Beyond Melting Pots, Cultural Pluralism, Ethnicity: Or, Deja Vu All over Again

Abstract

1 About five years ago Rudoff Vecoli, a leading historian of American immigrant history, presented to Immigration History Society his presidential address, which was published shortly thereafter in Journal Of American Ethnic History. The piece was called Return to Melting Pot: Ethnicity in United States in Eighties. It was mainly a review of two decades preceding address - a time when melting pot idea, dating from Israel Zangwill's play of name in 1908, was presumably laid to rest with work of Nathan Glazer and Daniel Moynihan in their influential 1963 book significantly entitled Beyond Melting Pot: Negroes, Puerto Ricans, Jews, Italians and Irish of New York City. The following year, Milton Gordons Assimilation in American Life: The Role of Race, Religion and National Origins was published, as well as a host of other work showing how the melting pot simply didn't happen. Studies of period showed how groups persisted in retaining their identity despite numerous predictions of their inevitable demise or diminution under leveling impact of Americanizing forces such as common schools, workplace, media. Vecoli carries story through ethnic of '70s when, as either a negative reaction to or a positive consequence of Black consciousness movement of late '60s and fragmentation during Vietnam War period of previous '50s consensus view of American society, society's divisions along race, gender, class, generational and lines became more visible, and a pluralistic view of American reality began to prevail again. With the violent confrontations of that bloody decade, loss of faith in homogeneity of Anglo-American establishment and its myths, the essential of society manifested itself. The lid was off... Vecoli writes. In its positive dimension this period empowered Native Americans, Hispanics, and later so-called white ethnics to affirm their previously repressed or undervalued self-identities (the era of Kiss me, I'm Polish or Ukrainian is Beautiful bumper stickers began). Vecoli then brings story up to late '70s and '80s, when he discerned as he says, a growing chorus of criticism challenging pluralist paradigm (15). In late '70s, a form of backlash occurred among certain historians and culture critics who had earlier been progenitors of revival. Thus, Nathan Glazer wondered whether assimilation model did not have to recommend it; Arthur Mann (the former Smith College and now University of Chicago professor and author of Laguardia) agreed, according to Vecoli, the common culture of Americans was much more important than differences among them; and above all others, doyen of recent American immigrant history, author of two crucial books in field, Strangers in Land and Send These to Me, past-president of American Historical Association, John Higham, proclaimed in 1982 the revival is over, and an era in studies has come to an end. Vecoli reports in a recent paper Higham urged historians to go beyond pluralism and address grand theme of the making of people of America (11). These critics were responding with much unease to manifestations of cultural and especially racial conflict in society. In their anxiety one senses a fear a Frankenstein monster has been unleashed - recognition of diversity in America, and even earlier a general celebration of richness of mix, now quails before spectre of divisive and unbridgeable differences. These scholars were by no means in camp of Reagan, but they were no doubt responding to some of same social conditions empowered his conservatism and versions of neo-nativism. In his 1984 speech to Republican National Convention when he accepted nomination for his second term, Reagan observed athletes from 140 countries who had come to compete in year's Olympics in Los Angeles, came to the one people in all world whose people carry bloodlines of all those 140 countries and more. …