Who Belongs in America?: Presidents, Rhetoric, and Immigration

Chapter 5. Hooking the Hyphen: Woodrow Wilson’s War Rhetoric and the Italian American Community

CHAPTER 5 Hooking the Hyphen Woodrow Wilson’s War Rhetoric and the Italian American Community Mary Anne Trasciatti SOCIOLOGIST ARTHUR TRAIN posed the following questions in an article about Italian Americans published in the Saturday Evening Post in 1918: “And why has not this great heterogeneous multitude of people become better absorbed into the body of our native American population? Why is it still speaking and reading in its own divers [sic] tongues? What is going to unhook the hyphen?”1 Train was vexed by the apparent inability or unwillingness of immigrants in general and Italian immigrants in particular to relinquish prior cultural practices, beliefs, and loyalties and thus become assimilated to the so-called American way of life. He articulated his concerns about assimilation by attacking “the hyphen,” a metonymic term for hyphenated ethnicity. A common feature of public discourse throughout World War I, diatribes against the hyphen signi- fied U.S. citizens’ insecurities about so-called “foreigners” in their midst. To those who identified themselves as simply “American,” hyphenated ethnicity had troubling racial and political implications. From a racial standpoint, hyphenated ethnicity signified pollution of pure Americanism by inferior foreign stock; politically, the hyphen indicated divided loyalty and a wavering commitment to American ideals. War always 108 | trasciatti generates intense social upheaval, creating anxiety among members of established groups who fear a threat to their comfortable status. In this case, hyphenated ethnicity suggested an uncomfortable degree of diversity among Americans at a time when the nation was involved in a war of unprecedented scale, the success of which was thought to depend upon unqualified support from a single-minded citizenry. Unhooking the hyphen required that immigrants make a definitive choice between Old World and New World loyalties, and patriotic citizens worked diligently to ensure that they made the “right” choice. The Committee on Public Information (CPI), the official wartime propaganda organ of the federal government, inundated ethnic communities with pro-American literature. The National Americanization Committee and a host of quasi-government and private organizations and individuals exhorted immigrants to pursue citizenship and to embrace “100 percent” Americanism.2 To a large extent, their persuasive efforts focused on the German American community and the eradication of even the slightest hint of affiliation with or sympathy for the enemy; however the CPI and Americanization movement also encouraged a pro-American line of thought and action among all immigrant groups. If the hyphen signified stubborn resistance to assimilation to anxious Americans, immigrants viewed hyphenated ethnicity as the end result of a process of ethnicization that involved relinquishing premigration regional affiliations in favor of a modernist national identity. This process was a major form of adaptation to an American culture that, as historian John Higham has observed, places a high value on “the principle of nationality as a basis of social identification.”3 Military alliance between Italy and the United States reinforced this national identity among Italian Americans, providing them with an opportunity to rally in support of both their country of origin and their adopted country. Although this dual loyalty could hardly be considered a threat to the war effort, the Italian American community was nonetheless berated for failing to embrace fully the ideals of “100 percent” Americanism. Behind this criticism was the assumption that Italian Americans would be dramatically improved if they became more American and less Italian. In this vein, Train suggested that Italian Americans were highly susceptible to corruption and overly focused on “Sunday recreation and other pleasures” as opposed to “political traditions and high ideals.” He argued, moreover, that excessive affinity for the company of their own “race” blinded Italian Americans’ basic democratic principles.4 According Hooking the Hyphen | 109 to Train, “The hyphenated citizen who speaks no, or at best imperfect English, has neither political traditions nor ideals; no national inheritance so far as America is concerned. . . . It has been found impossible to get certain bodies of foreign-born citizens to side with movements or better government.”5 Train’s observations sit squarely within the prevailing discourse on race that was so important to earlier debates restricting immigration. Popularized by sociologist Edward Alsworth Ross and distilled into its quintessential form by zoologist-cum-historian Madison Grant in his notorious 1916 book, The Passing of the Great Race, this discourse divided Europeans into a three-tiered hierarchy of Mediterranean, Alpine, and Nordic races. Of...