Born to Slovenian peasants, Louis Adamic commanded crowds, met with FDR and Truman, and built a prolific career as an author and journalist. Behind the scenes, he played a leading role in a coalition ...of black intellectuals and writers, working class militants, ethnic activists, and others that worked for a multiethnic America and against fascism. John Enyeart restores Adamic's life to the narrative of American history. Dogged and energetic, Adamic championed causes that ranged from ethnic and racial equality to worker's rights to anticolonialism. Adamic defied the consensus that equated being American with Anglo-Protestant culture. Instead, he insisted newcomers and their ideas kept the American identity in a state of dynamism that pushed it from strength to strength. In time, Adamic's views put him at odds with an establishment dedicated to cold war aggression and white supremacy. He increasingly fought smear campaigns and the distortion of his views--both of which continued after his probable murder in 1951.
Between May and September 1949, Nevada's ardent anti-communist Democratic senator Patrick A. McCarran chaired a subcommittee created to expose Soviet sympathizers within American ethnic communities. ...They targeted Slovene immigrant and best-selling author Louis Adamic because of his continued support for Yugoslav Communist guerrilla fighter and eventual dictator Josip Broz Tito. Over the previous two decades, Adamic had gained widespread acclaim for arguing that capitalist greed fomented working-class acts of sabotage, challenging Anglo-Saxon hegemony, and detailing the tyranny of the Serbian monarchy in Yugoslavia. By the time of his death in 1951-which his local New Jersey coroner ruled a suicide, but others insist was murder-Adamic had written thirteen books, over five hundred articles, and a number of pamphlets. His works appeared in magazines such as The Nation, New Republic, Harper's, and the The Saturday Evening Post. Academics assigned his books in their classes, Treasury Department officials used his stories on radio programs during World War II to sell war bonds, and presidents Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry S. Truman met with him at the White House to discuss immigrant patriotism and Tito's regime, respectively. Anti-Communists had no desire to put Adamic's work and activism into perspective. Affiliating with Communists, they insisted, made him a subversive.3. Adapted from the source document.
The article analyzes Louis Adamic's early translation phase that included, apart from his translations from Slovenian, also Croatian literature. His translations had a double function: to help him ...improve his English and to promote him as a writer. He randomly chose some Croatian short stories which he partly translated and partly adapted. He also did his best to introduce the authors to the American readers. The stories were published in American magazines but Adamic's repeated effort to publish a book of Yugoslav translations sadly failed. In spite of this, he was an important groundbreaker in the field paving the way for other translators who followed in his wake.
Louis Adamic (1898-1951) was the most successful Slovenian emigre writer. Virtually all his books deal with social and cultural issues of his two homelands, Slovenia and the U.S. This fact alone ...testifies to his pronounced bi-national socio-cultural involvement. Although he wrote in English, the balance between the Slovenian and the American component part of his cultural identity was never shaken. Adamic's insight into the immigration topics of his new homeland was fairly complex as he was able to observe them as an insider and as an outsider. For this reason his concepts and views on various aspects of national, ethnic and cultural identities as well as on intercultural relations (especially those within a multiethnic nation) have been recently rediscovered and found as credible and topical as they were when he published them. Adapted from the source document.
Explores responses to the Americanization program & the melting pot theory that claims new immigrants are best assimilated by divorcing themselves from their native culture & language. The focus is ...on the contributions of four advocates of the cultural pluralist movement: Horace Kallen, Randolph Bourne, Louis Adamic, & Leonard Covello. The origin & evolution of the melting pot theory is traced, noting the important role of the public school system in training immigrant children to become good American citizens. Kallen opposed the melting pot in 1915 by proposing a 'symphony of civilizations' which likened immigrant accomplishments to the rich harmony achieved when different instruments play together. Bourne focused on the dual purposes of Americanization: disempowering cultural minorities & bonding 'Anglo Saxon' workers to the dominant class. Adamic & Covello respectively highlighted America's opportunity to create a great culture by accepting diversity & the use of foreign languages in the schools as a way to enhance student success. The importance of keeping cultural pluralism on the top of the progressive agenda is emphasized. J. Lindroth
The American public was saturated with anti-immigrant rhetoric during the 1920s.1 Anzia Yezierska's novel Bread Givers (1925), written one year after the passing of the Johnson-Reed Immigration Act, ...is often read against this historical backdrop.- The novel's initial critics saw it as politically informed by the desire to prove the assimilability of eastern European Jews. ... it has been read as a critique of American ideals, a preservation of ethnic values, and a testament to the "hybrid identity" of its female protagonist.
PDF
