In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

203 Lori Harrison-Kahan l 9 “MORE THAN A GARMENT” Edna Ferber and the Fashioning of Transnational Identity In an 1896 speech in which he argued for the drastic curtailment of immigration to the United States,Senator Henry Cabot Lodge voiced the fear that the unrestricted acceptance of foreigners would effect “a great and perilous change in the very fabric of our race.”While Lodge addressed the negative economic impact of immigration, calling “low, unskilled labor . . .the most deadly enemy of theAmerican wage earner,” his main concern was the danger posed “to the quality of our citizenship .”1 As Lodge’s warnings illustrate, the increase in immigration at the turn of the century led to a rise in nativism, which reached its height in the 1920s with the passage of immigration quotas and the Johnson-Reed Act of 1924. Like most nativists, Lodge relied upon notions of scientific racism, fueled by the eugenics movement, and insisted on inherent distinctions between racial groups. His metaphor of race as a fabric, however , potentially undermines such essentialist claims. In this essay, I address how this material metaphor, originating in the discourses of nativism and scientific racism, is taken up in cultural pluralism as a loophole in nativist thought. I do so by mining an untapped source, the fiction of Jewish-American writer Edna Ferber,whose early work,published in the second decade of the twentieth century, centered on ethnic female protagonists employed in the fashion industry. Placing Ferber’s fiction in the context of turn-of-the-twentieth-century immigration debates,this chapter builds upon Ilya Parkins and Elizabeth Sheehan’s notion of fashion as an“integrative medium.”In the introduction to this book,Parkins and Sheehan describe fashion’s ability to bridge divides between public and private, intimate and spectacular, individual and collective, and material and conceptual. I expand upon their definition to demonstrate that fashion similarly allows for the interweaving of ethnic and class as well as 204 Fashion and Materiality of Gender gender differences and thus holds out the promise of a democratic, pluralist ideal. The Fabric of Our Race Maintaining the biological inferiority of immigrants, nativists continually expressed concerns that foreigners would manipulate their material environment in order to imitate, blend in with, and ultimately contaminate the American race. In Madison Grant’s 1916 The Passing of the Great Race, for example, the author warns that the new strain of immigrants would “elbow” the American “out of his own home” and ultimately lead to his “extermina[tion].” Like many nativists, Grant viewed the influx of Jews from Eastern Europe as an exemplary evil.They “adopt the language of the native American,” Grant wrote of Jewish immigrants,“they wear his clothes, they steal his name, and they are beginning to take his women, but they seldom adopt his religion or understand his ideals.”2 German ethnographer Richard Andree articulated similar ideas in his study of the Jewish Diaspora:“Even when he adopts the language, dress, habits, and customs of the people among whom he lives, he still remains everywhere the same.All he adopts is but a cloak, under which the eternal Hebrew survives; he is the same in his facial features, in the structure of his body, his temperament, his character.”3 By using the “cloak” to refer inclusively to “language, dress, habits, and customs,”Andree reveals that the immigrant’s ability to obscure his racial difference through clothes was a particular source of anxiety. While Andree referred to essential physiognomic and personality traits that remain the same despite the donning of a “cloak,” sociologist E. A. Ross suggested that clothing utterly fails to conceal difference when he argued that the New World should close its gates to foreigners. According to Ross’s The OldWorld in the New (1914), immigrants continue to “look out of place in black clothes and stiff collar, since clearly they belong in skins, in wattled huts at the close of the Great Ice Age.”4 For Ross, proper clothing may function as a marker of civilization, but it cannot conceal the primitivism of the immigrant .As scientific racism attempted to ascribe Jewish difference to the body,clothing—which marked the somewhat tenuous boundary between the bodily self and the environment beyond it—became highly contested territory in debates about the racialization of Jewish immigrants. While nativists often used the rhetoric of clothes to express fears of racial contamination, their opponents also turned to figurative language in order to imagine...

Share