Analyzing

CLASSIC

CONTEMPORARY

CROSS-CULTURAL

How Did Jews Become White Folks? KAREN B. BRODKIN

46

One way to see how societies construct race and ethnicity is to look at the historical ex- periences of particular categories of people in the United States. A century ago, the author of this selection explains, Jews and other European immigrants were defined as nonwhite. After World War II, however, Jews were included among “white folks.”

The American nation was founded and developed by the Nordic race, but if a few more million members of the Alpine, Mediterranean, and Semitic races are poured among us, the result must inevitably be a hy- brid race of people as worthless and futile as the good- for-nothing mongrels of Central America and South- eastern Europe.

(Kenneth Roberts, quoted in Carlson & Colburn, 1972:312)

It is clear that Kenneth Roberts did not think of my ancestors as white like him. The late nine- teenth and early decades of the twentieth centuries saw a steady stream of warnings by scientists, policymakers, and the popular press that “mon- grelization” of the Nordic or Anglo-Saxon race— the real Americans—by inferior European races (as well as inferior non-European ones) was de- stroying the fabric of the nation. I continue to be surprised to read that America did not always regard its immigrant European workers as white,

RACE AND ETHNICITY

that they thought people from different nations were biologically different. My parents, who are first-generation U.S.-born Eastern European Jews, are not surprised. They expect anti-Semitism to be part of the fabric of daily life, much as I expect racism to be part of it. They came of age in a Jew- ish world in the 1920s and 1930s at the peak of anti-Semitism in the United States (Gerber, 1986a). . . .

It is certainly true that the United States has a history of anti-Semitism and of beliefs that Jews were members of an inferior race. But Jews were hardly alone. American anti-Semitism was part of a broader pattern of late-nineteenth-century racism against all southern and eastern European immigrants, as well as against Asian immigrants. These views justified all sorts of discriminatory treatment, including closing the doors to immi- gration from Europe and Asia in the 1920s.1 This picture changed radically after World War II. Suddenly the same folks who promoted nativism and xenophobia were eager to believe that the Euro-origin people whom they had deported, re- viled as members of inferior races, and prevented

“How Did Jews Become White Folks?” by Karen Brodkin Sacks, from How Did Jews Become White Folks & What That Says About Race in America, by Karen Brodkin Sacks, pp. 79–83, 86–87, 88–92, 96 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1998)

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from immigrating only a few years earlier were now model middle-class white suburban citizens.

It was not an educational epiphany that made those in power change their hearts, their minds, and our race. Instead, it was the biggest and best affirmative action program in the history of our nation, and it was for Euromales. There are simi- larities and differences in the ways each of the European immigrant groups became “whitened.” I want to tell the story in a way that links anti- Semitism to other varieties of anti-European racism, because this foregrounds what Jews shared with other Euroimmigrants and shows changing notions of whiteness to be part of America’s larger system of institutional racism.

EURORACES

The U.S. “discovery” that Europe had inferior and superior races came in response to the great waves of immigration from southern and eastern Europe in the late nineteenth century. Before that time, European immigrants—including Jews—had been largely assimilated into the white population. The 23 million European immigrants who came to work in U.S. cities after 1880 were too many and too concentrated to disperse and blend. Instead, they piled up in the country’s most dilapidated urban areas, where they built new kinds of work- ing-class ethnic communities. Since immigrants and their children made up more than 70 percent of the population of most of the country’s largest cities, urban America came to take on a distinctly immigrant flavor. The golden age of industrializa- tion in the United States was also the golden age of class struggle between the captains of the new industrial empires and the masses of manual work- ers whose labor made them rich. As the majority of mining and manufacturing workers, immigrants were visibly major players in these struggles (Higham, 1955:226; Steinberg, 1989:36).2

The Red Scare of 1919 clearly linked anti- immigrant to anti-working-class sentiment—to the extent that the Seattle general strike of native-born workers was blamed on foreign agitators. The Red

Reading 46 How Did Jews Become White Folks? 275

Scare was fueled by economic depression, a mas- sive postwar strike wave, the Russian revolution, and a new wave of postwar immigration. Strikers in steel, and the garment and textile workers in New York and New England, were mainly new im- migrants. “As part of a fierce counteroffensive, employers inflamed the historic identification of class conflict with immigrant radicalism.” Anti- communism and anti-immigrant sentiment came together in the Palmer raids and deportation of im- migrant working-class activists. There was real fear of revolution. One of President Wilson’s aides feared it was “the first appearance of the soviet in this country” (Higham, 1955:226).

Not surprisingly, the belief in European races took root most deeply among the wealthy U.S.- born Protestant elite, who feared a hostile and seemingly unassimilable working class. By the end of the nineteenth century, Senator Henry Cabot Lodge pressed Congress to cut off immi- gration to the United States; Teddy Roosevelt raised the alarm of “race suicide” and took Anglo- Saxon women to task for allowing “native” stock to be outbred by inferior immigrants. In the twen- tieth century, these fears gained a great deal of so- cial legitimacy thanks to the efforts of an influential network of aristocrats and scientists who devel- oped theories of eugenics—breeding for a “better” humanity—and scientific racism. Key to these ef- forts was Madison Grant’s influential Passing of the Great Race, in which he shared his discovery that there were three or four major European races ranging from the superior Nordics of northwestern Europe to the inferior southern and eastern races of Alpines, Mediterraneans, and, worst of all, Jews, who seemed to be everywhere in his native New York City. Grant’s nightmare was race mixing among Europeans. For him, “the cross between any of the three European races and a Jew is a Jew” (quoted in Higham, 1955:156). He didn’t have good things to say about Alpine or Mediter- ranean “races” either. For Grant, race and class were interwoven: The upper class was racially pure Nordic, and the lower classes came from the lower races.

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Far from being on the fringe, Grant’s views resonated with those of the nonimmigrant middle class. A New York Times reporter wrote of his visit to the Lower East Side:

This neighborhood, peopled almost entirely by the people who claim to have been driven from Poland and Russia, is the eyesore of New York and perhaps the filthiest place on the western continent. It is impossi- ble for a Christian to live there because he will be driven out, either by blows or the dirt and stench. Cleanliness is an unknown quantity to these people. They cannot be lifted up to a higher plane because they do not want to be. If the cholera should ever get among these people, they would scatter its germs as a sower does grain. (quoted in Schoener, 1967:58)3

Such views were well within the mainstream of the early twentieth-century scientific commu- nity. Grant and eugenicist Charles B. Davenport organized the Galton Society in 1918 in order to foster research and to otherwise promote eugen- ics and immigration restriction.4 Lewis Terman, Henry Goddard, and Robert Yerkes, developers of the so-called intelligence test, believed firmly that southeastern European immigrants, African Americans, American Indians, and Mexicans were “feebleminded.” And indeed, more than 80 percent of the immigrants whom Goddard tested at Ellis Island in 1912 turned out to be just that. Racism fused with eugenics in scientific circles, and the eugenics circles overlapped with the na- tivism of WASP aristocrats. During World War I, racism shaped the army’s development of a mass intelligence test. Psychologist Robert Yerkes, who developed the test, became an even stronger advocate of eugenics after the war. Writing in the Atlantic Monthly in 1923, he noted:

If we may safely judge by the army measurements of intelligence, races are quite as signif icantly different as individuals. . . [and] almost as great as the intel- lectual difference between negro and white in the army are the differences between white racial groups. . . .

For the past ten years or so the intellectual status of immigrants has been disquietingly low. Perhaps this is because of the dominance of the Mediterranean races, as contrasted with the Nordic and Alpine. (quoted in Carlson & Colburn, 1972:333–34)

276 Race and Ethnicity

By the 1920s, scientific racism sanctified the notion that real Americans were white and real whites came from northwest Europe. Racism an- imated laws excluding and expelling Chinese in 1882, and then closing the door to immigration by virtually all Asians and most Europeans in 1924 (Saxton, 1971, 1990). Northwestern Euro- pean ancestry as a requisite for whiteness was set in legal concrete when the Supreme Court denied Bhagat Singh Thind the right to become a naturalized citizen under a 1790 federal law that allowed whites the right to become naturalized citizens. Thind argued that Asian Indians were the real Aryans and Caucasians, and therefore white. The Court countered that the United States only wanted blond Aryans and Cau- casians, “that the blond Scandinavian and the brown Hindu have a common ancestor in the dim reaches of antiquity, but the average man knows perfectly well that there are unmistakable and profound differences between them today” (Takaki, 1989:298–99). A narrowly defined white, Christian race was also built into the 1705 Virginia “Act concerning servants and slaves.” This statute stated “that no negroes, mulattos and Indians or other infidels or jews, Moors, Mahometans or other infidels shall, at any time, purchase any christian servant, nor any other except of their own complexion” (Martyn, 1979:111).5

The 1930 census added its voice, distinguish- ing not only immigrant from “native” whites, but also native whites of native white parentage, and native whites of immigrant (or mixed) parentage. In distinguishing immigrant (southern and eastern Europeans) from “native” (northwestern Euro- peans), the census reflected the racial distinctions of the eugenicist-inspired intelligence tests.6

Racism and anti-immigrant sentiment in gen- eral and anti-Semitism in particular flourished in higher education. Jews were the first of the Eu- roimmigrant groups to enter colleges in significant numbers, so it wasn’t surprising that they faced the brunt of discrimination there.7 The Protestant elite complained that Jews were unwashed, uncouth,

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unrefined, loud, and pushy. Harvard University President A. Lawrence Lowell, who was also a vice president of the Immigration Restriction League, was openly opposed to Jews at Harvard. The Seven Sisters schools had a reputation for “flagrant discrimination.” M. Carey Thomas, Bryn Mawr president, may have been a feminist of a kind, but she also was an admirer of scientific racism and an advocate of immigration restriction. She “blocked both the admission of black students and the promotion of Jewish instructors” (Synott, 1986:233, 238–39, 249–50).

Anti-Semitic patterns set by these elite schools influenced standards of other schools, made anti-Semitism acceptable, and “made the aura of exclusivity a desirable commodity for the college-seeking clientele” (Synott, 1986:250; and see Karabel, 1984; Silberman, 1985; Stein- berg, 1989: chaps. 5, 9). Fear that colleges “might soon be overrun by Jews” were publicly expressed at a 1918 meeting of the Association of New England Deans. In 1919 Columbia Uni- versity took steps to decrease the number of en- tering Jews by a set of practices that soon came to be widely adopted. The school developed a psychological test based on the World War I army intelligence tests to measure “innate abil- ity—and middle-class home environment” and redesigned the admission application to ask for religion, father’s name and birthplace, a photo, and a personal interview (Synott, 1986:239–40). Other techniques for excluding Jews, like a fixed class size, a chapel requirement, and pref- erence for children of alumni, were less obvi- ous. Sociologist Jerome Karabel (1984) has argued that these exclusionary efforts provided the basis for contemporary criteria for college admission that mix grades and test scores with criteria for well-roundedness and character, as well as affirmative action for athletes and chil- dren of alumni, which allowed schools to select more affluent Protestants. Their proliferation in the 1920s caused the intended drop in the num- ber of Jewish students in law, dental, and medi- cal schools and also saw the imposition of

Reading 46 How Did Jews Become White Folks? 277

quotas in engineering, pharmacy, and veteri- nary schools.8 . . .

EUROETHNICS INTO WHITES

By the time I was an adolescent, Jews were just as white as the next white person. Until I was eight, I was a Jew in a world of Jews. Everyone on Av- enue Z in Sheepshead Bay was Jewish. I spent my days playing and going to school on three blocks of Avenue Z, and visiting my grandparents in the nearby Jewish neighborhoods of Brighton Beach and Coney Island. There were plenty of Italians in my neighborhood, but they lived around the cor- ner. They were a kind of Jew, but on the margins of my social horizons. Portuguese were even more distant, at the end of the bus ride, at Sheepshead Bay. The schul, or temple, was on Avenue Z, and I begged my father to take me like all the other fa- thers took their kids, but religion wasn’t part of my family’s Judaism. Just how Jewish my neigh- borhood was hit me in first grade when I was one of two kids in my class to go to school on Rosh Hashanah. My teacher was shocked—she was Jewish too—and I was embarrassed to tears when she sent me home. I was never again sent to school on Jewish holidays. We left that world in 1949 when we moved to Valley Stream, Long Is- land, which was Protestant, Republican, and even had farms until Irish, Italian, and Jewish exurban- ites like us gave it a more suburban and Democratic flavor. Neither religion nor ethnicity separated us at school or in the neighborhood. Except temporarily. In elementary school years, I remember a fair num- ber of dirt-bomb (a good suburban weapon) wars on the block. Periodically one of the Catholic boys would accuse me or my brother of killing his God, to which we would reply, “Did not” and start lobbing dirt-bombs. Sometimes he would get his friends from Catholic school, and I would get mine from public school kids on the block, some of whom were Catholic. Hostilities lasted no more than a couple of hours and punctuated an other- wise friendly relationship. They ended by junior high years, when other things became more

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important. Jews, Catholics, and Protestants, Ital- ians, Irish, Poles, and “English” (I don’t remem- ber hearing WASP as a kid) were mixed up on the block and in school. We thought of ourselves as middle class and very enlightened because our ethnic backgrounds seemed so irrelevant to high school culture. We didn’t see race (we thought), and racism was not part of our peer conscious- ness, nor were the immigrant or working-class histories of our families.

Like most chicken and egg problems, it’s hard to know which came first. Did Jews and other Euroethnics become white because they became middle class? That is, did money whiten? Or did being incorporated in an expanded ver- sion of whiteness open up the economic doors to a middle-class status? Clearly, both tendencies were at work. Some of the changes set in motion during the war against fascism led to a more in- clusive version of whiteness. Anti-Semitism and anti-European racism lost respectability. The 1940 census no longer distinguished native whites of native parentage from those, like my parents, of immigrant parentage, so that Eu- roimmigrants and their children were more se- curely white by submersion in an expanded notion of whiteness. (This census also changed the race of Mexicans to white [U.S. Bureau of the Census, 1940:4].) Theories of nurture and culture replaced theories of nature and biology. Instead of dirty and dangerous races who would destroy U.S. democracy, immigrants became ethnic groups whose children had successfully assimilated into the mainstream and risen to the middle class. In this new myth, Euroethnic sub- urbs like mine became the measure of U.S. democracy’s victory over racism. Jewish mobil- ity became a new Horatio Alger story. In time and with hard work, every ethnic group would get a piece of the pie, and the United States would be a nation with equal opportunity for all its people to become part of a prosperous mid- dle-class majority. And it seemed that Euroeth- nic immigrants and their children were delighted to join middle America.9

278 Race and Ethnicity

This is not to say that anti-Semitism disap- peared after World War II, only that it fell from fashion and was driven underground. . . .

Although changing views on who was white made it easier for Euroethnics to become middle class, it was also the case that economic prosperity played a very powerful role in the whitening pro- cess. Economic mobility of Jews and other Eu- roethnics rested ultimately on U.S. postwar economic prosperity with its enormously ex- panded need for professional, technical, and managerial labor, and on government assistance in providing it. The United States emerged from the war with the strongest economy in the world. Real wages rose between 1946 and 1960, increas- ing buying power a hefty 22 percent and giving most Americans some discretionary income (Nash et al., 1986:885–86). U.S. manufacturing, banking, and business services became increas- ingly dominated by large corporations, and these grew into multinational corporations. Their orga- nizational centers lay in big, new urban head- quarters that demanded growing numbers of technical and managerial workers. The postwar period was a historic moment for real class mo- bility and for the affluence we have erroneously come to believe was the U.S. norm. It was a time when the old white and the newly white masses became middle class.

The GI Bill of Rights, as the 1944 Serviceman’s Readjustment Act was known, was arguably the most massive affirmative action program in U.S. history. It was created to develop needed labor- force skills, and to provide those who had them with a life-style that reflected their value to the economy. The GI benefits ultimately extended to 16 million GIs (veterans of the Korean War as well) included priority in jobs—that is, preferential hir- ing, but no one objected to it then—financial sup- port during the job search; small loans for starting up businesses; and, most important, low-interest home loans and educational benefits, which in- cluded tuition and living expenses (Brown, 1946; Hurd, 1946; Mosch, 1975; Postwar Jobs for Veter- ans, 1945; Willenz, 1983). This legislation was

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rightly regarded as one of the most revolutionary postwar programs. I call it affirmative action be- cause it was aimed at and disproportionately helped male, Euro-origin GIs.

GI benefits, like the New Deal affirmative ac- tion programs before them and the 1960s affirma- tive action programs after them, were responses to protest. Business executives and the general pub- lic believed that the war economy had only tem- porarily halted the Great Depression. Many feared its return and a return to the labor strife and radicalism of the 1930s (Eichler, 1982:4; Nash et al., 1986:885). “[M]emories of the De- pression remained vivid and many people suf- fered from what Davis Ross has aptly called ‘depression psychosis’—the fear that the war would inevitably be followed by layoffs and mass unemployment” (Wynn, 1976:15).

It was a reasonable fear. The 11 million military personnel who were demobilized in the 1940s rep- resented a quarter of the U.S. labor force (Mosch, 1975:1, 20). In addition, ending war production brought a huge number of layoffs, growing unem- ployment, and a high rate of inflation. To recoup wartime losses in real wages caused by inflation as well as by the unions’ no-strike pledge in support of the war effort, workers staged a massive wave of strikes in 1946. More workers went out on strike that year than ever before, and there were strikes in all the heavy industries: railroads, coal mining, auto, steel, and electrical. For a brief mo- ment, it looked like class struggle all over again. But government and business leaders had learned from the experience of bitter labor struggles after World War I just how important it was to assist de- mobilized soldiers. The GI Bill resulted from their determination to avoid those mistakes this time. The biggest benefits of this legislation were for college and technical school education, and for very cheap home mortgages.

EDUCATION AND OCCUPATION

It is important to remember that prior to the war, a college degree was still very much a “mark of

Reading 46 How Did Jews Become White Folks? 279

the upper class” (Willenz, 1983:165). Colleges were largely finishing schools for Protestant elites. Before the postwar boom, schools could not begin to accommodate the American masses. Even in New York City before the 1930s, neither the public schools nor City College had room for more than a tiny fraction of potential immigrant students.

Not so after the war. The almost 8 million GIs who took advantage of their educational benefits under the GI bill caused “the greatest wave of college building in American history” (Nash et al., 1986:885). White male GIs were able to take advantage of their educational benefits for col- lege and technical training, so they were particu- larly well positioned to seize the opportunities provided by the new demands for professional, managerial, and technical labor. “It has been well documented that the GI educational benefits transformed American higher education and raised the educational level of that generation and generations to come. With many provisions for assistance in upgrading their educational attain- ments, veterans pulled ahead of nonveterans in earning capacity. In the long run it was the non- veterans who had fewer opportunities” (Willenz, 1983:165).10

Just how valuable a college education was for white men’s occupational mobility can be seen in John Keller’s study of who benefited from the metamorphosis of California’s Santa Clara Val- ley into Silicon Valley. Formerly an agricultural region, in the 1950s the area became the scene of explosive growth in the semiconductor elec- tronics industry. This industry epitomized the postwar economy and occupational structure. It owed its existence directly to the military and to the National Aeronautics and Space Administra- tion (NASA), who were its major funders and its major markets. It had an increasingly white-collar workforce. White men, who were the initial production workers in the 1950s, quickly trans- formed themselves into a technical and profes- sional workforce thanks largely to GI benefits and the new junior college training programs

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designed to meet the industry’s growing work- force needs. Keller notes that “62 percent of en- rollees at San Jose Junior College (later renamed San Jose City College) came from blue-collar families, and 55 percent of all job placements were as electronics technicians in the industrial and service sectors of the county economy” (1983:363). As white men left assem- bly work and the industry expanded between 1950 and 1960, they were replaced initially by Latinas and African American women, who were joined after 1970 by new immigrant women. Inmigrating men tended to work in the better-paid unionized industries that grew up in the area.

Postwar expansion made college accessible to the mass of Euromales in general and to Jews in particular. My generation’s “Think what you could have been!” answer to our parents became our reality as quotas and old occupational barri- ers fell and new fields opened up to Jews. The most striking result was a sharp decline in Jewish small businesses and a skyrocketing of Jewish professionals. For example, as quotas in medical schools fell, the numbers of Jewish doctors mushroomed. If Boston is an indication, just over 1 percent of all Jewish men before the war were doctors compared to 16 percent of the postwar generation (Silberman, 1985:124, and see 118–26). A similar Jewish mass movement took place into college and university faculties, espe- cially in “new and expanding fields in the social and natural sciences” (Steinberg, 1989:137).11 Al- though these Jewish college professors tended to be sons of businesspersons and professionals, the postwar boom saw the first large-scale class mo- bility among Jewish men. Sons of working-class Jews now went to college and became profes- sionals themselves; according to the Boston sur- vey, almost two-thirds of them. This compared favorably with three-quarters of the sons of pro- fessional fathers (Silberman, 1985: 121–22).12

Even more significantly, the postwar boom transformed the U.S. class structure—or at least its status structure—so that the middle class expanded

280 Race and Ethnicity

to encompass most of the population. Before the war, most Jews, like most other Americans, were working class. Already upwardly mobile before the war relative to other immigrants, Jews floated high on this rising economic tide, and most of them en- tered the middle class. Still, even the high tide missed some Jews. As late as 1973, some 15 per- cent of New York’s Jews were poor or near-poor, and in the 1960s, almost 25 percent of employed Jewish men remained manual workers (Steinberg, 1989:89–90).

Educational and occupational GI benefits re- ally constituted affirmative action programs for white males because they were decidedly not ex- tended to African Americans or to women of any race. White male privilege was shaped against the backdrop of wartime racism and postwar sex- ism. During and after the war, there was an up- surge in white racist violence against black servicemen in public schools, and in the KKK, which spread to California and New York (Dalfi- ume, 1969:133–34). The number of lynchings rose during the war, and in 1943 there were an- tiblack race riots in several large northern cities. Although there was a wartime labor shortage, black people were discriminated against in access to well-paid defense industry jobs and in hous- ing. In 1946 there were white riots against African Americans across the South, and in Chicago and Philadelphia as well. Gains made as a result of the wartime Civil Rights movement, especially employment in defense-related indus- tries, were lost with peacetime conversion as black workers were the first fired, often in viola- tion of seniority (Wynn, 1976:114, 116). White women were also laid off, ostensibly to make jobs for demobilized servicemen, and in the long run women lost most of the gains they had made in wartime (Kessler-Harris, 1982). We now know that women did not leave the labor force in any significant numbers but instead were forced to find inferior jobs, largely nonunion, part-time, and clerical.

Theoretically available to all veterans, in practice women and black veterans did not get anywhere

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near their share of GI benefits. Because women’s units were not treated as part of the military, women in them were not considered veterans and were inel- igible for Veterans’ Administration (VA) benefits (Willenz, 1983:168). The barriers that almost com- pletely shut African American GIs out of their bene- fits were more complex. In Wynn’s portrait (1976:115), black GIs anticipated starting new lives, just like their white counterparts. Over 43 per- cent hoped to return to school and most expected to relocate, to find better jobs in new lines of work. The exodus from the South toward the North and far West was particularly large. So it wasn’t a ques- tion of any lack of ambition on the part of African American GIs.

Rather, the military, the Veterans’ Administra- tion, the U.S. Employment Service, and the Fed- eral Housing Administration (FHA) effectively denied African American GIs access to their ben- efits and to the new educational, occupational, and residential opportunities. Black GIs who served in the thoroughly segregated armed forces during World War II served under white officers, usually southerners (Binkin & Eitelberg, 1982; Dalfiume, 1969; Foner, 1974; Johnson, 1967; Nalty & MacGregor, 1981). African American soldiers were disproportionately given dishonor- able discharges, which denied them veterans’ rights under the GI Bill. Thus between August and November 1946, 21 percent of white soldiers and 39 percent of black soldiers were dishonor- ably discharged. Those who did get an honorable discharge then faced the Veterans’ Administration and the U.S. Employment Service. The latter, which was responsible for job placements, em- ployed very few African Americans, especially in the South. This meant that black veterans did not receive much employment information, and that the offers they did receive were for low-paid and menial jobs. “In one survey of fifty cities, the movement of blacks into peacetime employment was found to be lagging far behind that of white veterans: in Arkansas 95 percent of the place- ments made by the USES for Afro Americans were in service or unskilled jobs” (Nalty and

Reading 46 How Did Jews Become White Folks? 281

MacGregor, 1981:218, and see 60–61). African Americans were also less likely than whites, re- gardless of GI status, to gain new jobs commensu- rate with their wartime jobs, and they suffered more heavily. For example, in San Francisco by 1948, Black Americans “had dropped back halfway to their pre-war employment status” (Wynn, 1976:114, 116).13

Black GIs faced discrimination in the educa- tional system as well. Despite the end of restric- tions on Jews and other Euroethnics, African Americans were not welcome in white colleges. Black colleges were overcrowded, and the combi- nation of segregation and prejudice made for few alternatives. About 20,000 black veterans at- tended college by 1947, most in black colleges, but almost as many, 15,000, could not gain entry. Predictably, the disproportionately few African Americans who did gain access to their educa- tional benefits were able, like their white coun- terparts, to become doctors and engineers, and to enter the black middle class (Walker, 1970).

. . . The record is very clear that instead of seizing the opportunity to end institutionalized racism, the federal government did its best to shut and double seal the postwar window of op- portunity in African Americans’ faces. It consis- tently refused to combat segregation in the social institutions that were key for upward mobility: education, housing, and employment. Moreover, federal programs that were themselves designed to assist demobilized GIs and young families sys- tematically discriminated against African Ameri- cans. Such programs reinforced white/nonwhite racial distinctions even as intrawhite racialization was falling out of fashion. This other side of the coin, that white men of northwestern and south- eastern European ancestry were treated equally in theory and in practice with regard to the benefits they received, was part of the larger postwar whitening of Jews and other eastern and southern Europeans.

The myth that Jews pulled themselves up by their own bootstraps ignores the fact that it took federal programs to create the conditions whereby

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the abilities of Jews and other European immi- grants could be recognized and rewarded rather than denigrated and denied. The GI Bill and FHA and VA mortgages were forms of affirmative ac- tion that allowed male Jews and other Euro- American men to become suburban homeowners and to get the training that allowed them—but not women vets or war workers—to become pro- fessionals, technicians, salesmen, and managers in a growing economy. Jews’ and other white eth- nics’ upward mobility was the result of programs that allowed us to float on a rising economic tide. To African Americans, the government offered the cement boots of segregation, redlining, urban renewal, and discrimination.

Those racially skewed gains have been passed across the generations, so that racial inequality seems to maintain itself “naturally,” even after legal segregation ended. Today, in a shrinking economy where downward mobility is the norm, the children and grandchildren of the postwar beneficiaries of the economic boom have some precious advantages. For example, having parents who own their own homes or who have decent re- tirement benefits can make a real difference in young people’s ability to take on huge college loans or to come up with a down payment for a house. Even this simple inheritance helps perpet- uate the gap between whites and nonwhites. Sure Jews needed ability, but ability was not enough to make it. The same applies even more in today’s long recession.

CRITICAL-THINKING QUESTIONS

1. What specific evidence does the author pre- sent to demonstrate that race and ethnicity are so- cially constructed concepts? 2. How fair is it to say that Jews became success- ful due to their own abilities and efforts? To what degree did government programs play a part in this upward mobility? 3. According to the author, how do the historical experiences of Jews differ from those of African Americans?

282 Race and Ethnicity

NOTES

This is a revised and expanded version of a paper published in Jewish Currents in June 1992 and delivered at the 1992 meet- ings of the American Anthropological Association in the ses- sion Blacks and Jews, 1992: Reaching across the Cultural Boundaries organized by Angela Gilliam. I would like to thank Emily Abel, Katya Gibel Azoulay, Edna Bonacich, An- gela Gilliam, Isabelle Gunning, Valerie Matsumoto, Regina Morantz-Sanchez, Roger Sanjek, Rabbi Chaim Seidler-Feller, Janet Silverstein, and Eloise Klein Healy’s writing group for uncovering wonderful sources and for critical readings along the way.

1. Indeed, Boasian and Du Boisian anthropology devel- oped in active political opposition to this nativism: on Du Bois, see Harrison & Nonini, 1992.

2. On immigrants as part of the industrial workforce, see Steinberg, 1989:36.

3. I thank Roger Sanjek for providing me with this source. 4. It was intended, as Davenport wrote to the president of

the American Museum of Natural History, Henry Fairfield Osborne, as “an anthropological society . . . with a central governing body, self-elected and self-perpetuating, and very limited in members, and also confined to native Americans who are anthropologically, socially and politically sound, no Bolsheviki need apply” (Barkan, 1991:67–68).

5. I thank Valerie Matsumoto for telling me about the Thind case and Katya Gibel Azoulay for providing this infor- mation to me on the Virginia statute.

6. “The distinction between white and colored” has been “the only racial classification which has been carried through all the 15 censuses.” “Colored” consisted of “Negroes” and “other races”: Mexican, Indian, Chinese, Japanese, Filipino, Hindu, Korean, Hawaiian, Malay, Siamese, and Samoan. (U.S. Bureau of the Census, 1930:25, 26).

7. For why Jews entered colleges earlier than other immi- grants, and for a challenge to views that attribute it to Jewish culture, see Steinberg, 1989.

8. Although quotas on Jews persisted into the 1950s in some of the elite schools, they were much attenuated, as the postwar college-building boom gave the coup-de-grace to the gentleman’s finishing school.

9. Indeed, Jewish social scientists were prominent in cre- ating this ideology of the United States as a meritocracy. Most prominent of course was Nathan Glazer, but among them also were Charles Silberman and Marshall Sklare.

10. The belief was widespread that “the GI Bill . . . helped millions of families move into the middle class” (Nash et al., 1986:885). A study that compares mobility among vet- erans and nonveterans provides a kind of confirmation. In an unnamed small city in Illinois, Havighurst and his colleagues (1951) found no significant difference between veterans and nonveterans, but this was because apparently very few veter- ans used any of their GI benefits.

11. Interestingly, Steinberg (1989:149) shows that Jewish professionals tended to be children of small-business owners, but their Catholic counterparts tended to be children of workers.

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12. None of the Jewish surveys seem to have asked what women were doing. Silberman (1985) claims that Jewish women stayed out of the labor force prior to the 1970s, but if my parents’ circle is any indication, there were plenty of working professional women.

13. African Americans and Japanese Americans were the main target of wartime racism (see Murray, 1992). By con- trast, there were virtually no anti-German American or anti- Italian American policies in World War II (see Takaki, 1989:357–406).

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