The Huddled Masses the War Produced

Abstract

This chapter covers the World War II era and early Cold War period. During this period, mainline Protestants often promoted an “American Way of Life” while attending to Asian immigrants, Bracero workers, Japanese Americans in internment camps, and refugees through home missions. Nevertheless, such programs reflected a measured respect for cosmopolitanism and cultural pluralism, though they were by no means universal sentiments among American Protestants. The Second World War also encouraged various social sensibilities among white Protestants when it came to race, diversity, gender roles, and family values. This chapter focuses on an increasing Protestant critique of racial discrimination inherent in the immigration quota system, especially as church leaders called for overturning Chinese exclusion. It was during and immediately after the war that mainline leaders in the FCC began an aggressive push to overturn Asian exclusion once and for all, though with mixed results.