HIS 393: SEMINAR: RACE AND NATIONALITY IN AMERICA, 1900-1920
Professor John McClymer, ext 7278
Fall 2006

Description: The problem of the twentieth century, W.E.B. DuBois predicted, would be "the problem of the color line." From the perspective of the twenty-first century it is clear that he was right. This seminar will examine significant incidents from the first two decades of the twentieth century with an eye toward assessing how black and ethnic Americans sought to make places for themselves and how so-called Old Stock white Americans accommodated and/or resisted those efforts. Each student will choose one episode, will work intensively with primary sources to establish a reliable narrative of that event, and will try to contextualize that story in the larger history of the times.

The instructor is writing a book on this topic for Greenwood Press (forthcoming 2008), which will be the first volume in a five-volume series on race and nationality in America in the twentieth century edited by Professor Ronald Bayor of Georgia Tech. The topics that students will choose from are among those the instructor intends to emphasize in his book.

Prerequisites: All students in the seminar must also enroll in its associated proseminar, HIS 389: Special Topics: America in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. The seminar is designed for history majors and minors. Other students are welcome to enroll, if there is room.

Requirements: Students will give regular in-class reports on their topics. These will entail discussing what sources they are working with, what difficulties they are experiencing, and what tentative ideas they are developing. These reports should be detailed. Students should, for example, provide specific examples of source materials they are using for other participants to examine. At semester's end each student will give a final oral presentation in addition to submitting the completed research project. A word about "completed": all of these topics are very rich. No one will ever have the last word about any of them. The student's task, as a result, is to go as deeply into the topic as time and resources permit. Really good projects will leave their authors wishing they had more time so that they could explore their topic in still more detail.

The department is about to adopt an outcome assessment plan. The first phase of its implementation will be to assess student work in the seminars for majors. For a look at the rubrics involved, click here.

We will begin by collectively exploring the topics. Then students will choose the one that interests them most and meet with the instructor to craft a research project. Topics include:

• The Philippine-American War, 1899-1902(?) — In the wake of the Spanish-American War, the United States purchased the Philippines from Spain. Filipino nationalists, who had fought to oust the Spanish and cooperated with American troops in defeating the Spanish in the islands, refused to accept colonial status. The resulting war officially ended in 1902 but fighting continued for another decade. Hence the question mark after 1902. The war proved extremely bloody. American casualties were high, Filipino casualties enormous. It also proved very divisive in the U.S. And it accentuated the importance of racial and racist thinking. We sought to take over the Philippines to assist our "little, brown brother" in President McKinley's words. The U.S. was, in the language of Rudyard Kipling, assuming "The White Man's Burden." See resources page.
• The Trial of Sheriff Joseph Shipp — In 1906 a mob in Chattanooga, Tennessee lynched Ed Johnson, a black man accused of rape. In 1907 Sheriff Joseph Shipp was tried before the United States Supreme Court for his role in the lynching. It is the only time the Court tried a criminal case, and Shipp is one of only a handful of whites ever prosecuted in any court for lynching a black American. See resources page.
• Gentlemen's Agreement (1907) — This was an understanding reached between the U.S. and Japan severely restricting Japanese migration to the U.S. President Roosevelt accepted the agreement very reluctantly since he was personally persuaded that there was no reason to restrict Japanese immigration and that the anti-Japanese sentiment sweeping the West Coast and, to a lesser degree, the rest of the country unnecessarily insulted a rising Pacific power. As with the Philippine-American War, the Gentlemen's Agreement demonstrated the ways in which race and nationality fused in American public life. See resources page.
• The Dillingham Commission Reports — The Gentlemen's Agreement was part of a much larger movement to restrict immigration. Of special concern to restrictionists were newcomers from Eastern and Southern Europe. Their prefered method of restriction was a literacy test since most immigrants from Italy, Greece, and the Austro-Hungarian and Russian empires were unable to read and write. To head off the restrictionists President Roosevelt called for the establishment of a Commission to investigate the entire subject of immigration, including data about how various groups were faring in the U.S. Dominated by restrictionists, the more than forty volumes contain much valuable information and much distortion. Restrictionists would finally succeed in the wake of WWI. The Reports proved an encyclopedic survey of the case against continued immigration. See resources page.
• The Trial and Lynching of Leo Frank — In 1913 a thirteen-year-old factory worker named Mary Phagan was murdered. Leo Frank, who managed the factory in which she worked, was tried and convicted and, in 1915, lynched in her home town by men calling themselves the "Knights of Mary Phagan." Frank thus became the first American Jew to be lynched. And the lynchers, a few months later, participated in the founding ceremony of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. American Jews, in response to the lynching, founded the Anti-Defamation League. See resources page.
• The Ludlow Massacre — In 1914 management of the Colorado Fuel and Iron Company, ultimately responsible to John D. Rockefeller II, broke a strike in the Colorado coal fields by opening fire with machine guns and other weapons on the tent colony at Ludlow. Seventeen died. Several were infants. Most of the strikers were immigrants who had overcome ethnic and religious differences to combine against the coal company. The episode clearly introduces the element of class conflict into our study of race and nationality. See resources page.
• "Birth of a Nation" — In 1915 D.W. Griffith first exhibited his epic of the Civil War and Reconstruction. The first screening was at the White House. Woodrow Wilson had gone to school with Thomas Dixon upon whose "The Leopord's Spots" and "The Clansmen" the film was based. The film was enormously popular, as had been the novels, and inspired the second KKK. It also led to vigorous protests by American blacks, spearheaded by the new NAACP. See resources page.
• The Bisbee Deportation — In 1917 the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) organized a strike of copper miners in Arizona. Most of the strikers were immigrants or Hispanic (many of whose families had lived in the area since before the War with Mexico). On July 12th a large contingent of vigilantes rounded up some 1,000 strikers, forced them onto railroad cars, and deported them out of Bisbee. This sort of vigilantism was common in the U.S. as the frequency of lynchings demonstrates. It would become especially commonplace during and immediately after WWI. In the Bisbee Deportation we can see self-proclaimed Americans insisting that those unwilling to accept their values must literally get out. See resources page.
• New York City Mayoralty Race of 1917 — In 1917 the "boy mayor" of New York, John Purroy Mitchel, sought re-election. Defeated in the Republican primary, Mitchel ran as an independent in a four-man race. He was opposed by the Republican nominee, by a Socialist (Morris Hillquist), and by John Francis ("Red Mike") Hylan, a former Republican judge from Brookly who was the candidate of the NYC's democratic machine, Tammany Hall. Mitchel had won the 1913 election by the largest margin in city history. He would lose in 1917 by a margin twice as large. Mitchel's campaign is nonetheless interesting because it was a dress rehearsal for the postwar Red Scare. Your instructor has published several essays on this election. His "Of 'Morn' Glories' and 'Fine Old Oaks': John Purroy Mitchel, Al Smith, and Reform as an Expression of Irish-American Aspiration" is on reserve in the Assumption library.
• The Red Scare (1918-1921) and the Seattle General Strike (1919) — Anti-immigrant feelings fused with anti-radical fears in the Red Scare following WWI. Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer claimed that hundreds of thousands of Bolsheviks, virtually all immigrants, intended to overthrow the American government. He then organized a series of raids designed to destroy this alleged plot. Fuelling these fears were a number of strikes actually led by radicals. William Z. Foster, soon to run for president on the Communist Party ticket, led the great but unsuccessful Steel Strike of 1919. Equally frightening to folks like Palmer was the Seattle General Strike. A general strike, the closing down of an entire city, was a tactic associated with Bolsheviks. Immigration restriction triumphed in the wake of the 1919 strikes and the Red Scare. See resources page.
• The Chicago Race Riot (1919) — This was one of several major race riots during the War and its immediate aftermath. WWI greatly expanded the so-called Great Migration of southern blacks to northern cities. In places like Chicago African Americans competed with white ethnics for employment, housing, and for turf generally. The riot began when a black teenager floated into a part of the Lake Michigan beachfront claimed by whites who stoned him to death. This touched off several days of violence in which whites, often recruited from Chicago's "athletic clubs" (actually street gangs), attacked black neighborhoods. Blacks, sometimes led by WWI veterans, defended themselves with comparable violence. See resources page.
• "A simple Irish girl": The Saga of Olive Thomas — Olive Thomas (née Duffy) grew up in small mill towns near Pittsburgh, married at sixteen, and shortly thereafter decamped for New York where she won a beauty contest, began to pose for magazine illustrators, got a job in the chorus of Ziegfeld's Follies, and won a series of parts in silent films. Within a few years she was a major star. Her last movie, "The Flapper," made in 1920, was a huge hit and helped name the modern young woman of the 1920s. Olive died shortly thereafter under mysterious circumstances. Our interest is not so much in unraveling the mystery of her death as in seeing how a self-proclaimed "simple Irish girl" came to embody a wide range of popular fantasies.

Class Schedule:

Aug. 28: Introduction; for Aug. 30 read through either The World of 1898: The Spanish-American War at the Library of Congress's American Memory or the New York Public Library on line exhibition on the War of 1898, A War in Perspective: 1898-1998. Submit one hour before class two or three questions about the War, the American decision to purchase the Philippines from Spain, or the subsequent Philippine-American War.

Aug. 30: Discussion of questions; guided tour of The Philippine-American War site. For Sept. 6, choose two or three sources found on the site. Submit one hour before class links to each + a brief (1 paragraph) explanation of why you find each source intriguing.

Sept. 4: Labor Day holiday.

Sept. 6: Discussion of sources submitted; for Sept. 11, read Doug Linder's introductory essay at The Trial of Sheriff Joseph Shipp. Submit one hour before class two or three questions about the lynching of Ed Johnson or the trial of Sheriff Shipp

Sept. 11: Discussion of Shipp questions; guided tour of The Trial of Sheriff Joseph Shipp site and Shipp resources. For Sept. 13, read Raymond Leslie Buell, "The Development of Anti-Japanese Agitation in the United States," part 1, Political Science Quarterly, Dec. 1922 and part 2 , Political Science Quarterly, March 1923. Submit one hour before class two or three questions about the growth of anti-Japanese sentiment.

Sept. 13: Discussion of Buell questions; introduction to Leo Frank case and resources. Submit one hour before class the passages + a brief discussion of what you find intriguing about each.

Sept. 18: Discussion of Leo Frank case; read Nancy MacLean, "The Leo Frank Case Reconsidered"; introduction to Ludlow Massacre and resources

Sept. 20: Discussion of the Ludlow Massacre; for Sept. 25, read “Art [and History] by Lightning Flash”: The Birth of a Nation and Black Protest.

Sept. 25: In-class screening of key scenes of "The Birth of a Naation"; guided tour of "The Birth of a Nation" resources. Submit one hour before Sept. 27 class two or three questions about the film and its reception, including in the African-American community.

Sept. 27: Discussion of "The Birth of a Nation" questions; guided tour of The Bisbee Deportation site. For Oct. 2 choose two or three primary resources from the site that strike you as revealing. Submit one hour before class links to the sources + a brief discussion of what you find intriguing about each.

Oct. 2: Discussion of Bisbee Deportation sources; for Oct. 4 read McClymer, "Of 'Morn' Glories' and 'Fine Old Oaks': John Purroy Mitchel, Al Smith, and Reform as an Expression of Irish-American Aspiration" which is on reserve in the Assumption library. Submit one hour before class two or three questions about Mitchel, Smith, the 1917 mayoralty race, or other relevant topics.

Oct. 4: Discussion of "Of 'Mornin' Glories'" questions; guided tour of The Red Scare site. Read "The Great Red Scare" by Frederick Lewis Allen. Submit one hour before Oct. 11 class links to two or three cartoons that strike you as particular revealing + a brief discussion of what you find intriguing about each.

Oct. 9: Columbus Day holiday

Oct. 11: Discussion of Red Scare cartoons; guided tour of Seattle General Strike site. Submit one hour before Oct. 16 class two or three passages from the union account of the strike that you find particularly revealing along with a brief discussion of what you find most intriguing about each.

Oct. 16: Discussion of Seattle General Strike passages; guided tour of The Chicago Race Riot site and resources page. Submit one hour before Oct. 18 class links to two or three primary sources that you find particularly revealing along with a brief discussion of what you find most intriguing about each.

Oct. 18: Discussion of Chicago Race Riot sources; for Oct. 23 read "A simple Irish girl": The Saga of Olive Thomas. Submit one hour before class two or three questions about Olive.

Oct. 23: Discussion of Olive Thomas questions

Oct. 25: Individual meetings to discuss final projects

Oct. 30: Individual meetings to discuss final projects

Nov. 1: In-class reports (see Requirements above for details)

Nov. 6: In-class reports

Nov. 8: In-class reports

Nov. 13: In-class reports

Nov. 15: In-class reports

Nov. 20: Individual meetings

Nov. 22: Thanksgiving Recess

Nov. 27: In-class reports

Nov. 29: In-class reports

Dec. 4: Final oral reports

Dec. 6: Final oral reports

Dec. 13: Final reports due