Frances Kellor, Activism, and Me

I just finished writing my newest book, Founding Mother: Frances Kellor and the Quest for Progressive Democracy.  And the end of this book has occasioned some personal philosophical reflecting. You see, Frances Kellor argued that citizenship required political participation.  Personally, she dedicated her life to designing and implementing social reform.  And, I have lived by these precepts too. But my friends just want to have fun.  Is that okay?

In some ways circumstances call me to action.  If your neighbor’s house were on fire, would you not feel compelled to act?  Well, I believe the nation is going up in flames.  Therefore, I am compelled to act.  Kellor’s impoverished upbringing likely led to her making her first two books about defending exploited women.  My sense of emergency and her despair over injustice provide legitimate motives to social action.

Kellor implicitly denigrated domestic life.  She did not overtly say that women should leave their homes.  But she did descry domestic values that focused more on rumors of fidelity than those of tainted milk and immigrant exploitation.  She sought to shake women out of their private worlds via engaging them in basketball.  Women particularly needed to switch from the private to a public orientations to reach their potential and help America reach its.  

Kellor’s private life is partially obscured.  She lived with her girlfriend Mary Dreier for 47 years.  And they took vacations together.  But her private letters rarely mention activism and her activism only implicitly addressed her lesbian romance. Kellor founded the National Urban League and international arbitration, ran the Americanization program, two Presidential campaigns and more. She had no children as she dedicated her life to public service. And for that she deserves our respect.

But people in my life watch T.V. and never mention politics.  And, without engagement I personally feel useless and unimportant.  Perhaps my constant striving for a cause has a touch of insecurity attached to it; I want to matter.  Writing Founding Mother, and so sharing Frances Kellor, gave me a sense of doing something important for the public. With its completion questions about public life and identity come to the fore.

At what point do we, Kellor and I, let people rest and live as private citizens?  Television is passive. But do I consider all who watch it worthless? How much public activism must one mix with their meaningless private consumerism and family raising to be considered a good citizen? 

John Kenneth Press, Ph.D. is the author of Founding Mother: Frances Kellor and the Quest for Participatory Democracy.  www.franceskellor.com has more information.

Frances Kellor, Universalism, Particularism, and Culturism

Where do our historic Americanization movement and culturism fall within the spectrum of particularism and universalism? The answers are not so obvious and nearly counter-intuitive. Particularism says that cultural groups, such as the Jews, should focus on what makes them unique. Universalism holds that groups should find that which is common to all humanity within their cultures and basse their identity on those features. Clarifying this distinction is crucial in understanding our personal and national identities as well as our national policy.

Frances Kellor lead much of the Americanization movement which greeted the first wave of heavily contested immigration from 1906 to 1921. You could say that she advocated what might be termed a “multicultural nationalism.” During WW I, on the 4th of July, under the banner of ‘Americanization Day,’ she held loyalty parades. On that date, annually, hundreds of thousands of immigrants, in over 160 cities, marched in their native costumes to demonstrate their community’s loyalty to the United States and the allies. Thus, initially, one might see Kellor as the precursor to particularism.

Culturism defines itself as the opposite of multiculturalism. More specifically, culturism holds that majority cultures within a nation have the right to define, protect, and guide themselves. Most nations are culturist. Saudi Arabia guides itself on its principles according to its traditions and history; China does the same. Domestically, culturism parts with multiculturalism in saying that the West too has a particular culture and a right to protect, promote, and guide itself within its borders. Since this philosophy has a precept which gives the same right of sovereignty to all nations, people could nearly mistake it for a form of universalism.

The difference between Kellor’s vision of Americanization and culturism comes in the form of boundaries. Kellor, in fact, was pulling a trick. Her main technique of Americanization implemented John Dewey’s idea of melding citizens via democratic participation in reform efforts. Thus her curriculum called for community activism. And, if one read the details, nearly none of her Americanization curriculum concerned American history or the celebration of ethnic cultures. Kellor did not mind if you held on to your ethnic heritage. In point of fact, she did not care at all. Kellor, like Dewey, self-consciously sought to guide folks into the modern industrial age. She actually had a faith that all such differences would ultimately become insignificant.

Culturism, as the name denotes, takes culture seriously. The book, Culturism: A Word, A Value, Our Future, devotes two solid chapters to history. Its belief that the West has a core culture to protect, ties it to Europe. In an ultimate act of particularism, culturism holds that democracy, freedom of speech, the separation of church and state, and other such values are not universal, they are western. China’s government censors the internet as it sees fit, culturists do not assume that this nation’s ultimate desire is for democracy; this is a western political virtue. Culturism does not hold that Islam’s goals tend towards freedom of religion; this, again, is a western value. Thus culturism holds that international cultural particularism is not only important, but real.

Kellor’s Americanization ignored culture. In this it aligns with today’s multiculturalism. It considered culture ephemeral and reduced it trivia such as food, festivals, and fashion. Culturism, on the other hand, considers culture very significant. Culturists believe that cultural values can greatly influence economic and educational achievement, as well as the fate of nations. And so while Kellor’s Americanization movement would make no cultural distinctions in terms of immigration laws or which culture would be taught in schools, culturism would base its policies on the promotion of our particular western culture.

As schools of all nations, culturism holds that our schools must teach our heritage. Again, multiculturalism holds that we have no western core heritage. Our land is just a neutral space where various ephemerally distinct cultural groups play out universal values. Multicultural policy holds that if we emphasize our apparent-but-insignificant cultural diversity, we will arrive at universal agreement. Culturism, in taking values seriously, would expect cultures within our shores, if left to themselves and not taught the western historical narrative, may naturally turn anti-western. Thus culturism, possibly counter-intuitively, holds to particularism, and Kellor’s form of multiculturalism rests on the philosophy of universalism.

www.culturism.us

Culturist John's Dissertation is Done !!!

This week I finished my dissertation. The two weeks before or two days after that I could not write a post; my streak of years of weekly posts broken. But it was for good occasion as I just climaxed getting my dissertation done in three years - record time. Over the last three years I have been under constant pressure to write. I have written 5 books, including the dissertation, in 7 years. This is the first time I have been without a text pressure in a long time.

I would feel remiss were I not to tell you something of the content of my dissertation. My dissertation covers Frances Kellor's thoughts and actions as she led the national Americanization movement that greeted immigrants from 1898 to 1921. The literature portrays this movement as a coercive attempt by American society to enforce conformity on immigrants. There is truth to that. But Kellor was a deep activist. She coached and wrote about basketball, created networks of domestic workers, founded the National Urban League from a coalition, had everyone in the streets publicly when she made the 4th of July Americanization Day, tried numerous times to make all American residents super progressive activists, ran the Federal Bureau of Immigrant Education, ran two Presidential campaigns, united much of the world in arbitration, reluctantly led the fight for suffrage, and started Industrial, Educational, Political, and Neighborhood Americanization programs in order to increase democracy.

The night of my dissertation I went and got trashed with Sarah. The day after turning in my dissertation I taught a college course on Culturism and World Civilization. We spoke of how every major civilization has a story. Without Socrates and Jesus we'd have no western civilization. Without Muhammad no Islam. Without Confucius Asia would not have its current form. I told them the story of how the Romans wrote themselves, retroactively, into Homer's ballad, the Iliad. It is the same with Muslims writing them into Abraham's story as the son intended for inheritance. Civilizations need stories and these can't be made anew. You must look back. Incisively a student noted that it is hard to tell if these things even happened. And, I pointed out that this is especially dangerous for the West. Universal scientific rationalism peels away our dedication to our particular civilization. Islam defies the rationalism and China has a high context race-based cultural source of unity in a scientific age. But we only have individualism holding us together on the bonds wear thin. Culturism is needed.

That night I spoke late with Mary. She is an American studies student and a very old friend of the family. She is now in the American studies department. We spoke forever. Among the topics, my having dedicated my dissertation to my professor Lynn Gordon. She taught a course called "What are teachers for?" This course taught me about women's history and community and ways of presenting heroines. I enthused to Mary about how school has given me so much perspective generally. I can do Kellor's Americanization as labor history, or consumer history, or sexuality history, or gender history, or progressive history or education history. My mind has been expanded by three year doctoral crash course. Mary and I battled through the night about how much of ideology is foisted or malleable, and how ideology is connected to or grows out real realities. And, my schooling had made me about to recognize most of the theorists Mary knew. FUN !

I spent this morning and afternoon, Oct. 2nd, 2009, a day and a half after turning in the dissertation, taking Real Estate licensing and investment classes. I am headfirst into a new endeavor that will teach me something completely different. It may reform me as a person. What I cannot figure out is my new relationship to text. As I have said, I spent all of the last 7 or 8 years working feverishly, 7 days a week, long hours, writing my books. Now I needn't read my books. I have no full time class for which to research. Being possibly free of text creates nausea for me and makes me confront the world outside of text. But this is okay as my world civilization course is making me think things will run their course, in the long haul of history, regardless of my ideology. Still I write! I write you this note from across the divide, after the dissertation.

www.culturism.us