This internal unification was accomplished by a high emotional tension, a national and personal uncertainty, and a common hate. The prejudice against the various immigrant groups, arising as a result of the great wave of immigration, was abated for the moment; all the little prejudices were summed up in one great hatred of the common enemy, Germany. This was reflected in avoidance of everything German in this country as well; German instruction was withdrawn from many high schools, German music from the opera houses, German fried potatoes from the restaurants. The term, “German-American,” formerly in good repute, now became a byword, and with it every form of “hyphen.” The demand now was for “hundred per cent.” Americanism.
In the prevailing ignorance of foreign languages and peoples, or even if this ignorance had not existed in its full measure, the hatred against the Germans was transferred in part to other groups as well, even those with most reason to be anti-German or anti-Austrian. Foreign language newspapers fell under popular suspicion and official censorship much heavier than that of the English language periodicals. Some states passed laws, later declared unconstitutional, forbidding teaching, preaching or public meetings in languages other than English. Foreign sounding names attracted suspicion, and were changed in large numbers. Altogether, America begun to repeat the oppression of subject groups which had caused permanent resentment and sown the seeds of rebellion in almost every land in Europe, to create her own Ireland, Alsace-Lorraine or Poland. Americanization became a synonym for compulsory adoption of American standards and group habits.
Americanization had had a long, if somewhat unsatisfactory, trial before the war. It was the attempt, at that time, to bring American culture to the supposedly uncultured immigrant through settlements, night schools, and other cultural agencies. The attempt was satisfactory in a comparatively small proportion of the total immigrant population; and the earnest workers blamed this fact on the poorness of their textbooks, the unsuitability of their buildings, or the weariness of the people after a day of arduous labor. Now, all of these were undoubtedly true, but a more fundamental cause of the weakness of Americanization methods lay in the fact that they were all one-sided; they consisted in attempts to change the immigrant into an American, rather than attempts to join many groups together into a composite unity. Even the conference on Americanization called by the Secretary of the Interior in 1918 passed friendly and practical resolutions, but still one-sided and consequently superficial.
The few individuals who persisted in their individuality, who refused to be absorbed in the group purpose, formed no clearly marked group of themselves. They were the “conscientious objectors,” who refused any type of activity that might help the military machine; the “slackers,” who evaded the draft for selfish reasons; various religious groups, such as the Quakers; a few economic dissenters, such as the Industrial Workers of the World. They received, as they must have expected, the violent disapproval of the group, expressed in terms of mob attack, legal imprisonment, or at least, extreme social disapproval. They were the unassimilated residuum of personality in the general unification of the American group under the pressure of an external foe.
3.
Then came the armistice in November, 1918. As Dr. Drachsler remarks:
[69]The war lasted long enough to make America painfully conscious of her peculiar problem of nationalism, but was not of long enough duration to fuse the divergent ethnic elements permanently.
The artificial unity of war-time had no longer a purpose, and began instantly to dissolve into its component elements. But the high emotional tone of the war-time remained. Men still hated violently, but they could no longer release this hatred in battle or in sending others to battle. The repressive agencies remained in existence and in excellent running order; groups had learned how to use propaganda as an instrument; the habit of group pressure on subgroups and on different and opposing groups had been strengthened. Most of all, great masses of Americans had a new group consciousness of America as a group, with the uniformity of habit, opinion and conduct characteristic of their own subgroup taken as normal for the whole.
The first result, then, was that the original subgroups fell apart and that their opposition was stronger and more open than before the war. This was due certainly to the heightened emotional tone, not only of the American mind, but every group mind the world over. During the war men and nations lived habitually under conditions of excitement, uncertainty and tension. After the war the same emotional tone remained to color whatever group ideas might become associated with its action. So the whites who had drafted negroes to fight for them resented these same negroes coming home with the new pride of soldiers, remembering new equality of treatment they had received from the French. The daughters of the rich no longer danced with the poor, ignorant farm boys as they had in every cantonment. Prejudice against the uniform returned, and girls of certain classes would no longer care to be seen with soldiers or sailors; as they had when those men were expressing the group purpose by their very garments. And the hatred of the various immigrant groups for each other—the hatred of the older American groups against the immigrant, the Catholic and the Jew, returned with redoubled force. As the present writer found occasion to note directly after the close of the war:
[70]During the war we felt that prejudice between men of different groups and different faiths was lessening day by day, that our common enthusiasm in our common cause had brought Catholics, Protestants and Jews nearer together on the basis of their ardent Americanism. Especially we who were at the front felt this in the first flush of our co-operation, our mutual interest and our mutual helpfulness.