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CHAPTER ONE Introduction:The AmericanVariations, 1900 to 2000 ON OCTOBER 12, 1900, as many as thirty thousand Italians paraded from Washington Square through lower Manhattan to celebrate Columbus’s landing in America.They marched under a cloud of bad news: a state assembly resolution to prohibit the hiring of “alien Italian workers” for tunnel construction ; a socialite’s proud announcement to the press that she would ban Italian laborers from working on her estate, though it would cost her thousands of dollars; a brick-throwing brawl between Italian and Irish workmen (“Get out me way,yez Guineas,”shouted teamsterThomas Conley at the hod carriers); an unannounced invasion on a Tuesday morning of homes in Harlem’s Little Italy by police and sanitation workers, who liberally sprayed cellars with disinfectant (although, as chief inspector Feeney later admitted, they found few problems with uncleanliness);a request from the Italian government that those guilty of lynching five Italians in Louisiana in 1899 be punished; and the discovery in that summer of 1900 that Italians had been murdered in Mississippi.1 About a hundred years later, the Bronx Columbus Day parade, starting off on White Plains Road and heading to Pelham Parkway, featured local Italian-American businessmen and clergy, the NewYork City police band, Italian-, Irish-, Jewish-, and Puerto Rican–American politicians, a suburban drum-and-bugle corps, the “Dixie Dandies” traditional jazz performers, and aWest Indian steel drum band. (In 2000, the parade also included a Chinese dragon.)2 The great-grandchildren of 1900s Italian aliens had moved to the suburbs and found acceptance in America. More broadly, the multicultural- ism of the Bronx parade and the whole genre of ethnic carnivàle in modern America signified a happy consensus that, now, at last, difference was wonderful . If only it were so easy. The motto “e pluribus unum” inscribed on the Great Seal of the United States puts in Latin an American ideology. “From many, one” describes not only the union of many states into one federation, but also the faith that different kinds of people from many nations can coalesce.Yet every American generation has worried about that solidarity. At times, differences seem to overwhelm commonality. The turn of the last century was one such time.The millions among the “huddled masses” and “wretched refuse” flooding from southern and eastern Europe toAmerica’s“golden door”seemed much more foreign than the earlier immigrants who had come from northern and western Europe— they were different “races.” Gaps between newcomer and native, black and white, rich and poor, skewed the lottery of life: manyAmericans lived well and long, while many others lived grimly and briefly. Region still divided the native-born. Four of ten had been alive when Lincoln was shot, and mostAmericans still nurtured grievances from what the southerners called “theWar Between the States.” (The novelist Saul Bellow recalled a schoolteacher in the 1920s repeating tales of his father’s CivilWar battles.)3 Regional contrasts were all too apparent in both the poverty and the distinctive lifestyle south of the Mason-Dixon Line. Reconstruction had ended a generation earlier after failing to remove the consequences of generations of slavery; subsequent years of Jim Crow had preserved many of its bitterest fruits. The latest turn of century, in 2000, also had its divisions, the Bronx’s ecumenical parade notwithstanding. The influx of Asian and Latin American immigrants worried many native-born Americans, just as the influx of Italians , Jews, and other swarthy people had worried earlier generations. And more than ethnicity split Americans. The economic gap between the rich and the rest was widening to a degree unseen for decades. Political lines had carved sprawling communities into small, competing fiefdoms.The Protestant uniformity of 1900 had given way to the denominational mélange of 2000, and secular and religiousAmericans contested society’s moral ground rules. The historian Thomas Bender has pointed out the persisting tension in American thought between, on the one side, a historic view that the nation requires commonality and consensus and, on the other side, a modern, cosmopolitan view that the nation is enriched by diversity.4 This debate flared up in the seventeenth century when Puritans insisted on religious orthodoxy , and again in the nineteenth when Jeffersonians resisted the rise of industry and the laboring class it created.At the beginning of the twenty-first century, the debate has flared up around matters such as immigration re2 Century of Difference [3.145.143.239] Project MUSE...

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