"We Have No Master Race"

Racial Liberalism and Political Whiteness

In January 1944, Los Angeles mayor Fletcher Bowron announced the formation of the Los Angeles Committee for Home Front Unity to bring together leading political, civic, business, religious, and labor leaders. The committee would ensure that divisions pitting "creed against creed, race against race, color against color" did not undermine the wartime effort. "Unlike our enemy," Bowron explained, "we have no master race."

Bowron's pronouncement echoed the calls of dozens of other civic unity, "human relations," and "fair play" organizations across the state and around the country during this period; Los Angeles alone was home to twelve such organizations or coalitions by 1944. These groups drew from the broad antifascist, prodemocratic discourse ascendant during the war to advance what the Swedish economist Gunnar Myrdal referred to as "the American Creed": a nationally bound civic culture that conferred individual rights and privileges without regard to religion, race, ethnicity, or national origin. Myrdal's landmark 1944 study on race relations, An American Dilemma, emphasized that racial discrimination was a problem "residing in the heart," one that contradicted fundamental American principles of equality, fairness, and social mobility. Myrdal, like many of his contemporaries, advocated a widespread "educational offensive against racial intolerance" to address this lag or contradiction, arguing that "a great majority of white people in America would be prepared to give the Negro a substantially better deal if they knew the facts."

These groups elaborated the basic ideas, commitments, and political strategies of a discursive framework we recognize today as postwar "racial liberalism." Like all political discourses, racial liberalism is best understood as variegated and contested rather than coherent and unified. Across U.S. history, liberalism has often connoted a set of shared political principles and commitments—individual rights, a reliance on private property and free markets, equal treatment before the law, and a representative and limited government—that shape a particular gaze on politics, an "attitude of mind rather than a political creed."

Liberalism has furnished a political vocabulary for a range of projects and purposes, with disparate political actors utilizing its key signifiers (rights, freedom, opportunity, progress, etc.) for distinct and sometimes conflicting goals. But organizations and individuals that embraced racial liberalism in the immediate postwar era generally shared the belief that racism and racial subjugation were fundamentally incompatible with the emancipatory tenets of the American Creed, and they supported various types of government intervention to ensure that "private" prejudices did not encumber the public good. For these groups, racial liberalism both described an idealized state of social and political relations—equal treatment under the law without regard to race—as well as a strategy for achieving that change. Progress toward racial equality would be realized when atavistic ethnocentric impulses steadily gave way to a more tolerant and inclusionary Americanism—a neutral and indeed universal form of political judgment that was inherently indifferent to social location, position, or perspective. As the organizational motto of one group based in Los Angeles had it, "If you have racial or religious hatred in your mind you cannot have true Americanism in your heart."

In California, as the war was in its last throes, the rising influence of this discourse was unmistakable. For example, a Fourth of July celebration in 1945 at the Hollywood Bowl, Los Angeles's famed outdoor amphitheater, attracted fifteen thousand people to observe "Interdependence Day ... a CELEBRATION to Promote Racial Friendliness in America." Mayor Bowron introduced the keynote speaker, Supreme Court Justice Frank Murphy, who told the crowd to be vigilant against "all manifestations of the Nazi disease we may find among our own people." His speech, titled "All Men Are Brothers," urged a "spiritual battle" against "those in our midst who have been nurtured on the myths of the superior and inferior races and who practice discrimination against other Americans because of the color of their skin or some other arbitrary racial sign." Murphy warned of the "exaltation of any race, or nationality as superior to all others." Joining Murphy on the stage were a group of leading civic figures from the region, including Los Angeles archbishop John Cantwell, Rabbi Edgar Magnin, Supervisor John Anson Ford, and James Thimmes of the Congress of Industrial Organizations.

Had Myrdal located his study in California rather than the South, he would have found widespread violations of the American Creed at the time of the Interdependence Day celebration. Just a few dozen miles from the Hollywood Bowl, for example, school districts in Orange County still formally segregated Mexican American and Anglo students. Jim Crow regimes of segregation in public spaces could be observed in public swimming pools, railroad coaches, restaurants, and hotels. Large sections of residential housing in Los Angeles and many other cities in California were covered by racially restrictive housing covenants and occupancy clauses, which typically restricted ownership and residence of a property to "members of the Caucasian race," with the exception of live-in domestic servants. At the war's end, the state still had laws in place prohibiting interracial marriage and banning landownership by many Japanese Americans. Some local chapters of the American Legion, Elks Club, and Cub Scouts—and even public schools—continued to sponsor minstrel shows as fundraisers. And until 1941, the Los Angeles Times featured a weekly column titled "Social Eugenics," written by a prominent member of the American Eugenics Society who advocated for the widespread use of sterilization for "racial betterment." As historian Alexandra Stern explains, "California stood at the vanguard of the national Eugenics movement" led by an "influential sector of elite Californians that embraced Eugenics as the best...