The American Future (41 page)

Then again, you feel, reading her lovely pages, that none of this matters if she can just go out onto the sidewalk, into the raucous din of Halsted Street with its clatter of tramcars, newsboys, and street vendors, ragtime piano coming from the saloons, and see something that makes her feel all over again this faith in this America of neighborly difference, feel it deep in her Nebraska bones. On Greek Good Friday (for the Greeks are the closest community to the settlement house) she does just this, coming upon a procession of dark yellow candles wending its way down the street, priests and boys chanting the low anthems of the Aegean centuries. If someone came upon such a scene, she writes, they would never suppose they were in the United States of America. But “after a moment's reflection,” as they notice the Irish cops who clear the way for the procession and the lines of Jews and Poles and Lithuanians looking on with a mixture of reverence and curiosity, they realize “that this panorama could only be enacted in an American city.”

All around town unsellable Expeditions and Explorers were lined up in dealers' lots like cattle waiting for the abattoir truck. As the skies lowered over Dearborn, gray and sultry, nervous corporate accountants were trembling over their abacus, which by the end of the spring quarter would post an $8.7
billion
loss. But if this was the beginning of the end of Ford Motor Company, you would never know it at Fair Lane, Henry Ford's prairie-style urban ranch, built in his manorial years just two miles from the farm where he was born. The heavily horizontal Fair Lane is built in rusticated Marblehead limestone and has the baronial dimness that the great captains of industry often required, as if a wash of light might somehow distract even the weekend guest from a properly Calvinist appreciation of the relationship between toil and triumph. Halfway up the oak-paneled stairway are stained-glass windows with Fordian heraldic supporters—dairy cattle and wheat sheaves, reminding the admirer of his humble rustic origin, together
with homilies that repeat in the subterranean den: “He who chops his own wood is twice warmed.”

In so many ways Henry Ford was the opposite of the freebooting, free-market capitalist of classical American economic theory. All his life he was obsessed with the damage that unregulated industrial life was having on an older agrarian America, whose true son he imagined himself to have been (even if there was an equally strong part of him that could not wait to get the smell of cow off his dungarees). It would not be wholly absurd to see him as the last Jeffersonian rather than the personification of Hamiltonian big business, for he prized yeoman self-sufficiency in the worker as much as it had been traditionally cherished in the farmer. It's often forgotten that he built power-driven farm machinery and tractors before the Model T, and he always thought of his cars as liberators of those prairie-dwelling folk who were otherwise imprisoned by slogging labor and immense distance. From beginning to end he was the farmer's friend.

So once Ford had charge of the livelihoods of thousands, he felt the same kind of seigneurial responsibility toward their welfare that Jefferson had felt for his slaves at Monticello. He was perfectly willing to incur the wrath of the
Wall Street Journal
and his fellow captains of industry in 1914 by doubling the wage of the workers on his production lines at Dearborn to an unheard-of five dollars a day. But there were strings attached to the generosity. Ford had been reading social science and understood the net output of his workers to be conditional on their social experience and character, rather than simply a calculus of men, machines, and capital. Hence the need to control that social character. And given that so many thousands of his workers at Dearborn were new immigrants, he introduced the company's “Sociological Department” to take care of, and police, their daily life. Sobriety and conjugal virtue were not merely encouraged but ordered. But the most imperative need of all, if they were to prove themselves true American workers, was English. So a special English School was established for adult education. Attendance was not optional if the workers wanted to keep their jobs. The first phrase those who had come from Hungary or Poland, Syria or Sicily, were taught was “I am an American.”

On the first graduation day of the English School in 1914, at a Dearborn ballpark, a stage had been erected with a painted backdrop representing an Atlantic steamer named—what else?—
E pluribus unum.
In front of it was an enormous wood and pasteboard cookpot with handles like an item from a Brobdingnagian kitchen and FORD ENGLISH SCHOOL painted on it in large white lettering. Down from a gangplank marched the graduating students in the costume of their ethnic origin—Hungarian, Polish, German, Italian—into the “Melting Pot,” emerging in suits and academic gowns, holding American flags as the works band played “My Country 'Tis of Thee.” Samuel Marquis, a former Episcopalian minister and the presiding genius of both the Sociological Department and the English School, had orchestrated the ceremony so that each month of the nine it had taken the students to master English was represented by a minute of their graduation ceremony. In following years both the students and alumni (whose organization was called “the American Club”) participated in Americanization Day festivities held on the Fourth of July, in which thousands marched to City Hall in Detroit, a city where around three-quarters of the white population were foreign-born.

It seems unlikely that Henry Ford would have known that the symbol of the melting pot for the assimilating transformation of prospective citizens had been the invention of Israel Zangwill, a British Jew and thus the member of the one race that Ford believed utterly unassimilable to America; a message hammered relentlessly in his
Dearborn Independent
and in his book
The International Jew: The World's Foremost Problem
, a work the young Hitler found so instructive that he kept a portrait of his hero Ford close by in his study.

Zangwill's four-act play
The Melting Pot
, first performed in 1908, features an array of stereotypes: the moody, sensitive violin teacher, David Quixano (a peculiar choice of name for a Jew from the Pale), the sole survivor of the Kishineff pogrom in which he had seen his family, including a small sister, murdered before his eyes. Playing opposite David the fiddler is the aristocratic settlement worker Vera, also of course from Russia. On a visit to thank him for playing to the settlement children, Vera dreamily discovers his heavily thumbed scores of Mendelssohn and Bach's Chaconne and falls for David hook, line, and sinker, for, as she murmurs, was not King David a harpist? She yearns to hear the great symphonic work on which he is laboring entitled
The Crucible
: “America is God's Crucible,” he explains to the wide-eyed, fine-boned gentile, “where all the races of Europe are melting and re-forming…your fifty languages, your fifty bloody hatreds and
rivalries, your fifty feuds and vendettas, into the Crucible with you all. God is making The American.” But WAIT! A small, dark cloud lurks on the horizon; a Terrible Truth. Vera is herself the daughter of the anti-Semitic Russian baron who had led the pogrom. When he encounters in the evil baron (visiting New York, and why not?) his nemesis, All Seems Lost, even though Vera is a good sort, willing to convert. Months pass, and there is a shy and painful reunion that ends with the two in each other's arms. Behind them, the sun slowly sets on New York Harbor as the ecstatic David exclaims, “Ah Vera, what is the glory of Rome and Jerusalem where all nations and races came to worship and look back compared with the glory of America where all races and nations come to labor and look forward?” Suddenly a shaft of gold illuminates the outstretched arm and torch of the Statue of Liberty as the curtain very slowly falls.

It may not be Crèvecoeur, but there was nothing in Zangwill's
The Melting Pot
to give the baron of Dearborn heartburn, even if it had been written by a ravening Semite. But how would he have felt about the other Semites who gather these days at the American Islamic Center on Ford Road? For the enormous mosque with its three golden domes and two minarets, sandwiched—at a becoming distance—between the Greek Orthodox church and the Lutheran chapel on the same strip, represents the fruit of Horace Kallen's and Grace Abbott's philosophy rather than Ross's and Ford's.

“I'm not hyphenated,” says Chuck (Khalil) Alaman to me, rather adamantly, as we sit inside the mosque before Friday prayers. “I'm an American who happens to have some Lebanese blood, some French Canadian blood, and who is a Muslim.”

Chuck is a retired civil engineer in his seventies, silver-haired with an easy, elegant manner. If Muslims like Chuck have Americans losing sleep, then the country is in more trouble than it would seem, what with one of the major parties nominating someone whose middle name is Hussein. For Chuck, who served in the military during the Korean War, is a deeply passionate patriot who went through a very bad time after 9/11, when to be a patriotic Muslim American was looked on as an impossibility. “That was a bad time, the worst.
Asalaam aleykum
,” he greets an incoming worshipper, following it with “I like to say I'm American as apple pie.”

Or
lahme
, I want to say but don't. Muslims from Lebanon and Syria
have been in Dearborn for more than a century, part of the same emigration out of the relics of the Ottoman Empire. I know about this, given the route map of the Schamas, and am momentarily overcome by a craving for mint tea. People from his part of central Lebanon came to the town, of course, for work in the Ford factories. In his repellent catalog of stereotypes Edward Ross included the Syrians, whom he classified as “strangers to the truth,” shifty, oily Levantines trained in deviously unreliable ingratiation. This could not have been further from the Lebanese who came off their tough shift on the line and made a beeline for Chuck's father's store. There they could inhale and buy the dried savors of home: herb teas of all kinds, pistachios, figs and grapes, many kinds of rice, lentils, sesame, sumac; and notwithstanding those who might have been through Ford's Melting Pot, speak the softly beautiful Arabic of their old home.

Two more migrations happened: one after World War II when the French Mandate ended, Israel was established, and the Palestinians came in multitudes to Lebanon; a second in 1976 during the Lebanese civil war. Through all that time there had only been an informal small mosque and no halal butcher. The Dearborn Lebanese, perhaps about 500 families, bought their meat from kosher butchers, and growing up in that world, Chuck says, “I never felt burdened by either ethnicity or religion. We were known as Mohammedans then, and the kids at school didn't know much about us; we were just kids who played touch football in the park with everyone else. I was, well I am, part of the mosaic.” Chuck is indeed exactly the kind of American Grace Abbott had seen as a hope for the future: one whose faith and culture were a tribute to America's capacity for pluralism rather than a problem.

And then came 9/11 and the Iraq War, and life became a lot more difficult. Chuck remembers being in a store when it happened, staring in disbelief at the terrible images on the television screen and immediately praying silently that it not be Muslims who had done this. In Dearborn, he says, there was almost never a problem. No one turned their back or refused his hand; if anything they were more sympathetic, knowing the strength of his American heart. Outside the city, “Well…,” he says, not wanting to spell anything out but leaving me to guess. On the wall of the vestibule where we're sitting is a code of honor, unexceptionable for the faithful but including a telling warning to them not to pay heed to “outside literature,” meaning, it's quite clear, incendiary
jihadi calls from Muslims who have no share in Dearborn traditions. And off camera Chuck confesses that the most recent immigration—from Iraq especially—has not, for the most obvious reasons, been as smooth as he would like. “They don't speak much English and they don't want the Koran translated. They keep themselves to themselves more than I'd like, I will say that.” When I give Obama a hard time for hastily removing two women in headscarves from the photo op at one of his campaign rallies, Chuck sighs but says he understands. He might have done the same, he says.

But right now Chuck Alaman is an optimist. The mere fact of the Obama candidacy, with roots in Muslim Kenya and Christian Kansas, is a source of marvel to him; a vindication of America, whatever the outcome of the presidential election. “Did you know,” he asks, “that the first Muslim member of Congress, Keith Ellison [also an African American] from
Minnesota
mind, took the oath on Jefferson's Koran?” I confess I didn't even know that Jefferson had a Koran. But Chuck was right. The Virginian had bought the two-volume London translation of George Sale in 1765 and into the Monticello library it went, used, it is sometimes said, for his research in comparative law rather than theology. Though there is no reason why Jefferson should have had any less interest in Mohammed as a moral teacher than Jesus. When the news spread in March 2007 that a Congressman was indeed going to swear his loyalty oath on the Koran, it was no time before a fellow House member, one Virgil Goode, warned that it was the Beginning of the End of America and felt emboldened to add that “we will have millions more Muslims in the United States if we do not adopt strict immigration policies.”

For most everyone else, the uncontroversial moment of Congressman Ellison's swearing-in suggests all that is right about the United States when much is wrong. Best of all, the congressman's mother, Cilida, when asked how much that day meant to her, offered the perfect reply. “I'm a Catholic. I go to Mass
every
day.”