Beyond the Nation: Pushing the Boundaries of U.S. History from a Transatlantic Perspective

nova americana in english Beyond the Nation: Pushing the Boundaries of U.S. History from a Transatlantic Perspective edited by F. Fasce, M. Vaudagna, and R. Baritono Susanna Delfino, Helen Laville, Raffaella Baritono, Susanna Garroni, Elisabetta Vezzosi, Ferdinando Fasce, Paul Schor, Simone Cinotto, Maurizio Ricciardi, Matteo Battistini, Marco Mariano, Axel Schäfer, MaurizioVaudagna nova americana in english Beyond the Nation: Pushing the Boundaries of U.S. History from a Transatlantic Perspective edited by Ferdinando Fasce, Maurizio Vaudagna, and Raffaella Baritono Beyond the Nation: Pushing the Boundaries of U.S. History from a Transatlantic Perspective edited by Ferdinando Fasce, Maurizio Vaudagna, and Raffaella Baritono Collana Nova Americana in English Comitato scientifico: Marco Bellingeri, Marcello Carmagnani, Maurizio Vaudagna Translator: Michelle Tarnopolsky This book has been published with the support of the Department of Political and Social Sciences at the University of Bologna with funds provided by the PRIN 2008 national research network. Prima edizione maggio 2013 ©2013, OTTO editore – Torino [email protected] http://www.otto.to.it ISBN 978-88-95285-43-6 È vietata la riproduzione, anche parziale, con qualsiasi mezzo effettuato, compresa la fotocopia, anche ad uso interno o didattico, non autorizzato. Table of Contents Foreword 1 Ferdinando Fasce, Maurizio Vaudagna, and Raffaella Baritono Introduction 3 Susanna Delfino Placing the U.S. South in the History of Economic Modernization: From the National to the Transnational Approach and Beyond 21 Helen Laville Internationalism, Transnationalism and Organizational Identity in Women’s International Associations (1945-1975) 45 Raffaella Baritono “We Must Have Eagle Eyes:” Eleanor Roosevelt, the United Nations, and the World Trips of the 1950s 61 Maria Susanna Garroni Peace, Reform, and Democracy: U.S. Wilpfers, Transnational Dialogue, and the Birth of a Gendered Political Discourse 91 Elisabetta Vezzosi Mary McLeod Bethune at the United Nations Founding Conference: Women’s Leadership and the Building of a Black Global Community 117 Ferdinando Fasce Democracy of Color on the Airwaves: America’s Town Meeting of the Air and the Cultural Diplomacy of Race in the Early Cold War 141 i Table of Contents Paul Schor Public Statistics and the Construction of Racial Categories: The Persistence of National Norms in an International Context (1860-1940) 163 Simone Cinotto Consuming the European Other: Italian Cookbook Writers, the End of Labor, and the Transnational Formation of Taste in Postindustrial America, 1973-2000 181 Maurizio Ricciardi The Stalemate of Sovereignty: Talcott Parsons and the Eve of a Global Social System 205 Matteo Battistini Harold Lasswell, the “Problem of World Order,” and the Historic Mission of the American Middle Class 225 Marco Mariano America as a Transatlantic Nation: Henry Luce, Life, and the West in the 1940s 255 Axel Schäfer Transnationalism and Its Dilemmas: An Analysis of Immigration and Social Policy in the U.S. from World War I to the New Deal 273 Maurizio Vaudagna The United States and Social Rights at Home and Abroad: The Rise and Decline of “Freedom from Want” (1941-1952) 295 Contributors 323 ii Foreword Since 2009 a network of scholars from the Universities of Genoa, Bologna, and Eastern Piedmont have been working on an Italian research project called “Nation and Transnationality in U.S. History: A Transatlantic Perspective.” This volume presents the results of their work. Additional essays resulting from presentations given at the network’s final conference in Genoa in May 2012 by European Americanist scholars from Britain, France, and Italy have been added to those written by network members. The editors are especially grateful to Susanna Delfino, Helen Laville, Axel Schäfer, and Paul Schor for participating in our publication. This book also represents the fruits of a partnership of Italian Americanist historians who have been working together for over twenty-five years. Their joint undertakings were institutionalized in the early 1990s with the founding of the Interuniversity Center for European-American History and Politics (CISPEA), which includes historians special- izing in the United States from the Universities of Bologna, Eastern Piedmont, Florence, Rome Three, and Trieste as well as individual members from other Italian universities. The editors are especially grateful to Michelle Tarnopolsky who for many years has insightfully and carefully translated and revised essays on American history for this book series and has made important suggestions that have contributed to the publication of the present book. We are equally grateful to the officials of the departments within which the research and publication has taken place, especially Laura Ansaldi of the Department of Human Studies at the University of Eastern Piedmont for her patient and construc- tive cooperation. This book is dedicated to the memory of Raimondo Luraghi, a pioneer of American historiography in Italy, Europe, and the international scene who recently passed away after teaching for many years at the University of Genoa. 1 Introduction Ferdinando Fasce, Maurizio Vaudagna, and Raffaella Baritono The purpose of this collection is twofold: a. To stress the importance of location in the writing of American history and in particular to show how a non-U.S.-based scholarly project may significantly contribute to the practice of international/transnational U.S. history. b. To show how Italian Americanist historians have interpreted the transnational approach in light of their own experience in the field from the late 1970s onwards. The following pages represent an attempt to briefly illustrate this twofold purpose. The Transnational Turn in American History Writing Since the 1980s American and transatlantic history writing has undergone intense innovation in terms of methods and interpretation. The trend towards cultural global- ism, which tends to attenuate the national nature of socio-cultural traits, has made the Americanist profession keenly aware of the need to reformulate the history of the United States in a transnational vein by focusing on “movements and interactions among people, goods, and ideas across national boundaries, as well as non-national entities (e.g., races and religions).”1 The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 prompted historians on both sides of the Atlantic to begin trying to cast off the straitjacket of the Cold War. Indeed, the growth of global U.S. history studies has been facilitated by the disintegration of such bipolar dichotomies as East and West or capitalism and communism, while the Atlantic connection has stopped being the centerpiece of a “western” vision of the world. Scholars like Thomas Bender and Ian R. Tyrrell2 have pioneered “rethinking American history in a global age” and have stressed that such a perspective rejects traditional models of American 1. Akira Iriye, “Toward Transnationalism,” in The Short American Century. A Postmortem, ed. Andrew Bacevich (Cambridge, MA, 2012), 123. 2. Thomas Bender, A Nation Among Nations. America’s Place in World History (New York, 2006); Ian R.Tyrrell, Transnational Nation: United States History in Global Perspective Since 1789 (London, 2007). 3 Beyond the Nation separatism and exceptionalism and instead highlights how the American identity has evolved through a dynamic set of reciprocal interactions with traditions situated “beyond the nation.” Both the major U.S.-based associations of American history and their journals have launched initiatives aimed at “internationalizing American history.” Multiple fields of historical studies are concentrating on the globalist turn as a particularly fitting way to refresh their approach. In gender studies, for example, transnationalism stands out as a category that has succeeded more than others in grasping the peculiarity of women’s political activism inside and outside national borders.3 In particular, transnationalism can be considered a sort of bridge between historical scholarship and theoretical feminist thought, which too often have followed different paths. Another field that has contributed in decisive ways to the “transnational turn”4 is African American history and the history of the U.S. civil rights movement. Placed against the backdrop of the black diaspora, this history has become more inclusive and nuanced, incorporating ideas and people long forgotten due to either political discrimination or an incompatibility with traditional, strictly nation-state-based historical narratives. In the process, barriers between disciplines have been torn down, thus allowing for fruitful conversations between such different fields as social, political, and diplomatic history. Hence the recent blooming of a rich body of works on the multifarious and ambivalent relationships between the civil rights movement and the Cold War, for example.5 It is no mere coincidence that it was left to the first African American president in the history of the country, Barack Obama, to stress the global roots of the American nation and the multiple identities to be found in the present-day United States in his now famous Cairo University address of 2009. As a consequence, the “American people” are no longer the “common man” of New Deal democracy, the vast, white middle- and lower-middle classes once considered the backbone of American democracy. Instead, they are now part of a diverse multicultural variety of groups, ethnicities, races, genders, behavioral prefer-

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