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This chapter suggests several possible principles for reform that could guide attempts to bring law and practice closer together in a way that accepts at least some racial realism but is also in line with American values. Racial realism has after all become deeply embedded in American society, penetrating not only national discourse but also workplace practices. Ultimately, the chapter sets out, not to banish the specter of racial thinking from the workplace, but to emphasize efforts to keep jobs open to all, encouraging employers and the government to have awareness of and take responsibility for the negative impacts of racial-realist management strategies, and efforts to shape the regulatory incentive structure so as to encourage movement toward these goals.

This chapter examines Cecil B. DeMille's 1956 biblical epic film The Ten Commandments. The analysis of the film and its reception draws on insights from cinema studies, particular in relation to the history and status of the motion picture industry in mid‐twentieth‐century America. The Hollywood epic has typically been characterized as superficial and banal by biblical scholars and film critics alike, but this study argues for the rehabilitation of DeMille's Moses as a complex example of innovative biblical interpretation, shaped by DeMille's desire to champion American values in the context of Cold War rivalry with the Soviet Union.

This chapter examines the use of sport as social and political force to help facilitate the assimilation of Jewish immigrants and preserve the purity of an already endangered American stock. Social reformers and entrepreneurs used sport to transform and prepare immigrants and their children for full participation in a new modern age and to serve as a cultivator of American values and as a safety valve for the frustration and discontent of those packed into the more settled regions of the nation.

This concluding chapter argues that the civil servants described here saw themselves as defenders, not betrayers, of fundamental American values such as egalitarianism and democracy. Not only does acknowledging their presence in the Roosevelt and Truman administrations yield a more accurate history, but a broader understanding of how the right misrepresented and curtailed their influence may contribute to a more informed political discourse. Indeed, correcting the historical record seems especially important now, in the early twenty-first century, when conservatives have returned to arguing that goals such as a more equitable distribution of wealth are alien to the American tradition and to demonizing any deviation from free-market economic policy as socialistic.

This chapter presents some concluding thoughts from the author. It argues that nature continues to serve as a foundation for American political values, with natural science acting as guide. Key to its modern appeal is an understanding of science as an objective form of knowledge located within the authoritative natural world. The challenge for scientists and citizens alike is to recognize how much of our search for answers in the physical environment is not based on the ability of science to reveal what nature intended but is, rather, a necessary product of human relations in a social environment.

The appropriation of Dante by Cordelia Ray, a late nineteenth-century African American author whose thinking about race, civic activism, and freedom was refracted through her reading of the medieval poet, provides an interesting example of how the creative encounter with an earlier author can affect one's sense of identity — national and otherwise. Ray used the medieval poet to shed light on her understanding of American values, in particular on how the United States, which had fallen short of its promise of equality for all citizens before the law, was struggling to correct that injustice in her lifetime. When she published her poem ‘Dante’ in 1885 and when she emended it sometime before its republication in 1910, it was becoming clear that legal recourse might be the most salutary way to overcome the racial divide in the aftermath of the Civil War and Reconstruction. Her interpretation of Dante, the poet and the man, reflects this understanding.

This chapter discusses the efforts of the U.S. agencies to modernize and Westernize South Vietnam and imprint American values and culture on the Vietnamese people. At the same time, the Eisenhower administration had replaced the French colonial presence in South Vietnam with an American neocolonial one. It is noted that the Americans mostly stepped into places the French had vacated as they attempted to build South Vietnam on an American rather than a French model.

This chapter focuses on intermarriage patterns between Italian Americans and Jewish Americans, two groups exhibiting similar patterns. In the United States, intermarriage occurs between members of the dominant group and the minority group; or, there may be intermarriage between members of different minority groups. Most of the non-Italian spouses were either of Irish or German ancestry. In all likelihood Irish Americans supply the largest number of spouses. The report stated that over one-half of recent marriages that involved Jewish Americans were intermarriages. This rate of intermarriage is dramatic given the historical experiences of Jews. Intermarriages were banned and if such marriages occurred they often were treated as crimes. Intermarriage may be seen as a measure of acceptance, integration, and assimilation. For Italian-American parents and for Jewish-American parents as well, a strong resistance to intermarriage between their respective children may be seen as a rejection of American values and ideals.

This chapter discusses Hadassah's American foundations. American zionist ideology had much in common with core American values and the American ethos. Hadassah's ideology is no exception to this rule, echoing American national ideals and characteristics fundamental to American culture. In the absence of a national common denominator, such as country of origin or heritage, the American national consciousness was largely formed on the basis of ideological identification with and commitment to a set of universal values. An individual's American identity is based on a system of ideas that has penetrated the daily life of American society and constitutes a living faith for most Americans.

This chapter traces several key movements, including separate spheres gender ideology, the Cult of True Womanhood, and the ideology of romantic love, through which Protestant conceptions of morality became more broadly American moral views of gender propriety and sexual morality. As a result, Protestantism is part and parcel of U.S.-American culture and the complex of cultural values that is generally perceived as secular “American values.”

In California, Americanization initially centered on interventions in the labor market through the CCIH's regulation of agricultural labor camps. However, the CCIH developed two other important programs, housing and education, that were like two sides of the same coin, reflecting progressive understandings of the home. This view of the home was both traditional—preserving the middle-class value of privacy—and progressive: asserting the state's right to intervene in the home and regulate private property to protect the community against disease and disorder. While the commission's housing program sought to clean up the exterior appearance of immigrants' homes and neighborhoods, the education program tried to inculcate foreign-born women with new, Anglo-American values that would inspire immigrant families to transform their homes from within. But the targeting of immigrants' cultures that underlay the Home Teachers Act was to become the driving factor in the entire Americanization movement during World War I.

This concluding chapter summarizes the central arguments developed throughout this book. American Muslim efforts against domestic violence (DV) demonstrate powerfully that Muslim communities in the United States are indeed American, both in their affirmation of American values and in their resistance against oppressive and exclusionary laws and practices. In other words, critiques of anti-Muslim hostility, racism, and marginalization through cultural and religious domination are as much an expression of Americanness as the necessary engagement with American structures, institutions, and levels of government. Thus, one conclusion from this project is that Muslim advocates against domestic violence are no more than a specific example for American advocacy against DV. However, they are also set apart by their reference to their Muslim identity—and construction of Islam—as a powerful resource for this struggle to end DV in Muslim communities and American society. The chapter then describes an event at which the Muslim anti-DV movement was analyzed by its Muslim participants while pointing to larger frameworks of gender-based violence, anti-Muslim hostility, and racism.

This chapter describes how children growing up in Chinatown and desiring an American education chose between attendance at one of the private schools or at the segregated Chinese Public School. There is an apparent curricular emphasis of both the public and the mission schools in attempting to inculcate foreign-born schoolchildren with patriotic American values. These early efforts foreshadowed twentieth-century Progressive campaigns that promoted Americanization. Chinese parents, although not opposed to American education, attempted to counter some of the negative influences of Christianization and Americanization by sending their children to Chinese-language and Chinese-culture schools in Chinatown. Most Chinese children attended both American and Chinese schools; attendance at both Chinese and American schools contributed to a feeling of dual identity common to many second-generation immigrant children.

Latinos were categorized by new nativists as a dysfunctional urban underclass minority group that led a lifestyle sharply at odds with the accepted American values-based lifestyle: unemployed and not seeking work, dependent on welfare, families broken, and suffering from major health problems. However, data from 1940 to 2000 showed that, compared to other racial and ethnic groups, Latinos have consistently had the strongest work ethic, lowest use of welfare, highest rate of business establishment, strongest families, and unexpectedly good health outcomes, such as the longest life expectancy.

The Epilogue briefly peers into Mormonism’s unfolding relationship with American culture, suggesting that the story of Mormons and musical theater might well be a fitting encapsulation of the American interception of modernity. Musicals and Mormons have come a long way since their rootedness in Jacksonian principles; their regional genesis quickly fanned out to become immense global expressions of American values. In the meantime, America changed. What was once ideal and reputable has become goofy and outmoded, and Broadway and Mormonism have been forced to pay for their naive pasts with cynicism and guffaws. The musical theater industry opted to change its image by aggressively appropriating popular music genres. Mormon leaders have chosen a more passive response, having faith that stasis will eventually reveal the radical qualities of Mormon ideals. As a result, musical theater has begun to escape Mormonism as its once-familiar venue for practicing its theology of voice. Book of Mormon is one example of this fallout--its message both a condemnation and an invitation to become something better. In the end, the tale of Mormons and musicals is another story about how new ways of sounding create opportunities for other ways of living.

This chapter describes the disjointed and often discouraged art program of the Department of State and United States Information Agency, which sponsored several touring exhibitions that included modernist paintings. The 1947 exhibit Advancing American Art is well known because of its humiliating termination when it came under attack from congressional conservatives and the Hearst press, both of whom ridiculed the modernist paintings included in the show and insisted they were fundamentally radical and un-American. After the Eisenhower administration came into office, the cultural diplomats permitted more and more modernist content to creep into their exhibitions, and by 1959 even President Eisenhower defended the challenging works included in the American National Exhibition in Moscow and publicly endorsed artistic freedom as a basic American value.

This chapter examines the State Department's programs to distribute books among foreign audiences (particularly in central and eastern Europe)—books which were carefully chosen to convey American values or to further policy priorities. Unlike the art program, the book programs remained quite conservative in their artistic tastes and included very little modernism, framing what modernist titles they did feature as representative not only of freedom and individualism, but of America's regional diversity. Following the influential arguments of Arthur Schlesinger and others, the book programs presented modernism as being congenial to or even constitutive of Cold War liberalism. The chapter concludes by recounting William Faulkner's participation in the cultural-diplomacy program as well as the equivocal and cautious way the book programs included and presented his difficult works.