Oscar Handlin writes as an American historian whose studies have been focussed on the various groups that make up America and their relation to the common society and to government policy, foreign and domestic. He here examines, in the light of American experience and present facts, the fears expressed by Dorothy Thompson in the preceding article, and offers a sharply differing view.
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Dorothy Thompson’s fears are groundless. But they are nevertheless real for her and apparently of enough currency among others to call for serious discussion. However benevolent her intention, I think her argument misleading—dangerously so. But it ought not be shrugged aside without examination: honest errors are capable of rational correction.
“America Demands a Single Loyalty” is written as if it were directed to Jews alone. But the issues she raises are of far more general concern; all Americans have a stake in this problem. It is not so much the complexity of the Jewish situation that leads Miss Thompson astray. Her mistakes spring rather from fundamentally false assumptions as to the nature of foreign policy in a democracy and as to the quality of American society.
We shall not understand the wrong turnings her thought has taken without first examining the process by which foreign policy is established in this country and the general role in American life of organized ethnic groups.
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International relations complicate the functioning of a democratic government. In this area, the usual modes of arriving at policy are difficult to apply. Here the democratic society has contact with unequals, that is, with societies which are not democracies and in which the accepted canons of open discussion in the forum of public opinion do not apply. Early in the life of the American republic, its statesmen discovered that negotiations with monarchs and aristocratic bureaucrats involved them in dealings the conditions and terms of which were often not democratic. As late as the First World War, Woodrow Wilson voiced the popular resentment against the green-table diplomats and, in conscious protest, still called for open diplomacy openly arrived at. But we have had gradually to recognize the tradition of secrecy. This tradition is in essence anti-democratic because it involves the concealing of facts from the people within, as well as the foreign power without.
Furthermore, from the start, Americans recognized that decisions of foreign policy were, in their nature, graver than internal decisions. Domestic measures taken in the name of the people can be later reversed by the people. A law once passed can be repealed by the same body that enacted it; even the constitutions of the state and federal governments can be amended by a regular process. But in foreign policy, the people cannot retrace their steps; agreements involve parties outside the nation and, to that extent, abrogate its freedom of action.
These peculiar characteristics have produced the view that the diplomacy of a nation is a case unto itself and must be treated in a special way. The federal Constitution recognizes that peculiarity by setting up procedures for the ratification of treaties different from those for the enactment of statutes. American law also admits a somewhat wider latitude to the executive in external than in internal affairs.
But while acknowledging the peculiarities of diplomacy, the American people never accepted the view that it should be significantly free of democratic control. The Constitution defines treason very rigidly and very narrowly. The provisions with regard to secrecy are recent and largely the products of war emergency. The main line of American thought has recognized that foreign, like domestic, policy could produce legitimate differences of opinion, and that the most effective way of resolving those differences is through open debate.
The contrary opinion, that there is a single “national interest” not subject to determination by the ordinary rules of politics, has always been defeated. A century and a half ago, a rabid minority in the Federalist party, eager to push the country into a war with France, secured the enactment of the ill-omened Logan Act which forbade a private citizen to enter into conversations with a foreign government outside the regular diplomatic channels. But the consequence was a decisive test of popular opinion. For the act was never applied and was one of the significant factors responsible for the defeat and ultimate disappearance of the Federalist party.
Since that time few statesmen have ventured openly to deny that individuals and groups had a direct interest in foreign policy and could legitimately use every means to shape it. Those who have denied that proportion, under the guise of some mystique of “national interest,” have generally done so to cloak their own personal interests, as a way of reaching decisions in camera and outside the light of public debate.
Thus, although the mechanism has some-times been different, our foreign policies, with few exceptions, have been determined in the same way as our domestic policies, through the clash of interests and ideas. The United States has never been homogeneous as to the social and economic composition of its whole population, as to their intellectual backgrounds, their cultural allegiances, or the nature of their perspectives on the world position of the country. The “national interest” was never revealed as an ideal above and beyond all the individuals in the nation. It was rather discovered by realistic compromise achieved through free discussion and open exposition of all the diversities of opinion and interest involved.
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Public pressures on the formulation of policy have therefore invariably been healthy because they have served to bring to light the whole variety of ideas and interests in the nation. Such pressures have come in an impressive diversity of forms. In our early history the exertion of influence on the government was often violently sectional. The years of the second war with England found New England so hostile to the program pushed by the other regions as to approach the brink of secession. More recently, in our own times, the Pacific Coast followed a policy toward the Japanese that diverged significantly from that approved in other parts of the country. In such commercial matters as the negotiation of trade agreements, sectional interests are forcefully asserted and carefully weighed before reaching a national policy. That these pressures should be put on the federal government was never taken to be a sign of lack of patriotism.
So, too, class groupings have played a prominent part in shaping our diplomacy. If the great slave-owners before the Civil War thought it desirable to annex Cuba, they displayed no hesitancy in pressing their views upon the officials in Washington. Investing capitalists, eager for opportunities in the Far East at the opening of this century, made known their eagerness to the State Department and found a ready reception from Secretary of State John Hay. Still later, in the 1920’s, a good part of the work of our representatives abroad was to foster the legitimate interests of American business.
Again, many religious denominations have frequently called upon the intercession of the American government in behalf of their own communicants or to further a line of action they considered desirable. The story of our relations with Mexico in the 1920’s and with Spain in the 1930’s could not be told without assigning a prominent role to the influence of the Catholic Church, just as, in another part of the world, our relations with China in those decades were profoundly modified by the sentiments of Protestant missionary groups.
Our government has likewise been responsive to the purely intellectual interests of reformers. It was as a result of pressure from such men that we expressed open sympathy with the European revolutions of 1848. It was the hostility of such groups that prevented President Grant from embarking upon imperialistic ventures in the Caribbean.
To those Americans who lusted after the seeming consistency and definiteness of the European chancellories this situation seemed chaotic. Like the fatuous ambassador who is said to have complained that “the national American policy is to have no foreign policy,” they missed the comfortable control that enabled their opposite numbers elsewhere to determine a course of action without reference to the desires of the mass of their countrymen. But for all its faults our foreign policy has been democratic; only rarely in the United States have the interests and prejudices of a few individuals for long determined the course of our diplomacy. It is precisely through the contending force of particular pressures that we have usually arrived at a balanced policy that commanded the support of a majority. Nowhere else have the people had as much to say about world affairs.
It is necessary to understand the general character of the pressures that apply to the formulation of foreign policy before one can place in proper perspective the particular kinds of pressure that originate in ethnic groups of foreign antecedents and connections.
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The shadow of the phrase “hyphenated American” hangs over discussion of this kind of influence. That term originated in the hysterical days before our entry into the First World War. Frustrated in his own political ambitions and bored with the slaughter of big game, Theodore Roosevelt then regarded with envy the opportunities for glory open to Frenchmen and Englishmen. Longing to lead a charge again, he could not believe that real Americans were not eager to enter the war. The deficiency in zeal, he felt, could only be accounted for by some alien flaw, the hyphens in the national character. The xenophobic hatreds of the war and the first few years after gave some currency to his phrase and popularized the notion that the action of the “hyphenated” groups was abnormal. That notion lingers in Miss Thompson’s article. But most Americans have long since reverted to the more traditional attitude, which regards the actions of ethnic groups as similar to those of groups that have a sectional or class or ideological orientation.
For, apart from the fear-ridden years of the First World War, we never pretended that any group of Americans would lack special sympathy for the country of its antecedents, that emigration would dissolve the ties of home and kin and ancient aspirations. For more than a century, for instance, the revolutionary movement for Irish independence was sparked by former Irishmen who had become citizens of the United States. From this side of the ocean came a large part of the national ideology: there came as well a steady flow of men and money to further the cause. And the American government vigorously defended the right of this part of its citizenry to engage in actions hostile to England, even when those actions approached preparation for an armed rebellion. The fact that Irish Americans were able to enlist the support of their government played a prominent part in the ultimate independence won by the republic of Ireland.
In a similar way, the activities of Bohemians in this country influenced the birth of Czechoslovakia; and Germans, Italians, and a host of other people labored to join the interests of their old and new homelands. The clearest case, perhaps, though the one most often forgotten, is that of the immigrants of British descent. When the Scottish-born Andrew Carnegie or the English-born E. L. Godkin argued for closer American ties with the land of their birth, there was no suspicion that they were treacherously dividing their loyalties or deviating in the slightest degree from their attachment to the land of their adoption.
In this perspective, requests by American Jews that their government take steps on their behalf as Jews are not at all unusual. The United States can boast of a long history of such assistance even when the specific interests of American Jews were not in the least involved. Thus, from time to time, diplomatic pressure was brought to bear on Turkey, Morocco, Rumania, and Russia to induce those powers to ameliorate the condition of their own Jewish citizens. That American Jews should ask for such aid, and expect to get it, was entirely natural. That other Americans should understand and support such demands was an aspect of the view that diplomacy was a tool of the interests of the people.
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What lies behind Miss Thompson’s fears, however, is not so much the fact that many voices intrude upon the deliberations of the diplomats (she herself has properly been by no means reticent in this respect), but rather the apprehension that some of these voices are alien. Through her statement runs a profound misunderstanding of the nature of American culture. That accounts for her trepidation.
Familiar with the minorities of Eastern Europe, Miss Thompson looks at the United States and discovers that no minorities exist here. But it is a mistake to leave the matter at that point. For the absence of minorities is not the outcome of uniformity or homogeneity in our society; it is the product of the freedom of many diverse groups to organize their cultural life with very few restraints. There is no majority church, no majority literature, and no majority political status; consequently there are no minorities. That, as I recently attempted to show in these pages,1 is one of the essential ingredients of our way of life.
Miss Thompson’s failure to take in this aspect of our culture is reflected in the elementary confusion with which she uses the word nation. I am sure she has no totalitarian sympathies; it is, no doubt, through lack of reflection that she uses the word in its inclusive totalitarian connotation. What can she have in mind when she says that immigrants on entering the United States must surrender not only their former citizenship but also their former nationality? Surely not that they must give up their familiar language, their traditional religion, the totality of their old culture! At the very time the Constitution was begun with the words, “We, the people,” German was an official tongue in Pennsylvania; when Lincoln spoke of a nation, citizenship was not even a prerequisite for voting in some states; and when Wilson incautiously made the statement quoted by Miss Thompson, the public schools of Baltimore still offered instruction in German. The reason why ethnic groups became minorities in Austria and not in the United States is not that there were no ethnic groups here, but that the scope of their action was so wide in our open society that they needed no juridical definition of separate status.
It is a condition of the variety and liberty of life in this country that men are capable of expressing themselves, wherever they feel such need, through associations to which they are drawn by a common ancestry. A democracy cannot limit the freedom of such groups to act; it cannot say, “Have a folk literature but let it not impinge upon politics,” for that would divorce from the real life of the people either literature or politics. By the nature of its heritage America is committed; only by denying its own past could it turn away from the multi-cultural pattern which has thus far enriched it. That is not likely to happen. Until it does, every group in our society can be as rich in loyalties as it likes, and can express those loyalties wherever it has an interest in doing so—in the arts, in religion, in politics, in international affairs. We shall all be the stronger for it.
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But what of Washington, and the stirring passage Miss Thompson cites? It is always worth paying heed to the utterances of the father of his country; but those are even more meaningful if they are understood exactly as he meant them and within the context of events in which he spoke. The first president, of course, addressed no particular ethnic group. In the last decade of the 18th century there were few foreign-born in the United States, and well over three-quarters of our population was of English descent. Who then held the obstinate loyalties against which his warning was directed?
These were the years of the great debate as to the course the new nation should follow in the bitter imperial struggle between France and England. In violent battles over the face of the whole globe, both powers had come into conflict with the United States, had violated our rights, had flagrantly disregarded international law. Each had its partisans in this country, Americans eager to bring us into the war as an ally of one side or the other. To that end Francophiles and Anglophiles persistently justified the acts of their friends, and condemned the acts of their enemies, though often the acts themselves were identical.
It was not the championing of one country or the other to which Washington objected. The danger he saw lay in the obstinacy and prejudice with which the argument was carried on. Each party had created for itself a double standard of international morality, refused to admit that the same criteria of right and wrong should apply to both contending powers. And this was dangerous because it stood in the way of that open clash of opinion which was the first step toward the method of compromise that is so essential to the democratic process. To such obstinacy Washington objected in domestic as well as in diplomatic affairs.
There is therefore a double significance to Washington’s warning. It is important to remember that he addressed not a particular ethnic group, but all Americans and most of them natives, several generations here. The loyalties that seemed dangerous seemed so not because of their foreignness; they had developed among people who had no direct ties with the countries involved. It is even more important to remember that what seemed dangerous to Washington was not that some Americans had a double loyalty, had divided their attachments between the United States and England and France; what was dangerous was the obstinacy and prejudice of those attachments. We may profitably apply the implications of this message to the position of the Zionists in American society.
That Israel shares with the United States the loyalty of American Zionists is not a departure from the American pattern. Miss Thompson oversimplifies matters when she views Zionism as an East European movement. That was true of East European Zionism; but American Zionism was an American movement, rooted in New World conditions. The early Zionists in this country, from Mordecai Noah and Emma Lazarus to Henrietta Szold and Louis Brandeis, were native-born; as long as immigration continued, most foreign-born Jews were apathetic or hostile. The bitter dissensions after the First World War, when the European and American movements were thrown together, testify to the depth of the differences between them.
Miss Thompson is also in error if she imputes to Zionists the aspiration of becoming in the United States a national minority after the model of those in the Austrian Empire. No Jewish group regards that status as desirable. There has been a deplorable lack of clarity among Zionists in defining their own attitudes toward life outside Israel. But I know of none who asks for more than some form of cultural autonomy or pluralism here. And only those who hold a monolithic view of culture would deny them that aspiration.
The position of Israel with regard to Jewish Americans is then entirely similar to the position of Italy and Ireland with regard to Italian and Irish Americans. In all these cases particular groups of Americans sustained and supported a country with which they had hereditary ties of some sort. But they did so in terms of standards that had universal currency among all their fellow-citizens—the spread of democracy through the world, the self-determination of nations, international action for peace, the desirability of aiding small peoples against great oppressors. One did not have to be a Jew or an Irishman or an Italian to find justice in these arguments. The strength of ancestral attachments deepened the concern of immigrants; but this was a concern they could share with all Americans who had the same standards. Multiple loyalties were no problem; all Americans held them to some degree, for their conception of nationality was not totalitarian, did not dictate that they must love only the United States.
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Even the prospect that some Zionists would prefer to leave the United States and settle in Israel need not perturb Miss Thompson. Expatriation, the extreme of divided loyalty, has long been recognized as a right of Americans. The only relevant questions are those as to the nature of the motives that lead to expatriation and their effects upon the welfare of the United States. If an individual feels that his chances for self-fulfillment are greater outside the United States than in it, we shall be only the gainers by allowing him to seek his opportunities wherever he may find them. That was and is true in the cases of gifted artists like T. S. Eliot and Henry James. It was true of the great body of devoted missionaries of American birth who carried Western civilization and medicine to many parts of the world in the 19th century. It is true of American priests who go to Rome to enter the Vatican’s service. It is true of those Irish Americans who may respond to Premier John Costello’s recent appeal that they come home to rebuild Erin.
So too, if there are among American Jews young men who find a challenge to their social imagination in the new life of the Israeli communal settlements or a challenge to their constructive energies in the backward economy of the Near East, they will, in going, be following an American tradition of long standing. In their departure, they will only be spreading to another part of the world the ideals of American democracy.
What matters is the sentiments that move their going. What distinguished Ezra Pound from Henry James is not that one went to Italy and the other to England, but that one was a Fascist and the other was not, that one went with hatred in his heart, the other as a devoted critic of American society. There is a moral that should be studied by the American Zionists. To the extent that they think of halutziut as a pioneering movement dedicated to the furtherance of humanitarian ethics and democratic nationalism, which they share with all Americans, Miss Thompson’s strictures are pointless and irrelevant. But to the extent that a minority among them attempt to build up Israel by denigrating America, to induce emigration with the argument that a sound Jewish life is impossible here, they are, consciously or not, doing an ill service to the Jews, to Israel, and to the United States.
The same yardstick may be applied to all the activities of American Zionists. We objected to the German-American Bund for the same reason we objected to the Silver Shirts, not because they were German Americans, but because they were Nazis. The meaningful question is not whether loyalties are divided, but whether they can be justified in terms acceptable to all Americans. That is why I find the occasional efforts to defend Israeli policy by a separate standard as distressing as does Miss Thompson. A few American Zionists were altogether too cavalier in their attitude toward the Arab refugees; a few were reckless in their apologetics for terrorism; a few took a hot-headed and unprincipled position on the UN decision to internationalize Jerusalem. An excess of zeal carries an occasional individual to an untenable stand; when a Jewish member of the Boston City Council voted to exclude a Japanese good-will delegation because he “felt that the Far East nations did not vote for new democracies in the United Nations, such as the state of Israel,” his logic was bad and he served no one well.
Fortunately such instances are rare within American Zionism and certainly within American Jewry. Not more than a tiny fraction are disposed to regard the United States as “a sort of Diaspora of the State of Israel.” But precisely because the elements which do hold that point of view are weak, because they feel powerless and often frustrated, they sometimes feel impelled to make statements and behave in ways that seem to outsiders to take on a conspiratorial aspect. That is a danger all Americans and all Jews must guard against.
I am in perfect agreement with Miss Thompson as to the dangers of labeling anti-Semitic anyone who is not a Zionist. I would go farther and criticize the deplorable tendency to identify as “Jewish self-hatred” any expression of divergent opinion. The readiness of some groups to find safety in censorship, open or explicit, is an evidence of weakness and a possible source of serious misunderstanding. The eagerness of some Zionists to achieve a kind of artificial discipline in the Jewish community through some form of imposed organizational unity is a reflection of their own sense of loss of power; but it may also breed resentments of a most serious nature. Finally I hope there will be a serious effort to eliminate any suspicion, however unfounded, that there are hidden secrets in the Zionist aims, that they seek special rights or wish to avoid general obligations.
American Jews would be wise to heed these warnings. What might happen they can see in the history of our Communist party. Probably nothing has earned American Communists so much bad will in this country as their willingness to maintain a double standard of international morality to justify Russian policies, and to retreat for that purpose into a helpless frustrated conspiracy. It would be most regrettable if even the smallest minority of American Jews sank into the same bog with regard to Israel.
On the other hand the Zionists can legitimately expect that their critics will view their situation with understanding. Drastic accusations will only strengthen the sense of frustration, weaken the role of the moderates, and confirm the hostility of those who, in the last decade, came to think they ought suspect the whole outside world. After all, there is no evidence that the Zionists here are subjecting anyone to coercive discipline; there are no grounds for fear that the nationalism of Israel is the nationalism of Hitler or that American Zionists will follow the model of the Bund. Such exasperating charges, the very tone of such comparisons, will needlessly poison an atmosphere, now still conducive to understanding.
The willingness to give an audience to such critics as Miss Thompson, and to keep these discussions open and in the public gaze, is in itself a token of the good faith of the vast majority. Now, as in the past, the Jews of this country maintain an interest and, through their government, act in behalf of those across the seas, in Israel and elsewhere, to whom they feel particular ties of brotherhood along with those that bind them to all men. Such actions and such motives are wholly creditable and wholly American.
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1 Group Life Within the American Pattern,” COMMENTARY, November 1949.