Paperback(1st Edition)
-
PICK UP IN STORE
Your local store may have stock of this item.
Available within 2 business hours
Related collections and offers
Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780252084324 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Illinois Press |
| Publication date: | 06/30/2019 |
| Series: | Working Class in American History |
| Edition description: | 1st Edition |
| Pages: | 238 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.60(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Modernism and Exile
The Origins of Louis Adamic's Politics, 1898–1932
In his 1930 short story "A Bohunk Woman," Louis Adamic invented Mila Tanasich to represent the South Slav "women in America whose men performed the hard, dirty work in industry, and to whom fate was not so gentle." Early in the story, a fictionalized Adamic learned from a friend about a fifty-year-old Croatian immigrant woman who desperately needed work as a cleaning lady. A freight container had fallen on her dockworker husband and crippled him. Now her family had no income. Serving as the narrator, the imaginary Adamic explained that feelings of pity led him to hire her. Near the end of the story, the normally reticent Tanasich exclaimed that "life is cruel and evil," especially in America, which "is big and terrible." Various illnesses, accidents, and war left only one of her seven children alive and led to the deaths of her first three husbands. This had taught her that "perhaps nothing matters. I don't matter. Only life matters ... life and America. Life must go on. A terrible process, isn't it? America must become great. ... We all came over from the Old Country to help America become great and terrible." The story ended with Tanasich dying on her way to the hospital.
Adamic used the paradox of America being "great and terrible"— of immigrants providing the labor to make the United States the wealthiest nation on earth while receiving mostly misery in return — to express his sense of being an exile. Adamic and many of his fellow South Slavs grew up feeling displaced because the Austrian Empire controlled Slovenia and Croatia. Then the xenophobes who dominated US public discourse, policy, and law made it clear to those who migrated to the United States that southern and eastern Europeans were not welcome because they were not quite "white" and thus not quite American. Prior to the 1930s, the idea of ethnic groups remained largely outside public comprehension. In the statutes, rulings, scholarship, and reporting that they wrote, lawmakers, judges, academics, and journalists legitimized racial hierarchies that placed Slavs, Italians, Greeks, and Jews above blacks and Asians but below Anglo-Saxons. A 1926 survey asked Anglo-Americans to rank "races" based on their willingness to associate with them. Of the forty choices, Serbo-Croatians, the category that included Slovenes, finished just ahead of Mexicans, Blacks, Filipinos, and Japanese. Those South Slavs seeking inclusion into white America did have a bit of solace. Champions of assimilation attempted to make race mutable. Although most textbooks described race as biologically determined, eastern and southern European immigrants could transcend their genetics by learning English, going to citizenship classes, following the directives of their employers, rejecting radicalism, and convincing native-born whites that the distance between themselves and those groups "below" them was vast.
Adamic and his fellow South Slavs found themselves in between white and black on America's spectrum of racial hierarchy, trapped in between Slovenian and US cultures. This sense of liminality combined with the feeling of dehumanization that accompanied becoming an industrial laborer motivated Adamic to focus both his fiction and journalism on those who faced the pressure to conform without the opportunity to be accepted. Adamic used the exiles he invented, such as Mila Tanasich, to lay bare the myths of US "promises of wealth" and so-called opportunities for newcomers as well as the assurance that if they adhered to Anglo-American middle-class norms they would achieve social acceptance.
Adamic contended that "America broke and mangled the emigrants' bodies, defiled their souls, deprived them of their spiritual and aesthetic sensibilities, corrupted their charming native dialects and manners, and generally alienated them from the homeland." The Austrian monarchy "drove the good Slovenian peasants to America, and America ruined them" as employers and native-born elites continued to treat them as peasants. According to Adamic, this constant suffering had the positive consequence of imbuing some South Slavs with a "peasant wisdom." Adamic used his father as an example of someone who possessed this sensibility and described him as "a hard realist, a practical man, a fatalist, possessing a natural, almost biological good sense and a half-cynical earth knowledge older than any religion or system." Accepting a permanent peasant existence offered a more authentic life because it allowed one to recognize that promises of future economic upward mobility or expanded political rights were chimeras.
Adamic's journey to the United States and his subsequent travels around the country brought him into contact with an array of people whose stories resembled his. Articulating his and their feelings of exploitation and nonbelonging led him to offer a critique of capitalism and express feelings of exile that extended beyond immigrant communities and resonated with the wider native-born working and middle classes. Although native-born whites in particular did not share the sense of liminality that immigrants harbored, they experienced a collective crisis of "being" as the United States industrialized and urbanized at a rapid pace. Recognizing this reality, Adamic promoted empathy between native and foreign-born workers by telling stories about US-born workers losing their Americanness. He did this by borrowing plots from the works of his favorite author, Slovenian modernist poet, essayist, and playwright Ivan Cankar. After gaining some acclaim by questioning the meaning of "American," he turned to writing about South Slavs and received broader recognition as the leading immigrant writer on the immigrant condition. Then, in 1932–33, Adamic added a political dimension to his stories of being and belonging by advocating on behalf of Slovenian culture at a crucial moment in his homeland's history. By questioning employers' right to control workplaces and nativists' influence over defining American identity, Adamic set in motion a cultural shift. His work encouraged immigrants to stop thinking of themselves as exiles and instead fight for a new culture that synthesized their customs with the values of the dominant society to forge a new way of being American and, more important, of being human.
From Slovenia to the United States
On March 23, 1898, Ana and Anton Adamic experienced the arrival of their fourth child, Alojzij (who would become Louis in the United States), at their home in Praproce, roughly fourteen miles southeast of the capital Ljubljana. Louis's father had been born at Spodnje Blato, a village near Praproce, and Louis would usually claim the former as his birthplace to emphasize his peasant origins. Blato is Slovenian for mud. Alojzij was Ana and Anton's eldest living child of their ten surviving children; the first three had died of diphtheria. After completing primary school in Praproce, Alojzij attended secondary school in Ljubljana, and his devoutly Catholic mother expected that he would matriculate into the seminary upon graduation. But after his third year, he may have dropped out of school. He later told his mentor and leading US satirist H. L. Mencken that he ran away from school and became a fourteen-year-old hobo. In his semifictional Laughing in the Jungle (1932), he offered a different narrative. Adamic claimed to have joined a group of anti-imperialist activists hoping to one day overthrow the Austrian monarchy. He made it clear to readers that he became a student activist out of a search for adventure, not a conversion to radicalism. Later in Laughing, he portrayed his decision to go to the United States as stemming from this same yearning for excitement, along with a desire to avoid joining the priesthood. According to a family history, a period of economic distress likely factored into Adamic's decision to migrate. Anton's father Janez had done well enough selling potash that he bought land and, in addition to farming, had a lumber business, making Adamic's family well-off peasants. Anton inherited property at Praproce, which included Janez's manor there. The winter before Adamic left, heavy snows damaged the home's roof and then an earthquake weakened its walls. Expensive repairs, not bad grades, may have prompted Alojzij to quit school and find work in America.
Regardless of his actual reasons for emigrating, Adamic made it to Le Havre, France, in 1913, where he bought a ticket in steerage on the Niagara and headed for Ellis Island. He arrived in New York City in late December as a fourteen-year-old who did not speak English. Adamic was one of the 458,580 Croats and Slovenes (the US government did not differentiate) who arrived at Ellis Island between 1898 and 1915. The 1920 census counted 208,552 people who spoke Slovenian as their first language, up from 183,431 in the 1910 census. Although Slovenes settled in eight hundred urban areas in the United States, they concentrated in and around Cleveland, Chicago, and Pittsburgh. In fact, Cleveland became second to Ljubljana in the number of Slovenians in one city. Also, they made significant impacts on the culture and politics of the factory and mining towns of Colorado, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Minnesota, Montana, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Wyoming. Most men worked in the plants, mills, and mines that formed the burgeoning US industrial landscape, while Slovenian women typically took jobs as waitresses or household servants. More men than women migrated to the United States from Slovenia and Croatia, but exact numbers are hard to find. US officials did not count the number of people leaving the country, and the fact that 47 percent of Slovenian and Croatian migrants journeyed between their homeland, the United States, and back at least once highlighted the problem of acquiring precise data. This pattern of return migration also highlighted the reality that displacement, whether spurred on by economic insecurity or political oppression, fed South Slavs' sense of alienation.
Adamic lived with distant relatives in New York City during his first three years in the country. He took a job as an errand boy for a Slovenian-language newspaper, and by 1916 he had learned English well enough to translate pieces into Slovenian. By seventeen, he had become the assistant editor. Conflicting accounts assert that Adamic was either fired or the paper folded because it did not make a profit. He then took various unskilled jobs, sweeping floors in a Paterson, New Jersey, silk mill being one of them. At night he took English lessons.
Adamic's personal battles with unemployment and possibly his sense of adventure led him to join the army in December 1916. This was the moment when a US army clerk changed his name from Adamic to Adamic because American typewriters had no accent marks. Adamic served two tours. When the United States joined the allies in World War I, federal officials offered immigrant soldiers a fast track to citizenship. He took advantage of this opportunity and became a US citizen in 1917. He spent much of World War I in the Panama Canal Zone rather than Europe, most likely because the US government listed his nationality as Austrian and had a policy of avoiding possible conflicting loyalties in its soldiers. In addition to Panama, the army stationed him in Louisiana, France, and Hawaii. After the war, army officials sent him to Fort MacArthur in the harbor town of San Pedro, California, near Los Angeles, where he continued to live after being discharged in January 1923.
In San Pedro, he started translating pieces by South Slavic authors and taking freelance reporting jobs in hopes of launching a career as a writer. Most notably, he covered a strike by dockworkers affiliated with the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) in San Pedro. Neither translating nor freelance reporting provided him with steady well-paid employment, and so he went to sea as a cabin boy on five merchant ships and then worked as a construction laborer, a printer, a farmworker, and an autoworker. He continued doing translations and started writing his own short stories when he could find the time.
The Los Angeles literary scene appealed to him and he read voraciously and spent a great deal of time at Stanley Rose's bookstore. There Adamic met established and aspiring writers such as Carey McWilliams, future editor of The Nation; Carlos Bulosan, socialist and anticolonialist; and Jim Tully, an originator of the hard-boiled genre of novels that focused on hobos and drug addicts. Hollywood stars such as Charlie Chaplin also frequented Rose's shop, which was rumored to sell bootleg liquor in addition to books. Adamic and McWilliams maintained a close friendship; he and Tully corresponded at least through 1941, and he later joined Chaplin on the boards of many left-wing organizations to raise funds and champion worker, immigrant, and African American rights and oppose fascism.
Needing a steady income, Adamic secured a job as a clerk at the Port of San Pedro in 1925, processing the paperwork of arriving ships. He often had downtime waiting for freighters, and he took those moments to write. Small magazines started publishing his work that year. Between 1927 and 1931, Mencken published eight of Adamic's articles in his American Mercury, the country's most popular magazine. Adamic's career blossomed after that.
Also, Adamic's personal life changed dramatically in 1927. At a party in Los Angeles he met Stella Sanders, the daughter of Austro-Hungarian Jewish immigrants. Stella was a student at Hunter College who had come to Los Angeles from her home in New York City to visit her uncles. Adamic and Sanders, twelve years his junior, remained in contact, sporadically meeting during the next two years. By 1929, he and Stella were in love and Adamic believed that he could make a living as a writer. He moved to New York City that year. Louis and Stella married in June 1931 and lived on and off with Stella's mother Minnie Sanders through the summer of 1937.16 By 1937 he earned enough money to buy a farmhouse in Milford, New Jersey. The couple never had children.
Louis devoted most of his waking hours to his craft, and Stella played an essential role in helping him to succeed. From the late 1920s through at least 1932, Stella heavily edited Louis's work as he fine-tuned his English.
She also accompanied him on his 1932 trip to Yugoslavia, which was funded by a Guggenheim Fellowship. Louis won that award to visit his homeland, after being away for nineteen years. In 1934, he published The Native's Return about some of the experiences he had on this trip. When he and Stella returned from Yugoslavia, Stella helped Louis promote the book by going on the radio with him. Unfortunately, not much exists about Stella's life in Louis's correspondences. Many of Adamic's letters burned the night he died, September 4, 1951. The two grew estranged after World War II and separated.
The Making of a Modernist
As Adamic started to gain a command of English, he continued to read voraciously, spending much of his free time in public libraries. Upton Sinclair's work appealed to him, especially The Jungle. From his experience at various low-wage jobs, Adamic proclaimed that Sinclair had captured the "daily weariness, physical and mental," that one felt after performing the "artless, colorless, [and] toneless" labor that most Americans did for ten to twelve hours per day and "instinctively rebelled" against. But Adamic found Sinclair's protagonist Jurgis Rudkus, who joined the Socialist Party and committed his life to battling capitalist exploitation and nativism, unrealistic because Jurgis eventually found happiness.
Although Adamic's work at moments included romantic and antimodernist accents, he had a greater affinity for the American modernists. Modernists rejected the notion that societies perpetually improved and sought to expose the irrationality of Christianity, capitalism, and the US political system. Adamic specifically noted his attraction to the works of Sinclair Lewis, John Dos Passos, and Theodore Dreiser because they best captured the "dog-eat-dog individualism" of "this machine age" that "terrorized and standardized" the "vainly aspiring masses" and turned their hopes into disenchantment. Adamic appreciated American modernists' attacks on the constellation of Christian fundamentalists, antiunion zealots, nativists, and eugenicists whom he viewed as manipulating the public into equating Anglo-Saxon Protestantism with Americanism and believing that hard work, faith in God, and obeying the law would result in economic security and spiritual fulfillment.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Death to Fascism"
by .
Copyright © 2019 Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois.
Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments, ix,
Introduction, 1,
1 Modernism and Exile: The Origins of Louis Adamic's Politics, 1898–1932, 11,
2 Liberating "Shadow" America: Antifascism, Pluralism, and Democracy, 1932–39, 41,
3 Smrt Fašizmu, Svoboda Narodu! The Life of a Diasporic Leader, 1939–45, 71,
4 "Peace as a World Race Problem": The Anti-imperialist in an Anticommunist World, 1944–48, 105,
5 Anticommunists and Death Narratives, 135,
Epilogue: Antifascism Today, 163,
Notes, 169,
Index, 207,