Bounds of Their Habitation Read online

  John Henry Barrows, pastor of the First Presbyterian Church of Chicago and organizer of the late nineteenth-century religious assembly, offered these words of welcome to the representatives of the “great world religions” gathered at the Parliament: “We are met in a school of comparative theology, which I hope will prove more spiritual and ethical than theological,” with men “determined to bury . . . our sharp hostilities.” No sectarian flag of any religion would fly over the Parliament. Instead, the goal would be to “broaden and purify the mental and spiritual vision of men.” Barrows envisioned the Parliament as part of a culminating vision of teaching the great truths of liberal Protestantism, the summa of all religions: “Christendom may proudly hold up this Congress of the Faiths as a torch of truth and love which may prove the morning star of the twentieth century.”

  The event veered from the path Barrows planned for it. In particular, representatives of Hinduism and Buddhism stole the show. One of them, Swami Vivekananda, vaulted from the Parliament into celebrity status. As, in effect, the first Hindu missionary to America, he explained how Hinduism consisted not in a struggle to believe in dogma, but “in realizing; not in believing, but in being and becoming.” Protestants hypocritically lambasted Asian religions, but, he rhetorically asked, when a Christian goes to church, “why is the cross holy, why is the face turned toward the sky in prayer? Why are there so many images in the Catholic Church, why are there so many images in the minds of Protestants, when they pray? My brethren, we can no more think about anything without a material image than it is profitable for us to live without breathing.” For Hindus, “all the religions from the lowest fetichism to the highest absolutism mean so many attempts of the human soul to grasp and realize the Infinite, determined by the conditions of its birth and association, and each of these mark a stage of progress, and every soul is a child eagle soaring higher and higher.” And ultimately, “in the heart of everything the same truth reigns.” The true religion would be the same for all. With no location in place or time, it would be infinite like God, with no place for intolerance. It would “recognize a divinity in every man or woman, and whose whole scope, whose whole force would be centered in aiding humanity to realize its Divine nature.” It would constitute the sum total of the world’s religions but still have “infinite space for development; which in its catholicity would embrace in its infinite arms and formulate a place for every human being.”

  Vivekananda’s fame attracted followers, imitators, and proselytizers. One of the most prominent, Swami Paramananda, established Vedanta societies in East Coast cities and a retreat in southern California. Famously, he argued that Jesus had instructed followers to love their neighbor, while Hindu sages explained why you were to love your neighbor. “Until we have this realization of oneness with the Supreme, it is not possible to rise above all our differences and feel true love for our fellow-man. We too often forget that Christ Himself was an Oriental.” The Aryans of India, he added, never condemned any faith because “universal tolerance is the dominant note of their teaching . . . and those who follow sincerely any one of these manifestations will surely reach the final goal of Truth.” Men had within themselves the “germ of perfection,” so “why then talk of sin?”

  The visions propagated by the engineers of the White City and the universalist religious message promoted by the Parliament came at a transformative moment in post–Civil War American history. From the 1870s to the mid-1920s, approximately 24 million immigrants entered the United States. Some came from traditional sending destinations, including the British Isles, Germany, and Northwestern Europe. Many more came from Italy, southern and eastern Europe, Russia, and Mexico. Just to take one decade as an example, from 1900–1910 about 1,800,000 people arrived from northern Europe. By contrast, over, 3,800,000 came from eastern Europe (including Russia) and another 2,400,000 from southern Europe, particularly Italy. The bulks of those immigrants were Jews and Catholics and were numerous enough over a several decade period to make America’s status as an evidently Protestant and Christian nation seem far less secure then it was before. In the 1920s, Congress attempted to wrest the flow of immigrants back to traditional sending countries. The National Origins Act of 1924 limited quotas of immigrants from any country to two percent of the number from that country who were residing in the United States in 1890. Over the next generation and a half, until the Hart-Celler Act of 1965 radically altered immigration patterns again, the American population settled, religiously, into a Protestant-Jewish-Catholic triad. That was reinforced by the national unity and rhetoric of Judeo-Christian civilization that came out of the World War II era.

  This chapter examines the evolving notions of religion and race from the tumultuous years of the late nineteenth century to the World War II era. While the 1924 Immigration law seemed to seal a revitalized definition of whiteness now defined as Anglo-Saxon heritage, intellectual currents of cultural pluralism arose in the era which would soon fundamentally reshape America’s heritage of race and racism. Concepts of race, religion, and citizenship were contested, reformulated, and shaken up. Through the period, powerful nativist sentiments, expressed in law, contended with rising pluralist ideas, expressed mostly in the reality created by immigrants and by intellectuals responding to a different vision of America. Contending forces shaped the American bounds of religious habitation during this era. Abstract intellectual ideas, messy social realities, and religious thinkers and activists intent on promoting pluralism all played a part.

  Here, we follow the complicated tangle of race, religion, nativism, and pluralism in this era through a comparative examination of Jews and Asians in early twentieth-century America; the rise of the social gospel movement, including religious liberals and radicals who helped to form the NAACP; the advent of William Seymour and the Holiness-Pentecostal tradition in American religion, which brought with it an emphasis on interracial worship, faith healing, premillennialist thought; the racism and nativism of novelists such as Thomas Dixon, films such as Birth of a Nation, and pseudo-intellectual writers on the character of immigrants such as Madison Grant; and the responses of Indian leaders in the Progressive Era to the effects of the Dawes Act and the complicated tangle of Indian nations and citizenship. At the intellectual and abstract level, ideas of racial purity remained powerful, but contended with younger notions of a pluralist vision for America. At the grassroots level, popular cultural forms of religion reshaped racial interactions at everyday levels; the full significance of that development would be seen in decades to come. All these clashing forces fundamentally reshaped ideas and practices by which Americans governed the bounds of habitation of race and religion.

  RACE, RELIGION, AND IMMIGRATION

  The immigration of a new generation of Jews from Eastern Europe and Russia offered a serious challenge to America’s vaunted claim to tolerance. Jews had a long history of relative acceptance in American life. Jews had been accepted in colonial America, so much so that George Washington famously wrote to a Jewish congregation in Rhode Island that “happily, the Government of the United States, which gives no bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance, requires only that they who live under its protection should demean themselves as good citizens . . . . May the children of the stock of Abraham who dwell in this land continue to merit and enjoy the good will of the other inhabitants while every one shall sit in safety under his own vine and fig tree and there shall be none to make him afraid.” A relatively small number of Jews, largely of German origin and highly assimilated into Western culture, arrived through the first two-thirds of the nineteenth century.

  But the latter decades of the nineteenth century, and going forward to World War I, witnessed a far more massive migration, fueled by pogroms and economic decline in Eastern Europe and Russia. In Cincinnati, Rabbi Isaac Mayer Wise invented Reform Judaism as a religious mechanism by which Jewish people could maintain some traditions while participating fully in the modern world and in American democracy. Late nineteenth-century
Jewish immigration challenged this pact, for Russian and Eastern European Jews brought with them an Orthodoxy and a “foreignness” that concerned the same kinds of nativists and Protestant thinkers who decried the transformative immigration patterns of that era. The relationship of Jews to whiteness seemed more in question, as the predominance of German Jews from an earlier era gave way to immigrants from stranger lands further east in Europe.

  Nativist Protestants responded partly by attempting to reclaim Jesus in the defense of Protestant whiteness. They distanced Jesus from his Semitic heritage. Madison Grant served as a key propagandist. A New York attorney and self-styled public intellectual, he warned of imminent threats to America’s racial stock and heritage. In his influential The Passing of the Great Race: The Racial Basis of European History (1916), he raised the specter of the millions of “new immigrants” flooding into the United States during the previous thirty years. He worried that nonwhites—Italians, assorted Eastern Europeans, Russians, Jews, Asians—would spell doom for America. It would kill America’s heritage in being settled by the Nordic race. To avoid “race suicide,” as Grant called it, white Americans must realize who was truly white. “Nordic” whites, of course, stood atop the racial hierarchy. Since, as he argued, “[m]ental, spiritual and moral traits are closely associated with the physical distinctions among the different European races,” the greatest moral teacher in world history—Jesus—must have been white and not Jewish. Grant grounded his proof in how biblical Jews responded to Jesus: They “apparently regarded Christ as, in some indefinite way, non-Jewish.” Grant pointed to the history of European art for painting Jesus as Nordic. “In depicting the crucifixion no artist hesitates to make the two thieves brunet in contrast to the blond Savior . . . Such quasi-authentic traditions as we have of our Lord strongly suggest his Nordic, possibly Greek, physical and moral attributes.”

  Madison Grant

  Source: Image from Our Vanishing Wild Life (1913).

  Yet Judaism was a religion, one respected by Christians who understood themselves to be in the same religious universe as Jews—as opposed, for example, to Asian Buddhists. Thus, while Judaism as practiced might pose some challenges to a Protestant or Christian Republic, it could be incorporated, for Jews were not racialized in the way other groups were. As an ethnoreligion that provided the historic basis for the Christian story, Judaism gradually found its way into the American language of religious tolerance and pluralism—the so-called Judeo-Christian tradition, a term that took hold in the 1950s but can be traced back conceptually to earlier decades.

  This immigrant story also compelled a reexamination of the meanings of race, ethnicity, and religion. If Jews could be understood as at least partially white, and with a religious narrative that spoke to deep American understandings, such as the Exodus story, the same could not hold true for Asians and Pacific Islanders. They were never eligible for assimilation into whiteness. Asian immigrants practiced diverse varieties of religious traditions but none that counted as deserving full respect. And yet, the Asian religious presence was ambiguous in one sense: “Oriental” religious thought had long since drawn the intense interest of American intellectuals and seekers, most especially the Transcendentalists who translated “Eastern” religious texts into English. Moreover, spectacular religious events, such as the World’s Parliament of Religions of 1893, introduced certain strands of Eastern Indian thought. Many Americans already were participating in alternative, metaphysical, “New Thought,” and other movements that self-consciously drew from their invented versions of “Eastern traditions.” Thus, while Asian immigrants and their everyday religious practices met discrimination, harassment, and outright exclusion, “Eastern” religious thought drew respect. Americans from Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry Steel Olcott, called America’s first “white Buddhist,” to the followers of New Thought and “Unity” all found themselves drawn to their own versions of what constituted Asian religious thought. They prepared the way for the later Beat writers and poets such as Allen Ginsberg and Gary Snyder.

  Below the level of the intellectual or the exotic, however, Asians and their religions were racialized in a way that made it impossible to claim the privileges of whiteness. Starting with anti-Chinese riots through the late nineteenth century, and with legislation such as the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 which remained in force until the 1940s, white Americans could not conceive a place for Asians in the republic. They signified their disdain in the 1917 immigration law creating an “Asiatic Barred Zone,” prohibiting immigration from most of Asia and the Pacific Islands. Part of this resistance and hostility derived from economic factors, such as working-class men’s attacks on Chinese railroad workers and Japanese farmers in some of the richest regions of California. A considerable part, too, came from the sense of religious unassimilability. Aside from those who might have been Christian converts, Asian immigrants simply had no historic fit in dominant notions of American religiocultural nationalism.

  The presumed whiteness of Jesus even shaped legal arguments about citizenship for immigrants. When Syrian immigrant George Dow faced a challenge to his eligibility for American citizenship in the 1910s, the Syrian American Association rallied to his defense. Syrians were not “Asiatic,” they protested, unless one counted Jesus, “the most popular man in history,” as “Asiatic.” Syrian Americans reasoned that “if Syrians were Chinese then Jesus who was born in Syria was Chinese.” They played on some lower court decisions about Dow, some of which had suggested that the Semitic heritage of Syrians meant they could be classed as white. Jesus’s Jewishness helped to save Dow. He won the case and remained in America, white and free.

  The case of Bhagat Singh Thind in 1923 made the contrasting point. In 1920, Thind, a Sikh from northern India, sued for citizenship under the claim that he was scientifically classified as a Caucasian and was therefore white. A unanimous Supreme Court decision, however, ruled against him on the grounds that whiteness was equivalent to assimilability, and that therefore a “Hindoo” (never mind that he was a Sikh) was not in anyone’s actual working definition of whiteness.

  Thind’s lawyers had argued he was Caucasian in the scientific sense. The court replied that the founders and those who wrote the Naturalization Act of 1790 were not familiar with the term “Caucasian.” They instead were thinking of “free white persons,” and it would be “illogical to construct words of common speech used in a statute into words of scientific terminology” when the science of the early twentieth century would not have been known to the framers. This was in fact the opposite of the premise of Dow, which had relied on an analysis of “scientific” terminology regarding race. The court argued that the language of the Naturalization Act of 1790, and the reigning concept of whiteness then, had to be respected. The justices wrote, “It may be true that the blond Scandinavian and the brown Hindu have a common ancestor in the dim reaches of antiquity, but the average man knows perfectly well that there are unmistakable and profound differences between them today.” The mere possibility of some sort of common Aryan language in common proved nothing. After all, the justices reasoned, millions of Negroes spoke English, and no one presupposed they had any common ancestors with people from England. The framers, therefore, really only intended to “include only the type of man whom they knew as white” within the common understandings of the day, when immigration was almost exclusively from northern Europe. People from various parts of Northwestern Europe—English, Irish, French, German, Italian, Scandinavian, and so on—quickly melded into American life and culture, whereas those from the Punjab “would retain indefinitely the clear evidence of their ancestry,” and Americans “instinctively recognize it and reject the thought of assimilation.” The 1917 Act of Congress prohibiting all Asian immigration, including of people from India, clearly expressed the general “attitude of opposition to Asiatic immigration generally” and of a similar attitude toward “Asiatic naturalization as well, since it is not likely that Congress would be willing to accept as ci
tizens a class of persons whom it rejects as immigrants.”

  Like obscenity, apparently, the justices could not define whiteness, but they knew it when they saw it—and it did not include anyone wearing a mysterious headdress. Not a citizen but a legal resident, Thind married a white woman and later became well known as a sort of proto–New Age author of books about the ancient wisdom of the East, playing off the very stereotypes that had defeated him in court.

  RACE AND THE RISE OF THE KLAN

  If the immigration of millions of people from around the world to the United States and spectacular events such as the World’s Parliament of Religions represented the social and intellectual turn to a kind of Protestant-directed pluralism, the intensely nativist and racist responses from the era signified the continued power of the religion of whiteness. The turn to the social gospel in the early twentieth century, usually seen as part of an era of progressive reform, also could spur racially illiberal sentiments. In the South, in particular, progressives supported segregation and prohibition together. They sought to reform politics and clean up cities, but also (in some cases) to promote eugenics as a scientific program to improve the human race. They demanded child labor laws and educational reforms for the benefit of whites. And some sensational pastors of the era capitalized on the national move toward racism. One particularly important exponent of white southern racialism was the North Carolina minister, novelist, and stage actor Thomas Dixon. Perhaps more than any other single figure from the era, he turned history into lightning.

  A former Southern Baptist minister turned popular novelist, Dixon helped transform the suffering savior of the Lost Cause into a herald of American power. Dixon’s most famous works, The Leopard’s Spots and The Clansman, sanctified white supremacy. He set out to convince the nation that Klan members were the real protectors of God’s racial plan for the United States and world. “We believe,” one of his fictional white characters explained, “that God has raised up our race, as he ordained Israel of old, in this world-crisis to establish and maintain for weaker races, as a trust for civilisation, the principles of civil and religious Liberty and the forms of Constitutional Government.” Dixon determined that the Anglo-Saxon family was the core of the American nation and God’s plan to redeem the world. In Dixon’s historical imagination, the KKK was a new church, formed “for their God, their native land, and the womanhood of the South.”