"Nordics" and "Negroes"

Matthew Pratt Guterl. The Color of Race in America, 1900-1940. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001. xii + 234 pp. Illustrations, notes, and index. $39.95.

The 2000 census marked a significant change in American racial classification: for the first time Americans could check more than one racial category. This policy shift has been heralded by some as the dawning of a new era when America sees beyond black and white to acknowledge and celebrate multiple ethnic heritages. Matthew Pratt Guterl, however, suggests that this future will be elusive. In his lucid and revealing book, The Color of Race in America, 1900-1940, Guterl describes the emergence of bi-racialism, marked by a focus on "race-as-color" with a limited palette of black and white. In the early twentieth century, when European immigration was reaching its peak, intellectual leaders on the left and right began to imagine an America whose racial identity would be collapsed into a "white-black dyad" (p. 5). This vision was fulfilled in the years following World War I when European immigration was cut off and African-American migration to the urban North accelerated dramatically. By the 1920s "Nordics" and "Negroes" became the central racial classifications in America. This pervasive bi-racialism fulfilled W.E.B. Du Bois's prediction that the problem of the twentieth century would be "the problem of the color line."

Guterl does us a great service by extending the history of racial construction well into the twentieth century. By the mid-nineteenth century, Irish and other immigrants had a tenuous hold on white identity, as described by David Roediger and others. ¹ As new waves of southern and eastern Europeans flooded eastern cities at the turn of the century, racial classification became increasingly complex. Racial mapping promoted by scientists and displayed at world's fairs offered myriad ethnic and racial identities to urban Americans. In both scholarly journals and public displays, social scientists created a hierarchy of racial categories that sought to categorize every American according to his or her genetic material. Guterl reproduces one such convoluted "race chart" published in 1893 which includes hundreds of racial groups descended from the original "ruddy races," "brown races," and "black races" (pp. 20-1). The move from this complex web of racial identity to a bi-racial America, in Guterl's analysis, solidified in the decade following World War I.

In order to focus his story and give it a metropolitan slant, Guterl locates the center of this transformation in New York City. In doing so he acknowledges that bi-racialism did not define all regions, the Southwest for example, and was present earlier in others such as the antebellum south. Focusing on New York also allows him to extend his study to Europe and the developing world as the city was "the entrepot from which the growing obsession with whiteness and blackness was exported" (p. 11). This global perspective on racial identification is incisive and reflects the work done by Gail Bederman for an earlier period. ² It is particularly significant given the central role World War I plays in Guterl's story, and his biographical subjects' international ties.

Guterl clarifies his subject further by focusing on the lives of four men. Daniel Cohalan was an Irish nationalist who sought to reinvigorate Irish-Americans' commitment to their native land. At the same time many Irish-Americans were identifying themselves primarily as white American patriots, rather than Celtic nationalists. Madison Grant, a direct descendant of John Adams, proposed a "white world supremacy" he called "Nordicism" that would unite the Irish, English and other "white folks" under one umbrella (p. 8). In sharp contrast W.E.B. Du Bois responded to the upheavals of World War I and the Great Migration by developing a form of international socialism that saw "blackness" as a fundamental category. Guterl's final figure stood between black and white, as a victim of bi-racialism. Jean Toomer, the Harlem Renaissance writer, refused to categorize...