"Forget All Differences until the Forces of Freedom Are Triumphant": The World War II­ Era Quest for Ethnic and Religious Tolerance ROBERT L. FLEEGLER

IN NOVEMBER1942, Louis Adamic, a public intellectual who wrote several books about the role of immigrants in American society, authored an article in the New York Times Magazine titled "no 'Hyphens' This Time." Adamic commented on the lack of punitive action against recent immigrants during the war: "So far in this war—aside from the campaign against the Japanese group on the Pacific Coast, which was old-time exclusionism hitched to a potentially serious military problem—there has been no great hue and cry about the 'foreigners.'" He suggested that Americans were beginning to think anew about diversity:

The result is the partial but continuing breaking down of the belief, held by many old-line Americans, that the great diversity of backgrounds in our population is a disadvantage to the United States as a nation. The gradual deterioration of this idea has apparently been enough to prevent anti-alien hysteria, in spite of considerable attempts not unrelated to Hitler's purposes to foment it.