Immigration, Assimilation, and the Cultural Construction of American National Identity 2015026490, 9781138100411, 9781315657677

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Immigration, Assimilation, and the Cultural Construction of American National Identity

Over the course of the twentieth century, there have been three primary narratives of American national identity: the melting pot, Anglo-Protestantism, and cultural pluralism/ multiculturalism. This book offers a social and historical perspective on what shaped each of these imaginings, when each came to the fore, and which appear especially relevant early in the twenty-first century. These issues are addressed by looking at the United States and elite notions of the meaning of America across the twentieth century, centering on the work of Horace Kallen, Nathan Glazer and Daniel Patrick Moynihan, and Samuel P. Huntington. Four structural areas are examined in each period: the economy, involvement in foreign affairs, social movements, and immigration. What emerges is a narrative arc whereby immigration plays a clear and crucial role in shaping cultural stories of national identity as written by elite scholars. These stories are represented in writings throughout all three periods, and in such work we see the intellectual development and specification of the dominant narratives, along with challenges to each. Important conclusions include a keen reminder that identities are often formed along borders both external and internal, that structure and culture operate dialectically, and that national identity is hardly a monolithic, static formation. Shannon Latkin Anderson is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Roanoke College.

Routledge Research in Race and Ethnicity

 1 Racial Discrimination Institutional Patterns and Politics Masoud Kamali   2 Black Masculinity and Sexual Politics Anthony J. Lemelle, Jr.  3 Represent Art and Identity Among the Black Upper-Middle  Class Patricia A. Banks  4 Blackness and Transatlantic Irish Identity Celtic Soul Brothers Lauren Onkey   5 Music, Difference and the Residue of Race Jo Haynes  6 Black Citizenship and Authenticity in the Civil Rights Movement Randolph Hohle   7 Migrants and Race in the US Territorial Racism and the Alien/Outside Philip Kretsedemas

  8 The Black Professional Middle Class Race, Class, and Community in the Post–Civil Rights Era Eric S. Brown   9 Race and Class Distinctions Within Black Communities A Racial-Caste-in-Class Paul Camy Mocombe, Carol Tomlin and Cecile Wright 10 Making Diaspora in a Global City South-Asian Youth Cultures in London Helen Kim 11 A Moral Economy of Whiteness Four Frames of Racializing Discourse Steve Garner 12 Race and the Origins of American Neoliberalism Randolph Hohle 13 Experiences of Islamophobia Living with Racism in the Neoliberal Era James Carr 14 Immigration, Assimilation, and the Cultural Construction of American National Identity Shannon Latkin Anderson

Immigration, Assimilation, and the Cultural Construction of American National Identity Shannon Latkin Anderson

First published 2016 by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa business © 2016 Taylor & Francis The right of Shannon Latkin Anderson to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Anderson, Shannon Latkin. Title: Immigration, assimilation, and the cultural construction of American   national identity / by Shannon Latkin Anderson. Description: New York : Routledge, 2016. | Series: Routledge research   in race and ethnicity ; 14 | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2015026490 | ISBN 9781138100411 (hardback) |   ISBN 9781315657677 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: National characteristics, American—History. |   Nationalism—United States—History. | Cultural pluralism—   United States—History. | Americanization—History. | Protestantism—   Political aspects—United States—History. | United States—Emigration   and immigration—Political aspects—History. | Kallen, Horace Meyer,   1882–1974—Political and social views. | Glazer, Nathan—Political and   social views. | Moynihan, Daniel P. (Daniel Patrick), 1927–2003—Political   and social views. | Huntington, Samuel P.—Political and social views. Classification: LCC E169.1 .A546 2016 | DDC 305.800973—dc23   LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015026490 ISBN: 978-1-138-10041-1 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-65767-7 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by Apex CoVantage, LLC

For my parents, who said I could do whatever I imagined. Could there be anything more American than that?

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Contents

Acknowledgments

ix

Introduction

1

1 Immigration, Assimilation, and National Identity

6

PART I Horace Kallen and a New Narrative, 1905–1925 2 Mass Immigration, Prelude to War, and Narratives of the Nation

31

3 Kallen’s Pluralist Challenge

61

PART II Glazer and Moynihan Challenge the Melting Pot, 1950–1970 4 A Time for American Power (and Melting?) 5 Glazer and Moynihan’s Claim: Many and One

83 113

PART III Huntington’s Return to Americanism, 1985–2005 6 Multiculturalism and a Domestic Clash

153

7 Huntington’s Fear: E Pluribus Pluribus

175

viii  Contents 8 Anglo-America Under Review

197



Conclusion: The Meanings of America

222

Index

237

Acknowledgments

Many years ago after conversations about ethnic and national identity, my patient, brilliant graduate school advisor suggested that I read Philip Gleason’s (1980) famous essay “American Identity and Americanization.” Reading his work linking elite understandings of American national identity and immigration was a clarifying moment for me. I made lists of the historians, philosophers, political scientists and politicians he mentioned and began to read. And then I read more. And then Samuel P. Huntington’s (2004) Who Are We? was published. Suddenly the light bulb was glowing so brightly, it nearly popped, and I had discovered my project. To this day, it is to Gleason’s essay that my mind returns when people ask how I got started, but it was the insight of Krishan Kumar that got me there. This book has been long in the making, and there are many people and places to thank and appreciate. Much of the research happened during my graduate student years at the University of Virginia, but the critical time for making the work a book and finding a home for its publication was granted to me by my professional home, Roanoke College. These two institutions have supported me and my work far beyond my expectations. It was as a graduate student at the University of Virginia that I found mentoring of the best kind in my advisor, Krishan Kumar, who embodies the old trope of a gentleman and a scholar. Krishan’s mind and vast, bibliographic knowledge of the literature (in so many fields) helped us work from the narrow to the broad and then down to the case around which this project is centered: understandings of American national identity. Our very regular conversations—in his office at UVa, at the Institute for Advanced Study, by email, by phone, and over wonderful meals—are highlights of graduate school for me. I am forever in his debt, and treasure his and Katya’s years of friendship. And though I certainly didn’t know it at the time, the questions that motivate the project were born in my first semester at UVa. Little did I know that as I investigated the meaning of Jewish identity in James Hunter’s course in the sociology of religion, I was really beginning the process of asking more broadly why our connections with certain groups are so deeply meaningful. James supported me by providing an institutional home first in the

x  Acknowledgments sociology department and later at his extraordinary Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture (IASC), both at UVa. Those two places and the people in them nourished my thinking and showed me the joys of intellectual community, for which I am forever grateful. Milton Vickerman and Jeffrey K. Olick also dedicated much time and thought to this research. Their perspectives—on group life, inequality and group memory—have made an indelible mark on not only this book, but on who I am and how I teach. I count them both as friends and mentors and only regret not living close enough to continue traditions of lunches on the Corner to solve the world’s problems and complain about everything else. Many others from my days in Charlottesville were instrumental in the completion of this book, including Kevin Schultz, Bob Geraci, Murray Milner, Slava Jakelic, Josh Yates, and my fellow doctoral and post-doctoral fellows at IASC, who all read, heard, and discussed various parts of the manuscript along the way. Kevin has gone above and beyond as colleague, friend and historical advisor—any mistakes along those lines remain mine alone! My advisors and mentors from college, although not directly a part of this project, set me on this path, so I must also acknowledge Ed Morse, Francis Dodoo, and Anne Hornsby who worked with me in the early 1990s at Tulane University; they lit the fuse! More recently I have found my professional life in a little slice of heaven called Roanoke College in the mountains of southwestern Virginia, which places me in a spot of such natural beauty and lovely students and colleagues that I cannot quite imagine how I found myself here. The College has provided me with support both material and ideal, and if it weren’t for my academic dean, I might have never brought my proposal along on a conference trip to Omaha in the spring of 2014; thank you, Dean Smith. My departmental colleagues have been wonderful, and I am especially grateful to Marit Berntson and Lane Destro for their clear-eyed suggestions and ever-ready encouragement. Finally, I must thank those who have actually had to live with me and this project for the duration. Ben and Sydney, I hope you know how central you are to all I do. You have the good fortune of living in a time and place that allows us to keep exploring. Explore your hearts out and I’ll be along for the ride. And Doug, you’ve been my safe place for nearly twenty years now. Thank you for knowing me and my mind and for wanting to be with someone who is never totally satisfied, who never stops questioning, and for wanting to be my partner in all things.

Introduction

Armed brigades patrol the Southwest on the hunt for illegal border crossers. Police officers are ordered to demand identification from those who appear “not quite” American. Politicians pander to sound tough over issues of immigration, or “a path to citizenship,” or “amnesty.” Nine African-American women and men are shot and killed in a church by a white man who wanted a race war. Well-known scholars and authors screed on who counts as American—and the converse, who doesn’t count. “Dreamers” rally in the streets for their shot at the opportunities they envision as America’s soul. These things are happening today, but such behaviors also have long and revealing histories in the United States; they have happened before. This book tells the story of how the US has arrived where it is in the 2010s regarding heightened rhetoric and a seemingly ever-looming policy battle over immigration, this time as we approach the 2016 presidential election. The heart of this account is a rendering of the relationship between immigration, assimilation, and narratives of American identity. The often self-congratulatory, mythic story of the US as a nation of immigrants rings hollow in a climate of border-state militias and legislative deadlock on policy regarding the lives of the greater than ten million undocumented immigrants currently residing in the country. Though public discourse on American national identity and what divides us may be ubiquitous, overwrought, and tired, sociological investigation into the same has been scarce. Here a corrective is offered: an in-depth examination of scholarly writing about immigration and assimilation over the course of the twentieth century that illuminates and offers important insights into American ideals about newcomers and also about dominant narratives of national identity. These sources—the words of elite thinkers—offer data for a new analysis into notions of “the other” with a focus on the internal other, the immigrant, and the role distinctions play in constructing American identity. This book, then, provides a historical and structural account of the forces shaping narratives of American national identity: Anglo-Protestantism, the melting pot, and multiculturalism. The United States in the twentieth century and at the beginning of the twenty-first offers an excellent empirical location for an exploration of

2  Introduction thinking on immigration and assimilation, and how these ideas are connected to nations and national cultures. In considering most closely the writing of a relatively small cast of significant figures in American academia and public thought—notably Horace Kallen, Nathan Glazer and Daniel Patrick Moynihan, and Samuel Huntington—we see clearly the deep-rootedness of current conversations about immigration and the nation in the United States. As the population continues to change and immigration once again emerges as a pivotal national issue in the 2010s, understanding these roots is more critical than ever. Today’s conversation is anything but new. Important scholars and thinkers have long presented varying ideas about immigration and assimilation. In the 1910s we saw ideas ranging from the eugenics of Madison Grant and racist descriptions of “lantern-jaws” from sociologist E. A. Ross to positive readings of a “federation of ethnicities” from the philosopher Kallen. The low-immigration middle of the century brought with it a quasi-mystical belief in the US as a melting pot. This idea was widely adopted and gained broad acceptance and power. The notion of melting was then challenged in the 1960s by Glazer and Moynihan as they found evidence denying this blending. Alongside continued adherence to the story of the melting pot, a new account arose, multiculturalism, seemingly from a similar, though not identical, impetus as Kallen’s pluralism. The emergence and seeming triumph of multiculturalism continues to be challenged by ardent Americanist logic like that of Samuel Huntington at the turn of the twenty-first century. In fact, we see a narrative arc that, particularly vis-à-vis the Anglo-Protestant and multiculturalist stories, shows the linkages between national imaginary and high levels of immigration at both the beginning and end of the period under investigation, 1915–2005. But this is not a history of ideas alone, nor is it solely applicable to the US. That multiple ideas about assimilation are present throughout the period, and that these ideas portray America and Americans in varying ways, suggests that “America” has multiple meanings. Discourse on immigration and assimilation reveals the ways intellectuals within nation-states deliberate on how to deal with the internal “other,” and hence how they play a role in constructing national identities and a vernacular for thinking about immigration. For the first time in the sociological literature, this book brings together Kallen, Glazer, Moynihan, and Huntington as primary actors in the national discourse to illustrate the story of the construction of American identity via the lens of rhetoric about assimilation. In placing these men among their interlocutors, the book also examines the work of figures such as Israel Zangwill, E. A. Ross, Madison Grant, Milton Gordon, Stanley Lieberson, Douglas Massey, Louis Menand, and Alan Wolfe, all of whom contribute to the ways Americans understand immigration and what it means to be American.1 And this approach, assimilation upward to nation, can be applied broadly. The theoretical contribution of this book is seen in the explicit connection made between national identity and assimilation, which remains

Introduction  3 implicit in the historiography of assimilation, and is virtually ignored in today’s sociology of assimilation. The relationship between immigration, assimilation and the nation must take center stage. Instead of limiting the sociological discussion of assimilation to the objective outcomes experienced by immigrants and their families, here the lens is turned upward and broadened to look at how the idea of the nation is affected. In fact, nations and their identities are created by the dual processes of immigration and assimilation, and as the evidence posited herein shows, in intellectual debates about those processes. A driving theoretical assumption is that texts are written within particular contexts and structures, and they do particular kinds of work. Using the texts of twentieth-century intellectual elites on assimilation as a locus of evaluation, we gain insight into the processes of the construction and renovation of national narratives and identities in the US. The structural contexts are also closely examined, via attention to immigration itself, the economy, foreign affairs, and social movements. It is clear that ideas do not emerge in a vacuum, so a clear sense of milieu is needed. The findings are suggestive of work that might be done looking at other nation-states. Imagine, for example, looking at the many European states now deeply engaged in national dialogue about immigration and nation. In Germany, the far-right anti-Islam movement Pegida found massive audience in its anti-Islamic, anti-immigration marches in 2014–2015, and in France, long-simmering tensions with a growing immigrant population were brought to a head with the murders at Charlie Hebdo, the Parisian satirical newspaper, also in 2015. Conversations about national identity are undoubtedly happening and will only grow in importance as transnational migration and pluralism expand. How does assimilation provide a useful lens through which to view national projects? This book begins with the premise that we must problematize the multiple meanings of assimilation, how each of these meanings links back to immigration and power, and finally how ideas about immigration are inextricably linked to conceptions of national identity. In today’s scholarly parlance, analyses of assimilation range from reports of full-blown merging (homogenization) to multiculturalism to fragmentation or segmentation; each of these represents some form of assimilation. Immigration, Assimilation, and the Cultural Construction of American National Identity pushes sociological investigations of assimilation still further. It is imperative to show (1) what the varying ideas and definitions of assimilation are, (2) what assimilation means in each accounting, (3) who tells each story, (4) who shapes national narratives, and (5) how these national stories both reflect and, critically, impact discourse, policy, and practice regarding immigrants. It is a largely agreed-upon thing to say that we define ourselves in significant part by knowing what we are not. This is part of why our various group identities are so important to us: they offer distinction. We are typically aware of the various categories of people we come in contact with,

4  Introduction and we, as groups, construct our identities through an understanding of what culture is “ours” versus “theirs,” what status is ours versus theirs, what power, what religion; the list goes on and on. Very often, we think of national identities in particular as being constructed in opposition to the identities of other nations constituted by external “others.” Here, a strong argument is made that we must also look within our nations at discourses dealing with newcomers and other marginalized peoples. This book concentrates on the former, and is an exercise in self-examination that can offer insights into not only how ideas have both changed and remained over time, but also into where things are today. In the US, in this moment of rapid change in demography and its associated political and social discourse, such self-reflection is a crucial exercise. NOTE 1 Although not central to this particular investigation, that nearly all of those whose work is examined within these pages are men should not go unnoticed, nor should it be deemed unmeaningful.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Alba, Richard and Victor Nee. 2003. Remaking the American Mainstream: Assimilation and Contemporary Immigration. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Barth, Fredrik. 1969. Ethnic Groups and Boundaries. Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland Press. Crevecoeur, J. Hector St. John. 1998 (1782). Letters from an American Farmer. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gans, Herbert. 1979. “Symbolic Ethnicity: The Future of Ethnic Groups and Cultures in America.” Ethnic and Racial Studies 2: 1–20. Glazer, Nathan and Daniel P. Moynihan. 1970 (1963). Beyond the Melting Pot: The Negroes, Puerto Ricans, Jews, Italians, and Irish of New York City. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Glazer, Nathan. 1997. We Are All Multiculturalists Now. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Gleason, Philip. 1980. “American Identity and Americanization” Harvard Encyclopedia of American Ethnic Groups. Edited by Stephen Thernstrom. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Gordon, Milton M. 1999 (1961). “Assimilation in America: Theory and Reality,” in Majority and Minority. Edited by N. R. Yetman. Boston: Allyn and Bacon. Originally published in 1961 in Daedelus. Gordon, Milton M. 1964. Assimilation in American Life: The Role of Race, Religion, and National Origins. New York: Oxford University Press. Grant, Madison. 1918 (1916). The Passing of the Great Race, or the Racial Basis of European History. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons. Hing, Bill Ong. 2004. Defining America Through Immigration Policy. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.

Introduction  5 Huntington, Samuel P. 2004. Who Are We? The Challenge to America’s National Identity. New York: Simon & Schuster. Huntington, Samuel P. 1981. American Politics: The Promise of Disharmony. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Kallen, Horace M. 1998 (1924). Culture and Democracy in the United States. New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers. Kallen, Horace M. 1915. “Democracy versus the Melting-Pot.” The Nation. February 18 and 25. Lieberson, Stanley. (1963). Ethnic Patterns in American Cities.New York: Free Press of Glencoe. Massey, Douglas S. 1999 (1995). “The New Immigration and Ethnicity in the US” in Majority and Minority. Edited by N. R. Yetman. Boston: Allyn and Bacon. Myrdal, Gunnar. 2002 (1944). An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy, Volume I. New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers. Portes, Alejandro and Min Zhou. 1993. “The New Second Generation: Segmented Assimilation and Its Variants.” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, Vol. 530, Interminority Affairs in the U.S.: Pluralism at the Crossroads (Nov., 1993). Ross, Edward Alsworth. 1914. The Old World in the New: The Significance of Past and Present Immigration to the American People. New York: The Century Company. Schultz, Kevin M. 2011. Tri-Faith America: How Catholics and Jews Held Postwar America to its Protestant Promise. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Smith, Anthony D. 1986. The Ethnic Origins of Nations. Oxford: Blackwell. Smith, Rogers M. 1997. Civic Ideals: Conflicting Visions of Citizenship in US History. New Haven: Yale University Press. Smith, Rogers M. 1988. “The ‘American Creed’ and American Identity: The Limits of Liberal Citizenship in the United States.” Western Political Quarterly 41(2): 225–251. St. John de Crevecoeur, J. Hector. 1997 (1782). Letters from an American Farmer. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Takaki, Ronald. 1993. A Different Mirror: A History of Multicultural America. New York: Little, Brown and Company. Walzer, Michael. 1983. Spheres of Justice: A Defense of Pluralism and Equality. USA: Basic Books. Waters, Mary. 1990. Ethnic Options: Choosing Identities in America. Berkeley: University of California Press. Wolfe, Alan. 2004a. “Native Son: Samuel Huntington Defends the Homeland.” Foreign Affairs 83, i3. Zangwill, Israel. 1915 (1909). The Melting Pot Drama in Four Acts. New York: Macmillan Company:.

1 Immigration, Assimilation, and National Identity

The US is once again in the midst of a national conversation about immigration. Politicians and the media punditry pontificate about law-breakers or “Dreamers,” depending upon their ideological preferences. “Regular” folk participate in demonstrations, rallies, and other public events—some in support of an inclusive approach to newcomers, others holding fast to a more exclusive notion of who should have access to the bounty of the United States; many are in between or unsure. Much of this discourse and action takes place in a heated sort of rhetoric that seemingly presumes we are finally dealing with a long-standing public issue. The reality is that national, meaningful discourse about immigration and its many, many ways of affecting this country is not new at all. Immigration has been a major issue of debate at least three times in the twentieth century. Looking at the national conversation about immigration, embedding it in its sociohistorical context, offers a clearer view of the issue. A better understanding of earlier discussions can help construct a well-reasoned debate today—one based on knowledge of prior history and connections to other aspects of social life, rather than one based on ideological and/or political purity. There are so many questions to ask: What does it mean to be American? Or even more, to be “all-American”? Who is a hyphenated American and who is not? Who claims an American national identity, and who does not? Who can and who cannot? Is America a place where anyone from any background can arrive and find herself both embracing and being embraced by the milieu? Is America a place where structures, both material and ideal, both plain to see and hidden from view, draw incoming groups and their members into a particularistic core to which they will ultimately be incorporated or conform? Does it bring them into a shared space of diversity where difference is respected, all the while resisting a slippery slope into utter disunion? Does it allow them to be pulled apart into particularistic enclaves where broader, shared values have little meaning? Or does it pull newcomers into a preexisting hierarchy where conflict and power rule the day? Such questions continue to elicit strong responses, illustrating, if nothing else, that concerns about incorporating immigrants and minorities matter. Such questions also tell us that national identity matters, and it is this

Immigration, Assimilation, and National Identity  7 link between immigration and national identity that is under investigation. Assimilation is the intervening process, a lens through which both can be examined. American identity is an interesting case, and one that requires a few points of clarification. First, though citizenship is clearly relevant in many discussions of American national identity, national identity here is not intended to describe only the legal, political form of national identity embodied by formal status. Second, the purpose is not to explicitly draw distinctions between official American membership—citizenship—and more personal, individual feelings of belonging. Rather, the objective here is to delve into the intellectual development of the content and narratives of the latter and how these shape broader, shared group identities. The kinds of national narratives explored are cultural: What are the core values, beliefs, and ideologies at play? Who is included and who is excluded? Who has the power to determine what the core components of American identity have been, are, or will be? What external factors play a role in how we perceive these components? What part does immigration play? What about assimilation, or alternatively, resistance to assimilation? This kind of national identity, born of culture (or cultures) is permeated by shared values and a sense of belonging in a broad community. It is about having shared commitment to a set of institutionalized symbols and norms that are recognized by both larger institutions and individuals as “American” (even those outside of the country). Herein, “being American” is more than a political or legal status; it is the broader cultural identity that so many Americans feel and often articulate upon visiting other countries where their own particularities are brought into view.1 Clearly more is at stake in national identity than what country is listed on tax forms and passports.2 Scholarly writing on immigration and that on national identity—at least in the American context—are quite distinct. The former tends to emphasize group and individual-level change (or lack thereof), while the latter remains minimal in contemporary scholarship given long-standing (at least for the latter half of the twentieth century) reservations about positive assertions of nationalism. But it is evident that these processes, immigration and the construction of national identity, are happening, and also that they are inextricably tied to one another, and to a third social process, assimilation. The very heart of thinking about assimilation is a consideration of what it takes to be part of some group, and in this case, the national group. To link assimilation and national identity carefully and thoughtfully, to complement the excellent tradition of scholarship already in place, especially vis-àvis Europe, attention to the underlying assumptions about assimilation is imperative. This linkage is a central goal of this book. While there are many ways of approaching the relationship between immigration, assimilation, and national identity, here we look closely at the thinking of a narrowly defined set of intellectual figures who were writing

8  Immigration, Assimilation, and National Identity at pivotal moments. These thinkers were all attempting to understand what immigration and assimilation mean for the United States. Is incorporating newcomers a public good? If not, what are the problems associated with immigration? Does assimilation happen? And if so, in what ways? Is it a wholesale process? And to what might these newcomers be assimilating? Analysis of intellectual writing reveals a great deal about the process of building, maintaining, and changing the meaning of America. That multiple ideas about assimilation are present throughout the period, and that these ideas portray America and Americans in varying ways, shows that “America” has multiple meanings. Discourse on immigration and assimilation reveals the ways intellectuals within nation-states deliberate on how to deal with the internal other, and hence how they play a role in constructing national identities. Horace Kallen writing in the 1910s–1920s, Nathan Glazer and Daniel Patrick Moynihan in the 1960s–1970s, and Samuel Huntington in the 1990s–2000s are the primary players in this story of national discourse that illustrates the construction of American identity via the lens of scholarly rhetoric about assimilation. These men are crucial to understanding American identity in ways that many of the most significant established scholars of assimilation are not, largely because their work transcended the ivory tower, and because they deal explicitly with imaginings of the nation. Kallen, for example, introduced the notion of cultural pluralism (originally as a “federation of nationalities”) to the American public, and ultimately is understood—though not in his time—as having planted the seed for what we know today as multiculturalism (Walzer 1996:26). Glazer and Moynihan, perhaps in part because of Moynihan’s political career, have remained in the public consciousness for decades following the publication of Beyond the Melting Pot in 1963, and the book itself remains a controversial touchstone in the American literature about assimilation. Their denial of straight-line assimilation and assertion of ongoing ethnic particularity in New York City went straight to the heart of many Americans’ assumptions about assimilation and challenged the status quo. Huntington, the high-ranking Harvard professor whose publications found their way into public discourse (especially regarding confrontation with the Arab world), re-entered the explicit discussion of American identity with the antagonistic Who Are We? to provoke debate in the post-9/11 era.3 This book was clearly written as a crossover between academia and public audiences, with highly polemical rhetoric and ideas, and little original research. These figures and their most significant works dealing with assimilation in America are not the usual or obvious cast of characters in academic writing on assimilation today, which focuses primarily on immigrants, non-white minority groups, and global migration. Using them as centerpieces and embedding them in the intellectual and social context of their work offers more than an ivory tower image of how the meaning of America might be constructed. This approach presents images that—despite being

Immigration, Assimilation, and National Identity  9 produced by elites—gained ground beyond the hallowed halls of academe and that were typically, and sometimes intentionally, in confrontation with other such images of their day. These stories were a challenge. Assimilation has long been at the heart of American sociology as scholars have tried to explain the processes by which peoples are incorporated (or not) into society.4 Nations and nationalism is a field that has been central to sociology as a discipline from its beginnings, but its practitioners have rarely turned their eyes or tools on the United States. When we recognize the ongoing significance of racial, ethnic, linguistic, religious, and other cultural forms of difference that have an ongoing role in the creation and maintenance of national harmony or its alternatives, it is curious that the two fields of study, assimilation and nations, are rarely joined together explicitly in sociological endeavors aimed at studying the US. This must be remedied, and so three significant moments in the intellectual history of assimilation in the US are under investigation here in an effort to illuminate the construction, maintenance/reproduction, and renovation of the American nation and national identity. Assimilation will be the lens through which American identity is observed. Theoretically, rethinking the relationship between national identity and assimilation is crucial. Instead of limiting the sociological discussion of assimilation to the objective outcomes experienced by immigrants and their families, here the lens is turned upward to look at the nation. Think of this as assimilation upward. Here the process of assimilation, and especially intellectual debates on that process are seen as critical factors in the ongoing construction and maintenance of national imaginaries and national identities. Barthian transactionalism (1969) shows the ways ongoing contact with an “other,” typically an external other, plays a significant role in identity formation. But in pluralistic societies like the US, it is equally clear that internal others are an important focus of identity construction, and as such, much can be learned about the process of national meaning-making within elite conversations about intra-national boundaries. Looking at the discourse of twentieth century intellectual elites on assimilation as a locus of evaluation proves fruitful for revealing the varying processes of the construction, reproduction, and renovation of national narratives and identities in the US. This approach is also suggestive of work to be done looking at other nation-states. In examining the national meaning-making potential of elite discourse on assimilation, we can better understand the social and political actions that have been taken in the name of the nation. The process of building a national self-conception is perhaps largely done through oppositional processes within the nation. In other words, we not only know what it means to be American through comparison with external others, we also know it because we recognize boundaries and differences with internal others.5 We know that we speak English in our schools and other public fora, not Spanish, Korean, Yiddish, or Hindi. We know that—at least officially—women must be accorded social respect equivalent to that

10  Immigration, Assimilation, and National Identity granted to men as regards employment, education, and physical safety. We know that baseball is our national pastime, not soccer or even basketball. These are outward, available markers of “American” values and norms that are used to define a specific culture, despite the presence of alternatives. Looking at discourse on assimilation, then, offers a window on how intellectuals have considered the best way or ways to deal with new arrivals as a nation.6 Various standard options have been present, with some being more or less potent—and thus widely accepted—in different periods. What these perspectives tell us, by making claims about who is or is not assimilable, how the process should look, and most importantly what people should be assimilating towards, is what these intellectuals imagine America to be. If America is truly a melting pot, then everyone, including those who are already citizens, should change with each new influx of immigrants. We should incorporate aspects of the languages, religions, value-systems, and political ideologies into some ever-changing blend that is “American.” In an ideal-typical melting pot, everyone assimilates into something new. If instead America is a mosaic, more colloquially, a salad bowl, then we should all rub shoulders with one another, but not lose our own form, or reshape the frame. This is the popular image of multiculturalism. In the salad, cucumbers and tomatoes are staples of old, but feta cheese or chow mein noodles add more to the mix. Of course, there are many kinds of salads, but the underlying position of those adopting a multicultural perspective is that though we are all different, we are something even better when we are different together. In an ideal-typical mosaic, then, no one really assimilates completely, rather we are an integrated whole—together but distinct. Finally, if America is neither of these things, not pot, not bowl, but instead is truly a particular, unique, and stable monoculture with a specific and immutable core set of values and institutions, then all newcomers must change to accommodate those criteria. In the US, this has typically meant an Anglo-Protestant culture. In an ideal-typical monocultural nation, everyone with the exception of the descendants of the founders must assimilate into an unambiguous national type that should remain unaltered. In considering these three basic imaginings of America, varying temporal associations become clear. Anglo-Protestantism is a conservative—literally, not necessarily politically—vision of the US, a past-based national identity. It insists that America should be what it was. In seeing the writing on the wall as regards the changing population and culture, however, proponents of this view see threat and loss over the course of the twentieth century because things are changing. The ideology, then, is explicit, and normatively ascribes a proper sort of American identity. The melting pot, in stark contrast, suggests that what is American will always be fluid as newcomers continue to enter. In a radical manner, distinct from its neutral, nonthreatening public representation, the original meaning of the melting pot was that national identity changes everyone, all the time. Nothing is static, nothing is sacred. Except, perhaps, change. The melting pot, then, has a dynamic,

Immigration, Assimilation, and National Identity  11 future orientation. Finally, there is multiculturalism, which so many assume simply is where the US is. In some ways, that is true: the American population is diverse and living side by side. But multiculturalism also has an ideological bent. Here, the “should” relates to how people of differing cultures live in and govern a society together. But if Anglo-Protestantism looks back and the melting pot forward, multiculturalism is a presentist narrative. We are all here, living in a society that holds sacred the values of liberty and equality, so what are we going to do about it? Now? So how have intellectuals understood America? Is America one of those types? Is it some combination of these? And how does discourse on assimilation help to answer such questions? In the twentieth century, these stories are repeated with variations contingent upon sociohistorical context: Is immigration rising or falling? How is the country governed? Is the US involved in wars far afield? Are there social movements at home that are changing the social landscape? Is the economy growing? Are leaders leading? These questions and many more help to understand the derivation and framing of scholarly work, but also help us consider how these national imaginaries have been received by the broader population. Work on nations and nationalism has provided an excellent framework for understanding the origins and construction of modern nation-states. Within the sociological literature, however, relatively little emphasis has been placed on the ongoing processes of reproduction and reconstruction of the cultural identities connected to nations, particularly in the American case (see Corse 1997 and Kaufmann 2004 for two helpful exceptions). In fact, much of the literature, both academic and popular, suggests implicitly or otherwise that in each political state there is one agreed-upon national identity, namely the one which was constructed during the state’s founding period or during some revolutionary moment. In the US, for example, this could be the period following the Civil War as recent historiography suggests (e.g., Lawson 2002; Rubin 2005). This notion of unified national identity is especially perplexing given the many historical and anthropological studies that have demonstrated otherwise through careful documentation of coterminous national identities in the US and elsewhere (see Sahlins 1991; Berdahl 1999; Kumar 2003; Kaufmann 2004). The point is not to argue that there is not typically one dominant national identity, bolstered by a dominant national narrative, such is the usual situation, rather it is to recognize the presence of more than one national story. But the need remains to acknowledge and investigate other, more peripheral national stories being shared by groups of people and, perhaps more importantly, mobilized by certain elite actors as national, not sub-national and particular. Again, these may not share equal footing with whichever rendering of national identity is primary at a given historical moment, but which story is primary changes. The relationship between multiple identities is organized either hierarchically or in terms of core-periphery. The sociological literature on assimilation, with its current emphasis on segmented

12  Immigration, Assimilation, and National Identity assimilation, would imply that in addition to being hierarchical, the various versions of national identity also function in a segregated, or fragmented, fashion (see Portes and Zhou 1999 on segmented assimilation), which may well be the case. Here, the language of multiplicity and process works not just side by side, but in concert with concepts of hegemony and dominance. Not surprisingly, conflict enters the picture right alongside multiplicity, as does the language of the potential for moral good in nationalism (Frost 2006). Appropriately comprehensive theoretical work in sociology on American national identity can be achieved utilizing the medium of discourse regarding assimilation to shed light on what it means to be American, to see how that meaning is constructed, and also how it is revised in the context of intellectual trends and debates. By mapping out the story of assimilation through the work of significant figures, it will be clear that competing notions of American identity have long been at play, and that these ideas not only affect people and society at large, but are affected by external forces as well. For example, widely held notions regarding assimilation are surely shaped by the leanings of political administrations, which come into power as the result of popular sentiment regarding all sorts of domestic and international issues: rising rates of immigration, economic downturns (or upturns), wars. Other feelings of national anxiety can be related to shifting attitudes on the central issues of this research: the way in which thinking—and often anxiety—about immigration and assimilation reveals thinking about national identity. ASSIMILATION AND AMERICA Assimilation, here broadly conceived as the process by which immigrants are (or are not) incorporated into the national community, has been a critical issue in the US from before the turn of the twentieth century, and as such has often been fodder for those attempting to control the meaning of America. With the influx of new groups who bring with them new religions, new languages, new habits, and new values, many native-born Americans take a defensive posture to maintain a hold on their traditions. Marginalized native-born groups sometimes have the most vitriolic responses of all, as they feel their already fragile positions threatened. Even though cultural differences are often accompanied by new skills and new opportunities, many “natives” feel their sense of what it means to be American being threatened, not enhanced. Their way of life, what they see as the American way of life, is under assault from every side: by private parochial schools, new churches (or synagogues or mosques), different approaches to child rearing and work, and ostensibly less “civilized” cultures. Not everyone has had a negative, xenophobic response to immigration, though. Other Americans have embraced the idea of a shared, yet diverse culture, involving ongoing

Immigration, Assimilation, and National Identity  13 social recognition of new groups by emphasizing the positive contributions of diverse worldviews and approaches to problem solving. Others still have concentrated their goodwill on the celebration of sharing a diversity of cultures in the sense of expanded definitions of and increased exposure to the arts, literatures, and languages of far-away societies and cultures. The reaction to immigrant groups in each period—or at least the groundswell of emotion heard loudest—is mediated by the social, economic, and political context into which immigrant groups arrive, in addition to being influenced by characteristics of the groups and their members. Another significant factor, one dialectically related to context, is the confidence of the dominant group at a given historical moment. Depending upon the degree of economic expansion or decline, “confidence” will be higher or lower, xenophobia will be higher or lower, and immigrants will be more or less welcome. In periods of war, many people feel more isolationist. During times when immigration is less welcomed, the desire to rapidly assimilate those who do come may be heightened. Thus, for groups who can “blend” or “melt” more easily, there may be less resistance than there would be for a group that visibly, culturally, linguistically stands apart. This initial impression is then further arbitrated by the way those groups comport themselves once in residence. Do they assimilate quickly, giving up native languages and conspicuous habits? Do they settle into racial or ethnic enclaves, taking their time to adapt to their new surroundings? Or perhaps worst, from the perspective of nativists, do they insist upon sending their children to specialized schools, or request government assistance in maintaining cultural recognition? Such concerns, long associated with the study of immigration and assimilation, are also central to investigating national identity. Bill Ong Hing, a legal scholar who studies immigration, argues that There have always been two Americas. Both begin with the understanding that America is a land of immigrants. One America has embraced the notion of welcoming newcomers from different parts of the world . . . This America has understood that Americans are not necessarily of the same background or tongue. The other America has remained largely mired in a Eurocentric (originally western Eurocentric) vision of America that idealized the true American as white, Anglo-Saxon, English-speaking, and Christian. (2004:5) In discussing the relative inattention given to the deaths of those crossing the border between Mexico and the US, Hing argued that Americans do not identify with these immigrants because “America, and therefore who a real American is, has been defined in a manner that excludes the Mexican migrant” (Hing 2004:2). Because they are not understood as American, they are largely ignored. Hing envisions two versions of American identity, which are defined by attitudes about assimilation. He claims these polarized

14  Immigration, Assimilation, and National Identity positions were already established by the time John Adams became president in 1797. That debate has been essentially continuous in American history, and the debate is significant in that our immigration policy is a defining attribute of our national character (Hing 2004:7). What becomes clear upon reading a selection of books and articles written about assimilation over the course of the twentieth century, is that in addition to the two broad imaginings Hing suggests, there are others. While Hing sees little change in what counts as American via debates on immigration, Ellis Cose, a well-known writer who has written a history of immigration in America (1992), sees that definition as having broadened substantially over time. Cose tells us that from its inception, the US had understood itself to be “a haven to those seeking safety and opportunity” (1992:12). While one could certainly argue that this was true for only some factions, Cose goes on to say that “[I]n trying to live up to that calling, America has repeatedly faced tension between the desire to welcome and the impulse to exclude . . .” (12). He ultimately believes that each moment of fear about “foreign menace” has been followed by a recognition of the overstatement of threat and an increase in both inclusion and the greatness of America. But beyond both Hing and Cose, there is space for multiple (not just two) versions of American identity. These depictions of the US problematize central characteristics of American national identity: Is it, at its core, a nation built upon the culture and logics of Anglo and Protestant ideals, which ultimately compels conformity upon newcomers? Is it a nation of immigrants, built upon the culture and logics of democracy and pluralism, which will continue to celebrate those differences that do not violate the rights and lives of others? Is it some combination of these seemingly polarized ideals, demanding constant work to maintain order in a complex situation? Or is America something else entirely, something other than what the best-known national narratives claim it to be? To answer such questions, the focus here is on the work of the four thinkers mentioned earlier whose ideas have been timely, defiant, and influential: Kallen, Glazer and Moynihan, and Huntington. Their writing also directly connects sociohistorical context to narratives of the nation. Writing in the early part of the twentieth century, Kallen not only reacted against a deeply felt Anglo-Saxonist sentiment, he also offered a new conceptual framework for thinking about the US: cultural pluralism. After the middle of the century Glazer and Moynihan sought to debunk the myth of straight-line assimilation through an in-depth case study of ethnic groups in New York City, a study whose merits are still hotly debated today. And Huntington, an eminent scholar and provocateur writing on these issues in the post-9/11 context, warned of the demise of the original, “true” American identity, particularly in light of high levels of immigration from Latin America. Each case and each moment offers fertile ground to explore the intellectual milieu regarding immigration, assimilation, and national identity, and each also corresponds with intense public conversation about who should be allowed

Immigration, Assimilation, and National Identity  15 to enter the US. The chapters that follow will illuminate the relationship between social context, intellectual work, and the meaning of America. The connection between accounts of immigration, assimilation, and American identity is the very center of this project. Putting three important moments of intellectual debate about assimilation under the microscope will show that multiple ideas of “America” have long been present simultaneously, and also how these ideas are linked to each other in a dialogical process over time. The use of certain language and themes in Huntington’s Who Are We? (2004), for example, could very nearly be in conversation with Kallen back in the 1910s or 1920s, minus the dramatic contrast in terms of the composition of the immigrant population. Linking discourse regarding ways of dealing with the newly arrived internal other to discourse on the building of national identity, and further connecting such ideas across time illustrates how it is that nations and the identities associated with them are renovated. The metaphor of renovation works especially well as it offers significant range of variation. A renovation can be as limited as a partial renaming or as major as gutting a structure of its content and replacing it altogether. Apt indeed for considering nations and their identities.

History and Identity The historical sociological approach utilized here offers a structural and cultural perspective on national identity. American national identity is a dynamic process of construction, maintenance/reproduction, and renovation. In other words, as it is influenced by historical events, social forces, institutional structures, and technological advances, the narratives that constitute American identity are revised, as are the manner and media in which American narratives are told. And it is not only changes in material conditions that affect the meaning of America: changes in both secular and religious philosophies which introduced competing notions of nationhood—for example, Anglo-Saxonism versus liberal cosmopolitanism—also had a real impact, and began to emerge at the turn of the twentieth century (Kaufmann 2004). Ideological innovations and disputes then, which took place within larger debates over immigration and assimilation, have also had an influence on national identity. There is no single version of being American that is dominant throughout the country’s history, though many elements are fairly constant; we can think of these as stable elements of national narratives, the foundations.7 The Revolutionary period demanded the explicit construction of an American identity, although from the start the imaginings were multiple. The French ex-patriot Crevecoeur expressed one of the first literary images of “this new man,” and his drawing of American identity could still inform us today. Crevecoeur’s American was anything but a person with a static image: he was, according to Susan Manning (1998:ix), “polymorphic, protean, assuming and discarding identities to meet the occasion . . .”, in other

16  Immigration, Assimilation, and National Identity words, he was a man with a dynamic sense of identity.8 At approximately the same time, the founders were also formulating models of who the American would be, and they certainly did not all envision the nation and its men (for undoubtedly it was men they were thinking of) in such a flexible manner.9 Benjamin Franklin is well known for his frustration with the influence of Germans (instead of only those of Anglo descent) in Pennsylvania, and Thomas Jefferson viewed the American as the liberal individual yeoman farmer. In the decades and centuries after declaring independence, imagining the American would vary by region alongside fluctuations in immigration and the economy, wars both foreign and domestic, major social movements like civil rights and women’s rights, among other significant changes and events. With each change in the broader social context, the content and meaning of American identity were up for grabs, at least to some degree. At different moments, different social institutions made their move to capture the flag: to construct the dominant image of the American, typically building on themes already in place, i.e., renovating. The historical sociological method offers an avenue for asking and answering questions of how American national identity is constructed and maintained/reproduced over time in the realm of intellectual discourse, as well as when and why new narratives emerged. This is critical in that work in the fields of race, ethnicity, gender, and class has spent much time identifying and illuminating the ongoing nature of construction, but far less has been done with the primary task of unpacking the processual and flexible nature of national identity. The significance of such concepts as construction and reproduction becomes clear when thinking about scholars and pundits today who appeal to xenophobic fears by writing about the destruction of American culture, as if it were a static, monolithic entity. Yes, American society is changing. The overused factoid that by the year 2050 there will be no single racial/ethnic majority is but one clear indicator of that change.10 But American society has changed before, and with each major event or arrival, there have been thinkers who have rung the death knell of “the American way of life” or American culture and others who have hailed the story of immigrant success. To address this issue, attention is paid here to the multiple versions of national identity that have been present from near the beginning. Certain accounts have been dominant during certain periods, but they have not stood entirely alone. The historical structure of this project will help illustrate just which accounts have been available (and to whom), which intellectuals played a role in presenting them, and what factors, both domestic and international, had an impact on them from the founding of the US until the turn of the twenty-first century.

Nation-Construction and the Internal Other Though the topic of American national identity is indeed broad, limiting the focus to the way in which writing on assimilation reveals the ongoing

Immigration, Assimilation, and National Identity  17 process of construction, maintenance/reproduction, and renovation allows useful narrowing. To illustrate the dynamic and flexible nature of national identity will bring the rich literature on nations and nationalism together with that on the construction of other sorts of identity—especially gender, race, class, and ethnicity. This is an important goal in that much current writing on America and Americans bemoans the loss of something that has never existed as it is being described, at least not to the extent some commentators claim. The case of American national identity may indeed be an example of American exceptionalism; unlike many other nations, the US was founded on new territory, physically removed from the deep histories of its European roots. But the presence of a clear beginning—problematized by questions and research on Native Americans—does not mean that American identity has ever been singular or built on a tabula rasa.11 Such an approach follows in the footsteps of others who have recognized the multiplicity of traditions present (e.g., Rogers Smith 1997), and complements that literature by documenting the variability in narratives of American identity as seen through the lens of discourse on assimilation. While certain core values seem omnipresent in competing visions of American identity today—think of freedom, equality, democracy, justice—there has never been a singular, agreed-upon idea of the American, or even agreement on the deep meanings of the aforementioned words. In addition to variation of expressions of national identity within particular periods, understanding variation in “dominant” versions across periods is also pursued, thus addressing the historical sociological question of continuity and change. From the start there have been foundational ideological variations at play, and this process continues on, with new philosophies occasionally entering the field. Both scholarship and political demagoguery that appeal to the fear of losing the American way of life miss the story. It is ongoing construction and renovation that embody the very structure of American national identities, and for that matter, any nation’s identities. To insist upon a stable, monolithic identity is to deny the processual character of such things. Equally, to simply describe the presence of a panoply of cultures and traditions does not take us far in understanding what drives the feeling of primordiality in national identity. There is indeed something that binds people to the nations in which they live. THE BOOK This book is organized historically, looking at three specific moments where scholarly debate on immigration, assimilation and national identity both closely converged and made it out of the ivory tower. These “debates” are analyzed using interpretive discourse analysis and the methods of historical sociology to determine the meaning of such work and to ground it in its specific temporal and spatial context. Thus, engaging in close readings of

18  Immigration, Assimilation, and National Identity the writing of the central figures along with their interlocutors, we can see the way words are used and defined not only by each thinker, but also in relation to others who have mobilized the same words, perhaps with different meanings. Careful attention is also paid to how our cast of characters writes about immigration, and in what context. So, for example, when scholars from the middle of the twentieth century onward use the term “the melting pot,” rather than assuming they intend the precise meaning of Israel Zangwill’s popular 1908 play of that name, their usage needs to be understood as part of a particular conversation assuming particular context and meaning. The most important contextual issue for those writing about assimilation over time has been immigration. There have been, of course, particular issues that drove discussions of incorporation in particular historical moments, and these are addressed accordingly. The chapters that follow map out the sociohistorical milieu of the time and the history of ideas and scholarship on assimilation. Each part of the book includes attention to social structures: immigration, the economy, involvement in international affairs, and social movements. This is followed by readings of the central figures, essays, and books, and the responses to these. The same set of analytic questions is asked regarding Kallen, Glazer and Moynihan, and Huntington: (1) Who or what is the central figure in the debate responding to? (2) Are the questions being posed analytically or prescriptively? (3) How explicit is ideology, and what effect does that have on the broader discourse and the potency of the ideas? and (4) How do these ideas shape future discourse? Part One deals with the turn of the twentieth century and Horace Kallen, whose work at that time introduced us to the notion of cultural pluralism, a term used easily by many and explained well by few. Kallen’s early essays, themselves a response to events and ideas of his day, especially to an atmosphere of rampant nativism, provoked public debate in the periodical press and laid the groundwork for much current theorizing on assimilation and for the lexicon of multiculturalism. The nativism against which Kallen was responding was itself a reaction formation. The period following the Civil War through the First World War was one of massive immigration coupled with a self-congratulatory air, especially in the Northeast. Those entering the US at the time included Irish immigrants, then Germans, Scandinavians, Slavs, “Latins” (those speaking Spanish or Italian), Asians, Poles, Finns, Bohemians, Slovaks, and Jews. In his writing in the 1910s, Kallen introduced the notion of a shared national community wherein people could have likemindedness while maintaining their group identities, which was later characterized as “federation of nationalities” theory, prior to Kallen’s naming it cultural pluralism (Berkson 1920). Culture and Democracy in the United States, originally published in 1924 and reprinted in 1998, offers a compilation of Kallen’s most important essays written between 1914 and 1924, with a focal point being his seminal work on cultural pluralism and Americanization. Any mention of cultural pluralism flows at least in part

Immigration, Assimilation, and National Identity  19 from his work, since prior to his somewhat ambiguous explication, it simply was not part of the vernacular. Kallen’s work is discussed within both its sociohistorical context and his intellectual and professional work. The US was experiencing rapid domestic population growth, and was also expanding its role as an international player. Kallen was a scholar who saw around him, in quarters both academic and popular, a rising tide of nativism. Both kinds of context matter deeply. Following attention to public discourse surrounding the notion of cultural pluralism in the first quarter of the century, there is a significant gap in the years leading up to the next set of thinkers. This pause corresponds to one in the national conversation about assimilation having much to do with American immigration policy at the time, beginning with the highly restrictive national origins law passed in 1924. From then until the 1960s when the law was amended, immigration was slowed dramatically, thereby relieving some, though certainly not all, of the national anxiety about how and/or whether immigrants should be incorporated into American society. This is not to suggest that no interesting work was being done during this period or that no one was concerned about matters of assimilation. Rather, with fewer immigrants and less sense of impending cultural or economic threat, such work, especially that of Gunnar Myrdal and Milton Gordon, though obviously important intellectually, was less provocative in a public way. That would change shortly. Part II is centered on the middle of the twentieth century and Nathan Glazer and Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s famous study, Beyond the Melting Pot, first published in 1963, just prior to the major shift in US immigration policy. There are certainly other studies of assimilation from the 1950s–1970s, but none reached the saturation point—both in and out of the academy—of this one, and perhaps as a result, none provoked the same kind of reaction. The response to and the legacy of Glazer and Moynihan’s now classic rejection of the largely accepted story of melting pot assimilation and Anglo-conformist notions sheds light on various conceptions of the meaning of America as it was understood at the time. This major jolt in the accepted thinking, which continues to evoke dispute today, initiated conversations about what America is all about. By focusing on the experience of ethnic groups in New York City, home to two of the very locations most closely associated with immigration to the US, the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island, Glazer and Moynihan struck a nerve. The first edition of Beyond the Melting Pot was published just before immigration laws were relaxed; seven years later an updated second edition was released, and it is that version which most people read today.12 As with Kallen, Glazer and Moynihan’s work is embedded within the historical and intellectual structures of its time. Their ultimate rejection of their own initial account of which factor impeded “melting”—namely religion—in favor of the increasingly public and contentious issue of race was absolutely “of the moment” at the end of the turbulent 1960s.

20  Immigration, Assimilation, and National Identity Forty years down the road, many of the concerns that animated Glazer and Moynihan’s book remain significant issues in the US. Concerns about immigration and assimilation abound, as America continues to absorb—whether well or willingly—millions of immigrants. Part Three turns to Samuel Huntington, the prominent Harvard professor of government and area studies, and his book Who Are We?, published in 2004. This book and the grave concerns it detailed about the potential decline of America, and especially what he saw as the deterioration of Anglo-Protestant hegemony, builds on themes from earlier in his career, but also strikes out as a particularly polemical work. By contextualizing this thesis in the post-9/11, high Latin-immigration 2000s, intriguing comparisons take us back to the era when Kallen was writing. Kallen of course took the “other” position, arguing against the Americanist logic at play in his time, but the similarity of rhetoric between the two periods is remarkable. Given that Huntington’s book is much more recent and deals with contemporary issues, the vast number of reviews of the book, particularly those written by other significant scholars, are used to crystallize debates about assimilation and national identity in the 2000s. Reviewers and columnists offer a clearer picture of current meanings attached to immigration, assimilation, and American identity. Huntington’s intellectual legacy regarding assimilation remains in question, but his work certainly reveals the importance of explicitly re-establishing the connection between ideas about incorporating newcomers and the ways in which the meaning of America is built and renovated. NOTES   1 Many readers will be familiar with experiences, either our own or those of others, of feeling “more American” than ever upon traveling abroad. This is relevant not only as an illustration of the existence of some real sense of national identity, but is also an illustration of the importance of the function of boundaries: we feel most ourselves when we are confronted by those who hold different kinds of identities, those who are “other” (see Fredrik Barth (1969); Peter Sahlins (1989); and Daphne Berdahl (1999) for wonderful examples of the centrality of boundaries in identity formation). Additionally, it is important to understand that the national identity felt when in contact with non-Americans may well be different than that felt when surrounded by other Americans. Even so, focus on immigration and assimilation will illustrate the point that internal “others” also serve the function of helping to define national identities.  2 Certainly other scholars have examined cultural forms of nations, often using a framework of ethnic nationhood (e.g., Anthony Smith, Walker Connor). The contribution here has primarily to do with the construction and reproduction of national identity and the plurality of American identities. I also make explicit the link between elite discourse regarding immigration and assimilation and American identity.   3 Huntington is characterized as having re-entered the conversation because in 1981 he published American Politics: The Promise of Disharmony, a monograph dealing explicitly with American identity.  4 By and large, the focus of literature on assimilation is immigrants, not native-born minorities. As a result of this, the focus of this study is, likewise,

Immigration, Assimilation, and National Identity  21 on newcomers as opposed to marginalized groups already present in the US. A consequence of this is that the conversation about national identity that results serves only to further marginalize minority groups as they are left out of discussions about assimilation except as negative destinations toward which immigrants might move. Ultimately, it is African Americans and Native Americans who suffer most as a result of this process of identity construction, as their history in the US leaves them in a liminal position as neither natives nor immigrants.   5 The kind of differentiation being addressed in this research is not the same as that addressed by scholars who describe the way in which whiteness is defined in large part as being other than black. What is of concern here is differentiation at the level of national identification processes, not racial or ethnic identification.   6 Again, it is important to note that little of this discourse directly addresses African Americans, a significant omission and really a problem for the field. This is an area of concern that lies beyond the scope of this work, but which in and of itself tells us something remarkable about the lack of inclusion of what was, until very recently, the largest minority group in the US. If blacks are not even discussed as assimilable, how can members of that group possibly feel part of any American society?   7 It is important to be clear on this: though certain characteristics of dominant versions of American identity appear relatively unchanged over time, one of the driving questions of this study is to locate and discuss variation and alternatives. So while “the American” has long been seen—both visually and otherwise—as Anglo-Protestant and most often male, one of the things that becomes apparent is the existence of alternative national identities that are more inclusive. Race remains a major bone of contention for many Americans in their national self-understandings, and the lack of attention to it in discourse on assimilation is striking. Within this study, both constancy and variation will be examined. The maintenance of foundations can be understood not only as a purely racial phenomenon, but alternatively as a kind of “leading minorities” circumstance whereby small groups preserve power and authority in a democracy (Sartori 1997 [1987]:168–170). In this kind of framework, having a class of elites acting as decision-makers and power-bearers is seen by elite theorists as not a bad thing for democracies, and as more realistic than “semi-utopian democratic and Marxian” alternatives (Field et al. 1997 [1990]:175). The relationship of such elite theory to the larger questions of this study is found in the issue of priority of national narratives, whereby particular groups, namely elite, white, Anglo-Saxon Protestants, claim that their ideologies and authority are the nation’s original, and therefore should continue to prevail.  8 See Crevecoeur, Letters from an American Farmer, Oxford World’s Classics edition, 1998, for a discussion of the “mutable” nature of Crevecoeur’s American, especially pp. xiii-xv.  9 For examples of the founders’ work on American identity, see Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography and Thomas Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia and The Papers of Thomas Jefferson. See Kaufmann on Jefferson for certain inconsistencies (2004:41). 10 The fact that a statistic regarding changes in the ethnic/racial makeup of the country is often used to demonstrate the “challenge” facing America is indicative of the continuing significance of that factor. Race is an issue that will most assuredly present itself repeatedly in the history of American identity, and that continues to do so in the contemporary period. 11 See Liah Greenfeld (1992) on the English inheritance present in American identity, at least at the time of inception.

22  Immigration, Assimilation, and National Identity 12 This is not at all an insignificant fact. The introduction to the 1970 edition took Glazer and Moynihan to a much more “conservative” place, and as is discussed in Chapter 6, may well have played a major role in shaping the legacy of Beyond the Melting Pot.

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24  Immigration, Assimilation, and National Identity Gorer, Geoffrey. 1964 (1948). The American People: A Study in National Character. New York: W. W. Norton & Company. Gossett, Thomas Jr. 1997. Race: The History of an Idea in America (2nd ed.). New York: Oxford University Press. Grant, Madison. 1918 (1916). The Passing of the Great Race, or the Racial Basis of European History. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons. Grant, Susan-Mary. 2000. North Over South: Northern Nationalism and American Identity in the Antebellum Era. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas. Greenfeld, Liah. 1992. Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Guterl, Matthew Pratt. 2002. The Color of Race in America, 1900–1940. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Handlin, Oscar. 1951. The Uprooted: The Epic Story of the Great Migrations That Made the American People. New York: Grosset & Dunlap. Hansen, Marcus Lee. 1941 (1938). The Atlantic Migration, 1607–1860: A History of the Continuing Settlement of the United States. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Hansen, Marcus Lee. 1940. The Immigrant in American History. Edited by Arthur M. Schlesinger. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Harrington, Michael. 1962. The Other America: Poverty in the United States. New York: Macmillan. Hastings, Adrian (1997) The Construction of Nationhood: Ethnicity, Religion, and Nationalism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hennessy, Bernard C. 1962–1963. “Psycho-Cultural Studies of National Character: Relevances for International Relations.” Background 6(1–3): 27–49. Higham, John. 1984 (1975). Send These to Me: Immigrants in Urban America (Rev. ed.). Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Hill, Mike. 2004. After Whiteness: Unmaking an American Majority. New York: New York University Press. Hing, Bill Ong. 2004. Defining America through Immigration Policy. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Hobsbawm, E. J. 2000 (1990). Nations and Nationalism since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hobsbawm, Eric and Terence Ranger. 2000 (1983). The Invention of Tradition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hollinger, David A. 1995. Postethnic America: Beyond Multiculturalism. New York: Basic Books. Hosking, Geoffrey and George Schopflin. 1997. Myths and Nationhood. New York: Routledge. Hunter, James Davison. 2000. The Death of Character: Moral Education in an Age without Good or Evil. New York: Basic Books. Hunter, James Davison. 1991. Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America. New York: Basic Books. Huntington, Samuel P. 2004. Who Are We? The Challenge to America’s National Identity. New York: Simon & Schuster. Huntington, Samuel P. 1981. American Politics: The Promise of Disharmony. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Jefferson, Thomas. 2004. The Papers of Thomas Jefferson. Edited by J. Jefferson Looney. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Jefferson, Thomas. 1995. Notes on the State of Virginia. Edited by William Peden. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Kallen, Horace M. 1915. “Democracy Versus the Melting-Pot.” The Nation. February 18 and 25.

Immigration, Assimilation, and National Identity  25 Kallen, Horace M. 1998 (1924). Culture and Democracy in the United States. New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers. Kaufmann, Eric P. 2004. The Rise and Fall of Anglo-America. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Kohn, Hans. 1957. American Nationalism: An Interpretive Essay. New York: The Macmillan Company. Kumar, Krishan. 2003. The Making of English National Identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lawson, Melinda. 2002. Patriot Fires: Forging a New American Nationalism in the Civil War North. Lawrence: University of Kansas Press. Levinson, Sanford. 1988. Constitutional Faith. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Lieberson, Stanley. 1963. Ethnic Patterns in American Cities. New York: Free Press of Glencoe. Lieberson, Stanley. 1961. “A Societal Theory of Race and Ethnic Relations.” American Sociological Review 26(i6): 902–910. Lieven, Anatol. 2004. America Right or Wrong: An Anatomy of American Nationalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lind, Michael. 1995. The Next American Nation: The New Nationalism and the Fourth American Revolution. New York: Simon & Schuster. Lipset, Seymour Martin. 1967. The First New Nation: The United States in Historical and Comparative Perspective. Garden City: Doubleday. Luhman, Reid. 2002. Race and Ethnicity in the United States: Our Differences and Our Roots. Houston: Harcourt College Publishers. Manning, Susan. 1998 (1782). Preface to Letters from an American Farmer. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Massey, Douglas S. 1999 (1995). “The New Immigration and Ethnicity in the US” in Majority and Minority. Edited by N. R. Yetman. Boston: Allyn and Bacon. Massey, Douglas S. and Nancy A. Denton. 1993. American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. McClay, Wilfred M. 1994. The Masterless: Self and Society in Modern America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. McCrone, David and Richard Kiely. 2000. “Nationalism and Citizenship.” Sociology 34(1): 19–34. Meier, August and John H. Bracey, Jr. 1993. “The NAACP as a Reform Movement, 1909–1965: ‘To Reach the Conscience of America.’ ” The Journal of Southern History 59(1): 3–30. Menand, Louis. 2001. The Metaphysical Club. New York: Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux. Morgan, Edmund S. 1988. Inventing the People: The Rise of Popular Sovereignty in England and America. New York: W. W. Norton & Company. Morris, Pam. 1997. The Bakhtin Reader: Selected writings of Bakhtin, Medvdev and Voloshinov. London: Edward Arnold. Myrdal, Gunnar. 2002 (1944). An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy, Volume I. New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers. Nagel, Joane. 1994. “Constructing Ethnicity: Creating and Recreating Ethnic Identity and Culture.” Social Problems 41: 152–176. Nagel, Joane. 1996. American Indian Ethnic Renewal: Red Power and Resurgence of Identity and Culture. New York: Oxford University Press. Noll, Mark A. 1990. Religion and American Politics: From the Colonial Period to the 1980s (edited volume). New York: Oxford University Press. Olick, Jeffrey K. 2005. In the House of the Hangman: The Agonies of German Defeat, 1943–1949. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

26  Immigration, Assimilation, and National Identity Park, Robert Ezra. 1950. Race and Culture.Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press. Park, Robert Ezra. 1925. The City. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Paschal, Andrew (ed.). 1993. A W.E.B. Du Bois Reader. New York: Collier Books. Portes, Alejandro, Luis Eduardo Guarnizo, and Patricia Landolt. 1999. “The Study of Transnationalism: Pitfalls and Promise of an Emergent Research Field.” Ethnic and Racial Studies 22(2): 217–237. Portes, Alejandro and Min Zhou. 1993. “The New Second Generation: Segmented Assimilation and Its Variants” in Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, Vol. 530, Interminority Affairs in the U.S.: Pluralism at the Crossroads (Nov., 1993). Proctor, Robert. 1988. Racial Hygiene: Medicine under the Nazis. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Putnam, Robert D. 2000. Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community. New York: Simon & Schuster. Ravitch, Diane. 1974. The Great School Wars, New York City, 1805–1973; a history of the public schools as battlefield of social change. New York: Basic Books. Riesman, David. 1953. The Lonely Crowd: A Study of the Changing American Character. Garden City, NY: Doubleday. Ross, Edward Alsworth. 1914. The Old World in the New: The Significance of Past and Present Immigration to the American People. New York: The Century Company. Rubin, Anne Sarah. 2005. A Shattered Nation: The Rise and Fall of the Confederacy, 1861–1868. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press. Sahlins, Peter. 1989. Boundaries: The Making of France and Spain in the Pyrenees. Berkeley: University of California Press. Sartori, Giovanni. 1997 (1987). “Democratic Government by Leading Minorities, Responsiveness, and Responsibility” in Classes & Elites in Democracy and Democratization: A  Collection of Readings. Edited by Eva Etzioni-Halevy. New York: Garland Publishing. Shore, Cris. 2000. Building Europe: The Cultural Politics of European Integration. London: Routledge. Smith, Anthony D. 1986. The Ethnic Origins of Nations. Oxford: Blackwell. Smith, Anthony D. 1998. Nationalism and Modernism. London: Routledge. Smith, Rogers M. 1997. Civic Ideals: Conflicting Visions of Citizenship in US History. New Haven: Yale University Press. Smith, Rogers M. 1993. “Beyond Tocqueville, Myrdal, and Hartz: The Multiple Traditions in America.” American Political Science Review 87(3): 549–566. Smith, Rogers M. 1988. “The ‘American Creed’ and American Identity: The Limits of Liberal Citizenship in the United States.” Western Political Quarterly 41(2): 225–251. Spillman, Lynette P. 1997. Nation and Commemoration: Creating National Identities in the United States and Australia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. St. John de Crevecoeur, J. Hector. 1997 (1782). Letters from an American Farmer. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Steele, Shelby. 1990. The Content of Our Character: A New Vision of Race in America. New York: Harper Perennial. Steinberg, Stephen. 1989 (1981). The Ethnic Myth: Race, Ethnicity, and Class in America. Boston: Beacon Press. Takaki, Ronald. 1993. A Different Mirror: A History of Multicultural America. New York: Little, Brown and Company. Tocqueville, Alexis de. 2003 (1835). Democracy in America. New York: Penguin Classics. Vickerman, Milton. 1999. Crosscurrents: West Indian Immigrants and Race. New York: Oxford University Press.

Immigration, Assimilation, and National Identity  27 Wacker, R. Fred. (1983). Ethnicity, Pluralism, and Race: Race Relations Theory in America before Myrdal. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press. Walzer, Michael. 1983. Spheres of Justice: A Defense of Pluralism and Equality. USA: Basic Books. Walzer, Michael. 1996. What It Means to Be an American: Essays on the American Experience. New York: Marsilio. Waters, Mary, Reed Ueda, and Helen B. Marrow. 2007. The New Americans: A Guide to Immigration since 1965. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Waters, Mary. 2001. Black Identities: West Indian Immigrant Dreams and American Realities. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Waters, Mary. 1990. Ethnic Options: Choosing Identities in America. Berkeley: University of California Press. Weber, Eugen Joseph. 1976. Peasants into Frenchmen: The Modernization of Rural France, 1870–1914. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Weber, Max. 1996. “The Origins of Ethnic Groups” in Ethnicity. Edited by J. Hutchinson and A. Smith. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Originally published in 1978 in Economy and Society. Wilson, William Julius. 1996. When Work Disappears: The World of the New Urban Poor. New York: Vintage Books. Wilson, William Julius. 1980. The Declining Significance of Race. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Yetman, Norman R. 1999. Majority and Minority. Boston: Allyn and Bacon. Zangwill, Israel. 1915 (1909). The Melting Pot Drama in Four Acts. New York: Macmillan Company.

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Part I

Horace Kallen and a New Narrative, 1905–1925

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2 Mass Immigration, Prelude to War, and Narratives of the Nation

In the early years of the twentieth century, the United States was experiencing social change at a rapid pace and to a dramatic degree. Immigrants speaking Slavic and Mediterranean languages, practicing Judaism and Catholicism, and appearing racially distinct were filling out swiftly growing American cities. The quickly changing industrial structure led to shifts in where and how people lived and worked. Academic science put forward a theory of racial hierarchy that aligned with chauvinistic feelings of prejudice and uncertainty being expressed by so-called “natives.” In addition, there was the First World War and America’s changing role in international affairs. During this period, one of the major issues being debated was how to manage the arrival of immigrants. Should the country continue to allow so much immigration? Should immigrants be assimilated? Could they? And if so, how? And to what? The strategies and theories that emerged to address these questions were shaped substantially by social and economic changes, the geopolitical events of the day, and by ideas already “in the air.” These strategies and theories were not only commentary on newly arrived immigrants, but were also statements of American national identity. The accounts put forward were one location where people in the early twentieth-century United States could find a narrative with which they identified in terms of their individual feelings about immigration and assimilation, and the way these issues related to the nation. These statements were stories of national identity. Examining the discourse—not just each account independently, but how they relate to each other—reveals how intellectuals in the 1910s and early 1920s were offering competing visions of America, all in their rhetoric about immigration and assimilation. Horace Kallen was a central figure in philosophical and intellectual debate about assimilation in the early years of the twentieth century, known especially for his two-part essay “Democracy Versus the Melting-Pot,” published in The Nation in 1915. Kallen’s argument for ethnic pluralism, or a “federation of nationalities” (Berkson 1920), challenged not only the powerful conservative, xenophobic language of nativists, but also the liberal, universalist language of melting pot assimilationists, which was strong but contested at the time (Gleason 1980). While Kallen’s perspective did not lead

32  Horace Kallen and a New Narrative, 1905–1925 directly to a social movement in the same way his interlocutors’ propositions did—restrictionism and Americanization in their varying forms—his perspective represents the seeding of a major idea that eventually yields today’s multiculturalism.1 His articulation of an America based on the rights of groups (in addition to individuals) was pivotal in the intellectual discourse on assimilation, and has been largely underappreciated in the sociological literature.2 Sociohistorical context is critical in developing a framework for mapping out narratives of American identity from 1915–2005. This chapter examines those social and historical factors that would have impacted intellectual debates about assimilation. From there, the investigation moves to the rhetoric of both nativist and melting pot theorists whose work preceded Kallen’s essay, and to whom he directed his remarks. Careful analysis illuminates the ways in which work by these thinkers enlivened particular visions of American identity, and also the ways in which their prescriptions were similar and different, sometimes in unexpected ways. In the following chapter, with the context established, a close reading of Kallen’s arguments completes the puzzle, and points to the America his thinking evokes. AMERICA: 1900–1920 To create a better understanding of the social environment in which these conversations were taking place and to begin offering an account of the structural factors that might play a role in thinking about assimilation and the nation over the course of the twentieth century, four elements of American history from 1900–1920 are examined as they relate to the topic at hand: (1) immigration, (2) wars and other significant foreign affairs, (3) the economy, and (4) important social movements of the day. The meaning of American national identity underwent noteworthy modifications during the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries, and the social forces at play help reveal that process.

Immigration In looking at the relationship between immigration and the construction of the meaning of America, Bill Ong Hing (2004), a legal scholar of immigration, takes us back to the earliest moments of the country’s history. In setting up a dualistic framework between nativism and an open door, Hing ponders the thoughts of two of the young nation-state’s “founding fathers,” Benjamin Franklin, noted for disdaining the influx of foreigners and especially Germans, and George Washington, remembered for his vision of America as sanctuary. Hing asks: So which sentiment would guide America: Franklin’s disgust for the ‘most stupid of their own nation,’ or the open arms of Washington and Lazarus [Emma, poet of verse on the Statue of Liberty] to the poor and

Mass Immigration, Prelude to War, and Narratives of the Nation  33 oppressed? The contrast is emblematic of the debate on immigration and immigrants that has been a constant part of the American psyche since the nascent stages of the country. Refugees, immigrants, and their advocates have come to rely on the rhetorical examples of Washington and Lazarus. But this sentimental language is not part of the Constitution. Its force may be moral, but its sentiment remains absent from the language of our laws. (2004:8) It is evident, then, that from its beginnings the US has had, at the very least, a bifurcated view of immigration. This divide, as represented by Franklin’s hostility and Washington’s embrace, has fueled a debate that continued through the Civil War and remains unresolved still in the twenty-first century. Following the Civil War, the United States turned its attention to Reconstruction and the growth of its industrial economy. Initially, immigrants were seen as an important part of this economic shift as they entered the new labor force (Gleason 1980:38). Around the turn of the century, immigration was expanding and changing, and popular sentiment towards new arrivals began to sour (Gleason 1980; Yetman 1999). Although immigration hit an all-time high between 1881 and 1890 with more than 5.2 million newcomers, it decreased by over 1.5 million in the following decade, offering a brief respite. Then, in the first ten years of the twentieth century, the number of immigrants more than doubled from the previous decade to nearly 8.8 million, with a single-year peak in 1907 of over 1.2 million (Yetman 1999:569). The rising rates of immigration were coupled with a changing face. Where earlier waves of immigrants had come primarily from Northern and Western Europe, this new wave was making the journey from Southern and Eastern Europe, bringing new languages, cultures, religions, and appearances to the US (Higham 1984:43; Luhman 2002:178). The huge numbers and visible differences of this new immigration led to a great deal of hostility and insecurity among many “natives,” and to significant concerns about how the nation-state should deal with newcomers.3 A three-year study commissioned by the Congress, begun in 1907 and published in 1910–11, concluded that the new immigrants were racially different and genetically inferior to those already present, and that the government should “strongly consider restricting immigration” (Luhman 2002:185). This response, part of a broader cultural reaction called nativism, emerged alongside a very different one, perhaps best illustrated by the famous metaphor of the melting pot, which was coined (or at least made popularly known) right around this same time. While nativists believed that uncontrolled immigration was sure to be a detriment to American society and wished to restrict future immigration, those promulgating melting pot ideologies tended to believe that newcomers were a source of vitality and strength for the nation. By and large, those who supported the presence of immigrants were in favor of full inclusion, such that all Americans, old and new, would ultimately blend together. Many variations of nativism and

34  Horace Kallen and a New Narrative, 1905–1925 many different melting pot narratives existed, but the underlying distinction between the two was a desire for immigration restriction for the former and an open door for the latter. With the coming of the Great War, and particularly America’s involvement, restrictionism flourished. Theodore Roosevelt pushed for a campaign of “100 percent Americanism,” which the more liberal Woodrow Wilson also accepted (Hing 2004). At the time, the issue of hyphenation was paramount and was seen by many as akin to treason. The war especially led to charges of disloyalty targeting German-Americans. Slogans like the “New Nationalism” and “America for Americans” gained prominence (Hing 2004:54). Immigration, then, was seen as hugely problematic, while nationalism was de rigueur. For those who opposed immigration, the war did the job of grinding things to a halt, if only for a short time. The Red Scare of 1919–1920 also reinforced the nationalist fervor and the exclusionary rhetoric and practices already in place. All of this anxiety about immigration culminated in the passage of the 1921 Quota Law, which was a temporary measure introducing strict quotas based on the population of the US in 1910. This legislation was designed to drastically limit immigration from southern and eastern Europe, but would expire in 1924. In that year, the same year, in fact, that Kallen’s “Democracy Versus the Melting-Pot” was published for a second time, the restrictionists won out with a more enduring measure. The passage of the National Origins Quota Act (the Immigration Act of 1924) served as a major victory for nativists, and for all those who wished to maintain a predominantly Anglo-Saxon racial and cultural status quo (Higham 1988). The law was passed nearly unanimously; only six senators dissented (Hing 2004). This law diminished the number of European immigrants even more radically than its temporary predecessor, and banned outright Japanese immigration, thereby effectively ending Asian immigration for the next forty years. The quotas mandated in 1924 were based on 1890 population figures which preceded the growth of immigration from southern and eastern Europe, thereby cutting the potential numbers of immigrants from that part of the world down dramatically (Hing 2004:68). Though the actual implementation of the law—known as the Johnson-Reed Act—did not take place until 1929 due to postponements, its passage in 1924 was a critical moment in American immigration history, and also in the history of assimilation (Higham 1988). The years leading up to the publication of Kallen’s essay, then, were rife with discussion about how the United States should deal with its new and different immigrant population, and what it should do about those still coming. Philip Gleason, the distinguished scholar of American ethnic history, indicated in his seminal 1980 essay that this period signaled a qualitative shift in the language of American national identity. The shift was one away from religion—whereby those not Protestant fell outside the bounds of what was meant by “America”—toward ethnicity or culture, what was

Mass Immigration, Prelude to War, and Narratives of the Nation  35 typically called race in the early part of the twentieth century. Gleason saw, in that transferal of emphasis, a lasting legacy whereby “ . . . several of the terms in which subsequent discussion of ethnicity and national identity has been carried on emerged in this era” (1980:38). The reaction to this second wave played a significant role in shifting the basis of discourse about and narratives of American identity, all visible within the intellectual conversations taking place on the subject of immigration and assimilation. More recently, Eric Kaufmann (2004) describes the decades leading up to mid-century as marking a shift from an ethno-national America to a liberal-egalitarian America, a different way of thinking about national narratives. Whichever mapping one finds convincing, it is clear that the 1910s and 1920s were a critical moment in the construction of American identity, and immigration was a critical lens for seeing how this identity was understood. What neither of these beautifully conceived mappings emphasizes is the multiplicity of national stories, which also deserves attention.

Wars and Foreign Affairs A consideration of the period leading up to US engagement in World War I offers an excellent primer on the potential relationship between immigration and foreign affairs. For newly American European immigrants, there was a great deal of tension regarding their ties with their home countries and those with their newly adopted one (Gleason 1980). For natives there was increased aggravation at the potential for mixed allegiances, and especially at the prospective voice immigrants might have in whether or not the US entered the war. One particular example does much to illuminate this linkage of foreign conflict and domestic policy. The Congressional commission report published in 1910–11 included a recommendation for a literacy test as a means of restricting unwanted immigration (Higham 1984 [1975]). Between 1911 and 1917, a bill including this proposal was routinely put before the Congress and either rejected, or passed and later vetoed by Presidents Taft and then Wilson, who made arguments on the basis of economic need and cosmopolitan idealism, respectively. In even years (voting years), elected officials tended to play down the issue for fear of damaging their position with ethnic voters. But once it became clear that the country would indeed engage in the European war, sentiment was finally strong enough to push through restrictionist legislation over a presidential veto in 1917 (Higham 1984:52). This bill included a literacy test, a virtual ban on all Asian immigration, and an exclusionary clause forbidding entry to members of radical groups and permitting deportation of foreigners who took on radical positions. As John Higham noted in Send These to Me: Though the whole law grew out of prewar trends, the First World War created the extra margin of support that carried it past a veto. And

36  Horace Kallen and a New Narrative, 1905–1925 before long, the war generated a climate of opinion that made these restrictions seem perilously inadequate. Although the war temporarily deferred further action by interrupting migration automatically, the European holocaust unleashed the forces that brought immigration restriction to its historic culmination. (1984:53) There is no denying the relationship between engagement in foreign affairs and domestic dealings with immigration, and this in turn would have direct impacts on both the composition and meaning of the nation. What this suggests is that not only did the war lead to the passage of anti-immigration legislation, it fostered a climate that demanded more such action. German Americans were often seen as the enemy, and were subject to prejudice that occasionally rose to the level of mob violence. Anti-Semitism reached an apex in the late 1910s and early 1920s, amid more general hostility to any who did not meet the criteria for being part of the WASPish hetero-patriarchy (Schultz 2011). This anti-foreign sentiment was crystallized in a story from Georgia: a Northern, Jewish factory manager, Leo Frank, was found guilty of the murder of a young girl based upon evidence offered by a black night watchman. After the governor ruled against execution, Frank was lynched and left hanged in the woods (see Dinnerstein 1968, The Leo Frank Case for more; Higham 1984:153–4). In this instance, the hatred of the foreigner eclipsed even the mistrust and loathing of blacks in the South. The kind of fear that drove this highly unusual event (lynching a Jew), also motivated far more mundane activity aimed at lowering rates of immigration and limiting the rights of those already present. Higham made a crucial point regarding the connection between war and pluralism. In regard to the fact that pluralist perspectives such as that put forward by Kallen were not taken up in the 1910s and 1920s, Higham argued that such a movement was essentially impossible with the rampant anti-immigrant sentiment of the day. He said: Ethnic hatred reached an all-time high in the riots, hysterias, and proscriptions that accompanied and immediately followed the First World War. This 100 percent Americanism—an indiscriminate rejection of all deviant groups—would have to subside before a pluralist America could seem a real possibility. The great leap forward in assimilation, which followed the enactment in 1924 of a permanent immigration restriction law, would have to get well under way before the desirability of complete assimilation could be widely questioned. (1984:213–4) In other words, until the immediate “threat” of unencumbered immigration was removed, the idea of recognizing the various groups who had entered and seeing what they offered the country as a benefit rather than a problem was unworkable. At the same time the idea that assimilation could be harmful or coercive was also unable to gain traction. The nativist hysteria

Mass Immigration, Prelude to War, and Narratives of the Nation  37 that accompanied the war utterly prevented a new American narrative like Kallen’s from taking root and thriving.

The Economy Following the Civil War, the US experienced a period of major industrial and economic growth and increasingly adopted an attitude and image of “whatever is good for business goes.” This success in economics led Americans to essentialize the human qualities that led to such achievements, with “natives” assuming that this economic strength was derived from particular group characteristics, namely those associated with white Anglo-Saxon Protestants. As such, a passive racialism developed toward whites not of Anglo-Saxon ancestry. Simultaneously, the pro-immigration stance of many businesses that desired cheap labor became a significant rallying cry for nativists who worried over lost jobs and declining quality of life for “Americans,” and labor battles ensued. Along with the passive racialism taking place in the economic sector and the rise in labor disputes, an active scientific racialism was being promoted within academia. A science of the racial superiority of Anglo-Saxons, which culminated intellectually in eugenics and eventually politically in Nazi Germany, provided “legitimate” support for those feeling threatened by newcomers. This combination was a powerful one as regards thinking about and action towards immigration and assimilation. Dehumanization has often had terrible, even deadly consequences. The very same Congressional commission report that argued for restriction and literacy testing made its case, at least in part, by arguing that immigrants were bad for the American economy (Higham 1984:44–5). The report compared simultaneous snapshots of northwestern and southeastern European immigrants in the first decade of the twentieth century and found the latter lacking in all basic skills and likely to leave the US to return to their countries of origin, ostensibly taking American money, their money, with them. What was left out was any comparison of duration of residence between the two waves of immigrants, which largely coincided with their origins. Restrictionist groups argued that the new immigration was highly correlated with the growth of slums, a rise in crime, and increased disease and insanity. In one case Pennsylvania coal miners argued that the presence of the new, “degraded” immigrants kept wages low and conditions poor (Higham 1984:45). Higham explained that “[e]conomists and a growing number of labor leaders generalized the argument into a plea for saving ‘the American standard of living’ ” (1984:45). What all of these lines of reasoning were meant to show is that whatever negative changes in the economy existed—real, imagined, or otherwise—these lie at the feet of immigrants, structural factors be damned. During the early decades of the twentieth century, the divide between “natives” and immigrants played out in many ways, one of which was the starker and more obvious distinction between rural town life and life in

38  Horace Kallen and a New Narrative, 1905–1925 the rapidly expanding urban centers (Higham 1984:48–9). The prosperity that fueled the 1910s–1920s was not distributed evenly, and farmers in particular did not feel the gains. This led many rural Americans, especially in the wake of WWI, to join groups like the Ku Klux Klan which offered a sense of community and ritual that was receding as industrialization and urban centers expanded their reach (Ayers et al. 2005). Such exclusivist social groups played a role in the anti-immigration movement, since they explicitly blamed the new arrivals for destroying the traditional patterns and composition of society. In more classic economic terms, the tensions between natives and immigrants (and those supporting immigrants) played out in a battle waged between labor leaders who worked on behalf of the threatened American workers and capitalists who remained pro-immigration in line with their growing profits. The business lobby was more powerful in terms of legislative influence, further agitating both the native labor movement and rural Americans in general. Higham has argued that in this period, “the strains of a largely unregulated industrial capitalism produced more insecurity than most people could tolerate . . . ” and that, together with biological racialism and powerful ethnocentrism, led to the feeling among many that all social problems were ultimately caused by the “others” in their midst (1984:165). By the 1920s, the economy was increasingly stable, and that, combined with new immigration restrictions, led to a more general feeling of the nation being at ease (Higham 1984:109). The short-lived postwar recession faded into memory as the economy reached prewar levels by 1922 (Ayers et al 2005). Over the next seven years, America experienced economic growth at levels previously unseen, and the “roaring twenties” made their place in history.

Social Movements Until Warren G. Harding was elected president in 1920, Progressivism was the most significant social movement of the young century. What may be broadly described as the progressive movement was actually a cluster of social movements with the common goal being to improve conditions for workers, consumers, families, and individuals through government action. A driving assumption of this movement was that humanity could be perfected, that new industrial societies, while prosperous and optimistic, required intervention to raise the conditions of life to some minimum level, and that it was the obligation of the government to do all it could to reach that goal (Ayers et al. 2005:612). Perhaps the most relevant “Progressive” movement was Americanization, a program of more or less rapid assimilation of all immigrants. Like the broader movement, there were variations on exactly what needed to be accomplished and how it should be done, but the general principle was the need for immigrants to become incorporated into a particular kind of

Mass Immigration, Prelude to War, and Narratives of the Nation  39 America and for the government to play a role in that process. Movements for social change, like immigration, the war, and the economy, provide crucial context for understanding the debates about assimilation and the nation. The Progressive movement had many fronts, including increased governmental regulation in business and inter-state commerce; a strong emphasis on direct, less partisan democracy; a focus on social order (e.g., prohibition); an eye to exposing corrupt public figures (“muckraking”); reform efforts to improve the conditions of urban dwellers (including but not limited to the settlement house movement); and women’s suffrage. One unsurprising product of having so many aims was that at times the different sub-movements were at odds. For example, social order progressives like Edward Alsworth Ross advocated immigration restriction and were often virulently anti-immigrant (see The Old World in the New, 1914), while those involved with the settlement house movement, Jane Addams for instance, were assimilationist and spent their careers seeking to welcome and improve conditions for newcomers and other urban dwellers. One typical argument against immigration was somewhat predictable: if industry was in favor of immigration for the cheap labor it provided, than progressivism should be against immigration to protect those already working in the US (Ayers et al 2005:635). Overall, the Progressive movement reached its peak in the early 1910s, with key moments visible in the women’s suffrage movement, the passage of prohibitionist measures, and the beginnings of a strong restrictionist movement in newly proposed legislation (Ayers et al 2005:633–4). Another important social movement, arguably falling under the umbrella of Progressivism, was that for racial equality led by W. E. B. Du Bois. Du Bois’s assault on Booker T. Washington’s acceptance of black subordination and racial segregation formed the foundation of what would become the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (Meier and Bracey 1993; Ayers et al. 2005:606). The original goal of the NAACP at the time of its founding in 1909 was to achieve the full rights granted by the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments of the Constitution. Underlying this objective were the same beliefs that drove the rest of the Progressive movement, broadly speaking: “The Association’s belief in investigation and exposure and in the importance of laws and of the state as a guarantor of social order, its faith in the assimilability of minority groups, its belief in the progress and the essential rationality of human behavior . . .” (Meier and Bracey 1993:6). The institutionalization of the NAACP indicates that despite the early decades of the twentieth century being a period of rampant racism and nativism—and these sentiments ran all the way up to President Roosevelt himself (Meier and Bracey 1993)—at least one significant national organization was attempting to extend the logic of both social order and social welfare to include those outside the dominant group. At least one national organization was applying the logic of progressivism to the assimilation of all non-whites.

40  Horace Kallen and a New Narrative, 1905–1925 The internal contradictions of the Progressive movement pointed out above, that is, where nativist-restrictionists and assimilatory social welfare thinkers simply would not have agreed, reflected an intellectual confusion at the heart of the movement, which the NAACP attempted to resolve. For all progressives, the overarching goal was the betterment of society through government action. The questions that for most progressive groups were answered only implicitly, however, were: what was meant by “better,” and who constitutes “society”? The NAACP seemed to offer answers that were inclusive, yet still concerned with an orderly society.4 The other critical social movement related to progressivism was Americanization. Americanization was not a new program in the first two decades of the twentieth century, but it had changed from its earlier forms. Philip Gleason, whose essay “American Identity and Americanization” (1980) is a touchstone on the topic, describes a social movement that had become more structured than its antebellum forebear, and structured with a more particular agenda. That is, while immediately following the Civil War the term Americanization could have been taken to represent a fairly wide range of options, from forcible assimilation to accommodation and coexistence, by the turn of the century, declining confidence in the ability of America to incorporate its newcomers successfully led to language and social action increasingly focused on solidarity, but of a very narrow and particular sort. The same factors that fed nativism more broadly—racialism, urban problems, economic change, and the development and mobilization of Anglo-Saxonism—also drove the more coercive and institutionalized forms of Americanization which have, ever since, been the version most closely associated with the term itself (Gleason 1980:39).5 Gleason ascribes three phases to the Americanization movement. The first phase, from approximately the turn of the century to 1914, was one that “sought a more harmoniously integrated society,” be it through patriotic leagues like the Daughters of the American Revolution or through the work at settlement houses and social gospel churches. Certainly there were differences in approach and emphasis, but this period was fairly benign relative to what was to come. The start of World War I marked the beginning of what Gleason identifies as the second phase, with a striking shift toward mobilization of the Americanization movement. By 1915, governmental agencies and local groups alike joined in. The most significant of the latter was the National Americanization Committee, headed by Frances A. Kellor, a former settlement house worker and a Progressive. Kellor was in favor of forced assimilation, and with her institution behind her, worked with American manufacturers to offer Americanization courses to immigrant employees. This linkage between industry and an organization to assimilate new immigrants was a powerful tool, and according to Gleason, represented the first time that training immigrants to be workers in the industrial economy was tantamount to making them American.

Mass Immigration, Prelude to War, and Narratives of the Nation  41 The third phase of the Americanization movement followed the end of the war and accompanied the rising fear of social revolution, especially as symbolized by the Bolsheviks. During this period, the relationship between industry and Americanization tightened, as owners sought to inoculate their workers from what Gleason called “the radical few” (1980:40). It was organizations like the American Legion who were most rabid in their pursuit of revolutionaries, seeking to deport those they saw as a threat. Immigrants during this phase were openly angry at how coercive these new programs were, and increasingly saw the Americanization agenda as hostile to their cultures and very presence. That the Ku Klux Klan eventually adopted the rhetoric of Americanism for itself only seemed to prove their point. In closing his comments on Americanization around the turn of the century, Gleason made a point with crucial implications for any investigation of American national identity. He said: The major legacy of the movement was to make Americanization a bad word, even in its generic sense of assimilation. Although this development was understandable, it created a problem in respect to national identity, because it made the national name disreputable. It also gave rise to a situation in which those who resisted Americanization on the practical level (as assimilation) and reviled it as an idea could claim to be the truest Americanists of all. (1980:41) In other words, there is a problem of naming that remains nearly inescapable, so long as the association of Americanization with coercion and hostility towards immigrants remains. The paradox of interpretations of Americanization as either the pinnacle or nadir of Americanism has proved to have long-lasting relevance, and is starkly visible today. KALLEN’S INTELLECTUAL CONTEXT In the early years of the twentieth century, debate about immigration and assimilation was widespread and filled with a sense of urgency. Many thinkers, both within the academy and without, were addressing these issues in national magazines and journals. Horace Kallen and his well-known essay “Democracy Versus the Melting-Pot” (1915), which was originally published in two parts in the critical journal The Nation, provide a focal point to illuminate a set of national narratives being told in this period. But who was Kallen, and why make him a central figure in considering the relationship between assimilation and the nation during this era? During these years, the qualities people had in mind when asking what it meant to be American included race, nationality, and language (Gleason 1980:46). Kallen addressed these concerns in a way no one else had at that point, and in doing so challenged dominant conceptions of the meaning of America.

42  Horace Kallen and a New Narrative, 1905–1925 Kallen’s legacy has been described as follows: “Despite the catholicity of interest exhibited in his more than two dozen books, he is indelibly associated with only one idea, ‘cultural pluralism’ . . .” (Whitfield 1994). That idea, cultural pluralism, is indeed the principal reason for Kallen’s starring role here, along with Kallen’s deliberate engagement in public discourse. In the early years of the twentieth century, the two primary intellectual perspectives on immigration, assimilation, and American identity were nativism (and the associated restrictivism) and melting pot thinkers (often understood as assimilationists). What follows is an examination of important statements of these positions, a sense of how they influenced and mobilized Kallen’s thinking, and a clear view of the way in which American identity was being constructed, maintained, proposed, and renovated in the years following the turn of the century. This examination will also set the stage for the birth of a third story—one with deep roots and continuing significance.

The Nativists By the end of the nineteenth century, the character of American nativism had shifted away from religion (Gleason 1980) and republican politics (Walzer 1996), and towards ethnicity and what was called “race.” The massive influx of Eastern and Southern European immigrants in the first decade of the twentieth century fueled this new nativism, which demanded a call to arms among many Americans, vividly captured by Kallen in a 1924 essay: “The old values that rule the common life are in danger. Arm, arm lest they be destroyed” (1998 [1924]:5, emphasis in the original). Another hugely important factor in the development of this heightened parochialism was the First World War, which Kallen saw as having a direct impact on people’s responses to immigration: What this war did was to turn the anxiety about property into one about people. It now became people, qualities of race, heritage and attitude, not law, which was the menace to property and to the status it signified. What the war did was to turn the anxiety about the independence of American culture into despair about its existence. (1998 [1924]:15) Kallen went on to explain that the culture that emerged from the economic successes of the postbellum period was not seen as a culture at all; there was a concern that “America” was not well defined. This concern about the absence of a long-standing, shared national culture or identity led to terrific fear and to the development of traditionalist and nativist thinking. Immigration—long viewed as a plus for big business—was increasingly viewed as a major problem. Racialist thinking became more and more prevalent, especially that of the Nordic or Anglo-Saxon variety. The developments in science and industry that had driven the country’s economic

Mass Immigration, Prelude to War, and Narratives of the Nation  43 fortunes higher and higher were now seen by some as an assault on a traditional way of life. The historical context does much to suggest the intellectual schools of thought that emerged on the issues of immigration and ­assimilation. Kallen himself was responding to two primary positions, both ideological, and both of which conceived of themselves as Americanist: nativism—typically associated with forced Americanization and restrictionism, and assimilationism—best known through the metaphor of the melting pot. Kallen rejected central tenets of each of these perspectives, yet also drew upon the systems of meaning and action they represented. As conservative, early twentieth-century nativism goes, Madison Grant serves well as the prototype. Grant was a patrician intellectual based in New York City and a genealogist with great interest in zoology and physical anthropology. Socially, he was a tried and true elitist. Grant was averse to contact with those he thought beneath him and therefore avoided interaction with the masses. Grant was active in many associations, some explicitly racialist, others linked to his interest in the natural sciences. He co-founded the American Eugenics Society (http://www.amphilsoc.org/exhibits/treasures/aes.htm), served as president of the Immigration Restriction League, and was a founder and chairman of the New York Zoological Society (Higham 1988 [1955]:155–6). For his most famous tract, The Passing of the Great Race (1916), Grant drew upon his knowledge of Mendelian genetics—also cited by other eugenicists—in combination with his knowledge of physical anthropology.6 Grant turned these analytical tools on non-Nordic European immigrants, especially on Jews (Higham 1988). What is important is that although this book received relatively little attention at its publication, Grant was expressing ideas being put forward by other significant conservative nativists of the day, such as Lothrop Stoddard and Henry Pratt Fairchild. Gunnar Myrdal, in the 1940s, called Grant “the high priest of racialism in America” (2002 [1944]:114), while John Higham says he was “intellectually the most important nativist thinker in recent American history,” and additionally credits The Passing of the Great Race as being the first truly racist statement in American history (1988:155–7). Grant was playing into a ferocious xenophobia, as yet largely unarticulated in the terms of the new scientific racialism. Though there appears to be no direct correspondence between Kallen and Grant, Grant represented the most radical kind of nativism during the 1910s, especially the kind of racialist Anglo-Saxonism Kallen so strongly abhorred. One liberal scholar who served as a known foil for Grant was the anthropologist Franz Boas. When Boas, an ardent anti-eugenicist, argued for a modern, flexible accounting of race and ethnicity in The Mind of Primitive Man (1911), nativists like Grant recoiled (Higham 1988). Boas’ work made strong claims that assimilation, biological as well as otherwise, was taking place, and that conformity to a new “American type” was occurring

44  Horace Kallen and a New Narrative, 1905–1925 (Higham 1988:125). This was very much in keeping with the melting pot logic of the day. Nativist scholars like William Z. Ripley and Grant, who clearly rejected such thinking both normatively and objectively, set about putting together a scientific study that would show indisputably that race was an essential characteristic that would not be changed by the environment, as was being argued by the likes of Boas and the neo-Lamarckians. Published in 1916, The Passing of the Great Race was the book that put this argument together in a confident statement of nativist ideology and science (Higham 1988:154–7). So what did Grant claim in his racialist masterwork? He offered a racial, not national or linguistic, human taxonomy, insisting that the three factors are distinct, with race being the most significant. For him, there were three basic European races, the Nordic, Alpine, and Mediterranean, with the Nordic at the top and the Mediterranean at the bottom. Grant seemingly drew upon the physiognomic science of his day, equating physical features—hair color and amount, skin, eyes, nose, lips, stature—with the degree of character an individual possessed. Against the more malleable understanding of race put forward by someone like Boas, Grant was an unyielding biological essentialist who denied the neo-Lamarckian claim, common in his day, of change via the environment, and instead insisted on the logic of Mendelian genetics, which showed that intermarriage would yield changes to natives, and in a negative direction. Racial mixing—because it would lessen the quality of the higher stock (the Anglo-Saxons, those Grant called the Nordics)—would ultimately lead to an impoverished democracy.7 What Grant saw in America was “an opportunity . . . to produce in the isolation of a continent a powerful and racially homogeneous people” made up of “one of the most gifted and vigorous stocks on earth” (1918: 90). His story was one of exclusion and racial superiority needing to be preserved for the sake of the country. He created that meaning by drawing upon the racialist pseudo-science of the day, and playing on the anxieties of those who fell within the bounds of the dominant group. As would follow such logic, racial mixing and immigration were at the top of Grant’s list of social problems. On the former, he wrote: Whether we like to admit it or not, the result of the mixture of two races, in the long run, gives us a race reverting to the more ancient, generalized and lower type. The cross between a white man and an Indian is an Indian; the cross between a white man and a Negro is a Negro; the cross between a white man and a Hindu is a Hindu; and the cross between any of the three European races and a Jew is a Jew. (1918:18) It is quite clear that for Grant and those who agreed with him, race mixing was taboo. On immigration Grant warned that an open door would yield race suicide and/or race mixing, and thereby a diminution of American stock. Another issue that he and other nativists highlighted was the variation

Mass Immigration, Prelude to War, and Narratives of the Nation  45 in birth rates such that native stocks produced few children while immigrant stocks produced many. Grant called the situation in the US, where immigrants would come to dominate, the “survival of the unfit.” This was meant to illustrate that while immigrants may indeed have been better suited to the tenement and factory life of the new industrial cities, they were ill suited to govern, and the country would therefore deteriorate. To deal with these issues, Grant proposed a system of eugenics, such that birth control (often forced) “would probably be of benefit by reducing the number of offspring in the undesirable classes” (1918:49). He made a case for coercive population control based on social and “biological” characteristics: A rigid system of selection through the elimination of those who are weak or unfit—in other words, social failures—would solve the whole question in a century, as well as enable us to get rid of the undesirables who crowd our jails, hospitals, and insane asylums. The individual himself can be nourished, educated and protected by the community during his lifetime, but the state through sterilization must see to it that his line stops with him or else future generations will be cursed with an ever increasing load of victims of misguided sentimentalism . . .” (1918:51). In other words, for those immigrants who were already here (as opposed to potential immigrants whose entry the government could and should restrict) forced sterilization would do the job of preventing a more significant population shift and preventing racial mixing. Grant closed The Passing of the Great Race by exhorting his countrymen: We Americans must realize that the altruistic ideals which have controlled our social development during the past century and the maudlin sentimentalism that has made America ‘an asylum for the oppressed,’ are sweeping the nation toward a racial abyss. If the Melting Pot is allowed to boil without control and we continue to follow our national motto and deliberately blind ourselves to all ‘distinctions of race, creed or color,’ the type of native American of Colonial descent will become as extinct as the Athenian of the age of Pericles, and the Viking of the days of Rollo. (1918:263) For conservative nativists like Grant, restricting immigration was the only means of preserving the best of what was meant by “America”: the white Anglo-Saxon Protestant culture, politics, and lifestyle that had dominated the nation’s youth. Assimilation via intermarriage, for this was how radical nativists ultimately viewed the melting pot, was understood only as dilution of the gene pool, and subsequently the excellence of the country. Given the dehumanization of non-“natives,” intermarriage was portrayed essentially as cross-breeding. For nativists, it was a terrible, sinful option. Such a

46  Horace Kallen and a New Narrative, 1905–1925 narrative had significant power among those who felt threatened not only by the newcomers themselves, but also by the changes in the economy, the hostilities in Europe, and the rapid growth of urban America. For Grant, the social movement, as it were, that resonated most clearly regarding immigrants was conservationism. The conservation (or maintenance) of an earlier America—one that never existed as simply as he suggested—was and still remains a compelling statement of national identity with near-magnetic pull, especially in times of crisis or rapid change. Edward Alsworth Ross, Kallen’s principal foil in his 1915 essay, represented a different kind of nativist response to the same elements of social change: progressive nativism.8 Ross was a founding father of American sociology, with a position at the University of Wisconsin beginning in 1906 that came a few years after Ross was fired from Stanford, in part for publicly expressing his nativist views (Weinberg 1972). He would eventually hold the chair in the brand-new sociology department in Madison from 1929–1937, bringing in many new scholars and establishing a PhD program. Ross was also busy publishing well-known books and essays, and acting as the editor of a popular series of sociology texts, including a highly successful introductory text called The Principles of Sociology (Weinberg 1972:194–8). In addition to his academic endeavors, Ross was a very activist-oriented sociologist who believed the purpose of the discipline was to reform society. As such, he was a committed progressive thinker who devoted much time and energy to understanding what conditions would create social stability.9 What might seem strange to a reader today is that alongside these ostensibly liberal intellectual pursuits, Ross was also an active Anglo-Saxon nativist who believed that the “wretched” character and abilities of immigrants of the second wave would deplete the greatness of “America” and prevent social or political progress. This seeming paradox can be resolved by recognizing that Ross believed that in order to make progress, social stability was required, and that ongoing immigration denied that possibility. He, along with conservative nativists like Madison Grant, argued forcefully for restrictive immigration policies to stem the tide of newcomers. Along with what a biographer of Ross has called meliorative nativism, which intended (for Ross, not necessarily for others) to create the circumstances necessary for stability, Ross also became attached to the “Anglo-Saxon myth” of the Teutonic roots of America’s political and social traditions (Weinberg 1972). He identified his Scotch-Irish heritage with these “ancestors,” and then judged all new immigrants by the likelihood that they could take on the necessary characteristics to help lead America forward.10 Unlike biological racialists like Grant, Ross believed that it was social environment and social history, along with inherited factors, that determined the characteristics of ethnic groups (Weinberg 1972:154–7). That being the case, it appears that Ross actually proposed a more modern and flexible understanding of group identity from 1900–1910 than Kallen would in 1915. During that decade, Ross was cautiously optimistic about the assimilation of immigrants. By 1912,

Mass Immigration, Prelude to War, and Narratives of the Nation  47 however, his optimism had faded, and he developed a loathing of immigrants so unmistakable in his 1914 lament, The Old World in the New. This book was the tirade against immigrants to which Kallen would explicitly respond in his 1915 essay. The Old World in the New was a non-scholarly polemic aimed at furthering the Teutonic, Anglo-Saxon myth of America by distinguishing between the first and second waves of European immigrants, and utterly dehumanizing and devaluing the latter, group by group. While Weinberg (1972:160) insists that Ross’s meliorative thrust was present in this book, the depictions of the new immigrant groups likely fueled the righteous indignation of fellow nativists of many stripes. The language Ross used was so hateful and patronizing that other motivations seem to disappear in its wake.11 He did make an argument that those who had come for economic purposes were more assimilable than those who had come for principles, but the claim does not seem to hold up well throughout his chapters on each of the new immigrant groups. Ultimately, Ross believed that the only way to salvage what was good about America and to proceed forward progressively was to dramatically restrict immigration. If that were not to happen, Ross predicted that . . . the opinion would grow that the old American faith in the capacity and desire of the common people for improvement was a delusion, and that only the superior classes care for progress. Not until the twenty-first century will the philosophic historian be able to declare with scientific certitude that the cause of the mysterious decline that came upon the American people early in the twentieth century was the deterioration of popular intelligence by the admission of great numbers of backward immigrants. (1914:256) Thus, if the US experienced a significant decline, the clarity of hindsight would show that it came at the hands of immigrants. As it happened, Ross was effectively positioned to advocate his restrictionist agenda. As a friend to President Wilson, as president of the American Sociological Society, and as a member of prominent boards of directors, he wielded his influence frequently and well. Although in 1915 he worked alongside the Immigration Restriction League, after that point he was no longer active, in part because “. . . his attitude toward proposed legislation was more humane and less prejudiced than the demands . . .” the organization was putting forward (Weinberg 1972:163). This is indicative of Ross’s differences with Madison Grant. Ross’s foray into the eugenics movement, seen as progressive science in the 1920s, seemingly continued along the lines of his meliorative nativism in that a primary goal for Ross was to keep birth rates low in the service of social order, as well as to mediate in the changing ethnic makeup of the nation (Weinberg 1972:164). Ross’s progressivism kept him at arm’s distance from the most openly xenophobic nativist campaigns, especially the Red Scare immediately following WWI. Maintaining

48  Horace Kallen and a New Narrative, 1905–1925 his long interest in social order, Ross admired the social planning advocated by the Bolsheviks, which prevented him from attaching himself to the red baiting. He also rejected the anti-Semitic and racist campaign being waged by groups like the Ku Klux Klan. Ross, then, seemed to embody the internal contradictions latent in a perspective termed “progressive nativism.” Despite ideological differences, nativists like Grant and Ross were arguing for the same goals in immigration policy: restriction to avoid the pollution of the “American” gene pool and to reinstate stability. It was thinking like theirs that became most closely associated with the Americanization movement. Yet it is important to remember that their nativism had different roots and different purposes, at least to some degree. For Grant, himself a patrician intellectual of Anglo-Saxon descent, nativism was a kind of conservationism—literal conservatism. If no more immigrants were allowed to enter, perhaps the US could forbid miscegenation (or sterilize immigrants) and maintain the Anglo-Saxon biology and culture that had constituted the formative characteristics of American society and its greatness. For Ross, nativism and restrictionism were a means to future ends rather than tools for hanging on to the past. He held that ongoing immigration denied America the possibility of social stability, and therefore social order. Ross believed that the condition of constant flux prevented any real “progress” from being made. He argued, for example, that “[W]hen a people has reached such a degree of political likemindedness, that fundamentals are taken for granted, it is free to tackle new questions as they come up. But if it admits to citizenship myriads of strangers who have not yet passed the civic kindergarten, questions that were supposed to be settled are reopened . . .” (1914:279). What he never deeply considered were the potential advantages these new groups of immigrants might bring. Ross crossed the line between scholarship and chauvinism in the way he chose to demean the characteristics of immigrant groups by buying into the myths and logics of other racists of his day. His narrative of progress via prejudice is one that is difficult to digest in terms of twenty-first century ideas and ideals, yet placed within its context, it is not so difficult to see its emergence from the progressive movement and its appeal to so many “native” Americans.

The Melting Pot Thinkers At the same time Americanization was taking on an increasingly nativist, coercive tone, another vocabulary for handling the concerns of immigration was emerging. Though the belief in America’s assimilatory power was already established at the turn of the century, perhaps the single most recognized image of that power was first presented at a time when hostility toward unfettered entrance to the US was growing. The image was that of a melting pot, and that it was envisioned by a Jewish Englishman, Israel Zangwill, seems worth mentioning. Another major development in the beginning of the twentieth century was the rise in publication of immigrant

Mass Immigration, Prelude to War, and Narratives of the Nation  49 autobiographies. Generally speaking, these were triumphal accounts of foreigners who had shed their differences and truly taken on the character of their adopted country, America. On this side of the Americanist coin were the melting pot assimilationists, such as Mary Antin, Jacob Riis, and Edward Steiner, all of whom believed in some version of that melting pot ideal made so vivid by Zangwill. Zangwill himself stood somewhat outside the bounds of the intellectuals whose ideas bore the title of his play, in that he was not an assimilationist in the more common sense of the term, rather he understood himself to be in favor of amalgamation. What is striking, then, about those who are understood to fall into this category is the range of meanings given to its central symbol, the melting pot, and the varying imaginings of America that emerge from those meanings. Though the term “melting pot” may have been used before, it was its usage in Zangwill’s very popular, though critically panned, play of that very name that caught on. The Melting Pot—first staged in the US in Washington, D.C. on October 5, 1908—seems to have sparked the adoption of this image as an American ideal and the heart of an American narrative. The notion that this new country and its environment would lead to the creation of a “new man” goes all the way back to Crevecoeur’s (1998 [1872]) discussion of the topic in his Letters from an American Farmer, but the flesh-andblood reality, the performance of the idea came from Zangwill. In Zangwill’s telling, a whole new race of men was being created. This was not a tale of one group merging into another; it was a chemical reaction (think back to the image of a melting pot, originally conceived with metals, not food) wherein the contents of the mixture would be utterly transformed by their mixture in the “crucible.” The play was held in high esteem by such luminaries as Theodore Roosevelt, then president, and Jane Addams, sociologist, social worker, and co-founder of Chicago’s Hull House. The popular success of the play has been seen as driven by the connection audiences felt to the story being told: “Believing that in the crucible of love the most violent antithesis of the past may be fused into a higher unity, Zangwill gave voice in The Melting Pot to the aspirations of those harassed multitudes, particularly Jews, who fled the pogroms of Russia and Europe after 1882, arriving in droves until checked by the outbreak of the World War in 1914” (Wohlgelernter 1964:178). The play told the story of more recent immigrants through the tale of nation-crossed lovers. Zangwill was an established novelist and playwright prior to The Melting Pot, and was also active in a moderate Zionist movement as a founder of the Jewish Territorial Organization (Gleason 1992:8), serving as its President of Emigration Regulation Department (Wohlgelernter 1964:175). According to a Zangwill biographer, it was this experience that led directly to his work on The Melting Pot, and that convinced him that America was “the Melting Pot” (Wohlgelernter 1964:175, emphasis in original). Theoretical alignments also seemingly played a role in Zangwill’s thinking, namely that his perspective on race was somewhat closer to the more fluid, constructionist

50  Horace Kallen and a New Narrative, 1905–1925 vision of the anthropologist Franz Boas than to the essentialism of many others tackling these issues at the time (Wohlgelernter 1964:180). This non-essentialist thinking functioned as a foundation for Zangwill’s belief that in the “crucible” a new race could and would be formed. The Melting Pot offers a vision of what America can (and should) be doing with and for its newcomers, in the story of a young Jewish immigrant man with bold ideas about America’s purpose who falls in love with a Russian immigrant woman of noble birth. The young man, David Quixano, came to the US after his family had been killed in a pogrom in his native Russia. The young woman, Vera Revendel, came to the US to escape Czarist persecution after she rejected her family’s high position and became a revolutionary. The two meet because of his music, and before long it is clear that something deeper than arranging performances is afoot. Meanwhile, David is in love with the idea of America. He valorizes his new country: . . . America is God’s Crucible, the great Melting-Pot where all races of Europe are melting and re-forming! Here you stand, good folk, think I, when I see them at Ellis Island, here you stand in your fifty groups, with your fifty languages and histories, and your fifty blood hatreds and rivalries. But you won’t be long like that, brothers, for these are the fires of God you’ve come to—these are the fires of God. A fig for your feuds and vendettas! Germans and Frenchmen, Irishmen and Englishmen, Jews and Russians—into the Crucible with you all! God is making the American. (1915:33) He favors the notion of never looking back, of not being tied to the past, and of the past holding little if any power over the present. Yet at the same time, whenever anything reminds him of what happened to his family in Russia, he is utterly bereft. He lives with his uncle and grandmother, both of whom, to varying degrees, maintain traditional Jewish beliefs and practices. Vera, on the other hand, is less explicitly idealistic about America, but has taken upon herself a life’s work of running a settlement house; her actions tell us who she is. It is in commissioning David to play his violin for her patrons that the lovers come to know each other. As a result of his deep faith in the “crucible,” “the melting pot” that is America, David had been composing an American symphony which he dreams of being performed by a full orchestra to an audience of immigrants who will feel its truth and power in their souls. Any other audience would miss the point. As must be the case for the drama to work, there is a monstrous secret. It is revealed that Vera’s father, the Baron Revendel, was behind the pogrom in Kishineff, Russia, where David’s family was brutally murdered. For a month, David is unable to leave the past behind, despite Vera’s initial begging him to join her in doing so. His symphony is performed in the setting he

Mass Immigration, Prelude to War, and Narratives of the Nation  51 imagined, but he feels false since he himself has been unable to melt away the past. The play ends as he and Vera—somewhat inexplicably—rekindle their love, let the past go, and enter into the blending and reformulation that America inspires. The story of America, then, is one of leaving the past behind and joining in a mixed society with an eye toward an open, expansive future. There are other anecdotes less pertinent to the central story that illustrate some of Zangwill’s ideas about assimilation. For example, the Quixano family has an Irish maid who is perturbed by the complexity of keeping a kosher kitchen, preparing for the Sabbath, and other Jewish rituals. She is also frustrated that the grandmother speaks only Yiddish. Yet by the end of the play, she is participating in the Purim celebration, speaking some Yiddish herself, and even calling herself a Jew. This suggests that Zangwill saw assimilation happening in many directions. Another interesting note is that the only native-born American in the play is of low moral caliber, certainly not the type to which Zangwill would have his young hero aspire. Thus it is clear that for him, conforming to the characteristics of a dominant group, namely Anglo-Protestants, was not even a latent goal of assimilation. In an afterword to the 1914 edition of the play, Zangwill offered some insights into his thinking on assimilation in America. He wrote, for example, that “The process of American amalgamation is not assimilation or simple surrender to the dominant type, as is popularly supposed, but an all-round give-and-take by which the final type may be enriched or impoverished” (1915:203). In other words, Zangwill was not an Anglo-conformist; assimilation for him was multi-directional and involved throwing everyone into the pot, not just fitting immigrants into a mold of the dominant group. He also remarked that Jews, as the “toughest of all the white elements” to be part of the mix, in large part due to anti-Semitism over hundreds, if not thousands of years, would find a place in America as the old prejudices would not persevere in this place (1915:204). Zangwill presented a quite radical vision of America, reminiscent of Crevecoeur’s “new man” and looking forward to a new and renewable America. Of course, there were those who adamantly disagreed with Zangwill’s portrayal, chief among them Henry Pratt Fairchild. Fairchild was a well-known nativist who wrote a book directly responding to the chief idea of the play called The Melting Pot Mistake (1926). Fairchild, who was in favor of significant immigration restriction in the vein of Madison Grant, thought that Zangwill’s envisioning of America missed the reality of the situation on at least three levels. First, he suggested that immigrants maintained their group loyalties far longer than Zangwill suggested; second, he thought Americanization efforts would ultimately fail; and third, echoing Grant’s earlier words, he believed that racial inequality, not equality, was the norm in human behaviors and societies (Fairchild 1926; Wohlgelernter 1964:178).

52  Horace Kallen and a New Narrative, 1905–1925 Though no evidence has been found of direct correspondence or socializing between Kallen and Zangwill, that they were both active Zionists and public thinkers on the topic of immigration and assimilation suggests that at the very least they were aware of each other. Kallen was indeed aware of Zangwill since he argued specifically against Zangwill’s melting pot idea.12 Wohlgelernter (1964) discusses Kallen only as an analytical foil of sorts for Zangwill’s vision. Kallen represented an exposition of some of the factors that contradicted Zangwill’s melting pot as a model for society, especially regarding the notion that American democracy might depend on some kind of pluralism (1964:181). But around the turn of the century it was Zangwill’s rendering of America as a welcoming home to all comers that appealed most to those in favor of ongoing immigration. Given that the melting pot metaphor is still invoked so easily and often today, its power to hold our national imagination has proven enduring. Even so, invocation of the melting pot has rarely been accompanied by a clear articulation of its meaning. Zangwill’s narration of America as a place where everyone leaves their past behind has never been fully realized. Perhaps his vision was simply too radical and demanded the loss of too much for too many. Zangwill’s America also relied on an understanding of group identity that had yet to take hold in the academy, much less in the popular imagination, such that properties of birth and parentage need not determine one’s life or life chances. While such a fluid conception of race and ethnicity was taking shape in some anthropological circles around the turn of the century, even today there are those who deny its reality. To make a claim that national origin or ethnicity was not destiny was to reject claims of superiority, even exceptionalism, from any one group. An America that did this was the America Zangwill imagined. The immigrant autobiographers against whom Kallen argued in his 1915 essay tended to take approaches that were similar, yet distinct from Zangwill’s. Mary Antin, Edward Steiner, and Jacob Riis, all recounted the tale of coming to America and leaving the past behind.13 The primary distinction between these writers and Zangwill is that while he envisioned the true blending of all members of society into something new, these autobiographers saw something closer to a more conventional Anglo-conformist model of assimilation. In such a scenario, newcomers would shed their foreign skins and habits to become more like the dominant group, and in turn would be welcomed into that group, melting in. In fact, in a 1918 list of books published in The English Journal that was intended to, among other things, teach “an appreciation of American ideals . . .” the stories of all three writers were included. The purpose of having high school students read these particular narratives was to “present the social and industrial opportunities of the individual, and the basis on which these rest” (Penny 1918:129). In other words, the autobiographies of Antin, Riis, and Steiner (along with two other books of Steiner’s) were selected as prime examples of the American Dream, that illusory story of the individual who, by his or her own merit, finds a way to prosper and to enjoy the bountiful opportunities of life readily

Mass Immigration, Prelude to War, and Narratives of the Nation  53 available in the US for those willing to work hard and do the right things. The goal was to show that this was what any motivated, hard-working person could accomplish, although in reality what has continued to make these stories so meaningful is how many external barriers often lie in the way of that path. And that sometimes, exceptional stories grab attention precisely because of their exceptional, rather than typical, characteristics. The lack of attention paid to other factors—social, economic, political, cultural—allows the individual to reign supreme, precisely the message assimilatory voices early in the twentieth century wanted to promote as this would be one step in shifting people’s lives away from the immigrant group and toward life as “American” individuals. This story of the individual melting in after working hard and making tough choices was that told by Antin, Steiner, and Riis, in keeping with the long history of the preeminence of the individual in American lore; the individualist merged with the melting pot. Antin, Riis, and Steiner were all immigrants who envisioned themselves as utterly new following their assimilation, claiming that people were entirely changed by what they found upon arrival in the US. Ostensibly, this characterization followed both the psychological and social rhetoric of J. Hector St. John de Crevecoeur, who spoke of “this new man, the American” back in the eighteenth century, which drew upon the idea of some essence emanating from the place itself, a difference being that in the stories of the immigrant autobiographers, the natives don’t change, only the newcomers. This neo-Lamarckian tendency to find causality for change in the environment is present in much of the writing on race and immigration during the early part of the twentieth century. Alongside the valorization of America, each of these writers also located a huge amount of strength in what the individual could accomplish if properly dedicated and determined; how American indeed! Becoming American was truly an achievement that had to be sought out and worked for. Though Americanization is most frequently associated with nativists, those who espoused this more hospitable standpoint on incorporation were often part of the movement, as well. They were dismayed by some of the tactics of the conservatives, but still sought to assimilate immigrants via more liberal educational programs and other means. Immigrant melting pot writers emphasized the role of dominant versus minority stock to varying degrees, but in general the melting was of biological race and nationality (considered essentialist by many), not culture. The culture of Anglo-America, and its political institutions in particular, maintained its hegemony in this model, but in a kinder, gentler fashion. This vision of America, then, was not entirely distinct in content from that of the nativists, though what motivated it, and the foundations of its construction were quite different, and closer to melting pot ideals. Mary Antin was a Russian immigrant who, upon arriving in the United States and enjoying the opportunity for an education, by and large left her Jewish and Russian past behind her. It remained implicit in her writing

54  Horace Kallen and a New Narrative, 1905–1925 and in the fact that she, like Zangwill and Kallen, was a Zionist (Whitfield 1998:xxii). Once settled, Antin married a non-Jew and no longer practiced the religion of her youth. At eighteen, she published her first book, From Plotzk to Boston (1899), which included a warm introduction by none other than Zangwill. She was also an essayist and was published in several of the major journals of the time. But it was the 1912 publication of The Promised Land that vaulted Antin to literary prominence, and that book is the most thorough statement of her transformation. Though immigrant intellectuals like Antin argued for a kind of cultural Anglo-conformism alongside a blending of groups through interaction and intermarriage, her writing revealed a recognition of ongoing difference, or at least distance, from the core of dominant Anglo-American society. In the introduction to a 1997 publication of Antin’s book, Werner Sollors reinforces this point, noting that an inner tension remained in Antin’s writing, suggesting that her transformation was not as complete as a simpler reading might suggest. Perhaps it was herself Antin most wanted to convince. Not only were other Jews, like Kallen, offended by Antin’s casting off of her ethnicity, some natives were equally bothered by her referring to herself as “American” (Sollors 1997:xxxvii). And yet despite criticism from contemporaries like Barrett Wendell and friends like Kallen and Randolph Bourne, Sollors points out what may have driven Antin’s declaration of American identity: “ . . . it was assimilation, full American identity, even if adopted unilaterally by declaration of will rather than by birth or easy acceptance from old stock Americans, that entitled Antin to criticize her adopted ‘promised land’—or to praise it for something that it would first have to become by fully including people like her” (1997:xxxviii). In other words, perhaps if Antin said it, only then could it be so, and could she have a legitimate voice in America’s renovation. Her vision of America by necessity included immigrants, but also required that they accept an “American” way of life. Edward Steiner was an early twentieth-century immigrant writer whose work dealt with immigration and the urban poor. Steiner was born in Austro-Hungary (Slovakia) as a Jew and received his higher education in Germany, where he earned a PhD at the University of Heidelberg in 1885 at age nineteen. One year later, he fled to the US, likely because of feared persecution for ties with socialist groups (Haas 2005). Upon arrival, like most immigrants, he took on a series of jobs—garment worker, miner—prior to an attempt to get back into the profession he had begun earlier. Steiner not only became Americanized, but also converted from Judaism to Christianity, ultimately becoming of professor of Christianity at Grinnell College in Iowa. For Steiner, conversion was an individual journey that was taken as he moved westward, away from New York City. He eventually rejected the orthodoxy of both Judaism and Christianity, and after attending the Oberlin Theological Seminary took on a very broad kind of Christianity, while always retaining the importance of education and social welfare from his Jewish past. Those values led him to write and lecture a great deal about immigration and social problems, and also to tell his own story in From

Mass Immigration, Prelude to War, and Narratives of the Nation  55 Alien to Citizen (1914). It was Steiner’s hope that the book would serve both as inspiration to new immigrants and as a lesson to natives to “see in the alien the potential fellow citizen, and treat him as such . . .” (1914:17). He saw his story as but a case, exceptional only in the ways of personality, that would show others what they could do. Again, the individual within the American environment could accomplish anything. Steiner did acknowledge the lack of opportunities many immigrants faced, and for this reason he sought an audience among natives. Another highly successful immigrant who told the story of his coming to America was the Dane, Jacob Riis. Riis did not come in high circumstances, but ultimately the education and experience he had received prior to coming to the US paid off. Initially, he worked in a series of manual laboring positions, but after several years, landed a steady job at the New York Tribune and then the Evening Sun as a police reporter (Holmes 1936). Harkening back to an experience in his youth, where he had spent his own time and money helping to clean up an indecent tenement house, Riis’s work on the police beat put him in frequent contact with the poor. He became something of a crusader for giving people both dignity and opportunities, and by the time he was fifty years old had gained considerable celebrity for his work. Among those who appreciated and advocated for Riis was President Theodore Roosevelt, whose offers of political office Riis refused more than once (Holmes 1936). Riis’s progressive impulses yielded success, with positive outcomes involving improvements in housing for the poor, safety for children, and even New York City’s water supply. In 1902, at age fifty-two, Riis had his own story, The Making of an American, published. Theodore Roosevelt wrote the introduction to a 1914 edition following Riis’s death, which he concluded with this sentiment: “He did not come to this country until he was almost a young man; but if I were asked to name to fellow-man who came nearest to being the ideal American citizen, I should name Jacob Riis” (Roosevelt 1970:xiv). Riis could have received no higher compliment. In concluding his autobiography, he had written of how, upon being ill for many weeks during a visit to Denmark, he was cured when he saw, passing in the sea, a boat flying the American flag: “I knew then that it was my flag; that my children’s home was mine, indeed; that I also had become an American in truth” (1970 [1902]:283). The story told by Antin, Steiner, and Riis is one with which any American today would be familiar. A person down on her luck—for whatever reasons—has the gumption to work hard and exploit every possible opportunity in making a future. The individual alone is responsible for her fortune, good or bad. This is quintessentially American. The caveat for which this narrative allows, is that there is something in the American environment, in the spirit of the country, that presents itself to newcomers. The essence of the nation is there for the taking by those who journey to make America their home. Surely these melting-pot Anglo-conformists were aware of the rising nativist tone of the day, but perhaps, as Steiner explicitly pointed to, they hoped their stories could quell that hostility. The story they told was

56  Horace Kallen and a New Narrative, 1905–1925 one of acceptance, but with a strong sense of becoming someone new. All three spoke of rebirth or a new birth upon arrival; the image was then and remains a powerful one. This imagination of American identity was significant, although ultimately not radical, largely because despite the intent of the original author of the melting pot ideal, these immigrant narratives fell more closely to an Anglo-conformist position. The immigrant melting pot stories also reinforced a central value in the American national canon: that of individualism. Each narrative is of individual achievement, of merit and accountability. While many immigrants of their era found success, many struggled mightily and were explicitly and legally excluded, despite hard work. They were undereducated, exploited, and poor. Yet according to this vision, that could only be the result of their own shortcomings. Social structures that constrained upward social mobility are, in these narratives, overcome, and those who are not so fortunate are left with only themselves to blame. As it turns out, then, it was Zangwill who offered the most radical position of all in the years preceding Kallen’s entry into intellectual discourse on the incorporation of immigrants and the marginalized into “American” society. While nativists sought either a conservative or progressive path to restrict the numbers of immigrants entering the country, melting pot assimilationists sought to direct those immigrants on a path the natives might find acceptable. Zangwill alone suggested something altogether different that would require a certain amount of letting go on everyone’s part, all in order to create something new and truly unified and inclusive. The question at hand, then, is what would Kallen bring to the discussion, and how would his ideas, or would his ideas, change the discourse? Additionally, what effects would the historical context—the changing economy, the war in Europe, Progressivism, and ongoing immigration—have on subsequent national conversations about assimilation? And finally, would Kallen conjure a new way of narrating America that would matter in regards to how people could live together in a society made up of people from so many places? The following chapter directly examines Kallen’s entry into national discussions about immigration and assimilation in 1915, as well as the responses of other thinkers of the day. NOTES   1 There may or may not be a direct linkage between Kallen’s coining of “cultural pluralism” and today’s multiculturalism, but certainly there is at least a genealogical connection between early pluralist thinking as espoused by Kallen, Randolph Bourne, William James, and others, and multicultural movements seeking group recognition (Menand 2001).   2 A significant exception to the lack of notice Kallen receives in the scholarly literature is found in political philosopher Michael Walzer’s (1992) essay, “What It Means to be American.” Here, Kallen serves as the primary reference point for Walzer’s thinking about pluralism in the US.

Mass Immigration, Prelude to War, and Narratives of the Nation  57   3 The term “natives” is in quotes here to recognize the disingenuousness and discomfort it may inspire. In this particular discourse, at this particular time, “natives” was used not to describe those who were first on the land—Native Americans—but instead was the term used to describe the white Anglo-Saxon Protestants who peopled it as the “New World.” Given the primacy being given to the discourse of the period itself, quotes will no longer be utilized to indicate these concerns.   4 To say that the NAACP offered one potential resolution to the seeming progressive paradox is not intended as an argument that the founders of the organization were interested in all immigrants. It is worth mentioning, however, that there was a very strong presence of Jews in its governing wing, suggesting concerns that went beyond African Americans alone.   5 In his essay, Gleason points out that other Americanist traditions persisted, though with less strength, including that which was “animated by a more positive desire to assist the immigrants in adjusting to the strange and often harsh conditions of the life they encountered in the United States” (1980:39). Gleason sees this position as maintaining an earlier kind of cosmopolitan American nationalism.  6 Though The Passing of the Great Race was not published until 1916, nor given much importance until later, Grant’s ideas about racial essentialism, racial ranking, and assimilation were well known and articulated far earlier, thus making him, and his ideas, important for considering Kallen’s intellectual context (Higham 1988:156).   7 This decline in the quality of American democracy was not much of a problem for Grant since he would have preferred either a truer “republic” or an aristocracy. For him, both democracy and Christianity were problematic because each sought equality, which Grant believed would eventually diminish the country. He went so far as to say that charitable groups that help the poor only lead to more problems, and may bring “more injury to the race than black death or smallpox” (1918:50). He went on to say more about the relationship between race, inequality, and democracy: “Throughout history it is only the race of the leaders that has counted and the most vigorous have been in control and will remain in mastery in one form or another until such time as democracy and its illegitimate offspring, socialism, definitely establish cacocracy and the rule of the worst and put an end to progress. The salvation of humanity will then lie in the chance survival of some sane barbarians who may retain the basic truth that inequality and not equality is the law of nature” (1918:79).   8 There were indeed other intellectuals who advocated the seemingly contradictory positions of progressive nativism, including Frederick Jackson Turner, John R. Commons, Josiah Strong, and William Jennings Bryan (Weinberg 1972:149–50). Per Ross biographer Julius Weinberg, “Native Americans, working with an essentially Anglo-Saxon, rural, Protestant definition of the good society, enrolled in these [progressive] movements for contradictory reasons: some out of compassionate idealism, others for motivations grounded on ethnic prejudice. And a goodly number—Ross among them—served in the spirit of both” (150). See Chapter 7 in Weinberg (1972)—“The Sociologist as Nativist”—for more on Ross’s turn as a nativist.   9 Perhaps Ross’s most famous book, Social Control (1901), was in fact dedicated to the issue of creating social stability. 10 Nearly a century later, Samuel Huntington (2004) adopts the same Scotch-Irish national vanity and wields it in a quite similar manner. See Chapter 7. 11 One example of the extremely pejorative language utilized by Ross in describing immigrants is as follows: “There were so many sugar-loaf heads,

58  Horace Kallen and a New Narrative, 1905–1925 moon-faces, slit mouths, lantern-jaws, and goosebill noses that one might imagine a malicious jinn had amused himself by casting human beings in a set of skew-molds discarded by the Creator” (1914:286). He correlated physical characteristics such as those mentioned above with lower intelligence, sub-common blood, and inferiority in general, seemingly relying on the same physiognomic “science” as Grant. The presence of such peoples would surely damage the US. 12 Both men use the symphony to symbolize their vision of America. For Zangwill it is the embodiment of different parts blending together to form something altogether different from each individual sound. For Kallen it is the embodiment of the richness of being different together, within one shared framework. 13 These three authors were chosen because Kallen addressed them directly in “Democracy Versus the Melting-Pot.” I have not included Edward Bok with these authors despite a direct mention of him in the 1924 publication of Kallen’s essay, because Bok’s autobiography The Americanization of Edward Bok, was written in 1920, after the original publication of Kallen’s piece. For obvious reasons, it would be impossible to include all who told stories about their experiences as immigrants. There were, of course, other intellectuals whose ideas about race, immigration, and assimilation early in the century surely played a role in Kallen’s thinking, including Robert Park of the Chicago School, and other Jewish figures like Rabbi Judah Leon Magnes, who was anti-assimilationist. Those I have mentioned here are the ones Kallen himself identified in his 1915 essay.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Antin, Mary. 1997 (1912). The Promised Land. New York: Penguin Books. Antin, Mary. 1899. From Plotzk to Boston. Boston: W.B. Clarke and Co. Ayers, Edward L., Lewis L. Gould, David M. Oshinsky, and Jean R. Soderlund. 2005. American Passages: A History of the United States. United States: Thomson Wadsworth. Baltzell, E. Digby. 1964. The Protestant Establishment: Aristocracy & Caste in America. New York: Random House. Barth, Fredrik. 1969. Ethnic Groups and Boundaries. Prospect Heights, Ill.: Waveland Press. Berkson, Isaac B. 1969 (1920). Theories of Americanization: A Critical Study. New York: Arno Press and The New York Times. Boas, Franz. 1911. The Mind of Primitive Man. New York: Free Press. Bok, Edward. 1920. The Americanization of Edward Bok. New York: C. Scribner’s Sons. Borjas, George J. 2001 (1999). Heaven’s Door: Immigration Policy and the American Economy. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Bourne, Randolph. 1916. “Trans-National America.” Atlantic Monthly CXVII (July, 1916): 86–97. Brinner, William M. and Moses Rischin. 1987. Like All the Nations? The Life and Legacy of Judah L. Magnes. Albany: State University of New York Press. Cose, Ellis. 1992. A Nation of Strangers: Prejudice, Politics, and the Populating of America. New York: William C. Morrow. Crevecoeur, J. Hector St. John. 1998 (1782). Letters from an American Farmer. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Daniels, Roger. 1998 (1990). “What Is an American? Ethnicity, Race, the Constitution and the Immigrant in Early American History,” The Immigration Reader:

Mass Immigration, Prelude to War, and Narratives of the Nation  59 America in a Multidisciplinary Perspective. Edited by Daniel Jacobson. Oxford: Blackwell. Dinnerstein, Leonard. 1987. The Leo Frank Case. Athens: University of Georgia Press. Fairchild, Henry Pratt. 1926. The Melting Pot Mistake. Boston: Little, Brown and Company. Gossett, Thomas Jr. 1997. Race: The History of an Idea in America (2nd ed.). New York: Oxford University Press. Gleason, Philip. 1992. Speaking of Diversity: Language and Ethnicity in Twentieth-Century America. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Gleason, Philip. 1980. “American Identity and Americanization.” Harvard Encyclopedia of American Ethnic Groups. Edited by Stephen Thernstrom. Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Grant, Madison. 1918 (1916). The Passing of the Great Race, or the Racial Basis of European History. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons. Haas, Dennis. 2005. “The Conversion of Edward A. Steiner.” Grinnell Magazine. Hertzler, J.O. 1951. “Edward Alsworth Ross: Sociological Pioneer and Interpreter.” American Sociological Review 16(5): 597–613. Higham, John. 1988. Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 1860–1925. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Higham, John. 1984 (1975). Send These to Me: Immigrants in Urban America (Rev. ed.). Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Hing, Bill Ong. 2004. Defining America through Immigration Policy. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Holmes, John Haynes. 1936. “Jacob August Riis.” Dictionary of American Biography Base Set. American Council of Learned Societies, 1928–1936. Reproduced in History Resource Center. Farmington Hills, MI: Gale Group. Huntington, Samuel P. 2004. Who Are We? The Challenge to America’s National Identity. New York: Simon & Schuster. Kallen, Horace M. 1998 (1924). Culture and Democracy in the United States. New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers. Kallen, Horace M. 1915. “Democracy Versus the Melting-Pot.” The Nation. February 18 and 25. Kaufmann, Eric P. 2004. The Rise and Fall of Anglo-America. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Kennedy, Ruby Jo Reeves. 1944. “Single or Triple Melting-Pot? Intermarriage Trends in New Haven, 1870–1940.” The American Journal of Sociology 49(4): 331–339. Luhman, Reid. 2002. Race and Ethnicity in the United States: Our Differences and Our Roots. Houston: Harcourt College Publishers. Meier, August and John H. Bracey, Jr. 1993. “The NAACP as a Reform Movement, 1909–1965: ‘To Reach the Conscience of America.’ ” The Journal of Southern History 59(1): 3–30. Menand, Louis. 2001. The Metaphysical Club. New York: Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux. Myrdal, Gunnar. 2002 (1944). An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy, Volume I. New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers. Osborn, Henry Fairfield. 1918 (1916). “Introduction.” The Passing of the Great Race, or The Racial Basis of European History. Edited by Madison Grant. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons. Paschal, Andrew (ed.). 1993. A W. E. B. Du Bois Reader. New York: Collier Books. Penny, Edith M. 1918. “The American Spirit.” The English Journal 7(2): 129–132. Proctor, Robert. 1988. Racial Hygiene: Medicine under the Nazis. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Riis, Jacob A. 1970 (1902). The Making of an American. New York: Macmillan.

60  Horace Kallen and a New Narrative, 1905–1925 Ripley, William Z. 1899. The Races of Europe: A Sociological Study. New York: D. Appleton. Roosevelt, Nicholas. 1924. “Professor Kallen Proposes to Balkanize America: A Democracy of Nationalities to Solve Our Racial Problems.” New York Times. April 20: BR3. Roosevelt, Theodore. 1970 (1914). “Introduction,” in The Making of an American. Edited by Jacob A. Riis. New York: Macmillan. Ross, Edward Alsworth. 1914. The Old World in the New: The Significance of Past and Present Immigration to the American People. New York: The Century Company. Schlesinger, Arthur. 1940. “Foreword,” The Atlantic Migration, 1607–1860: A History of the Continuing Settlement of the United States. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Schultz, Kevin M. 2011. Tri-Faith America: How Catholics and Jews Held Postwar America to its Protestant Promise. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Shumsky, Neil Larry. 1975. “Zangwill’s The Melting Pot: Ethnic Tensions on Stage.” American Quarterly 27(1): 29–41. Sollors, Werner. 1997. “Introduction and Notes,” in The Promised Land. Edited by Werner Sollors. New York: Penguin Books. Steiner, Edward A. 1914. From Alien to Citizen: The Story of My Life in America. New York: Fleming H. Revell Company. Wacker, R. Fred. 1983. Ethnicity, Pluralism, and Race: Race Relations Theory in America before Myrdal. Greenwood Press: Westport, Conn. Walzer, Michael. 1996. What It Means to Be an American: Essays on the American Experience. New York: Marsilio. Weinberg, Julius. 1972. Edward Alsworth Ross and the Sociology of Progressivism. Madison, Wis.: The State Historical Society of Wisconsin. Whitfield, Stephen J. 1998. “Introduction.” Culture and Democracy in the United States. Edited by Horace M. Kallen. New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers. Whitfield, Stephen J. 1994. “Horace Meyer Kallen.” Dictionary of American ­Biography, Supplement 9: 1971–1975. Edited by John Fitzpatrick. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons. Reproduced in History Resource Center. Farmington Hills, MI: Gale Group. Wiebe, Robert H. 1967. The Search for Order: 1877–1920. New York: Hill and Wang. Wohlgelernter, Maurice. 1964. Israel Zangwill: A Study. New York: Columbia Press. Yetman, Norman R. 1999. Majority and Minority. Boston: Allyn and Bacon. Zangwill, Israel. 1915 (1909). The Melting Pot Drama in Four Acts. New York: Macmillan Company:.

3 Kallen’s Pluralist Challenge

The problem of proper adjustment of the foreign ethnic groups in our midst to the life of America—properly termed “Americanization”—was a subject of great interest even before the War. Now, in the aftermath, a heightened national consciousness has made of this question one of those burning issues which it is difficult, nay impossible, to discuss without stirring deep prejudices. Patriotism intensified by the experience of war immediately conjures up the spectre of foreign intrigue whenever the subject is broached . . . Closely linked with the fear of foreign enemies and with the apprehension of “Bolshevistic” revolution, it is small wonder that much of what is said nowadays concerning “Americanization” savors of hysteria. Isaac Berkson, Theories of Americanization (1920:1)

In the years between 1900 and 1915, there was a growing concern about the damage immigrants were doing to America, best illustrated in the rhetoric of those who belonged to what might be called the nativist chattering classes. Many scholars, politicians, and working people alike were afraid that something central to what they understood to be America was being lost as the country accepted millions of immigrants during this period. They were not entirely wrong: things in America were, without question, changing. What is problematized here, is whether the changes taking place were altering some primordial quality of American-ness, whether the changes were part of an eternal process of renovation, whether some new version of America based on diversity was being established, or whether in fact there were multiple understandings of America competing for dominance. In 1915, Horace Kallen published an essay that sought to address these concerns, “Democracy Versus the Melting-Pot.” Though the essay was written in significant part as a response to the nativist position being argued by E. A. Ross, the Wisconsin sociologist, it also went far beyond that conversation. Kallen took aim at those who denigrated people not of Anglo-Saxon Protestant descent, but also pushed aside the more radical rhetoric of the melting pot. In place of these two stories, which were far and above the most common of their day, he narrated a quite different America wherein

62  Horace Kallen and a New Narrative, 1905–1925 no one had to leave the past behind, going so far as to claim that no one really could. Kallen’s America was one that was, in practice, a federation of nationalities, such that the major purpose of the central government was to keep harmony between all groups, and to protect their rights as groups. Kallen’s essay was controversial in its day, though it did have some admirers. What follows is a close reading of Kallen’s words in “Democracy Versus the Melting-Pot” and other essays, and also analysis of a few responses. Along with an examination of what was new in his ideas, how his contemporaries reacted, and what, if any, the long-term ramifications of his intervention into this discourse on assimilation have been, the following set of questions is addressed: 1. To whom or what was Kallen responding? 2. Were questions and ideas being posed analytically or prescriptively? 3. To the degree that ideas were presented prescriptively, how explicit was ideology in the writing, and what effect does this have on the way it was received and how it can be analyzed? 4. How have Kallen’s ideas shaped future discourse? The chapter concludes with a sketch of the image of America suggested by Kallen’s ideas, and a comparison to others which were “in the air” at the time he was writing. When considering the relationship between intellectual thinking about assimilation and the construction of national narratives, Kallen is a critical figure in bringing to the fore a newly emerging vision of pluralism. HORACE KALLEN Kallen was a philosopher who had studied under William James, Barrett Wendell, and George Santayana at Harvard, and who, in the early 1910s, was teaching at the University of Wisconsin (Whitfield 1998). He was an active, productive scholar who frequently published in both academic and non-academic intellectual journals. Professionally, he was most closely and lastingly associated with the New School of Social Research in New York City, where he taught for over fifty years and where he was a founder. Kallen was a German-Jewish immigrant, who came to the US in 1887 at age five with his parents; his father was an Orthodox rabbi. Kallen’s life as a Jew was significant both personally and professionally. While he was active in the Zionist movement and maintained a strong ethnic and cultural Jewish identification, Kallen was very much a secularist (Whitfield 1998). He promoted a cultural brand of Judaism, and believed that such an identification squared very well with American citizenship. Here the connection between his professional ideas about ethnicity and democracy, and the personal linkage with understanding his own place in the US is evident. For Kallen, being Jewish was central to his identity, despite not practicing religiously.

Kallen’s Pluralist Challenge  63 In 1914, Edward Alsworth Ross, a founding father of American sociology and, like Kallen, a professor at Wisconsin, wrote a book called The Old World in the New, which laid out one version of the nativist position—a kind of social order progressive nativism—regarding immigration at this time. Drawing on neo-Lamarckianism and the beginnings of scientific racialism, Ross painted a portrait of most immigrants—particularly those coming after the 1890s—as swarthy, unintelligent, unskilled, clannish, and a sure threat to Anglo-American stock. He did make some exceptions, but by and large his position was that if America did not restrict immigration (which had actually peaked in 1907), the country and its natives were in grave danger of being polluted and degraded. Kallen was incensed and wrote a vitriolic response that retains its immediacy today, especially when read alongside Ross’s diatribe. That response was the essay “Democracy Versus the Melting-Pot.” Kallen’s criticism of nativism as well as more liberal assimilationism draws attention to him in an investigation of the connection between discourse on immigration and assimilation, and the construction and renovation of American national narratives. Kallen borrowed central tenets of each position in the formulation of his more pluralistic vision. From the nativists he accepted a belief in national essentialism, and with the assimilationists he agreed that immigration was a good thing for America. These different stories of the meaning of America, then, speak to each other in ways worth pursuing. What was Kallen actually arguing for? In his signature essay “Democracy Versus the Melting Pot,” Kallen mapped out his thinking about the relationship between “natives” and immigrants, and about the ways in which other intellectuals had taken on this issue. For Kallen, the US would be best served by modeling itself after the image of an orchestra, where a variety of instruments would play simultaneously but apart, and would produce a full, rich harmony. This image was in stark opposition to the various models of unity espoused by those thinkers arguing for Anglo-conformity, melting pot, and full exclusion, all of which consider themselves “Americanist” in some way, and all of which—when compared to Kallen’s orchestra—offered a significantly depleted sound. Kallen likely considered his model a form of Americanism, too, and the truest form at that. Kallen began the essay by going back to the US in Revolutionary times, briefly considering the Declaration of Independence. He did this to draw an unlikely comparison. The Declaration, he argued, was written not as a piece of abstract political philosophy, but instead as a policy document responding to very specific offenses and intrusions by the British government. Further, he made the unusual claim that the doctrine of “natural rights” must be understood as a protection against “divine rights,” thereby legitimating a new social order. Kallen acknowledged that this interpretation was not what had survived, but insisted on the importance of historical context and accuracy.1 His rationale for turning to the Declaration was that in the Americanization movement of the early 20th century he saw another, very specific response to an “other.” This time, the Americans found themselves in the

64  Horace Kallen and a New Narrative, 1905–1925 position of being the dominant group, trying to protect themselves from the intrusions and perversions of immigrants. Kallen wrote: “The relationships of 1776 are, consequently, reversed. To conserve the inalienable rights of the colonists of 1776, it was necessary to declare all men equal; to conserve the inalienable rights of their descendants in the 20th century, it becomes necessary to declare all men unequal” (1924:61). Kallen’s imagining of America was built upon a new foundation, having discarded the underlying logics of England’s nationhood, and he worried over America’s new formulation. As previously indicated, this essay was in direct conversation with E. A. Ross. Kallen rejected Ross’s notion that restrictionism would speed up the assimilation of those immigrants already in the US; Kallen believed ending immigration would actually lead to more rigid heterogeneity and hierarchy. Perhaps Kallen truly believed the logic that restriction would simply cement the racial/ethnic hierarchies already in place, but perhaps he simply hoped to dissuade the restrictionist-Americanists from ending immigration by playing into their greatest fears regarding assimilation (or, non-assimilation). His concerns were driven by the impression he had that many intellectuals and academics had taken a racialist turn toward “Respect for ancestors, pride of race!” and, ironically enough, in an apparent defense of democracy (62).2 Given the rising role of science to explain all things in American intellectual discourse, including race relations, identity and even eugenics, this move to racialism fits well. Another conversation Kallen was having was with the melting pot Americanists—including Mary Antin, Edward Steiner, Jacob Riis, and Israel Zangwill. Kallen found their delight and gratitude at becoming American too self-conscious, and even demeaning. He thoroughly opposed their position on assimilation as giving up too much, but he did agree with their stance on keeping immigration open. As a scholar and an active member of New York’s intellectual community, Kallen was in contact and conversation with some melting pot thinkers, and of those discussed here, had correspondence at least with Antin. Kallen discussed the role of schools as critical for the melting pot to cook its blend. He makes one of his only allusions to contemporary notions of race here, acknowledging parenthetically that the melting pot is essentially a European mélange: “(for some doubt is expressed even by the white population of the South as to whether negroes—of whom more than a third are already of mixed blood—should also constitute an element of this blend) . . .” (77). Clearly this is a significant understating of the case, a point many later scholars have seized upon in critiquing Kallen’s work as looking only at ethnic, and not racial, pluralism. Though this critique certainly has merit, here Kallen is actually lodging a critique himself, indicating that even if the melting pot was working in certain places and with certain groups, it did not include everybody. So what did Kallen think should happen? He was patently opposed to assimilation, and proposed what was often described in the early part of the twentieth century as ethnic federalism, and what, in the 1924 reprint of “Democracy Versus the Melting-Pot” in Culture and Democracy in the

Kallen’s Pluralist Challenge  65 United States, Kallen named cultural pluralism. His vision of a state that governed self-consciously organized national groups was based in part on the structures of Switzerland and Great Britain. This vision rested upon the essentialist belief that: . . . similarity of nationality has usually a considerable intrinsic base . . . At his core, no human being, even in a “state of nature,” is a mere mathematical unit of action like the “economic man.” Behind him in time and tremendously in him in quality, are his ancestors; around him in space are his relatives and kin, carrying in common with him the inherited organic set from a remoter common ancestry. In all these he lives and moves and has his being. They constitute his, literally, natio, the inwardness of his nativity . . . (85–6) and when he comes to America, “externally he is cut off from the past. Not so internally: whatever else he changes, he cannot change his grandfather . . . (85–6). In other words, Kallen’s conceptualization of ethnicity and nationality is a primordialist, collectivist one: national identity is ascribed and unchangeable, and no man stands alone. Membership in a national group is an essential fact of one’s identity. In fact, he argued that the manner in which immigrants come to the US with their kinsmen, and then make their way in American cities as immigrants tends to intensify, not lessen their ethnic backgrounds. Using a rationale that logically precedes Barth’s (1969) transactionalism, emphasizing the way that contact with an “other” (or others) actually strengthens or exaggerates one’s own identity, Kallen claimed that the immigrant experience reinforced the identities with which they arrived. Thus, identities are not only ascribed, but re-ascribed with gusto upon entry to the US. But this particular logic of national essentialism was shared by nativists like Ross and Grant, so where did Kallen take a turn away from restrictionism?3 Ultimately, his point was that even if ethnics were to take on the external characteristics of being American, they would remain whatever they were born. He believed that heterogeneity would be maintained and that those Anglo-American traits that were disseminated were only the most superficial ones. In particular, Kallen argued that religion and language would act as limiting factors regarding assimilation, with immigrants retaining these features of their native cultures, regardless of whatever “American” characteristics they might pick up. In other words, full assimilation is impossible, and based upon his earlier comments on democracy, not even desirable. As Kallen saw it, democracy needed pluralism, not sameness. Additionally, Kallen’s understanding of America, unlike the other brands of Americanism examined here, did not include any “dominant American mind other than the industrial and theological” (96).4 He argued: The spirit of the land is inarticulate, not a voice but a chorus of many voices each singing a rather different tune. How to get order into this cacophony is the question for all persons who are concerned about

66  Horace Kallen and a New Narrative, 1905–1925 those things which alone justify wealth and power . . . What must, what can, what shall this cacophony become—a unison or a harmony? (emphasis added, 96) For Kallen, there was no core American identity, no central story common to all. Rather, what existed was national and ethnic multiplicity and confusion that required structure for the US to function democratically. He also argued that the very institutions some nativists sought to protect—particularly democracy and the rise and strength of American industry—actually served to reinforce pluralism. He said that “The institutions of the Republic have become the liberating cause and the background for the rise of cultural consciousness and social autonomy” of the various national groups (107). The question of unison or harmony within the nation best illuminates Kallen’s concerns. He wanted to make explicit an actual choice elites had before them: either the US could pursue the melting pot ideal—at the expense of the very spirit of American philosophies and institutions—or could pursue cultural pluralism, which would embody those. His choice, made abundantly clear in his closing lines, is unequivocal: he thinks the right choice is cultural pluralism, and that to insist on a unison driven by racial vanity would be “aborting the hope of the world” (117). For Kallen the construction of American identity was dependent on the selection of a foundation between competing alternatives. The building of an American narrative was not something that just existed, rather it was an active, conscious decision to be made by elites, and Kallen suggested they choose wisely and keep an image of the America they desire in mind. None of this is to say that Kallen did not recognize the need for shared elements in a society. In fact, much of the beginning of “Democracy Versus the Melting-Pot” deals with precisely this issue, which he calls likemindedness. Likemindedness could be generated via other kinds of likeness—ethnic, religious, ideological—but was also related to self-consciousness and commonality. It was a pragmatic commonality that pluralism could produce, whereby the peoples living side by side in diverse cities could achieve this state of being, not by shared “heritage, mentality and interest,” but by more external factors such as the shared protection of residents and their needs (70). Kallen saw this kind of cooperation among ethnics in the urban areas of the Northeast and Midwest, but said nothing about the lack of such give-and-take in other parts of the country, namely the South. At the end of the essay, Kallen described what a culturally plural nation would look like, without ever using the term: “Its form would be that of the federal republic; its substance a democracy of nationalities . . . The political and economic life of the commonwealth is a single unit and serves as the foundation and background for the realization of the distinctive individuality of each nation that composes it and of the pooling of these in a harmony above them all” (116). In his mind, whether or not the US would be such a nation was dependent on the choices of elites.

Kallen’s Pluralist Challenge  67 What does Kallen’s analysis tell us about the meanings of America? In the 1910s and 1920s, Kallen was arguing against specific narratives of America, one of which, the nativist, he saw as embodied in the growth of the Ku Klux Klan. This story told of a pure Anglo-Saxon America, which would resist change to the death with its hate-driven language and action. It was a potent social movement and narrative because it mobilized the rites and rituals of religion and proclaimed itself the defender of both God and country—it captured the cross and the flag in one hand. This merging of nation and religion was potent, especially in a time when the evangelical church inspired little passion, and when, according to the historian John Higham, the country was in the midst of a campaign of ritual purification via the social order progressives. Following his depiction of the appeal and power of the KKK narrative, Kallen made his first printed mention of cultural pluralism (this was in 1924, and not in the reprint of “Democracy Versus the Melting Pot,” but in a new essay): In manyness, variety, differentiation, lies the vitality of such oneness as they may compose. Cultural growth is founded upon Cultural Pluralism. Cultural Pluralism is possible only in a democratic society whose institutions encourage individuality in groups, in persons, in temperaments, whose program liberates these individualities and guides them into a fellowship of freedom and cooperation. The alternative before Americans is Kultur Klux Klan or Cultural Pluralism. (35, emphasis added) Here Kallen has reduced all variations of Americanism to a clearly negative sameness, what he calls Kultur Klux Klan. His preferred imagining portrays a democratic America that thrives upon diversity and fosters both liberty and community. It is, in fact, diversity, Kallen argued, that creates unity in the US, a new reading of e pluribus unum. The other primary story of America that Kallen was challenging was that which was brought to life in the image of the melting pot. Kallen, drawing heavily on his essentialist beliefs, felt that not only had the melting pot not worked, but that it could not ever achieve a new American race. Where melting pot proponents like Mary Antin and Israel Zangwill saw beauty in the creation of a uniquely American people, Kallen saw loss and homogenization. He also rejected the possibility of such blending. In at least some ways, he was correct. The model of assimilation urged by melting pot proponents was one that would indeed—if ever fully realized—generate a biological amalgamation new to all, but that required the loss of ethnic, national, and religious attributes. Kallen did not see the melting pot as Zangwill did, and he believed any distinctions not fitting the Anglo-American mold would be first to go. It is important to remember that Kallen’s rejection of this biological mixing combined with a continuation of the hegemony of

68  Horace Kallen and a New Narrative, 1905–1925 Anglo-American values and beliefs was not only about the latter, i.e., Anglo hegemony. For Kallen, racial diversity also meant maintenance of biological diversity alongside cultural diversity, and he understood such maintenance of difference to be critical for democracy. Thus, the melting pot narrative had to be rejected. Kallen challenged the idea that Americanism (by which he meant American national identity) was static, and instead argued that the core values that made up American ideology—liberty, union, and democracy—were “protean” and manipulable. He illustrated this in another essay originally published in 19165 by showing that the importance and priority of these values had shifted over time. At the time of the revolution, “Liberty” was foremost as the colonists sought fairer governance and the ability to exercise their rights. At the time of the Civil War, “Unity” attained priority, as Liberty was increasingly understood in terms of the individual rather than the nation and the chasm between North and South demanded repair. By the 1910s, it was “Democracy” that was preeminent, in part as a result of the new meaning placed on Liberty. For Kallen, it was clear that the meaning of America changes. At the same time, he too was putting forward a particular vision of America, one that included change and diversity, within a democratic framework, and one that was shaped by both earlier ideas and sociohistorical factors. With cultural pluralism, this America could be achieved. For Kallen, this emphasis on democracy was a logical lead-in to cultural pluralism: . . . the problem of Democracy is so to perfect the organization of society that every man and every group may have the freest possible opportunity to realize and perfect their natures, and to attain the excellence appropriate to their kind. In essence, therefore, Democracy involves, not the elimination of differences, but the perfection and conservation of differences. It aims, through Union, not at uniformity, but at variety, at a one out of many, as the dollars say in Latin, and a many in one. It involves a give and take between radically different types, and a mutual respect and mutual cooperation based on mutual understanding. (53) Why did Kallen believe that democracy necessarily involved the continued recognition of difference? He took the notion of individual liberty, and in linking it to national (ethnic) essentialism (of which he was thoroughly convinced) found pluralism vital to democracy. This was clearly a normative statement, which one can agree with or not, but Kallen made the case for a particular meaning of America wherein ethnic/national group recognition was central to national unity and the functioning of the nation-state. For immigrants and other minority group members, the appeal of this imagining might have been palpable, but for natives and those feeling comfortably assimilated, it represented changes they wanted to avoid.

Kallen’s Pluralist Challenge  69 Regarding the effect of the war on the way immigrants were treated and understood, Kallen took a hard line. He insisted, for example, that national hyphenation—which was increasingly frowned upon in the 1910s—was not a matter of disloyalty and certainly did not constitute treason. He offered a broader perspective, showing that everyone is, in fact, multi-hyphenate. Everyone must choose to elevate one or another aspect of identity (not only as a member of an ethnic group, but as parent, lover, worker, etc.) on occasion, but must not “lose sight of the truth that the hyphen unites very much more than it separates, and that in point of fact, the greater the hyphenation, the greater the unanimity” (54–5).6 Kallen differentiated hyphenation from treason, arguing that treason is an intentional act to disadvantage the US, which to him, would be especially hideous in light of the voluntary nature of American citizenship. In the essay where he made these arguments, Kallen also emphasized the significance of citizenship—what was once known as “the Great Vocation.” He felt the rights and responsibilities of citizenship must be taught for the sake of our democracy, as they clarified the role of the citizen: “It assumes that each citizen, with all his allegiances and other imperfections on his head, is to be the guardian of the State, and that the State is to secure him freedom and safety in his endeavors, his achievements, and his associations.” (57) For Kallen, national origins did not make some people more or less capable of learning this role. Being American was achievable by anyone, so long as s/he could maintain a national culture and community, and commit to American civic life. RESPONSES TO KALLEN Though Kallen’s ideas about cultural pluralism were not taken up right away in any institutional form, there were at least two significant, thoughtful, non-nativist responses that give some indication as to the manner in which sympathetic ears were considering these new conceptions about assimilation, democracy, and American identity. The first of these responses was written by the well-known literary critic, Randolph Bourne, and was published as “Trans-National America” in the Atlantic Monthly in July 1916. Bourne was a cultural critic who had a meteoric but short-lived career from 1911 to 1918; he died at age 33. Bourne developed an isolationist philosophy as a negative reaction to the exclusive, military-inflected nationalism he observed on a 1914 trip to Europe, and his belief that the US entering the war would lead to problems at home concerning the relationships between national/ethnic groups. Bourne’s espousal of political isolationism has also been related to his personal and social isolation, the first perhaps best understood in the context of his significant physical deformities, and the latter as a result of his taking less popular positions during war period. In 1914 Bourne was asked to join the staff of the nascent New Republic, and he also wrote for other intellectual journals of the day, including the Atlantic Monthly,

70  Horace Kallen and a New Narrative, 1905–1925 the Seven Arts, and the Menorah Journal. By the end of his life, Bourne felt isolated from and abandoned even by some of the intellectuals he had earlier admired as they took interventionist positions on the war. According to an important essay by historian David Hollinger, Bourne’s “articulation of the cosmopolitan ideal was with, rather than against, the drift of history when his efforts are viewed in another context: the emergence of a national, secular, ethnically-diverse, left-of-center intelligentsia” (1975: 134). Bourne’s general sense of the direction America should be going in was very much in line with Kallen’s. In fact, Bourne drew directly on “Democracy Versus the Melting-Pot” for his famous “Trans-National America,” which appeared just a year and a half later. This span of time matters because in the meantime, by the summer of 1916, preparedness had become the reigning foreign affairs philosophy (following the sinking of the Lusitania and the death of over one hundred Americans), and Bourne’s position was even less well received by intellectuals of the day than Kallen’s had been. Bourne was less rigid than was Kallen as regards immigrants themselves changing. His pluralism was also less political, and more intellectually motivated than Kallen’s (Hollinger 1975: 142). The two men knew each other through the development of the left-of-center intelligentsia of the period, with at least one instance where Bourne was a guest in Kallen’s home (Hollinger 1975). One letter also exists, per the inventory of the American Jewish Archive, indicating at least some scholarly exchange between the two men. That Bourne’s essay was published in the Atlantic is also important for at least one reason: the Atlantic was (and is) a highly respected intellectual, non-partisan journal commenting on the critical features of the day. In other words, it had a relatively broad, educated readership, suggesting that Bourne’s ideas were not relegated to a marginal publication, thus limiting their dissemination. In short, Bourne was opposed to coercive Americanization policies, was in favor of a particular kind of national cosmopolitanism that he thought could be realized only in the US, and was in support of Kallen’s arguments from “Democracy Versus the Melting-Pot,” which he then invoked for making his own arguments regarding assimilation. Like many Americans, Bourne believed that the melting pot had failed, and that “assimilation in this country was proceeding on lines very different from those we had marked out for it,” leading “natives” to blame the immigrants themselves for its “failure” (1916: 86). He argued that rather than accepting the melting pot ideal as the true meaning of Americanism, that “perhaps the time has come to assert a higher ideal” (Bourne 1916:86). He wanted America to take into consideration not only what the descendants of “British stocks” decided, but to be something crafted by all those who had made it their home. Like Kallen, Bourne was critical of the immigrant autobiographers, and Mary Antin in particular. He rejected her logic that all immigrants were simply people who missed the Mayflower and came as soon as they could. He argued that she missed the point that when they did come, immigrants brought different cultures and languages: “These people were not mere arrivals from the same family, to be welcomed as understood and long-loved, but

Kallen’s Pluralist Challenge  71 strangers to the neighborhood, with whom a long process of settling down had to take place” (87). Simultaneously, Bourne disapproved of the nativist movement, which he called English-American conservatism. This turn of phrase was significant in that its construction utilized the hated hyphenation to show a parallel between the natives and the new immigrant groups. He took this a step further in saying, “There may be a difference between these earlier and these later stocks, but it lies neither in the motive for coming nor in the strength of cultural allegiance to the homeland. The truth is that no more tenacious cultural allegiance to the mother country has been shown by any alien nation than by the ruling class of Anglo-Saxon descendants in these American states” (Bourne 1916:88). Bourne reasoned that this truth remained implicit only because, as the ruling group, the “Anglo-Saxons” had the power to name those who came after them as “other.” From there, Bourne went on to say that there was no dominant American culture, only groups of immigrants looking back to their homelands. In describing America in the 1910s, what Bourne saw was a sort of unintentional imposition of Anglo-Saxon culture on all other groups, rather than “democratic cooperation.” He claimed that . . . the Anglo-Saxon element is guilty of just what every dominant race is guilty of in every European country: the imposition of its own culture upon the minority peoples. The fact that this imposition has been so mild and, indeed, semi-conscious does not alter its quality. And the war had brought out just the degree to which that purpose of ‘Americanizing,’ that is, ‘Anglo-Saxonizing,’ the immigrant has failed. (Bourne 1916:89) So we see, once again, the way in which the war crystallized the limitations of the melting pot and simultaneously forged an ever more intense nativism. What Bourne envisioned for America was something much more along the lines of Kallen’s ethnic federalism: Do we not see how the national colonies in America, deriving power from the deep cultural heart of Europe and yet living here in mutual toleration, freed from the age-long tangles of races, creeds, and dynasties, may work out a federated ideal? . . . America is a unique sociological fabric, and it bespeaks poverty of the imagination not to be thrilled at the uncalculable potentialities of so novel a union of men. To seek no other goal than the weary old nationalism,—belligerent, exclusive, inbreeding, the poison of which we are witnessing now in Europe,—is to make patriotism a hollow sham, and to declare that, in spite of our boastings, America must ever be a follower and not a leader of nations. (1916:91) What Bourne described sounds very much like Kallen’s ethnic federalism, and what in 1924 Kallen would name cultural pluralism, but for the moment, Bourne called for “a federation of cultures” and a union of

72  Horace Kallen and a New Narrative, 1905–1925 “national colonies.” He argued that America needed to be future-oriented, which had been impeded by the dominant myth of the melting pot (or at least his reading of it), and he saw this unusual variation on American exceptionalism—the presence of so many cultures within one union—as an opportunity to be taken advantage of, not a danger to be countered. The very presence of so many national cultures paved the way, in Bourne’s eyes, for America to be the first truly “international nation” (1916:93). It was from this idea that Bourne came to the title of his essay. This international, or cosmopolitan, nation would be enacted by promoting precisely that action that most put fear into the hearts of the nativists: dual citizenship. Bourne argued that by embracing a transnational, cosmopolitan American identity, the tension within immigrants and immigrant communities between homeland and America would be relieved. Importantly for Bourne, who was a non-interventionist regarding the war, such a transnational nationalism might allow the US to find a position above the fray of the war, expressing some new, greater American ideal. Thus for Bourne, thinking about pluralism—at least in the sense that groups be encouraged to retain cultural characteristics—was intimately related to his thinking about international affairs, and especially the First World War. Kallen’s ideas gave him the tools to make his argument, and in many ways the national narrative Bourne projected mirrored Kallen’s. Another response to Kallen’s “Democracy Versus the Melting-Pot” was written in 1920 as a doctoral dissertation in philosophy at the Teachers College at Columbia University by Isaac B. Berkson. Berkson was heavily influenced by the more flexible understandings of race and culture being advocated by Franz Boas, among others, at the time. Berkson’s practical interest was mostly with the development of the Jewish community through schools, and it may have been Berkson’s concentration on the Jewish experience that ultimately limited the reception of his book, Theories of Americanization, and thus any strong intellectual legacy Berkson might have had. Many readers likely felt the examples to which he continually returned did not apply well to the many other immigrant communities in question in the immigration/assimilation debates of the day. But Berkson began his work thinking not only of the Jewish community. The book, published in 1920, included a great deal of attention to Americanization and cultural pluralism—which Berkson dubbed the “federation of nationalities” theory—and somewhat less time considering melting pot views. For Berkson, much of the question of assimilation needed to be deliberated upon not only in terms of what would be good for immigrants and natives, but also how any particular theory or strategy aligned with democracy. He wanted to know how immigrants fit into American democracy, whether they could maintain a group identity, and if so, through what means. Though he repeatedly made a case for generalization, his empirical evidence was about Jews, and more specifically Jews in New York, so this argument for extrapolation was fairly weak (see p. 2 for his first attempt at this). Berkson noted that “The whole argument rests upon the assumption

Kallen’s Pluralist Challenge  73 that the United States aims to be a democracy” (1920:2). Of course, by that he meant democracy as he interpreted it, which is as a deeply religious and spiritual social system manifest in “Political organization rather than prayer . . .” (9). Not surprisingly, given his focus on Jews, it is the Old Testament to which Berkson most closely linked what today might be called democracy’s humanitarian impulse (11). Ultimately, as regards the relationship between democracy and assimilation, he argued the “Coercion is the antithesis of everything democratic . . . ” and called for the schools to be the primary agents of democratic socialization (44). For Berkson the socialization taking place in schools was apparently not seen as coercive in a harsh, intentional manner. Berkson saw his analysis as broadly applicable (not just for Jews) in large part because he was not interested in the processes of assimilation, but rather “the general principles that should govern that relationship” (1920:2). It is this focus on the principles of assimilation and its relationship to democracy that gets lost—especially in sociological approaches to assimilation—after the middle of the twentieth century. Berkson dedicated a significant portion of his book to thinking through “Americanization” theory, melting pot theory, and “federation of nationalities” theory, none of which, according to his analysis, met the principles of democracy. He did all of this as a prelude to introducing his own theory, which he mapped out in the remainder of the text. One gap worth mentioning, given the historical moment, is that Berkson paid little attention to restrictionism. When talking about the options regarding dealing with foreign ethnic groups, he focused on the polarized positions of “either total assimilation or complete retention of the group identity” (53). This lack of middle ground was also evident in the significantly smaller space dedicated to discussion of melting pot theories than to the other two strategies. Berkson rejected Americanization theory (a very broad understanding of nativism), which he reduced to total Anglo-conformity, for relying upon both bad science (that is, the racialist science so popular at the time) and for being anti-democratic (1920:61). He acknowledged the strong Anglo-Saxon cultural stamp on America, but, like Kallen and Bourne, denied the legitimacy that its hegemony should remain the imprint of US identity. He also saw the diversity of the US as a strength, not a danger: “In the face of the fact that the United States is richer, more powerful, more highly cultured, and its moral outlook as lofty as it ever was in the days of the fathers of our country, in spite of a continuous stream of immigration, positive evidence would be needed to prove that our fundamental institutions are being threatened” (1920:64). The one legitimate premise for Americanization, by Berkson’s estimation, would have been the call for “likemindedness”—a term that comes up repeatedly in the discourse—for preserving unity for the functioning and protection of the state. Unfortunately, he argued, the likemindedness the nativists were emphasizing was all about external characteristics, as opposed to actual “mindedness,” which would have been about shared social aims (1920:67). More simply, he regretted that “Americanization” theory was built on destructive and negative processes, rather than

74  Horace Kallen and a New Narrative, 1905–1925 constructive and positive ones where the building of shared values and goals would have superseded coercive measures to make immigrants forget their pasts.7 That negative approach, he claimed, would yield self-hatred among immigrants, and only a shallow understanding of paramount American ideals and principles. And given the nativists’ prescriptions, even those would have been undermined by the authoritarian use of American institutions. Berkson cast aside this exclusivist, demeaning narrative and moved on to consider the melting pot. While certainly more favorable to melting pot thinking than to nativist thinking, Berkson still found problems. He outlined what could be called the melting pot creed as follows: Out of the present heterogeneity of races, a new superior race is to be formed; out of the present medley of cultures a new, richer, more humane civilization is to be created; out of the present ferment a new religion will develop representing the spiritual expression of the new people, a religion more relevant to modern conceptions of life than the historical creeds and more tolerant of the differences among humankind. (1920:73) So what were Berkson’s concerns? Although Americanism under melting pot logic was positive, inclusive, and communal, it simultaneously required self-annihilation for the sake of building a new America; thus it retained the destructive element found in nativist theory. Another problem was that its attention to the contribution of ethnic groups was all about race, not culture. In other words, physical mixing was what was being prescribed, while ultimately, as regards culture, a tacit Anglo-conformity remained (1920:76–7). Like nativism, this narrative required too much devaluation of the immigrants’ pasts and cultures for Berkson. On Kallen’s federation of nationalities position, Berkson gave a fair-minded reading. He described Kallen’s argument as follows: The basis of this theory rests on the assumption that the ethnic quality of an individual determines absolutely and inevitably what his nature is to be . . . Since ‘race’ is such an ineradicable and all determining element, it is the central fact of any man’s life. Government performs its function of freeing human capacities only when it exists for the purpose of freeing ethnic expression. Its special function is to permit free development of the ethnic group, for the individual’s happiness is ‘implied in ancestral endowment.’ (79) Berkson agreed with Kallen’s conclusion, but not with the logic that anticipated it. He strongly criticized Kallen’s ethnic essentialism and determinism, finding that ultimately, Kallen’s reasoning was but the flip-side of that utilized by nativists like Ross and Grant (1920:83). Taking up the flexible ideas of thinkers like Boas and Edward Thorndike, Berkson claimed that

Kallen’s Pluralist Challenge  75 not only race, but “differences of habitat, of vocation, of political institutions, of the ‘zeitgeist’ and social atmosphere” all combine to constitute the culture of the group (1920:86). This construction of group culture also implied temporal flexibility, as all but physical race (and even that through racial mixing) could change. In addition to the critique of ethnic “predestination,” Berkson also went back to the principles of democracy and found a problem with Kallen’s formulation. Here he focused on the way in which the federation of nationalities perspective (cultural pluralism) elevated the group to a position of primacy rather than the individual (1920:89). This emphasis on groups would lead to sectionalism and segregation, both of which would hamper the functioning of a democracy. For Berkson, unlike Kallen, democracy was an explicitly presentist philosophy wherein a present circumstance should have more weight than historical ones: “Life is the author, history the interpreter, not vice versa. The notion of the hegemony of the ethnic group tends too much to bend the present life to a standard created by the past” (91). So what America did Berkson imagine? He saw America working under the principles of what he called the “Community Theory,” which was an ethnic response to the problem of adjustment, but specifically under and within democratic conditions.8 Like Kallen, he was opposed to assimilation and the loss of ethnic distinction. Unlike Kallen, he placed emphasis on group culture, not race (or biology). This emphasis replaced Kallen’s essentialism with something more flexible, but also confronted Berkson with the possibility that intermarriage and propinquity might eventually lead to ethnic dissolution. Seemingly, as long as such a process was not forced, it was something that might have to be accepted. However, Berkson thought ethnic groups could retain their cultures while remaining fully engaged in national life, and he thought this could be done through ethnic schools. Such institutions were not to compete with the public schools, but rather were to complement them. Contemporary Hebrew schools could serve as the model Berkson was working from, where Jewish children attend classes from one to several days a week in addition to regular schools in preparation for their lives in the Jewish community. He understood that his proposal might well come to the same results as the melting pot: . . . if the ethnic group finally disintegrates, the ‘Community’ theory really resolves itself into the ‘Melting Pot’ theory, accomplishing the fusion without the evils of hasty assimilation. Its essential merit is that it rejects the doctrine of predestination [i.e. essentialism]; it conceives the life of the individual to be formed not in accordance with some preconceived theory but as a result of the interaction of his own nature with the richest environment. (Berkson 1920:118). For Berkson, the American story, by necessity, had to recognize the importance of group life and national life, both while bearing in mind that the individual had to remain sovereign. In principle, then, he agreed with Kallen

76  Horace Kallen and a New Narrative, 1905–1925 that group culture was important and that to denigrate it would not help the cause of national unity, but in the process, he seemed to believe that the melting pot thinkers saw the future more clearly. EARLY TWENTIETH-CENTURY DISCOURSE AND THE MEANING OF AMERICA Let us return to a brief analysis of Kallen’s ideas on assimilation, going back to the analytical questions posed at the start of the chapter:

To Whom or What Was Kallen Responding? Kallen was responding to two loosely defined groups, and the histories that drove their ideas. First, and certainly most obvious from the 1915 essay, Kallen was shooting back at the restrictionists/nativists. He found their arguments in favor of closing the doors to immigration to be anti-democratic, xenophobic, misguided, and wrongheaded. For him, the meaning of America attributed by the nativists was not America at all. At the same time, Kallen was also rejecting the ameliorative tactics offered by the melting pot thinkers of his day. He saw them—those who had come as immigrants and now espoused the melting pot position—as betraying themselves and their groups (he was especially dismayed by Jews who did this). Finally, he thought that despite the difference in approach and tone, that the approach of melting pot thinkers would lead to the same end as that being sought after by the more belligerent nativists: all immigrants would become similar “in background, tradition, outlook and spirit to the descendants of the British colonists, the ‘Anglo-Saxon’ stock” (Kallen 1998 [1924]:71). Both of these groups whose ideas Kallen decried were responding to the same social and historical factors as Kallen himself: massive immigration, WWI, changing economic structures and institutions, and increasing national, institutional centralization. In addition, all of these thinkers wrote in the context of progressivism and its paradoxes, and the beginnings of racial science. By the mid-1920s, the nativist Americanists won the day. Restrictionism became the law of the land, Kallen’s ideas all but disappeared for a time, the melting pot fell into disrepute, and for at least a few years, an Anglo-centric nativism thrived.

Were Kallen’s Questions Being Posed Analytically or Prescriptively? For Kallen there was a strong prescriptive element driving his analysis. As a Jew who strongly embraced what he called “Hebraism,” an ethnic, not religious, Jewish identity, Kallen saw a lot to lose with full-fledged assimilation. More analytically, he believed that democracy needed pluralism to thrive and to realize its full potential. Kallen utilized the essentialist logic

Kallen’s Pluralist Challenge  77 still dominant (though increasingly challenged) at the time to support his prescriptions. He also frequently reacted against certain ideologies (e.g., individualism) with other ideologies (e.g., collectivism). As such, his analysis and prescriptions were very much tied together.

To the Degree That Ideas Were Presented Prescriptively, How Explicit Was Ideology in His Writing, and What Effect Does This Have on the Way It Was Received and How It Can Be Analyzed? Kallen’s ideology was not always explicit in this essay, but as a well-known thinker and writer with connections to Zionism and other social movements, his normative positions were surely not a mystery. Given how vitriolic Kallen was toward E. A. Ross, his ideology may have been all the more evident for those familiar with the debates on assimilation at the time. While Kallen’s work received some response in 1915, when his ideas on assimilation, pluralism, and democracy were published as a book in 1924, they received less attention. This may have had less to do with any shock at or resistance to his analysis—either normative or objective—and more to do with the fact that restrictionist legislation had just been passed, making his positions less relevant. Immigration was going to decline, at least for the time being.

How Have Kallen’s Ideas Shaped Future Discourse? Between the publication of Kallen’s essay in The Nation in 1915 and its appearance in a book of his collected works in 1924, Isaac Berkson prominently featured Kallen’s analysis as one of four theories of Americanization in his 1920 book. Berkson discredited nativist theories as both scientifically wrong and antithetical to democratic principles. While he found the claims of melting pot thinkers more palatable, given their more positive-constructive approach (as opposed to the negative-destructive one taken by nativists), they ultimately demanded the disavowal of the immigrant community, which Berkson did not accept. With Kallen, Berkson agreed that immigrants be allowed to maintain the culture of their origins, and also liked the critiques of both Anglo-conformist nativists and melting-pot thinkers. Even so, he found little of practical use in Kallen’s essay, and was critical of Kallen’s national (ethnic) essentialism and determinism. In place of these three theories, Berkson then put forward his own perspective on community in a plural democracy. The problem of practical use in Kallen’s ideas may well have been a real stumbling block for its wider usage. Kallen appears to have been influential to the degree that later scholars like Milton Gordon and Nathan Glazer found his work on assimilation important. Gordon refuted Kallen’s claim of cultural pluralism and argued instead for structural pluralism. Glazer—at least in the late 1950s—found Kallen’s work inspirational to his own, and Kallen’s focus on religion found an important place in Beyond the Melting Pot (1963). Today, however,

78  Horace Kallen and a New Narrative, 1905–1925 Kallen receives little, if any recognition within sociology, despite the fact that his vision of a federation of nationalities—cultural pluralism—appears to be a, if not the, logical antecedent to multiculturalism. A renewed attention to his ideas and their role in mobilizing a narrative of diversity that makes national level claims would be worth the effort, both in terms of understanding the history of ideas, and in terms of understanding the ongoing debates about immigration, assimilation, and what counts as American. CONCLUSION What does Kallen’s work, and the conversation into which he entered, tell us about the meaning of America? We see that at one moment in time, early in the 20th century, at least at the level of elites, there were at least three narratives regarding the meaning of America. One was a racialist story that told of the superiority of Anglo-Saxon (or Nordic) stock—literally and figuratively. For those telling this tale, immigrants were a threat not only to race purity, but to the survival of “American” values and institutions, and America’s economic progress. A second story told of an America that brought immigrants to its bosom and created new and better people. This story—often understood today in the trope of America as an immigrant nation that repeatedly absorbs its newest members—is the liberal tale that despite itself, seems to fall back on, at the very least, the superiority of Anglo-American political values. Interestingly, by the 1920s, not only did conservatives continue to reject this melting pot narrative, but liberals began to as well. The liberal repudiation of that story was premised on the problems associated with coercive assimilation, while the conservatives saw the failure of assimilatory mechanisms. The result of this dual refutation of the melting pot was the new restrictionist legislation of 1924. Finally there is a third story, told by Kallen, and supported at least in part by Bourne and Berkson, of an America that can and should continue to welcome newcomers. But this narrative says America cannot and should not change them, and that they should be respected and welcomed as they are, if only for the sake of advancing democracy. This was the story of cultural pluralism. A second finding that is implicit here is that the meaning of America changes over time, but has recognizable elements across time. In examining Beyond the Melting Pot by Glazer and Moynihan and Who Are We? by Huntington, the manner in which this happens becomes much clearer. But even looking at just this one period, in thinking about the way a massive influx of immigrants, a war, a changing economy, and a centralization of institutions could produce three conceptions of American identity, the possibilities begin to emerge. These intellectuals and their ideas gained meaning both from the work that preceded them, and continued to find new meaning in that which followed. The story continues mid-century as decades of low levels of immigration come to a close.

Kallen’s Pluralist Challenge  79 NOTES 1 Kallen was thus employing a dialogical analytical method in his reading of American history. He insisted on going back to the source to see how the meanings of “sacred” documents had been altered, and to retrieve the original intent by understanding its context. 2 All quotes from Kallen in this chapter come from Kallen, Horace M. 1998 (1924). Culture and Democracy in the United States. New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers. 3 This biological essentialism was shared by many during this period, and was likely the dominant understanding of human characteristics and relationships between groups in society. One type of evidence that illustrates the predominance of this perspective can be seen in the ascendance of Social Darwinism as an explanatory tool used to account for inequality in American society (Schultz 2003). In fact, the period leading up to Kallen’s essay, more precisely 1870–1917, represents the zenith of the authority of applying Darwinian thought to society (Schultz 2003). Social scientists, including Ross, explicitly understood society as a “Darwinian jungle” that needed to be tamed with methods of social control. Thus, Kallen’s acceptance of biological essentialism was not an outlier, but rather an acceptance of the standard way of conceiving of such issues in his day. It was scholars like Isaac Berkson (1920), who drew upon the ideas of Franz Boas and demanded a more flexible accounting of ethnic and racial personhood, who were the exceptions, not the essentialists. 4 It is, of course, of interest why Kallen so minimized the importance of dominant narratives of industry and religion. Perhaps he underestimated the significance of these realms in the construction of American identity, but perhaps he recognized their importance and was concerned that if that were maintained, cultural pluralism could never come to be. 5 First published in 1916 as “A Meaning of Americanism,” The Immigrants in America Review. 6 It may be problematic that Kallen wanted to emphasize both multiplicity in identity and national essentialism. This is a problem of logic, if not also biology, and one that was pointed out by two letter writers to The Nation in 1915 and a book review in The New York Times in 1924 (Roosevelt 1924). 7 Obviously, nativists like Grant would have understood their motives as conserving, not destroying, while those like Ross would have seen their positions as explicitly progressive, not regressive or destructive. 8 Community Theory was Berkson’s own contribution to the literature on ­assimilation and America.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Antin, Mary. 1997 (1912). The Promised Land. New York: Penguin Books. Antin, Mary. 1899. From Plotzk to Boston. Boston: W.B. Clarke and Co. Barth, Fredrik. 1969. Ethnic Groups and Boundaries. Prospect Heights, Illinois: Waveland Press. Berkson, Isaac B. 1969 (1920). Theories of Americanization: A Critical Study. New York: Arno Press and The New York Times. Boas, Franz. 1911. The Mind of Primitive Man. New York: Free Press. Bok, Edward. 1920. The Americanization of Edward Bok. New York: C. Scribner’s Sons.

80  Horace Kallen and a New Narrative, 1905–1925 Bourne, Randolph. 1916. “Trans-National America.” Atlantic Monthly CXVII (July, 1916): 86–97. Crevecoeur, J. Hector St. John. 1998 (1782). Letters from an American Farmer. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Fairchild, Henry Pratt. 1926. The Melting Pot Mistake. Boston: Little, Brown and Company. Glazer, Nathan and Daniel P. Moynihan. 1970 (1963). Beyond the Melting Pot: The Negroes, Puerto Ricans, Jews, Italians, and Irish of New York City. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. Gleason, Philip. 1980. “American Identity and Americanization” Harvard Encyclopedia of American Ethnic Groups. Edited by Stephen Thernstrom. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Gordon, Milton M. 1964. Assimilation in American Life: The Role of Race, Religion, and National Origins. New York: Oxford University Press. Grant, Madison. 1918 (1916). The Passing of the Great Race, or the Racial Basis of European History. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons. Higham, John. 1988. Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 1860–1925. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Higham, John. 1984 (1975). Send These to Me: Immigrants in Urban America (Rev. ed.). Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Hing, Bill Ong. 2004. Defining America through Immigration Policy. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Hollinger, David. 1975. “Ethnic Diversity, Cosmopolitanism and the Emergence of the American Liberal Intelligentsia.” American Quarterly 27(2): 133–151. Kallen, Horace M. 1998 (1924). Culture and Democracy in the United States. New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers. Kallen, Horace M. 1915. “Democracy versus the Melting-Pot.” The Nation. February 18 and 25. Kaufmann, Eric P. 2004. The Rise and Fall of Anglo-America. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Myrdal, Gunnar. 2002 (1944). An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy, Volume I. New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers. Riis, Jacob A. 1970 (1902). The Making of an American. New York: Macmillan. Roosevelt, Nicholas. 1924. “Professor Kallen Proposes to Balkanize America: A Democracy of Nationalities to Solve Our Racial Problems.” New York Times. April 20: BR3. Schultz, Kevin M. 2003. “Social Darwinism.” Pp. 411–412 in The Dictionary of American History, 3rd ed., gen. ed. vol. 7. Edited by Stanley I. Kutler. New York: Simon and Schuster. Steiner, Edward A. 1914. From Alien to Citizen: The Story of My Life in America. New York: Fleming H. Revell Company. Whitfield, Stephen J. 1998. “Introduction.” Culture and Democracy in the United States. Edited by Horace M. Kallen. New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers. Whitfield, Stephen J. 1994. “Horace Meyer Kallen.” Dictionary of American Biography, Supplement 9: 1971–1975. Edited by John Fitzpatrick. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1994. Reproduced in History Resource Center. Farmington Hills, MI: Gale Group. Wohlgelernter, Maurice. 1964. Israel Zangwill: A Study. New York: Columbia Press. Zangwill, Israel. 1915 (1909). The Melting Pot Drama in Four Acts. New York: Macmillan Company.

Part II

Glazer and Moynihan Challenge the Melting Pot, 1950–1970

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4 A Time for American Power (and Melting?)

“. . . remember, remember always that all of us, and you and I especially, are descended from immigrants and revolutionists.” Franklin Delano Roosevelt, to the Daughters of the American Revolution, 1938 (in Ravitch 1990:475)

Though the passage of the National Origins Act in 1924 marked the end of an era of massive European immigration into the United States, it did not mark the end of concerns about the meaning of America, and who counted as American. Certainly there was some sense of reprieve once the numbers of newcomers fell from close to a million (or more) each year from 1902 to 1915, to more manageable figures in the low hundreds of thousands in the 1920s, down to the tens of thousands from 1931 to 1946 (Patterson 1996:62, Yetman 1999:569). And yet, despite the growth of the economy and the slowing of immigration, which brought a new level of stability to certain aspects of social life, American society continued to change. After World War II, the Civil Rights Movement began its slow march to secure equal treatment for minorities. Prior to the formation of groups like the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in 1957, Catholics, Jews, blacks, and others were beginning to agitate for equal access and a real place in American society. It was, in fact, Catholics and Jews who seemingly made the first real demands for group recognition, while respecting the political and legal systems already in place (Schultz 2011). One legacy of having defeated Hitler, Mussolini, and the Japanese was that the scientific racialism that animated much of the Second World War lost any sense of the legitimacy it had once carried. Groups of people could no longer be left out or actively, legally, discriminated against on the basis of “inferior blood” and the characteristics that accompanied it. The middle of the twentieth century also harbored the early stages of the ideological battles of the Cold War, and the ascendance of the US to its role as a global superpower. At the same time, Americans were living in a statistical blip where government supported a family wage, divorce rates went down, women’s entry into the workplace stalled, and the media began

84  Glazer and Moynihan Challenge the Melting Pot, 1950–1970 its meteoric rise into the everyday consciousness of the populace (Coontz 1992). At the end of the twentieth century, this was the period most often looked back to with nostalgia, as though this American Golden Age simply emerged on its own as some reward for superiority, and as if during this time there were no internal issues dividing the country. To imagine the middle of the century as one free of any concerns is to look back with rose-colored glasses. Though certain ethnic and racial barriers to full membership were falling, many remained. Though immigration had dramatically slowed, it continued, and the quota system still in place remained in dispute. And though there were fewer immigrants to be incorporated, there were still many people living in the United States who lingered on the margins of American life. In describing a campaign to cut off aid to Native Americans, one prominent historian argued that the situation of these peoples “testified to the continuing strength of white ethnocentrism and institutional discrimination in the country” and illustrated “the continuing power of white assimilationist thinking” (Patterson 1996:377). It was into these matters that Nathan Glazer and Daniel P. Moynihan intervened with their well-known and controversial book, Beyond the Melting Pot, first published in 1963, which serves as the second focal point regarding immigration, assimilation, and American identity. This chapter examines both the sociohistorical and intellectual context into which Glazer and Moynihan entered, in an attempt to tease out and illuminate those imaginings of America prevailing at the time, and to explain why they thrived. Though the authors did make policy suggestions in the book, the goal of Beyond the Melting Pot and most of its intellectual cousins was somewhat different from the essays and books from the 1910s and 1920s. The central books and thinkers here tend to be more within their academic disciplines, and less explicitly part of public discourse. One of the draws of this particular book as a centerpiece for thinking about assimilation and America in the middle of the century, however, is precisely the fact that it transcended the academy. To be clear, there was not the same kind of public conversation taking place between scholars in the 1960s as there had been in the 1910s. Perhaps this is related to the professionalization and increasing specialization of the academy, perhaps it is due to the substantial decline in immigration, but regardless the distinction exists. It may have been this increasingly formalistic kind of academic discourse within increasingly highly specialized universities, as opposed to the more direct conversations taking place in intellectual journals earlier in the century, that helped to drive the literature about race, ethnicity, immigration, assimilation, and nation into tightly bounded regions of study, which thereafter rarely meet again. Glazer and Moynihan, in their indirect way—by outwardly focusing on the city, but clearly intending to describe much more—did make the attempt to put all of these pieces together, resulting in a complicated, often divisive, report. Regardless of how one might feel about their arguments

A Time for American Power (and Melting?)  85 and analysis, that effort at complexity and completeness mattered, and has rarely been duplicated. The area that even they were rather inattentive to was the nation. They were absolutely telling a national story, but theoretically the level of the nation remained largely implicit. And ultimately, what they proposed as a research agenda, ethnic studies, only advanced the trend of submerging the nation as a unit of analysis in the US. This chapter maps out the American sociohistorical context of the post–World War II period into the mid-1960s, paying specific attention to immigration, wars and significant foreign affairs, the economy, and important social movements of the period. Following that is an examination of the intellectual writing to which Glazer and Moynihan understood themselves to be responding. These thinkers, whose work preceded Beyond the Melting Pot, were putting forward their own visions of America, and how those related to the events of the day. But first, it is imperative that the milieu in which those authors were writing be brought to light. The relationship between context and the production of knowledge is vitally important as it can show why particular ideas emerged and caught hold when they did. AMERICA: POST–WORLD WAR II–1965 The years following World War II provide ample material for understanding how various laws, events, wars, economic shifts, and social movements play a role in the construction of American national identity. The economic highs of the immediate postwar period would be joined by the fears of an external other, communism, and would be followed by the sometimes radical actions of those objecting to economic and social inequities. Presidential politics illustrated the swing of Americans’ ideas about what mattered, ranging from a continuation of FDR’s New Deal, to a turn toward get-tough conservatism. Then, in 1960 America elected John F. Kennedy. Kennedy represented a kind of hope and idealism that sparked a renewed interest in public service and a rededication to government playing a role in serving the greater good. Following his assassination, it was unclear where the country would go, and the remainder of the decade would bear out that ambivalence. And though not much happened until 1965 in the way of major immigration reform, the skirmishes and backdoor dealings that took place were extremely telling regarding the way those in power imagined America and who really belonged. James T. Patterson (1996), a prominent historian of the US, described the defining development of this period as one of ever-increasing expectations on the part of Americans. He points to postwar optimism, fueled by the success of the economy, leading to what he calls a “rights revolution” wherein Americans believed that their country really could change the circumstances of the marginalized and create a more equitable society. This belief, according to Patterson, has still not really waned, but rather has been tempered by

86  Glazer and Moynihan Challenge the Melting Pot, 1950–1970 concerns about the economy, about social change more broadly, and about the loss of tradition. Though Patterson may be right regarding the most obvious battles about what some call “special rights” as opposed to equal rights, the writing for such confrontations was on the wall much earlier. Another important scholar of this period, and especially the 1950s, set out to provide “a different view” of these years. J. Ronald Oakley (1986) found something much less triumphal than Patterson in the paradoxes of a decade that saw, for example, extraordinary economic growth alongside domestic poverty being virtually ignored (see Michael Harrington 1962). The fifties were an era of rampant advances in consumer culture alongside many political predicaments, both domestic and international—kitsch and the Cold War. The nostalgia for these years, Oakley explains, is understandable, especially for certain groups (white males) focusing on certain moments (the relative calm of 1953–1957). But pointing out the roots of the turbulence that was to come is also important, and this was Oakley’s contribution to the literature.

Immigration From the passage of the Immigration Act of 1924 through the early 1950s, very little change occurred in American immigration policy. The Great Depression and then World War II kept the rates of newcomers especially low for some time, and then the Cold War brought into play a whole new set of concerns. Even so, between 1943 and 1946, some 200,000 Mexican farm workers were admitted to the US, as were 130,000 railroad workers (Cose 1992:93). Initially the government responded to these workers with a wink and a nod, indicating that in some cases, immigration was not so much about the nation’s ethnic or racial composition, but was instead about big business. Before long, however, it became clear that these workers were not leaving as had been anticipated, and concerns about the rapid growth of the population grew apace, especially along border areas. Concerns in the southwestern US at that time foreshadow those to come. In a manner similar to that in which WWI and the Red Scare of 1919–1920 played a major role in the lead-up to the restrictions of 1924, the Cold War and anticommunist sentiment following WWII and the beginning of the Korean War contributed to the mood that led to the McCarran-Walter Act of 1952. Since instituting the national origins system in 1929, 79 percent of those who had come to the US had come from Northern and Western Europe, and overall, immigration had been well below even the quota numbers (calculated by the Senate Judiciary Committee in 1950, reported in Cose 1992:94). Seemingly embarrassed by the racism implicit in the immigration laws, Congress occasionally, beginning with Guam in 1950, offered citizenship or token quotas to non-European countries. These actions could suggest the presence of a middle position between hard-core nativism and total inclusion, or may simply represent a realpolitik, of sorts, where the US

A Time for American Power (and Melting?)  87 was hyper-aware of international scrutiny and sought to minimize the damage a negative image could convey. The 1952 law, the McCarran-Walter Act, exhibited a significant shift in immigration policy, such that individuals with particular ideologies—in addition to those with particular national origins1—were to be singled out for exclusion. While maintaining the restrictions in place for European immigrants, the 1952 law nominally lifted the ban on Asian immigration by offering a paltry quota of two thousand entrants per year. The two primary targets were communists and anarchists, and a third, unrelated, group was also targeted at this time: homosexuals. Why were communists, anarchists, and gays unwelcome? According to Hing, the legal specialist on immigration, the answer was quite simple: they were “un-American” (2004:73). For communists and anarchists, such restrictions were not terribly surprising given other policies and actions taken in the preceding years and the nearness of WWII.2 As for the exclusion of homosexuals, though they had been implicitly excluded beginning in 1917 because of what was called “mental degeneracy,” it was a clarification in the 1952 bill that made that determination explicit (Hing 2004:82–3). It was not until 1990 that homosexuality (and “psychopathic personality,” the term under which the ban had originated) was taken out of all exclusionary language. The 1952 bill also included significant prohibitions against the illegal entry of Mexicans. Though President Truman vetoed the bill, his rejection was handily overridden by the Congress. Truman’s objection was not to the new ideological elements of restriction, but instead was founded on the continuation of the National Origins System from the 1924 law that he utterly opposed.3 In his veto document, written in late June 1952, Truman pointed out what he saw as the contradiction between American ideals and the quota system: The idea behind this discriminatory policy was, to put it baldly, that Americans with English or Irish names were better people and better citizens than Americans with Italian or Greek or Polish names . . . Such a concept is utterly unworthy of our traditions and our ideals. It violates the great political doctrine of the Declaration of Independence that ‘all men are created equal.’ It denies the humanitarian creed inscribed beneath the Statue of Liberty . . . It repudiates our basic religious concepts, our belief in the brotherhood of man . . . (in Hing 2004:76) For Truman, then, America should be a racially and ethnically inclusive nation. The rationale for maintaining the quota system deviated from the racialist logic that had gained its initial support in the 1910s and 1920s. In 1952, the claim was that the quota system made sense when one kept in mind concerns about assimilation and social order. The Senate Judiciary Committee wrote: “. . . that the adoption of the national origins quota formula was a rational and logical method of numerically restricting immigration in

88  Glazer and Moynihan Challenge the Melting Pot, 1950–1970 such a manner as to best preserve the sociological and cultural balance in the United States” (Hing 2004:77). In this way, the legal definition of who was a good or true American remained limited by origin, and now also by ideology. This position was clearly based on an even narrower imagining of America, such that not only national origin, but also particular ideologies were to be sanctioned. This vision of the US was clearly an exclusive one. Following the override of his veto, Truman put in motion a systematic investigation of the structure of the immigration laws to be overseen by the Commission on Immigration and Naturalization. In 1953, the report coming from that inquiry, entitled Whom We Shall Welcome, argued strongly for eliminating the quota system. President Eisenhower agreed with the position found by Truman’s commission, but no substantial changes were made for more than a decade. Congress did, however, pass the Refugee Relief Bill of 1953. This legislation did nothing to change the quotas of 1924, but did open the door to 214,000 victims of the aftermath of WWII and new Soviet growth. Unlike the Displaced Persons Act of 1948, this law did not rely upon the “mortgaging” of future quotas (Cose 1992:98). From 1952 through 1965, quarrels over immigration selection persisted, and though they were not typically framed in racial terms, ethnicity, race, and national origin remained the primary barriers to change. As Hing says so clearly, “The survival of the national origins quota system of the 1920s through the 1952 act illustrates the western European dominance over the accepted image of ‘an American’ in the minds of policy makers and the public” (2004:93). The treatment of concerns over immigration from Mexico illustrated this ongoing hegemony. Despite new restrictions in the 1952 law, illegal entry continued to rise. The attorney general, Herbert Brownell, and others set about a propaganda campaign describing “wetbacks” as depraved drug-users and prostitutes.4 The smear job also insinuated that many communists were sneaking into the US across the Mexican border. These assaults hit their mark, and public outcry ensued. Even social workers, religious organizations, and Mexican-American organizations decried the invasion of illegal entrants. Who did stand up for the growing population of migrants without papers? The agricultural industry. In June of 1954, “Operation Wetback” was initiated to secure the border using Immigration and Naturalization Service officers, patrol agents, ranchers, and even US Army support. The operation began in California and then moved on to Texas, intercepting those entering illegally at every turn. In 1955, the general in charge of the program declared a certain kind of victory, claiming that crime had been reduced, disease had declined, and the economy was recovering (Cose 1992:101). The government even asserted that the operation had resulted in over one million undocumented immigrants leaving the US. Publicly, the campaign was a success. After its conclusion, legal immigration from Mexico increased, and this was interpreted as a positive effect of Operation Wetback in redirecting immigration through proper channels. Even so, Mexican immigration continued to

A Time for American Power (and Melting?)  89 present problems, especially regarding concerns over the taking of “American” jobs. As Cose says, with the advantage of hindsight, “. . . the Mexican migration problem awaited a more permanent solution” (1992:102). It still does in the 21st century. According to Cose, Presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy were “haunted” by two paradoxes: “that America, which considered itself a refuge, had no ongoing policy for accepting refugees; and that a country founded on the concept of human equality would choose immigrants principally on the basis of ethnicity and race” (1992:103). It was President Kennedy’s vision of a more globally integrated, fairer America, first put forward in A Nation of Immigrants (written and delivered to the Anti-Defamation League in 1958 but not published until 1964, after his death) while he was a senator, that finally spurred major changes in America’s immigration laws. As president, Kennedy’s focus on immigration was buried by events in Cuba. Using a strategy Eisenhower had employed earlier for Hungarians, he “paroled” 60,000 Cubans, granting them entry. A crisis of emigration from China to Hong Kong led to similar actions, with the US opening its doors in 1962 to those fleeing communist China (Cose 1992:104). By 1963, Kennedy had a broader shift in immigration policy ready to go. He sought to phase out the national origins system in favor of a needed skills and family reunification approach. Kennedy’s vision was supported not only by those who rejected the xenophobic basis for national origins quotas, but also by those who believed that freer movement across borders would be good for the economy (Hing 2004:94). At the time, the major domestic crisis facing the US was civil rights, and the international hot issue was test-ban treaty talks. Immigration did not supersede these issues, and then Kennedy was killed. After the assassination, President Johnson took up the mantle of immigration reform. Echoing the earlier words of his predecessor, he said, “In establishing preferences, a nation that was built by immigrants of all lands can ask those who now seek admission: ‘What can you do for our country?’ But we should not be asking: ‘In what country were you born?’ ” (from the 1964 State of the Union address, quoted from Hing 2004:94). Johnson made clear the linkage between immigration reform and civil rights reform, and pushed hard in 1964 for Congress to pass Kennedy’s immigration bill. Despite popular support, it failed that year, but with added pressure passed in late September 1965. The bill no longer looked much like what Kennedy had proposed—now largely resembling a family reunification bill—but the national origins system had at last been overthrown.5 Some wondered at the time why the bill had passed so relatively easily this time around. Cose surmises that because “ . . . most Americans hailed from European stock, legislators had assumed that the generous family numbers would almost all go to Europeans . . . ” (1992:111). This, of course, was not to be the case as Asians, Latinos, and other non-Europeans came quickly to America’s shores. Opposition to open immigration remained. This was especially true among some Southern legislators who strongly rejected any proposed

90  Glazer and Moynihan Challenge the Melting Pot, 1950–1970 changes, often bringing to mind the more nativist arguments of the 1920s in their statements. Even the politicians supporting the 1965 bill did not believe or expect it would lead to significant changes in America’s population or culture. Clearly they miscalculated rather dramatically, especially in regards to the massive shift in demographics that was to follow. The 1965 amendments to immigration policy signified a major departure in the law, and perhaps, Hing suggests, in the image of an American (2004:96). What is notable in regards to the literature written during that period and to the immigration situation in the US today, with the liberalization of immigration numbers for most of the world, is these changes limited immigration from countries in the Western Hemisphere for the first time. Given the rising numbers of immigrants from Mexico, it is no shock that by the mid-1970s something of an immigrant glut—a three-year waiting list of nearly 300,000—developed (Hing 2004:98). This goes beyond the period under review here, but given the rising focus on Puerto Ricans and occasionally Mexicans in the academic literature, it is an important trend to be aware of as having emerged in the 1960s. As for Hing’s belief in a shifting vision of national identity, a look at the turn of the 20th century will offer more answers (see Chapter 6).

Wars and Other Significant Foreign Affairs There can be no question that much of what went on in the US in the 1950s emerged at least to some degree in the long shadow of World War II. The Cold War, Korea, and Cuba also affected the various policies, ideologies, and social movements that made up the substance of public discourse during that era. In the year preceding American entry to the war, 1938, President Roosevelt made small gestures aimed at providing asylum to those outside the US, or at least relaxing the rules of immigration application procedures. The latter was accomplished by allowing Jewish refugees to flee the Nazis to other countries without giving up their places in the US quota line (Cose 1992:83). One group of potential refugees was turned back to Europe on their boat, and in 1939 a bill to admit 20,000 German refugee children, many of them Jewish, died in committee.6 Groups like the Daughters of the American Revolution and the American Legion weighed in against admitting any Germans above the legal quota, largely in nationalistic and anti-Semitic terms, and it became clear to the sponsors of the bill (supported by such luminaries as Albert Einstein, John Steinbeck, and Herbert Hoover) that it would never pass (Cose 1992:84). After the bombing of Pearl Harbor, anti-Japanese sentiment rose dramatically with arrests of Japanese “subversives,” and legislative committees convened resulting in a recommendation to deport potentially dangerous Japanese-Americans. This logic eventually led to the internment of over 100,000 people of Japanese descent. Once the US was fully engaged in Europe, Germans and Italians also felt this hostility, but were never

A Time for American Power (and Melting?)  91 persecuted as a group in the same way as the Japanese. The internment was clearly a defining home-front feature of WWII. At the time, military and political arguments demanding the “neutralization” of potential subversives over-rode any critiques of racism (Cose 1992:89). To demonstrate, Cose offered an example: In 1944, however, a single day at the Supreme Court yielded seemingly contradictory decisions, one upholding an evacuation order for an America-born Japanese man, and one rejecting the internment of a “demonstrably patriotic Japanese-American” woman. The latter case caused internment proceedings to grind to a halt. The Court declared that loyalty was a quality possessed by individuals, not by races or religious groups; a move back to individualism over group membership was implicit. The fact that the war was going well for the US and its allies made such a shift in policy easier for Americans to digest. The battle against Nazism also diminished the legitimacy of racialist dogma and group-level policy. In the years following the end of the war, a few small concessions were made to the 1924 immigration policy linked to global affairs. The first was to allow so-called “war-brides” to enter the US, the second was to offer entry to those engaged to veterans, the third gave access to a small number of immigrants from India and the Philippines, and the fourth opened the door to Chinese wives of Americans (Cose 1992). Roosevelt and then Truman attempted to find ways to admit those displaced by the war, but for the most part they were hamstrung by the 1924 quotas. Increasingly the popular press (e.g., The New York Times and Life magazine) began calling for a loosening of immigration restrictions for Europeans displaced by or persecuted during the War (Cose 1992:91). In 1948, the Displaced Persons Act was passed, and Truman signed it into law. His signature, however, was given reluctantly as he abhorred the anti-Semitic structure of the bill: with geographic guidelines built in, greater than 90 percent of displaced Jews were excluded (Cose 1992:91–92). Additionally, Truman opposed the manner in which these displaced persons were to be held against the immigration quotas for their home countries. In 1950, the geographic limitations were removed, but the quota issue remained in place until 1965. More than 400,000 Europeans came to the US under the auspices of the 1948 act. The Cold War began after WWII, as the Soviet Union and the US were unable to see eye to eye on either particular global concerns or more general, undergirding ideological ones. The Truman Doctrine, announced in 1947, made the conflict with the Soviets manifest. The US would now actively support those peoples who sought to climb out from under communist regimes. Later that same year, Secretary of State George C. Marshall proposed a broader, slightly more ambiguous plan to aid in Europe’s recovery that soon took on his name. The underlying claim of the Marshall Plan was that if Europe’s economy could be bolstered, capitalist European governments would survive. The Plan was a terrific success on both sides of the Atlantic, economically and politically. It also created more distance between the West and the Soviets. In 1949, the US officially signed on to participate in the

92  Glazer and Moynihan Challenge the Melting Pot, 1950–1970 North Atlantic Treaty Organization, or NATO, another indicator of the American alliance with Western Europe. The Cold War also prompted a Red Scare on the home front. The House Un-American Activities Committee sought out communist sympathizers, heightening the fears of the general public. Patterson (1996:165) explains that the weakness of the political left, alongside the rising place of “Cold War fears” may have checked the unbridled optimism that immediately followed WWII, but in the long run, did not stop the impressive economic growth of the country. This shift in American public life and America’s relationship to the world led the way to big gains for Republicans, and to a three-way internal divide for the Democrats. Leading up to the 1948 presidential election, many Southern Democrats who leaned toward a more conservative approach actually split with the party and formed their own, the “Dixiecrats,” while a group of Northern Democrats favored a further-left platform, and thus supported a different candidate under the banner of the “Progressive” party. This looked like the end for Truman, and like a sure victory for the Republican nominee, Thomas E. Dewey. Startling many, perhaps most famously the Chicago Daily Tribune, Truman won. In an interesting twist, it appears that the three-way split may have helped Truman by allowing him to take on a more centrist platform on international engagement. This circumstance also gave him entrée to establish ties to the African-American working classes whom the Southern Democrats had always avoided, but whom he could now court. America’s anxiety during the Cold War also fostered the perfect environment for a small but potent and highly visible social movement that erupted in the early 1950s: McCarthyism. The most significant effect of this communist witch hunt was that Senator McCarthy’s constant attacks on Democrats for being aligned with communists worked their way into America’s psyche and struck a death blow to the Democratic consensus of the WWII and initial postwar period. In 1952, Eisenhower defeated Truman in the presidential election, and a Republican Congress was voted in as well. Global affairs were having a clear impact on domestic ones. The Republicans were expected to be much tougher on the communist threat than any Democrats would have been, and the Cold War was now squarely in the spotlight. The House Un-American Activities Committee was busy at work, and Eisenhower broadened the role of the Federal Loyalty Security Program, which was aimed at ferreting out “disloyal” federal employees. Yet, in 1954, after turning his attention on both the Congress itself and an Army base, McCarthy lost his way in his pursuit of communists. He was censured by his colleagues in the Senate, and the court of public opinion ultimately concurred. The worst of Cold War red-baiting, then, seemed to have passed. As Eisenhower’s second term drew to a close, there was a moment where it appeared he and Khrushchev might find common ground. The downing of an American spy plane deep inside Russia in the days preceding a summit in Europe crushed such hopes. The Cold War carried on.

A Time for American Power (and Melting?)  93 Another major foreign policy situation that had tremendous influence in the early 1950s was Korea. In 1948, Russian and American troops divided Korea into two countries on either side of the 38th parallel, the communist North and the anticommunist South. In 1950, the North invaded the South in a significant ground assault. Despite having paid little attention to South Korea since the division, Truman saw this incursion as demanding an American response. Within a week Truman had proposed a resolution to the UN, and sent troops to South Korea. After advances first by UN forces and then by China and the North Koreans, war was on. The war essentially ended where it had begun, with no major victory or change. General MacArthur wanted desperately to wage a full-scale attack to defeat the North Koreans, but Truman, who saw this as the wrong war for the US to be engaged in, refused. Truman soon fired MacArthur, and Truman’s popularity took its fatal blow. MacArthur emerged heroic in American popular culture, while Truman was seen as a coward. In 1952, Eisenhower defeated Truman’s successor, Adlai Stevenson, and became president. A parting gift from the Eisenhower administration to Kennedy as he took office was the instability of relations with Cuba and its communist leader, Fidel Castro. The Eisenhower administration had approved a top-secret plan to overthrow the Castro regime, which Kennedy adopted. Kennedy worried about having a Soviet-aligned communist neighbor, and moved ahead in 1961. It was a total disaster. More than one hundred of the Cuban exiles who volunteered to take part were killed, and nothing was accomplished. Even so, the Bay of Pigs, as this failed mission became known, did not reduce Kennedy’s popularity. In fact, it grew. At the same time, so did Kennedy’s determination to topple Castro and send a message to the Soviets. As it turned out, Kennedy would have another chance to do so just one year later, in October of 1962. Khrushchev deployed intermediate-range ballistic missiles to Cuba; these weapons had offensive capabilities reaching far into the US. Kennedy put a naval blockade in place, and demanded that Russia remove its missiles within forty-eight hours. Within that time, and with much diplomatic posturing on both sides, Khrushchev agreed. For the US this was an important victory, and it also had the added effect of cooling heads. Less than a year later, the “Treaty Banning Nuclear Weapons Tests in the Atmosphere, in outer space, and under water” (also called the Limited or Partial Test Ban Treaty) was signed by over ninety nations. Of course, 1965 was the year that brought the official beginnings of US engagement in Vietnam and one of the most fraught periods in American foreign policy. This effort, like Korea and Cuba before, was understood initially as one to contain communism, and was therefore intimately related to the Cold War. The escalation of events in Vietnam led to protests, most significantly from Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). These young people from across the country called themselves the “New Left” and advocated a socialist brand of politics. Their positive identification with figures like Fidel Castro and Ho Chi Minh made their position anathema, even to

94  Glazer and Moynihan Challenge the Melting Pot, 1950–1970 some liberal intellectuals like Glazer and Moynihan. In fact, it seems to have been, at least in part, the radical student movement that would ultimately drive Glazer to a position of neo-conservatism. Thus the interconnectedness of war, social movements, and national meaning is clearly implicated.

The Economy Before one can talk about the post-WWII economy in the United States, a few things must be said about the Great Depression which came before. The economic and accompanying social traumas of that period tried many Americans as they had never been tried previously. And yet, according to historian Edward Ayers, et al. . . . what truly defined the nation in this decade [the 1930s] was its passionate response to misfortune . . . The Great Depression not only increased the social responsibilities of government, it also opened the political process to millions of ‘forgotten Americans,’ who exercised power by joining labor unions, switching political parties, and migrating to places where they could vote and be represented. (2005:749) The depression led to an activism not present before, especially regarding increased recognition of the importance of political representation. This era also saw, in spite of the devastation of the depression, the government making massive efforts to help people get through; food, jobs, public works, and a foundation upon which to build the successes of the war period came from the center—the state. Following the war, the structural supports that had been put in place prior helped propel the country’s growing prosperity, and people “strongly supported” this active form of governance: “ . . . there was little opposition to expanding the social security system, increasing the defense budget, or providing hefty benefits to veterans of war. Soldiers came home and picked up their lives. The marriage rate soared [from 1946 onward], a baby boom followed, and young families rushed to the suburbs. Peacetime consumption replaced wartime production as the key to national prosperity. . .” (Ayers et al. 2005:749–50, marriage data p. 817). The economic boom continued through the 1950s as America’s role in the world continued its ascendance. According to historian James Patterson, this “[e]conomic growth was indeed the most decisive force in the shaping of attitudes and expectations in the postwar era” (1996:61). Growth clearly helped in fulfilling America’s long-felt and desired place as the most significant country in the world, bolstering mid-century notions of exceptionalism. One undesirable aspect of the economic and societal boom of the postwar period was that it was not evenly distributed across all Americans, and over time the inequities became increasingly clear. Men were home, so women were no longer needed to perform full-time, wage-earning jobs in the industrial economy. They were once more marooned in the home, perhaps with

A Time for American Power (and Melting?)  95 part-time positions that aided in the growing trend of consumption, as men returned to their prewar lives. African Americans, despite having fought for the freedoms of others in Europe, were still openly discriminated against back home, reinforcing and forcing into the glare of a new spotlight what Myrdal (1944) had labeled the “American dilemma.” These socioeconomic disparities, among others, fueled the fires of social movements taking place in the US. The emphasis on the family during the 1950s, which was largely possible because of the soaring economy, also had interesting effects, especially on women’s roles in American society. With soaring marriage and birthrates, a quick return to “traditional” family structures followed (Coontz 1992). As women were pushed out of the workplace and places of higher learning, they moved back into domestic life and a deepening cult of motherhood, which was to claim all of their attention and energy. These women then became the engine of America’s economic growth: they were the chief consumers, particularly of cars and home appliances and clothing and other decorator goods, as they filled their new suburban homes. It is important to note that such a lifestyle shift was not available to all, or even most, women, but the ideal of the housewife as happy domestic goddess became a shorthand for normative American womanhood. By the early 1960s, economic growth had slowed such that unemployment was rising and factory production had declined. President Kennedy, in an effort to increase spending, cut taxes and sought full employment for Americans, without the hazards of inflation. Facing a direct challenge from the steel industry, Kennedy stood firm and prevailed. In the early 1960s, the economy grew again and unemployment declined. When Johnson took over after Kennedy’s assassination, he set about pursuing Kennedy’s agenda by enacting significant tax cuts. This led to another economic boom, which further reduced unemployment and filled the federal coffers. Once he actually won the presidency in 1964, Johnson went about selling his own vision of America, “the Great Society,” and declaring a “War on Poverty.” His efforts, including programs like Head Start, food stamps, and Volunteers in Service to America (VISTA), achieved major success alongside significant disappointment. Two important gains from Johnson’s efforts were the increased participation of minorities in local affairs, and a significant decline in the numbers of those living in federally defined poverty, from 20 percent in 1960 to 12 percent in 1970 (Ayers et al. 2005). Unfortunately, the program did not ever gain a great deal of respect. The Great Society and the War on Poverty were among the last major efforts by an American president to use the government out loud to support those in financial need via redistributive policy until the passage of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act in 2010.

Social Movements The postwar period, in addition to fostering an atmosphere conducive to economic growth, also created an environment ripe for social and cultural

96  Glazer and Moynihan Challenge the Melting Pot, 1950–1970 change. The aftershocks of the war, primarily the Cold War and the utter delegitimization of racialist ideologies, would now support several social movements that profoundly affected America and Americans. One such movement that both rose and fell in the 1950s was McCarthyism. Joseph McCarthy, Wisconsin’s junior senator, provoked massive national debate with unsubstantiated claims of communists working in Truman’s State Department. His cause was mocked by liberals, but quickly backed by Republicans who saw an opportunity to exploit the threat of the Soviets while exemplifying the foreign policy weakness of Democrats. The Cold War and Korea fueled the public response, and fear of communism exploded. Republican politicos encouraged McCarthy’s frequent outbursts in hopes that it would lead them to presidential victory. They were correct, and in 1952, Eisenhower defeated Truman. A better known, and further-reaching, social movement of the 1950s developed as American blacks pursued their civil rights. The Civil Rights Movement was arguably the preeminent social movement of the second part of the 20th century, affecting the lives of all Americans. Even though President Eisenhower was not nearly as strong a supporter as Truman had been, the movement, aided by a handful of charismatic and strong leaders, took on a life of its own that would radically alter American public life. Under the leadership of Thurgood Marshall and William Hastie, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) set out to undermine Plessy v. Ferguson and its separate-but-equal doctrine. In 1950 they won two minor cases at the Supreme Court, and in 1953 they brought Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka. In 1954, in a 9–0 decision, Plessy was overturned on the grounds that segregation was not equal, and had clear negative effects. The guidelines on how to desegregate were vague. The process led to a colossal uproar in the South—an entire way of life was at stake for segregationists, and change was uncomfortable for everyone. Violence at schools was commonplace, and the Ku Klux Klan experienced a resurgence. Images of this period are likely among the best known in modern American history. Throughout the South, even following Brown, daily life remained largely separated by race: drinking fountains, restaurants, restrooms—all bore the mark of white or black, and blacks did not have the finer resources. In 1955, Rosa Parks, an African-American woman in Montgomery, Alabama, challenged this color line by refusing to give up her seat at the front of a bus. She was arrested for this offense. A few days later, a bus boycott began, and its leader was the young Martin Luther King, Jr. In 1956, the Alabama law requiring such segregation on public transportation was overthrown. In 1957, Dr. King and other black ministers came together to form the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), which sought social justice for blacks in America. In 1961, the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) organized the now-famous “freedom rides” through the South. The goal was to force the

A Time for American Power (and Melting?)  97 federal government to enforce its laws prohibiting segregation at all terminals for busses, trains, and airplanes used for interstate travel. From May through September of that year, black and white riders (who were veteran protesters) ignored the demarcations of segregation at bus terminals and bore the brunt of assaults. Ultimately the government was forced to respond, and ordered the desegregation of commercial interstate transportation. Between 1960 and 1964, there were many such skirmishes in the larger battle for civil rights. Another of these took place at Ole Miss (the University of Mississippi) when, in 1962, a black Air Force veteran, James Meredith, was admitted as a student. The governor of the state refused to allow him to matriculate, so President Kennedy sent Meredith with federal marshals, and later federalized the Mississippi State Guard to increase the protection. Given the armed mob of protesters awaiting his arrival, such efforts were obviously needed for Meredith to matriculate. These protesters clearly had a different view of what comprised the US than did those supporting Meredith. In 1963 the movement ratcheted things up as the SCLC pursued a campaign of civil disobedience in Birmingham, Alabama: there were sit-ins, kneel-ins, marches, and boycotts. Local officials disrupted these events, sometimes violently, but Kennedy stepped in on behalf of the protesters, particularly drawing upon Martin Luther King’s depiction of segregation as immoral. When Kennedy again sent in federal marshals to bring black students to a Southern university—this time the University of Alabama—a message had been sent. Not surprisingly, those opposed to integration did not take such changes lying down. Civil rights activists, some of them white, were killed as they fought for equality. Then, still in 1963, Kennedy proposed a civil rights bill that rocked the Congress. The bill was to outlaw most kinds of discrimination and segregation. On both xenophobic and property-rights grounds, conservatives were determined to reject it. That August was the “March on Washington,” where King gave his impassioned “I Have a Dream” speech to an ecstatic audience of over 200,000. Things were changing, though not without resistance. After Kennedy was killed in late 1963, Lyndon B. Johnson quickly stepped into the Civil Rights Movement, meeting with King within weeks of taking office. Kennedy’s Civil Rights Act was passed in June 1964, after much obstruction from some senators. Though the passage of the bill certainly did not end problems of race in the US, there can be no question that it mattered deeply. The next front was demanding voting rights, and this took King from Selma, Alabama, back to Montgomery. This was 1965. The upshot of this protest was a bloody ordeal that left at least two civil rights activists dead and many more injured. President Johnson then called for a new voting rights bill. In the months and years to come, race riots erupted across the US. In 1965, it was the Watts section of Los Angeles. Later it would be Newark, Detroit, and many, many other predominantly black urban neighborhoods

98  Glazer and Moynihan Challenge the Melting Pot, 1950–1970 that would explode in the fury of desperation. A more militant movement emerged at about this same time, calling itself “Black Power” and advocating black nationalism. Those supporting this black identity dissociated themselves from the old guard of the Civil Rights Movement. They rejected integration in favor of separatism and racial pride. Competing visions of America were present even within a single minority group. Alongside the battle for racial equality, a less voluble battle for sexual equality was also in the early stages of being waged; this was the so-called “second wave” of feminism, as suffrage had been secured 1920. Women, sparked by the forced return to the breadwinner-homemaker model of family life following WWII, were beginning to refine their message. Betty Friedan’s (1963) The Feminine Mystique brought this and other gender issues vividly to the public. In subsequent years, women sought equal pay and other civil rights, and formed the National Organization for Women (NOW) to institutionalize their demands. The women’s movement was much more of a slow burn, but it was getting its footing during this period. By 1950 a very different kind of social movement was taking place as well, this one driven more by technology and the entertainment industry than any group specifically seeking social change (or conservation). Even so, this shift in life had a profound effect not only on the daily lives of Americans, but also on the way in which national meaning was created and passed along to various audiences. What could have done all this, and so quickly? Television. The potential power of the medium was clear to many constituencies, as it offered access to politics, the judiciary, war, and entertainment never before imaginable. It also, by 1955 when pre-taped programs took over the lineup, portrayed a very particular image of the US such that married women did not work outside the home, middle-class affluence and good behavior reigned supreme, and with a couple of notable exceptions, the visible evidence that whiteness was America. Individuals from minority groups were nearly absent. These portrayals were not incidental. It seems worth considering why this period, the 1950s in particular, serves as such a touchstone for American nostalgia. A few social markers may help explain this. America was experiencing—as has been mentioned—unprecedented economic growth and an increase in international political capital. Success in science was signaled by such hallmark moments as the development of the polio vaccine. The construction of the national highway system brought a feeling of national connectedness, alongside the fantastic economic gains it provided; businesses like McDonald’s and Holiday Inn got their starts alongside these new highways. And at the same time, until close to the end of his second term, Eisenhower retained a near folk-hero status as president. Thus the fifties as America’s golden years. But it must be clear that without the progressive policies enacted during and after the Great Depression, much of this would have been impossible. Finally, it is worth pointing out a development in American politics that might just be deemed a social movement, or at least a changed relationship

A Time for American Power (and Melting?)  99 between social movements and governance. During the 1940s, there was increasingly a changed relationship between interest groups and politicians, to the degree that some historians have described the ascendance of “interest group liberalism” (Patterson 1996:60). The dominance of such a system, according to Patterson, led to political gridlock, and for some years to come stymied significant social change. But as we know, change was coming, as in the 1960s the winds would shift again. GLAZER AND MOYNIHAN’S INTELLECTUAL CONTEXT Given the historical moment in which they initially wrote Beyond the Melting Pot, it is actually not entirely clear what scholarly or intellectual sources drove Glazer and Moynihan’s investigation aside from interest in both ethnicity and New York City. As we have seen, the 1950s and early 1960s were a relatively quiet period regarding immigration, but with the Civil Rights Movement afoot, turmoil was brewing and change was in the air. Unlike the 1910s when Horace Kallen put forward his ideas about America as a federation of nationalities as a direct challenge to two other visions of America being hotly debated, the early 1960s did not present Glazer and Moynihan with a public intellectual debate under way. Rather, their effort was more a corrective to classics in the fields of ethnicity and immigration. They thought it necessary to bring the important ideas of earlier thinkers into line with the social reality of the day. Among those whose work Glazer and Moynihan sought to bring up to date were Robert E. Park, Louis Wirth, and Everett C. Hughes, all of whom were members of the “Chicago School” of sociology. Park, well known for describing what he called the “race relations cycle,” was an early pioneer in the discipline, and in fact was more an intellectual contemporary of many of those writing earlier in the 20th century. Like Kallen, he began his academic career in the early 1910s (though he was fifty years old at the time), and was likely well aware of, if not well acquainted with, other sociological figures like E. A. Ross, especially given their proximity between Chicago and Madison, Wisconsin. Though he was brought to the University of Chicago rather late in his professional life, Park’s career was a full one, with many important essays and a legacy of students who would carry on his work. It is easy to see why Glazer and Moynihan saw him and his work as important in understanding the way different groups seek to live side by side in an urban atmosphere, but also to see why they wanted to re-address the matter of assimilation several decades down the road. As students of Park’s at Chicago, Wirth and Hughes had carried on his approach of uniting theoretical research with deep observation in the field. The other literature that Glazer and Moynihan were drawing upon was the historiography of immigration and of immigrants in the US. They looked at Marcus Hansen’s and Oscar Handlin’s work as the masterpieces in need of renewal.

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The Classics Best known as a founder of the Chicago School of sociology, Robert Ezra Park came to his academic profession in a roundabout fashion. At the University of Michigan he studied under John Dewey, whose intellect he found especially inspiring. Park graduated in 1887 and became a journalist, working in Minneapolis, Chicago, Detroit, Denver, and New York. For graduate school Park attended Harvard University and studied with William James, among others. After completing his MA he moved his family to Germany, where he completed his graduate work in 1904. It was in a course taught by Georg Simmel, who would become quite influential in Park’s own work, that Park received his only formal sociological education. Not wishing to work exclusively within academia, Park worked for the activist Congo Reform Association (which put pressure on Belgium to improve the situation in that African country) before he found himself working for and alongside Booker T. Washington at the Tuskeegee Institute. In this post, much of which was spent traveling around the South and observing the social lives of African Americans, Park began developing his understanding of the world as processual, and his interest in concerns regarding race. Park’s work taught him lessons that found their way into his writing on assimilation and race relations: inclusion was a slow but steady process that was taking place in the US. After meeting W. I. Thomas, a distinguished University of Chicago sociologist, in 1912, Park soon moved to Chicago and began his illustrious career there. At Chicago, Park played a major role in the foundations of American sociology and in the construction of that university as “ground zero” for the young discipline. Thomas and Simmel were among the most significant influences on Park’s sociology, which was focused on social transformations and changes—i.e., processes—rather than institutions. His time with Booker T. Washington most informed his thinking about blacks in the US, and it was in this vein that he studied race and ethnicity, and made contributions to discourse about assimilation in America. As early as 1913, Park saw a shift in the way blacks were identifying in the US, especially in regards to what he saw as “race pride” (Wacker 1983:46). By the 1920s, he believed this transformation had really taken hold, especially in the form of Marcus Garvey’s black nationalism and the “cultural renaissance” of that period. He saw that many “Negroes” were adopting the status of separateness that had long been placed upon them, and were embracing it. Surely this would impede the process of assimilation that was being fought for so vigorously by others, but from Park’s perspective it was healthy for blacks to behave in this way (Wacker 1983:49). As a “conflict” theorist (in the vein of Simmel), he saw it as only natural that members of a marginalized group would form an identity, and that group’s consciousness, in Park’s analysis, would be their ticket to greater opportunities (Wacker 1983:53).

A Time for American Power (and Melting?)  101 Park’s perspective on assimilation and race relations seems to find two basic responses in recent literature. One is to criticize him for what is arguably the most utilized concept to come out of his work on the topic: the race relations cycle. The story of race relations, from this perspective, is one of “contacts, competition, accommodation and eventual assimilation, [and] is apparently progressive and irreversible. Customs regulations, immigration restrictions and racial barriers may slacken the tempo of the movement; may perhaps halt it altogether for a time; but cannot change its direction; cannot at any rate, reverse it” (Park 1950:150).7 The critique, then, is a reductionist one claiming that Park assumed that assimilation was inevitable, and that to hold this position meant he was essentially an Anglo-conformist. In fact, Park was a conflict, ecological thinker, and likely believed that the process he was describing was not only a long one, but one left best to the groups and their members to work out as they sought out resources within their social environment. Richard Alba and Victor Nee (2003) offer a different, more generous reading of Park’s work on assimilation. They argue that the race relations cycle needs to be read in light of a very limited view of what assimilation itself entails (2003:19). They see Park’s “assimilation” as very flexible and as allowing a good deal of room for group particularities. Additionally, Alba and Nee point to Park’s position as saying that if the process of incorporation was allowed to take its own course—as opposed to the forced assimilation programs of the Americanization movement—assimilation would be more successful. For this reason, among others, Alba and Nee (2003), in offering their own “new assimilation theory,” seek to revive the traditions initiated by Park. For Glazer and Moynihan Park’s work was a classic they believed needed updating. Given that nearly forty years had passed since his work was published, they wanted to incorporate the rich experiences of non-white and/ or non-Anglo groups they observed in the interim. In addition to drawing upon his ideas about assimilation, however, there is also a connection to Park’s understanding of the city as a social organism. It is clear in Beyond the Melting Pot that the life of New York City is sui generis of the everyday interactions and transactions that we see on the surface. Glazer and Moynihan were keenly aware of the importance of the ways cities are structured and how the groups that make them up relate to one another. In some ways then, this perspective is an heir to Park’s work on urban sociology, especially as indicated in The City (1925). Louis Wirth was one of Park’s early students and also a member of the Chicago School. Wirth himself was a German-Jewish immigrant, having been brought to the US by an uncle to further his education in 1911. At the University of Chicago he quickly became interested in sociology, studying under Park, W. I. Thomas, and Ernest Burgess among others. Following graduation in 1919, Wirth worked as a social worker for Jewish Charities of Chicago before returning to the university to complete his graduate work.

102  Glazer and Moynihan Challenge the Melting Pot, 1950–1970 During his period of study, Wirth became increasingly anticapitalist and renounced Judaism for atheism. Wirth’s doctoral dissertation, published in 1928 as The Ghetto, was an examination of the ways in which Jews have long lived in socially isolated communities, with a modern examination of this phenomenon in Chicago. Park wrote the foreword to the book, and in describing “the ghetto” as a place in which initially Jews chose to live and eventually were legally compelled to live in Venice of long ago, told us that in the early twentieth century . . . other alien peoples have come among us who have sought, or had imposed upon them, the same sort of isolation. Our great cities turn out, upon examination, to be a mosaic of segregated peoples—differing in race, in culture, or merely in cult—each seeking to preserve its peculiar cultural forms and to maintain its individual and unique conceptions of life. Every one of these segregated groups inevitably seeks, in order to maintain the integrity of its own group life, to impose upon its members some kind of moral isolation. So far as segregation becomes for them a means to that end, every people and every cultural group may be said to create and maintain its own ghetto. In this way the ghetto becomes the physical symbol for that sort of moral isolation which the ‘assimilationists,’ so called, are seeking to break down. (Park 1928:ix) This seems a rebuke to the Americanists of the period, who were so intent to make assimilation (of the Anglo-conformist variety) a quick fix via educational programs and requirements. At the same time, these comments also serve as evidence that Park himself was not an Americanist (as some critics have suggested), and rather that he understood that there were significant barriers—the ghetto being one—to an easy process of absorption. The language Park used to describe Wirth’s work on minorities in an urban environment evokes something very clearly seen in Glazer and Moynihan’s Beyond the Melting Pot and Kallen’s work several decades earlier, namely the pluralistic nature of cities. For Wirth, the study of Jewish history “furnishes an opportunity to study the ways in which the culture of a group reacts upon the character of a people, and conversely, the mutations that take place in a culture as a result of the changing experiences of a people” (1928:1). He saw ghettos as places where incoming groups settled in an effort to adjust “to the strangers among whom they have settled” (1928:4). For him, this represented a clear stage in Park’s cycle of race relations, namely accommodation; enclave living was not an affront to the new home, but a tool of adaptation. Wirth went on to say more about the process of assimilation among ghettoized groups in the US: It illustrates picturesquely the ways in which a cultural group gives expression to its ancient heritage when transplanted to a foreign setting, the constant sifting and resifting of its members, and the forces

A Time for American Power (and Melting?)  103 through which the community maintains its integrity and continuity . . . the ghetto demonstrates the subtle ways in which this cultural community is transformed by degrees until it blends with the larger community about it, meanwhile reappearing in various altered guises of its old and unmistakable atmosphere. (1928:5) From these comments, it is clear why The Ghetto became and remains a classic in ethnic studies. Wirth predicted a long path for “assimilation,” and one that would be punctuated with ethnic revivals. One group that this interpretation does not explain well in the American context is blacks, but given Wirth’s own, more specialized expertise and the time in which he was writing, his foresight was strong.8 His merging of urban studies and a sophisticated understanding of ethnicity (not race) make it no surprise that Glazer and Moynihan understood him to be an intellectual antecedent to their work. Another Chicago School antecedent to Glazer and Moynihan was Everett Cherrington Hughes. Hughes was born and raised in Ohio, the son of a minister with progressive ideas about racial equality and education. After attending Ohio Wesleyan and graduating in 1918, Hughes began teaching English to steel workers in Chicago. This experience awakened an interest in the significance of ethnic identity that would last well into his academic career. In 1923, Hughes began his graduate studies at Chicago, learning from Park and other sociologists and anthropologists. In 1952, having returned to Chicago as a faculty member, Hughes resumed his focus on race and ethnicity, and alongside his wife, Helen MacGill Hughes, published Where Peoples Meet. Among other topics, the Hugheses explored discrimination in the workplace, the naming of racial and ethnic groups, and the way status in a given society is shaped by interactions between different groups. In all of these areas, they argued for a broad, comparative social science, avoiding specialized, passionate accounts of particular groups or incidents. They were interested not in “minorities as such, but the processes and situations of contact in which peoples are made” (1952:12). This approach reflects Park’s notion of process, and seemingly precedes Fredrik Barth’s (1969) concentration on boundaries in the study of ethnicity. It is later reflected in Glazer and Moynihan’s emphasis on ethnic relations in Beyond the Melting Pot. Did Park, Wirth, and Hughes put forward a particular vision of America? In spite of their methodological rigor and scientific approach to studying humanity, and lack of explicitly public discourse, yes, indeed they did. They saw issues of racial and national identity in America as in process, not static, and certainly not looking in the rear-view mirror. That tradition is surely a major part of what attracted the attention of Glazer and Moynihan. With Hughes, the move toward ethnicity was also a critical renovation of earlier notions of cultural pluralism, which emphasized nation of origin rather than the group as it was in America, which he elevated as would Glazer and Moynihan.

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The Historians While social scientists working in the Chicago tradition were indeed taking up questions of assimilation and race relations, historians were considering the phenomenon of immigration. Marcus Lee Hansen was one of these historians, and his work in the 1930s on immigration—and also the social and personal consequences of emigration—was groundbreaking. Hansen, like so many intellectuals who worked in this area, was himself the child of immigrants. Born in 1902 in Wisconsin, his childhood was spent crisscrossing the Midwest as his father, a Baptist missionary of sorts, set up churches in communities of Scandinavian immigrants. By 1917, Hansen had earned his bachelor’s and master’s degrees from the University of Iowa, and from there moved on to Harvard to complete his graduate education. At Harvard, under the tutelage of Frederick Jackson Turner, Hansen wrote his doctoral dissertation looking at mass migrations of peoples across the Atlantic, earning his PhD in 1924. After a relatively short but varied academic career, Hansen died in 1938. The Atlantic Migration, published in 1940, earned him a posthumous Pulitzer Prize. In his foreword to that book, Arthur M. Schlesinger noted the importance of the 1924 immigration law that had gone into effect in 1929: It is not surprising that this changed aspect of affairs should have an effect on scholarly studies of immigration. In earlier years the subject engaged the energies principally of economists and sociologists eager to describe and evaluate the impact of the arriving hordes on American society. They regarded immigration as a social problem rather than a social process, and they often wrote for the purpose of influencing governmental policy. Today the subject is exciting the increasing attention of professional historians. More clearly than ever before, they are able to survey the phenomenon at a focal distance and appraise its results with judicial detachment. (1940:xiv) In the decade immediately following the implementation of the national origins system, then, historians recognized that they could now evaluate the massive immigration that had then been stemmed, with some critical distance. This was a significant difference between this period and that in which Horace Kallen was writing: with slowed immigration, discussion was less urgent, less heated, and could be more academic. Among Hansen’s innovations were his attention to the Europeans as they left, and what they brought with them that soon became central to America’s national character. In The Immigrant in American History (1942), a collection of essays and lectures compiled by Schlesinger, Hansen’s dedication to a better understanding of the role of immigrants in American life is on display. What we also see is that Hansen himself had a quite distinct vision of who and what counted as American. A few lines from Schlesinger’s foreword illuminate this:

A Time for American Power (and Melting?)  105 The importance of Professor Hansen’s theme need not be argued in a country where nearly half of the white inhabitants are descended from postcolonial foreign stock. These later arrivals introduced differences of outlook and culture which greatly modified the basic Anglo-Saxon heritage and the whole pattern of American life. As a result, the old-stock American as well as the new found himself in the ‘melting pot,’ for he could not escape the influences of the social and intellectual environment which the more recent comers helped to fashion. (1942:x) Hansen, according to Schlesinger, had a Zangwillian notion of America as a melting pot: not only immigrants, but natives too would be swept into the crucible and would be transformed. Hansen made the point about immigrants more specifically as well: . . . every man, woman and child brought with him something else that no student of American society can ignore . . . Each newcomer carried with him habits of life and belief and intellectual and aesthetic tastes. Planted in the American soil, these inbred attitudes were to grow and bear fruit long after the humble individuals who had introduced them had vanished from the scene. (1942:129–130) What the immigrants brought with them planted seeds for America’s future. Hansen also paid a good deal of attention to the policies of the US government and the role these played in shaping the country. He marked the significance of the 1818 decision by the government not to give land to European national groups (in this case it was the Irish who had asked for a Western land grant): “Probably no decision in the history of American immigration policy possesses more profound significance. By its terms the immigrant was to enjoy no special privileges to encourage his coming; also he was to suffer no special restrictions. His opportunities were those of the native, nothing more, nothing less” (1942:132). Hansen saw that immigrant groups re-created the “social institutions they had left behind . . . ” as they were disillusioned with those they found in place, especially schools, churches, and language (133). These institutions were not carbon copies of their homeland counterparts, but the adaptability shown in their construction made “it possible to weave the heritage of the Old World into the pattern of the New” (134). This logic shows up clearly in Glazer and Moynihan’s Beyond the Melting Pot in their characterization of ethnic groups as something new, different than the culture immigrants had left behind. Hansen was also intrigued by what forces led immigrants to maintain ties with the Old World, or at least with those in their immigrant cohort. Among other factors, he saw that each cohort of new immigrants reinforced the old ties, nativist movements like the Know-Nothings provoked ethnocentric responses, and ethnic newspapers initially did both things, but eventually served primarily to bolster group connections within the US. In addition,

106  Glazer and Moynihan Challenge the Melting Pot, 1950–1970 Hansen saw the Civil War as a major factor in shaking up the structure of national/ethnic patterns, both institutionally and psychologically. Because of the need for grain, “The poor immigrant of 1857 was the rich farmer of 1865; and his ardent interest in the culture of the country he had left was cooled by the knowledge that the culture of his adopted country lay now within reach. The family moved into a frame home, leaving the log cabin to stand deserted as a reminder of pioneer beginnings” (1942:141). The war also carried the potent device of bringing immigrant sons into the battle and thereby further binding families to their new home. In these ways, the melting pot had been doing its work. After the Civil War, industrial cities beckoned immigrants with open arms, and Hansen saw the dramatic Americanizing power of that environment upon those who heeded the call. He also remarked briefly on the “new immigration,” mostly in making the observation that “They were the first immigrants to arrive in large numbers after the close of the great period of land settlement,” and the patterns of crowded urban living dramatically shaped their social lives in the US (1942:151). This illusion to the kinds of urban, ethnic investigations to come likely help Hansen hold onto his place in the literature, though it is his nineteenth-century ethnic history for which he is renowned. Another prominent historian who explored a different angle on the question of immigration in American society was Oscar Handlin. Born to Jewish immigrant parents in 1915 in Brooklyn, New York, Handlin grew up in the cauldron itself, and the mark it left clearly influenced the journey his mind would take. For him, that intellectual journey began early. Before he was ten years old, Handlin knew he wanted to be a historian. He graduated from high school and then Brooklyn College by age nineteen, and he then carried out his graduate work at Harvard, where he earned his PhD in 1940. Handlin taught at Harvard for the duration of his career and published many books, one of which, The Uprooted (1951), won the Pulitzer Prize for history. Handlin began that book with these apropos and oft-quoted lines: “Once I thought to write a history of the immigrants in America. Then I discovered that the immigrants were American history” (1951:3). Having reached that conclusion, and not wishing to write a comprehensive history of the US (comparable in some ways to Hansen’s Atlantic Migration in scope), Handlin opted to reverse the lens. Rather than examining the impact immigrants had on America, he endeavored to understand the impact transplantation had on immigrants. Like Hansen, Handlin illuminated the circumstances into which European immigrants arrived. He also paid close and careful attention to the psychical trauma of their adjustment: The immigrants lived in crisis because they were uprooted . . . No one moves without sampling something of the immigrants’ experience . . . But the immigrants’ alienation was more complete, more continuous,

A Time for American Power (and Melting?)  107 and more persistent. Understanding of the reactions in that exposed state may throw light on the problems of all those whom the modern world somehow uproots. (1951:6) This deeply human concern for the emotional and spiritual, in addition to the spatial, economic, political, and social dislocations of the immigrant experience set Handlin apart. Thus, when he later looked at more recent movements of people, it is no surprise that this same concern was evident. He portrayed changing family structure, and made the reader feel the isolation of the family and the shift to family connectedness as a source of weakness rather than strength. He recognized the many religions immigrants brought with them, and understood why clinging to religion and ritual made so much sense amidst the loss of home and country. He never said, well, they left of their own accord, so the uprootedness of the immigrants is their own problem. Yet despite the obvious empathy and respect Handlin had for immigrants, he also believed there was a distinct thing called America. It was not a frozen-in-time meaning he understood, but he did see something already present which the immigrants would have to consider. In writing about the worries immigrant parents had for their children that drove some out of urban areas where many groups were present, he wrote: “ . . . the parents could no more keep America away in the country than in the city” (257). Thus, unlike Glazer and Moynihan—and Kallen and Bourne and the Chicago sociologists—to Handlin “America” was something palpable and external to the immigrants. And yet at the end of The Uprooted, we learn that Handlin’s “America” was not at all that of nativists or even many of the melting pot thinkers. The Uprooted concluded with the story of the 1910s restrictionist lobby and the 1924 immigration law. Handlin’s concerns were with social and economic stagnation, and the hardening of class structures—the problems of too much stability, against the overwhelming need for it sought by the social order progressives of that era. He saw that restriction denied America as he understood it: Restriction involved a rejection of the foreign-born who aspired to come to the United States. It also involved a condemnatory judgment of the foreign-born already long established in the country. The end product of assimilation and racism, it confirmed and deepened the alienation these theories had produced. Restriction gave official sanction to the assertions that the immigrants were separate from and inferior to the native-born . . . and also marked the width of the division between them and the truly American.” (1951:294, emphasis in the original) The 1924 law, in Handlin’s eyes, drove many previously proud immigrants into offended, “defiant nationalism,” which then gave ex post facto credibility to the law in the eyes of xenophobes. Even World War II, which

108  Glazer and Moynihan Challenge the Melting Pot, 1950–1970 did delegitimate scientific racialism, was not a panacea for the alienation of immigrants in their quest for belonging: “Those doubts were the larger products of a society that had moved to a restricted view of itself, of a culture that was beginning to think of itself as fixed rather than fluid, of a society tempted to prefer conformity over diversity” (1951:299). Restricting immigration, then, for Handlin, made America something other, something new, rather than restoring it to some glorious past as conservatives envisioned. Restriction was change, not preservation. Finally, in the uprootedness of the immigrant experience, Handlin offered “a meaning of America”: . . . America was the land of separated men. Its development in the eighteenth century and the Revolution had set it apart from Europe; expansion kept it in a state of unsettlement. A society already fluid, the immigrants made more fluid still; an economy already growing, they stimulated to yet more rapid growth; into a culture never uniform they introduced a multitude of diversities. The newcomers were on their way toward being Americans almost before they stepped off the boat, because their own experience of displacement had already introduced them to what was essential in the situation of Americans. (1951:305) For him, America was at its core a process, and one that seemingly required a moment of uprootedness to truly take to heart. One of his later books, which perhaps connects most directly to Glazer and Moynihan’s work illustrated this well. In 1959, Handlin’s The Newcomers: Negroes and Puerto Ricans in a Changing Metropolis was published. He took a historical view of the lives of these two groups as they settled in New York City, and the impact that settlement had on both the groups themselves and the metropolis. Handlin noted that among those “shocked” by the circumstances of these new arrivals to the city, children of immigrants stood right alongside those from the “old stocks.” He recognized the significance of visible, i.e., racial, distinction in that response, but more than that he argued that the shock was a result of “ . . . the inability to view these people in the perspective of the city’s earlier experience. The inference of a good deal of contemporary discussion is that these problems are altogether new and therefore insoluble” (2). To correct this, Handlin insisted on “recalling” rather than “pushing away” immigrant and adjustment theory. Certainly Beyond the Melting Pot bears the imprint of these ideas, and even takes up Handlin’s implicit challenge by lining up blacks and Puerto Ricans alongside white ethnic groups born of earlier immigration. Samuel Huntington’s Who Are We? (2004) returns to this sense of insolubility at the turn of yet another century. The following chapter closely considers Glazer and Moynihan’s book, both as it emerged from the context explored here, and also as it shaped a legacy of its own. The imaginings of America suggested by figures like Handlin, Hansen, and the scholars of the Chicago School left an imprint

A Time for American Power (and Melting?)  109 on those writing about immigration, assimilation, and America who would follow. Glazer and Moynihan were no exception. But where would they intervene in the literature? Would they follow the sociologists and offer an updated snapshot of urban, ethnic life and the process of assimilation in the metropolis? Would they follow the historians and emphasize the immigrant experience itself? In fact, they built upon the existing literature by doing both. Chapter 5 examines Beyond the Melting Pot in an effort to better understand Glazer and Moynihan’s story of New York and its ethnic communities as they relate to the construction of America. NOTES 1 While maintaining the restrictions in place for European immigrants, the 1952 law nominally lifted the ban on Asian immigration by offering a paltry quota of two thousand entrants per year. 2 For examples of anticommunist or anarchist legislation, consider the Smith Act of 1940, or the Internal Security Act of 1950 (see Hing 2004:73–74 for more on these). Additionally, this was the era during which the House Committee on Un-American Activities was at work, as was the Loyalty Review Board. 3 This veto was very much in step with Truman’s record on civil rights forged in the late 1940s. For more, see Hing (2004:77). 4 The purpose of including this pejorative term is to show that prejudicial language was being employed not only on the street, but at the highest levels of the US government. 5 For a clear accounting of the back-door politics that led to the bill’s passage in 1965, see Ellis Cose (1992:106–112). 6 In 1939, the SS St. Louis, loaded with nine hundred German Jews, found itself without a place to moor between Cuba and the US as neither country would allow it to land its passengers. After a one-month stand-off, the ship returned to Europe (Cose 1992:83). 7 An interesting point is that this passage is found in an essay not about the situation of blacks in the US, but about the future prospects of the “Pacific frontier.” One suspects that if the topic were solely blacks, Park might have made different kinds of generalizations. For that group, which he saw as increasingly demonstrating group consciousness, the result of competition appears to be other than accommodation, unless separatism can be seen as one type of accommodation. 8 It may also be the case that race groups represent a specific type of ethnic group that follows a different path than, for example, ethnic groups based primarily on religion or language. Ferreting out such distinctions in group behavior would be useful further study.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Alba, Richard and Victor Nee. 2003. Remaking the American Mainstream: Assimilation and Contemporary Immigration. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Alba, Richard. 1999. “Immigration and the American Realities of Assimilation and Multiculturalism.” Sociological Forum 14(1): 3–25.

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A Time for American Power (and Melting?)  111 Herberg, Will. 1955. Protestant—Catholic—Jew: An Essay in American Religious Sociology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Hing, Bill Ong. 2004. Defining America through Immigration Policy. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Hughes, Everett Cherrington and Helen MacGill Hughes. 1952. Where Peoples Meet: Racial and Ethnic Frontiers.Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press. Hughes, Everett Cherrington. 2006. Papers. “Biographical Note.” Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago Library. Huntington, Samuel P. 2004. Who Are We? The Challenge to America’s National Identity. New York: Simon & Schuster. Kallen, Horace M. 1998 (1924). Culture and Democracy in the United States. New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers. Kallen, Horace M. 1915. “Democracy versus the Melting-Pot.” The Nation. February 18 and 25. Kennedy, John Fitzgerald. 1964. A Nation of Immigrants. New York: HarperCollins. Lieberson, Stanley. 1963. Ethnic Patterns in American Cities. New York: Free Press of Glencoe. Lipset, Seymour Martin. 1967. The First New Nation: The United States in Historical and Comparative Perspective. Garden City: Doubleday. “Louis Wirth” in Contemporary Authors Online. Gale Group, 2006. “Louis Wirth” in Encyclopedia of World Biography Supplement, Volume 21. Gale Group, 2001. “Louis Wirth” in World of Sociology. 2 volumes. Gale Group, 2001. McGiffert, Michael. 1963. “Selected Writings on National Character.” American Quarterly 15(2): 271–288. Mead, Margaret. 2000 (1965). And Keep Your Powder Dry: An Anthropologist Looks at America. New York: Berghahn Books. “Milton Myron Gordon” in Contemporary Authors Online. Gale Group, 2001. “Milton Myron Gordon” in World of Sociology. 2 volumes. Gale Group, 2001. Myrdal, Gunnar. 2002 (1944). An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy, Volume I. New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers. “Nathan Glazer” in Contemporary Authors Online, Gale Group, 2003. “Nathan Glazer” in World of Sociology. 2 volumes, Gale Group, 2001. Oakley, J. Ronald. 1986. God’s Country: America in the Fifties. New York: Dembner Books. “Oscar Handlin” in Contemporary Authors Online, Gale Group, 2006. “Oscar Handlin” in Encyclopedia of World Biography, 2nd ed. 17 volumes. Gale Research, 1998. Park, Robert Ezra, Ernest Burgess, and Roderick D. McKenzie. 1967 (1925). The City. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Park, Robert Ezra. 1950. Race and Culture. Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press. Park, Robert. 1928. “Foreward,” The Ghetto. By Louis Wirth. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Park, Robert Ezra. 1925. The City. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Patterson, James T. 2005. Restless Giant: The United States from Watergate to Bush v. Gore. New York: Oxford University Press. Patterson, James T. 1996. Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945–1974. New York: Oxford University Press. Ravitch, Diane. 1990. The American Reader: Words that Moved a Nation. New York: Harper Perennial. Ravitch, Diane. 1974. The Great School Wars, New York City, 1805–1973; a history of the public schools as battlefield of social change. New York: Basic Books. Riesman, David. 1953. The Lonely Crowd: A Study of the Changing American Character. Garden City, NY: Doubleday. Riis, Jacob A. 1970 (1902). The Making of an American. New York: Macmillan.

112  Glazer and Moynihan Challenge the Melting Pot, 1950–1970 Ripley, William Z. 1899. The Races of Europe: A Sociological Study. New York: D. Appleton and Co. Ritzer, George. 1993. McDonaldization of Society: An Investigation in the Changing Character of Contemporary Social Life. Pine Forge, PA: Pine Forge Press. “Robert E(zra) Park” in Contemporary Authors Online. Gale Group, 2006. “Robert E. Park” in World of Sociology. 2 volumes. Gale Group, 2001. “Robert E. Park” Encyclopedia of World Biography, 2nd ed. 17 volumes. Gale Research, 1998. Roosevelt, Franklin Delano. 1938. The American Reader: Words that Moved a ­Nation. Edited by Ravitch, Diane. 1990. New York: Harper Perennial. Ross, Edward Alsworth. 1914. The Old World in the New: The Significance of Past and Present Immigration to the American People. New York: The Century Company. Schlesinger, Arthur. 1940. “Foreword.” The Atlantic Migration, 1607–1860: A History of the Continuing Settlement of the United States. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Schultz, Kevin M. 2011. Tri-Faith America: How Catholics and Jews Held Postwar America to Its Protestant Promise. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Schultz, Kevin M. 2003. “Social Darwinism.” The Dictionary of American History, 3rd ed., gen. ed., vol. 7. Edited by Stanley I. Kutler. New York: Simon and Schuster. Smith, Anthony D. 1986. The Ethnic Origins of Nations. Oxford: Blackwell. Suttles, Gerald. 1968. The Social Order of the Slums: Ethnicity and Territory in the Inner City. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Wacker, R. Fred. 1983. Ethnicity, Pluralism, and Race: Race Relations Theory in America before Myrdal. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press. Walzer, Michael. 1983. Spheres of Justice: A Defense of Pluralism and Equality. USA: Basic Books. Waters, Mary. 1990. Ethnic Options: Choosing Identities in America. Berkeley: University of California Press. Wirth, Louis. 1928. The Ghetto. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Yetman, Norman R. 1999. Majority and Minority. Boston: Allyn and Bacon.

5 Glazer and Moynihan’s Claim Many and One

My essential thesis here is that ethnicity has proved to be hardy. As though with a wily cunning of its own, as though there were some essential element in man’s nature that demanded it—something that compelled him to merge his lonely individual identity in some ancestral group of fellows smaller by far than the whole human race, smaller often than the nation—the sense of ethnic belonging has survived. Milton M. Gordon, Assimilation in American Life (1964:25)

In the middle of the twentieth century, with the National Origins Quota System in place, immigration was significantly reduced from its earlier peak. As such there was not the kind or quantity of public discourse that had been present in the 1910s and 1920s. So why focus on this moment and why on Glazer and Moynihan? Like Kallen, nearly fifty years earlier, Glazer and Moynihan were arguing against the prevailing wisdom of their day. They argued that in spite of the popular dominance of the myth of the melting pot, and in spite of the restriction of immigration into the US, ethnic identification remained strong both at the level of individuals and in terms of orienting social group action. They claimed a reality of ethnic pluralism, which was distinct from Kallen’s cultural pluralism for reasons to be explained in the pages that follow. Glazer and Moynihan’s Beyond the Melting Pot demands attention for its huge readership, which transcended the typically high walls of the ivory tower. Even today the book stirs controversy when discussed. Finally, this book was written at, around actually, another critical juncture in American immigration history. While Kallen wrote in the years immediately preceding the passage of the National Origins Act, Glazer and Moynihan wrote both just before and just after its repeal. They paid it little mind, but did maintain the thinking that new groups continuing to come (including domestic migrants, i.e., blacks) would lead to the creation and re-creation of ethnic groups. This, they said, would result in the creation and re-creation of the city—New York City, the empirical focus of their study—and the country itself.

114  Glazer and Moynihan Challenge the Melting Pot, 1950–1970 This chapter offers a close reading of Glazer and Moynihan’s famous book, particularly as their thoughts relate to national patterns (as opposed to specifically New York City—NYC—patterns), and as their ideas shifted in the years between the first edition in 1963 and the second in 1970. The story they tell presents a narrative of America in process, especially well illustrated by the substantive changes they felt compelled to make a mere seven years after the original publication. There were other books written during this period that act almost as distant relations to Glazer and Moynihan’s, most importantly, Milton M. Gordon’s Assimilation in American Life. Within the sociological literature on assimilation, Gordon’s book is surely considered more essential, but it did not ever reach the kind of critical mass or public reception afforded Beyond the Melting Pot. For this reason, it has been less present in public discourse on American identity, but it deserves attention. Other important thoughts about assimilation in the US will also be attended to here. The question here is, what did these two men, Nathan Glazer and Daniel Patrick Moynihan, bring to intellectual debates and public discourse about assimilation in American life, and more importantly, to discourse about American national identity. These concerns will be addressed by examining four specific sub-questions intended to illuminate the meaning of their work: 1. To whom or what were Glazer and Moynihan responding? 2. Were their questions and ideas being posed analytically or prescriptively? 3. To the degree that ideas were presented prescriptively, how explicit was ideology in the writing, and what effect does this have on the way it was received and how it can be analyzed? 4. How have the ideas shaped future discourse? These questions are explored throughout this chapter.

GLAZER AND MOYNIHAN Who were Glazer and Moynihan, and why do their biographies matter? Like so many intellectuals interested in the fate of immigrants in the US, Glazer himself grew up in a minority home, in his case, Jewish. His parents were relatively unassimilated, moderately Orthodox, moderately socialist, and while not Zionist, were supportive of Israel, what was then Palestine. Glazer was born and raised in New York City, and had six siblings. He went to City College in 1940 and became active in Jewish organizations and publications. Glazer decided that social science was an excellent tool for pursuing his social and political positions, so he majored in sociology. Though he finished his master’s degree from the University of Pennsylvania in the same year he graduated from City College, 1944, he spent the next eighteen years of his life editing, writing, researching, and teaching, all

Glazer and Moynihan’s Claim  115 before ultimately earning his PhD in 1962. During his pre-doctoral years, Glazer worked for the American Jewish Committee’s journal Commentary, spent several years at Anchor Books, and taught at many prestigious US colleges and universities (including Bennington College, the University of California at Berkeley, and Smith College). Following the completion of his degree in 1962, Glazer was offered a position at Berkeley, and then in 1969 made his final career move to Harvard. In the 1990s Glazer made a striking—though in light of several of his contemporaries, not unique—shift from near-radicalism to neoconservatism. Seemingly the radicalization of students in the late 1960s, which he saw as misguided and ineffectual, led to Glazer’s increasingly entrenched position that government policies aimed at mending the consequences of poverty, inequality, and minority status had not only failed, but had done more harm than good. In Beyond the Melting Pot, this turn toward individual and group responsibility (as opposed to government responsibility) is nascent, but identifiable—especially in the 1970 second edition. In a review essay of a more recent book, We Are All Multiculturalists Now (1997), James Traub (1997), the well-known writer on cultural, political, and international affairs, explored Glazer’s intellectual history.1 He traced Glazer’s roots back to the New York Intellectuals of the late 1930s–1940s, and located that heritage in Beyond the Melting Pot. In the 1960s, despite the persistence of ethnic group ties, Glazer (and Moynihan) believed that just as other groups had done before them, blacks would overcome the various hurdles they faced and find their own “path to success.” In 1963, Glazer still held the optimistic perspective that New York City would ultimately be an integrated, but not Anglo-conformist space. But then came the violent, militant radicalism of the 1960s, which seemed a whole different world from the intellectually radical days of Glazer’s youth. Glazer hated the increasingly racialized rhetoric claimed by blacks, and blamed both blacks themselves and white liberal intellectuals for moving the discourse in such a direction. He did not fully account for the exceptionalism of blacks’ history and their changing circumstances. The combination of the shift toward race rhetoric and the increasingly hostile student movements ultimately drove Glazer to the right, to a neoconservative position. He objected mightily to government intervention in the form of affirmative action, assuming that blacks would eventually be included in the American mainstream without such measures. By the late 1980s, however, when such assimilation still had not taken place, Glazer backtracked. He held that affirmative action was not the answer, but acknowledged perhaps there was room for government to play a role in improving the situation of America’s blacks, and recognized their circumstances did not directly parallel those of immigrants. By the late 1990s, when he wrote We Are All Multiculturalists Now, Glazer appeared resigned to multiculturalism in the US as a penance of sorts for the ongoing exclusion of blacks. For him, the calamitous legacy of this state of affairs was

116  Glazer and Moynihan Challenge the Melting Pot, 1950–1970 that even if today’s blacks were to take on the character of an ethnic group, rather than a racial group, per his and Moynihan’s arguments in Beyond the Melting Pot, little would change because of interim events. The America that Glazer recalled with nostalgia was no longer a possibility, regardless of whether it ever existed at all. Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s story is rather different, though certain themes ring familiar, especially regarding the characteristic of an idiosyncratic intellectualism. Moynihan grew up middle-class until his father abandoned the family when he was ten. He was born in Tulsa, Oklahoma, but raised primarily in New York City, and after his father’s departure, in some of its poorest areas; his interest in poverty would be lifelong. Moynihan began contributing to the family’s economy early on, selling newspapers and shining shoes, among other odd jobs. After graduating from high school with honors and attending City College for one year in 1943–4, Moynihan joined the Navy and went to Tufts University for officer training. The war (WWII) ended while he was in school, and after being dispatched, Moynihan earned a BA and an MA from that university, in 1948 and 1949 respectively. Moynihan also spent a year at the London School of Economics on a Fulbright scholarship. After returning from England, the young scholar—just twenty-six—got his first taste of politics, and found it to his liking. Though he did later return to the academy, earning a PhD from Syracuse University and teaching at numerous colleges and universities, Moynihan is best known for his public service, and especially for his years as a senator from New York. Prior to that elected post, he served in the administrations of Presidents Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon. The latter post was seen as quite a strange turn, but Moynihan saw it as an opportunity to push forward policies intended to alleviate the suffering of those living in poverty, and to improve their life chances. Having spent much of his youth living with very little in the way of material goods, he identified closely with those in difficult circumstances, and saw himself as an advocate for the poor. His policy suggestions as a member of the Nixon administration went nowhere. For all of his many books and essays and speeches, Moynihan is, for better or worse, most closely associated with two published representations of his thinking: Beyond the Melting Pot (1963) and The Negro Family: The Case for National Action (1965); the latter better known—and derisively so—as the “Moynihan Report.” In Beyond the Melting Pot, along with Glazer, Moynihan sought to make the case that ethnic groups had maintained their sense of identity upon settling into American life, despite their cultures having changed and adapted in particular ways. Although the book was officially co-authored, Moynihan’s primary contribution was the chapter on “The Irish.” In The Negro Family, written while he was an assistant secretary in the Labor Department in the Johnson administration, Moynihan argued that although the legacy of slavery and mistreatment of blacks were in part responsible for the desperate situation of so many members of this group, that certain traits and behaviors internal to the group were

Glazer and Moynihan’s Claim  117 also to blame. Such a reversal of responsibility is a classic “culture of poverty” claim, and this characterization led to tremendous criticism, both of the ideas and of Moynihan himself, with his critics branding him a racist. This was especially distressing for Moynihan, given that he saw himself as an advocate for American blacks, calling for the titular “national action.” Negative response to The Negro Family may well have long shaped readings of Beyond the Melting Pot within the academy.

Beyond the Melting Pot In their effort to show that New York City’s ethnics had not “melted,” Glazer and Moynihan made remarkable contributions both to early ethnic studies and to broader inquiry about the meaning of America. The latter is the focus here. Beyond the Melting Pot was first published in 1963 by MIT Press, with most of the research and writing taking place in 1960–1, and then released in a second edition in 1970. The updated edition included an eighty-plus-page entirely new introduction that was intended to work through important changes the authors observed in the intervening years. Unlike Horace Kallen’s 1915 essay “Democracy Versus the Melting-Pot,” Glazer and Moynihan’s book was not so much an ideological response—though it certainly had ideological components—as a practical and scholarly inquiry into how New York City ran, and what could be done to lessen inequality for new arrivals. Glazer and Moynihan’s study was also less closely linked to opposing logics (or even agreeable ones), and as a result is less in conversation with their contemporaries than it is with a century’s worth of proselytizing the assimilatory powers of America. The line for which Glazer and Moynihan are most famous reads: “The point about the melting pot is that it did not happen” (1970:290). Embedded there is a refutation of the enduring narrative of the magic of America to successfully absorb newcomers: immigrants come, shed their pasts, and are quickly incorporated into society. That there are multiple meanings ascribed to the melting pot is fairly accepted today in the academic literature, but the version Glazer and Moynihan rejected—also that which Kallen rejected almost fifty years earlier—was that of one-way, Anglo-conformist melting. Implicit in the title of their book is a different imagining of America, and one that challenged the assumed wisdom of the day. Beyond the Melting Pot is perhaps nonobvious, but a critical book to discuss when attempting to understand the meaning of America. Glazer and Moynihan vacillated in terms of whether they were only discussing New York City, or whether they really meant to describe America more broadly. They did both. They wanted to capture a great deal about the inter-ethnic relations and politics of one of the most fascinating and important cities in the world, and at the same time they wanted to narrate a story about the entire country and its relationship to immigrants. In addition to those concerns, the authors also added important theoretical notes as regards ethnicity. They claimed that while immigrant groups were changed by coming to

118  Glazer and Moynihan Challenge the Melting Pot, 1950–1970 America, that they changed in ways that maintained differentiation and a group identity. Another major conceptual proposition of the book was that “ethnicity is not epiphenomenal” (5). In fact, Glazer and Moynihan argued that ethnicity drives events and that its study is deserving of much more attention. The authors saw this book as filling a gap that existed in the space of what happens to immigrants and America—that is, what are the consequences of immigration for immigrants and for the nation—after the immigrants are no longer newcomers (22–3).2 They saw this gap as the opening for a new field of ethnic studies. Glazer and Moynihan viewed Beyond the Melting Pot as exploratory in some regard. They began the preface of the first edition by calling it “a beginning book,” indicating that they expected there to be much more work ahead. An additional ambivalence, whether the book was about New York City or the US, was manifest in the first paragraph. They started off by emphasizing the complexity of the city, and then quickly turned to national life: “The notion that the intense and unprecedented mixture of ethnic and religious groups in American life was soon to blend into a homogeneous end product has outlived its usefulness, and also its credibility. In the meanwhile the persisting facts of ethnicity demand attention, understanding, and accommodation” (xcvii). Thus, from the beginning they were talking about assimilation and America, and especially what didn’t happen: melting. They went on to say that “ . . . the American ethos is nowhere better perceived than in the disinclination of the third and fourth generation of newcomers to blend into a standard, uniform national type” (xcvii). In other words, not only did original immigrants not blend, but even several generations later, ethnicity was preserved. In the introduction the authors moved right into describing the population of New York, going as far back as 1660 (when it was New Netherland), to illustrate that the city had always had “an extraordinarily heterogeneous population” (1). Glazer and Moynihan recognized that there were features making New York unique in certain ways, yet they rejected the conclusion that it was somehow something different altogether from the rest of the US. In fact, they said “ . . . it [NYC] is America: not all of America, or even most, but surely the most important single part” (2). That last bit is obviously arguable, but a clear conclusion can be drawn. As regards immigration history, New York City has been central in American history and therefore there was and is much merit to paying it extra attention. Glazer and Moynihan, however, took their attention to the city further still, and argued that “. . . the nation comes more to resemble the city: urban, heterogeneous, materialist, tough; also, perhaps, ungovernable, except that somehow it is governed, and not so badly, and with a considerable measure of democracy” (2). The logic, then, would be for extrapolating from trends about ethnicity and assimilation outward from what has taken place in New York City. Such an analytical move finds it roots in the urban sociology born of the Chicago School. In his essay “The City: Suggestions for the Investigation of Human Behavior in the Urban Environment” (1925) Robert Park characterized the

Glazer and Moynihan’s Claim  119 city as not the stereotypical, unnatural environment within which people suffer, but rather as the embodiment of humanity; humans in their natural habitat. Studying life in the city, then, is central to understanding all social life. Glazer and Moynihan saw ethnic groups as the most important lens for understanding all other elements of New York City life, and also our national life. Ethnicity should not be understood or studied as epiphenomenal; ethnicity was, from their perspective, a driving engine of social change and action. Ethnicity is a force unto itself. In addition, Glazer and Moynihan claimed that factors such as religion, class, and ethnicity are “inevitably tied to each other”—especially in the urban environs of the city—and must all be considered accordingly (5). So they took stock of New York City’s ethnic populations, both in 1960 and in the past. At the time they were writing, Glazer and Moynihan—acknowledging problems of data quality—estimated the city was approximately 25 percent Jewish, 14 percent “Negro”, 8 percent Puerto Rican, 11 percent Italian, and 4 percent Irish.3 The history they presented shows that true WASPs (English Protestants, that is) were probably never much of a majority, if at all, given the large Dutch and other European populations in the city, as well as the large number of blacks. By the mid-nineteenth century, Irish and German immigrants were arriving in large numbers, and by 1890, these two immigrant groups combined made up over half the population (8). At about this time, Jews and Italians took over as the largest immigrant groups, dramatically changing the composition of the city’s population. Entry of these groups continued in force until the National Origins Law was passed in 1924, and was sustained at a much lower rate thereafter. Two other groups, less often in the foreground of national conversations about immigrants, also came to New York City in large numbers following wars. After WWI, large numbers of American blacks (“Negroes” in the language of the book) migrated northward, and after WWII, Puerto Ricans came to the city. Glazer and Moynihan certainly recognized that there were differences between these later entrants and those who came before, but seemed not to fully realize the effects those differences might have. Ultimately, they believed that the basic group process of upward mobility would be the same for blacks and Puerto Ricans as it had been for the various groups of European immigrants. They also believed that life in New York City in particular was unique as regards the national, linguistic, religious, and socioeconomic diversity present. Yet, Glazer and Moynihan saw the import of national diversity fading as immigrant links to home country and language seemed to be fading (12). What they described was not little Italies in the sense that immigrants were behaving as they would have if they had remained in Italy, but now happened to be in New York City. What they saw, and what they depicted, was that as groups were transformed by influences in American society, stripped of their original attributes, they were recreated as something new, but still as identifiable groups. Concretely, persons think of themselves as

120  Glazer and Moynihan Challenge the Melting Pot, 1950–1970 members of that group, with that name; they are thought of by others as members of that group, with that name; and most significantly, they are linked to other members of the group by new attributes that the original immigrants would never have recognized as identifying their group, but which nevertheless serve to mark them off, by more than simply name and association, in the third generation and beyond. (13) This characterization of what ethnic groups were in the US was, in large part, Glazer and Moynihan’s way of illustrating the failure of both the Zangwillian vision of the melting pot—whereby immigrants would shed their native cultures and blend together in America’s “crucible”—and of Kallen’s cultural pluralism—which functioned as a federation of nationalities, not new ethnicities. According to Glazer and Moynihan’s analysis, though immigrants did indeed change, leaving much of their native culture behind, they remained identifiable groups. The belief that the changes in immigrants would yield a singular new race had not come to pass, and one suspects Glazer and Moynihan did not see this happening in the near future either. Equally, although immigrant groups remained identifiable, they did not do so in the way Kallen predicted, as miniature national groups within an American political system. Glazer and Moynihan put it this way: “The assimilating power of American society and culture operated on immigrant groups in different ways, to make them, it is true, something they had not been, but still something distinct and identifiable” (13–4). This was ethnic pluralism. Factors both internal and external to the group played a significant role in terms of how various groups were actually shaped by American society. Family structure, religion, education and financial norms and backgrounds, alongside the narrowness and provinciality of what was meant by “American” for so-called natives, and how that was to be policed, aided in the varying degrees of assimilation and separation that were experienced by immigrants (14–5). In describing the shift from immigrant group to ethnic group, Glazer and Moynihan offered the following: The ethnic group in American society became not a survival from the age of mass immigration but a new social form. One could not predict from its first arrival what it might become or, indeed, whom it might contain. The group is not a purely biological phenomenon. The Irish of today do not consist of those who are descended from Irish immigrants. Were we to follow the history of the germ plasm alone—if we could—we should find that many in the group really came from other groups, and that many who should be in the group are in other groups. The Protestants among them, and those who do not bear distinctively Irish names, may now consider themselves, and be generally considered, as much “old American” as anyone else. The Irish-named offspring of German or Jewish or Italian mother often find that willy-nilly they have become Irish. (16, emphasis in the original)

Glazer and Moynihan’s Claim  121 Thus, the ethnic group as realized in the United States was something altogether new, not an expression of biological essentialism, a la Horace Kallen earlier in the century. It symbolized the old country, so to speak, but its membership was flexible and it was not as connected to the traits and characteristics and behaviors of the old country as is typically assumed. The group that seemed to have the most difficulty shedding its immigrant, old-country identification was the Jews, but this was not a function of biology. In addition to clarifying the notion that ethnic groups were not merely relocated Italians, Irish, etc., Glazer and Moynihan also set out to understand what ethnic groups actually are. First, they saw ethnic groups as being “continually recreated by new experiences in America” (17). In other words, they did not reify or calcify ethnic groups into static entities; they saw process. They recognized the ongoing connections to the past that had served to bind those that might otherwise have scattered in the vastness of the US. While nodding to the traditional sources of ethnic solidarity typically discussed (kinship, homeland, language, religion, history; see Anthony D. Smith 1986), Glazer and Moynihan also emphasized the element of group interest as a significant attachment. The interests they referred to were at the intersection of class, religion, profession, politics, education, and other aspects of social group life. They concluded that this “interplay between rational economic interests and the other interests or attitudes that stem out of group history makes for an incredibly complex political and social situation” (17). A few additional points of connection to the ethnic group include “fellowfeeling” and organization. In the chaos of arriving and settling in the US, connection to ethnic groups provided meaning and order to the lives of the immigrants. Glazer and Moynihan suggested, in fact, that America’s long and strong tradition of social service organizations grew up in relation to the ethnic and religious groups associated with immigrants (18). In thinking about the future of assimilation more broadly, Glazer and Moynihan argued that “[t]ime alone does not dissolve the groups if they are not close to the Anglo-Saxon center. Color marks off a group, regardless of time; and perhaps most significantly, the ‘majority’ group, to which assimilation should occur, has taken on the color of an ethnic group, too” (20, emphasis added). The question remained, then, “To what does one assimilate in modern America?” (20) Their answer was that ultimately there was no one primordial center, a position very much in line with that taken by early twentieth-century thinkers like Kallen and Randolph Bourne. It was one that—whether intentionally ideological or not—refused to give any particular ethnic group, namely WASPs, the kind of power that a “center” would have and could demand. In doing this, Glazer and Moynihan created a kind of ethnic equivalency, which helped in making their case for ethnic pluralism rather than Anglo-Protestant hegemony. Arguing against the notion of a center clearly includes a vision of what America is and perhaps also what it should be. After working through their five cases of important New York City ethnic groups who had retained their distinctiveness—Negroes, Puerto Ricans,

122  Glazer and Moynihan Challenge the Melting Pot, 1950–1970 Jews, Irish, and Italians—Glazer and Moynihan turned back to the broader questions of assimilation and American identity. Like so many others interested in what it means to be American, Glazer and Moynihan looked back to J. Hector St. John de Crevecoeur and his vision of a new American race of men, melted from the wide array of nationalities of arriving immigrants. But unlike so many who turned to Crevecoeur (and still do), they presented him to show that the process he imagined never came to fruition. They claimed that beginning with the Chinese exclusion of 1882, and culminating in the National Origins Act of 1924, the US “formally adopted the policy of using immigration to reinforce, rather than further dilute, the racial stock of America” (289). They also looked back at Israel Zangwill’s play The Melting Pot (which they found “bad”) and puzzled over its long run. They decided it must be that “its title was seized upon as a concise evocation of a profoundly significant American fact” (289). That is, the popularity of the play was based upon its revelatory theme of America’s assimilatory capacity. But Glazer and Moynihan remained skeptical, and ultimately determined that “the response to The Melting Pot was as much one of relief as of affirmation: more a matter of reassurance that what had already taken place would turn out all right, rather than encouragement to carry on in the same direction” (289). In fact, it was in the context of their remarks about Zangwill’s main characters that the authors wrote their famous lines: “The experience of Zangwill’s hero and heroine was not general. The point about the melting pot is that it did not happen” (290). Glazer and Moynihan also dismissed arguments that focused purely on immigration as the determining factor explaining racial/ethnic stratification, finding such claims to be limited. Rather, they insisted on understanding the role of external structures: The fact is that in every generation, throughout the history of the American republic, the merging of the varying streams of population differentiated from one another by origin, religion, outlook has seemed to lie just ahead—a generation, perhaps, in the future. This continual deferral of the final smelting of the different ingredients (or at least the different white ingredients) into a seamless national web as is to be found in the major national states of Europe suggests that we must search for some systematic and general causes for this American pattern of subnationalities; that it is not the temporary upsetting inflow of new and unassimilated immigrants that creates a pattern of ethnic groups within the nation, but rather some central tendency in the national ethos which structures people, whether those coming in afresh or the descendants of those who have been here for generations, into groups of different status and character. (290–1) The institutional and ideological structure of the US, then, not simply the ongoing influx of newcomers, maintains and reshapes persistent systems

Glazer and Moynihan’s Claim  123 of inequality. The point could certainly be made that the very end of their statement did not require the groups be of ethnic character. In fact, at the end of the book, they do seem to recognize the ascendance of other group forms, namely religious and racial. Yet it is clear that for Glazer and Moynihan, ethnicity remained the central organizing principle of American social life, and was an important player in the political realm as well. Glazer and Moynihan also made the well-known, but little acknowledged, point that early in American history even differences within the English-speaking peoples were problematic (291). This led them to claim that the group-forming characteristics of American social life—more concretely, the general expectation among those of new and old groups that group membership is significant and formative for opinion and behavior—are as old as the city. The tendency is fixed deep in American life generally; the specific pattern of ethnic differentiation, however, in every generation is created by specific events. (291, emphasis added) Thus, stratification is constant, but the substance of it and what creates and sustains it is contingent. In direct opposition to Horace Kallen’s claims from early in the twentieth century, Glazer and Moynihan found that the aspect of ethnicity most likely to retreat from importance was nationality. They argued that nationality “rarely survives the third generation in any significant terms” (313). They believed it was religion that would keep groups together, despite other modifications upon settling in the US. The other significant “ethnic” factor that would maintain its importance, according the Glazer and Moynihan, was race. They said: “Religion and race seem to define the major groups into which American society is evolving as the specifically national aspect of ethnicity declines” (314). They then went further to say “[b]ut the American nationality is still forming: its processes are mysterious, and the final form, if there is ever to be a final form, is as yet unknown” (315). They seem not to heed their own warning here. By reifying claims about religion and race, they lose the room for fluidity and contingency they had earlier proclaimed. So concluded the original publication of Beyond the Melting Pot. A mere seven years later, Glazer and Moynihan saw fit to publish a second edition with an extensive new introduction. Such a significant reconsideration so quick on the heels of the original is fairly unusual but could conceivably be related to some unpredicted historical event or change in course. In this particular case, while they did indeed point to some such occurrences, namely the civil rights movement, the authors left out at least one change that played a role—and likely an important one—in their revised accounting of ethnicity and America. The shift that remained unnamed in the rewrite was the repeal of the national origins system in 1965 that so dramatically altered the face of immigration to the US. It may not have been clear just five years later how much the demographics of the country would shift, but given the obvious relationship between immigration and assimilation, it is

124  Glazer and Moynihan Challenge the Melting Pot, 1950–1970 somewhat surprising they did not see fit to discuss the new laws at all. But with the hotter crisis of civil rights taking center stage, it was there that the authors directed their attention. What did Glazer and Moynihan have to say in 1970? The first thing they tried to do was inject space into that seven-year interim, by explaining that the research in the book actually dated back to 1960–1, thus making the span a decade. Even so, the reappraisal could be perceived as somewhat hasty, or as an indication they recognized their predictions were simply incorrect. Another view could be that it was what they were seeing in the late 1960s that was anomalous, not what they had observed initially. Whichever way, this introduction was written around a major rethinking, primarily as regards the role of race and religion. The change Glazer and Moynihan addressed was one that was set up in the conclusion of the first edition. The authors claimed that religion would be the glue holding ethnic groups together, and that race would also be important. In 1970, following significant changes both nationally and locally (in New York City), they confessed, “It hardly seems as though religion defines the present, or the future, major fissures in New York life” (viii). In 1970 it was race that dominated “ethnic” concerns: “Race has exploded to swallow up all other distinctions, or so it would appear at the moment” (viii). What events signaled the changes they saw during the 1960s? Their answer was the expansion of the civil rights movement, and particularly the violence that accompanied it, even (and perhaps especially) in Northern cities. Glazer and Moynihan looked back and saw that the optimistic forecast they had predicted for New York’s black population had not come to pass. They discerned that in actuality blacks were making certain kinds of social headway, but that the new separatist rhetoric and, more importantly for rethinking Beyond the Melting Pot, the shift from identifying as an ethnic group to a racial group stymied such processes (see pp. xii–xiv). In fact, it was this shift that, having failed to see the ascendance of the race paradigm, Glazer and Moynihan blamed for their having misperceived the future of blacks: “As an ethnic group, they would be one of many. As a racial group, as ‘blacks,’ as the new nomenclature has it, they would form a unique group in American society” (xiii). In other words, rather than proceeding as one ethnic group among the many taking part in American society, the shift to racial identification pitted blacks in a campaign against nearly everyone else, and certainly against those in power: whites. This characterization of the shift from ethnicity to race is both apt and naïve simultaneously. It is apt in that the rhetoric of the period did dramatically reshape ethnic and racial relations. Yet, if “Negroes” had been treated on equal footing with other ethnic groups to begin with, there would have been no need for a civil rights movement with all its accoutrements; no impetus for separatism. This is a place in the analysis where Glazer and Moynihan appear to have detached New York from the rest of the country, by pointing out that many immigrant groups had arrived on the bottom

Glazer and Moynihan’s Claim  125 rung of the ladder but had slowly moved up, just as they thought the relatively newly arrived blacks (from the South to the city) would do. But such thinking took New York City’s blacks out of their deeper historical context, ignoring trends elsewhere in the country. When they didn’t assimilate along the same path as new immigrants (white ethnics), Glazer and Moynihan turned to a tactic that seems at odds with their then-liberal credentials: blaming the victim. Rather than recognizing that “Negroes” had always been seen differently than other ethnic groups in the US, Glazer and Moynihan argued that there was a shift from ethnic to racial identification based on a choice made by blacks: “Groups may preexist in sociological reality, but they shape themselves by choice; they define their own categories” (xiii). Once made, argued Glazer and Moynihan, that choice to be “black” signaled “ominous” changes. They said, “Thus, as Negroes become ‘black’—and, perhaps beyond that, part of an alliance of the ‘internally colonized’—one cannot say this was inevitable, that the shaping forces of American society determined it” (xiv). According to this logic, it was blacks who forged the race war. Glazer and Moynihan praised the reform efforts of the 1960s, citing creativity and wide-ranging civil rights legislation, aimed at improving the conditions of blacks, despite noting that more could have been done. What they argued was that the good intentions of the powers-that-be and others who were well meaning were as important—if not more—than positive outcomes (see p. xv). Here again we see an ideological aspect to Glazer and Moynihan’s argumentation. Because they liked the vision of a multi-ethnic America, the turn towards race, the escalation of civic demands by blacks, was a mistake. What Glazer and Moynihan’s critique assumes is that blacks were or would ever be conceived of as ethnic, parallel to white ethnics, which looking back today seems unlikely at best, perhaps even absurd. The fact that so much of the onus for that shift was placed on blacks themselves is one telling indicator of the direction Glazer’s thinking in particular would take. Glazer and Moynihan did not actually ascribe sole responsibility for the creation of “blackness” and race to blacks themselves. They also attributed culpability to the mass media and the intelligentsia who failed to accurately and fully report and assess group inequality. Glazer and Moynihan described a knee-jerk liberal reaction, whereby early in the decade every slight, every job lost, every failure of race relations was the responsibility of whites. Then came the black power movement, which swung the pendulum 180 degrees, such that now, only blacks could help themselves. As Glazer and Moynihan sensibly acknowledged, “This was as extreme a position in ascribing all power to the deprived as the previous position was in denying any power to the deprived. Both were wrong” (xvi–xvii). Because they saw these as the two public faces of the civil rights movement, Glazer and Moynihan believed nothing positive could be accomplished regarding race, politics, economics, or otherwise.

126  Glazer and Moynihan Challenge the Melting Pot, 1950–1970 Another revision in the second edition—one closely related to the rise of race as the dominant group identifier—was a shift in possibilities for assimilation, especially for blacks. In 1963, Glazer and Moynihan had identified colorblindness (and total assimilation) and the ethnic pattern as the two options in the US. They rejected colorblindness not primarily because of racism, but because empirically the ethnic pattern was already in place: even white groups hadn’t fully assimilated (xxii). By 1970 a third option had emerged: separatism, particularly racial separatism. At the time of their reconsideration, the authors felt that colorblindness was no longer even a possibility, and at that time, the range rested between the ethnic pattern (what they called the Northern model) and separatism (the Southern model). They saw the Northern ethnic pattern holding the most plausible “solution” (xxiii). In an explicitly prescriptive gesture, Glazer and Moynihan wrote: “We believe the ethnic pattern offers the best chance for a humane and positive adaptation to group diversity, offering the individual the choice to live as he wishes, rather than forcing him into a pattern of a single ‘Americanized’ society or into the compartments of a rigidly separated society” (xxiv). Thus the vision of America that they continued to prefer was one of voluntaristic ethnic pluralism within a shared political state. Interesting, though, that they saw the evidence of the Southern model right there in New York City. There were, of course, significant elements of the original edition which Glazer and Moynihan stood by strongly, especially concerning the persistence of ethnicity and the way in which ethnic groups are “shaped by the distinctive experiences of life in America” (xxxiii). They wrote: Beyond the accidents of history, one suspects, is the reality that human groups endure, that they provide some satisfaction to their members, and that the adoption of a totally new ethnic identity, by dropping whatever one is to become simply American, is inhibited by strong elements in the social structure of the United States. It is inhibited by a subtle system of identifying, which ranges from brutal discrimination and prejudice to merely naming. It is inhibited by the unavailability of a simple ‘American’ identity. (xxxiii) This point is crucial. These lines tell us how Glazer and Moynihan understood the meaning of America. They reside in an interesting position near the federation of nationalities position expressed by Kallen, yet different in its emphasis on ethnicity, broadly defined. Against Kallen, they rejected the significance of sustained influence from the native countries of immigrants, yet embraced the connection subsequent generations would feel to their group. Like Kallen, they rejected the presence of any core group defining America; otherwise they would have a much easier time describing a “simple” American identity, or even a destination for assimilation. Also like Kallen, they fully welcomed, and even seemed to deem necessary, hyphenation

Glazer and Moynihan’s Claim  127 in discussing identity in the US. Against Kallen, they were not biological determinists or essentialists, and in fact, utterly rejected the significance of biology in terms of what mattered for maintaining ethnicity. Thus the story of America that Glazer and Moynihan told was similar to Kallen’s but more developed thanks to the ability to observe over more time. America was a country of people and groups, and the presence of these groups was not a mere holdover from their arrival, but a structure in American life that had been reproduced time and again, for better or worse. The linkage of ethnic groups to interest groups seemingly locked this pattern of ethnic identification into perpetuity. Returning to the issue of race and ethnicity, and especially the way identification for “Negroes” was shifting from the latter to the former, Glazer and Moynihan saw a troubled future: To our minds, whether blacks in the end see themselves as ethnic within the American context, or only as black—a distinct race defined only by color, bearing a unique burden through American history—will determine whether race relations in this country is an unending tragedy or in some measure—to the limited measure that anything human can be—moderately successful. (xl) The onus here is on only black Americans, not the external structures that Glazer and Moynihan previously acknowledged. They went on to say that there were three significant kinds of conflict that happened in New York City: interest-based, ethnically-based, and racially-based, and they believed that to focus only on one—race—would ultimately be devastating to the community, and writ large, to the country. While interest and ethnicity certainly matter on occasion and with regard to particular issues, of the three, race has certainly become the dominant way the American public understands social stratification—correctly or not. Glazer and Moynihan’s increasingly reductive understanding of the group they called “Negroes” and of race more broadly clearly contributed to their conclusions. In discussing what happened with each of their study groups in the intervening years between the first and second editions of the book, Glazer and Moynihan stumbled onto something that is now part of the conventional wisdom—and that foreshadowed a particular kind of academic specialization—as regards immigration and assimilation in the US. While showing that Puerto Ricans actually had a fairly abysmal decade in the 1960s, the authors noted that with the entry of other Spanish-speaking immigrants that Puerto Rican identity was liable to change, perhaps in the direction of a broader, linguistically based group. At the same time, there was some intra-group contestation over whether to have an identity as immigrants or as the colonized (lxx). This distinction smacks of a meaning similar to that invoked by the fragmented/segmented assimilation literature today, whereby assimilating in one direction “leads to bitterness,

128  Glazer and Moynihan Challenge the Melting Pot, 1950–1970 the second to hope” (lxx). In other words, Glazer and Moynihan saw a choice for Puerto Ricans regarding whether they would assimilate—at least to some degree—toward “traditional” American values, behaviors, and beliefs, or whether they would take on the position of victimhood, antisocial (anti-mainstream) behavior, and entitlement. Though in many ways this was and is a false dichotomy, that the authors saw it when they did suggests that they had a great deal of insight into the way in which ethnic/racial groups were functioning within American society. That they predicted the construction of a broad, Spanish-speaking group—today’s Hispanics—was also quite perceptive. What is striking in examining these ideas about ethnicity from 1970 is the implicit change in the conceptualization of America. Considering their denial of any core group or American center in 1963, this turn to traditional values and beliefs rings false, or at least not fully elaborated. It suggests that what Glazer and Moynihan sought was a kind of deep Anglo-conformity that allowed for superficial group characteristics to remain at the surface.

CONTEMPORARIES AND RESPONSES One of the most significant sociological scholars of assimilation, not only during the period in which Glazer and Moynihan were writing, but also in American sociology more broadly, was Milton M. Gordon. Like so many who showed a marked interest in the situation of recent immigrants in the middle of the twentieth century, Gordon himself was the child of immigrant parents. Gordon’s parents were Russian Jews who had settled in rural Maine. As a teen he found himself in Portland and part of a sizable Jewish community. He also found himself experiencing intra-group class distinctions, as the Jewish high school fraternities in Portland were divided along economic lines. Gordon attended Bowdoin College where he once again experienced the effects of inter-group distinctions, feeling that Jews were treated as outsiders. These experiences apparently influenced the intellectual work that would soon follow. Gordon completed his graduate work at Columbia University, earning his PhD in 1950. During the last four years of his doctoral work he began teaching at the University of Pennsylvania. His first major book, Social Class in American Sociology, published in 1958, indicated an attempt to study a phenomenon he had so keenly witnessed in action, and simultaneously to energize and systemize the study of economic stratification in American sociology. Gordon wanted to show that having an equalitarian ideology—as the United States did—did not guarantee a classless society, and that in actuality, American class structure was quite complex. Gordon soon added the characteristics of race, ethnicity, and religion to his account of stratification in American society, most notably in Assimilation in American Life: The Role of Race, Religion, and National Origins, published in 1964, just one year after Glazer and Moynihan’s Beyond the

Glazer and Moynihan’s Claim  129 Melting Pot. Both books on assimilation won national awards for studies dealing with race, and both have had tremendous legacies—though in quite different ways—in the social sciences. No evidence was found that Gordon was in conversation with Glazer and Moynihan, and Gordon’s book never found the same extra-academic readership. Both books are deeply significant as part of a conversation in the 1960s about assimilation, and thereby the meaning of the nation. So how did Gordon contribute to this discourse? Gordon began his book with these short but apt lines from Alice in Wonderland facing the title page: “Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?” [asked Alice] “That depends a good deal on where you want to get to,” said the Cat.

This usage is telling in a number of ways, but most of all because it indicates that more than fifty years ago Gordon was illuminating the very questions that drive research on immigration and assimilation today: there are multiple destinations, one needs to be aware of what those destinations might be, and some element of choice is involved in selecting where one is headed. The lines also foreshadow the direction the sociology of assimilation has taken, with strong emphasis on the segmented or fragmented nature of the process.4 Finally, Lewis Carroll’s words suggest the highly postmodern possibility that there is no single truth, no single answer, only a variety of options. What is left out of these short lines—yet what Alice later confronted in spades—is that even having made a particular choice, there may well be significant barriers to reaching one’s goal. These themes offer a window into much of Gordon’s smart and still relevant study, but also point to some of what he missed. The first factor, that of multiple destinations, is seen almost exclusively through the prism of the multiple melting pot about which more will be said, a corrective to a more simplistic melting pot model, but still not America as a whole. Gordon’s focus—and subsequently that of so many other scholars of ethnicity, race, immigration, and assimilation—on the picture only from the side of the assimilating groups missed that there were (and are) also multiple understandings of America itself that implicitly inform understandings of assimilation. He acknowledged Anglo-conformity, the melting pot, and cultural pluralism, but reduced these to purely empirical possibilities to be judged only according to his multi-layered model of assimilation. Had the various types of assimilation been maintained, happened at all, or disappeared? As though the meaning of America could be discovered on a multiple-choice test, Gordon wanted primarily to know, which one best described the reality? What does not emerge from this kind of analysis is that imaginings of America, narratives of America, destinations, all have the potential to hold a tremendous amount of not only

130  Glazer and Moynihan Challenge the Melting Pot, 1950–1970 meaning, but power, regardless of how empirically present they might be at a given moment. If, for example, the core group held to a vision of America as not just Anglo-conformist, but racially nativist, the empirical reality of cultural assimilation among the working and middle classes might be much less important. Gordon’s goals in doing this work grew from his concerns regarding group-level inequality: prejudice and discrimination based on racial, religious, or ethnic difference. Gordon introduced the structured elements of group life to the study of discrimination and prejudice. He understood that because the group element of social life was legally “invisible” (5)5, it was difficult to appraise accurately. He also pointed out the reality that “the white Protestant American is rarely conscious of the fact that he inhabits a group at all. He inhabits America. The others live in groups” (5). This understanding of the world has long allowed those inhabiting positions of dominance to define everyone else as other, and to claim that it is to his “neutral” position that they must aspire; this is the foundation of hegemony. Like Glazer and Moynihan, Gordon saw that relatively little social science had been done in this vein of looking for the structural factors that might help explain the social world of relations between large identity groups. The consequence of this gap, Gordon argued, was that there had been no high-level discourse regarding inter-group relations in recent years. He then laid out the situation as follows: “Liberals,” well-meaning people, and professional intergroup relations workers (not necessarily mutually exclusive categories) know that they are against racial, religious, and nationality prejudice and discrimination and want to see these phenomena eliminated from American life. They are “for” equality of opportunity in all areas for all men regardless of “race, creed, or national origin.” Faced with the concrete reality of an overt discriminatory act in employment or housing, they are concertedly against it. But the question of whether Negroes, or Jews, or Catholics, or Mexican-Americans, should maintain or lose their group identity in this America of the future is one which, for the most part, receives no thoughtful attention or is dealt with largely in clichés. Do we want “total assimilation,” “the melting pot,” or “cultural pluralism”? (8) In other words, even those individuals and organizations whose stated goals were to handle and improve inter-group relations barely considered structural or theoretical aspects of the problem. Like Glazer and Moynihan, Gordon did not acknowledge the role of slowed immigration in considering why so few scholars, much less laypeople, were addressing these issues. In all likelihood, the sense of urgency declined following the enactment of the National Origins Act and led many to believe the problems of intergroup relations would melt away. What is clear from both Beyond the Melting Pot

Glazer and Moynihan’s Claim  131 and Assimilation in American Life was that by the 1960s, for a variety of reasons, neither the groups themselves nor the difficulties they faced in sharing one society went away. With Glazer and Moynihan, Gordon agreed that ethnicity had retained a much stronger role in American society than expected. The melting pot had not done its work, and for Gordon, the question was how to first understand, and then reduce, the prejudice and discrimination that characterized American society. In explaining the nature of ethnicity in America, Gordon offered a model of competing claims for ethnic affiliation based upon nation-state (the US), race, religion, and national origin (that is, from where the immigrant generation came). Individuals had the choice of these sources with which to identify, and typically they chose some combination of possibilities, e.g., white, Catholic, and Irish. Gordon’s operationalization of ethnicity is particularly helpful in its clarity.6 Yet it is striking that in his definition he omitted any mention of group interest as a characteristic around which identification might be formed or sustained. Perhaps it is this omission that draws such a sharp line between Gordon’s analysis of ethnic life as compared with Glazer and Moynihan’s. For the latter, shared interest was a central element of ethnic group identification and cohesion. For Gordon, interest—cultural, linguistic, political, economic—merited little mention. Gordon offered a helpful primer on the intellectual traditions of acculturation and assimilation, which ultimately led to the more empirical analysis he intended for both himself and others to undertake. He began by distinguishing the two, showing that acculturation grew out of an anthropological tradition concerned solely with “cultural behavior,” but not “the social relationships of the two groups, the degree or nature of ‘structural’ intermingling, if any, the question of group self-identification, or any other possible variable in the situation” (62). Assimilation, on the other hand, emerged out of sociology in the 1920s, and encompassed—at least initially—a broader process including both acculturation and a sharing of structural contacts and relationships. By the 1950s, assimilation had become squarely a cultural phenomenon, but one that was sometimes one-way while at others was multi-directional. One voice in the 1950s that was especially resonant to Gordon was Arnold Green. Green (1952) dealt with both culture and structure, and suggested a distinction Gordon then framed as one between behavioral and structural assimilation. It was here that Gordon seemed to reduce the meaning of culture to something almost purely external, behavior, and upon that foundation, he launched his empirical argument describing structural pluralism in the US. Gordon mapped out a model of seven types, or layers, of assimilation— cultural (“or behavioral”), structural, marital, identificational, attitude receptional, behavior receptional, and civic. Using these as empirically observable processes, he measured whether the US met any of the various rhetorics used to describe the incorporation of immigrants and other ethnic groups: namely, Anglo-conformity, melting pot, or cultural pluralism.7

132  Glazer and Moynihan Challenge the Melting Pot, 1950–1970 One significant variation from Glazer and Moynihan (and from Kallen and Bourne before them) was to be found in these pages: Gordon, unlike his peers, believed there was a core social group in the US, the white, Anglo-Saxon Protestants, and especially the middle class of that group. He insisted this did not deny contributions made by others: Taken together with the substantial quantitative impact of these non-Anglo-Saxon groups on American industrial and agricultural development and on the demographic dimensions of the society, this record reveals an America in mid-twentieth century whose greatness rests on the contributions of many races, religions, and national backgrounds. My point, however, is that with some exceptions, as the immigrants and their children have become American, their contributions, as laborers, farmers, doctors, lawyers, scientists, artists, etc., have been made by way of cultural patterns that have taken their major impress from the mould of the overwhelmingly English character of the dominant Anglo-Saxon culture or subculture in America, whose dominion dates from colonial times and whose cultural domination in the United States has never been seriously threatened. (73, emphasis in the original) Thus, any model of assimilation Gordon presented assumed a core toward which immigrants might shift and eventually model their lives and choices after, despite retaining other group characteristics. For Gordon, this reality was not intended to demean the contributions made by immigrants, but to acknowledge those individuals while recognizing that they had, in fact, taken on the “cultural patterns,” i.e., behavioral patterns, of the core group. He clearly does assert a dominant culture. He then explained his multi-process model of assimilation using four non-core ethnic groups—“Negroes,” Jews, Catholics, and Puerto Ricans. What Gordon found was that for almost all of the groups, cultural assimilation (acculturation, behavior change) had occurred, at least to some degree, while the other six layers of assimilation were yet to be realized. This led him to claim that cultural assimilation is the first of these processes to take place, but that its realization did not indicate guaranteed realization of the others, and in fact acculturation alone could remain the indefinite state of affairs. Gordon differentiated between intrinsic and extrinsic cultural traits: intrinsic ones—those somehow essential to the group itself—would be the more difficult to align with the host country’s. Though provocative, his characterization offered little in explaining why some groups acculturated more quickly than others. The bottom line for Gordon, however, was that acculturation did not necessarily lead to inter-group harmony that would be born of full-blooded assimilation, and therefore was inadequate for solving problems of discrimination and prejudice. But prior to getting at what might help in dealing with ill relations between groups, he understood that first we needed to understand what America really was. For him, that meant testing

Glazer and Moynihan’s Claim  133 the three principal theories, or “axes” (85), regarding inter-group relations: Anglo-conformity, melting pot, and cultural pluralism.8 Gordon believed structural assimilation would have been necessary to fully incorporate newcomers and minorities into the core of American life. It would take structural assimilation to fully disband ethnicity in the US, but this, according to Gordon’s analysis, had not taken place. In his famous line, he writes: “Structural assimilation, then, turned out to be the rock on which the ship of Anglo-conformity foundered” (114).9 For Gordon, Anglo-conformity theory required of newcomers and minorities that they abandon completely the characteristics and cultures of their countries of origin, choosing instead (or being forced) to adopt those of the American core, the WASP.10 According to Gordon, this position, at least the moderate variants within the broader category, has been “the most prevalent ideology of assimilation in America throughout the nation’s history,” and continued to be that in the middle of the twentieth century (89). Not surprisingly, the Americanization movement of the 1910s–1920s was seen by Gordon as the “fullest expression” of Anglo-conformity as a practical goal, with a special fervor noted in the “100% Americanism” campaign of the WWI era marking a peak. Gordon found that Anglo-conformity had been achieved in only one of his seven types of assimilation: cultural (105). The important implication was that “acculturation without massive structural intermingling at primary group levels has been the dominant motif in the American experience of creating and developing a nation out of diverse peoples” (114, emphasis added). While many melting pot thinkers were actually proponents of a non-interventionist Anglo-conformity (see Antin, Riis, and Steiner in Chapter 2), Gordon characterized the melting pot model closer to the Zangwillian tradition: in America a new American type would come into being (85). Zangwill—following the long-ago lead of Crevecoeur—may have been the sole early twentieth-century promoter of this radical melting pot thesis that Gordon then described as the central vision.11 Gordon explained that at the turn of the century, precisely when Zangwill was working out these ideas, “the melting pot idea was embedded in the rhetoric of the time . . .” but that even so, Anglo-conformity was probably still dominant (121–2). With the introduction of the idea of cultural pluralism, the melting pot idea faced a real challenge. The threat was largely answered, according to Gordon, by the triple melting pot notion claimed by Ruby Jo Reeves Kennedy (1944), and later Will Herberg (1955), which suggested that though there was not a single pot into which all newcomers and minorities would melt, that there were three “pots” that could be labeled, as Herberg did, Protestant, Catholic, and Jew. This is not to say that the idea of cultural pluralism went down in defeat, but rather to indicate that for those looking for a middle ground, the image of multiple melting pots was promising. Gordon found, like Glazer and Moynihan, that the creation of a new people with new institutions and structures had not come into being. The melting pot had not happened. Even acculturation, which seemingly had

134  Glazer and Moynihan Challenge the Melting Pot, 1950–1970 occurred within an Anglo-conformist framework, was not present. Although new immigrant groups and marginalized groups had surely left an imprint on “American culture,” even more dramatic were the changes to the cultures of the various non-core groups, and no totally new culture had emerged (127). So Gordon ultimately arrived at the conclusion that rather than a melting pot, the situation more closely resembled the “transmuting pot” suggested in 1954 by George R. Stewart, whereby what we would see was “the transformation of [their] cultural survivals into Anglo-Saxon patterns, and the development of their descendants in the image of the Anglo-Saxon American” (129). The affinity between this and a non-interventionist Anglo-conformity seems clear, but for Gordon, it led to the conclusion that what America actually looked like was “multiple melting pots.” From there he moved on to discuss cultural pluralism. Gordon began his discussion of cultural pluralism with a lesson in its origins. He showed and described that “cultural pluralism was a fact in American society before it became a theory,” describing the ethnic enclaves of the nineteenth century. He worked through the public discourse of the 1910s when the rhetoric of cultural pluralism was taking shape, unpacking the words of John Dewey, Norman Hapgood, Randolph Bourne, and of course, Horace Kallen, who offered the “classic statement of the cultural pluralist position” (139–141). But it was the bloom of internationally known, scientifically justified racism, exemplified by Nazism in the 1930s–1940s, that put cultural pluralism and the idea of a “nation of nations” on the tongues of Americans (156). By the 1940s “intercultural education” became an educational philosophy that sought to “reconcile the right of America’s racial, religious, and national origins groups to maintain a creative relationship to their diverse ethnic heritages with the need of a democratic society for unity and cooperation in matters essential to the society’s functioning and progress” (157). Gordon gave a crucial glimpse at what he thought necessary for groups within a culturally pluralistic society to survive: . . . they must be carried on by subsocieties which provide the framework for communal existence—their own networks of cliques, institutions, organizations, and informal friendship patterns—functioning not only for the first generation of immigrants but for the succeeding generations of American-born descendants as well. And here a crucial theoretical point must be recognized. While it is not possible for cultural pluralism to exist without the existence of separate subsocieties, the reverse is not the case. It is possible for separate subsocieties to continue their existence even while the cultural differences between them become progressively reduced and even in greater part eliminated. (158) He later added . . . if a moderate degree of structural and cultural pluralism are legitimated by the American Creed, legitimation should be made salient in

Glazer and Moynihan’s Claim  135 the public consciousness. For to legitimate and explain the system as it actually operates is to justify it and help to draw away the animus that many American have toward minority groups which, in their minds, do not “assimilate” or “melt” . . . . (240) For a society to sustain cultural pluralism, that arrangement would need to be legitimated by the powers-that-be, otherwise discrimination and prejudice would carry on as a backlash against those who “refused” to assimilate. What Gordon saw in looking at the US was that various groups, mainly the three large religious categories and black-white racial groups, maintained structural separation even though behavioral (cultural) differences had been steadily reduced. In other words, while acculturation, or cultural assimilation, has occurred, structurally, ethnic groups remain largely distinct from the core of American society (as defined by Gordon). Thus, and this is the very crux of his argument, Gordon said that “a more accurate term for the American situation is structural pluralism rather than cultural pluralism, although some of the latter also remains . . . Structural pluralism, then, is the major key to the understanding of the ethnic makeup of American society, while cultural pluralism is the minor one.” (159, emphasis in the original) Looking back it appears that Gordon’s claim that acculturation had largely happened, and that our focus needed to be on structures, not culture, has contributed to fifty-plus years of sociologists virtually ignoring national culture when studying assimilation. Additionally, that same conclusion on his part may have had a role in the directions in which the field splintered, such that race and ethnicity is now largely the study of African Americans, assimilation refers to either late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century European immigrants or today’s Latino immigrants, and neither of these fields spends much time at all thinking about America as a nation. So what vision of America did Gordon present? He saw a core culture—a WASP America—but simultaneously seemed favorable to a non-discriminatory, but hierarchically organized, kind of pluralism. Gordon’s America was based on a particular way of viewing the world: an empirical, positivistic reality. For him America was what could be measured in a particular, social scientific way. The research agenda he suggested seemingly won the day, because the vast majority of work on assimilation that followed took just such a path, measuring residential segregation, educational attainment, occupational attainment, etc., avoiding the empirically thornier questions of culture and zeitgeist that had played such a role in earlier discourse. This shift to more empirical study, which also characterized certain aspects of Beyond the Melting Pot, led ideology and prescription to retreat into underlying assumptions rather than bald statements of position. Some social science presented work on national identity as neutral, but it was not. Those writing on the issue of assimilation certainly had ideas about the meaning of America, which shaped their questions, definitions, and findings.

136  Glazer and Moynihan Challenge the Melting Pot, 1950–1970

Other Voices There was, of course, other work published in the years surrounding Beyond the Melting Pot that offered important insight into views of America at the time. Two of these: Stanley Lieberson’s Ethnic Patterns in American Cities and Gerald Suttles’s The Social Order of the Slum merit special attention. Glazer and Moynihan referenced these books explicitly in the introduction to the 1970 edition of Beyond the Melting Pot as exemplars in work being done on issues of racial and ethnic relations broadly speaking.12 Lieberson, though born in Montreal in 1933, was a New Yorker by residence, having been raised in Brooklyn. Ethnic Patterns (1963) was published while he was a professor at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. The book itself, published in the same year as Beyond the Melting Pot, is a comparative study of assimilation in ten cities via patterns of residential segregation, using a human ecology approach and drawing upon competitive aspects of Social Darwinism. In fact, Lieberson argued that race and ethnicity played a factor in “delimiting the rivalries and competition” within the social environment (1963:3). Both topic and method were squarely within the Chicago School tradition. Lieberson regretted that studies of the period of mass immigration to the US had recently fallen mostly to historians as sociologists were increasingly focused on the advancement of statistical methods and the use of technology for analyzing large quantities of data. He felt that sociologists could bring those developments to the study of immigration and assimilation, and that they should utilize them to design comparative, rather than particularistic studies. In an interesting way, then, Lieberson seems to fall outside of Glazer and Moynihan’s very descriptive approach (buttressed of course by their theoretical contribution about the nature of ethnic identification) and closer to Gordon’s more systematic approach. But for Lieberson the focus remained on ethnic segregation as the most significant indicator of and causal factor regarding assimilation. Rather than looking at ethnic/racial segregation as either an economic or cultural issue, he argued that such segregation was related to the “situation faced by immigrants upon their arrival and in the context of the conditions of their settlement” (5). Additionally, and most importantly regarding Glazer and Moynihan’s attention to the book, for Lieberson ethnic segregation was to be understood not primarily as a negative response, but as a form of adaptation (5). Thinking back to Park’s race relations cycle, Lieberson claimed that perhaps residential segregation is a step on the path to a fuller assimilation. And so his structural approach to the study of ethnicity and assimilation was one that Glazer and Moynihan found to be important to the development of ethnic studies. Another scholar added in the 1970 edition of Beyond the Melting Pot was Gerald Suttles. In 1968, Suttles published The Social Order of the Slums: Ethnicity and Territory in the Inner City. Born in 1932 in the mountains of western North Carolina, Suttles earned his PhD from the University

Glazer and Moynihan’s Claim  137 of Illinois in 1966 and spent most of his career at the University of Chicago. In Social Order of the Slums, Suttles detailed three years worth of intense observations made while living in the Addams area on the Northwest side of Chicago. Why were Glazer and Moynihan so enthusiastic about the work Suttles was doing? He recognized that within these poor, “slum” neighborhoods ethnicity really mattered. The Addams area’s population was composed primarily of four groups: Italians, blacks (“Negroes”), Puerto Ricans, and Mexicans. Suttles focused on the former two for purposes of contrasting the two poles of social organization within the “slum” (1968:97). He claimed that although from the outside the “slum” looked monolithic, its residents found community and distinction in their ethnic groups: “The ethnic sections in the area . . . constitute basic guidelines from which the residents of each section can anticipate certain forms of reciprocity and the alternative dangers that may be in store elsewhere” (1968:98). In the language of today’s sociology, one might say that these residents of ghettoized areas sought a positive identification with their ethnic groups rather than simply accepting an externally imposed identity as deviant, unsuccessful, irremediable, poor, etc. They lived in a culturally, ethnically plural environment, not one where they blended. For Glazer and Moynihan, this insight into the ways in which different groups and the individuals who comprise them coexist was surely an important one. THE MEANING OF AMERICA IN THE MIDDLE OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY To address the analytical questions set out about Glazer and Moynihan, and Beyond the Melting Pot at the beginning of the chapter, we return to key issues:

To Whom or What Were They Responding? Glazer and Moynihan were providing a rejoinder to those trumpeting the success of America as a melting pot. Above all else, they sought to show that in America, ethnicity had survived despite the inevitable changes to people and groups wrought by the process of immigration (or migration) and settlement. They were also making an effort to describe New York through the lens of ethnic group life and interaction. The portrait they painted of the city showed that in spite of, or regardless of, the myth of the melting pot that groups continued to create their own communities within a broader social system; empirically this was pluralism. The power of the melting pot narrative had allowed Americans to ignore just how different certain groups’ lives and possibilities were from other groups by assuming that everyone was steadily blending together. The notion of melting pot assimilation had

138  Glazer and Moynihan Challenge the Melting Pot, 1950–1970 blinded Americans to the ongoing significance of ethnicity at all levels: on the family, on education, on job opportunities, on city governance, on many other social systems of all sizes, and on concerns about inequality. Glazer and Moynihan felt that by ignoring these relationships, the long-term effects and attributes of immigration were not fully understood, nor was group life. These things were being masked. They wanted to carry on the legacy of scholars like Robert Park, Oscar Handlin, and Marcus Hansen who had made such an effort to understand urban life and immigration, respectively. Glazer and Moynihan wanted people to study ethnicity, and providing such a clear representation of the consequence of it rather than its disappearance for the lives of so many seemed the perfect way to encourage such work. The theoretical contribution Glazer and Moynihan made—about the way in which ethnicity survived, but not as a carbon copy of national origins—was another kind of response. Analytically, as opposed to empirically, understanding ethnicity in this way offered a rethinking of cultural pluralism. Whereas Horace Kallen and other likeminded thinkers from early in the century had thought of pluralism as a “federation of nationalities,” Glazer and Moynihan’s interpretation offered something new, and perhaps less potentially ominous than its predecessor. If what carries over is not so much the precise culture, religion, and “character” of the homeland of immigrants, but is instead transformed versions of these things that have adapted to life in the US, maybe that would be less foreboding to those holding more nativist ideologies or those nervous about the changing constituency of the US. This “ethnic pluralism” (a la Isaac Berkson in the early part of the twentieth century) provided a new imagining of America that might be more palatable, so long as the ethnic groups took on the “proper” civic behaviors of other citizens.

Were Their Questions Being Asked Analytically or Prescriptively? For Glazer and Moynihan it appears that no attempt was made to disguise the fact that they were making certain kinds of judgments, especially in their full-bodied analyses of blacks, Puerto Ricans, Jews, Italians, and Irish. In the introduction to the book, they acknowledge that the “ . . . paucity of the literature and the size of the subject . . . ” made it “ . . . beyond our capacities to present our theses wholly in terms of objective and verifiable statements” (1970:22). A paragraph later, they went on to say, “Some of the judgments—we will not call them facts—which follow will appear to be harsh. We ask the understanding of those who will be offended . . . ” (22). Yet in spite of recognizing that some of their determinations would not be welcomed in certain quarters, it also seems clear that Glazer and Moynihan saw great of vitality in ethnic communities, and much to offer to society at large. The 1970 preface gave new insights into the authors’ own positions about various aspects of ethnic and racial life in America. They were openly

Glazer and Moynihan’s Claim  139 opposed to the racialization of “Negroes” into blacks, as they saw this creating a hostile, dualistic scenario. They were quick to blame blacks (and the liberal intelligentsia) for making this choice, but paid little attention to other factors. It is in this section of reconsideration that we get the first glimpse of Glazer’s turn to neo-conservatism, which largely governed his later work.

To the Degree That Ideas Were Presented Prescriptively, How Explicit Was Ideology in Their Writing, and What Effect Does This Have on the Way It Was Received and How It Can Be Analyzed? It is interesting to consider the difference seven years can make in the reading of a book. In the original publication, the primary prescription Glazer and Moynihan made was that the option of ethnic pluralism appeared to be the most humane for coexistence in heterogeneous population centers. Generally speaking, Beyond the Melting Pot received quite a favorable reception in the academic journals, with one exception.13 One has to wonder, however, if the preface to the second edition might have changed some of those; the more critical tone, especially towards blacks, may have led some readers to a different conclusion. Perhaps it is that tone—and the seeming shift in ideology—that led to the ongoing controversy surrounding the contributions of the original. The prescriptive language in both volumes may explain why, unlike books like Gordon’s Assimilation in American Life, which took on a much more explicitly analytical tone, remain required reading in courses studying assimilation and race, while Beyond the Melting Pot does not. The presence of explicit prescription should not make Glazer and Moynihan’s book any more or less useful than any other work of social science. In fact, that they are up front about their position takes some of the guesswork out of the analysis. It is in examining texts that profess a purely analytical approach that we perhaps ought to be especially careful, since ideology so frequently resides below the surface. Nevertheless, here Beyond the Melting Pot is part of the data.

How Have Their Ideas Shaped Future Discourse? In 2000, some thirty years after the publication of the second edition of Beyond the Melting Pot, the International Migration Review issued a set of essays from a 1998 symposium, “Beyond the Melting Pot 35 Years Later: On the Relevance of a Sociological Classic for the Immigration Metropolis Today” (IMR v34, n1:243–279). The very presence of such a special installment tells us that despite the fact it is often a flashpoint for controversy, the book and its ideas still matter. The section featured essays from several leading social scientists working on immigration and assimilation, following a brief introduction from Richard Alba, another of these. The writers were Alejandro Portes, Philip Kasinitz, Nancy Foner, Elijah Anderson, and Glazer himself.

140  Glazer and Moynihan Challenge the Melting Pot, 1950–1970 In the opening piece, Alejandro Portes, best known for his work on Latin American immigration and more recently, on the second generation, finds himself “struck” by certain aspects of Beyond the Melting Pot that have gone relatively underdeveloped or little discussed. He points to the significance of the simultaneous rejection of the melting pot and cultural pluralism (as Kallen had expressed it) in favor of a more deeply contextualized understanding of ethnicity. This aligns with the dominance of assimilation studies, which examine what happens to people—immigrants and other marginalized peoples—as opposed to society itself, the nation. Portes mentions the ways in which Glazer and Moynihan’s analysis “pre-figured” the theoretical movement depicting segmented or fragmented assimilation. And, though Portes did find room for critique, overall his comments were highly favorable, in terms of writing style, clarity of question, and intelligibility of argument. As he writes in 2000, Thirty-five years after the publication of the book, what can we say about this statement [that the melting pot “did not happen”]? Probably that the weight of evidence leans strongly in its favor and that the absence of a single, uniform “American” emerging out of successive waves of immigration is more evident now than then. With the benefit of hindsight, one can say that it could scarcely be otherwise. In no country in the world, not even in the advanced democracies of Europe, have differences in group history, religion, language, and race failed to give rise to enduring ethnic divisions. Why should the United States be so different? Why should the group dynamics that eventually culminate in such enduring social divisions be entirely absent from America? Why would Ellis Island or its successors magically transform people, removing their memories, their attachments and resentments, and making them instantly ready for the so vaunted “crucible”? (Portes 2000:246) And yet, Portes also wants to qualify the “correctness” of Glazer and Moynihan’s finding against the melting pot. He quickly articulates the idea of fragmented assimilation, and argues that for some groups the melting did happen, but that the pot was not appealing to all, and also not open to all. Portes also bemoans the book’s lack of theoretical foundation, a seeming corrective to his earlier celebration of its readability and lack of reliance on jargon. Ultimately, Portes seems to have been duly impressed by his re-reading of Beyond the Melting Pot in preparing to write the essay. He recognizes that Glazer and Moynihan’s framework for understanding ethnic groups as something new, shaped by their social environment and history, and quite useful for his own work on those of the second generation who are increasingly reclaiming their ethnic identities. Portes also sees the book, perhaps because of some of its more obvious flaws, as having left behind a significant research agenda that continues to be carried out.

Glazer and Moynihan’s Claim  141 Philip Kasinitz, like Portes, finds himself “surprised” when he sits down to re-read the book. For him, a lifelong New Yorker whose work focuses on immigration, migration, and New York City, the premise of Beyond the Melting Pot was simply the backdrop to his youth, and thus went relatively “unacknowledged.” The revelations of revisiting Glazer and Moynihan’s narrative include a renewed appreciation for its depiction of New York, a greater clarity regarding the then-radical nature of the book’s claims about the endurance of ethnicity—especially intriguing in light of the authors’ later association with those opposed to multiculturalism, and the realization that despite the authors’ discontent with how ethnic studies developed, that Beyond the Melting Pot was actually a first step in the direction of that field today. For Kasinitz, however, it is the whole of the book, rather than its parts, that stands out most. What Glazer and Moynihan were really after was a description of “multiethnic structure,” otherwise known as the city. Though it was Gordon that explicitly attacked the relational aspect of ethnic groups, Kasinitz sees it in the depiction here of a certain kind of acculturation taking place amongst the ethnic groups (2000:251). Unlike Portes, Kasinitz sees less strength in the argument against the ongoing plausibility of the “melting pot” ideal. What remains strong to him, however, is the notion that ethnic groups function so much as interest groups, much in line with a Gansian (1979), expressive identity, but not in regards to living group-specific everyday lives. Finally, like Portes, Kasinitz comments on how well written the book is, and how it should inspire other sociologists to tell their stories without the clumsiness of jargon and unintelligible methods. Taking an entirely different approach to rethinking the major concerns of Beyond the Melting Pot, Nancy Foner uses the authors’ arguments as a springboard for discussing what is happening in America—and especially New York City—today as regards immigration and transnationalism. While certainly critical of particular predictions Glazer and Moynihan made regarding the ethnic composition of New York as well as their underplaying of the significance of race, Foner, whose work has been concentrated on immigration, the city, and transnationalism, is largely impressed by the prescience of their take on the importance of culture and of the ever-changing structures that make up the city. In addition, Foner sees Glazer and Moynihan as having been “ahead of their time in noting the impact of transnational and global processes on ethnic identity” (2000:260). Going back to her original complaint about the authors’ predictions, Foner avoids saying if the structures she’s outlined as dominant today will still matter in thirty-plus years. Instead, she harkens back to the last line of the book, which points to the processual character of America, and the mystery of its final form. Elijah Anderson, whose ethnographic work in the urban core of Philadelphia has long been a staple of the race literature, seems to read Glazer and Moynihan quite differently from his colleagues. Anderson begins with the premise that ultimately Beyond the Melting Pot was “documenting the

142  Glazer and Moynihan Challenge the Melting Pot, 1950–1970 realization of this concept [the melting pot]” in a depiction of New York City. Given that as a point of departure, his essay functions as a critique and debunking, drawing primarily upon the experience of blacks in contemporary America. Most enlightening is Anderson’s portrayal of parallel developments within the black community: the disappearance and then remaking of the “race man” and the rise of an oppositional culture among black youths. The link back to Glazer and Moynihan in Anderson’s assessment is that both of these developments lead to greater separation of blacks from mainstream society, and thus increased particularism rather than assimilation. Perhaps another look at the 1970 introduction would have tempered Anderson’s frustration regarding the notion of the inevitability of upward mobility for blacks, but surely would have raised his ire in its explanation for why that was not taking place. In an especially useful turn, the special section of essays closes with one from Glazer, allowing us to understand the legacy of the book from one its authors. Glazer states up front that the most obvious thing to note when rereading the book today, is “how much it is a book of its time” (2000:270). In saying this, he is not merely distancing himself from some of the conclusions reached in the 1960s, but also acknowledging how difficult such work is to do, especially if one is aiming to be predictive, and how processual and dynamic identity is. He points to the particularly unique moment in New York’s history that was the 1950s–1960s, and how that plays a significant role in how Beyond the Melting Pot is read today. That temporal and spatial specificity led Glazer and Moynihan to three particular assumptions that Glazer now feels were in error and which led to flawed conclusions: first, that the era of mass immigration was over, second, that immigrants start at the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder and steadily move into the mainstream, and third, that “migrant” blacks and Puerto Ricans would display similar patterns of adjustment to immigrant groups. The first of these assumptions is the most relevant here, and that Glazer now acknowledges the role of low immigration leading up to the initial publication shores up the central claim here of the link between assimilation and notions of the meaning of America. He also concedes that the shift in immigration policy that led to New York’s becoming once “again a city of immigration” (2000:272) in the mid-1960s played a role in the changing identity of blacks thereafter, much as Anderson suggests in his essay. One of the most telling things from this symposium is the way that four leading scholars in the field came out with such markedly different readings. At the end of Beyond the Melting Pot Glazer and Moynihan laid out a research agenda for ethnic studies, and here again Glazer seems to set the stage for projects to come. He talks about the way in which the “image of the immigrant” needs to be reconceived, he implies the need for more research into the social and structural relationship between blacks and newer immigrants, and he proclaims a need for better and broader answers to questions about the ongoing reproduction of the black underclass. Glazer’s tone is not apologetic, but in revisiting the theses of his (relative) youth, he has once again set the stage for controversial new thinking and research into matters of race, ethnicity, and assimilation. A legacy indeed.

Glazer and Moynihan’s Claim  143 CONCLUSION What then, after all, can reading a book like Beyond the Melting Pot, within its own historical and intellectual context, show about the construction and meaning of America at that time? For one thing, from the relative lack of heated, back-and-forth, explicit debate—a la the 1910s and 1920s—it appears that most Americans took the meaning of America for granted. At the very least, likely due in no small part to the continued use of the national origins system through 1965, most Americans were not being confronted with some questions because they were not faced with a constant stream of newcomers. Who was thinking about what America represented? Perhaps those who lived in big cities where migrants, immigrants, and their children clustered, as well as those living along border areas, particularly in the Southwest. And, of course, a few intellectuals who found these concerns to be central in one way or another. The narratives of America being offered during this period did not fall into precisely the same categories as those in the early part of the twentieth century. As already mentioned, with such dramatically reduced immigration, with the battle over fascism in Europe, with economic growth and hopefulness abounding for much of the twenty years following WWII, the concerns were different, and so were the meanings being constructed and/or renovated. An America defined against communism was central, but immigration and assimilation did not vanish entirely. One story of America came from a small number of immigration historians who presented America as a “nation of immigrants,” not so much to tell the story of pluralist America, but to humanize the masses of new faces and to tell their stories. Another story of America was coming out of the Chicago School of sociology, which presented the concerns about assimilation within the broader framework of understanding America as in process; perhaps even as a process itself. A third story came from Glazer and Moynihan. They were scholars of the city, and in that city they saw a proud future for those many newcomers as they navigated and negotiated American life from within the vantage point of their ethnic groups. The imagining of America that Glazer and Moynihan offered was, in many ways, a renovation—a fairly major one—of Horace Kallen’s cultural pluralism. Glazer and Moynihan imagined ethnic pluralism, and they saw the continued importance of ethnicity not as a fluke of constant immigration, but as a structure of American social life. In addition, they saw America—like the Chicago School scholars they admired so much—as dynamic, not essential or static. Many politicians, especially those who resisted the Civil Rights Act of 1964 or the Immigration Act of 1965 represented—to varying degrees—the kinds of nativism found earlier in the century. Southern politicians who sought to maintain a system of legalized segregation and discrimination saw America as white. Race had taken the place of national origin for many of them, and blacks simply did not have a part in the story of America they told. Those politicians (and there were many) who sought to maintain the

144  Glazer and Moynihan Challenge the Melting Pot, 1950–1970 national origins system feared the country would be over-run with European immigrants fleeing the long arm of communism. They maintained more traditional concerns about nationality, but had to be careful in their rhetoric following the horrors of Nazism. The presidents who sought to change immigration policy—and this was mostly following WWII—envisioned the America of Emma Lazarus’s famous lines on the Statue of Liberty: America as a haven, and as a place of opportunity. And then there were the academics, who seemingly wanted to deny any normative concerns about America at all as they studied assimilation. Glazer and Moynihan did this to some degree, but also made clear that they found ethnicity a far superior way of organizing American life to either being color-blind or racially divided. Milton Gordon, with his analytic model for understanding how much any given group has assimilated, wound up seeing “multiple melting pots.” Gordon reduced America to its possible empirical outcomes, and yet he gave away some his own underlying assumptions when in the end he disavowed any need for programs like affirmative action. Perhaps he truly believed that America would eventually bring opportunities to everyone, but perhaps he was simply comfortable with the status quo, and did not see any reason for particular groups to need a leg up. Such “value-free” scientific work is certainly the modus operandi in the social sciences today, and these men were at the cusp of such an ethos. But perhaps what was most significant in all this work about assimilation is how little it considered the nation itself. Sometime between the early part of the twentieth century and the early 1960s, the connection, the outward link between assimilation and national identity was broken, at least for American scholars. Politicians seemingly retained that association, and it was in debates about race and immigration that it was carried on explicitly. But the many other sociohistorical happenings of the period, including changing norms within sociology itself, played a role in the thinking of those considering assimilation more positivistically, and those connections must be uncovered. Following an investigation of Samuel Huntington’s Who Are We? we will return to the sociological question of the relationship between sociohistorical factors, ideas about assimilation, and the construction of narratives about America.

NOTES   1 Traub has been a staff writer for the New York Times Magazine since 1998, and has also had essays and articles published in other major news and commentary journals, along with publishing two books.  2 All page numbers from Beyond the Melting Pot are from the 1970, MIT Press edition.   3 Figures taken from p. 6 and p. 318—Table 2 in Beyond the Melting Pot.   4 See Portes and Zhou (1993) for the classic statement of what is essentially bifurcated assimilation whereby some immigrants move toward the center and some move toward the margins.

Glazer and Moynihan’s Claim  145   5 All page numbers for Gordon citations are drawn from the 1964 book, Assimilation in American Life: The Role of Race, Religion, and National Origins, New York: Oxford University Press.   6 For more on Gordon’s model of ethnic identification in America, see pp. 26–8. For his depiction of the way in which ethnic groups constitute subsocieties within the US, see pp. 34–9.  7 To show what he was trying to measure, Gordon sketched out two ideal-typical situations, one Anglo-conformist and one melting pot. When describing the Anglo-conformist situation, he said that this “would represent the ultimate form of assimilation—complete assimilation to the culture and society of the host country” (69). In other words, complete assimilation for Gordon was unidirectional towards the core.  8 Gordon largely ignored nativism as a major axis of America’s history of incorporating newcomers. He likely considered it to be part of the Anglo-conformist category, but in reality only some nativists would fit in that category. As discussed in previous chapters, while some nativists may have been satisfied with total assimilation to the core group, others would have much preferred either ending immigration altogether or genetically rooting out non-Anglo blood via a program of eugenics. For most of these more radical nativists, the inter-racial mixing necessary for full assimilation to the core, i.e., Anglo-conformism, was utterly anathema. What is most curious is that Gordon dedicated so little of his description of Anglo-conformity—or melting pot or cultural pluralism for that matter—to the significance of attitudes about immigration, which were surely important in the construction of each position. As with Glazer and Moynihan, the forty years of slowed immigration seemingly blinded him somewhat to the significance of its role.   9 We could say the same about the melting pot. Without a true merging of the structures and institutions of a society, even biological mixing might lead only to the kind of multi-level system that continues to characterize countries like Brazil (F. James Davis 1991, Who is Black?). 10 This is also the basis of a popular understanding of the melting pot. In other words, for many people who would consider themselves in favor of “melting,” all of the melting is to be done by the newcomers, into a pot understood to be American. 11 On p. 125 Gordon has one paragraph alluding to a convergence between Anglo-conformity theory and melting pot theory. He depicts such an interpretation as “loose and illogical,” but he has underestimated the weight and logic of the overlap in writing and thinking about immigration and assimilation. 12 Glazer and Moynihan gave relatively little space (seven pages) outlining work being done in the field, but most of it was very particularistic. I selected Lieberson and Suttles out of that section because of their broader scope, which was more in keeping with the issues at stake here. Of course there were also other books in the period that Glazer and Moynihan did not mention, which surely matter to the concerns herein. One of these was E. Digby Baltzell’s The Protestant Establishment (1964), which focused on the ways in which the WASP elite’s ongoing exclusion was having (and would increasingly have more) negative effects on America’s role as an international leader. That is, because of the ramifications of its exclusionary vision of America, the once-dominant group was losing its authority on the home front, and was therefore less able to garner authority in the world. Another important book from the period, in a much more theoretical vein, was Fredrik Barth’s Ethnic Groups and Boundaries, originally published in 1969. Barth’s ideas about the ways in which ethnic groups are constructed and maintained have had a lasting influence on social scientists of all stripes who deal with

146  Glazer and Moynihan Challenge the Melting Pot, 1950–1970 concerns about the way groups interact along boundaries. Additionally, his arguments about the significance of ethnicity as a means of organizing cultural differences remain significant. Though Glazer and Moynihan did not refer to either of these, given the issues at stake in this study, their contributions to the field are also relevant. 13 In reviews in Political Science Quarterly, The American Journal of Sociology, American Sociological Review, The Journal of Negro History, International Migration Digest, and Western Folklore, Beyond the Melting Pot received good (or better) reviews. The Journal of American History was the anomaly, with a quite critical reading, mostly regarding the section on Jews.

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148  Glazer and Moynihan Challenge the Melting Pot, 1950–1970 Kallen, Horace M. 1998 (1924). Culture and Democracy in the United States. New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers. Kallen, Horace M. 1915. “Democracy versus the Melting-Pot.” The Nation. February 18 and 25. Kasinitz, Philip. 1998. “Beyond the Melting Pot 35 Years Later: On the Relevance of a Sociological Classic for the Immigration Metropolis Today.” Immigration Migration Review 34(1): 243–279. Kennedy, Ruby Jo Reeves. 1944. “Single or Triple Melting-Pot? Intermarriage Trends in New Haven, 1870–1940.” The American Journal of Sociology 49(4): 331–339. Lieberson, Stanley. 1963. Ethnic Patterns in American Cities. New York: Free Press of Glencoe. Lieberson, Stanley. 1961. “A Societal Theory of Race and Ethnic Relations” American Sociological Review 26(i6): 902–910. Lipset, Seymour Martin. 1967. The First New Nation: The United States in Historical and Comparative Perspective. Garden City: Doubleday. Massey, Douglas S. 2004. “Review of Who Are We?” Population and Development Review 30(i3): 543–548. Massey, Douglas S. and Nancy A. Denton. 1993. American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Mead, Margaret. 2000 (1965). And Keep Your Powder Dry: An Anthropologist Looks at America. New York: Berghahn Books. Meier, August and John H. Bracey, Jr. 1993. “The NAACP as a Reform Movement, 1909–1965: ‘To Reach the Conscience of America.’ ” The Journal of Southern History 59(1): 3–30. “Milton Myron Gordon” in Contemporary Authors Online. Gale Group, 2001. “Milton Myron Gordon” in World of Sociology. 2 volumes. Gale Group, 2001. Nagel, Joane. 1994. “Constructing Ethnicity: Creating and Recreating Ethnic Identity and Culture” Social Problems 41: 152–176. “Nathan Glazer” in Contemporary Authors Online. Gale Group, 2003. “Nathan Glazer” in World of Sociology. 2 volumes. Gale Group, 2001. “Oscar Handlin” in Contemporary Authors Online. Gale Group, 2006. “Oscar Handlin” in Encyclopedia of World Biography, 2nd edition. 17 volumes. Gale Research, 1998. Park, Robert Ezra, Ernest Burgess, and Roderick D. McKenzie. 1967 (1925). The City. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Park, Robert Ezra. 1950. Race and Culture. Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press. Park, Robert Ezra. 1925. The City. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Patterson, James T. 1996. Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945–1974. New York: Oxford University Press. Portes, Alejandro, Luis Eduardo Guarnizo, and Patricia Landolt. 1999. “The Study of Transnationalism: Pitfalls and Promise of an Emergent Research Field.” Ethnic and Racial Studies 22(2): 217–237. Portes, Alejandro and Min Zhou. 1993. “The New Second Generation: Segmented Assimilation and Its Variants.” Pp. 74–96 in Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, Vol. 530, Interminority Affairs in the U.S.: Pluralism at the Crossroads (Nov., 1993). Portes, Alejandro. 2000. “Beyond the Melting Pot 35 Years Later: On the Relevance of a Sociological Classic for the Immigration Metropolis Today.” Immigration Migration Review 34(1): 243–279. Riis, Jacob A. 1970 (1902). The Making of an American. New York: Macmillan. “Robert E(zra) Park” in Contemporary Authors Online. Gale Group, 2006. “Robert E(zra) Park.” in World of Sociology. 2 volumes. Gale Group, 2001. “Robert E(zra) Park” in Encyclopedia of World Biography, 2nd ed. 17 volumes. Gale Research, 1998.

Glazer and Moynihan’s Claim  149 Ross, Edward Alsworth. 1914. The Old World in the New: The Significance of Past and Present Immigration to the American People. New York: The Century Company. Schultz, Kevin M. 2011. Tri-Faith America: How Catholics and Jews Held Postwar America to its Protestant Promise. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Smith, Anthony D. 1986. The Ethnic Origins of Nations. Oxford: Blackwell. Steinberg, Stephen. 1989 (1981). The Ethnic Myth: Race, Ethnicity, and Class in America. Boston: Beacon Press. Steiner, Edward A. 1914. From Alien to Citizen: The Story of My Life in America. New York: Fleming H. Revell Company. Stewart, George R. 1954. American Ways of Life. New York: Doubleday & Company. Suttles, Gerald. (1968) The Social Order of the Slums: Ethnicity and Territory in the Inner City. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Takaki, Ronald. 1993. A Different Mirror: A History of Multicultural America. New York: Little, Brown and Company. Taylor, Charles. 1994. “The Politics of Recognition.” Pp. 25–74 in Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics of Recognition. Edited by Amy Gutmann. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Traub, James. (1997) “I Was Wrong: Nathan Glazer Comes to Terms with Multiculturalism.” Slate. http://www.slate.com/id/2983 Ueda, Reed. 1992. “American National Identity and Race in Immigrant Generations: reconsidering Hansen’s ‘Law’.” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 22(3): 483–491. Vickerman, Milton. 1999. Crosscurrents: West Indian Immigrants and Race. New York: Oxford University Press. Walzer, Michael. 1983. Spheres of Justice: A Defense of Pluralism and Equality. USA: Basic Books. Waters, Mary, Reed Ueda, and Helen B Marrow. 2007. The New Americans: A Guide to Immigration since 1965. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Waters, Mary. 2001. Black Identities: West Indian Immigrant Dreams and American Realities. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Waters, Mary. 1990. Ethnic Options: Choosing Identities in America. Berkeley: University of California Press. Weber, Eugen Joseph. 1976. Peasants into Frenchmen: the modernization of rural France, 1870–1914. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Weber, Max. 1996. “The Origins of Ethnic Groups” in Hutchinson and Smith (1996). Originally published in 1978 in Economy and Society. Yetman, Norman R. 1999. Majority and Minority. Boston: Allyn and Bacon. Zangwill, Israel. 1915 (1909). The Melting Pot Drama in Four Acts. New York: Macmillan Company.

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Part III

Huntington’s Return to Americanism, 1985–2005

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6 Multiculturalism and a Domestic Clash

The clash between the multiculturalists and the defenders of Western civilization and the American Creed is . . . “the real clash” within the American segment of Western civilization. Americans cannot avoid the issue: Are we a Western people or are we something else? The futures of the United States and of the West depend upon Americans reaffirming their commitment to Western civilization. Domestically this means rejecting the divisive siren call of multiculturalism . . . Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (1996:307)

In the decades following the 1965 amendments to immigration policy, the volume and composition of America’s immigrant population changed dramatically. Substantial numbers of Asians entered along the coasts, while even larger numbers of Mexicans entered along the southern border. Of more immediate significance than the shifts brought about by the relaxation of immigration policy, however, were those that followed the passage of the 1960s civil rights legislation. African Americans became full, legal members of the American state, and their roles in politics, culture, and society expanded quickly though not evenly across the country. The corresponding women’s movement heralded qualitative changes in both the public and private spheres as women and girls now demanded equal opportunities in education, business, and even sport. But concerns about inequality and uncertainty carried on. Although Roe v. Wade—considered by advocates to be an important step for women’s rights—granted access to abortions throughout the US in 1973 (and therefore symbolically to women’s control of their own bodies), an Equal Rights Amendment failed to be ratified by thirty-eight states and failed to pass in Congress in the early eighties. In America’s inner cities, manufacturing plants were closing or moving out, leaving urban populations, which in many cases were disproportionately black, with no jobs and few prospects to earn a legitimate living (see Wilson 1996). The emergence of a drug-infested, violent “street” culture took hold in many such areas, creating a counterculture often understood by outsiders to be determined by bad culture (bad black

154  Huntington’s Return to Americanism, 1985–2005 culture), as opposed to by racism, poverty, lack of opportunity, and social isolation (see Anderson 1999). Blatant racial discrimination (mean person racism) was on the wane, but even in areas not subject to such economic privation institutional racism maintained its hold in such spheres as housing, education, and career advancement (see Massey and Denton 1993). Americans and popular culture were changing in ways that reflected an increased acceptance of diversity and pluralism, but institutions and structures were transforming more slowly. Additionally, in a society where individualism reigns supreme, institutional racism is most often invisible and broadly denied (see Bonilla-Silva 2013). The Cold War continued on, with occasional flare-ups and occasional moments of progress. The mid-seventies were dominated domestically by Watergate. The Vietnam War ended with the fall of Saigon in 1975, bringing to a close a period of international humiliation not previously encountered before by the US. American foreign affairs shifted focus with renewed efforts to bring peace to the Middle East. President Jimmy Carter’s presence at the signing of the Camp David Accords in 1978 signaled America’s role as a vital third party in negotiations. This involvement in Middle Eastern affairs included a short-lived American intervention in Lebanon in the 1980s, during which over 200 Marines were killed in a barracks bombing. Ronald Reagan’s presidency ushered in a more muscular approach to America’s role in the world, not only via intervention and tough rhetoric aimed at the Soviet Union, but by growing and strengthening the military at home. Despite Reagan’s popularity both during and after his two terms in office, domestic life was not entirely rosy under his watch. A long-developing recession hit its peak under his supply-side economic policies, while the social safety net was being whittled down with a revival of bootstraps ideology. Though there was significant economic recovery, deficit spending reached all time highs as did the national debt. In terms of international affairs, it was Reagan’s role in ending the Cold War that carried the most significant legacy. His individual importance as a player in the breakdown of the Soviet Union is, of course, debatable, but the proverbial Iron Curtain and the concrete Berlin Wall did come down under his watch (see Knopf 2004). This chapter examines what the years following changes in immigration law in the mid-1960s, to the period immediately preceding Who Are We? The Challenges to American National Identity written by Samuel Huntington (2004). This is the third focal point in this study, considering the relationship between immigration, assimilation, and imaginings of America. A survey of the sociohistorical context leading up to the publication of the book, focusing primarily on the 1990s and the turn of the century, sets the stage. The story is narrowed by a concentration on four specific areas, especially as they are linked to assimilation and national identity: immigration, wars and foreign affairs, the economy, and significant social movements. Examining these topics, the same ones examined in regards to Horace

Multiculturalism and a Domestic Clash  155 Kallen’s 1915 essay and Glazer and Moynihan’s 1963 book, offers insight into the relationship between social structures and national narratives. The changes in immigration policy enacted in 1965, for example, clearly played a major role in jump-starting trends that fed the concerns motivating Huntington to write his book. Who Are We? is, in some ways, a step back toward the kind of work Kallen wrote nearly a century before, as opposed to Beyond the Melting Pot by Glazer and Moynihan. Kallen’s essay was clearly a piece of public intellectual work as opposed to an academic article; it was sometimes polemical. It was published in The Nation as opposed to an academic journal, and was written as part of a normative and intellectual, though not always scholarly discourse about assimilation and America. Who Are We?, although perhaps a bit more ambiguously, occupies a similar location. Huntington himself acknowledges that his 2004 book was written for both personal and professional reasons, making it different from much of his corpus and from other work being done by academics on nations and national identity today. He is much more explicitly normative than Glazer and Moynihan (in Beyond the Melting Pot) about his preferences and prescriptions, and is often quite disdainful toward the academy, particularly as regards his characterization of the professoriate as radically left-leaning. But before examining the text of Huntington’s book in the following chapter, illuminating its context is necessary. Considering the intellectuals and schools of thought to which he understands himself to be responding, along with questions of with whom he is in conversation and why, helps us understand the derivation of his concerns. Regarding the matter of why he explicitly responds to certain ideas has everything to do with the imaginings of America various thinkers propose, and how Huntington reacts to them. This combination of exploring both structural and intellectual frameworks illustrates clearly that knowledge and ideas are produced within both particular social structures and particular discourses. To understand Who Are We? and what it tells us about stories of American national identity, we must know the milieu from which it came. AMERICA: 1990s–2004 Given the historical closeness of this period, it is a challenge to construct an accurate representation of the years leading up to the publication of Who Are We? Yet, it is of utmost import to the questions driving this study that at the very least, we are able to see the major contextual factors that likely played a role in structuring the debates about immigration, assimilation, and the meaning of America. What did immigration look like? Did it change dramatically from the middle of the century, and if so, how? Was immigration policy amended, and if so, in what directions? With the Cold War having drawn to a close,

156  Huntington’s Return to Americanism, 1985–2005 what concerns drove American foreign policy? How were American relations with other global actors changing? What bearing did this have on the internal cohesion and definition of America, if any? Who would become the “other” against whom the US could define itself? What was the economy like during these years? Is there any reason to believe that either the highs or lows of the economy were related to the incorporation of newcomers, and therefore to the construction, maintenance, or renovation of American national identity and the stories that serve as its foundation? And finally, what important social movements of the period were related to such concerns? Had any new ideas or interests found a place of prominence in the public sphere? Were groups of people lobbying for their inclusion in American life? If so, how were these received? How do they matter? Since the historiography on this period is young at best, there is less ability to rely on traditional academic sources to tell the story of what happened and why. Instead, a sketch of what was happening leading up to and in the 1990s is presented to contemplate what connections that sketch—and its component parts—had to the ways various thinkers envisioned America.

Immigration The 1965 amendments to US immigration policy brought an air of respectability worldwide for the appearance of tolerance the new law implied (Hing 2004). In 1970 the percentage of the population that was foreign-born was a century-low 4.7; by 2000 it was 10.4. This change represented approximately 28 million immigrants, including legal and illegal entrants to the US during this thirty-year period (Patterson 2005:294). It was a growing awareness of these numbers and the origins of these newcomers that led to the hostile response among many Americans. As the composition of the immigrant population changed and the shift away from Western Europeans become clear, a backlash grew. Increasingly, proposals seeking to limit the increasing numbers of Latinos and Asians entering the country were put forward. Lawmakers, the labor movement, some African-American groups, some environmentalists, and many ordinary Americans (black, white, rich, poor) decried the presence of these newcomers, arguing that they were taking jobs away from “rightful American workers,” contributing to overpopulation, overtaxing public services, and not acculturating quickly enough (Hing 2004:111, Patterson 2005). Restrictions against Mexicans appeared first in 1979, with numerical limits and penalties on employers who hired those in the US without proper documentation. Throughout the 1980s, other approaches were utilized to reduce immigration from Latin America and Asia. These included shifting immigration policy away from a focus on family relationships and reunification, formally adopting a position to assist those countries negatively affected by the changes in 1965, and utilizing diversity visa programs. All of these changes favored immigrants from Western Europe.

Multiculturalism and a Domestic Clash  157 Hing (2004), an immigration law scholar, notes that these moves toward restrictionism were reminiscent of sentiment around the turn of the twentieth century, when business interests battled nativist interests over immigration policy. While business leaders then and more recently were likely motivated by profit, not primarily by an explicit vision of America, an egalitarianism of sorts is implicit in their more libertarian, open, economically driven philosophy toward immigration. Nativists, on the other hand, at the end of the twentieth century just as at the beginning, were operating on the principle that the racial/ethnic composition of America mattered, and that change in the direction of increased diversity should be actively avoided. In 1986 California voters approved Proposition 63, which was designed to make English the state’s official language. In this case the target was bilingualism, but the message was clear: Americans (Californians) were frustrated with the high levels of immigration, especially from Mexico (Patterson 2005). Rhetoric was sometimes explicitly racist. Drawing on such emotions, some conservative politicians ran campaigns aimed at reducing the source of hostility—the immigrants themselves, with Patrick Buchanan’s presence and performance in the primaries for the 1992 presidential elections being but one example of this strategy. Those not concerned about this new wave of immigrants made the argument that at the turn of the century the percentage of the population that was foreign-born had topped fourteen, and the country had carried on very well. In the decades that followed the high levels of immigration around the turn of the twentieth century, the US grew its economy, its military might and reputation, and its global power in dramatic fashion. The bulk of the 1965 legislation to loosen immigration restrictions held up despite the worries of many Americans. This can likely be attributed to the combined efforts of improbable and influential bedfellows. Conservative politicians beholden to the business interests in their districts were aligned with liberals who supported notions of pluralism and diversity, and who noted that the new immigrants were in fact assimilating as readily as previous groups had (Patterson 2005:298–99). This alliance held the door open in the face of exclusionary anger and demands for stricter regulation. But there were cracks in the façade of tolerance, and one excellent indicator of the tenor of these becomes clear in a section titled “Defining Mexicans as Non-Americans” in Hing’s (2004) Defining America Through Immigration Policy. Hing explains that in the 1970s, two Supreme Court cases illustrated the complications associated with legislating the immigration problems along the US-Mexican border (2004:139). In 1973, Almeida-Sanchez v. United States resulted in an effective ban on stopping and searching vehicles without a proper warrant or probable cause, a decision strongly contested by the Border Patrol. Just two years later following claims of a crisis, however, United States v. Brignoni-Ponce, led to language giving Border Patrol officers much more discretion in how they determine which cars to search. This allowed searches to begin again.

158  Huntington’s Return to Americanism, 1985–2005 It was not only such cases that showed the criminalization of illegal immigration—especially along the border. Immigration and Naturalization Services (INS) enacted sweeps in the 1980s reminiscent of Operation Wetback in the 1950s. One such sweep resulted in the arrest of five thousand mostly Latino immigrants. In the 1990s, targeted prevention operations became the norm along the border as Operation Gatekeeper was enacted to prevent migrants from utilizing the most traveled paths into the US. This policy resulted in immigrants seeking new border crossings and new strategies to leave Mexico, which was in the midst of a major economic crisis. Many of the new routes were extremely dangerous, and immigrant deaths went up by a factor of six hundred between 1994 and 2000. Hing finds this a travesty: Why do policy makers, the Border Patrol, and the American public allow these avoidable deaths to continue? Why is there no outcry? Our nation has allowed the moral outrage of Operation Gatekeeper to continue because we have defined Mexican migrants outside the scope of becoming real Americans. Operation Gatekeeper represents the worst manifestation of defining America through immigration policy. (2004:205, emphasis added) Hing makes a strong argument about the ongoing de-Americanization (not to mention de-humanization) of non-white, and even non-Anglo, immigrants in the US. Additionally, his point about the deadly consequences of recent immigration policy is crucial. In a more generalist accounting, Patterson (2005) concludes that despite most Americans favoring some restrictions and reductions in immigration, national politicians, fearing repercussions from business, liberals, and growing Latino and Asian populations, were unlikely to introduce major changes to immigration policy, or even to enforce, for example, the criminalization of hiring illegal immigrants following the amnesty policies of the mid-1980s. The question then, is what might the relationship between the immigration history of the 1970s–1990s and Huntington’s Who Are We? A more detailed narrative is offered in the following chapter, but for now it can be said that the increases in Mexican immigration in the last quarter of the twentieth century were a driving factor in his analysis. His palpable distaste for the changing composition of the US population is not some neutral distaste for growth; it is reserved for non-Europeans.

Wars and Other Significant Foreign Affairs The war in Vietnam came to a close in 1975, signaling the end of a very difficult period in American foreign policy. In 1978 Jimmy Carter was a witness to the signing of the Camp David Accords wherein Egypt officially recognized the state of Israel, and Israel ceded the Sinai back to Egypt. This was

Multiculturalism and a Domestic Clash  159 an important moment for both Carter and the US, solidifying the American role as a broker in attempting to secure Israel’s place in the region. Carter’s triumph was short-lived. He had made little progress dealing with the Soviets, an ongoing bugaboo, and then in 1979 a group of American diplomats was taken hostage in Iran. The hostage crisis lasted over a year, with the release coming only minutes after Reagan was sworn into office, having handily defeated Carter’s re-election bid. Though Cold War activities dominated foreign affairs during the 1980s, Reagan, too, found himself pulled into Middle Eastern affairs, this time as part of a multinational force in Lebanon. This intervention was fairly limited, lasting from 1982 to 1984, and ending a few months after the international forces’ barracks were targeted by suicide bombers, resulting in the deaths of over two hundred American Marines. Cold War activities took the American military into small-scale interventions in places like Grenada, Nicaragua, Angola, Cambodia, and Afghanistan. With Mikhail Gorbachev’s ascent to power and a developing discourse, tensions between East and West declined, paving the way for the fall of the Soviet Union. Reagan emerged a hero in these global events, and his brand of conservatism garnered immense power. Coming on the heels of the closing of the Cold War, the 1990s began with the US as the lone global superpower. The primary foreign policy issues at the time involved the ongoing conflicts involving Israel in the Middle East, concerns about how Eastern Europe would emerge from Soviet dominance, and developing anxieties about Saddam Hussein and Iraq. When Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990, ostensibly over concerns about oil drilling, the international community responded with a deadline for withdrawal. When that demand was ignored, the Gulf War began in 1991, with the preponderance of soldiers coming from the US. Although the quick success of this war led to popularity for George H. W. Bush and his generals, domestic problems got in the way of his re-election. During the Bill Clinton years, foreign policy was less focused on aggressive military action, and more on America’s role as peacekeeper. This manifested itself with a presence in the Balkans and in Haiti, and with Clinton’s continued efforts at resolving Israeli-Palestinian issues of statehood. But the US, of course, was not the lone global actor, and a new international foe was emerging during these years: Islamic radicals cum terrorists. In 1993, the first World Trade Center bombing alerted the US to the realities of international terrorism, a threat that, as is known in hindsight, was growing rapidly. On September 11, 2001, Islamic terrorists perpetrated a set of deadly attacks utilizing American passenger planes, destroying the towers of the World Trade Center, damaging the Pentagon, hurtling into a Pennsylvania field, and resulting in the deaths of nearly three thousand people. This event, led to an affirmation and consolidation of American national identity and patriotism unseen in decades. The 9/11 attacks also led to nearly unanimous declarations of sympathy and goodwill from other nations. Although he of

160  Huntington’s Return to Americanism, 1985–2005 course decried the strikes themselves, Huntington was deeply moved by the national unity that flourished in their wake. Soon after, George W. Bush declared a “War on Terror” that would send American troops into Afghanistan in an effort to root out the Taliban and the Al Qaeda network, thereby limiting any further damage it could do. Bush told the world, “You are either with us or against us.” The task turned out to be much more difficult than the administration anticipated, and troops remained there until 2013. Another Middle Eastern hotbed returned to the forefront not long after the September 11th attacks, as Saddam Hussein reasserted himself—according to the Bush administration—as a player in international terrorism and as possessing illegal weapons, “WMD,” weapons of mass destruction. The US, against the judgment of the UN and many other usual allies, opted for a full-scale unilateral invasion of Iraq. The grounds upon which Bush justified the war turned out to be fallacious, and the fighting lasted longer and was more deadly than Americans were led to expect. All of this depleted much of the remaining global goodwill for the US along with domestic support for interventionist, neoconservative foreign policy, and also led to disastrous domestic ratings of the Bush presidency. The internal debates about the War on Terror and Iraq were important for those concerned with issues of assimilation and American identity. Immigration and visa restrictions were put in place, making it more difficult for people of certain national origins to come to the US. Following the 9/11 attacks, there was an upsurge in hate crimes and hate speech targeting those of Arab descent. For some Americans, it became clear that Muslims, and Arab Muslims in particular, were the new “other” against which America and Americans defined themselves. For Huntington, the 9/11 attacks were mostly emblematic for the unity Americans obtained in their wake; for him, it was the incoming Hispanic immigrants who mattered most as an “other.” This focus on the damage a growing Latino population would have on the US is of particular interest given Huntington’s previous work, The Clash of Civilizations (1996), which set up a world divided into East and West (the Arab East, not the Communist East), Muslim and Christian. Even in the context of a career that created the very language of such a “clash,” Huntington saw Latino immigration as a more significant threat to the American nation than Muslims.

The Economy In the 1970s the American economy struggled mightily. The country was dealing simultaneously with inflation and unemployment. An extended oil embargo led to skyrocketing gas prices, which in turn led to high demand for fuel-efficient cars. This spelled bad news for Detroit, as it was the Japanese automakers who produced such vehicles. By and large, the economy of the mid–late seventies was understood by most Americans to be fairly disastrous. Yet America’s poverty rate was significantly lower than it had

Multiculturalism and a Domestic Clash  161 been in 1960 and its gross national product was significantly higher than that of its rivals. One historian suggests the negative nostalgia for the period has mostly to do with the heightened expectations of Americans, especially those who came of age during the booming post–World War II years (Patterson 2005). This is not to deny the poor performance of the economy during this decade; rather it is to say that Americans were less tolerant of economic downturns than they might have been in previous eras. Stagflation held into the 1980s, with unemployment remaining high and wages remaining low. In fact, real wages for men in production jobs remained essentially stagnant from the late 1970s through the end of the century. It was in no small part the low level of wage increases that drove many women into the workforce. With inflation rising but pay remaining the same, families increasingly needed two wage-earners to maintain their standard of living while avoiding significant debt. Labor unions were losing their power throughout this period, workers worried over job security, and Americans exhibited distrust in government as their taxes crept higher and higher. This last factor would play an important role in the shift from liberal to conservative administrations just ahead (Patterson 2005). After Reagan was elected president in 1980, a new economic regime—supply-side economics, often called “Reaganomics”—came into being. Taxes were cut, defense spending increased, pensions and entitlements were protected, and, not surprisingly as a result of this combination of policies, the budget deficit rose dramatically, leading to a serious recession. The country entered a recovery phase in 1983, though the deficit remained high, as did interest rates. Then-Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan (the same Moynihan examined in Chapters 4 and 5) saw Reagan’s policies as an intentional strategy to undermine the welfare state by drastically underfunding social programs. By the late 1980s, the economy was, by many indicators, coming around and Reagan’s popularity grew; he remains an icon for many Americans. After Reagan’s second term, George H. W. Bush assumed office. By 1990, he began to move away from his predecessor’s supply-side policies, finding that the expansion of the debt was no longer tenable. Despite having promised “No new taxes” on the campaign trail in 1988, Bush found that a tax increase was necessary, drawing the indignation and ire of many conservatives. By the early nineties a recession took hold that was slow to recede. Jobs were lost in huge numbers and Japan loomed on the edge of America’s economic dominance. It was not until the middle of the decade that things solidly turned around. This brings us to the Clinton years and the rise of an increasingly technology-driven global economy. The US had restored its position of dominance in the world. Clinton’s comfort in international relations, though shaky at first, grew steadily. He sought to manage the economy not as a New Dealer, but via “triangulation.” This strategy allowed him to pursue legislation on typically Republican issues such as the 1996 welfare reform

162  Huntington’s Return to Americanism, 1985–2005 bill, which imposed tough standards on welfare recipients. The economy was performing extremely well during much of Clinton’s tenure, and by 1998 was approaching a budget surplus. Much like a mirror image of Reagan, Clinton’s successes and his connection with people left him a liberal icon, despite his largely centrist politics. But with George W. Bush’s presidency, hopes of maintaining such a surplus were quickly lost. Bush was a tax-cutting conservative, but with a high level of spending. Following the 9/11 attacks, the US entered a recession during which unemployment rose for the most consecutive months since the Great Depression. By 2003, a turnaround was in evidence, as economic indicators reflected slow, if steady, growth. How might a slice of economic history help contextualize Huntington’s Who Are We? The most obvious connection would be the concerns Americans had about unemployment coupled with the sense that immigrants take jobs away from “real” Americans. The late 1990s and early 2000s were not a period of economic depression, thus limiting any arguments that nativist sentiments must be linked to periods of sustained economic struggle. There is no doubt that moments of economic decline make the country an easy target for those who would tear down American society, but in the case of September 11th, the target was prosperity. It was America’s strength, then, not its weakness that seemed to motivate the Al Qaeda terrorists. Similarly, it is America’s economic strength, among other factors, that brings immigrants into the country—at least relative to the weak economies of their homelands. Again, then, as regards the economy it is America’s strength that attracts what are, from Huntington’s perspective, potential dangers including both immigrants and terrorists. The economy serves as a beacon for many in the developing world, and as we will see, Huntington borrows language from turn-of-the twentieth-century nativists to express his anger at latecomers.

Social Movements As with immigration, foreign affairs, and the economy, social movements played a significant role in shaping the sociohistorical context in which Huntington was writing. In the mid–late sixties, a counterculture emerged that would have lasting effects on American social life and also on Huntington’s intellectual development. While it was not a unified movement, there were characteristics that served as hallmarks for those who participated in countercultural groups and activities. The dominant philosophies were often radical; the power structure was deemed backward and unresponsive, and social change was necessary and inevitable. Many who took part in the civil rights, feminist, and antiwar movements adopted this stance, as did others seeking personal freedoms and equality the movements seemed to offer. By and large, adherents to countercultural ideas and activities were young, though not all young people took part and not all the rest disagreed.

Multiculturalism and a Domestic Clash  163 Many consumed the music and fashions and trappings without fully adopting the radical spirit. The revolutionary notions attached to 1960s counterculture did not disappear with that decade. In the seventies the antiwar movement carried on until the end of the conflict in Vietnam, environmentalists became increasingly vocal, and both women’s rights and civil rights groups continued their mobilization with both victories and frustrations. The eighties brought a new twist to American social movements, which aligned closely with the shift from a largely liberal government to Reagan’s explicitly conservative one. One of the most important social movements of that decade, at least as regards the impact it would have on domestic affairs over time, was the growth of the Christian Right as a movement that had emerged in the 1970s. Through organizations like the Moral Majority and the increasing presence of “televangelists,” the Christian Right took advantage of every opportunity to get its message—religious and sociopolitical—out. Over the next two decades, what became known as “the religious right” played a significant role in public debate not only on “culture war” topics like abortion and homosexuality and women working outside the home, but also in local, state, and national politics (see Hunter 1991). In 2004, for instance, it was argued that George W. Bush won re-election primarily as a result of strong voter turnout among evangelical Christians. By the early nineties, America was animated by a more liberal mood and elected a more liberal president. As such it is no surprise that the most significant emerging social movements—especially as related to the topics of immigration and national identity—had a decidedly liberal hue about them, which typically led to an organized opposition. Multiculturalism, which had been present as a means of expanding the American vision of history and the canon for some time, increasingly became a divisive issue often framed as a battle over demands for “special” rights. This played out in higher education, workplaces, and even hospitals as some Americans fought for equal opportunity, while others resisted such demands as a form of preferences. In fact, while on occasion activists advocating multiculturalism did seem to suggest a balkanization of sorts, more sophisticated accounts depicted it as a philosophy that recognized groups and their histories while simultaneously valuing national cohesion and shared ideals and principles (Taylor 1994; Kymlicka 1996). Another movement that gained traction in the 1990s, along with zealous detractors, was the gay rights movement, which has a place within multiculturalism. In a quite different sphere, a social movement more in the spirit of 1960s materialized largely as a response to economic globalization, although other types of globalization were also in dispute. The anti-globalization movement was not limited to the US, and in fact is often aimed at the US, but needs mentioning here because of its relationship to the issues at hand. What is typically thought of as the anti-globalization movement is a largely leftist association of smaller groups decrying what they perceived

164  Huntington’s Return to Americanism, 1985–2005 as Westernization, Americanization, or even “McDonaldization” (Ritzer 1993) of the world. American economic hegemony is perceived to be crushing local cultures worldwide via its exports of material, cultural, and ideational goods. Anti-globalization groups organized large and sometimes violent protests at meetings of the World Trade Organization, the International Monetary Fund, and other international non-governmental organizations, and in some European countries have attacked American retail outlets to vent their frustration. There is little question that the rise of the Christian Right, the forward march of multiculturalism, and a very active anti-globalization movement contributed to Huntington’s work on Who Are We? Multiculturalism is one of the primary targets of the book, which argues that such a national philosophy can lead only to disunity and the eventual breakdown of America. Huntington is adamantly opposed to multiculturalism, but he reduces it to a straw man, seeing only special, group rights at the expense of a shared center. The connection between Huntington’s ideas and the anti-globalization movement is more ambiguous. He is not in favor of the US being or becoming a global hegemon, and in fact likely has sympathies with the anti-globalizers, but not on their terms. For Huntington, the concern about globalization has largely to do with the impact it has on America as a nation. This links directly to the connection between the rise of the Christian Right and Who Are We? Given his appeal for Americans to return to an Anglo-Protestant culture, the rise of the Religious Right validates for Huntington the desire many Americans have to turn inward and back to more traditional values and morality.1 Globalization, of course, assumes increased connectedness with the rest of the world, and therefore is an affront to Huntington’s call for cultural insularity. Globalization is also, of course, seen vividly in the ever-increasing movement of people around the world, manifest clearly in transnational migration and, to our direct purposes here, immigration to the US. HUNTINGTON’S INTELLECTUAL CONTEXT There is little question but that elements of the immediate social context of the late 1990s and early 2000s motivated Huntington to write Who Are We? But in addition to factors like the loss of an external “other” as the Cold War came to a close and a growing domestic population of Spanish speakers (an internal “other”), Huntington was also responding to at least two philosophies that were dominant in the academic literature about America as a nation: the philosophy of multiculturalism and the ongoing notion of the centrality and power of the liberal democratic creed. It is also clear that Huntington’s arguments in Who Are We? emerged from fears he voiced at the end of The Clash of Civilizations (1996) about the decline of the West and in particular, the US. He wondered over the sense of immortality

Multiculturalism and a Domestic Clash  165 Americans displayed, and reminded his reader that societies who believed their ideologies to be universal both substantively and temporally were typically on their way to collapse. Using this as a starting point, he entered a conversation somewhat apart from the international perspective of Clash with his new book. That dialogue, which stretches back to the turn of the twentieth century and beyond, is one that links together thinking about immigration, assimilation, and the meaning of America. This section maps the schools of thought present in the literature at the end of the twentieth century; these were the ideas to which Huntington was directly responding, and the dialogue into which he was entering. There were four general ways of representing America as a nation. The first representation was put forward by the multiculturalists, and it envisions a pluralist America and emphasizes the importance of the recognition of minority groups and their claims to rights. The second is expounded by liberals and focuses on the role of the liberal democratic creed in uniting Americans, and also on the centrality of a political identity. The third is a nativist reading of America, little seen in academia today but present early in the twentieth century academy, and more recently in activist groups, politicians, and their literatures (including a significant online presence). Finally, the fourth is a kind of cultural nationalism that underscores the importance of the cultural origins of American identity, and claims that societies must have something more than abstract political principles to bind people to them.

The Multiculturalists In the 1990s, academic philosophers devoted a great deal of intellectual energy thinking and writing about multiculturalism and its relationship to liberal democratic states. Rather than espousing a crude identity politics, as is often portrayed both by conservatives and by those in the media,2 these thinkers constructed complex, sophisticated accounts of the relationship between cultural diversity, claims for recognition, and liberal political philosophies (see, for example, Appiah 1994; Taylor 1994; Walzer 1994; Kymlicka 1996). The overarching argument such thinkers make is that not only is the demand for recognition not anti-democratic, but rather it is essential to making pluralistic democracies (which account for the vast majority of democracies) work. The much esteemed Canadian political philosopher Will Kymlicka (1996), for example, argued that group claims must be considered or the power of the dominant or majority group is elevated, or at the very least reinforced, however latently. He rejects a reaction that begs for people to be treated only as individuals, claiming that given the advantages built into institutions and social structures for members of the majority group, such talk “is itself just a cover for ethnic and national injustice” (1996:194). To give an example familiar in the American context, to insist upon color-blindness in the law and in policy is to ignore the inequalities present, thereby actively

166  Huntington’s Return to Americanism, 1985–2005 maintaining racially based differential treatment. Pretending structural inequality does not exist only serves to reproduce it. In examining the relationship between recognition and identity, Charles Taylor (1994) builds a case for the need for recognition in modern societies, to construct a meaningful, healthy identity. For Taylor, the very rise of the concept and importance of identity is at the heart of the pursuit of multiculturalism. Without the need for a dialogically formed identity, the demand for recognition would not have nearly the sense of urgency that it does in today’s world. Ultimately, Taylor rejects both absolute demands for equal respect and the rejection of any non-Western “other.” He argues instead for an initial “presumption of equal worth” that offers a starting place for dealing with cultures different from the dominant one (1994:72). Versions of multiculturalism like Kymlicka’s and Taylor’s clearly go beyond simplistic notions of balkanization. Another group that falls somewhat outside the bounds of questions of national meaning but is clearly relevant both topically and as context for Huntington, are sociologists who study assimilation. By and large, these scholars fall into a multicultural framework in that their study of assimilation recognizes and analyzes the experience of the various immigrant communities. As social scientists, they usually do their best to avoid prescription, and seek to understand assimilation in a non-ethnocentric manner. Most sociological work on assimilation is focused on immigrants themselves, and whether and how they become incorporated into American society. So, for example, Portes and Zhou (1993) have made a convincing claim for a phenomenon they call “segmented assimilation,” whereby newcomers have three basic paths ahead of them upon entering the US: They can assimilate toward the dominant Anglo-centric culture, they can assimilate outward (and what is occasionally characterized as downward) toward marginalized cultures, or they can remain in ethnic enclaves. Rarely do sociologists studying ethnicity concentrate their efforts on the connections between immigration, assimilation, and the nation. Alba and Nee (2003) hinted at a study that would shed light specifically on the relationship between assimilation and the nation with their Remaking the American Mainstream; even the title is evocative. While they make a case for a dialogical form of assimilation taking place, ultimately they retain the more characteristic focus on the state of assimilation itself, i.e., are immigrants being assimilated. Because they only rarely look at the impact of assimilation on the nation as a whole, most sociologists offer little in the way of explicit imagining of America vis-à-vis the twin processes of immigration and assimilation. For Huntington, all of these positions and approaches are anathema, though he never carefully considers any of the more sophisticated accounts. Rather, he complains that multiculturalism is anti-European and anti-Western, and that multiculturalists would like to see American children educated in languages other than English and without any reference

Multiculturalism and a Domestic Clash  167 to common American culture. Though many universities have changed requirements in Western civilization courses, the vast majority of American classrooms are still taught in English, and the civics courses still teach about American government. In the sociology, he rejects the definition of assimilation as anything other than Americanization, and finds dialectical readings unconvincing. What Huntington dislikes and seeks to address is the lack of normativity about America’s moral superiority and the need for Americanization-type programs for immigrant children. Huntington, in Who Are We? aims to reconstruct what is “truly” America as against the multiculturalists’ deconstruction.3

The Liberals, and Other Political Definitions of American Identity Louis Hartz’s (1955) The Liberal Tradition in America serves as the exemplar for a different philosophical tradition regarding the meaning of America. Hartz argued, borrowing from Tocqueville, that the ability of Americans to adopt an egalitarian social and political philosophy was born of the fact that they never had to overthrow an ancien regime to pursue such ideas. What makes America uniquely American, then, is the shared, irrational attachment to a sober, not radical, liberalism born not of the special culture or characteristics of Anglo-Saxon heritage (as Huntington argues in Who Are We?), but of the historical fact that there was no feudal order in place to overthrow. Hartz recognized that many would wonder at his seeming ignorance of the Revolution, but he suggests that it was quite different than the European revolutions, which took place within a present, established order, not against a far away one. In 1981, Huntington himself took up the mantle of a liberal political definition of what it meant to be American in American Politics: The Promise of Disharmony. The central argument of that book was very much in line with Hartz’s thesis: What made Americans unique was not the place of their birth, their shared backgrounds, or even their religion. What made Americans unique was their adherence to the values and principles symbolically located in the “American Creed.” In an effort to show how deeply these beliefs were held, Huntington looked back at the “revolutionary” activism of the 1960s, and went so far as to say that “the struggles of the 1960s did not involve conflicts between partisans of different principles. What the 1960s did involve was a reaffirmation of traditional American ideals and values . . . ” (1981:3). He recognized that the attachment to liberal principles in the US created a disparity between ideals and the reality of institutions that would involve a future of ongoing disharmony as the quest to realize those ideals continued on. For Huntington, in 1981, it was this connection to liberal ideas, coupled with the gap between the ideal and the real, which was always being pursued, that defined American national identity (260). Like Hartz and early Huntington, Rogers M. Smith, professor of political science at the University of Pennsylvania, largely sees American identity in

168  Huntington’s Return to Americanism, 1985–2005 political terms. Unlike them, Smith (1988, 1993, 1997) argues that American identity, particularly American civic identity, consists of more than a durable attachment to liberalism. Liberalism, though critically important, is too narrow in Smith’s view, and is joined by republicanism and ascriptive forms of Americanism in comprising American national identity. The last of these, ascriptive forms of Americanism including race, ethnicity, and gender, is described as especially problematic by Smith due to its exclusivism. Most interestingly, Smith claims that all three versions of America—the liberal, the republican, and the Americanist—are visible throughout American history, although none is ever totally dominant. Once again multiplicity in American narratives is revealed. By 2004, Huntington rejects positions that privilege the political aspect of American national identity. Turning away from his earlier stance, he sees little but decline since the 1960s (which are now conceived as licentious) and claims that what is needed to restore America’s greatness is a cultural identity, seemingly akin to what Smith described as ascriptive, exclusionary forms of Americanism.

The Nativists In the first five years of the twenty-first century, there was a 33 percent increase in the number of hate groups in the US; in 2005, 132 “Patriot” groups were also identified (Potok 2006: http://www.splcenter.org/ get-informed/intelligence-report/browse-all-issues/2006/spring). The standard issues that motivated this trend include race hatred, homophobia, and anti-Semitism, as they relate to a sense that the “hated” groups represent a corruption of America. But perhaps more than ever, national-level policies have played a significant role in the growth of such movements. Immigration, especially Latino immigration, has given the message of hate groups particularly strong resonance across the US, as the issue of undocumented immigration has remained in the national spotlight. Between April 2005 and February 2007, more than 250 new anti-immigration groups were established (Zablit 2007). Brian Levin, the director of California State University’s Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism, draws a comparison with the early part of the twentieth century, when the Ku Klux Klan had its highest ever membership of five million (Zablit 2007). In the early 2000s, Levin claims, the same complaints about immigrants taking jobs and changing American society mobilized in the 1910s–20s were being mobilized once again. Other policies whose motives are under suspicion by hate groups are the War on Terror and the Iraq War, both of which, many hate groups object, are being driven by Jews with the primary aim of protecting Israel, not the US. Jews and immigrants have both been blamed for the attacks on September 11, 2001 (Knickerbocker 2001). This return to anti-immigrant rhetoric and the logic of nativism, and especially the quasi-religious nativism associated with the Klan, is quite

Multiculturalism and a Domestic Clash  169 troubling to many. It is important to point out that even so, membership in hate groups remains low compared to the heights reached in the first quarter of the twentieth century. The fear among experts on hate crimes, is that with the advent of the Internet, individuals having an affinity for xenophobic ideas need not formally join groups and participate in visible public ceremonies to be part of a community. Today, sophisticated websites run by hate groups with innocuous-sounding names can exploit the fears associated with high levels of immigration. In addition to the many chapters of the Ku Klux Klan, the Southern Poverty Law Center lists organizations with names like America’s Promise, California Coalition for Immigration Reform, and the Federation for American Immigration Reform, which do little to reveal the extremist ideologies they support. This means that the numbers of those adopting these philosophies may be well over the numbers of official group members. Nativism of the sort proposed by hate groups, what Huntington (2004) calls extreme nativism, is driven by the desire to return the US to the peak of a homogenous golden age where Anglo-Saxon (or some less particular variant of “white”) culture and people were dominant. They decry race-mixing and claim that it is whites who are now being marginalized and discriminated against in America. This desire to return to some more pure version of America is similar to rhetoric from the 1910s when figures like E. A. Ross and Madison Grant were making their contributions to national discourse about assimilation and America, though contemporary hate groups rarely rely explicitly on the type of scientific racism Grant, in particular, espoused. The rise in non-European immigration is a major factor in the resurgence of old groups like the Klan and the emergence of new ones. Huntington, though obviously deeply troubled by the changes that seem imminent owing to the changing composition of the country, does not espouse a racialist argument a la these nativists. Rather, he promotes a cultural nativism that could easily be exploited by those promoting more extreme views. The fact that he is neither a Klansmen nor a scientific racialist does not make his words neutral or harmless.

Cultural Nationalism The intellectual school of thought on American identity into which Huntington (2004) asserts himself is that of cultural nationalism.4 The notion of deep cultural roots in national identity, often closely connected to or even embodied by ethnicity, is not one that has been taken up by many social scientists in discussing the US. In fact, the dominance of liberalism and nativism as frames for understanding America, and mostly liberalism, has been such that appeals to culture have been few, with the significant exception of the development of multiculturalism as a viable alternative or companion philosophy. Why liberalism is not seen as a culture itself is a phenomenon worthy of further exploration.

170  Huntington’s Return to Americanism, 1985–2005 The development of a contemporary notion of cultural nationalism owes much to Anthony D. Smith who elaborated the idea in The Ethnic Origin of Nations (1986). Smith’s position, that the substance of national identity owes much to the shared culture or ethnie, a kin and culture group formation that predates what we might call ethnicity today. Central to this argument is the idea that the stories that combine to build national narratives may be myths or history, but their empirical truth is of little concern. What matters is that the people in question understand and believe them to be true and also believe or feel them to be binding in some way. Smith articulated this conception of the nation very much in response to the more political and economic definitions of nations, which gave weight primarily to political philosophies and the rise of capitalism, respectively. One important message to be taken from Smith’s position (which he later named ethno-symbolism) is that national identities are more than purely instrumental. In other words, people do not feel connected to their nation only out of rational self-interest. This is not to say that instrumental aspects of national identity do not exist, but that perhaps deeper than those are cultural, expressive ties that make the nation feel like family. It is largely this element of cultural nationalism that lends support for putting Huntington into this school of thought regarding the American nation; perhaps he is one of the first American academic proponents of it in recent decades.5 Huntington, using logic that would be familiar to European scholars of nations and nationalism, believes that the US must return to its Anglo-Protestant roots in order to rebuild national unity and to maintain its place in the world. Huntington’s interest in what makes America unique is also indicated by Smith’s words: . . . while attention may legitimately be focused on the constant elements of ‘nationhood’ in the modern world and the universal trends that govern their formation, the variations between nations are equally important, both in themselves and for their political consequences. My belief is that the most important of these variations are determined by specific historical experiences and by the ‘deposit’ left by these collective experiences. (Smith 1986:ix) This attention to what is distinctive is central for Huntington, in that he finds himself working to explain that what made America what it is—in regards to its success as a democracy and as the dominant player on the world stage—can be found only by looking at the substance of the Anglo-Protestant culture that he claims remains at the core of American culture. The other chief proponent of the significance of cultural nationalism in the US, Eric Kaufmann (2004), also argues for the centrality of the Anglo roots of American society and culture.6 The difference is that unlike Huntington, he sees its significance as having faded, not only in light of the liberal pluralism and cosmopolitanism that have arisen late in the twentieth century, but actually in a kind of dual thinking comprised of both liberal

Multiculturalism and a Domestic Clash  171 ideology and ethnic nationalism, which emerged in the 1920s (2004:31). And so we see, even within the same school of thought, in the first years of the twenty-first century, as in the first years of the twentieth, the meaning of America remains contested. The following chapter includes a close reading of Who Are We? In working through the claims Huntington makes about America as a nation and the threats he suggests might destroy it, we must also examine his motivations. This would not come as a surprise to him: Huntington acknowledges up front that the project was a personal one, and to ignore that would lead the reader to draw conclusions that might not be appropriate. Even so, he asks an important question about what it means to be American, and his answers are not off the intellectual mapping of discourse on the subject. In fact, what is most interesting is where they fit in, and why. NOTES 1 Directly connected to this desire for a return to more “traditional” values is Huntington’s disdain for an earlier social movement of sorts, the counterculture. Though it is removed by three decades from his recent work, he clearly understands the establishment of the counterculture to be an indicator of serious moral decline suffered by the US at the end of the twentieth century. 2 The “media” is meant to encompass all forms, print, web, television, etc. In media, one interesting phenomenon is that even those who identify with multiculturalism often describe a rather crude rendition of it, rather than calling upon more sophisticated, nuanced accountings. 3 The deconstruction Huntington refers to is not an accurate representation of the ideas of figures like Kymlicka and Taylor. In fact, each of these figures derides radical multiculturalism as untenable and as harmful to society. 4 Those who argue that the meaning of America is best characterized by cultural nationalism need not be in favor of such a situation; this may be an empirical observation rather than a normative position. 5 Huntington not was explicitly writing out of a Smithean framework. In fact, Smith does not appear anywhere in Who Are We? Rather, Huntington’s claims about the US inadvertently fit into a paradigm on nations present in the nations and nationalism literature, which is particularly strong in European social science. 6 Unlike Huntington, Kaufmann explicitly draws on Smith’s ideas about the nation and does not take a cultural nativist position about the US himself. Kaufmann sees nationalism as a cultural phenomenon, but does not advocate on its behalf.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Alba, Richard and Victor Nee. 2003. Remaking the American Mainstream: Assimilation and Contemporary Immigration. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Alba, Richard. 1999. “Immigration and the American Realities of Assimilation and Multiculturalism.” Sociological Forum 14(1): 3–25. Anderson, Benedict. 1991 (1983). Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism (Revd edition). London: Verso.

172  Huntington’s Return to Americanism, 1985–2005 Anderson, Elijah. 1999. Code of the Street. New York: W.W. Norton & Company. Appiah, K. Anthony. 1994. “Identity, Authenticity, Survival: Multicultural Societies and Social Reproduction.” Multiculturalism. Edited by Amy Gutmann. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Ayers, Edward L., Lewis L. Gould, David M. Oshinsky, and Jean R. Soderlund. 2005. American Passages: A History of the United States. United States: Thomson Wadsworth. Barth, Fredrik. 1969. Ethnic Groups and Boundaries. Prospect Heights, Ill.: Waveland Press. Bellah, Robert N., Richard Madsen, William M. Sullivan, Ann Swidler, and Steven Tipton. 1996 (1985). Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life. Berkeley: University of California Press. Bonilla-Silva, Eduardo. 2013. Racism without Racists: Color-Blind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in America. USA: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers. Bonilla-Silva, Eduardo. 1999. “The New Racism: Racial Structure in the United States.” Race, Ethnicity, and Nationality in the United States: Toward the Twenty-First Century. Edited by Paul Wong. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Borjas, George J. 2001 (1999). Heaven’s Door: Immigration Policy and the American Economy. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Bramen, Carrie Tirado. 2000. The Uses of Variety: Modern Americanism and the Quest for National Distinctiveness. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Cose, Ellis. 1992. A Nation of Strangers: Prejudice, Politics, and the Populating of America. New York: William C. Morrow. Crevecoeur, J. Hector St. John. 1998 (1782). Letters from an American Farmer. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Frost, Catherine. 2006. Morality and Nationalism. New York: Routledge. Fukuyama, Francis. 2006 (1992). The End of History and the Last Man. New York: Free Press. Glazer, Nathan and Daniel P. Moynihan. 1970 (1963). Beyond the Melting Pot: The Negroes, Puerto Ricans, Jews, Italians, and Irish of New York City. Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press. Glazer, Nathan. 1997. We Are All Multiculturalists Now. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Gleason, Philip. 1980. “American Identity and Americanization.” Harvard Encyclopedia of American Ethnic Groups. Edited by Stephen Thernstrom. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Grant, Madison. 1918 (1916). The Passing of the Great Race, or the Racial Basis of European History. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons. Grant, Susan-Mary. 2000. North over South: Northern Nationalism and American Identity in the Antebellum Era. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas. Hartz, Louis. 1991 (1955). The Liberal Tradition in America. San Diego: Harcourt Brace & Company. Higham, John. 1988. Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 1860–1925. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Higham, John. 1984 (1975). Send These to Me: Immigrants in Urban America (Rev. ed.). Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Hing, Bill Ong. 2004. Defining America through Immigration Policy. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Hollinger, David A. 1995. Postethnic America: Beyond Multiculturalism. New York: Basic Books. Hollinger, David. 1975. “Ethnic Diversity, Cosmopolitanism and the Emergence of the American Liberal Intelligentsia.” American Quarterly 27(2): 133–151. Hunter, James Davison. 2000. The Death of Character: Moral Education in an Age without Good or Evil. New York: Basic Books.

Multiculturalism and a Domestic Clash  173 Hunter, James Davison. 1991. Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America. New York: Basic Books. Huntington, Samuel P. 2004. Who Are We? The Challenge to America’s National Identity. New York: Simon & Schuster. Huntington, Samuel P. 1996. The Clash of Civilizations and the Making of the New World Order New York: Simon & Schuster. Huntington, Samuel P. 1981. American Politics: The Promise of Disharmony. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Jacoby, Tamar. 2004a. Reinventing the Melting Pot: The New Immigrants and What It Means to be American (edited volume). New York: Basic Books. Jacoby, Tamar. 2004b. “Rainbow’s End: A Renowned Student of America’s Maladies Detects a New Threat to Our Identity.” The Washington Post. March 16: BW03. Kallen, Horace M. 1998 (1924). Culture and Democracy in the United States. New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers. Kallen, Horace M. 1915. “Democracy Versus the Melting-Pot.” The Nation. February 18 and 25. Kaufmann, Eric P. 2004. The Rise and Fall of Anglo-America. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Knickerbocker, Brad. 2007. “Anti-Immigration Fuels KKK Resurgence.” Christian Science Monitor. February 10, 2007. Knickerbocker, Brad. 2001. “Hate Groups Try to Capitalize on Sept. 11.” Christian Science Monitor. November 21, 2001. Knopf, Jeffrey W. 2004. “Did Reagan Win the Cold War?” Strategic Insights 3(i8). http://hdl.handle.net/10945/11247 Kymlicka, Will. 1996. Multicultural Citizenship: A  Liberal Theory of Minority Rights. New York: Oxford University Press. Lieven, Anatol. 2004. America Right or Wrong: An Anatomy of American Nationalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lind, Michael. 1995. The Next American Nation: The New Nationalism and the Fourth American Revolution. New York: Simon & Schuster. Massey, Douglas S. and Nancy A. Denton. 1993. American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Massey, Douglas S. 1999 (1995). “The New Immigration and Ethnicity in the US.” Majority and Minority. Edited by N. R. Yetman. Boston: Allyn and Bacon. McClay, Wilfred M. 1994. The Masterless: Self and Society in Modern America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Menand, Louis. 2001. The Metaphysical Club. New York: Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux. Morgan, Edmund S. 1988. Inventing the People: The Rise of Popular Sovereignty in England and America. New York: W. W. Norton & Company. Myrdal, Gunnar. 2002 (1944). An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy, Volume I. New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers. Patterson, James T. 2005. Restless Giant: The United States from Watergate to Bush v. Gore. New York: Oxford University Press. Patterson, James T. 1996. Grand Expectations: the United States, 1945–1974. New York: Oxford University Press. Portes, Alejandro, Luis Eduardo Guarnizo, and Patricia Landolt. 1999. “The Study of Transnationalism: Pitfalls and Promise of an Emergent Research Field.” Ethnic and Racial Studies 22(2): 217–237. Portes, Alejandro and Min Zhou. 1993. “The New Second Generation: Segmented Assimilation and Its Variants.” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, Vol. 530, Interminority Affairs in the U.S.: Pluralism at the Crossroads (Nov., 1993). Potok, Mark. 2006. “The Year in Hate, 2005.” Intelligence Report. The Southern Poverty Law Center. Issue 121. http://www.splcenter.org/get-informed/ intelligence-report/browse-all-issues/2006/spring.

174  Huntington’s Return to Americanism, 1985–2005 Putnam, Robert D. 2000. Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community. New York: Simon & Schuster. Riesman, David. 1953. The Lonely Crowd: A Study of the Changing American Character. Garden City, NY: Doubleday. Ritzer, George. 2000 (1993). The McDonaldization of Society. Thousand Oaks, CA: Pine Forge Press. Ross, Edward Alsworth. 1914. The Old World in the New: The Significance of Past and Present Immigration to the American People. New York: The Century Company. Schultz, Kevin M. 2011. Tri-Faith America: How Catholics and Jews Held Postwar America to its Protestant Promise. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Schultz, Kevin M. 2003. “Social Darwinism.” Pp. 411–412 in The Dictionary of American History, 3rd ed., gen. ed., vol. 7. Edited by Stanley I. Kutler. New York: Simon and Schuster. Smith, Anthony D. 1998. Nationalism and Modernism. London: Routledge. Smith, Rogers M. 1997. Civic Ideals: Conflicting Visions of Citizenship in US History. New Haven: Yale University Press. Smith, Rogers M. 1988. “The ‘American Creed’ and American Identity: The Limits of Liberal Citizenship in the United States.” Western Political Quarterly 41(2): 225–251. Smith, Anthony D. 1986. The Ethnic Origins of Nations. Oxford: Blackwell. Smith, Rogers M. 1993. “Beyond Tocqueville, Myrdal, and Hartz: The Multiple Traditions in America.” American Political Science Review 87(3): 549–566. Takaki, Ronald. 1993. A Different Mirror: A History of Multicultural America. New York: Little, Brown and Company. Taylor, Charles. 1994. “The Politics of Recognition.” Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics of Recognition. Edited by Amy Gutmann. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Walzer, Michael. 1996. What It Means to Be an American: Essays on the American Experience. New York: Marsilio. Walzer, Michael. 1994. “Comment.” Multiculturalism : Examining the Politics of Recognition. Edited by Amy Gutmann. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Walzer, Michael. 1983. Spheres of Justice: A Defense of Pluralism and Equality. USA: Basic Books. Wilson, William Julius. 1996. When Work Disappears: The World of the New Urban Poor. New York: Vintage Books. Wilson, William Julius. 1980. The Declining Significance of Race. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Yetman, Norman R. 1999. Majority and Minority. Boston: Allyn and Bacon. Zablit, Jocelyne. 2007. “Ku Klux Klan staging comeback in U.S. amid immigration debate.” Agence France Presse: February 14, 2007.

7 Huntington’s Fear E Pluribus Pluribus

.  .  . the soil in which America’s distinctive culture first took root was both English and dissenting. The earliest settlers’ values still do much to color ours, and the “American Creed” that unites us politically—our belief in freedom, tolerance, equal opportunity, the rule of law and the like—is plainly a product of the British Enlightenment. But to say that our national character is Anglo-Protestant is to mistake origins for essence. Tamar Jacoby (2004b)

Perhaps choosing Samuel Huntington Who Are We?, a book branded by some as a conservative screed, appears an odd choice following Kallen’s essay and Glazer and Moynihan’s Beyond the Melting Pot. It’s not. As with the other two selections, Who Are We? offers an analysis and imagining of America that goes against the grain of its historical moment. In an America where we often assume we are “all multiculturalists now,” to borrow from Nathan Glazer (1997), Huntington tells a story that cuts quite differently. He makes a case that America began and has remained a Christian nation with a strongly Anglo-Saxon essence to its culture and institutions. Moreover, he argues that a return to the values and culture that best represent that Anglo-Protestant core is necessary for America’s very survival. The controversial thesis of this book by a renowned and well-respected Harvard professor has generated scholarly discussion alongside a wide, general readership, another important condition for the selections herein, thus giving it a place in national discourse beyond the walls of the ivory tower as well as within.1 Finally, as did Kallen’s essay and Glazer and Moynihan’s book, Huntington’s book came at a time when immigration and foreign affairs have been central national concerns. The ongoing national attention to Mexican immigration, in the Southwest especially, and of course the attacks of September 11th, the War on Terror, and the Iraq War, and the relationship of all these things to American leadership provided the context in which Huntington worried over the meaning of America. This chapter provides a close reading of Who Are We? in an effort to fully understand Huntington’s position. Part of the challenge here is to discern

176  Huntington’s Return to Americanism, 1985–2005 what work he really intends for the book to do: Is it a piece of scholarship or is it a polemic? Is it, and can it, be both? The following chapter explores the immediate response to the book; a quick search on Google reveals hundreds if not thousands of reviews. At the end of this chapter I will consider the same set of analytical questions posed in examining Kallen and Glazer and Moynihan, with a slight alteration to the final question: 1. To whom or what was Huntington responding? 2. Were questions and ideas being posed analytically or prescriptively? 3. To the degree that ideas were presented prescriptively, how explicit was ideology in the writing, and what effect does this have on the way it was received and how it can be analyzed? 4. How have the ideas been received following publication?2 Because it was published in 2004, there is no real way of predicting what, if any, legacy it will have, but exploring the way it was received via book reviews offers at least a picture of its initial place and a sense of how Huntington’s ideas might be mobilized. HUNTINGTON’S POSITION Who Are We? (2004) is a provocative look at American national identity. The book is not the product of original empirical research, rather is an extended essay mobilizing previously published data and anecdotes with a pointed new analysis. In 1981 Huntington wrote American Politics: The Promise of Disharmony, which argued that the unifying and defining feature of American life was its liberal democratic creed. In the twenty-five years that followed, he changed his mind. After observing the post-9/11 surge in national behavior—patriotism—and then worrying over the threats to the (temporary) unity the terrorists had inspired, he wrote the new book. And yet, Who Are We? The Challenges to America’s National Identity is not really about ­September 11th, except in the power Huntington grants to the unifying effect of external threats, which cannot be overstated. The central analytical questions of this project, namely Huntington’s imagining of America and its place in the construction of American national identities and America’s very survival, dominate the book. Who Are We?, like Kallen’s “Democracy Versus the Melting-Pot,” takes national identity head-on and normatively, leaving no need for guessing Huntington’s beliefs and preferences. Huntington, in fact, acknowledges approaching American identity as both “a patriot and a scholar,” while recognizing such an approach may be problematic (2004:xvii).3 In the foreword, Huntington describes the America he fears is under attack, an America defined by Anglo and Protestant culture: The “American Creed,” as initially formulated by Thomas Jefferson and elaborated by many others, is widely viewed as the crucial defining

Huntington’s Fear  177 element of American identity. The Creed, however, was the product of the distinct Anglo-Protestant culture of the founding settlers of America in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Key elements of that culture include: the English language; Christianity; religious commitment; English concepts of the rule of law, the responsibility of rulers, and the rights of individuals; and dissenting Protestant values of individualism, the work ethic, and the belief that humans have the ability and the duty to try to create a heaven on earth, a “city on a hill.” Historically, millions of immigrants were attracted to America because of this culture and the economic opportunities it helped to make possible. (xvi) Some of these features enjoy widespread agreement, but certainly not all. Huntington deals with such concerns throughout the book, but it remains evident that for him this is the meaning of America. But this America is weakening, and he worries that without intervention, it will be gone. Huntington identified a number of factors exacerbating the problems of American identity: (1) the loss of an external “other” that followed the end of the Cold War, (2) the splintering effects of multiculturalism and diversity, (3) a “third wave” of immigration bringing huge numbers of slow-toassimilate Latinos (mostly Mexicans), (4) the presence of unprecedented numbers of single-language speakers (in this case Spanish), (5) the absence of explicit measures meant to Americanize immigrants, and (6) the spread of anti-national attitudes among elites.4 The target at which he aims most clearly is anything that might be construed as or contained within multiculturalism. This inventory of problems brings into relief what America should look like from Huntington’s perspective: unified, monocultural, and nationalist.5 In response to these fears, Huntington also shares several possibilities as to what America might become. The first is the liberal view that a commitment to liberal political principles (i.e., “the Creed”) can withstand the centrifugal forces of multiculturalism; the second, that the country will be increasingly divided by language and culture—Spanish and English; the third, that extreme nativists will reassert a racialist America via expulsion or exclusion; and fourth, Huntington’s choice, that a cultural America returned to its Anglo-Protestant roots would reinvigorate its weakening sense of nationhood. For Huntington a clear assertion of nationhood is imperative. In his concerns about American national identity Huntington reveals many things, including three characteristics he sees in American identity: It is particularistic, it was and should remain singular, and religion is the most important aspect of shared culture, not race or ethnicity. This last is resonant with Glazer and Moynihan’s thinking in the initial publication of Beyond the Melting Pot in 1963. In arguing that American identity is particularistic he does try to distance himself from exclusivist ideologies. He protects his position by saying that his is an “argument for the importance of Anglo-Protestant culture, not for the importance of Anglo-Protestant people” (xvii, emphasis added). Further, Huntington takes the clearly debatable

178  Huntington’s Return to Americanism, 1985–2005 position that the US has largely “eliminated the racial and ethnic components that historically were central to its identity and has become a multiethnic, multiracial society in which individuals are to be judged on their merits” (xvii). He claims that all immigrants in the past came to America wanting to adopt all parts of what he calls the Creed and that as long as newer immigrants (read: Mexicans) do the same—regardless of their color or native creed—America will endure. His denial of any remnants of racism and his use of culture as a proxy for people, race, and ethnicity allows him to presume a relatively level playing field upon which an egalitarian meritocracy could be played out. The possibility of multiple American identities coexisting is not, according to Huntington, a good option: America is but one thing, a monoculture. Strong nations are clear and united. The book is framed as a post-9/11 evaluation, where, in the decades leading up to the events of that day, American identity was at a low ebb as multiculturalism was being pursued by various and sundry collectivities, depleting any sense of nationhood. The flag-flying and patriotism that followed 9/11 moved Huntington, but the likelihood (and now reality) that such “nationalism” would be short-lived prompted him to ask the titular question: Who are we? For Huntington, the challenges that stand in the way of the resurrection of what counts for him as the American identity emerged between the 1960s and the start of the twenty-first century, right in line with the end of the national origins system and the beginning of a new wave of immigration, primarily from Latin America and Asia. This timing belies Huntington’s contention that it is not the presence of newcomers, per se, that is the problem for him. A third element regarding American identity is Huntington’s reliance on the notion that race and ethnicity no longer play a role of any significance, but that religion, Protestant Christianity, does and should. If we think back to the introduction to the second edition of Beyond the Melting Pot, Glazer and Moynihan felt it necessary to repudiate their initial claim regarding the significance of religion in American life and identity. That, in concert with the general acceptance of the changing role of religion in public life, makes Huntington’s claim a noteworthy one.6 What he envisions in the best of all possible worlds is . . . a recommitment to America as a deeply religious and primarily Christian country, encompassing several religious minorities, adhering to Anglo-Protestant values, speaking English, maintaining its European cultural heritage, and committed to the principles of the Creed. Religion has been and still is a central, perhaps the central, element of American identity. America was founded in part for religious reasons, and religious movements have shaped its evolution for almost four centuries . . . In a world in which culture and particularly religion shape the allegiances, the alliances, and the antagonisms of people on every continent, Americans could again find their national identity and their national purposes in their culture and religion. (20, emphasis added)

Huntington’s Fear  179 This attention to religion and religious motivations for governance is central to Huntington’s overall argument about “who we are.” While he bemoans the effects of Latino immigration—while avoiding critiquing Latinos themselves—Huntington does see their Christianity as a potentially important binding element for American identity. Given that the predominant religions of Hispanics in the US are Catholicism and Pentecostalism, not Protestant in the American mold, this reduction to broader Christianity is problematic. That he elevates the role of religion while denying the salience of race and ethnicity clearly evokes an analytical and normative position that is simply not held up by attention to the actual lives of millions of Americans, nor decades of social science research to the contrary. Huntington takes on a rhetorical tone that appeals in a populist fashion. Though he is certainly aware of the presence of multiple stories within which Americans live their lives, only the narratives of non-elites count as truly American. Corporate, intellectual, and even governmental elites, he explains, have increasingly taken on transnational identities in place of national identities. On the other hand, Huntington tells us, the American public maintains an identity more strongly governed by national loyalties, and much more patriotic than its elites. While it is the case that elites and non-elites experience and understand the world differently, Huntington’s populism is out of step with most nationalism theory. His claim is built on the assumption that identities are (a) all or nothing, and (b) zero-sum. In other words, if, for instance, cosmopolitan elites do not believe it a good idea to enforce the reciting of the pledge of allegiance at shareholder meetings (an example used by Huntington) because of the global scope of their enterprises, not only have they taken on transnational identities, they are also anti-American. By this token, Huntington rejects as a possibility a cosmopolitan American narrative as an alternative to a more particularistic one. A cosmopolitan identity could not be American using his logic. This perspective works with the current-events framing of the book written in the post-9/11 context. Huntington is pleased by the invocation of a “red-blooded” American identity and the patriotism that followed that horrible day, but bothered by its fleeting character and what that suggests about the substance and meaning of American identity. This is a significant and worthwhile question to consider, and it leads Huntington to pose his central questions: “We Americans” face a substantive problem of national identity epitomized by the subject of this sentence. Are we a “we,” one people or several? If we are a “we,” what distinguishes us from the “thems” who are not us? Race, religion, ethnicity, values, culture, wealth, politics, or what? Is the United States, as some have argued, a “universal nation,” based on values common to all humanity and in principle embracing all peoples? Or are we a Western nation with our identity defined by our European heritage and institutions? Or are we unique with a distinctive civilization of our own, as the proponents of “American exceptionalism”

180  Huntington’s Return to Americanism, 1985–2005 have argued throughout our history? Are we basically a political community whose identity exists only in a social contract embodied in the Declaration of Independence and other founding documents? Are we multicultural, bicultural, or unicultural, a mosaic or a melting pot? Do we have any meaningful identity as a nation that transcends our subnational ethnic, religious, racial identities? (9, emphasis added) These questions mirror many of those asked at the outset of this project, yet the turn Huntington takes is quite different from that suggested by a century of discourse.7 The fear-mongering regarding the collapse of both American identity and the US as a political union stands in stark contrast to the lived experience and survival of America through waves of immigration, fears about external loyalties, problems of incorporation, all alongside a nation-state thriving in so many ways.8 It is perhaps the combination of Anglo-Protestant populism and the denial of the ongoing significance of race and ethnicity that leads to Huntington’s story of decline. He states: Historically the substance of American identity has involved four key components: race, ethnicity, culture (most notably language and religion), and ideology. The racial and ethnic Americas are no more. Cultural America is under siege. And as the Soviet experience illustrates, ideology is a weak glue to hold together people otherwise lacking racial, ethnic, and cultural sources of community. Reasons could exist . . . why “America, more than any other nation, may have been born to die.” Yet some societies, confronted with serious challenges to their existence, are also able to postpone their demise and halt disintegration, by renewing their sense of national identity, their national purpose, and the cultural values they have in common. Americans did this after September 11. The challenge they face in the first years of the third millennium is whether they can continue to do this if they are not under attack. (12) He is not deterred by how short-lived the displays of national identity and unity were following 9/11. Rather, he wants to know how to maintain the kind of national cohesion that emerges in the face of threat in the absence of threat. Given his normative proclivities, it is no surprise he generates a list of potentially lethal threats. We can now delve more deeply into how Huntington sees America and Americans, which requires looking back. First and foremost, American identity is constituted by Anglo-Protestant culture and the American Creed.9 For him, it is first imperative to debunk two “partial truths”: one, that America is a nation of immigrants and two, that America is defined by its political creed alone. He claims that neither of these positions “tell us anything about the society that attracted the immigrants or the culture that produced the Creed” (37). Huntington goes to great lengths to make the distinction between America as a settler nation versus an immigrant nation,

Huntington’s Fear  181 coming down on the side of the former. The British settlers who came were not immigrants. They came, according to Huntington, to create a new society, not to join or valorize one. That these settlers thought of themselves as British (or English, Irish, Scottish, etc.), and that many came to expand the glory of the home nation, does not dampen Huntington’s confidence that they were the bearers of a new nation: “Their values, institutions, and culture [which] provided the foundation for and shaped the development of America” for decades if not centuries to come (38). For Huntington, though certain elements have virtually disappeared in their relevance to national identity (namely race and ethnicity), the culture and religion of the original settlers remain the “core culture” today (40). Here his sentiments mirror those of early twentieth-century sociologist E. A. Ross, who judged the viability of all new immigrants by the likelihood that they would be able to adopt this Anglo culture and ethic (Weinberg 1972). To sustain the necessary attachment to the nation, the culture, which serves as the foundation for national identity, must be more than abstract political credos, according to Huntington.10 In the case of the US, he asserts that it is Anglo-Protestant religion—specifically, dissenting Protestantism—and the corresponding culture that matter. For Huntington, this is a substantive reversal from his position in 1981, whereby the liberal political values of the Creed held primacy in American national identity.11 Huntington maps out the origins of the Creed, and locates them in efforts to construct distinction from Britain. But underneath the abstract ideas rests a new kind of civil religion, something more than political institutions and ideas: The Creed makes it possible to speak of “Americanism” as a political ideology or set of beliefs, comparable to socialism or communism, in a way in which one would never speak of Frenchism, Britishism, or Germanism. It also gives Americanism, as many foreign ­commentators have observed, the characteristics of a religion and makes America, in G. K. Chesterton’s oft-quoted phrase, “a nation with the soul of a church.” (48) For Huntington this American church would look like dissenting Protestantism. But the relationship between religion and republic goes far beyond style for him; Christianity must be present. Huntington rejects Louis Hartz’s (1955) thesis from The Liberal Tradition in America, which claimed that the foundation of American ideology came from secular doctrines of the European Enlightenment. Instead, Huntington argues: It was founded as a succession of Protestant fragments, a process under way in 1632 when Locke was born. The bourgeois, liberal ethos that subsequently emerged was not so much imported from Europe as it was the outgrowth of the Protestant societies established in North America.

182  Huntington’s Return to Americanism, 1985–2005 Scholars who attempt to identify the American “liberal consensus” or Creed solely with Lockeian ideas and the Enlightenment are giving a secular interpretation to the religious sources of American values. (63) It is not from the Enlightenment but the Reformation and the settlers of Puritan Massachusetts that Huntington finds the origins of America’s Anglo-Protestant culture and its political creed. Without the Reformation, America never would have come into being. He adds that “The Puritan message, style, and assumptions,” which included a sense of religious mission in the New World and a particularly potent spirit of dissent, “spread throughout the colonies and became absorbed into the beliefs and outlooks of other Protestant groups” (64).12 He argues that historically, and even today, evangelical Protestantism has been at the center of American culture, citing Martin Marty, George Marsden, and Garry Wills as support. To further support his contention about the foundations of American culture, Huntington also highlights the centrality of the work ethic in both Protestant religion and American culture,13 and the effects of the four Great Awakenings in providing “a sense of national, distinct from provincial, consciousness” (77). If the origins of the Creed are to be found in religion rather than the new, secular ideologies of (and preceding) the founding period, Huntington must have had specific ideas as to the Creed’s roots. The Creed, he explains, is a shared ethos made up of belief in liberty, equality, individualism, small government, and government of, by, and for the people (67). From that relatively agreed upon portrayal (though the meanings of each value certainly vary across and within space and time), he makes three claims about the Creed. The first two, that the ethos of the Creed has been both stable and agreed upon, are not difficult to substantiate, though much has been made of the distinction between ideology and practice (see Myrdal’s An American Dilemma (1944) for such work). The third, that “almost all the central ideas of the Creed have their origins in dissenting Protestantism,” is a more novel position in scholarship, and would depend upon the interpretation of the role of origins. Huntington explains: The Protestant emphasis on the individual conscience and the responsibility of individuals to learn God’s truths directly from the Bible promoted American commitment to individualism, equality, and the rights to freedom of religion and opinion. Protestantism stressed the work ethic and the responsibility of the individual for his own success or failure in life. With its congregational forms of church organization, Protestantism fostered opposition to hierarchy and the assumption that similar democratic forms should be employed in government. It also promoted moralistic efforts to reform society and to secure peace and justice at home and throughout the world. (68) Thus, each element of the Creed is in some way preceded by Protestant doctrine or culture. One obvious question, using Huntington’s own method

Huntington’s Fear  183 of retrieval, would be to ask about common antecedents to Protestantism and the Enlightenment, given that similar arguments about the link between the Enlightenment and the Creed have long been made. For him, however, the ultimate point about the relationship between religion and political culture in the US is this: “The American Creed . . . is Protestantism without God . . .” (69). Writing as an embattled religionist and nationalist, Huntington goes on to vigorously defend and endorse the relationship between America and Christianity. Eviscerating the possibility of atheists being truly American, he recalls a 2002 court case where the Ninth Circuit Court inveighed against saying “under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance in schools. Huntington recounts the overwhelmingly negative response to this ruling among both the general population and politicians (who, of course, depend on the votes of said general population). Huntington never mentions the political context within which these words were added in 1954; they were added in the midst of the Cold War against the God-less Soviets. They offered distinction from an other. He describes the judicial incident as one where atheists were attempting to “impose their atheism on all those Americans whose beliefs now and historically have defined America as a religious nation” (82). Additionally, he cites evidence from 1973 showing that Americans would rather have socialists than atheists as teachers to their children, all in an effort to show the centrality of religion to American identity (87–8). Huntington’s hostility toward atheists is palpable. For Huntington, America is not only a religious nation, but a Christian one. The fact that no state religion was established allowed religiosity to bloom freely (88–92). “America,” Huntington says, . . . is a predominantly Christian nation with a secular government. Non-Christians may legitimately see themselves as strangers because they or their ancestors moved to this “strange land” founded and peopled by Christians, even as Christians become strangers by moving to Israel, India, Thailand, or Morocco. (83) In essence then, non-Christians are strangers—outsiders, others—in America; they are excluded from Huntington’s vision. He reminds the reader that until Catholics were Americanized that there used to be a great deal of conflict between them and Protestants (see, for example, The Great School Wars, Diane Ravitch 1974). For Huntington, Americanization explicitly means Protestantization, which is, of course, not a characterization preferred by Catholics or members of other confessions. Despite America’s being a Protestant nation, however, Huntington is quick to point out that while they may feel out of place or out of step, others (non-Protestants) are very well tolerated. He believes that “[G]iven this general tolerance of religious diversity, non-Christian faiths have little alternative but to recognize and accept America as a Christian society. They are tiny minorities among a people overwhelmingly devoted to the Christian God and his Son” (101).

184  Huntington’s Return to Americanism, 1985–2005 Such a strong statement about what others must accept today is bound to be seen as problematic by many, particularly in the context of a scholarly text. In an effort to further link Protestantism with American identity, Huntington uses the language of civil religion, renovating a central tenet. The notion of civil religion, with its origins in Rousseau, found its clearest conceptualization in the American case in Bellah et al.’s Habits of the Heart (1985). In Who Are We? Huntington infers from Bellah that to have a thriving national identity, a Deist religion must be present; atheism would be incompatible with American civil religion (103). For Huntington, the Christian nature of American civil religion is the core of national identity: It is a church that has included Protestants, Catholics, Jews, other non-Christians, and even agnostics. It is, however, a church that is profoundly Christian in its origins, symbolism, spirit, accoutrements, and most importantly, its basic assumptions about the nature of man, history, right and wrong . . . America’s civil religion is a nondenominational, national religion and, in its articulated form, not expressly a Christian religion. Yet it is thoroughly Christian in its origins, content, assumptions, and tone . . . While the American Creed is Protestantism without God, the American civil religion is Christianity without Christ. (106) That Americans put so much stock in particular symbols of the nation—the flag, first and foremost—and that those symbols are presented and displayed in a quasi-religious manner supports Huntington’s notion about the sacralization of national meaning. But in the above lines, he himself acknowledges that America’s national (civil) religion is not “expressly a Christian religion.” Huntington has taken the importance of religious symbolism in the construction of a sacred national beyond its meaning, as civil religions come in varying forms, many of which do not necessitate the presence of an explicitly transcendent being (see Varieties of Civil Religion, Bellah and Hammond 1980). In thinking about the current fragility of American national identity, Huntington sees American history as a series of challenges to the (his) Anglo-Protestant vision, beginning with loyalty to colonies and then states as opposed to the nation, and ending with the anti-national attitudes and behaviors of elites and immigrants. During the years preceding the Revolution the nation was briefly elevated above other forms of collectivity, thereby illustrating that “in America . . . collective experiences, together with the leadership of widely dispersed elites, created a common consciousness among people, who fought for and won their independence, and then created minimal central political institutions . . . ” (113). Huntington would surely be challenged by many scholars who argue that the Revolution made the American nation, not the other way around (e.g., Greenfeld 1992). Many historians would contend that it actually was not until the Civil War that America coalesced into anything like the form we know today (e.g., Lyn Spillman 1997; Susan-Mary Grant 2000). Huntington does more

Huntington’s Fear  185 than give a nod to this line of thought by outlining the usage of the word “union” rather than nation, and by taking Boorstin’s (1967) position that there was no real national history prior to the Civil War, and thus no real nation, but this seems to contradict his mapping of American consciousness. He also claims that the century following the Civil War was the period of “nationalism triumphant” in American history (108). In a moment of blindness to many marginalized groups living in the US, Huntington claims that following the war, “[V]irtually everyone identified the United States as their nation,” including “Americans of all classes, regions, and ethnic groups . . .” (119–120). Huntington describes a steady rise in popular attachment to the idea of American identity following the institutionalization of Americanization practices early in the twentieth century. He discusses the role of schools, nonprofit organizations, industries, and even religious organizations in inculcating American values, English language, and the adoption of American modes of daily life. Citing a disputed 1994 study, Huntington argues that by 1950 the nation and its immigrants expressed, according to Huntington, the highest levels of national identification in the nation’s history, the “zenith of American national integration,” which was then followed by a period of fragmentation and retreat into group identities (137). For Huntington this equates with the “erosion of national identity” that characterizes the remainder of the twentieth century. The reality is that a decline in straight-line assimilation is not synonymous with the destruction of national identity, as pluralistic models of national structure suggest. Huntington directly addresses what he calls the “Assimilation Debate,” focused on turn-of-the-twentieth century immigration. He identifies three basic philosophies: the melting pot, Anglo-conformity, and ­cultural pluralism—the last of which he re-characterizes as ethnic pluralism, based on an essentialist understanding of ethnicity which has little standing in today’s academy. The melting pot idea Huntington describes is that put forward by Zangwill, with roots going back to Crevecoeur. In other words, he limits the notion of the melting pot to its most literal interpretation with everyone blending into something new. Anglo-conformity, on the other hand, is presented in its most benign form, and is oddly attributed to Milton Gordon. This model of incorporation, to Huntington, looks like tomato soup to which immigration may have added “celery, croutons, spices, parsley, and other ingredients that enrich and diversify the taste, but which are absorbed into what remains fundamentally tomato soup” (129). This sounds more like the melting pot ideology espoused by immigrants like Mary Antin than the less benign Anglo-conformity of nativists like Madison Grant or even that of Americanization programs of mid-century. Such explication neutralizes the impression of exclusion; it limits the connection of Anglo-conformity to such descriptors as xenophobic, racist, and other such characterizations. Finally, Huntington turns to cultural pluralism, on which he spends significantly more energy. He looks to Kallen’s 1915 essay, which he portrays

186  Huntington’s Return to Americanism, 1985–2005 as the “salad image of America” (129).14 For Huntington the most useful thing to come from Kallen is the notion of ethnic essentialism, which reinforces Huntington’s fears about the negative impact immigration would have on national unity. He says: “Immigration, according to Kallen, dissolved any earlier American nationality and changed America into a ‘federation of nationalities,’ ‘a democracy of nationalities’. The model he saw for America was Europe where many nationalities coexist within the framework of a common civilization” (130). In reality, the model Kallen saw was not Europe, but Switzerland, where different linguistic-cultural-national groups coexist within a single state, not the much more vague notion of civilization. Huntington portrays the idea of cultural pluralism as defensive, without influence, and ultimately a failure. While Kallen’s cultural pluralism may not have found its legs in the early twentieth century, the development of the philosophy of multiculturalism owes the idea at least a nod. Huntington’s dismissal of the concept as insignificant does not make it so. Not only does Huntington catalog the threats, he also takes on the foes of the America he loves: subnational identities, dual citizenship and transnationalism, Mexican immigration, and cosmopolitanism (especially among elites), deconstructionists, and multiculturalism—all of which rose in influence after 1960. He rejects Kallen, Michael Walzer, Bill Clinton, and Al Gore, who all celebrated diversity as a central part of an American narrative (142). To Huntington, celebrating diversity within the nation is to deny the nation itself, reflecting his narrow, monolithic understanding of what nations in general, and America in particular, are. Any movement that honors subnational groups is “deconstructionist,” and multiculturalism is reduced to an idea that shuns unity or community (171). As mentioned he maligns affirmative action in favor of a color-blind ideology that ignores ongoing institutional racism and sexism. Ultimately, Huntington’s populist position is reminiscent of that which E. A. Ross took in the 1910s: If popular opinion (as determined by survey data) is against corrective affirmative action programs, then that is what should hold, regardless of—or even in direct opposition to—what elites, meaning those preferring multiculturalism, believe to be right. He argues that elites have replaced individual rights with group rights, thereby eliding a central tenet of American ideology: individualism (157). Huntington also targets those studying “the new ethnicity,” and includes Glazer and Moynihan as important actors in that field, which emerged largely in the 1960s. That the multiculturalists and the new ethnics were at odds makes this attack interesting, and Huntington rightly points out that their foci were somewhat different. If the “new ethnics” were taking aim at the melting pot—per Glazer and Moynihan’s Beyond the Melting Pot, the multiculturalists were shooting for the Anglo-conformists. Actually, there are many ways in which particularistic melting pot ideologies are not so different from softer Anglo-conformist ones, but for many multiculturalist activists (not the more sophisticated theorists), anything European (including clearly non-Anglo-Saxon groups) was lumped into Anglo-conformity,

Huntington’s Fear  187 or whiteness, which always maintained an air of oppression, guilt, and exclusion. For Huntington, the problem both multiculturalism and the new ethnicity have in dealing with difference is that they come “at the expense of teaching the values and culture that Americans have had in common” (173). In part, he is right. The canon and core curricula have expanded as previously ignored or under-represented groups have entered the educational sphere. But this is only loss if one insists on a narrow view of what counts as American. It is only loss if one excludes the possibility that living with those who are different from us, benefiting from those differences, and sharing certain liberal democratic values is also an American value. To Huntington this notion of unity in diversity is repugnant. Huntington connects his concerns about diversity and deconstruction with the 9/11 frame of his book, and rather fatalistically puts the success of the “deconstructionist” movement in the hands of external threats and terrorism. If threats and violence are high, deconstructionists (multiculturalists and “new ethnics”) will not get far; America will be united. If, on the other hand, threats are not real or imminent, the breakdown of a unified national identity and the nation itself is a real possibility. Regardless of threats, however, assimilation is also central factor in Huntington’s consideration of national identity. Huntington claims that of the thirty-four million Europeans who came to the US between 1820 and 1924, almost all of their descendants “totally assimilated into American society and culture” (178). Such a statement may or may not be true, depending on how one chooses to define “assimilation,” a task with which he is not overly concerned. Given that in the last thirty-five years of the twentieth century more than twenty million immigrants arrived from Asia and Latin America, the underlying question in the book is whether their behaviors (and those of their descendants) will mirror those of the earlier European immigrations. Huntington sees the new immigration in terms of the needs of the labor market, but argues that the cons of so much immigration outweigh the pros.15 In a statement that certainly resonates with the immigration debates took place in the American Southwest in 2006, he concludes that “[t]he immigration issue may produce serious divisions among elite groups, arouse popular opinion against immigrants and immigration, and offer opportunities for nationalist and populist politicians and parties to exploit these sentiments” (180). Huntington wonders at the ability of a state to maintain its core, or “essential,” character even as external events threaten it, and as internal conditions adjust to immigration. He invokes the idea of societal security, so the question then becomes how should the state deal with issues of immigration and assimilation, and the relationship between these two processes. Immigration diminishes the stability needed for social order, which is necessary, according to Huntington, for a strong, shared, clear national identity. As he touts the US’s assimilatory achievements early in the twentieth century, Huntington turns to Milton Gordon. In an utter misuse of Gordon, he implies that not only cultural assimilation, but also structural assimilation,

188  Huntington’s Return to Americanism, 1985–2005 marital assimilation, etc., also occurred (182–3). He avoids a claim of total assimilation, but clearly believes that Anglo-conformity won the day. He sees assimilation as “possibly the greatest, American success story,” in that it produced a people “who became overwhelmingly committed to America’s Anglo-Protestant culture and the values of the American Creed . . . ” (183). But at the turn of the twenty-first century, Huntington sees something different: Historically America has thus been a nation of immigration and assimilation, and assimilation has meant Americanization. Now, however, immigrants are different; the institutions and processes related to assimilation are different; and, most importantly, America is different. The great American success story may face an uncertain future. (184) Gordon’s model of cultural assimilation does not fit the new immigration by Huntington’s reasoning. The differences Huntington points out are based on a list of factors he sees as having enabled the smooth assimilation of earlier comers as opposed to more recent ones. He claims that: Most immigrants came from European societies with cultures similar to or compatible with American culture. Immigration involved self-selection; immigrants had to be willing to confront substantial costs, risks, and uncertainties. Immigrants who did not convert to American values, culture, and way of life returned to their home countries. Immigrants came from many countries, with no single country or language predominant at any one time. Immigrants dispersed to ethnic neighborhoods throughout the United States, with no single group of immigrants forming a majority of the population in any region or major city. Immigration was discontinuous, interrupted by pauses and reductions, both overall and for individual countries. Immigrants fought and died in America’s wars. Americans shared a common, reasonably clear, and highly positive concept of American identity and created activities, institutions, and policies to promote the Americanization of immigrants. After 1965, all of these factors are either absent or much more diluted than they were previously. (185) Taken one by one, most of these statements contain at least a kernel of truth, but there are multiple problems. Take, for example, the statement about immigrant dispersion and the avoidance of immigrant clusters: To think that states like Wisconsin and Minnesota did not take on large and influential German, Polish, or Scandinavian communities, or that cities like New York and Chicago were not made up of significant ethnic enclaves is simply incorrect.

Huntington’s Fear  189 The entirety of the above excerpt offers ample insight into what bothers and concerns Huntington: the possibility that assimilation might not be synonymous with Anglo-conformist Americanization. Again, we see here that the story of America Huntington tells is a very particularistic and narrow one, but it is also true that he is clearly tapping into sentiments held by many. Huntington’s story is only “right” if national imaginaries are monolithic, static, and essentialist, and for members of the dominant group that feels natural and real. A final threat Huntington attends to is globalization. He sees three primary ways in which the “merging of the world” has had a hand in how Americans understand themselves and their country. The first is that there is no one well defined “other,” no enemy, no ideology against which to maintain the superiority of democracy. He hopes that September 11th may have rectified that situation, and given the ongoing wars in the Mideast, he may be right. The second is the rise of cosmopolitan identification among American elites as their lives take place in the increasingly interconnected world. Huntington calls this the “denationalization” of elites. His arguments regarding elites are strongest when he focuses on the split between the way elites and non-elites understand the world, but he mostly continues to strike a straightforward populist note. The third outgrowth of the changing world is that in the absence of an other and the declining need for ideological identification, non-national cultural identities, both subnational and transnational or diasporic, have risen in import. Since he openly prefers national identification, this troubles him. In concluding the book, Huntington returns to his initial concerns regarding trends affecting American identity, and the possible directions that identity might go. The four trends he sees as significant in shaping American identification are the “virtual disappearance of ethnicity,” the decline in salience of race and the “blurring of racial distinctions,” the increase of both size and influence of the Hispanic population alongside the “trend toward a bilingual, bicultural America,” and the widening chasm between elites and non-elites regarding both what and how important national identity should be (295, Chapter 11). Simultaneously, he emphasizes two external factors that interact with all of these: vulnerability to threat and attack from outside the US, and increased contact with those espousing vastly different religious and cultural worldviews. In considering the decline of ethnic identification for Americans, Huntington reveals several things. The first is that ethnicity is for whites (300). While whites have, or had, distinct identities based upon their countries of origin (this is ethnicity for Huntington), non-whites had race based upon the color of their skin, shape of their nose, etc. Given his framing of ethnicity as central for Americans, for Huntington, then, it is really only whites who get to claim such an identity. He sees four alternatives to ethnicity: to adopt a broad Euro-American identity such as that put forward by Orlando Patterson in The Ordeal of Integration (1998), which would clearly be open only to whites; to move toward a cultural “Anglo” identity that would affirm the

190  Huntington’s Return to Americanism, 1985–2005 Anglo-Protestant culture but somehow not be ethnic, only cultural; to adopt a racial, “white” identity that would rely on maintaining racial differences; or to take on an American national identity. This last is what he sees as the best opportunity for national unity to be strengthened. As he makes clear, however, this American identity is one that would involve remembering that [D]issenting Protestantism is central to America’s [identity]. Americans are overwhelmingly committed to both God and country, and for Americans they are inseparable. In a world in which religion shapes the allegiances, the alliances, and the antagonisms of people on every continent, it should not be surprising if Americans again turn to religion to find their national identity and their national purpose. (365–366) Taking up the national option, then, means taking up a specific Christian identity; religion would win the day over ethnicity, culture, and race. But the sticky problem of race remains, which despite seeing the blurring of distinctions and the reduction of its importance in everyday life, hangs on. Even Huntington acknowledges the ongoing, and potentially permanent, effects of racial inequality, but he focuses on sociocultural distinction instead. His response is that as more traditional, group-level racial divisions are fading, the acceptance of the multiracial individual is rising. This accords well with his broader plea for a turn toward unified national identity, as minority individuals may be more likely to accept his vision of America than a minority group might be. One of the most revelatory passages in the book involves Huntington’s understanding of white nativism, which follows his words on race. He sees nativism as an unsurprising response to increasing diversity and the ascendance of a “multicultural” society. On this account, there is little argument to be made. It is in his definition and apologia for nativism that Huntington’s positions become analytically problematic: The term “nativism” has acquired pejorative connotations among denationalized elites on the assumption that it is wrong to vigorously to defend one’s “native” culture and identity and to maintain their purity against foreign influences . . . John Higham [the well-respected historian] defines nativism more neutrally as the “intense opposition to an internal minority on the ground of its foreign (i.e. ‘un-American’) connections.” It is in this neutral sense that the term is used here, but with two modifications so as to include, first, opposition to groups, such as blacks, that lack “foreign connections” but are nonetheless seen as not a true part of American society and, second, to include “opposition to an internal minority” that is perceived as becoming a majority. (310–311, emphasis added) Thus in a few lines, Huntington has indicated that nativists have every right, and in fact should, oppose groups like African Americans and Hispanics, in

Huntington’s Fear  191 a quest for truly American national unity. He attributes the philosophy of today’s nativists (who he differentiates from extremists) to “the tradition of Horace Kallen” in that they have an essentialist view of ethnicity and race. While the attribution of a primordialist understanding of ethnicity is technically correct, surely it is unusual to suggest that nativists find their intellectual heritage in the words of America’s first public promoter of cultural pluralism (312). Huntington also returns to two of his frequent foils in the book, Latinos and elites, as he concludes. His complaints against Hispanics are consistent: They avoid assimilation by maintaining a self-sustaining, self-contained culture in the US and in doing so seek to divide America in two, most obviously via bilingualism.16 His grievances with elites continue to emphasize how out of touch they are with non-elites (“the public”). The consequences of this gap are significant. Americans (non-elite Americans) will lose their trust in both public and private institutions. This loss of trust will lead to a decline in participation both politically and in civil society. Additionally Huntington would expect an increase of public policy initiatives from the masses to curtail such programs as affirmative action, bilingual education, and other basic social services.17 Where does this leave the notion of American identity? For Huntington, it leaves the way Americans understand themselves at the mercy of external threats and internal others. He strongly argues for a turn to religion to regain stability and reclaim substance. Huntington has clearly changed his mind about the ability of a liberal democratic creed to unify Americans (1981). Now there must be something specific, actually something transcendent, to hold Americans together. He holds that if non-Americans want to become American, they must not only espouse the liberal democratic beliefs that remain central, they must also . . . migrate to America, participate in American life, learn America’s language, history, and customs, absorb America’s Anglo-Protestant culture, and identify primarily with America rather than with their country of birth. People are not likely to find in political principles the deep emotional content and meaning provided by kith and kin, blood and belonging, culture and nationality. These attachments may have little or no basis in fact, but they do satisfy a deep human longing for meaningful community. (338–339) People do need substantive, not merely abstract, identities, but to suggest his vision as inclusive or “truly” American suggests a highly debatable, deeply rigid boundary structure that ignores so much about social life in the US. In his effort to show the plausibility of a return to an Anglo-Protestant America, Huntington charts the return to conservative Christianity that began in the 1970s and 1980s, intervening in what he recalls as a period of

192  Huntington’s Return to Americanism, 1985–2005 licentiousness and immorality, which had deleterious effects on Americans and their national community. One interesting indicator of the return of religion to the public square is the increase of “God talk” and eventually “Christ talk” in politics. But he also contextualizes the rise in public religiosity in the US alongside similar increases elsewhere around the world. In considering the years immediately following September 11, 2001, Huntington points out an important dynamic: “Muslim hostility encourages Americans to define their identity in religious and cultural terms, just as the Cold War promoted political and creedal definitions of that identity” (358). The presence of Islamic terrorism (an external other) could prompt the Christian revival he desires. Ultimately, then, Huntington produces a list of three possibilities for the US. These include a cosmopolitan-globalist identity, an imperial-superior identity, and a national identity. The cosmopolitan alternative is one in which society would be very open, would value diversity, and would move toward increasing cooperation and identification with international organizations—here Huntington sees weakness and decline; “the world reshapes America” (363). This, for him, is the left-liberal worldview. An imperial America requires the belief that America’s creedal values are superior and universal and should be introduced worldwide: “the people of other societies have basically the same values as Americans, or if they do not have them, they want to have them, or if they do not want to have them, they misjudge what is good for their society, and Americans have the responsibility to persuade them or to introduce them to embrace the universal values that America espouses” (364). This is the modus operandi of the George W. Bush administration, the neoconservative worldview: “America remaking the world” (363). Finally, there is Huntington’s option, the national approach. Such an . . . approach would recognize and accept what distinguishes America from those societies. America cannot become the world and still be America . . . America is different, and that difference is defined in large part by its Anglo-Protestant culture and its religiosity. The alternative to cosmopolitanism and imperialism is nationalism devoted to the preservation and enhancement of those qualities that have defined America since its founding. (364–5) Huntington calls for a more isolated, stable, conservative nationalism. He argues that there is only one America, and that if we do not return to it, the country will become something different—bad different. It is this highly particularistic America Huntington sees as fading and wishes to re-inject with the life and color of Anglo-Protestantism. A problem is that such an objective relies on both theoretical and empirical realities that do not exist, namely that national identities and national narratives are monolithic and static, and that in the American case, Anglo-Protestantism is the singular,

Huntington’s Fear  193 “true” American identity. The Anglo-Protestant heritage is tremendously important in the shaping of many of the country’s ideas and institutions, but it does not necessarily define “who we are” today. The response to Who Are We? was fast and loud. In the following chapter book reviews by prominent scholars are examined. This is a departure from the approach used to understand significant responses over time, but works well as an initial snapshot of how Huntington’s construction of American identity was received. NOTES   1 Samuel P. Huntington passed away in 2008, during the research and writing of this book. Reading Who Are We? upon its release in 2004 was a defining moment in this study of American identity.   2 This fourth question is modified. We cannot yet know how Huntington’s book shapes future discourse, so instead I examine the book’s reception.   3 All page numbers in this section will be from Huntington’s Who Are We? 2004. New York: Simon and Schuster, unless otherwise indicated.   4 Whether each of these threats represents an empirical reality is not Huntington’s focus; he asserts each with some evidence, not always strong. But Who Are We? is about the effect of threats and fear, and the building of a unified identity.   5 Huntington briefly articulates two theoretical claims regarding national identity. The first is that the dichotomization of civic and ethnic national identities is false and should be broken down. The rationale for breaking down this dualism comes from a belief that all nations are the product of conflict, which causes “peoples” to emerge, even when claiming nationhood on the basis of political principle, not ethnicity or kinship. In other words, nations are fundamentally groups of people with shared sense of self, destiny, and other. The second is that so-called “ethnic” nationalism is a misnomer, as the ethnic variety of nationalism also comprises what some have called “cultural” nationalism. Taking his understanding of ethnicity directly from Horace Kallen, Huntington sees ethnicity as essential (primordial), and culture as fluid (31). Here, he ignores the last several decades of social science, wherein ethnicity has been shown to be quite flexible (e.g., Mary Waters (1990) Ethnic Options: Choosing Identities in America is a classic statement). This distinction does important work for Huntington, however, in that it protects him in certain ways from charges of racism (ethnicism) that might emerge from his imagining of America. The problem is that to use Kallen’s criteria of essentialist ethnicity as your definition for ethnicity is not sound scholarship today. Dealing with theory is not at the heart of Huntington’s process.   6 Eric Kaufmann (2004) makes a similar claim to Huntington regarding the roots of American identity, invoking the significance of an Anglo-Protestant heritage. But for Kaufmann, this foundation is primarily an ethnic one, not solely a religious or cultural one as Huntington claims. Additionally, Kaufmann does not make any calls for a reassertion of said Anglo-Protestant Americanism, and instead argues for something closer to the liberal position that Huntington (2004) decries.  7 A survey of twentieth-century discourse about assimilation and national identity shows that in fact there have always been (from the Revolution forward) multiple American narratives. At different moments, different ones

194  Huntington’s Return to Americanism, 1985–2005 were more potent; new stories emerged, old stories were renovated to fit the times. This multiplicity in imaginings of the nation is, of course, one of the stated targets of Huntington’s book.   8 One of Huntington’s more dire predictors is that Mexico will reclaim parts of the Southwest where large populations of Mexican immigrants have settled.   9 See Chapters 3 and 4 in Who Are We? for Huntington’s full explication of this position, as it is the foundation for his prescriptions to come. 10 The liberal position relying on the political creed to serve as a shared center serves as a part of what Durkheimian sociologists would call civil religion, which could serve as a basis of national identity. Huntington would seem to deny the possibility of civil religion here, or at least the potential for civil religion to evoke the same levels of connection and loyalty and meaning so readily granted to transcendental religions. 11 Huntington (1981), American Politics: The Promise of Disharmony. 12 A claim could be made that Huntington, like others before him (notably Tocqueville), is giving a New England–based account of American cultural history. 13 In venerating the central place of work in American culture (and religion), it is worth simply mentioning the way in which such an ideology demeans the role of women in society who “don’t work.” Claiming such importance for work would seemingly unmask the so-called cult of domesticity that arose mid-century to celebrate the importance of women, given that they (the revered homemakers) do not take part in what Huntington calls the “principle source[s] of status and legitimacy” in American life (71). This illustrates one way women were excluded from living out certain central American narratives. 14 The use of this unsophisticated metaphor, as opposed to the more scholarly “mosaic,” appears expressive of Huntington’s relative lack of esteem for cultural pluralism. 15 This framing is markedly different than that used to explain earlier waves of immigration, when the argument was that those who came did so because of their affinity for America’s Anglo-Protestant culture. Surely the motivations of European immigrants and Mexican immigrants were not wholly different from each other. 16 It is worth noting that Latinos, for Huntington, apparently fall outside the realm of ethnicity or race in his analysis of the trends affecting American identity. It seems at times that he has, without saying so particularly clearly, indicated a shift in American racial/ethnic divisions from the historical axis of black and white, to something new: Hispanic and Anglo, an ostensibly cultural divide using Huntington’s logic. 17 Consider, for example, some of California’s propositions vote in recent years, especially Prop 187, which ended social services but was overturned by a federal court, and Prop 209, which effectively ended affirmative action in educational institutions

BIBLIOGRAPHY Bellah, Robert Neelly, Richard Madsen, William M. Sullivan, Ann Swidler, and Steven Tipton. 1996 (1985). Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life. Berkeley: University of California Press. Bellah, Robert Neelly and Phillip E. Hammond. 1980. Varieties of Civil Religion. San Francisco: Harper & Row.

Huntington’s Fear  195 Boorstin, Daniel J. 1967. The Americans: The National Experience. New York: Vintage. Crevecoeur, J. Hector St. John. 1998 (1782). Letters from an American Farmer. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Glazer, Nathan. 1997. We Are All Multiculturalists Now. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Gleason, Philip. 1980. “American Identity and Americanization.”Harvard Encyclopedia of American Ethnic Groups. Edited by Stephen Thernstrom. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Gordon, Milton M. 1964. Assimilation in American Life: The Role of Race, Religion, and National Origins. New York: Oxford University Press. Grant, Madison. 1918 (1916). The Passing of the Great Race, or the Racial Basis of European History. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons. Grant, Susan-Mary. 2000. North over South: Northern Nationalism and American Identity in the Antebellum Era. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas. Greenfeld, Liah. 1992. Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Hartz, Louis. 1991 (1955). The Liberal Tradition in America. San Diego: Harcourt Brace & Company. Higham, John. 1988. Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 1860–1925. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Higham, John. 1984 (1975). Send These to Me: Immigrants in Urban America (Rev. ed.). Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press. Huntington, Samuel P. 2004. Who Are We? The Challenge to America’s National Identity. New York: Simon & Schuster. Huntington, Samuel P. 1996. The Clash of Civilizations and the Making of the New World Order New York: Simon & Schuster. Huntington, Samuel P. 1981. American Politics: The Promise of Disharmony. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Jacoby, Tamar. 2004a. Reinventing the Melting Pot: The New Immigrants and What It Means to be American (edited volume). New York: Basic Books. Jacoby, Tamar. 2004b. “Rainbow’s End: A Renowned Student of America’s Maladies Detects a New Threat to Our Identity.” The Washington Post. March 16: BW03. Kallen, Horace M. 1998 (1924). Culture and Democracy in the United States. New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers. Kallen, Horace M. 1915. “Democracy versus the Melting-Pot.” The Nation. February 18 and 25. Kaufmann, Eric P. 2004. The Rise and Fall of Anglo-America. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Myrdal, Gunnar. 2002 (1944). An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy, Volume I. New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers. Patterson, Orlando. 1998. Rituals of Blood: Consequences of Slavery in Two American Centuries. Washington, D.C.: Civitas/Counterpoint. Patterson, Orlando. 1997. The Ordeal of Integration: Progress and Resentment in America’s “Racial” Crisis. Washington, D.C.: Civitas/Counterpoint. Ravitch, Diane. 1974. The Great School Wars, New York City, 1805–1973; a history of the public schools as battlefield of social change. New York: Basic Books. Ross, Edward Alsworth. 1914. The Old World in the New: The Significance of Past and Present Immigration to the American People. New York: The Century Company. Spillman, Lynette P. 1997. Nation and Commemoration: Creating National Identities in the United States and Australia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Tocqueville, Alexis de. 2003 (1835). Democracy in America. New York: Penguin Classics.

196  Huntington’s Return to Americanism, 1985–2005 Walzer, Michael. 1996. What It Means to Be an American: Essays on the American Experience. New York: Marsilio. Walzer, Michael. 1994. “Comment.” Multiculturalism : Examining the Politics of Recognition. Edited by Amy Gutmann. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Walzer, Michael. 1983. Spheres of Justice: A Defense of Pluralism and Equality. USA: Basic Books. Waters, Mary, Reed Ueda, and Helen B Marrow. 2007. The New Americans: A Guide to Immigration since 1965. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Waters, Mary. 1990. Ethnic Options: Choosing Identities in America. Berkeley: University of California Press. Weinberg, Julius. 1972. Edward Alsworth Ross and the Sociology of Progressivism. Madison, Wis.: The State Historical Society of Wisconsin. Whitfield, Stephen J. 1998. “Introduction.” Culture and Democracy in the United States. Edited by Ronald H. Bayor. New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers. Whitfield, Stephen J. 1994. “Horace Meyer Kallen.” Dictionary of American ­Biography, Supplement 9: 1971–1975. Edited by John Fitzpatrick. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons. Reproduced in History Resource Center. Farmington Hills, MI: Gale Group. Wiebe, Robert H. 2002. Who Are We: A History of Popular Nationalism. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Wiebe, Robert H. 1967. The Search for Order: 1877–1920. New York: Hill and Wang. Williams, Raymond. 1983. Culture and Society, 1780–1950. New York: Columbia University Press. Wilson, William Julius. 1996. When Work Disappears: The World of the New Urban Poor. New York: Vintage Books. Wilson, William Julius. 1980. The Declining Significance of Race. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Wirth, Louis. 1928. The Ghetto. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Wohlgelernter, Maurice. 1964. Israel Zangwill: A Study. New York: Columbia Press. Wolfe, Alan. 2004a. “Native Son: Samuel Huntington Defends the Homeland.” Foreign Affairs 83(i3): 120–125. Wolfe, Alan. 2004b. “Huntington and Wolfe respond ‘Credal Passions’.” Foreign Affairs 83(i5): 158–159. Yetman, Norman R. 1999. Majority and Minority. Boston: Allyn and Bacon. Zablit, Jocelyne. 2007. “Ku Klux Klan staging comeback in U.S. amid immigration debate.” Agence France Presse: February 14, 2007. Zangwill, Israel. 1915 (1909). The Melting Pot Drama in Four Acts. Macmillan Company: New York.

8 Anglo-America Under Review

In the weeks and months immediately following the publication of Who Are We?, a near-avalanche of responses came in: in newspapers, magazines, online, on television, and of course, in academic journals. Many national and internationally respected scholars of American history and social science had the opportunity to discuss Huntington’s construction of American national identity in the form of book reviews. There is not yet a way to measure the intellectual legacy of Who Are We? so soon after its publication, but studying reviews by notable figures offers a source of data for interpreting the initial reception of the book—at least within academic circles. Essays and reviews by Amitai Etzioni, Francis Fukuyama, Nathan Glazer, Douglas S. Massey, Louis Menand, Peter Skerry, Rogers M. Smith, and Alan Wolfe are all examined. Additionally there is commentary by Huntington himself on Wolfe’s review, which offers an unusual glimpse into the way Huntington sees the reception of his book, and the way in which the discourse is being constructed. It seems fitting to begin with Nathan Glazer’s review, published in the Fall 2004 issue of Education Next. Glazer does not disagree with Huntington regarding either the changes that are taking place regarding American identity or the distinctive elements of the current Hispanic immigration. What he does disagree with is the characterization of the relationship between the two things, and the need for alarm. Harkening back to the preface of the second edition of Beyond the Melting Pot, Glazer also finds that Huntington attributes too much influence to religion shaping American identity. Likely as a result of the review being published in an education journal, Glazer emphasizes the role of schools in the potential for what he calls a “domestic clash of civilizations—or at least a clash of cultures” (2004:80). Glazer illuminates what he sees as the central question of Huntington’s book, removing the layers of rhetoric about 9/11, globalization, and other peripheral concerns: “The question is, Are Mexican-American values so different as to pose a problem” for the America Huntington holds dear (2004a:81). For Glazer, the answer is clearly that they are not. He argues that all groups seek to distinguish themselves in certain ways, but that at the end of the day, the values of “family, church, community, and the like,”

198  Huntington’s Return to Americanism, 1985–2005 which are central to Hispanic culture, are also central to Huntington’s venerated Anglo-Protestant culture despite its embrace of individualism (2004a:81). Additionally, though Huntington is worried about the Catholicism of Latin Americans, Glazer points to Huntington’s own conclusions in an attempt to neutralize the need for fear or anxiety about religious differences. If Catholicism has been mostly Protestantized in the US, as Huntington claimed, why the concern? Why, Glazer wonders, would Huntington see high levels of conversion of Mexican Americans to evangelical Protestantism as more assimilatory than their becoming members of established Catholic communities where they would be brought into established American religious institutions? “Here,” says Glazer, “Huntington’s commitment to the Protestant roots of American identity leads him into confusion” (2004a:81). In essence, his quarrel with Huntington is that Huntington’s attention is so heavily focused on the religious origins of what it means to be American, that he misses the ways America has already changed, and not so recently. Glazer says: “Certainly Protestantism played a key role in shaping American values. But origins are overtaken by subsequent events, and in a changing society they do not maintain the same role they played in shaping it . . . I do not see why a book asking, ‘Who are we?’ should conclude with a chapter on the role of religion” (2004a:81). For Glazer, this has particular resonance given that in the original 1963 edition of Beyond the Melting Pot he had likewise emphasized the importance of religion in American life. But by 1970, when the book was re-issued, he had come to a quite different conclusion: It was race, not religion, that really mattered in establishing an American system of pluralism with a center. Thus, he similarly rejects Huntington’s emphasis on religion, and wonders at the lack of attention paid to race, which he sees as having played a much bigger role in the shaping of the multiculturalism Huntington so abhors than either immigration or religion. That is, it is not Mexican Americans, but African Americans who have long been driving the American agenda on diversity and integration. Ultimately, what Glazer says is that the rules of the game are altogether different than they once were. He seems to be gently encouraging Huntington to accept change by bolstering the notion of America’s power to transform those who come here. He argues that not only is assimilation different than it once was, but that “citizenship, patriotism, and sovereignty are all undergoing surprising changes” that might allow us to see the very same phenomena as Huntington with less alarm (2004a:82). Glazer reminds us of the anxieties felt by “natives” when other large-scale immigrations were occurring, and believes those “fears have proved groundless” (2004a:82). Glazer sees no need to fear the breakdown of the United States along the lines Huntington has suggested, even if the meaning of America has been revised. As in 1970, Glazer imagines a pluralistic America, governed by shared values that hold it together. Two other sociologists reviewing Who Are We?, Amitai Etzioni and Douglas Massey, found little to be happy about in Huntington’s work. In a

Anglo-America Under Review  199 scathing review essay in Contemporary Sociology, founding father of communitarianism and University Professor of Sociology at George Washington University in Washington, D.C., Etzioni (2005) uses his space to accomplish two goals: One is to review Who Are We?, and the other is to, using the case of Who Are We?, consider the broader question of how incendiary scholarship should be handled within the academic presses.1 In the case of Huntington’s work—including Who Are We? and much of his earlier work—Etzioni declares Huntington to be “a systematic and articulate advocate of nationalism, militaristic regimes, and an earlier America in which there was a homogenous creed and little tolerance for pluralism” (2005:485). That alone draws a vivid picture of Etzioni’s view of Huntington’s America. But how does he respond to the specific arguments of the book? To understand Huntington’s take on America circa 2004, Etzioni places the book within the body of Huntington’s work. Etzioni argues that much of Huntington’s writing is based on a theory of fear. The theory is comprised of two basic parts: the identification of a threat followed by an argument for a nationalist response. In the case of Who Are We?, the threat is made up of Hispanics (mostly Mexicans) and anti-national (or at least non-national) elites. The response: a return to an idealized, unified American nation that must keep multiculturalism and all forms of change and diversity at bay. Since this kind of fear-based logic is grounded in historical reality, the question is not does fear matter, but is the particular threat identified as dangerous as it is made out to be? Or, is it manufactured “in order to keep a nation under the control of one power elite or another . . . ” while simultaneously allowing said power-holders to limit citizens’ rights and enact policies which might be rejected were it not for the mobilization of fear (2005:478). Huntington, says Etzioni, is careful not to spell things out too fully. Rather, he uses a subversive technique of naming courses of action that might be objectionable, but not advocating them. In this way, he can be understood only as predicting a possibility (e.g., a reactionary nativism as a response to ongoing Mexican immigration), not as having endorsed the phenomenon. Etzioni claims that there is no use in attempting to prove and/or disprove Huntington’s assertions. Largely, he rejects this course of action because it allows that Huntington has already set the terms of the debate. Instead, Etzioni suggests reviewers look directly at the Mexican immigrants Huntington derides and assess their situation. He marshals evidence that, among other things, denies any risk of Southwestern secession, finds general parallels between Latino linguistic assimilation and that of previous generations of immigrants, and shows that Latinos, despite their being mostly Catholic, adopt or already possess many of the values that Huntington defines as Protestant. Even if they did not, the values they prioritize would not be dangerous to America in any way: Etzioni, like Glazer, suggests the Latinos’ emphasis on family and community could be a good thing. The vision of America put forward by Huntington, says Etzioni, is the melting pot: All those who come should leave their native cultures at the

200  Huntington’s Return to Americanism, 1985–2005 door, and learn how to be true Americans.2 Etzioni finds Huntington’s desire to end or limit immigration, renew Anglo-Protestantism as central to the meaning of America, and be forever in national crisis mode problematic. An active attempt to renew Anglo-Protestantism implies the need for “Americanization” type programs for those immigrants who do enter the country. And the necessity of threat and fear leads to a militarization of American society in the interest of generating national solidarity against an other. Etzioni locates this last prescription in Huntington’s earlier work such as the call to readiness in The Clash of Civilizations: The West is put on notice that a globalizing and radical Islam will soon threaten its hegemony. In Who Are We?, it is Mexican immigrants and native-born multiculturalists threatening the cultural hegemony of the Anglo-Protestants. The notion of militarization also evokes ideas present in The Soldier and the State: The Theory and Politics of Civil-Military Relations (1957), a book Huntington wrote as an untenured professor that was so controversial in its support of authoritarian regimes that he was, albeit temporarily, forced out of the Harvard department of political science. Etzioni concludes by turning the table on Huntington: He does have something to fear. What is being threatened is not America, but the Anglo-Protestant “settlers” Huntington has set up as the bearers of culture. Their “control indeed has and is being undermined by immigrants, yet it is not America that is losing power and creed but (as elsewhere in the world)— the settlers” (2005:485). This particular group sees others putting America at risk, but Etzioni argues that they are the ones posing the threat. They do this, he suggests, by seeing the country in terms of themselves versus everyone else. Huntington, knowingly or unknowingly, depicted this division clearly when he argued that America is a settler nation, not a nation of immigrants. The veracity of such a claim is beside the point, but what is clear is the early construction of an “us” versus “them” national psychology, which, for these settler elites (not the anti-national ones), the power resides with the “us.” That power has surely been diminished, and as such, Huntington is feeling the pinch. His mistake, by Etzioni’s account, is to have projected his group-specific fears onto the entire nation, and thereby misjudged who it is that is being threatened. In laying bare the foundations of Huntington’s imagining of America, Etzioni reveals his own. Like many others who eschew the need for immigrants to erase their pasts, Etzioni supports the notion of pluralism, America as a mosaic: The country “is enriched by a variety of elements of different shapes and colors, but is held together by a single framework . . . As Americans, we are aware of our different origins but also united by a joint future and fate” (2005:482). But Etzioni takes this image one step farther by recognizing that not only can and do many different peoples share a common “framework,” but that over time that framework itself has been both maintained and changed by those who enter anew. This addition of flexibility to the core is remarked upon by many social commentators, but rarely so clearly in relation to an imagining of the country.

Anglo-America Under Review  201 The other sociologist whose response to Huntington’s Who Are We? is under examination here is Douglas S. Massey. Massey is the Henry G. Bryant Professor of Sociology and Public Affairs at Princeton University, and has spent his career studying, among other things, transnational migration and particularly Mexican immigration into the US; he is an authority on the very population of migrants against which Huntington inveighs.3 Massey finds much of Who Are We? to be purely polemical and frequently objectionable. He worries most about non-scholarly reception, lamenting the fact that although the book has been largely lambasted in the academic presses, the general public will remember only that a Harvard professor said that Latin American immigrants were a threat to US national identity and that Mexican people, especially, were ruining the country. With this seed planted in the American mind, people will not ask what policies created such a large and disadvantaged population, or why socioeconomic mobility has become so difficult for anyone outside of the top fifth of the income distribution, or why public services of all sorts, but most particularly education, have deteriorated so appallingly. Instead they will ask politicians how they could have let such an undeserving lot of people into the country. The book lays the foundations for a politics of blaming immigration and immigrants. (2004:548) Massey fears that the complexities of immigration and assimilation will be lost, and an unsurprising response would be, at the very least, a rise in ethnocentrism. Massey certainly recognizes that Huntington discussed more than the problems associated with Hispanic immigration, but worries that will be the take-home message from the book. If Massey is correct, then despite any pleas Huntington might make to the contrary, his book could be used as evidence to bolster xenophobic, nativist movements. Aside from concern about interpretations and mobilization of the book, Massey also takes issue with the substance and story Who Are We? tells. He sees Huntington as a cultural determinist wildly out of step with contemporary scholarship on both culture and identity. As such Massey finds Huntington’s depiction of the ongoing significance and centrality of Anglo-Protestant culture not surprising, but incorrect and even naïve. Huntington, Massey puzzles, seems to have missed the turn in social science where culture was increasingly seen as a response to social environments, not the cause of them. While not all scholars take as hard a line on the relationship between human circumstances and culture as Massey, it remains problematic that Huntington ignores this paradigmatic shift altogether. It is omissions such as this one that lead Massey to claim that, Who Are We? is not a “work of objective social science” at all (544). Regarding Mexican immigration more specifically, Massey rejects Huntington’s conclusion that today’s immigration is utterly different from that of earlier waves. While acknowledging that there are some differences—namely

202  Huntington’s Return to Americanism, 1985–2005 the “linguistic concentration” of immigrants from Latin America—Massey suggests that by and large the new immigrants are following a path strongly reminiscent of that taken by earlier groups. Mexican Americans are learning English, preferring to speak English, and over the generations, replacing daily Spanish-speaking with English-speaking. Since Huntington is aware of this (he cites some of the data), Massey surmises it is the retention of Spanish troubling Huntington. Given the weight Huntington grants to culture, he ostensibly sees retention of Spanish as a rejection of American culture. Such a zero-sum perspective simply does not reflect the reality of immigrants’ attachment to their new country. Massey notes that Huntington also ignores structural factors that have made assimilation—at least via measures of economic and educational attainment—difficult for Mexican immigrants; Huntington blames the immigrants for their slow incorporation. Massey mentions border policies, the loss of well-paying jobs, and the declining quality of America’s system of public education as significant barriers to social mobility. The one structural factor to which Huntington attends, residential segregation, is not, according to Massey, the source of anxiety Huntington suggests. First, it is no worse than it was for Eastern and Southern Europeans at the turn of the twentieth century, and second, at the regional level, it is declining as Mexican immigrants are increasingly settling in all fifty states. Massey says little about Huntington’s larger imagining of America. What he does say, however, shows his disdain for Huntington’s turn to a revival of Anglo-Protestantism as America’s core culture. He notes, for example, that Huntington’s family has its history in precisely the kind of cultural milieu he is arguing in favor of, suggesting an autobiographical element to the story. Huntington has, according to Massey, “magnifie[d] the Anglo-Protestant roots of American culture” in order to make his case (2004:544). For Massey, then, we know that an imagining of America does not begin and end with the culture of the English colonists, but includes many of the contributions made by both early non-English immigrants and natives, and all those who have come since, including Africans. The implications of Massey’s comments are that America is what it is because of its immigrants, not in spite of them. From him, we get an image of pluralism. Reviews expressing a great deal of concern over Huntington’s book were not limited to sociologists. Louis Menand, Harvard professor of American cultural history and author of Pulitzer Prize-winning The Metaphysical Club (2001), finds Huntington’s book overly hysterical, though not surprising or out of step with his previous work. Menand (2004) is critical of Huntington’s use of “culture” when he means ideology, does not see the crisis of national identity that Huntington describes, rejects the idea that multiculturalism is tearing away unity in America, counters Huntington’s claims about the unassimilability of Hispanic immigrants, and chastises Huntington for ignoring the creedal notion—as put forward by no less an American figure than Lincoln on the fields of Gettysburg—of American democracy as

Anglo-America Under Review  203 an experiment, not a dogma. All in all, Menand, an expert on America as a nation and its political culture, dispenses with Huntington’s narrow imagining of America. In placing Huntington’s Who Are We? within the context of his earlier work, Menand is in step with many of the other reviewers. In understanding what motivates Huntington, and in this case the broader, international concerns to which American unity is related, Menand turns to Huntington’s more recent and widely read The Clash of Civilizations (1996). Who Are We?, Menand says, is not about national values per se, but national security and power. National values and national identity matter only as they relate to security and power. Huntington, he tells us, favors a domestic monoculture and a global multiculture. The US should not seek to dominate the world political scene with its values and system but should instead focus on maintaining and even strengthening internal unity. Menand sees Huntington as resurrecting a largely retired argument from the 1990s regarding the ill effects of multiculturalism on American national identity. The logic of this line of reasoning lost its grip following the quick unity that emerged after the attacks of 9/11. The underlying shift that helps explain the relatively easy move to unity was that America’s very diversity—its domestic tolerance and inclusivity—became the most relevant shared core value in the face of external attack. Given this, it is no surprise that Menand describes Huntington’s characterization of multiculturalism as anti-Western as “absurd” (2004:92). Menand also suggests most Americans would not recognize the Anglo-Protestants and their lofty political and philosophical value as what binds them to their country. His depiction of Huntington’s vision of America has a cast that includes essentially two sorts of anti-national villains: deconstructionists who are explicitly anti-national (in Huntington’s understanding) in their rhetoric and globalists who are implicitly anti-national in their inattention to the importance of the nation. Again, Menand dispenses with Huntington’s arguments, exposing legal shifts that led to the “surge” in illegal immigration from Mexico, wondering at the use of the term “deconstructionist” for figures like Bill Clinton, and questioning the conclusion at which Huntington arrives, which suggests that America’s role as a global superpower is bad for national identity. In the end, Menand offers of glimpse of his own worldview, which goes far in explaining his rather negative reception of Huntington’s book. Menand sees no danger in internationalism, and in fact sees isolationism—which he sees in Who Are We?—as precisely what squandered our moment of global support following 9/11, and therefore far more problematic than inclusion and engagement. Where Huntington sees America’s place in the world as under attack, Menand sees the US as part of the global neighborhood where relationships need tending. Rogers M. Smith (2004), the noted political scientist and author of the award-winning Civic Ideals: Conflicting Visions of Citizenship in US History (1999), also has a largely unfavorable response to Who Are We? He

204  Huntington’s Return to Americanism, 1985–2005 documents the shift Huntington made in his thinking about the nation, from being centered around a liberal political creed to a religio-national culture, after the publication of American Politics (1981). As one who believes that in addition to attachment to the liberal creed and republicanism, American identity (and for him, especially American citizenship) has also been strongly shaped in exclusionary terms based on sex, race, religion, and ethnicity, Smith finds both accounts—purely creedal and purely cultural—lacking, but in precisely opposed ways. He claims that with the 1981 publication of American Politics, many scholars—himself included—argued that Huntington was not giving sufficient credence to the importance of race, religion, and sex in the formation of American political identity. By 2004, with the publication of Who Are We?, Huntington has seemingly done a 180-degree turn, agreeing with his earlier critics, and arguing for the significance of alternate, cultural, sources of American identity. In light of the many changes that have taken place in the US from the 1960s onward, Smith suggests that Huntington now “thinks a purely creedal conception of American nationality cannot withstand these ‘deconstructionist’ forces” (2004a:521). Smith argues that American nationalism has changed, and also that a purely abstract political national identity would indeed be too weak. It is largely in the motivation for Huntington’s intellectual conversion and the prescriptions he makes that Smith finds fault. Smith’s major critique is that Huntington’s shift in thinking appears to be driven by an overstated personal fear for the loss of what he thinks of as truly American. He also finds Huntington’s logic regarding assimilation to be flawed. He indicates there is not clear evidence that the slow assimilation of recent immigrants, especially Mexicans, is due to an overwhelming desire to maintain loyalty to their country of origin, one of Huntington’s deepest concerns. Smith also finds that Huntington did not consider the ongoing role of structural barriers such people face when trying to get ahead. It is easy to imagine a long list of the kinds of barriers Smith has in mind: language, low levels of education, few job skills, policies that impede the ability of such individuals to find steady work, less measurable forms of discrimination, the inventory could go on and on.4 Smith takes aim at the way in which Huntington attempts to separate his call for a return to Anglo-Protestant culture from Anglo and Protestant race and religion. He finds it “politically . . . impossible to disentangle . . . ” culture from the race and religion with which it is associated, regardless of Huntington’s personal motives. Smith offers a dispassionate assessment of Who Are We? that finds Huntington’s concerns about and desires for America wanting. We get little explicit sense from Smith as to his own imagining of the country. This is likely because, in writing a more standard book review, we see less of his position explicated. What is clear, though, is that he sees a more complex, less monolithic America then Huntington, and one with multiple sources for its meaning. Civic Ideals, Smith’s major book on American citizenship and identity, marshals volumes of evidence to make precisely that case.

Anglo-America Under Review  205 Francis Fukuyama, renowned scholar and author of The End of History and the Last Man (1992) and currently Olivier Nomellini Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI), resident in FSI’s Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law at Stanford University, wrote a review of Who Are We? that is less critical of Huntington’s arguments than the others discussed thus far. Fukuyama, a former student of Huntington’s, has commented on his professor’s work numerous times, most notably on the former’s The End of History and Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations. The former neoconservative (Fukuyama 2004:online) begins by agreeing with the basic premises of the book, namely that the US is essentially a Protestant country and that that specific form of religion and the cultural values it emphasizes have played a significant role in America’s success as a democracy. Fukuyama claims that for Huntington, Anglo-Protestantism matters not for confessional reasons, “ . . . but rather because they lead to good effects like democracy or development” (2004:online). Fukuyama may be clearer on this than Huntington, nevertheless it is useful in attempting to distance Huntington’s position from one put forward by, for example, religious leaders on the American political right. If Fukuyama is right, then, religion and culture are in some way instrumental. In accepting these core conceptual elements, Fukuyama then places Huntington within a deep scholarly tradition about the US, including such figures as Tocqueville, Louis Hartz, and Seymour Martin Lipset. Like Smith, Fukuyama acknowledges that this is not Huntington’s first foray into this conversation. He also aligns the arguments of the current book with claims made in The Clash of Civilizations regarding what democracy really amounts to; for Huntington democracy is more a product of European Christian culture and societies than an exportable, universal sociopolitical system with unlimited applicability. It is clear that the logic of the former reigns in Who Are We? For the most part, Fukuyama is satisfied with Huntington’s endeavor, seeing it as appropriately scholarly, if limited, in its policy recommendations. He is pleased that someone as judicious as he believes Huntington to be has taken on issues of immigration, “since they deserve serious discussion and should not be left to the likes of Pat Buchanan and worse to promote,” but does not press hard on Huntington’s evidence or conclusions. One area where Fukuyama senses a problem in Huntington’s story is in the discussion of elites and non-elites. It is not that he objects to Huntington’s characterization of elites as cosmopolitan, secular, and non- (if not anti-) nationalist, and non-elites as more patriotic and conservative, but a question of the composition of those groups. Many of the elites that appear as a problem in Huntington’s narrative are the most pedigreed of all the Anglo-Protestants: the blue bloods, WASPs, and Brahmins. The patriotic, hard-working non-elites (signal: the Protestant work ethic), on the other hand, include immigrants from around the world, such as Koreans, Indians, and Mexicans. That Latinos have largely usurped low-skill jobs from native-born blacks across the country is evidence to Fukuyama that they

206  Huntington’s Return to Americanism, 1985–2005 will indeed be successfully assimilated into American life. That they also share values with non-elite Americans out of proportion to earlier immigrant groups that have been successfully incorporated only bolsters that appraisal. One way of reading this critique is to wonder why, given the weight Huntington gives to culture in the book, the aspects of Mexican immigration he worries most about are not cultural, but demographic and geographic. Had he focused more on the shared aspects of culture—religion, emphasis on family, conservatism—the picture that developed may have looked markedly different. Another point of interest, particularly given the larger questions herein, is that Fukuyama indicates that to talk about Hispanics as a singular, monolithic group is to miss the reality of the situation. He discusses one internal divide whereby Hispanic elites are liberal and have expectations of entitlement and non-elites are hard-working, want to assimilate, and want no special favors.5 Huntington seems to discuss all Hispanics as though they share the same attitudes and values as their elites, a position he would vehemently object to as regards native-born Americans, who follow much the same pattern Fukuyama described for Hispanics. In part for these reasons, Fukuyama is much less fatalistic about the future of the US than Huntington. Over a year after the bulk of the reviews of Who Are We? were published, the distinguished political scientist Peter Skerry, a professor at Boston College and senior fellow of the Brookings Institute, wrote a review essay in the November/December 2005 issue of Society.6 Regarding Huntington’s book, Skerry agrees with many of the critics that Huntington is wrong about the anti-Americanism of Mexicans, but rejects as facile the impulse to discount him (and the book) out of hand. In fact, Skerry finds the basic concern at the heart of the book a legitimate one that deserves serious consideration: “that American national identity is undergoing stressful change that should concern even those who regard as inevitable, or even approve of, the forces driving it” (2005:82). Like Huntington, Skerry assumes national identity to be singular, and seemingly prefers that identity to be largely static. As the sociological literature on such identifications as ethnicity, class, and even gender suggests, flexibility is seemingly a hallmark in today’s world and is likely a factor for nations as well. That Skerry thinks everyone should be “concerned” could be read as telling about the way he understands the meaning of America, and where he stands intellectually. Huntington, he tells us, is a career-long Burkean (that is, a “liberal” conservative) who is a “shrewd, self-conscious member of the elite, who presumptively defends the established institutions—not because he is a chauvinist or a racist but because he is preoccupied with the destabilizing effects of change” (82). In other words, despite his elitism, he is not prejudicial towards people, only towards change. Skerry reminds us Huntington also happens to be openly a Democrat who was against the Iraq war. This is to illustrate that Huntington’s conclusions are not driven by a particular right-wing agenda, as cries of xenophobia are apt to suggest. Skerry advises

Anglo-America Under Review  207 that Who Are We? is a book that is “prone to misinterpretation,” and that Huntington is merely pointing to certain possibilities (again, a good example is that of a nativist response to high levels of immigration), not endorsing or condoning them (2005:83). Here he takes a dramatically different position from Etzioni, who found this approach to be deceptive. In seeking to dispel the notion that Huntington is a racist or xenophobe as he is portrayed in many reviews, Skerry draws a flattering comparison to the highly esteemed historian of immigration, John Higham. While Skerry is able to point to particular ideas upon which the two men have similar findings (e.g., that the nativist response of the white working class to immigrants is not irrational), there are differences in tone, sense of apologia, and ultimately, prescription. In each case, Higham does a better job of remaining neutral, detached, and Huntington acknowledges some of his normative claims. Skerry finds other things about both Huntington and Who Are We? to admire. Like other reviewers, Skerry turns to Huntington’s earlier work to offer a more thorough evaluation of Who Are We? In doing so, he sees remarkable consistency, along with an unusually high degree of professional dispassion over Huntington’s long career. In an effort to expose as misguided the frequent claim that Huntington has taken a drastic turn from his emphasis on the creed in American Politics, Skerry argues that in fact the possibility of a shift to a different shared center was foreseen in the 1981 book. He claims that Huntington indicated that although the creed was then the defining factor for American identity, such was not necessarily always going to be the case. This may be so, but Huntington offers little explanation for this change over the course of twenty-three years; why is it that culture has emerged as the new defining factor over even the Creed, and why now? As for the actual substance of Who Are We?, Skerry finds much to agree with and much that would be better left behind. As mentioned, he believes the questions that motivate Huntington’s project are important and worthy of study. He accepts wholeheartedly Huntington’s assertion that Anglo-Protestantism is the core of American culture and American national identity. Skerry recognizes, and even understands, the objections of many critics, but says they have offered little in the way of “equally strong counter-arguments” (2005:86). This may be true, but only as regards a counter-argument putting forward some other ethno-cultural basis for national identity. There is a long history of American discourse claiming that the only basis for American identity is the political creed, of which Huntington was once a part. Equally, there is a strong literature on notions of pluralism and multiculturalism, both of which are statements of American identity, just not the kind Huntington, and perhaps Skerry, prefer. Despite the feeling Skerry’s essay has of defending a colleague, he spends ample time pointing out the problems he sees with the book. Skerry’s critiques center on the issue of the assimilability of Mexican immigrants. For example, he finds that Huntington overstates the importance of immigrant

208  Huntington’s Return to Americanism, 1985–2005 (Mexican) culture—vaguely conceived—in refusing to assimilate, while ignoring the barriers to socioeconomic and educational advancement that slow the way. This structural critique aligns with that suggested by Massey, Etzioni, and others. Skerry also finds that Huntington is simply incorrect about intermarriage—there is more than he suggests, there is more identification with America than he suggests, and there is more residential mobility than he suggests. Huntington ignores the poor quality of social services and educational institutions available to most immigrants, the veritable explosion of the day-labor movement, and the competition for jobs between Hispanics and African Americans in which the former are winning out all across the country because employers find them to be better workers on many counts. Skerry attributes these oversights (!) to Huntington’s emphasis on culture as opposed to institutions. In fact, Skerry’s biggest frustration with the book is that Huntington, who has long written about political institutions, spends so little time doing so here in favor of his heavy emphasis on culture and values. Skerry believes that Huntington’s overall thesis could be better supported by returning to closer study of such institutions (e.g., the role of political machines in integrating previous generations of immigrants, and what will happen now that the political structure is governed by rights groups instead). The problem is that Skerry wishes Huntington had written a different, more political science-y book—one about political institutions and “postmodern policy-making.” But this is where he misses the point: Questions of political science were not the driving force behind Huntington’s Who Are We? Huntington himself explains that he wrote the book as a “patriot and a scholar,” leaving little doubt that his rationale was not purely the kind of rational approach that might have led to the book Skerry imagines. Rather, Huntington was driven by a more personal agenda to make sense of the changes in his beloved nation. Skerry appreciates Huntington’s big questions, and also supports the idea that Anglo-Protestantism is central to (if not necessarily the center of) narratives of America and American national identity, but perhaps gave his colleague too much benefit of the doubt as regards the normative aspects of the book, which he largely denies are there. Examining a conversation (in essays) between Alan Wolfe and Huntington himself brings things full circle, and beautifully illustrates the dialogical nature of the construction, maintenance, and renovation of ideas about American identity. Alan Wolfe, Professor of Political Science and the Director of the Boisi Center for Religion and American Public Life at Boston College, and ubiquitous commentator on the issues addressed by Huntington, wrote a review essay on Who Are We? in Foreign Affairs just a few months after the book’s publication (2004a). Four months later, Huntington responded to Wolfe’s assessment, presumably feeling angry and misinterpreted, and Wolfe was given space to answer back (2004b). That so much space was allocated for the discussion of this book is telling as regards the weight it was granted by the editorial staff of a well-respected academic and policy magazine.

Anglo-America Under Review  209 Wolfe allows that in the past he found Huntington to be a careful scholar and a paragon of realism, regardless of whether he agreed with him. In considering Who Are We?, he, like the other reviewers, looked back to Huntington’s earlier work, including American Politics, and saw a practical, non-ideological approach to looking at American political history and issues of national identity. What he wonders now is why Huntington did not apply the same standard to his work on immigration in the new book. While acknowledging some of the helpful analytical observations Huntington makes regarding structural characteristics that set the current Hispanic (mostly Mexican) immigration apart from previous waves, Wolfe is jarred by what he sees as “moralistic passion—at times bordering on hysteria . . .” (2004:121). He is surprised by this shift in analytical mode, and describes the turn as one from dispassionate belief in the cohesive power of the liberal democratic creed to “romantic nostalgia for Anglo-Protestant culture” as the core of American national identity (2004:121). Wolfe wonders at Huntington’s fear-mongering, and goes so far as to write that “Who Are We? is Patrick Buchanan with footnotes” (2004:121).7 Interestingly, but not surprisingly given his own attentiveness to the role of religion in American society, Wolfe dismantles a premise many commentators seem to have taken for granted as essentially correct: the presence and significance of what Huntington calls Anglo-Protestant culture. He denies Huntington’s claim regarding the centrality of dissenting Protestantism in the early years of the United States, noting that in much of the young country other, non-dissenting Christian denominations held spiritual sway. Even in heavily Puritan New England, Wolfe explains, the dissenting sect soon became so powerful that it functioned as either officially or nominally the established church. Wolfe argues that no singular Protestant religion exists, and therefore, if Huntington’s claim regarding the importance of shared religion to the construction of national identity holds true, there is no singular national identity. Wolfe writes: “There really is no such thing as the Protestant religion; there are many Protestant sects whose ideas on everything from scriptural authority to the role of the liturgy are in conflict. If religion shapes identity, the United States has had many identities because it has had so many religions . . . ” (2004:122).8 Much of Wolfe’s frustration with Who Are We? comes from his belief that as a usually careful and capable scholar, Huntington knows the reality of American religious history, but marshaled his knowledge in ways to avoid dealing with it fully or accurately. It is in part the sense that Wolfe finds Huntington’s story to be disingenuous that motivates his critique about the lack of Huntington’s typical rigor. Wolfe also rejects many of the claims being made regarding the dangers immigrants pose to America. He finds many of Huntington’s claims to be overblown (e.g., the likelihood that Mexico might literally reclaim the Southwest) and out of step with the reality that immigrants—as they have been incorporated into American society—have brought many new ideas and much vibrancy to the US. Wolfe calls on compelling data that illustrate

210  Huntington’s Return to Americanism, 1985–2005 the strong connection many immigrants have toward their new country: whether or not they are willing to fight (and therefore potentially die) for their country. As it turns out, three-quarters of immigrants say they would be willing, compared with eighty-one percent of native non-Hispanic whites who say the same (2004:124). This is hardly the meaningful difference Huntington’s rhetoric might lead one to expect. Like Fukuyama, Wolfe also criticizes Huntington’s arguments regarding the patriotism gap between anti-nationalist elites and more nationalistic ordinary Americans. Wolfe argues that recent non-Anglo-Protestant immigrants make up a sizeable part of that group that is (or at least should be) counted as part of the patriotic masses, and that the anti-national elites Huntington derides are among the most obviously Anglo-Protestant of all Americans. Wolfe seems to be suggesting, by Huntington’s logic, the Boston Brahmins should be great nationalists. It is Wolfe’s final critique that crystallizes what he perceives as the central problem. In his assessment of Huntington’s call for a reinvigorated national culture, Wolfe pinpoints Huntington’s demand for a national culture (which Wolfe understands as being inextricably attached to a particular race or ethnic group, a commonly held connection) as opposed to a national creed, as the fatal flaw of Who Are We? If Huntington had remained committed to his position from American Politics, wherein a set of creedal values serves as a center for America and Americans, Wolfe would be satisfied. The creed, in Wolfe’s perception, can act as a bulwark against nativism and the kind of fear-mongering he senses Huntington leaning toward. It is in his feeling that Huntington actually endorses a nativist response to immigration that Wolfe is the most troubled. Perhaps it was this most pointed set of critiques that enlivened Huntington, because just two issues later, Foreign Affairs published his response to Wolfe’s review in a letter titled “Getting Me Wrong” (2004b). He claims that ultimately, Wolfe misread the book, seeing it as a polemic against immigration rather than as the inquiry into matters of American national identity. Huntington argues that only one chapter is about immigration, and one other is about Mexican immigrants and the Hispanic population in the United States. In fact, the concerns about the unique circumstances of Mexican immigration and what he sees as slow assimilation permeate the text. But in Huntington’s own estimation, Who Are We? is about “the salience and substance of American national identity,” where the salience has varied over time, and the shared substance has dwindled. Both are of concern, but it is the latter that occupies the bulk of the book, with attention to the need for perceived threats to maintain the former. In answering Wolfe’s particular criticisms, Huntington remains at the level of rhetoric and confrontation. Regarding the substance of American identity, Huntington suggests that much of what was shared (at least by those who could claim any power to determine such things) has been lost over time. What remains, though in a diminished form, and this is at the

Anglo-America Under Review  211 heart of the book, is a shared culture and creed that need bolstering. Rather than address Wolfe’s critique about the existence of a single Anglo-Protestant culture that acts as the essence of American identity, Huntington simply reminds the reader that America would be very different had it been settled primarily by people other than the British colonists. He also rejects Wolfe’s point about the seeming contradictions about who is more or less patriotic based upon religious and/or cultural background (i.e., the Brahmins’ anti-nationalism), denies any fatalism with regard to America’s future, and refutes out-of-hand the notion that he harbors an exclusivist ideology about who and what counts as American. For all of these false accusations, Huntington blames Wolfe’s continued need to attach culture to ethnicity, which leads him to misunderstand what Huntington is arguing for. Wolfe does indeed see a strong relationship between culture and ethnicity, as do many major thinkers today. What is harder to see is how Huntington finds a hard line between the two. Yes indeed, there are instrumental elements of ethnicity that are not based on culture, but a firm separation is a stretch. Scholars like Anthony D. Smith (1986) and Eric Kaufmann (2004) have linked the two in clear ways, and anecdotal depictions of ethnic groups and ethnic life corroborate the connection with images of parades, foods, music, and most notably and more deeply, language and religion. Perhaps most telling is Huntington’s assertion that even his non-Protestant friends understand the claim he is making: “When I talk about America’s pervasive Anglo-Protestantism to Jewish friends, a common response is, ‘Of course! I am an Anglo-Protestant Jew!’ ” (Huntington 2004b:158). This sentence draws Wolfe’s ire, with his skepticism about Jews making such a claim: “Most Jews claim to be Jewish. No other sentence in either Huntington’s book or letter reveals the problems of talking about culture rather than creed more than Huntington’s variation on the old saw, ‘But some of my best friends are Jewish.’ And if assimilated Jews might take umbrage at Huntington’s nativism, imagine how Mexican-American Catholics must feel” (Wolfe 2004b:159). Having not polled America’s Jews, it is difficult to know for certain whose depiction is more empirically accurate, but Wolfe’s point is well taken. While it is not difficult to imagine Jews saying that they are American Jews (or Jewish Americans), it is harder to see them claiming to be “Anglo-Protestant Jews.” Both men were given the opportunity to respond to each other’s comments. Wolfe reiterates his critique, while once again signaling a long-felt respect for Huntington. He responds to Huntington’s statement about Jews, and mostly, reinforces his sense that Who Are We? is a position paper of sorts on the threats posed by immigration. In Huntington’s final reply (which repeats an earlier claim that Wolfe’s review is made up in part of “total nonsense”), he simply rejects Wolfe’s reliance on the liberal democratic creed for American unity, comparing such a stance to the ideologically driven regime of the Soviet Union, a deflection of sorts. Huntington rejoinders: “America, in contrast, is happily more than an ideology. It has been

212  Huntington’s Return to Americanism, 1985–2005 and is a community defined by the culture of the founding settlers, including language, religion, customs, legal traditions, and institutions” (2004b:159). Here, Huntington returns to one of the more compelling aspects of his argument, namely that political principles are not enough to generate the kind of attachment to a nation that forms the core of national identification. National narratives are not built solely of principles. National stories are constructed out of experiences, myths, traditions, and political values, but not one or the other alone. It is in requiring a single story that Huntington both misses the mark empirically and reveals his own preferences normatively. Wolfe misses in the other direction by imagining an America solely united by the creed. Such a state of affairs might be possible in a country where culture, ethnicity, race, and religion were held constant, but very few such nations exist, and the United States is obviously not one of these. Before closing the consideration of reviews of Huntington’s book, it is worth mentioning two such pieces that were published in major national newspapers, as opposed to academic journals. Both were written by intellectuals typically cast as conservative, so their responses to Who Are We? would ostensibly be different than those published by the “liberal academics” who dominated the reviews here. Indeed, their responses were different, but not in the anticipated ways. The first appeared in the New York Times prior to the book’s publication, and put its finger on something central to the American experience: It is not the Anglo-Protestant past that binds us together; instead it is a shared vision of the future. David Brooks, the author of this review essay, argued that “History is not cyclical for [Americans]. Progress does not come incrementally, but can be achieved in daring leaps. That mentality burbles out of Hispanic neighborhoods, as any visitor can see” (NYT, 2/24/2004, Op-Ed). Brooks went further to claim that the “real threat” to America would come from any xenophobic move to close the borders, thereby taking away the “new energy, new tastes, and new strivers who want to lunge into the future.” I do not take this to mean that Brooks believes the past does not matter, but instead to mean that in his imagining of America—which may be that shared by many immigrants—one sees opportunity and change as absolutely central to the meaning of the US. The presence of this narrative of possibility is precisely what has brought so many immigrants to the shores of the country, not just the Anglo-Protestant values Huntington upon which Huntington places so much weight. The other review, this one from the Washington Post (5/16/04, washingtonpost.com) by immigration expert and Manhattan Institute senior fellow Tamar Jacoby, also focuses on the wrong-headedness of Huntington’s vision of America. Jacoby, who edited a volume called Reinventing the Melting Pot: The New Immigrants and What It Means To Be American (2004), believes very strongly that immigrants should be integrated wholly into American society, and also that ultimately, their native cultures will do little to change “America” and will fade over time. Her understanding of the melting pot is much like that of Mary Antin and other immigrant autobiographers. Even

Anglo-America Under Review  213 so, she rejects Huntington’s position that America is primarily and at its essence an Anglo-Protestant nation. He seems to have forgotten, she argues, that much of what makes America America is the way the young country revised its Anglo origins, most notably, with the separation of church and state and with egalitarianism in place of a class system. Those changes, together with American democracy, created a nation that could continue to absorb newcomers and make them Americans as it made the “settlers” Americans. In clarifying her story of America, Jacoby chastises Huntington for having so little faith in the America he loves. Regardless of the content of these reviews, what they reveal without question is the variety of ways intellectuals imagine America in the early years of the twenty-first century: Huntington’s vision of an Anglo-Protestant culture, Glazer’s of a pluralistic (multicultural) society, Wolfe’s of a creedal nation, Etzioni’s of a centered multiculturalism that aligns with his communitarianism, and Jacoby’s near-Zangwillian melting pot, represent some of the visions present today. All of these imaginings of America are resonant, because they are all American narratives. Each is the embodiment of the way some Americans understand their country, but none speaks for everyone. Huntington would reject this multiplicity on normative, if not also objective grounds. Clearly he believes there should be a single, agreed-upon national identity and national story. But beyond that, he would claim that all those narratives other than the Anglo-Protestant one he sees as the core of American culture are not actually American. THE MEANING OF AMERICA AT THE DAWN OF THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY Prior to concluding this chapter, let us return to the set of analytical questions also asked regarding both Kallen’s essay and Glazer and Moynihan’s book.

To Whom or What Was Huntington Responding? By and large, it is fair to say that Huntington was responding to a sense of change, and more poignantly of loss, regarding what he considers the core of American national identity and America itself. Objectively, it was the changes brought about by four decades of increased immigration following the seismic shift in policy that was the 1965 Immigration Act, which reversed the restrictionism of the 1929 Act. But it is his response to alternative imaginings of America as mediated by the incorporation of newcomers that really drives Who Are We?, along with responses to it. Huntington explicitly offers a rejoinder to those espousing two schools of thought: cosmopolitan-liberalism and imperial superiority. The former envisions America as something like Etzioni’s mosaic, celebrating the many-ness of America. Additionally, globalization is seen as less

214  Huntington’s Return to Americanism, 1985–2005 problematic (or at least differently problematic), and nationalism is seen as less significant and sometimes a negative as global institutions grow and develop. The latter, imperial superiority, sees America through a neoconservative, interventionist lens. America can remake the world in its image, building democracies wherever necessary for the good of all people. This image is based on a belief in the superiority and universality of its political creed. There are, however, other actors that are targets in Huntington’s writing. Scholars and activists of multiculturalism are to be rejected at all costs as diminishing what is truly America by emphasizing diversity. Multiculturalism as manifested in schools is a particular bugaboo for Huntington, with bilingualism or new rules against celebrating Christian holidays in schools serving as concrete examples. Extremist nativists (i.e., groups like the Ku Klux Klan) are also to be rejected for their radical positions, which ignore the basic rules of democracy. Additionally, Huntington dislikes postmodern scholarship that argues against the importance (or even existence) of meta-narratives. Basically, Huntington is responding to all those who would deny the centrality of Anglo-Protestantism not only in the construction of America and its concomitant identity, but also in its maintenance. Any imagining of American identity that suggests that there either has been or should be significant renovation in that identity and the narrative that accompanies it is in the line of fire.

Were His Questions Being Asked Analytically or Prescriptively? In Who Are We?, Huntington answers this question quite directly in the foreword, when he says “This book is shaped by my own identities as a patriot and a scholar. As a patriot, I am deeply concerned about the unity and strength of my country as a society based on liberty, equality, law, and individual rights. As a scholar, I find that the historical evolution of American identity and its present state pose fascinating and important issues for in-depth study and analysis” (xvii). Not being a newcomer to academic writing and perhaps anticipating the responses to scholarship perceived as normative social science, Huntington acknowledges the potential for problems with such a dual approach, but hopes the evidence he offers is the result of a dispassionate study, all “while warning the reader that my selection and presentation of that evidence may well be influenced by my patriotic desire to find meaning and virtue in America’s past and in its possible future” (xvii).

To the Degree That Ideas Were Presented Prescriptively, How Explicit Was Ideology in His Writing, and What Effect Does This Have on the Way It Was Received and How It Can Be Analyzed? Not surprisingly, given Huntington’s declaration of a strongly personal element in writing this book, the ideology in Who Are We? is ever-present, but sometimes implicit. For example, Huntington repeatedly discusses the

Anglo-America Under Review  215 importance of the presence of an “other” in order to consolidate the “us,” but never, as he had in an earlier book (The Soldier and the State, 1957) glorifies a militaristic value set or argues in favor of reducing democratic principles in favor of more authoritarian ones. Another ideological factor that many readers sense just beneath the surface of the book is a kind of Anglo-Protestant superiority. Huntington does not ever say specifically that Anglo-Protestantism is the best culture, but he does tell, show, and persuade us that from Anglo-Protestant culture emerged the freest, most successful society in the world today. This position yielded many cries of racism and xenophobia, and for many potential readers, tainted the book before the spine was cracked; for some this was a selling point. As to how this affects the way in which the book has been and will be analyzed, there is no question that the prescriptive aspect plays a significant role. As was evident in the above review of reviews, many of those tasked with evaluating Who Are We? seem to take the assignment on with a sense of responsibility to disprove the data and positions offered by Huntington. Others, like Etzioni, see this assignment as futile, and perhaps even a losing battle as it gives Huntington the power of setting the agenda. Etzioni, in fact, takes this question of how to respond to prescriptive works especially seriously (clearly illustrating that this is indeed how he understood the book), and concludes that the most important thing the reviewer must do is unmask the underlying ideology that props up the arguments at hand. Scholars who are more sympathetic, or maybe just more charitable, seemed to find their duty to be in showing where Huntington was right, or at least on to something important (see especially Skerry). If we accept Peter Skerry’s depiction of Huntington’s motives of concern with change, not with people, as correct, then one figure Huntington resembles closely is from the early part of the twentieth century, E. A. Ross.9 Ross, an early sociologist, was what may be called a social order progressive. In 1912, he wrote what may be an ideational predecessor to Who Are We?, a tract called The Old World in the New (1914), where he bemoaned the second-wave immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe as unfit to be Americans. His language was less subtle than Huntington’s, and without a trace of political correctness, but his fears were the same (again, this is if Skerry is correct): The US could not maintain any kind of stability, and therefore could not move forward, so long as this steady stream of newcomers continued to arrive. Regardless of whether or not Huntington is “a racist,” the logic he shares with Ross has him writing in ways that evoke racism and nativism, just as this was true for Ross. It is true that stability is compromised when immigration is ongoing, but whether that impedes “progress” is a question with varying answers, depending upon the specific question and who’s being asked. Despite the similarities to Ross in their concerns about order and stability, one would be unlikely to call Huntington a social order progressive, but perhaps a social order conservative instead. So what does this mean? When reviewers feel compelled to deal with the prescriptive features of the book up front, the meaning of the book, along

216  Huntington’s Return to Americanism, 1985–2005 with its inherent successes and failures, is likely to get lost in name-calling, justifications, and politicization. It also means the book may be isolated from the other literature with which it is in conversation. All of the reviewers spent time looking to Huntington’s earlier work, but none put him in conversation with liberals (like Smith 1997), multiculturalists (like Takaki 1993), or the new nativists (like the Southwestern border’s Minutemen), or with the much longer historical discourse on these issues. This is the goal here: to show that what Huntington fears is not new, and his response did not emerge in an intellectual vacuum. Rather, there is a whole history of fear—rational or irrational—of the societal-level changes a changing population will bring. By focusing so much on whether or not Huntington is a racist or an authoritarian, or whether he is intellectually consistent, we miss that he is part of a larger conversation, one with a long history, about the meaning of America. By putting him in the broader context of that conversation, we can minimize the sense of anxiety he might otherwise evoke.

How Have His Ideas Shaped Future Discourse? It is difficult at this point to project what effect, if any, Huntington’s ideas as expressed in Who Are We? will have on future discourse regarding the relationship between assimilation and national identity, given how recently the book was published. The veritable flood of reviews and responses suggest that in some way the book matters. One possibility, given the predominance of negative assessments within academia, is that studies will be undertaken in an effort to better understand the impact immigrants, and particularly Mexican immigrants, are having on American society. A second is that a political scientist may take up Peter Skerry’s call and examine the changing structure of political institutions and attempt to learn what role that shift plays in the process of integration of immigrants. Another is that more sociologists may further take up the relationship between immigration, assimilation, and national identity, which thus far has remained little discussed in that discipline. And a fourth prospect is that people could be so turned off by the polemical tone of Who Are We? that they will steer clear of studies of national identity altogether to avoid the kinds of accusations—he’s a liberal multiculturalist, or she’s a conservative nativist!—that seem to be attached to such work. An outside-the-academy prospect that rings rather differently is that named by Massey in his review: the use of Huntington’s rhetoric by those “concerned” about immigration, and Latin American immigration in particular. This would be the mobilization of Huntington’s book by twenty-first-century nativists. CONCLUSION Ultimately, Who Are We? is two stories under the cover of one book. Huntington tells the story of the role of Anglo-Protestantism (and

Anglo-America Under Review  217 Anglo-Protestants, at least initially) in the construction, maintenance, and renovation of America. This account is personal, nostalgic, and perhaps for those reasons, compelling on the face of it. Questions of accuracy abound, but for those who feel he is describing them and their history in the US, it is a tale of holding on to “what matters.” He also tells the story of Mexican immigration, the slow assimilation of these new residents, and the fears he has about the changes they will bring to the US. It is when he puts the two narratives together that the normative, prescriptive elements begin to outweigh the empirical and objective, and space for criticism and frustration from readers expands quickly. Reviewers and others who cite the book have legitimate critiques about both stories, but to my mind the weakness of the project as an academic treatise was the desire Huntington had to connect them in a prescriptive way. This made immigrants a clear scapegoat for the diminution of a near-primordial American unity, and led to the parts of the book that read the most histrionic and exclusivist, perhaps even nativist. Without question, a strong case can be made for the importance of Anglo-Protestant culture on the development of the US and its institutions. Equally, a case can be made for scholarly investigation into what makes the new Latin American immigration to the US different from previous waves. It is where a scholar or thinker goes from there that leads to the particular responses described here. Huntington’s hysteria over remote possibilities like Mexico reclaiming parts of the Southwest contribute to a certain difficulty in taking the book seriously. Yet it would be a mistake to belittle the story he’s telling; it is one that many Americans believe and respond to. The story of America Huntington offers is one that serves as a counterpoint for those not enamored of bilingualism in their children’s schools, of taxpayer dollars going to health care for immigrants, and of elites who seem out of touch with ordinary Americans’ lives. In other words, true, half-true, or false, Huntington’s story hits at a gut-level for many people, and offers one of many available American identities. The book also tells a story about the importance of external others. Huntington walks up to the line of wishing for wars (or at least particular kinds of major international crises) in order to promote the kind national unity to which he would have America return (e.g., pp. 16, 177, 199, 260, 361). In the absence of such events from the end of Vietnam and going up until September 11, 2001, a new vision of America, one that promoted the benefits of diversity and equality seemingly took hold, and intellectual elites, says Huntington, lost their confidence in earlier national stories.10 Again, the failure of imagination is his, in that he simply cannot see (or will not accept) the possibility of values such as diversity being part of America’s story, or even the notion that simply the presence of an “other,” not necessarily an actual war, could have the same unifying effect. He bemoans the shift toward organizations promoting ethnic group identity and the increased promotion of diversity in schools, and utterly decries the development of dual citizenship and transnationalism. Assimilation, he concludes, no longer means what it used to, and in fact, he sees three alternatives having

218  Huntington’s Return to Americanism, 1985–2005 emerged in American society: segmented assimilation, nonassimilation, and hyphenation (2004:220). All three are currently present, and none satisfies Huntington. We can see, however, from the reviews of the Who Are We? that other narratives of America are present. Some scholars continue to find the essence of America in its liberal democratic creed, others in its history of inclusion and diversity, and others still in its future orientation, its ability to include newcomers without demanding the forfeiture of native culture, its economic potential. From the beginning of the twentieth century onward, multiple stories of America have been present. Without question, some are more compelling than others, some captured by the voice of politicians, others that of businessmen, immigrants, or regional groups. The point is all are American stories that make national-level claims; they want to argue that the way they see America is, or should be, the way everyone sees it. But to make the claim that one of these stories is the only one neglects lived reality. Like the Rashomon effect, a psychological phenomenon that describes the way in which subjectivity leads to equally plausible accounts of the same event, our past and present circumstances; religious, racial, and ethnic backgrounds; systems of belief; and other such factors allow for the coexistence of multiple national stories, all of which make valid claims about the meaning of America. Might some national narratives be better in terms of the creation of policies that will allow the US to maintain its role as the lone superpower? Absolutely. Might others be better in terms of allowing all Americans (Anglo-Protestant by birth or not) to reach their fullest potential? Absolutely. But deciding which of these, among many other concerns, matters most and then choosing and elevating the national story that fits best is not the job of social scientists like Huntington, Glazer, or Kallen, but of policy-makers, politicians, and Americans as citizens. Conversation about the meaning of America will go on indefinitely, because the factors that determine national stories will continue to vary and people will continue to champion the ones that they see as best or most accurate. But perhaps what is most interesting is how consistent the conversation has been over the twentieth century once cultural pluralism became part of the discussion. Versions of Anglo-conformity (Anglo-Protestantism), the melting pot, and cultural pluralism (multiculturalism or the mosaic) have dominated the dialogue. Emphasis has shifted in part because of structural factors like immigration rates and foreign affairs, but perhaps also for less tangible reasons. Twentieth-century American national identity, then, may be understood as contingent within a framework of consistency. NOTES 1 Though the latter is largely out of the purview of this study, it is worth noting that an eminent scholar like Etzioni would take such a public and personal stand against another eminent scholar, Huntington, and his most recent book. Etzioni compares Who Are We? to other tracts he considers

Anglo-America Under Review  219 quasi-social science such as The Bell Curve (Herrnstein and Murray 1994), writing that these books, among a few others, purport to be scholarship but “actually appeal to, reinforce, and help to legitimate one form of prejudice or another” (477). In answering his own question about the appropriate academic response to such texts, Etzioni decides that they should be reviewed, but that the ideological bases that underlay the analyses must be revealed.  2 What Etzioni calls the melting pot is typically characterized as Anglo-conformity or Americanization.  3 See Beyond Smoke and Mirrors: Mexican Immigration in an Age of Economic Integration (2002), which won the Otis Dudley Duncan Award in social demography in 2004.  4 These barriers represent the same structural factors pointed to by several other reviewers, including Etzioni, Massey, and Peter Skerry.   5 There are certainly other intra-group distinctions within the broad classifications of Hispanic and Latino. The reality that this “group” encapsulates people from so many countries, which also all have internal sources of diversity speaks volumes. The one mentioned here differentiating between Latino elites and non-elites is one that aligns with the kinds of distinctions Huntington makes about Americans more broadly.  6 An interesting aside: Skerry was once the Legislative Director for Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan. Moynihan, of course, is studied here for his co-authorship of Beyond the Melting Pot.   7 This comment is especially interesting when taken alongside Francis Fukuyama’s (2004) statement that Huntington was a much more dispassionate, analytical voice on immigration than a figure like Buchanan would be.   8 It is worth noting that Wolfe’s conclusion drawn from Huntington’s conceptualization of national identity points to an outcome similar to that proposed here: the presence of multiple national stories.   9 Ross is discussed in some detail in Chapter 3 regarding his role as the foil for Horace Kallen’s article, “Democracy Versus the Melting-Pot.” Skerry’s review essay does not include any mention of Ross as an ideological forebear to Huntington. 10 One could certainly make the case that the Cold War was a significant enough international crisis to yield the us-vs.-them mentality Huntington is saying is necessary, but it apparently was not over time; it was too distant. We could imagine the kinds of reasons this might be the case to include the fact that, by and large, very few lives were in obvious danger on a day-to-day basis in anything like the battles of a conventional war, and with the exceptions of occasional flare-ups, it was mostly in the background of Americans’ everyday lives.

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220  Huntington’s Return to Americanism, 1985–2005 Eller, Jack and Reed Coughlan. 1996 (1993). “The Poverty of Primordialism” in Ethnicity. Edited by J. Hutchinson and A. Smith. Oxford: Oxford Paperbacks. Etzioni, Amitai. 2005. “The Real Threat: An Essay on Samuel Huntington.” Contemporary Sociology 34(5): 477–485. Fukuyama, Francis. 2006 (1992). The End of History and the Last Man. New York: Free Press. Fukuyama, Francis. 2006. “After Neoconservatism.” The New York Times. February 19, 2006. Fukuyama, Francis. 2004. “Identity Crisis: Why We Shouldn’t Worry About Mexican Immigration.” Slate Magazine, posted June 4, 2004. Glazer, Nathan and Daniel P. Moynihan. 1970 (1963). Beyond the Melting Pot: The Negroes, Puerto Ricans, Jews, Italians, and Irish of New York City. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. Glazer, Nathan. 2004. “Review of Who Are We?” Education Next, Fall 2004: 80–82. Glazer, Nathan. 1997. We Are All Multiculturalists Now. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Gleason, Philip. 1980. “American Identity and Americanization,” Harvard Encyclopedia of American Ethnic Groups. Edited by Stephen Thernstrom. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Grant, Madison. 1918 (1916). The Passing of the Great Race, or the Racial Basis of European History. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons. Hartz, Louis. 1991 (1955). The Liberal Tradition in America. San Diego: Harcourt Brace & Company. Herrnstein, Richard J. and Charles Murray. 1994. The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in America. New York: Free Press. Hing, Bill Ong. 2004. Defining America through Immigration Policy. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Huntington, Samuel P. 2004a. Who Are We? The Challenge to America’s National Identity. New York: Simon & Schuster. Huntington, Samuel P. 2004b. “Huntington and Wolfe respond ‘Credal Passions’.” Foreign Affairs 83(i5): 155–158. Huntington, Samuel P. 1996. The Clash of Civilizations and the Making of the New World Order New York: Simon & Schuster. Huntington, Samuel P. 1981. American Politics: The Promise of Disharmony. Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Huntington, Samuel P. 1957. The Soldier and the State: The Theory and Politics of Civil-Military Relations. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press. Jacoby, Tamar. 2004a. Reinventing the Melting Pot: The New Immigrants and What It Means to be American (edited volume). New York: Basic Books. Jacoby, Tamar. 2004b. “Rainbow’s End: A Renowned Student of America’s Maladies Detects a New Threat to Our Identity.” The Washington Post. March 16: BW03. Kallen, Horace M. 1998 (1924). Culture and Democracy in the United States. New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers. Kallen, Horace M. 1915. “Democracy Versus the Melting-Pot.” The Nation. February 18 and 25. Kaufmann, Eric P. 2004. The Rise and Fall of Anglo-America. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Lind, Michael. 1995. The Next American Nation: The New Nationalism and the Fourth American Revolution. New York: Simon & Schuster. Lipset, Seymour Martin. 1967. The First New Nation: The United States in Historical and Comparative Perspective. Garden City: Doubleday. Massey, Douglas S. 1999 (1995). “The New Immigration and Ethnicity in the US,” in Majority and Minority. Edited by N. R. Yetman. Boston: Allyn and Bacon.

Anglo-America Under Review  221 Massey, Douglas S. 2004. “Review of Who Are We?” Population and Development Review 30(i3): 543–548. Massey, Douglas S. and Nancy A. Denton. 1993. American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Menand, Louis. 2004. “Patriot games: The new nationalism of Samuel P. Huntington.” The New Yorker, May 17, 2004 (posted online May 10, 2004). Menand, Louis. 2001. The Metaphysical Club. New York: Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux. Riis, Jacob A. 1970 (1902). The Making of an American. New York: Macmillan. Ross, Edward Alsworth. 1914. The Old World in the New: The Significance of Past and Present Immigration to the American People. New York: The Century Company. Skerry, Peter. 2005. “What Are We to Make of Samuel Huntington?” Society, ­November/December: 82–91. Smith, Anthony D. 1998. Nationalism and Modernism. London: Routledge. Smith, Anthony D. 1986. The Ethnic Origins of Nations. Oxford: Blackwell. Smith, Rogers M. 2004. “Review of Who Are We?” Political Science Quarterly 119(3): 521–522. Smith, Rogers M. 1997. Civic Ideals: Conflicting Visions of Citizenship in US History. New Haven: Yale University Press. Smith, Rogers M. 1993. “Beyond Tocqueville, Myrdal, and Hartz: The Multiple Traditions in America.” American Political Science Review 87(3): 549–566. Smith, Rogers M. 1988. “The ‘American Creed’ and American Identity: The Limits of Liberal Citizenship in the United States.” Western Political Quarterly 41(2): 225–251. Steiner, Edward A. 1914. From Alien to Citizen: The Story of My Life in America. New York: Fleming H. Revell Company. Takaki, Ronald. 1993. A Different Mirror: A History of Multicultural America. New York: Little, Brown and Company. Taylor, Charles. 1994. “The Politics of Recognition.” Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics of Recognition. Edited by Amy Gutmann. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Tocqueville, Alexis de. 2003 (1835). Democracy in America. New York: Penguin Classics. Wolfe, Alan. 2004a. “Native Son: Samuel Huntington Defends the Homeland.” Foreign Affairs 83(i3): 120–125. Wolfe, Alan. 2004b. “Huntington and Wolfe respond ‘Credal Passions’.” Foreign Affairs 83(i5): 158–159. Zangwill, Israel. 1915 (1909). The Melting Pot Drama in Four Acts. New York: Macmillan Company.

Conclusion The Meanings of America

Unity and Union tend to be talismanic words in nations, institutions, committees, families, and other forms of social organization; yet their use often serves to deflect the impertinent questions of whose unity and blurs the distinction between agreement and acquiescence, consensus and hegemony, reconciliation and domination. Wilfred M. McClay (1994:13) Beyond the accidents of history, one suspects, is the reality that human groups endure, that they provide some satisfaction to their members, and that the adoption of a totally new ethnic identity, by dropping whatever one is to become simply American, is inhibited by strong elements in the social structure of the United States. It is inhibited by a subtle system of identifying, which ranges from brutal discrimination and prejudice to merely naming. It is inhibited by the unavailability of a simple ‘American’ identity. Glazer and Moynihan (1970:xxxiii)

What is America? What does America mean to its millions of residents? Though the political element of American national identity is universalistic and inclusive, the cultural element is not. While citizenship—the heart of political identity in the US—bestows the same rights and responsibilities upon all who legitimately claim it, no unified American culture offers an agreed-upon national story for all to share. There are aspects of the national story, mainly those embodied in the Creed—freedom, democracy, individualism, perhaps even meritocracy—that transcend the categories of politics and culture. Even these, though shared as proper objectives for all, are often contested on the ground. That is, certain groups find that they are less able than others to pursue the life and happiness and freedoms guaranteed them by the Declaration of Independence. The inequalities that persist in the United States play an important role in the existence and persistence of the multiple imaginings of America. For immigrants today, alongside many natives, the notion that America is and must remain Anglo-Protestant in its culture is both unreasonable and unlikely. For many working-class Americans, especially whites, but not

The Meanings of America  223 exclusively so, the image of an infinitely diverse nation that pays little homage to its origins is misguided at best, dangerous at worst. For others still, the story of America as a melting pot, where everyone will lose her past and transform into something altogether new is equally distressing and implausible. For most of the twentieth century, and into the beginning of the twenty-first, the three dominant narratives of America, broadly conceived, have been Anglo-conformity, pluralism, and the melting pot. Anglo-conformity has taken forms both extremist, in the guise of nativism and eugenics, and pragmatic, in the form of Americanization programs. Pluralism has been formulated as cultural, ethnic, racial, and religious, and has been understood to function both within the context of a shared political community and as the structure of separate communities in a shared geographic space. The melting pot, perhaps the most slippery of these imaginings, has been variously proposed as the radical transformation of all Americans, to a relatively benign Anglo-conformity where all immigrants transform into some idealized “American” who most strongly resembles natives of Northern and Western European descent. From 1915 to 2005, America has been many things. In the late 1910s and early 1920s, sentiment was broadly opposed to the ongoing high rates of immigration. A nativist Anglo-conformist vision of America was mobilized to push for restrictionist legislation. In 1924 this movement won success with the passage of the National Origins Law. Following WWII, America was thriving; the economy was growing exponentially as was the country’s role in the world. The children of immigrants from early in the century moved with their parents to the suburbs and attended public schools; they were, for the most part, functionally assimilated. During this time, a general belief in the story of America as a melting pot that could absorb the diversity of individuals grew in strength. In fact, the conviction that America had such transformative power, along with the dramatically decreased numbers of immigrants and a reputation for racism from the international community, likely informed the next major shift in policy, a reversal of the National Origins Law, which came in 1965. Very few, if any, commentators expected the degree of change that was coming, not only in numbers, but also in the composition of the immigrant population. When the post-1965 immigrant population was revealed to be largely non-European, and in fact mostly Asian and Latin American, concerns began to re-emerge. At the same time, the ethos of the civil rights movement had arrived, and the place of multiculturalism became increasingly prominent. Ethnic studies courses and majors on university campuses and multicultural curricula in public schools became ever more the norm. This served only to fuel the growing discontent among those who believed there was, in fact, one “true” America, those espousing Anglo-conformist rhetoric of all degrees.

224  Conclusion This story, then, the story of American stories, ends in 2005, not so far from where it began in 1915. Immigration rates in 2005 were high. Many Americans, and not only those with Anglo-Protestant heritage, feel threatened by newcomers, or at least bothered by the changes they perceive all around them. These various positions—Anglo-conformist, pluralist, and melting pot—have often found their ideas being shouted by intellectuals who make arguments about what America should be. Such normative claims are mostly eschewed by the professoriate today, but that is not always the case. In the first half of the century, it was not uncommon for scholars to have public opinions about whether or not assimilation (or acculturation) was a positive thing, and what it meant for the country. By the middle of the century, however, professionalization had changed the academy. Sociology, as a discipline, increasingly shunned work with a strong normative cast in favor of more positivistic analyses. This led to a significant shift in work on assimilation, away from studies describing the situation of immigrant and minority groups and offering prescriptive measures, toward studies that showed patterns of assimilation (or non-assimilation) and sought to explain those trends. This led not to the oft-discussed value neutrality preferred by the new social scientific regime, but to a burying of the ideologies upon which the various researchers were basing their work. For those working in other fields, explicit analyses of multiculturalism, which virtually heralded its value, were quite de rigueur. At the same time, group-specific fields of study grew rapidly, such that many campuses now include African-American Studies, Asian Studies, Jewish Studies, and Latin American Studies, among others. CONCLUDING THE STUDY What all of this reveals is that nations—at least the US—are not nearly so singular as much of the literature about them might suggest. They are, instead, moving targets, that, like so much else in the social world, are complex, multiple, and contingent. This is not to say that there are no elements of American national identity that are stable—there are. But this does not diminish the reality that nations, like so many social formations, are processual, not static, and that there are several important, real narratives that qualify as national. Even if we were to make the argument that America has always been a pluralistic society, what kind of pluralism—cultural, ethnic, racial, religious—mattered most at different moments would simply reaffirm the shifting nature of what has meaning in any given context. This study incorporated multiple levels. At the most empirical level, using interpretive discourse analysis this study has illuminated the meanings of America present in intellectual dialogue about immigration, assimilation, and the nation from the 1910s through 2005. Having brought together an unlikely cast of primary players—Kallen, Glazer and Moynihan, and

The Meanings of America  225 Huntington—I have revealed a clear pattern of shifting dominance and of multiplicity in national stories. The second level is implicit in the first: I established the relationship between discourse on assimilation and the construction, maintenance, and renovation of national identity, such that talk about one has implications for the way the other is understood, and vice versa. The last level takes two theoretical directions. The first of these is to offer to the theoretical literature on nations a more flexible accounting of the nation and of national identity. Nations are not monolithic or monocultural, nor are they static. Nations are continually re-conceived in part through national conversations about topics like immigration and assimilation. The second is to bring the nation back into the sociological literature on assimilation. Social scientific writing on assimilation used to have something to say about immigration and America as a whole. More recently it has become a narrow subfield dedicated to looking at trends and outcomes for specific groups and for subsequent generations. This research is important and smart, but there is more. Assimilation matters to all Americans because it, or at least the idea of it, has a great deal to say about how the nation is conceived of in the first place. Looking at elite-level discourse on assimilation across nearly a century is instructive. We can see that while some narratives of what should happen to immigrants have been in place for the entire period (if not longer), some have been revised, others have emerged, and others still have gone and returned. We can see what sociohistorical trends are related to the rise or fall of these visions of America, and as a result, can make tentative claims about the relationship between structural factors and the cultural construction of national identities. That is, national stories have to find traction for their meanings to be relevant, and the way this happens is by drawing upon the context of the day. If immigration levels are high, if threats to the country are tangible, chances are good that Anglo-conformist sentiment will gain strength. If the reverse is true, imagining America as a melting pot, a crucible within which immigrants lose their native characteristics and become truly American, is much easier. If renovations in national stories—big or small—are related to context, then nations must be reconceived as both multiple and flexible, instead of monolithic and static. Let us briefly reconsider our three central stories.

Nativism and Kallen’s Challenge One of the major problems nearly all of the commentators had at the turn of the twentieth century was a conflation of the competing positions regarding immigrants, assimilation, and America. In part, this may have been an analytical tactic to simplify—and then discount—the opposition. Doing this, however, only complicated the terms of a critical debate about how America was going to deal with immigrants of the second wave. Kallen, for example, reduced the melting pot idea to a kind of Anglo-conformity,

226  Conclusion thereby dismissing the revolutionary element of Zangwill’s proposal, and skipping ahead to his true foil, the nativist E. A. Ross. This allowed Kallen to clearly differentiate his position—cultural pluralism—from those already established. The reality is that even within each broadly conceived category of American narratives, variation is present. Kallen was battling any and all positions that demanded the loss of native culture for immigrants, and therefore the distinctions between Anglo-conformity and melting pot ideologies mattered little to him; he simply saw something different from his own imagining, and something that genuinely troubled him. Eric Kaufmann (2004) has made a valuable contribution to thinking about American identity, especially in considering the first part of the twentieth century. In essence, he argues that, in part because of thinkers like Kallen, but mainly because of an internal divide in ideas about liberalism, an “internecine schism” within the majority group signaled the decline of the WASP majority nearly half a century prior to the Civil Rights movement. Kaufmann suggests that the ideological hegemony of Anglo-Saxonism and Americanism was waning as early as the 1930s, and a space for ideas like cultural pluralism was opening up. In later decades, then, these notions—ideas like Kallen’s—were already in the air, ready to be drawn upon.

Glazer and Moynihan’s New Pluralism The intervention into the assimilation literature made by Glazer and Moynihan (1963) was in many ways quite different from that by Kallen fifty years prior. First off, Glazer and Moynihan were not responding to as aggressive a stance by ideological opponents. While World War II had indeed led to a strong sense of national unity on the home-front, the ideologies that were employed were built to counter European totalitarianism, not racially distinct immigrants. As such the dominant ideologies of the 1950s-1960s were not part of the same kind of internal hostile rivalry as those presented by nativists early in the century. Immigration was not a “problem” in the way it had been at the turn of the twentieth century. Rather, unity, a liberal, political-social unity, as opposed to a racial-cultural unity, was the Americanism of the day.1 Glazer and Moynihan’s position regarding ethnic pluralism, then, was in some ways part of a different conversation. They were not so much joining a discussion about immigration and assimilation among temporal peers as they were entering a long-running dialogue among topical peers. Even so, it was clear that Beyond the Melting Pot hit a cultural nerve as it made major waves upon publication. Their study also had quite different purposes than Kallen’s essay. For Glazer and Moynihan, while there were certainly applied implications—some of which were not made explicit until the 1970 introduction—the real intention may have been to ignite a new academic field: ethnic studies. For Kallen, the purpose had been much more explicitly a project of national-level social engineering, such that the basic and primary structures and institutions affecting people’s lives would be reconsidered.

The Meanings of America  227

Huntington’s New Nativism Huntington’s (2004) contribution to American intellectual discourse on assimilation and national identity is, in many ways, much more like that made by Kallen then that by Glazer and Moynihan. He is not making a purely scholarly argument about theories and outcomes, but likewise he is not presenting only his opinion; he does some of both, as a scholar and a patriot. Like Kallen, Huntington was responding directly to the sociohistorical context of the turn of a century. It happens that in both cases, talk of immigration and foreign affairs dominated the national scene at the time of their writing. Also like Kallen, while actual policy prescriptions are few, it is obvious Huntington has a clear social vision that he would like to see realized in order to rescue his imagining of America. Huntington wants to see a reinvigorated Anglo-conformist narrative that reminds Americans of the cultural and religious roots which he contends make them different from other nations. On the opposite side of the coin, Kallen offered a narrative that showed that what made America different was the way the country dealt with diversity of origins. For Kallen, the recognition of pre-American origins for people’s ability to create positive self-understandings within such a vast nation was, in fact, what made America unique, not an essentialist national identity like those present in European nation-states. The story of the meanings of America, then, is one with a narrative arc linked closely with patterns of immigration to the US. In the early years of the twentieth century, the US was experiencing an influx of immigrants that was dramatically changing the composition and character of American cities and towns. By the 1910s, Europe was erupting into conflict. During this period, concerns about the changes at home and fears about engagement in the world drove a dialogue that, among other issues, had a great deal to say about how the US should handle newcomers. Should they be allowed to come? To maintain their native cultures? Should they be “Americanized” via educational programs? These questions and the answers given to them were motivated by concerns at multiple levels. Social order progressives, for example, felt the way for America to be stabilized—a necessary condition for progress—was to restrict the entry of immigrants. Conservative nativists agreed, but also thought a program was needed to forcibly eliminate cultural practices and connections to the immigrants’ countries of origin. Some went even further, proposing programs of the quasi-science eugenics. A few thinkers, most notably Kallen, argued that immigrants should absolutely be able to retain their cultures, so long as they identified as Americans politically and participated in civic life. There were, of course, other views, including Zangwill’s melting pot, which would have had all Americans changing—not only the newcomers. Embedded in each of these positions is an imagining of America containing a normative position. By the middle of the century, with two world wars behind it and a new status as an international power, America was a very different place. In addition to its changed role in the world, America had also undertaken

228  Conclusion dramatic domestic policies that had an impact on the nation in ways relevant to this study. The most significant of these policies was the enactment of the National Origins Law in 1929.2 Coupled with the depression of the 1930s and World War II, the new immigration policy helped in drastically reducing the number of immigrants. In the 1950s, with low numbers of newcomers and a booming economy, it became clear that the US needed to respond to international and domestic criticism of its racially based immigration restrictions. Immigration policy was revised, this time more focused on excluding those of potentially dangerous ideologies, although origins exclusions remained. In the midst of the Cold War, the obvious ideological offender was communism, but atheism was also a target. Around the same time another set of concerns, this time the upsurge in Mexican immigration, was rising, and limitations were put on the number that could enter through the Southern border. These limitations played a critical role in the rise of illegal immigration: As restrictions on legal immigration were put into place, the same gross number of immigrants yielded an increase in those who would now be categorized as illegal. The significance of this shift would come to fruition in the decades to come. In 1965, after years of lobbying on the part of presidents and congressmen, a bill was passed overturning the National Origins Act. This would become a turning point in the story of American narratives in the twentieth century. In the 1950s American national identity was fairly unified against the ideology of the Soviet Union, as opposed to being internally contested to the same degree as earlier periods. It helped that the economy was great, veterans benefits were substantial, the divorce rate was low, and wages kept up with inflation; people could feel good about being American. By the 1960s, that emphasis was changing as domestic affairs came to the fore. With the burgeoning civil rights movement and internal objections to Vietnam, and some turns in the trends just mentioned, questions about the meaning of America resurfaced. It was at about this time that questions about the incorporation of immigrants and minorities began increasing in frequency within the academy. Milton Gordon studied whether and how assimilation was taking place. Scholars in the tradition of the Chicago School examined the effects of race on urban life. Glazer and Moynihan made a compelling case against the inevitability of assimilation. Once again, particular understandings of America were at play in all of the new investigations, illustrating the multiplicity of stories making claims at the national level. After the 1965 change in immigration policy, rates of immigration began to rise. Perhaps as important as the rise itself was the fact that the vast majority of new immigrants were Latin or Asian. By the close of the twentieth century, Mexican immigration, and more specifically, illegal immigration, had become a major domestic issue. Concerns about English-language adoption and about supporting a population of non-taxpaying residents with education and health care dominated discourse, especially in the Southwest. Then came the devastation of September 11, 2001. While the threat of

The Meanings of America  229 terrorism, particularly radical Islamic terrorism, was not actually new, for many Americans it only became tangible as the towers of the World Trade Center collapsed that morning. A new “other” crystallized. Once again at a time of crisis, as at the turn of the twentieth century, the national conversation about the meaning of America went into high gear as the new millennium began. Even in 2015, in the public sphere, multiculturalists clash with the new nativists. The former insist that respect for diversity is at the core of American values while the latter contend that the overwhelming diversity now present in the US is leading to a loss of what is uniquely American. Both sides claim that their position yields the success—in business, geopolitics, science—to which Americans have become accustomed. In many incarnations of that conversation there is little room for middle ground, and again, as was the case one hundred years earlier, strongly stated positions such as these can make for strange bedfellows. Intellectuals like Huntington (who defined his political affiliation as Democratic), for example, found themselves aligned with extremist groups and neoconservatives alike regarding certain concerns about immigration. Huntington’s plea may have been worded in a more scholarly manner, but the central issue is the following: Mexican immigration is qualitatively and quantitatively different than previous waves and is dangerous to America. There is a sense that whatever the consensus among Americans about needing to stop, or at least slow, immigration, and there is considerable popular consensus on this, that multiculturalism has already won the day.3 Empirically, or at least demographically speaking, that appears accurate—for now. But the questions animating this study are not demographic. I have not asked how many whites or Mexicans or Asians or blacks there are; rather I have asked, what is the meaning of America? What I found were multiple narratives and the sociohistorical factors that brought them to life. There are many stories that define the meaning of America. A century’s worth of discourse has shown unequivocally that multiple stories of America exist and have existed for a long time. Additionally, I have demonstrated that national stories, the frameworks within which people live their lives as citizens and residents, both reflect and affect their sociohistorical moments. That is, material conditions affect the construction of ideals, as ideals simultaneously affect the material world. At certain moments, certain narratives take hold of the popular imagination more firmly: When rates of immigration are especially high, visions of a unified, traditional nation are appealing to those who fear change or competition. To those who feel America has embraced their differences, visions of an open, inclusive nation may feel more “true.” When an ideology of pluralism is dominant, immigrants may feel, and therefore find, that America is open to them. When an ideology of nativism holds sway, the grounded experience of newcomers would almost certainly be less positive. Another finding is that the presence of national stories provides a structure within which subsequent generations can interpret their own situations.

230  Conclusion The words used—nativism, melting pot, pluralism, Anglo-Protestantism, multiculturalism—do not stand alone as isolated utterances. This language is part of a long-standing national conversation about who and what counts as American. Thus, when a scholar attempts to use the term “nativism” in a neutral way, for those schooled on the issue, there is dissonance. Nativism is not, in the history of discourse about immigration and assimilation, a neutral term. It is also not the only term in the conversation to have pejorative connotations. Multiculturalism occupies a dual position in the discourse. When used by scholars, it is a term typically meant to indicate a philosophy that encourages recognition of non-majority/non-dominant groups within a liberal democratic framework. When used by some activists, however, it conveys something more akin to racial/ethnic/religious separatism, thus the pejorative inference. When multiculturalism is labeled as divisive or destructive, it is usually, though not always, the latter understanding that is driving the condemnation, not the former. The point is that in elite-level discourse about assimilation and the meaning of America, words and the ways they are used matter. When a thinker invokes cultural pluralism, we know that her vision of America is not one that requires conformity to the religion and values of a particular group. To know more, we would need to probe that thinker’s notion of political identity, as well as their broader national identity. Is national identity a monolith? Is political identity separate from cultural identity? Can an individual claim a political national identity that is seemingly distinct, and perhaps even inconsistent with her cultural national identity? Or is it, as one political theorist has argued, “not the case that Irish-Americans, say, are culturally Irish and politically American, as the pluralists claim . . . Rather, they are culturally Irish-American and politically Irish-American” (Walzer 1992:46)? These questions remain to be investigated empirically. Michael Walzer, the highly esteemed political theorist, has referred to the relationship between political and non-political national identities as that between “the twinned American values of a singular citizenship and a radically pluralist civil society” (1992:17). For some thinkers, the two forms of national identity appear to be conflated. Let me reiterate: In this project I have concentrated on cultural national identity4, which incorporates a degree of the political, but only insofar as in some cases political ideology is understood to be a basis for American culture. Walzer argues that there is no singular American identity, with the possible exception of political identity, but even that is not set in stone: The country has a political center, but it remains in every other sense decentered. More than this, the political center, despite occasional patriotic fevers, doesn’t work against decentering elsewhere. It neither requires nor demands the kind of commitment that would put the legitimacy of ethnic or religious identification in doubt. It doesn’t aim at a finished or fully coherent Americanism. Indeed, American politics, itself

The Meanings of America  231 pluralist in character, needs a certain sort of incoherence. A radical program of Americanization would really be un-American. It isn’t inconceivable that America will one day become an American nation-state, the many giving way to the one, but that is not what it is now; nor is that its destiny. America has no singular destiny—and to be an “American” is, finally, to know that and to be more or less content with it. (1992:48–49, emphasis in original) America, then, in Walzer’s eyes, is precisely what Huntington is concerned about: It is unclear, imprecise, and subject to change. A primary difference between the two men’s positions is that for Huntington, America was, and can again be, a nation-state, while for Walzer, it never was and such a shift would be undesirable, and even “un-American.” IMPLICATIONS FOR FUTURE STUDY In addition to offering a new sociology of American national identity, I began with the intention of complexifying, if you will, the depiction of nations in much of the academic literature. That is, I set out to show that national identities are not singular, are not constructed only at the moment of national establishment (or even occasionally), and are not substantively static. By looking closely at three historical moments of American intellectual discourse about assimilation over the course of nearly a century, each of these points has become evident. National identities and the narratives that support and frame them varied not only across time, but also within each period. National stories affect and are affected by sociohistorical context, and as such are maintained, reconstructed, and renovated continuously. Given that construction, including maintenance and/or renovation, is essentially the permanent condition of nations, it is not surprising that over time, the substance of national imaginings changes. The changes that occur are typically associated with other kinds of societal shifts, illustrating the relationship between social structures and the construction of culture. These changes in American identity are rarely, if ever, wholesale. In all likelihood, multiplicity of national narratives is not only the case in the US. Though the context would obviously vary from place to place, an examination of other nations would likely reveal a similar pattern. Or would it? Is this a case of “American exceptionalism”? I suspect it is not, but only further study would answer definitively. The kinds of pluralism in national identity and national meaning might vary. The lens through which one would look would likely not be assimilation in many cases. But surely in many countries today, take France and Germany, concerns about national origins, religion, and the relationship between culture and politics would provide fertile ground for an undertaking similar to this one on America. Understanding the histories of national stories could give pause to efforts

232  Conclusion to assert power both domestically and abroad. It could also help us create compassionate but realistic policies on immigration. Globalization is here to stay; so transnational migration and immigration are now part of every nation’s reality. The empirical presence of multiple national narratives and identities has practical implications. It suggests that calls to reconvene some lost national unity—other than the political unity of citizenship—are flawed and perhaps disingenuous. Yet, all nations have and need shared stories in order to carry on as particularistic entities, and here is where Huntington is onto something important. In the presence of multiple stories, the question must be asked: Is anything shared? Without a doubt it is. Public schools (state systems of education) in America still do the basic job Ernest Gellner (1983) saw for them of creating a literate, functional citizenry. And despite the frequent contestations about expanded canon and curricula, most American children continue to learn certain classic American stories (myths), and it is not until later that those are problematized to any degree. Are children today being exposed to more diversity in their educations? Almost certainly yes, but if this is so across the board, then what is happening is the sharing of a diverse American literature, science, and social studies. America does exist, but in multiple forms with shared elements. If that leads to greater inclusion and equality, then a strong but narrow cultural unity might be the wrong goal for a democracy. In twenty-first century discussions of immigration—mostly the territory of activists, assimilation—the territory of scholars, and of national identity—the territory of politicians, it is imperative to bring history “back in.” When we write policy dealing with immigrants or school curricula or discrimination, we are inscribing a vision of America into law. When we wonder over assimilation, we really want to know who fits, where they fit, and why. These things are at the center of national identity, and have been questioned for well over the century described here. The very same questions exist elsewhere in the world, and always, knowing the history can help make sense of the present. But in the US, to understand national identity, there is more to be done. Studying elite perspectives on immigration and assimilation reveals how national identity is constructed in relation to new populations of internal others who bring foreign cultures and religions and ways of life. In the US, however, race must also be considered directly in terms of national identity, as must other forms of essentialized identification such as gender. Equally important, given the development of globalization over recent years, and theorizing about the diminution of national identity, is understanding why such forms of identification are so deeply meaningful and important in people’s lives. National, racial, ethnic, and religious identities give people a home in the social world, but it will be important to understand how and why such identities operate. People need groups. What remains to learn is how living in and with groups can provide both a social home and social fairness without exclusion or inequality.

The Meanings of America  233 NOTES 1 This is not to suggest there was no discord in public conversation during this period, but it was not centered around immigrants and assimilation. 2 The National Origins Law was passed in 1924, but not enacted until 1929. 3 For one example of such an argument, see Glazer (1997) We Are All Multiculturalists Now. 4 The type of national identity discussed here is different from cleaner measures of national membership, such as citizenship.

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234  Conclusion Gossett, Thomas Jr. 1997. Race: The History of an Idea in America (2nd ed.). New York: Oxford University Press. Grant, Madison. 1918 (1916). The Passing of the Great Race, or the Racial Basis of European History. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons. Handlin, Oscar. 1959. The Newcomers: Negroes and Puerto Ricans in a Changing Metropolis. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Handlin, Oscar. 1951. The Uprooted: The Epic Story of the Great Migrations That Made the American People. New York: Grosset & Dunlap. Hansen, Marcus Lee. 1941 (1938). The Atlantic Migration, 1607–1860: A History of the Continuing Settlement of the United States. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Hansen, Marcus Lee. 1940. The Immigrant in American History. Edited by Arthur M. Schlesinger. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Hastings, Adrian. 1997. The Construction of Nationhood: Ethnicity, Religion, and Nationalism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Herberg, Will. 1955. Protestant—Catholic—Jew: An Essay in American Religious Sociology. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Higham, John. 1984 (1975). Send These to Me: Immigrants in Urban America (Rev. ed.). Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Hing, Bill Ong. 2004. Defining America through Immigration Policy. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Hobsbawm, E. J. 2000 (1990). Nations and Nationalism since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hobsbawm, Eric and Terence Ranger. 2000 (1983). The Invention of Tradition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hollinger, David A. 1995. Postethnic America: Beyond Multiculturalism. New York: Basic Books. Hunter, James Davison. 1991. Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America. New York: Basic Books. Huntington, Samuel P. 2004. Who Are We? The Challenge to America’s National Identity. New York: Simon & Schuster. Huntington, Samuel P. 1996. The Clash of Civilizations and the Making of the New World Order New York: Simon & Schuster. Huntington, Samuel P. 1981. American Politics: The Promise of Disharmony. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Jacoby, Tamar. 2004a. Reinventing the Melting Pot: The New Immigrants and What It Means to be American (edited volume). New York: Basic Books. Kallen, Horace M. 1998 (1924). Culture and Democracy in the United States. New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers. Kallen, Horace M. 1915. “Democracy Versus the Melting-Pot.” The Nation. February 18 and 25. Kaufmann, Eric P. 2004. The Rise and Fall of Anglo-America. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Kumar, Krishan. 2003. The Making of English National Identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kymlicka, Will. 1995. Multicultural Citizenship: A  Liberal Theory of Minority Rights. New York: Oxford University Press. Lieberson, Stanley. 1963. Ethnic Patterns in American Cities.New York: Free Press of Glencoe. Lipset, Seymour Martin. 1967. The First New Nation: The United States in Historical and Comparative Perspective. Garden City: Doubleday. Massey, Douglas S. and Nancy A. Denton. 1993. American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Massey, Douglas S. 1999 (1995). “The New Immigration and Ethnicity in the US,” in Majority and Minority. Edited by N. R. Yetman. Boston: Allyn and Bacon.

The Meanings of America  235 McClay, Wilfred M. 1994. The Masterless: Self and Society in Modern America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Menand, Louis. 2001. The Metaphysical Club. New York: Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux. Morgan, Edmund S. 1988. Inventing the People: The Rise of Popular Sovereignty in England and America. New York: W. W. Norton & Company. Myrdal, Gunnar. 2002 (1944). An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy, Volume I. New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers. Park, Robert Ezra, Ernest Burgess, and Roderick D. McKenzie. 1967 (1925). The City. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Park, Robert Ezra. 1950. Race and Culture. Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press. Patterson, James T. 1996. Grand Expectations: the United States, 1945–1974. New York: Oxford University Press. Patterson, Orlando. 1997. The Ordeal of Integration: Progress and Resentment in America’s “Racial” Crisis. Washington, D.C.: Civitas/Counterpoint. Portes, Alejandro and Min Zhou. 1993. “The New Second Generation: Segmented Assimilation and Its Variants.” Pp. 74–96 in Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, Vol. 530, Interminority Affairs in the U.S.: Pluralism at the Crossroads (Nov., 1993). Putnam, Robert D. 2000. Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community. New York: Simon & Schuster. Ross, Edward Alsworth. 1914. The Old World in the New: The Significance of Past and Present Immigration to the American People. New York: Century Company. Sahlins, Peter. 1989. Boundaries: The Making of France and Spain in the Pyrenees. Berkeley: University of California Press. Schultz, Kevin M. 2011. Tri-Faith America: How Catholics and Jews Held Postwar America to Its Protestant Promise. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Shore, Cris. 2000. Building Europe: The Cultural Politics of European Integration. London: Routledge. Smith, Anthony D. 1998. Nationalism and Modernism. London: Routledge. Smith, Anthony D. 1986. The Ethnic Origins of Nations. Oxford: Blackwell. Smith, Rogers M. 1997. Civic Ideals: Conflicting Visions of Citizenship in US History. New Haven: Yale University Press. Takaki, Ronald. 1993. A Different Mirror: A History of Multicultural America. New York: Little, Brown and Company. Taylor, Charles. 1994. “The Politics of Recognition,” Multiculturalism : Examining the Politics of Recognition. Edited by Amy Gutmann. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Walzer, Michael. 1992. What It Means to Be an American: Essays on the American Experience. New York: Marsilio. Walzer, Michael. 1983. Spheres of Justice: A Defense of Pluralism and Equality. USA: Basic Books. Zangwill, Israel. 1915 (1909). The Melting Pot Drama in Four Acts. New York: Macmillan Company.

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Index

acculturation 131 – 5, 141, 156, 224; see also assimilation Addams, Jane 39, 49, 137 African Americans: black nationalism 98, 100; cultural assimilation 132; ethnicity vs. race 124 – 5; nativist opposition to 190 – 1; race-related murder of 1; racialization of “Negroes” into blacks 139; social lives of 100; working-classes 92 Alba, Richard 101, 139, 166 Almeida-Sanchez v. United States (1973) 157 Al Qaeda terrorists 160, 162 America: economic growth/struggle 37 – 8, 94 – 5, 160 – 72; federation of nationalities theory 71 – 3, 78, 99; meanings of 222 – 4; under multiculturalism 155 – 64; overview 32 – 5; post-World War II 85 – 99; social movements 38 – 41, 162 – 4; wars and foreign affairs 35 – 7, 90 – 104, 158 – 60 American Creed 176 – 82, 188, 207, 222 American Eugenics Society 43 American exceptionalism 17, 179 – 80 Americanism: future studies 231 – 2; historical evolution of 214; history and 15 – 16; introduction 1 – 4; overview 6 – 12; as particularistic 177; political definitions of 167 – 8; static nature of 68; two versions of 13 – 14 Americanization theory: Angloconformity as 223; democracy and 73 – 4; forced assimilation programs of 101; melting pot

thinking 48 – 56; nativism and 42 – 8; overview 38, 40 – 1 American Legion 90 American Politics: The Promise of Disharmony (Huntington) 20, 167, 176, 207 American Sociological Society 47 Anderson, Elijah 139, 141 – 2 Anglo-Protestantism: arguments for 54, 207 – 8; assimilation and 166; challenges to 184, 214; culture of 45, 130; defined 10; deterioration of 20; English character of 132; ethnic pluralism and 121; forms of conformity 223; importance of 177, 192 – 3; introduction 1 – 2; ­non-interventionist Angloconformity 133; role of 216 – 17 Anti-Defamation League 89 anti-globalization movement 163 – 4 Antin, Mary 49, 52 – 4, 67, 70 anti-Semitism 36, 48 Asian immigration 34, 35, 87 assimilation: America and 12 – 17; by Anglo-centric culture 166; attitude receptional assimilation 131; behavior receptional assimilation 131; cultural assimilation 131 – 3, 187 – 8; defined 217 – 18; elite-level discourse on 225; hyphenated assimilation 218; identificational assimilation 131; intermarriage assimilation 45 – 6, 54; introduction 1 – 4; Latino linguistic assimilation 199; marital assimilation 188; model of seven types 131; multi-process model of 132;

238  Index nonassimilation 218; overview 6 – 12; publications on 128 – 9; segmented assimilation 218; segmented/ fragmented assimilation 140; structural assimilation 131, 133, 187 – 8 “Assimilation Debate” 185 Assimilation in American Life: The Role of Race, Religion, and National Origins (Gordon) 114, 128, 131 Barth, Fredrik 20, 65, 103, 145 Barthian transactionalism 9 Berkson, Isaac B. 72 – 6, 77 Beyond the Melting Pot (Glazer, Moynihan): as analytical vs. prescriptive 138 – 9; author biographies 114 – 17; authors’ position on 137 – 8; conclusion 143 – 4; contemporaries, and responses to 128 – 35; ideology in 139 – 42; introduction 8, 19, 113 – 14 (see also melting pot theory); other published works with 136 – 7; overview 117 – 28; popularity of 113; religion, focus on 77 – 8 bilingualism 191, 214, 217 biological essentialism 121 black power movement 125 Boas, Franz 43, 72, 74 Bolsheviks 41 Bourne, Randolph 54, 69 – 70, 134 Brooks, David 212 Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka (1954) 96 Buchanan, Patrick 157 Burgess, Ernest 101 Bush, George H.W. 159, 161 Bush, George W. 160, 162, 192 California Coalition for Immigration Reform 169 Camp David Accords (1978) 154, 158 Carroll, Lewis 129 Carter, Jimmy 154, 158 – 9 Catholics/Catholicism 31, 132, 183, 197 – 8 Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism 168 Charlie Hebdo murders 3

Chicago School of sociology 99, 100, 108 – 9 Christian Right 163 – 4 Civic Ideals: Conflicting Visions of Citizenship in US History (Smith) 203 – 4 Civil Rights Act (1964) 143 Civil Rights Movement 83, 96 – 8, 124 civil rights reform 89 Civil War 33, 37, 68, 106, 184 – 5 The Clash of Civilizations (Huntington) 160, 164, 200, 203 Clinton, Bill 159, 161 – 2, 186, 203 Cold War 90, 154 – 6, 159, 177 colorblind ideology 126 Commission on Immigration and Naturalization 88 communism 85, 93, 96, 143 – 4, 181, 228 communitarianism 199 Congo Reform Association 100 Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) 96 – 7 conservationism 46 conservative Christianity 191 – 2 Cose, Ellis 14 cosmopolitanism 186, 192 Crevecoeur, J. Hector St. John de 53, 122, 185 cultural assimilation 131 – 3, 187 – 8; see also assimilation cultural nationalism 165, 169 – 71 cultural pluralism: Etzioni, Amitai, views on 200; federation of nationalities theory 71 – 3, 78; forms of 223; Huntington, Samuel, views on 185 – 6; Kallen, Horace, views on 62 – 9; overview 18, 36, 41 – 2, 61 – 2; understanding of 230; war and 36 Culture and Democracy in the United States (Kallen) 18 Daughters of the American Revolution 90 defiant nationalism 107 Defining America Through Immigration Policy (Hing) 157 dehumanization 37, 45 “Democracy Versus the Melting-Pot” (1915) 61 – 9 denationalization of elites 189 Dewey, John 134 Displaced Persons Act (1948) 88 diversity 67, 186, 203

Index  239 dual citizenship 186 Du Bois, W.E.B. 39 Eisenhower, Dwight 93 elites/non-elites 179, 189, 206 English-American conservatism 71 e pluribus unum and diversity 67 ethnic essentialism 68, 74, 77, 186 ethnic federalism 64, 71 – 3 ethnicity 65, 69, 124, 131 The Ethnic Origin of Nations (Smith) 170 Ethnic Patterns in American Cities (Lieberson) 136 ethnic pluralism 113 – 14, 120 – 1, 138, 223 Etzioni, Amitai 198 – 200, 215 eugenics 43, 45, 223 European Enlightenment 181 – 2 European totalitarianism 226 Fairchild, Henry Pratt 43 Federal Loyalty Security Program 92 Federation for American Immigration Reform 169 federation of nationalities theory 71 – 3, 78, 99, 126, 138 The Feminine Mystique (Friedan) 98 Foner, Nancy 139, 141 Fourteenth Amendment rights 39 Frank, Leo 36 Franklin, Benjamin 32 Friedan, Betty 98 From Alien to Citizen (Steiner) 54 – 5 From Plotzk to Boston (Antin) 54 Fukuyama, Francis 205 Garvey, Marcus 100 German-Americans 34, 36 German-Jewish immigrants 62, 101 Glazer, Nathan: assimilation and 77; conclusion 226; against inevitability of assimilation 228; introduction 2, 8; melting pot 14, 19; multiculturalism and 175; review of Who Are We? 197 – 8; see also Beyond the Melting Pot; melting pot theory Gleason, Philip 34 – 5, 40 – 1 globalization 164, 189, 213 – 14, 232 Gordon, Milton M.: assimilation and 77, 114, 128 – 33; model of cultural assimilation 144, 187 – 8, 228; overview 19

Gore, Al 186 Grant, Madison 43 – 8 Great Depression 98, 162 Green, Arnold 131 Habits of the Heart (Bellah) 184 Handlin, Oscar 99, 106 – 8, 138 Hansen, Marcus Lee 99, 104 – 5, 138 Hapgood, Norman 134 Harding, Warren G. 38 Hartz, Louis 167 – 8 Hastie, William 96 hate groups 168 – 9 hetero-patriarchy 36 Higham, John 35 – 6, 43, 207 Hing, Bill Ong 13, 32, 88, 157 Hispanic Americans 190 – 1, 201 Holocaust 36 homosexual targets 87 House Un-American Activities Committee 92 Hughes, Everett Cherrington 99, 103 Hughes, Helen MacGill 103 Huntington, Samuel: Anglo-Protestant hegemony 20; conclusion 227 – 31; cultural pluralism 185 – 6; intellectual context under multiculturalism 164 – 71; introduction 2, 108; see also multiculturalism/ multiculturalists; Who Are We? The Challenges to American National Identity Hussein, Saddam 159 hyphenated assimilation 218 identificational assimilation 131 illegal immigration 158, 203, 228 The Immigrant in American History (Schlesinger) 104 – 5 immigrants/immigration: groups, identification of 120; illegal immigration 158, 203, 228; introduction 1 – 4; judging viability of 181; mass immigration 31 – 41; model of cultural assimilation 188; multiculturalism and 156 – 8; overview 6 – 12; politics of blame 201; post-World War II 86 – 90; relaxing of policy toward 153; second-wave immigrants 35, 46 – 7, 215, 225; see also assimilation; cultural pluralism; specific immigrant populations

240  Index Immigration Act (1924) 86 Immigration and Naturalization Service 88 Immigration Restriction League 43, 47 imperial-superior identity 192 intermarriage assimilation 45 – 6, 54 International Migration Review (1998) 139 Iraq War 160, 168, 206 Islamic radicals 159, 200, 229 isolationist philosophy 69 Jacoby, Tamar 212 Japanese-Americans 91 Jefferson, Thomas 176 Jewish Territorial Organization 49 Jews/Judaism: cultural assimilation 132, 211; group identity 72 – 3; hate groups and 168; overview 31 Johnson, Lyndon B. 97 Kallen, Horace: biological essentialism 121; conclusion 78, 225 – 6; cultural pluralism 134; federation of nationalities theory 71 – 3, 78, 99, 126, 136; ideology of 77; impact on future discourse 77 – 8; introduction 2, 8; nature of questions by 76 – 7; non-nativist responses to 69 – 76; overview 62 – 9; response to restrictionists/nativists 76; see also Americanization; cultural pluralism; mass immigration Kasinitz, Philip 139, 141 Kaufmann, Eric 35, 170, 226 Kellor, Frances A. 40 Kennedy, John F. 89, 93 King, Martin Luther 97 Know-Nothings movement 105 Ku Klux Klan 38, 41, 48, 67, 168 – 9 Kymlicka, Will 165 labor unions 161 Latin American immigrants 199, 201 – 2 Lazarus, Emma 144 Letters from an American Farmer (Crevecoeur) 49 Levin, Brian 168 The Liberal Tradition in America (Hartz) 167 Lieberson, Stanley 136 – 7

likemindedness concept 66 literacy test requirements 35 McCarran-Walter Act (1952) 86 – 7 McDonaldization 164 The Making of an American (Riis) 55 Marshall, Thurgood 96 Marshall Plan 91 Massey, Douglas 198 – 9, 201 – 2 mass immigration 31 – 41 mass media and race relations 125 The Melting Pot (Zangwill) 49 – 50, 122 melting pot theory: as assimilationist 42; defined by Huntington, Samuel 199 – 200; democracy and 73; dynamic future of 10 – 11; intellectual context of 99 – 109; introduction 1; nativist theory and 74; new ethnicity and 186; overview 48 – 56, 83 – 5; post-World War II 85 – 99; as radical transformation 223 Menand, Louis 202 The Metaphysical Club (Menand) 202 Mexican immigrants: assimilation difficulties 202, 208, 217; elites/non-elites 206; linguistic assimilation 199, 201 – 2; perceived threat of 175, 179, 201; rise of illegal immigration 228; values of 197 – 8 The Mind of Primitive Man (Boas) 43 monoculture 178, 203 Moral Majority 163 Moynihan, Daniel Patrick: conclusion 226; against inevitability of assimilation 228; introduction 2, 8; melting pot 14, 19; Reagan’s policies 161; melting pot theory; see also Beyond the Melting Pot multiculturalism/multiculturalists: American identity and 167 – 8, 176 – 7; America under 155 – 64; cultural nationalism 169 – 71; cultural pluralism 186; historical prominence of 223; intellectual context under 164 – 71; introduction 1 – 2; nativism/ nativist theory 157, 168 – 9; overview 78, 153 – 5, 165 – 7; understanding of 230

Index  241 multiethnic structure 141 Myrdal, Gunnar 19 National Americanization Committee 40 National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) 39 – 40, 96 nationalism: black nationalism 98, 100; cultural nationalism 165, 169 – 71; defiant nationalism 107; ethnic federalism and 71; ethnic nationalism 171; importance of 34, 192; introduction 7, 9, 11 – 12, 17; military-inflected nationalism 69; opposition to 204, 214; populism vs. 179; post-Civil War 185; threat to 178; transnational nationalism 72 National Organization for Women (NOW) 98 National Origins Quota Act (1924): Chinese exclusion 122; intergroup relations, problems over 130; National Origins System 87; as nativist victory 34; reduced immigration from 83, 113, 119, 228; restrictionist legislation and 223 Native Americans 17, 48, 84 nativism/nativist theory: Americanization and 40, 42; Anglo-conformity as 223; conclusion 225 – 6; defined by Huntington, Samuel 190 – 1, 227 – 31; intermarriage assimilation 45 – 6; melting pot theory and 74; multiculturalism 157, 168 – 9; overview 33 – 4, 37 – 8, 42 – 8; progressive nativism 46 – 8 Nazism 37, 134, 144 Nee, Victor 101, 166 The Negro Family: The Case for National Action (Moynihan) 116 – 17 neo-Lamarckianism 63 The Newcomers: Negroes and Puerto Ricans in a Changing Metropolis (Handlin) 108 new ethnicity 186 – 7 New Nationalism 34 New York Zoological Society 43

nonassimilation 218 non-interventionist Anglo-conformity 133 non-Nordic European immigrants 43 normativity, lack of 167 North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) 92 Oakley, J. Ronald 86 The Old World in the New (Ross) 39, 47, 63, 215 open immigration opposition 89 – 90 Operation Gatekeeper (1954) 158 Operation Wetback (1954) 88 – 9, 158 The Ordeal of Integration (Patterson) 189 Park, Robert E. 99, 118 – 19, 138 The Passing of the Great Race (Grant) 43 – 5 Patterson, James T. 85 – 6 Patterson, Orlando 189 Plessy v. Ferguson (1950) 96 pluralism: ethnic pluralism 113 – 14, 120 – 1, 138, 223; religious pluralism 223; structural pluralism 135; see also cultural pluralism populism 179 – 80 Portes, Alejandro 139 – 40 pre-American origins 227 predestination doctrine (essentialism) 75 progressive nativism 46 – 8 Progressivism 38 – 9 Protestant Christianity (Protestantism) 178, 181 – 3, 198; see also Anglo-Protestantism Puerto Ricans 127 – 8, 132, 142 Quota Law (1921) 34 racialism/racialist thinking: colorblindness 126; increase in 40, 42; scientific racialism 37, 43, 63, 83, 108, 169; segregation 75, 143; separatism 126 Reagan, Ronald 154 Red Scare (1919 – 1920) 47, 86 Refugee Relief Bill (1953) 88 religion as unifier 123, 178 – 84, 198 religious pluralism 223 Remaking the American Mainstream (Alba, Nee) 166 Riis, Jacob 49, 52 – 3, 55

242  Index Ripley, William Z. 44 Roe v. Wade (1973) 153 Roosevelt, Theodore 34, 49, 55, 91 Ross, Edward Alsworth: American sociology founder 63; conclusion 226; immigration restriction 39; introduction 2; popular opinion 186; progressive nativism 46 – 8; second-wave immigrants 215; viability of all new immigrants 181 Russian Jews 128 Schlesinger, Arthur M. 104 scientific racialism 37, 43, 63, 83, 108, 169 second-wave immigrants 35, 46 – 7, 215, 225 sectionalism 75 segmented assimilation 218 segregation 75, 143 Send These to Me (Higham) 35 – 6 separation of church and state 213 separatism 98, 124, 126, 230 September 11th attacks 159 – 60, 180, 228 – 9 Simmel, George 100 Skerry, Peter 206 – 8, 215 Smith, Anthony D. 170 Smith, Rogers M. 167, 203 – 4 Social Class in American Sociology (Gordon) 128 social movements in America 38 – 41, 162 – 4 The Social Order of the Slums: Ethnicity and Territory in the Inner City (Suttle) 136 – 7 The Soldier and the State: The Theory and Politics of Civil-Military Relations (Huntington) 200, 215 Sollors, Werner 54 Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) 83, 96 – 7 Southern Poverty Law Center 169 Soviet Union 91, 154 stagflation 161 Steiner, Edward 49, 52 – 5 Stewart, George R. 134 Stoddard, Lothrop 43 structural assimilation 131, 133, 187 – 8

structural pluralism 135 Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) 93 subnational identities 186 Suttle, Gerald 136 Taylor, Charles 166 Thomas, W.I. 100 Thorndike, Edward 74 transactionalism 9, 65 transmuting pot theory 134 transnationalism 141, 186 Traub, James 115 Truman, Harry S. 87 – 8, 91 – 3 Turner, Frederick Jackson 104 Tuskeegee Institute 100 unemployment rates 161 The Uprooted (Handlin) 106 – 7 U.S. Declaration of Independence 179 US-Mexican border concerns 157 Vietnam War 154 Walzer, Michael 186, 230 – 1 War on Terror 160, 168 wars and foreign affairs 35 – 7, 90 – 104, 158 – 60 Washington, Booker T. 39, 100 Washington, George 32 We Are All Multiculturalists Now (Traub) 115 Westernization 164 Where Peoples Meet (Hughes) 103 white nativism 190 Who Are We? The Challenges to American National Identity (Huntington): as analytical vs. prescriptive 214 – 16; author’s position on 176 – 94, 213 – 14; conclusion 216 – 18; cultural pluralism 185 – 6; future discourses on 216; nativism/ nativist theory 190 – 1; overview 108, 144, 154 – 5, 162, 175 – 6; Protestant Christianity 178, 181 – 3, 198; religion as unifier 178 – 84; reviews of 197 – 213

Index  243 Wilson, Woodrow 34, 47 Wirth, Louis 99, 101 Wolfe, Alan 208 women’s rights 9 – 10 women’s suffrage 39 World Trade Center bombing 159 World Trade Organization 164 World War I 40, 42, 47

World War II: economic growth after 94 – 5; immigration after 86 – 90; melting pot theory after 85 – 99; scientific racialism and 108 Zangwill, Israel 18, 48 – 56, 67, 120, 185, 227 Zionism 54, 62