This Land Was Made for You and Me

Nov. 1, 2024

One hundred years ago, the K of C Historical Commission honored marginalized racial, civic and religious contributions in American history

By Maureen Walther

Nov. 1, 2024

A group of Jewish children orphaned as a result of World War I pose with U.S. flags after arriving to New York City in 1921. That same year, the Knights of Columbus established its Historical Commission to counter prejudice that was based on a false or one-sided telling of American history. (Library of Congress)

Meta Warrick Fuller had an eye for capturing history. A preeminent African American artist of her day, she moved viewers with her expressive sculptures. Her works included dioramas celebrating African American heritage, for which she became the first Black woman to receive a U.S. federal art commission.

But on May 2, 1922, Fuller mulled a different tribute to Black Americans: a book for the Knights of Columbus Historical Commission. The chairman of the commission, Edward McSweeney, was a friend from across town in Framingham, Massachusetts, and had recently discussed with her a new project called the “Racial Contribution Series.”

Fuller took up her pen and dashed off a letter to another friend, the distinguished W.E.B. Du Bois, co-founder of the NAACP and the first Black person to earn a doctorate from Harvard University.

“If you are interested in the writing of a history of the contribution of the Negro to America,” she wrote, “will you please communicate with Hon Edward F McSweeney… chairman of the historical committee of the Knights of Columbus.”

Du Bois snapped at the opportunity to write for the K of C Historical Commission and shot off a letter to McSweeney the next day. Du Bois’ resulting book, The Gift of Black Folk: The Negroes in the Making of America, published in 1924, details the numerous ways that African Americans have contributed to the U.S. history and identity.

Two more titles were released that year and accomplished similar goals for other groups facing discrimination. The Jews in the Making of America, by George Cohen, flew in the face of then-rampant anti-Semitism, while The Germans in the Making of America, by Frederick Franklin Shrader, disputed anti-German prejudices unleashed in the wake of World War I.

The goal of the Racial Contribution Series, McSweeney wrote, was to “give the people of the United States the most direct and unqualified answer to the wave of racial and religious ostracism which, since the war, has been sweeping over the United States.”

Although no further volumes of the series were ultimately published, this countercultural triptych and other publications of the Historical Commission were representative of the Knights’ bold efforts to combat nativist groups such as the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s and ’30s. In pursuit of a true patriotism, the Knights of Columbus sought to build greater solidarity among Americans — a solidarity that embraced, rather than suppressed, the country’s growing racial, ethnic and religious diversity. A century later, the Order’s dedication to religious and civic freedom remains central to its principle of patriotism and its service to God and country.

‘THE IDEAL OF LIBERTY’

“Edgy” doesn’t begin to describe the boldness of launching the Historical Commission and publishing the Racial Contribution Series in the 1920s. Beneath the glitziness of the “Roaring Twenties,” many Americans continued to sip and serve from a menu of unsavory prejudices.

Record numbers of people had immigrated to the U.S. in the decade before World War I, particularly from southern and eastern Europe. As America emerged from the war, the question of who was an American surfaced — and resurgent nativism eagerly weighed in.

Federal immigration quotas cropped up to pursue a Protestant, English-descendant majority or demographic of power. Top universities and medical schools, including Harvard, adopted admission caps for Jewish Americans. Responding to anti-German sentiment, the governor of Iowa issued the “Babel Proclamation” in 1918, a travesty against the First Amendment that mandated only English could be spoken in every school, public conversation and religious service.

Edward McSweeney, chairman of the Knights of Columbus Historical Commission from 1921 to 1925. — Edward McSweeney (left), chairman of the Knights of Columbus Historical Commission from 1921 to 1925. (Public domain, Square One Publishers)

Black Americans had high hopes that their service in World War I would loosen bigotry’s chokehold on American society. But the “Red Summer” of 1919, marked by race riots in dozens of cities and towns, set the tone for the following decade, which saw the resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan.

Not even children’s history textbooks were exempt from propaganda based on the “Anglo-Saxon myth,” which both downplayed the merits of the nation’s founding and disparaged racial and religious minorities.

The Knights of Columbus was unwilling to sit out the challenge. At the 1921 Supreme Convention in San Francisco, the Order responded by establishing a commission, under the aegis of the Fourth Degree, that was dedicated to combating the rewriting of American history.

Announced by Supreme Master John Reddin and driven by an A-list cast of experts, the Knights of Columbus Historical Commission would strive “to investigate the facts of history as applicable to our country, to correct historical errors and omissions, to mollify and preserve our national history, to exalt and perpetuate American ideals, and to combat and counteract anti-American propaganda,” McSweeney explained. “The guiding principle in the historical program has been the ideal of liberty in government and religion.”

The Historical Commission became one of the most important initiatives ever introduced by the Fourth Degree, which proudly considered the issue within its patriotic purview. Whereas the Order’s Commission on Religious Prejudices took on anti-Catholic bigotry in the presses and the courts, the Historical Commission focused on discriminated groups more broadly.

W.E.B. Du Bois was commissioned by the Historical Commission to write *The Gift of Black Folk*, one of the volumes in the Racial Contribution Series, published by the Order in 1924. (Library of Congress)

It helped that the Order’s man on the job, McSweeney, knew firsthand of the actual diversity of the United States, having served as U.S. commissioner of immigration at Ellis Island, from 1893 to 1902. Fiery and vocal, he was not a man who shrank from a challenge.

The commission began by launching independent investigations of history textbooks used in the public schools and colleges. Supreme Master Reddin reported that “Investigators … expressed amazement at the error, concealment and falsification of historic facts appearing therein.”

The Knights’ exposé led to changes. “When the people at large awoke to the fact that their children in the schools were being taught a false history of their nation, their protest made itself felt, and the publishing houses responsible for these histories began to act to save themselves,” McSweeney said.

A second initiative, aimed at higher education, solicited and awarded stellar scholarly research related to America’s history and politics, which the commission then shared in free publications, books and addresses. The quality spoke for itself: Among its awardees was Samuel Flagg Bemis, who later went on to receive a Pulitzer Prize.

But something more was needed. As McSweeney vented to Supreme Knight James Flaherty: “The K.K.K. has created a monster composed of idolatry, superstition, and cruelty, hideous enough to frighten the ignorant and timid.”

Ignorance, the Order knew, could be countered, and the timid could be emboldened if others took a lead.

FLIPPING THE SCRIPT

After two years of behind-the-scenes drafting, research, editing and revising, the Historical Commission was ready to launch its final project: the Racial Contribution Series. The series blazed a trail, not only in what stories it told, but in how and by whom they were told.

“This series is unlike any heretofore published,” McSweeney noted, “since it gives the actual history of racial contributions to the making of the United States, not from the isolated viewpoint of a single race, concerning other races, but from the viewpoint of each race concerning itself.”

The commission originally planned more than half a dozen monographs to highlight the role of different immigrant groups, including the Irish, Dutch and Scandinavians. Ultimately, only three were published, all in 1924, shortly before the Historical Commission concluded its work. But those books packed a punch, distilling the Commission’s concerns by concentrating on three groups targeted for discrimination.

The K of C Historical Commission published three volumes in its Racial Contribution Series, detailing the contributions of African Americans, Jews and Germans in American history. (Knights of Columbus Multimedia Archives)

The Gift of Black Folk by Du Bois proved particularly significant. By detailing the numerous ways African Americans have aided and shaped the making of the nation, the book debunked the idea that America’s character, greatness and future grew solely from English culture, religion and offspring.

“America is conglomerate,” Du Bois reasoned in his book. “This is at once her problem and her glory — perhaps indeed her sole and greatest reason for being.”

Covering everything from the arts to the art of war, from psychology to spirituality, Du Bois’ groundbreaking volume in many ways became a model for both Black history and for the telling of American history. The other books in the series, though written by different authors, followed in the same vein, serving both as myth-busters and antidotes.

William H. Skaggs, former mayor of Talladega, Alabama, wrote to Du Bois about the book: “It is the most comprehensive and forcible volume you have written, and I may add that, I believe, it is the most valuable work you have produced. It is an important contribution to our political

A Holy Names sister instructs students at St. Mary’s Academy & College in Portland, Ore., circa 1915.

This Land Was Made for You and Me

‘THE IDEAL OF LIBERTY’

FLIPPING THE SCRIPT

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