods of socioeconomic analysis seemed to diminish Founding Fathers. Invoking liberal tribune John Dewey, Kallen condemned such legislation as epitome of America's homogenizing heritage. The fact is, genuine American, typical American, is himself a hyphenated character, wrote Dewey, in a passage that Kallen quoted. And this means at least that our public schools shall . .. enlighten all as to great past contributions of every strain in our