The Revival of 'Liberal' Citizenship
But beginning in the Progressive era, the more
cosmopolitan, liberal conception of American citizenship was revived in somewhat altered form.
President Woodrow Wilson articulated it deftly in a 1915 address to newly naturalized citizens, who
had just sworn allegiance to the United States. Wilson told the new Americans that they had vowed
loyalty "to no one," only to "a great ideal, to a great body of principles, to a great hope of the
human race." He urged them to think of America, but to "think first of humanity," so as not to divide
people into nationalistic "jealous camps." The true prophet of the new liberal conception of
citizenship generated by Progressive thought was, however, Horace Kallen, a Jewish philosopher
influenced by the pragmatism of William James and John Dewey. Like Dewey, Kallen was disgusted
by the harsh Americanization movement of World War 1, which included public and private efforts to
strip recent immigrants of "alien" characteristics virtually overnight. He argued in opposition that the
true ideal of American identity was "cultural pluralism": the United States should be a "federal
republic" in form, but a "democracy of nationalities" in fact, a commonwealth of numerous organic
communities that would cooperate voluntarily in the "enterprise of self-realization" within culturally
distinctive, but mutually respectful, ancestral groups. Kallen thus added to Wilson's emphasis on
shared liberal ideals the contention that needs for a "native" community should be met by
memberships in smaller ethnocultural bodies. This did not mean that Kallen's interpretation of
American citizenship was less cosmopolitan than Wilson's. For Kallen, that citizenship was "no more
than citizenship in any land with free institutions" that permitted heterogeneity while encouraging
cultural cross-fertilization. In his important 1924 summary of his views, Culture and Democracy in
the United States, Kallen wrote that the enlightened citizen, educated by the experience of diversity,
would be "essentially a citizen of the world."
Wilson's liberalism, and its elaboration in Kallen's cultural pluralism, did not forestall the inflamed
xenophobia of World War I and the postwar period. In fact, Wilson himself came to urge repressive
measures against native dissidents and aliens alike, to safeguard morale" for the war effort. The
chief monuments of the nation's rising nativism, the bigoted immigration laws of the 1920s and the
second-class citizenship accorded blacks, women, and other minorities, continued to predominate in
American law and public policy through the Depression and the Second World War. But in the wake
of that conflict with racist totalitarian regimes, liberal egalitarian forces gained new vigor in
American life.
In the 1950s, most leaders of ethnic groups, immigrant organizations, and social reform movements
came to accept some form of cultural pluralism, of equality among autonomous but cooperative
ethno-cultural groups, as the proper ideal for American life. Slowly, they gained successes in reshaping
American laws and policies to accord with this modern liberal conception. In 1952, Congress
passed the McCarran-Walter Act, which finally abolished all overt racial requirements for
naturalization, though the national quota system was largely maintained, and as part of the Cold
War, federal powers to deport ideologically undesirable aliens were increased. Shortly thereafter, the
Supreme Court struck down racial segregation, and later in the decade Congress adopted tentative
legislation on behalf of black voting rights.
The 1960s marked the real ascendancy of the liberal notion of "cultural pluralism" as the dominant
conception of civic identity in American public law. The historic 1964 Civil Rights Act promoted social
equality for blacks and also for other minorities and women; the Voting Rights Act of 1965 furthered
their political equality, and the 1965 Immigration and Naturalization Act at last terminated the
discriminatory national quota system. New governmental programs were created to address the
special needs of ethnocultural minorities, such as educational curricula more attuned to the nation's
varied cultural heritage, bilingual ballots and governmental publications, and federally sponsored
affirmative action programs in hiring and school admission policies. In the early 1970s, many of
these initiatives were extended, by legislative amendments and by judicial decisions that broadened
remedies against discrimination for all citizens and that provided almost equal protection to aliens as
well.
Those measures could not, however, succeed in erasing the marks past policies had left on American
institutions, social practices, and Popular beliefs. Efforts to do so, moreover, increasingly
encountered resistance. The tense struggle over desegregation, especially in northern cities,
remains an ongoing national dilemma. Affirmative action measures, and the spread of
representative quotas, explicit or implicit, within political parties and governmental administrative
proceedings, have produced mounting acrimony. Concerns about the social changes that might
result from the Equal Rights Amendment grew so strong that it was defeated, at least for the
present.
The return to more open immigration since 1965 has led to an unprecedented influx of Asian and,
especially, Spanish-speaking newcomers, heavily concentrated in a few regions, where they
sometimes constitute local majorities. In consequence, many are again expressing fears that native
American citizens are losing jobs to aliens, and that our political institutions and expanded social
programs are being rendered unworkable by strangers in the land who cannot or will not participate
in them responsibly. Recent controversies over bilingualism, refugee policies, amnesty for illegal
aliens and education for then children, all reveal that the sorts of anxieties many Americans
experienced prior to the closing of the immigration doors in the 1920's have not disappeared, but
only slumbered in the intervening years. Their re-awakening has already had an impact on the
actions of legislators, judges, and immigration officials, who show signs of a new hardening toward
the claims of aliens, refugees, and domestic ethnic minorities. The Supreme Court has recently
broadened the range of public employments that states may limit to citizens; the Immigration and
Naturalization Service has resurrected near-punitive confinement for refugees awaiting processing;
and federal officials have stopped advocating affirmative action programs and sweeping
desegregation measures.
To be sure, few in public life today would defend the explicitly racist and chauvinistic nativism that
pervaded American public discourse in the first quarter of this century. But immigration, ethnic, and
racial questions are once again visibly central to America's public life; and so it is impossible to avoid
the fear that the nation will see heightening ethnic conflicts in the years ahead. These consequence
of the post-war move toward policies promoting "cultural pluralism" raise anew some disturbing and
unsolved questions. Can Americans hope to meet their needs for a sense of meaningful civic identity
and national community if citizenship in the United States rests only on the cosmopolitan ideal of
shared commitment to liberal principles, and so means no more than membership in any land with
free institutions? Or must liberal policies always prove counterproductive, thrusting people back into
their more communitarian subgroups, and generating not tolerance and openness but bitter
ethnocultural rivalries? Will these quarrels, in turn, generate a disaffected citizenry that limits its
political participation to agitation on behalf of special group interests, leaving more remote than ever
the republican ideal of a vigorous public actively cooperating for the common good? Can feelings of
allegiance to one's roots, the fuel of American nativism, be made to serve a healthy patriotism, or
must they generate parochial perspectives that can only produce bigotry in a society that is now
ineradicably heterogeneous?
These painful and perplexing issues will probably continue to be addressed in American law through
some combination of liberal, republican and nativist views. Whether any new combination can be
found that will seem legitimate, meaningful, and satisfying to Americans is a further question,
however--one that the nation will be unable to avoid as it ponders the significance American
citizenship Should be given in public policies and adjudication during the American Constitution's
third century.
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