1930s multiculturalism: Rachel Davis DuBois and the Bureau for Intercultural Education

Radical Teacher, Spring, 2004 by Shafali Lal

The Service Bureau began with a national committee of twenty-two members including James Weldon Johnson, Leonard Covello, Mabel Carney, and Crystal Bird Fausett, and an executive committee of five, headed by Heber Harper of Teachers College. In 1938, progressive educator William Heard Kilpatrick assumed the chairmanship. During the first five years of the Bureau's existence, the American Jewish Committee, the Works Progress Administration, and the Progressive Education Association provided funding. In 1938, with the U.S. Office of Education, DuBois developed the highly successful radio program, "Americans All, Immigrants All." This 26 episode radio series included some written by CBS cultural critic Gilbert Seldes, on such topics as "Negroes in America" and "Slavic Contributions to American Life." With tremendous energy and optimism, Rachel DuBois offered a vision for tackling the social changes engendered by the waves of Irish, Italian, Jewish migration to the eastern coast of the U. S. and African-American migration to the north. Coining the term "cultural democracy," DuBois agitated against both Israel Zangwill's idea of an American "melting-pot" (the title of his popular 1908 play) and Horace Kallen's and Randolph Bourne's conceptions of cultural pluralism. To her mind, only cultural democracy could heal the divisions between native born and immigrant Americans. As she asserted in her manifesto on intercultural education, Get Together Americans.

   [The] willingness--and ability--objectively
   to survey what
   all cultures may have to contribute
   to a growing world
   civilization is the essence
   of cultural democracy. It
   does not rest on the
   assumption that all culture
   traits are of equal value
   and have an equal right to
   survive; and it does not
   have for its aim a merging
   of them all in a uniform
   national or world culture.
   But, recognizing the
   advantage of the state of
   flux in which practically
   all cultures find themselves,
   and further recognizing
   the need for experimental
   adaptations, it is
   predisposed to treat with
   respect all those values
   that are cherished anywhere
   by any group.

For DuBois, cultural democracy preceded both a civic democracy and economic democracy. Foreshadowing Gunner Myrdal's later celebration of the American creed, DuBois argued that democracy in American life or in any "dynamic society" was neither fully present nor wholly absent; rather a potentially explosive disjuncture reductively termed prejudice existed between theory and practice.

While DuBois feared social tensions and physical violence at home, other Bureau officials, like countless others in the 1930s, feared fascism abroad and its potential importation. Bureau board member Eduard Lindeman, for example, cautioned against following the example of Germany's ultimately illusory melting pot. DuBois quoted his claim that Jews there "were vulnerable precisely because they had become absorbed in a fictitious whole." To guard against home grown intolerance, Americans needed to appreciate the culturally enriching traits inherent in America's past and present immigrants. This tenet became the core of the Service Bureau's evolving orthodoxy.