“Typical of Her Race”: Cultural Pluralism and the Editorial Records of Survey Graphic

Figure 1.

“Maris Pacifici,” Survey Graphic, May 1, 1926.

American progressives opened the May 1, 1926 issue of Survey Graphic to an unfamiliar view of their world, a map of “Maris Pacifici.” Bearing the caption, “The Pacific Vortex,” the map presented a cartographic perspective centered on the Pacific rather than the Atlantic Ocean. The magazine’s editors claimed that the map was a conscious “reversal of [the American] point of view,” an attempt to re-orient a public accustomed to seeing things from a Eurocentric perspective. Looked at from the Japanese or Chinese perspective, editors said, the United States was after all the eastern-most rather than western-most point of the world.¹

This cartographic reorientation in Survey Graphic—a social work magazine funded and owned by a collective of two thousand educators, missionaries, social workers, and philanthropists called the Survey Associates—symbolized a paradigm shift in progressive race relations that occurred in the first decades of the twentieth century.² Scholars see the publication as representing a shift in the progressive discourse on race relations from one that cataloged and ordered the world from a Eurocentric set of norms to a pluralist one that framed that world in decidedly more relativistic and cosmopolitan terms. That reorientation in the progressive community—while never fully completed—marked the early stirrings of a multiculturalist movement in the United States, as well as the maturation of a set of anti-imperialist and pro-immigration policies that publicly challenged the raucous ethnocentrism of these years. While not necessarily the first episode in the nation’s culture wars, which occurred during earlier debates over immigration in the 1840s and ’50s, this birth of cultural pluralism in national politics and letters was a major event in the battle to define the substance and texture of American nationalism and the nation’s position in a cosmopolitan world. It was also, as scholars like David Hollinger have pointed out, an “important precursor” to later debates over the meaning of the nation’s identity and its understanding of the phrase e pluribus unum.³

Cultural pluralist thought was not a unitary phenomenon.⁴ The slew of writers, teachers, and social activists associated with that movement, like Horace Kallen, Randolph Bourne, Rachel Dubois, Alain Locke, John Collier, Margaret Mead, and W. E. B. Dubois, each had their own ideas about what pluralism, or in contemporary parlance cosmopolitanism, meant and how it might be put into practice on either the national or global stage in their writing and politics. But over and above such differences ran this consistently multiculturalist ideal that sought to celebrate the world’s racial and ethnic diversity without giving up on the project of national and even global unity. As the critic Everett Akam puts it, pluralism meant, at least in the national context, resolving “how Americans might achieve a sense of racial and ethnic diversity while still retaining the common ground of shared traditions and citizenship,” or as Werner Sollors has put it, learning to balance out, in effect, one’s given ethnic descent (over which there is no choice) with one’s consenting to become an American.⁵

The nation was not the end point, however. In this earlier progressive tradition pluralism also meant striving towards a global community and a more self-conscious human universalism so as to transcend even these lines of national kinship. Historically, that pluralist ideal took root in the progressive community during the 1920s as a reaction to a nasty racial environment characterized by the rabid nativism of World War I, the rise of the second Ku Klux Klan, and the birth of eugenics and its debates over dysgenic immigrants; and it gained firm footing in the 1930s during the great cultural shakeup of the Great Depression.

Of course, this birth of pluralism in the United States is not a new subject. Works like Akam’s Transnational America: Cultural Pluralist Thought in the Twentieth Century, Louis Menand’s The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America, Diana Selig’s...