An American Creed? The Cultural Gifts Movement and the Limits of Interwar Diversity

As he surveyed America's diverse and often uneven socioracial landscape in 1944, the renowned Swedish economist Gunnar Myrdal observed that "Americans of all national origins, classes, regions, creeds, and colors, have something in common: a social ethos, a political creed" based on liberal democracy and expansive protections of individual rights. Myrdal asserted that this "American Creed" was the "cement" for a vast, disparate, contentious nation.¹

In Americans All, Diana Selig excavates the history of the "cultural gifts" movement in the interwar years that preceded Myrdal's famous study. Selig focuses on the pivotal figures and organizations involved in the antiprejudice campaigns that began in roughly 1924 and took place in America's schools and religious and civic spaces through the 1930s. A "cultural gift," Selig explains, was a term that liberal educators and those involved in the movement "used to describe the contributions of immigrant and minority groups to American life" (p. 2). In eight concise chapters, this fascinating and intensively researched monograph moves chronologically and thematically to construct the first major historical study of this movement, which aimed to enhance the American creed by confronting and overcoming the worst prejudicial complications of American diversity.

Historians have paid scant attention to the cultural gifts movement because it has been overshadowed by the competing forces and images of the era: rampant racism, nativism, the Red Scare, a domestic "return to normalcy," the apparent demise of progressive reform, the image of the "roaring 1920s" followed by the cataclysm of the depression, and the rise of New Deal politics. Selig, however, persuasively demonstrates how widespread this progressive effort was in enlisting hundreds of thousands of American parents, children, journalists, clergy members, scholars, and educators. The movement was closely linked to "world thinking" and international education, with roots in the growing internationalism of the Progressive Era. As Selig succinctly explains, the movement was one defined by what it opposed—prejudice—and loosely united by what it supported: a "gifts" model of cultural appreciation. The resulting "crusade" sought to teach children and parents that immigrant and minority groups brought significant positive cultural attributes to American society. The movement's educators and activists followed John Dewey in promoting the aims of progressive education and espousing an abiding faith "in the power of schools to transform the social order" (p. 9). They insisted that "ethnos" could be compatible with—and even incorporated into—American ideals; and they laid the groundwork for what later came to be called intercultural, then multicultural, education and ethnic studies. Selig makes a convincing case for the importance of the cultural gifts movement by arguing that it "shaped how Americans understood such essential matters as diversity, national allegiance, and democratic participation, while providing the rhetorical and institutional frameworks for later developments in American liberalism" (p. 17).

Starting in the mid-1920s, liberal thinkers and educators rejected the homogenizing concept of the melting pot and the Americanization model of assimilation. These reformers adapted pluralist ideas about culture and cosmopolitanism espoused in the mid-1910s by thinkers such as Horace Kallen and Randolph Bourne. Postwar pluralist reactions built on these notions although they primarily stemmed from the more recent experience with the hyper-patriotic intolerance of the WWI period and the increasing reach of racially exclusive, ethnically bigoted, and religiously biased border patrols, discriminatory policies, and organizations such as the Ku Klux Klan. To counter these forces, liberal educators, social scientists, and activists proclaimed that immigrant cultures added new ideas, values, and talents to society; thus, cultural values held the potential to propel progress and enhance national harmony. They drew on cutting-edge social science, which located prejudice as a behavior learned in the environment, via culture. Selig shows how such a view was embellished over time to become the intellectual foundation for the cultural gifts approach to parental education and to children's curricular initiatives. Science provided the movement with a sense of cultural authority and made prejudice "an...