"Out of an obscure place": Japanese War Brides and Cultural Pluralism in the 1950s

In the spring of 1954, the American philosopher Horace Kallen was invited to deliver a series of lectures at the University of Pennsylvania reviewing the state of cultural pluralism in American postwar society. The concept of cultural pluralism was Kallen’s own invention, an idea of American society first expressed in his 1915 essay, “Democracy Versus the Melting Pot,” in which he defended America’s growing racial and ethnic diversity-“the federation or commonwealth of nationalities” that seemed to emerge in the wake of early-twentieth-century immigration-as the strength rather than the curse of the nation. Although by 1954 the supposed menace of immigration had long since been checked, most notably by the 1924 Immigration Act that imposed severe restrictions on immigration from Europe and Asia, the diversity Kallen had defended earlier in the century was once more poised to overwhelm the national imagination. As Kallen delivered his lectures that spring, the Supreme Court was hearing the Brown case, the culmination of a stream of compelling legal arguments that contested the notion of “separate but equal” established in 1896 in Plessy v. Ferguson. Given the anxiety that racial desegregation provoked in many whites, Kallen and the liberal intellectuals attending his lectures understood the need to reassess and restate the case for cultural pluralism.

In the face of tense public and legal debate over desegregation, Kallen reasserted the promise of pluralism in stirring strains that seemed at times to evoke an almost radiant vision of what Americans might yet achieve. His vision depended on the willingness of white Americans in particular to embrace change. As he put it, “the dogma that we cannot change the past is not an understanding of the process of change but a prejudice of our resistance to it and a static illusion symbolizing our fear of it” (“Meanings” 24). The chief effect of his lectures and the published responses to them was to affirm that the coming changes in race relations anticipated by the Brown deliberations would be generative rather than enervating:

It is the variety and range of his participations, which does in fact distinguish a civilized man from an uncivilized man, a man of faith and reason from an unreasoning fanatic, a democrat from a totalitarian, a man of culture from a barbarian. Such a man obviously orchestrates a growing pluralism of associations into the wholeness of his individuality.

(25)

In descriptions like this one, Kallen recasts the threat of integration as a deft “orchestration” of differences that would leave the nation “whole” rather than fractured. But while most Americans might have assumed this orchestration would soon occur through increased interactions between blacks and whites, as indeed it did, there were other, less visible avenues by which public voices sought to orchestrate or imagine the successful transition to racial integration in the mid-1950s.

As one participant in the lecture series, Stewart G. Cole, observes in his response to Kallen’s lectures, the liberal assurance expressed by Kallen grew out of the belief that because “the resurgence of real democracy has redeemed this country” in the past, it could not fail to do so again in the future. But Cole goes one step further to predict that the coming democratic resurgence would more likely emerge “out of unofficial or obscure places” (114). While the Brown decision clearly established the postwar challenge of cultural pluralism as the integration of African Americans-so much so that it has since become common to view race relations in the 1950s as primarily a black-white struggle-the case for integration also frequently provoked anxieties and shame about racism in America that encompassed the conditions of other racialized groups as well. In this way, the threat of black-white integration produced a range of related fears about the histories or conditions of race relations that seemed to emerge, almost overnight, “out of unofficial or obscure places” to become a part of the broader discourse on racial integration and cultural pluralism.

Such is the case of Japanese Americans in the postwar period, a group...