Common Ground (magazine)
| Former editors | Louis Adamic, M. Margaret Anderson |
|---|---|
| Categories | Literary magazine |
| Frequency | Quarterly |
| Publisher | Princeton University Press |
| First issue | September 1940 |
| Final issue | 1949 |
| Company | Common Council for American Unity (CCAU) |
| Country | USA |
| Based in | New York City |
| Language | English |
Common Ground was a literary magazine published quarterly between 1940 and 1949 by the Common Council for American Unity to further an appreciation of contributions to U.S. culture by many ethnic, religions and national groups.
The magazine was created by attorney Read Lewis, who helped found the Settlement House Movement, Slovenian American author Louis Adamic (aka Alojze Adamič) and M. Margaret Anderson. The Carnegie Corporation of New York provided funding to start the new magazine. The name of the magazine was likely taken from the title of a book of the same name published by a leading member of the interfaith movement in 1938. Early staff included include the future senator Alan Cranston and the poet Charles Olson.
Louis Adamic was instrumental in the founding of the magazine. In 1940 he became the director of the Common Council for American Unity (CCAU) and became the founding editor. A prolific writer in the 1930s, Adamic had begun a writing career after serving in the U.S. Army in World War I. By the 1930s he was a prominent social critic and writer focusing on the immigrant experience in America. He was the author of Dynamite: The Story of Class Violence in America (1931) and Laughing in the Jungle: The Autobiography of an Immigrant in America (1932). In 1932 he was awarded the Guggenheim Fellowship. Adamic had helped found the Common Council for American Unity (CCAU) in 1939. The CCAU succeeded the Foreign Language Information Service (FLIS), which had formed in 1921 to counter the anti-immigrant attitudes that became prevalent in the U.S. during the 1920s. In 1959, the CCAU merged with the American Federation of International Institutes to form the American Council for Nationalities Services (ACNS). ACNS later became the Immigration and Refugee Services of America in 1994, and in 2004 changed its name to U.S. Committee for Refugees and Immigrants (USCRI).
Adamic's advocacy for cultural pluralism is captured by his insistence that "in the past there has been entirely too much giving up, too much melting away and shattering of the various cultural values of the new groups." Adamic insisted that the "Americanized foreigner became a cultural zero paying lip service to the U.S., which satisfied the Americanizers." In place of Americanization, he proposed "Americanism", which would make a "central educational and cultural effort… toward accepting, welcoming, and exploiting diversity."
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