Kellor's LGBT Status and Today's American Identity

More than nearly any other American, Frances Alice Kellor can claim to have shaped America’s modern identity.  Historians acknowledge her as the leading figure in the Americanization movement (1906-1921).  This movement sought to assimilate and educate immigrants during the greatest period of immigration our nation had ever known.  As the head of New York’s Bureau of Industries and Immigrants, she was officially in charge of immigrants during the pinnacle of this population transfer.

How did Kellor’s transgender lesbian identity impact her sculpting of our public identity?

Kellor’s vision of Americanization did not involve cultural, ethnic, racial or religious norms.  She only insisted that immigrants become activists in pursuit of social justice.  The ideal she promulgated made all potential Americans without regard to their private cultural ideals.  As such she helped launch the vision that led to today’s multiculturalism.  In her view, and ours, all cultures can equally claim their status as Americans.  

Again, how did Kellor’s transgender lesbian identity impact her sculpting of our public identity?

When in public, Kellor only discussed policy.  Her letters to her girlfriend contain sentimental terms of endearment, but in public she identified as a male and had a hard edge.  She wrote that her male attitude and attire addressed the limited access women had.  She needed to be taken seriously outside of what she called “sex cloisters.”  And her aggressive transgender public persona might likely taught immigrants something about being an American. But more importantly  for our question, we read nothing referring to sexuality in her work. 

Rather than her transgender identity, her lesbian identity informed the way in which she shaped our national character.  Her private life remained intensely private.  And, consistently, she removed immigrants’ private lives from their qualification of being American.  Again, she argued that all who publically fought for social justice were Americans.  Your personal characteristics and morality were removed from the scrutiny in her formulation.

The Americanization curriculum Kellor wrote, presaged today’s social sciences in looking at numbers more than normative behaviors.   And in doing so she pushed a social trend of her era towards bureaucratization.  But much of the Americanization movement demanded cultural conformity.  Kellor had that option available.  It was popular.  Instead, as she rose to the top of the Federal Americanization bureaucracy, she separated personal characteristics from American identity.

In separating the public and private realms, she kept her lesbian life safe.  In this way, even more than her transgender identity, Kellor's lesbianism informed the culturally neutral version of Americanization she championed and we assume today. 

Alice Kellar's Transgender Name

Recently a person about to read Kellor’s biography, Founding Mother, wrote me “I refer to her [Kellor] as a woman only because that is how she is portrayed on just about every site.” She then asked, "Would it be more correct to refer to her as Francis (male), than Frances (female)??”

In the small town of her youth, Coldwater, Michigan, Kellor wrote a gossip column under the name “Alice Kellar.” Mysteriously, upon arriving at Cornell University’s law program, she changed her last name's spelling from “Kellar to Kellor” and swapped out her feminine first name for her middle name, “Frances.” So while she used the female spelling, she consciously chose her sexually ambiguous first name.

A banker's daughter in Coldwater disliked Alice because she and talked like a boy.  In all images of Kellor she has some level of male attire; in the majority she simply dressed as a man. Despite her shortness, Kellor had her arm around her girlfriend’s shoulders in a photo in which they both greeted Eleanor Roosevelt. The visual record is clear that Kellor took the male role in her life and same-sex marriage of 49 years.

When others denounced women’s basketball because it would make girls too masculine, Kellor championed it for the very same gendered reason. Kellor publically identified her considerable political career as masculine, and railed against the gender-based cloistering of women into feminine concerns. In a very real way, Kellor’s transgender identity suffused all of her work.

As no private letters show her self-identifying with the pronoun “he,” I referred to Kellor as “her” throughout Founding Mother.  However, the book forefronts the looming importance of masculine gender identity to Frances, (with an ‘e’). 

Kellor's Americanization and American Arbitration Association

            Frances Alice Kellor (b. 1873) helped found the American Arbitration Association (AAA) in 1926 and served as its vice-President until her death in 1952. The AAA sought to resolve disputes within industries and between nations. In juxtaposing Kellor’s work, the Americanization movement and the AAA, we can come to appreciate Kellor’s genius and the nature of her projects.

Kellor worked to create win-win situations via sociological constructs. This pattern first emerged in her 1904 book investigating the plight of domestic workers, Out of Work.  As a solution, she set up a certification program.  If a housewife saw an employment agency had good grades, she new the workers were well trained and not exploited. Workers could also use this rating to choose employment agencies. Even employing housewives were graded. Rather than pit employers against employees, this system helped all involved.

The AAA utilizes arbitration to solve conflicts. In litigation one side defeats the other in a court of law.  This system creates losers and distorts reality.  Mediation happens when two people agree to discuss their differences in an attempt to come to an amicable resolution.  When honest discussion fails, the two sides can hire an arbitrator.  This neutral third party comes up with a solution that works as well as possible for both parties. While Kellor preferred that the sides would mediate an agreement on their own, if they could not, the AAA would provide a neutral and trained arbitrator for them.

Historians often simply typify the Americanization movement Kellor led as hostile to immigrant culture. In fact, her programs aimed their animus at the prejudice of long-term Americans and industrial exploitation.  If corporations would stop abusing workers, strikes and revolutionary propaganda would cease.  However, the immigrants did not have the power in this relationship.  American institutions would have to shift for all to coexist in harmony. Her movement sought an attitudinal shift that would result in our all winning.

Deeper understanding of the AAA and Americanization comes via remembering Kellor’s Service project. The activist half of the official progressive party, the Service featured a legal branch and an educational branch. The legal branch turned sociologists’ findings into bills. The educational branch got the populace to understand and agitate for these bills. Thus, the Service system limited the importance of politicians and made constant activism more important than elections.

In the Service, the AAA, and the Americanization movement, the medium was the message. Kellor’s employment certification program was to require the cooperation of housewives, workers, agencies, and trained female sociologists.  But the participation was not stressed as an end.  But the Service overtly sought to unite immigrants and long-term Americans via participation in reform efforts. Their working together was as important as their goals. Kellor took great pride in her ability to get thousands of businessmen to volunteer as arbitrators. It gave them practice in envisioning cooperation and solutions that benefited all.  She hoped arbitration would “drive disputes out of American industries in a manner befitting the democracies in which we live.” (NYT, 12/2/41)

In the first half of her career we see Kellor move towards creating unity and win-win situations via mass activism. But as immigration restriction laws were passed, Kellor announced the need to protect “International Human Beings.” In her efforts to protect immigrants, she overtly denounced the national perspective for an international one. Her move towards internationalism also highlighted tension with the concept of Americanization.  From her perspective, the American public was showing itself to be punitive and exclusionary. As such she moved towards working with elites in the AAA. But even at this time, her embrace of internationalism made the word “American” in the title of the AAA anachronistic.

Historians have only understood the Americanization as a reactionary movement born of conservative fears of changes wrought by immigration and industrial change. Rather than a hayseed, Kellor was a cutting-edge sociologist who designed extra-governmental systems with an eye towards fomenting altruism. The failure of the Service and the passage of immigration restriction laws likely drove her to work with elites in the AAA rather than the masses about whom she had lost some faith.   But in all of her efforts, she used sophisticated means to create win-win situations that would call upon the better angels of our nature.

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To what extent was Kellor's switch to working with elites in the AAA a rational assessment of popular attitudes?  Is there a clash between "Enlightened" policies and popular public sentiment now?

What evidence, arguments, and counter-arguments might arise in a debate over whether or not sexism accounted for Kellor only being the Vice-President during her 26 years at the AAA?  

Teachers can find more questions concerning Kellor and the AAA, in the final section of the "Essential Questions Handout," under "Lesson Plans" at www.franceskellor.com