WHAT IS AN AMERICAN?

New Zealand Listener, Volume 17, Issue 436, 31 October 1947, Page 15

WHAT IS AN AMERICAN?

The final article in the series written for "The Listener" by

BEATRICE

ASHTON

O Jean la Touche in his Ballad for Americans he is "Just an Irish-Negro-Jewish-Italian, French-and-English-Span-ish-Russian, Chinese-Polish-Dutch-Hungarian, Scottish-Swedish-Fin-ish-Canadian, Greek and Turk and Czech and double-check AMERICAN!" Heard from’ New Zealand _ before Pearl Harbour, this sounded well enough and made good propaganda for American democracy. Hearing it in Salt Lake after three months there I thought’ the case over-simplified; and when I last heard it in June it sounded nothing more than a gallant vision of an integrated people without reference to the actual situation. Somewhere in the experience of every American is»the corner drug store with its ice-cream sundaes at the counter, the current song hit over the juke-box, the liquor .cheek-by-jowl with the patent» medicines, the easy informality, the local gags, and the sense of national crisis or well-being. On Main Street or actoss the railroad-tracks, in Harlem or Chinatown, the pattern is the same. But Americans living diversely in these places sharing. many similar experiences neither regard each other with equal respect nor allow each other equal freedom. It was not long before I knew all the terms of disdain and contempt levelled at each group by ‘the other. There was Polack for the Poles, Hunky for the Hungarians, Wop for the Italians. People who dressed with infinite care from Jewish department stores used less finesses as they sprinkled their vocabulary with Kike. and Jew-boy; American women wore Mexican jewellery with great pride while California crowded Mexican children into segregated schools; women worked alongside Nisei Japanese resenting their freedom from internment without bothering to discover that they were the wives and daughters of Japanese-Americans fighting with great distinction ‘in Italy. Negroes and Jews Americans, I found, fell into certain fixed levels of social prestige and opportunity. There was none of that indiscriminate order of Jean la Touche. First came the people of German, English, French, and Scandinavian. descent and after them the Irish and Italians, the Greeks, the Armenians, the Orientals, the Mexicans-and trailing last, shunned by all the rest, the Negro. Running like a cross-section over the entire social structure of the nation are the Jews, not entirely absorbed, not yet the victims of rampant anti-Semitism, resented and mever quite accepted. Eenie meenie minie mo, Catch a nigger by the toe If he hollers make him pay Fifty dollars every day. Not a chant of the Ku Klux Klan, but just the small children of the neighbourhood playing outside the house. "Last man down’s a nigger-baby"-and this time the children are playing indoors with their aunts and uncles at a family party. Three of these children were at Nursery School with Negro

teachers whom they dearly loved. And none of those parents, hearing either group of children at play, thought to remove the offensive. word from their patter. "The Misfortune of America" It is true that I arrived in America knowing more about the Negro. question than about keeping house, more

about. lynchings in the South than about barbecues on lawns in the West. It is the misfortune of America that all the world can fasten its eyes on Greenville, South Carolina, and watch the trial of 30 white lynchers and yet have very little opportunity to know how a good American home functions, how kind and generous, how honest and genuine the average American is. But these same Americans have very little time for private introspection and still less for probing their national problems without prejudice and fear. + If I saw barbecues instead of lynchings I still did not go around unaware of the Negro population silent and subservient. |The boot-blacks, the waiters, the cleaning-maids in the theatres and stores, the porters on the trains all go about their business with care and a courtesy that the white population pays for in tips rather than with equal courtesy and respect. The best jazz is played in night clubs by Negro bands and white people pay any price to hear it. When Marian. Anderson sings in Portland the largest hotel will not give her a room, but the manager of the hotel sits in the best seat in the theatre. For his unchallenged superiority as an artist Paul Robeson may eat at a restaurant which otherwise bears a sign which all Negroes recognise as a device to exclude them. A Personal Solution "Negro problem? What Negro problem?" they say in Salt Lake City. Then I discovered that for the sins of Ham, the Negrd has been cursed to remain among the sons of darkness for ever and for that reason he cannot hold office in the Mormon Church. For the same reason he had nowhere to swim when on leave from camp in those hot Utah summers. Having excluded him from the Mormon swimming-baths it did not seem important to the city fathers to

do anything further about it. There was nowhere Negroes uld eat on leave; there was no permanent Negro population of any size to absorb them. There was still no "problem." Somewhere I had to find a personal solution of the matter. It isn’t possible to make friends with just any Negro in any situation and thereby shelve your guilt by proving your compassion. They would prove stubborn and very uncooperative guinea-pigs. Fifteen thousand Negroes had poured into Portland for the shipyards and they had gone north to stay. They are crowded into a small area near the river, segregated in one housing project and restricted to the fringe of the Veterans’ Housing Project at Vanport. All the old wives’ tales from the south preceded them north and while I saw for myself that they were quiet and dignified on the streets, I was assured that they did not know what to do with their money and were a rampant danger to the rest of us. Would you meet a Negro socially? There is the acid test for a Caucasian’ who feels that something more than (continued on next page)

WHAT IS AN AMERICAN P

(continued from previous page) lip service is necessary. On that staff we met socially and without embarrassment. "Did you have them in your house?" said my neighbour. Then one day I drove acfoss town with 9 Negro. couple in their Packard. (Whatever some war workers, Negro or white, had done with their wages, these people had bought a house, furnished it, and ran an expensive car as well). As I left the house my husband stood at our door watching heads appear from every window in our courtyard. ; Americans in the North either ignore the Negro situation altogether, or argue about it, or indulge in all the myths concerning the Negroes in the south. The bogy of intermarriage is always thrown across any serious discussion, It "confuses the real issue that there are vast hurdles of petty restrictions and frustrations, 1ét alone real discrimination and actual persecution-all to be removed! before the Negro enjoys his full privilege as an American citizen. What a staff like ours learned from working alongside those Negro women came to us as a rare opportunity. Margaret Halsey says in her book Colour Blind, "There is no perfect way to live with our Negro compatriots, any more than there is a perfect way of living with one’s husband or wife. . But there are better ways at our finger tips than we are using now." There has lately been a flood of books by white writers of distinction, all in vocal support of the American Negro. Miss Halsey has written two, Lilian Smith provided Strange Fruit, and Sinclair Lewis has just had his Kingsblood Royal distributed among the reading public of the Literary Guild. But White Americans who ignore the colour bar and go to the length of mixing socially with Negroes are suspect to the average American. There is a Negro president of the .Portland chapter of the American Veterans’ Committee, and at Vanport the chapter succeeded in persuading the authorities to combine Negro and white families in one unit as an experiment. For their pains these courageous people are branded with equal scorn as "nigger-lovers" and "Communists." These brands do not always settle with equal vigour on people or on organisations, but these "Communists," these "radicals" were under fierce fire in the States as I left. Liberals are "Crack-Pots" As the fear of Russia grows and the fever of propaganda and prejudice tises, the merest liberal is branded and condemned. Talking about progressive Americans as liberals is less than kind in one sense, but what else describes them, a loosely contrived bunch of intellectuals, labour leaders, and ordinary citizens?- These are the remnants of the New Deal, divided among themselves and apparently unable to rally sufficiently from the death of Roosevelt to make themselves felt politically. ‘Somehow and rarely we discovered these people, branded in every society but their own as crack-pots, cranks, and Reds. At the higher level they -are people like Eleanor Roosevelt, still under fire from conservative groups for her long career of honest effort on behalf of minorities and underprivileged

groups in her own country, and still without prestige after her work at Lake Success; men like David Lilienthal, who suffered ignominiously and was branded a dangerous radical for his fine job of developing the T.V.A, into a servant of the people. Americans would rather be divided sharply between MRepublicans and Democrats than fall to right or left of centre. But actually there is a sharper line right across their two-party system than there is any longer between the parties. What defeated the remnants of the New Deal legislation was the combination of Southern conservative Democrats with the Republicaris, Against this New Dealers like Senator Pepper and Henry Wallace could not~® rally enough support, even with the help » of Republicans like Wayne Morse, of ~ Oregon. And where telegrams and letters to Congressmen were the weapons of liberal organisations and labour unions, the conservatives had on their side most of the Press, most of the radio commentators, and all the large powerful organisations designed to protect the status quo. With millions of dollars of advertising’ the National Association of Manufacturers broke the ‘brave attempt of O.P.A. to hold down the cost of living: with all the pressure it could exert the National Real Estate Board. defeated every effort of Mr. Truman’s administration to copé with the housing shortage: the American Legion occupies its time with plans for a bonus and leaves its members with. out a lead in supporting legislation that would have housed them better, givén them better rights to a job, and kept down inflation. "The American Way-or Else" To suggest that there is any other way than to give Free Enterprise its arroe gant head is to run foul of Americans, Behind such a suggestion there is always a taint o "Communism," They blithely disregard the compromise between unbridled capitalism and rigid socialism that we have here in New Zealand and that they know in Sweden and England. It must be the American Way-or else. Suggest socialised medicine to an American bemoans ing his doctor’s bills, and he looks at you as if you were taking away his birthright. Suggest that some opportunities are closed to Americans without financial backing, det alone the hindrance of belonging to a minority group, and he will launch out romantically on variations on the theme of Rags to Riches, and Log Cabin to White House-and that is that. An American woman said to me that the things I wanted so badly to bring to New Zealand told her exactly why she would rather stay home. But leavying behind the devices and gadgets wag not so hard. It would be harder to pure sue against inflation the dollars that pro- ~% vide the comfort and luxury’she could not give up. Then her argument lost all its force. "Besides," she said, "It isn’t even a democracy." She meant, I imagine, that we have "socialised" away our freedom, Her America is the land of the brave and the free and the privileged. There you are privileged to take whatever you want, to take it and pay for it through the neck.