806 ★ CHAPTER 20 From Business Culture to Great Depression
Supreme Court admitted as much in 1923 when it rejected the claim of Bhagat
Singh Thind, an Indian- born World War I veteran, who asserted that as a “pure
Aryan,” he was actually white and could therefore become an American cit-
izen. “White,” the Court declared, was not a scientific concept at all, but part
of “common speech, to be interpreted with the understanding of the common
man” (a forthright statement of what later scholars would call the “social con-
struction” of race).
Pluralism and Liberty
During the 1920s, some Americans challenged the idea that southern and
eastern Europeans were unfit to become citizens, or could only do so by aban-
doning their traditions in favor of Anglo- Saxon ways. Horace Kallen, himself
of German- Jewish origin, in 1924 coined the phrase “cultural pluralism” to
describe a society that gloried in ethnic diversity rather than attempting to
suppress it. Toleration of difference was part of the “American Idea,” Kallen
wrote. Anthropologists like Franz Boas, Alfred Kroeber, and Ruth Benedict
insisted that no scientific basis existed for theories of racial superiority or for
the notion that societies and races could be ranked on a fixed scale running
from “primitive” to “civilized.”
These writings, however, had little immediate impact on public policy. In
the 1920s, the most potent defense of a pluralist vision of American society
came from the new immigrants themselves. Every major city still contained
ethnic enclaves with their own civic institutions, theaters, churches, and
foreign- language newspapers. Their sense of separate identity had been height-
ened by the emergence of independent nation- states in eastern Europe after the
war. It would be wrong, to be sure, to view ethnic communities as united in
opposition to Americanization. In a society increasingly knit together by mass
culture and a consumer economy, few could escape the pull of assimilation.
The department store, dance hall, and motion picture theater were as much
agents of Americanization as the school and workplace. From the perspec-
tive of many immigrant women, moreover, assimilation often seemed not so
much the loss of an inherited culture as a loosening of patriarchal bonds and
an expansion of freedom. But most immigrants resented the coercive aspects
of Americanization programs, so often based on the idea of the superiority of
Protestant mainstream culture.
Promoting Tolerance
In the face of immigration restriction, Prohibition, a revived Ku Klux Klan,
and widespread anti- Semitism and anti- Catholicism, immigrant groups
asserted the validity of cultural diversity and identified toleration of