Modeling Citizenship

2. Interrupted Allegiances: Indivisibility and Transnational Pledges

2 / Interrupted Allegiances: Indivisibility and Transnational Pledges From time to time there has been born [sic] in upon this community the intimation that in “The Melting Pot” Mr. Israel Zangwill had written [sic] a most important play. The bill-boards have carried the indorsements [sic] of men of prominence in civic and National affairs, and even Col. Roosevelt, while still President, was quoted as among its most enthusiastic admirers. This merely goes to prove that even a President may be mistaken. — new york times, september 7, 1909 San Francisco’s Chinatown nowadays is no milieu for the novelist who is an outsider. With the slave girls vanished, also the racketeering tongs, the social life of the quarter is other than what it was, or had seemed to be. And you get a notion of this in The Flower Drum Song. Mr. Chin Y. Lee has an objective eye on the scene. —idwal jones, new york times, may 19, 1957 On December 21, 1898, following the fin-de-siècle U.S. victory in the Spanish-American War, President William McKinley addressed American citizens at home and newly annexed Filipino subjects abroad. The twenty-fifth commander-in-chief maintained that American forces came “not as invaders or conquerors, but as friends, to protect the natives in their homes, in their employment, and in their personal and religious rights.” McKinley buttressed such “friendly” foreign policy claims with the assertion that “all persons who, either by active aid or by honest submission, cooperate with the Government of the United States to give effect to these beneficent purposes will receive the reward of its support and protection.” The president solemnly concluded that: it should be the earnest and paramount aim of the military administration to win the confidence, respect, and affection of the inhabitants of the Philippines by assuring them in every possible way that full measure of individual rights and liberties which is the heritage of a free people, and by proving to them that the mission of interrupted allegiances / 53 the United States is one of the benevolent assimilation, substituting the mild sway of justice and right for arbitrary rule.1 Replete with allusions to democracy, householding, and asylum, McKinley euphemistically (albeit unintentionally) dictated the course of twentieth -century U.S. empire. More to the point, McKinley’s address reads foreign bodies through voluntary affiliation and naturalization. Specifically, the imperial project that began with the Spanish-American War, built on the assimilation of Filipino bodies into the larger body politic, proved an oft-deployed template for subsequent U.S. excursions abroad. Indeed, as Amy Kaplan, Allan Isaac, and Victor Bascara contend, the characterization of U.S. nationhood through sentimental democratic principles (reminiscent and reflective of past exceptionalist claims) was primarily exported through military power and cultural influence.2 Correspondingly , McKinley’s recipe for “benevolent assimilation” used naturalistic ingredients to U.S. imperialistic ends. Constitutive of natural law (that is, political universality) and naturalization (which, as Priscilla Wald argues, “evinces the alchemy of the state”), McKinley’s address exalted democratic desire and reified sociopolitical sameness.3 In so doing , the president accessed an alchemical process wherein foreignness naturalistically gives way to “benevolent” American selfhood. McKinley was certainly not alone in his manipulation of domestic frames to serve foreign policy agendas. From Theodore Roosevelt to President Harry S. Truman, from the Spanish-American War to the cold war, utopian articulations of unproblematic assimilation were positioned alongside the forceful spread of U.S. democracy. McKinley’s declaration of “benevolent assimilation” and later cold war policies engendered a global (although asymmetrical) U.S. citizenship practice. Even so, the very notion of “benevolent assimilation” was by no means limited to the political arena. Indeed, if Abraham Cahan and Edith Maude Eaton negotiated domestically driven “ethnic questions” at the turn of the twentieth century, then British Jewish playwright Israel Zangwill and first-generation Chinese American novelist Chin Y. Lee were analogously invested in foreign policy-determined “ethnic solutions .” The most well-known (or infamous) of their literary productions —Zangwill’s The Melting-Pot (1908) and Lee’s The Flower Drum Song (1957)—concentrate on two immigrant groups who lack clear nation-state affiliation because of pogram (Russia) and communism (China). Likewise, The Melting-Pot and The Flower Drum Song test, to different ends, the viability of state-authorized belonging for de facto 54 / interrupted allegiances political refugees. Significantly, Zangwill’s dramatic test and Lee’s literary...