Beyond the Melting Pot
DOLMAN, JOSEPH
Beyond the Melting Pot American Crucible: Race and Nation in the 20th Century By Gary Gerstle Princeton. 325 pp. $29.95. Reviewed by Joseph Dolman Editorial writer and columnist,...
...The consequence was a tragic split of forces that were never far apart...
...Reviewed by Joseph Dolman Editorial writer and columnist, "Newsday" So maybe America was never the great cultural crucible Israel Zangwill described in his 1909 play, The Melting Pot...
...And it sought to widen the gap between natives and immigrants...
...The Freedom Democrats asked for seats as the true representatives of Mississippi, and Johnson told them no...
...It reinforced barriers that separated Asians and blacks from whites...
...Republicans tried to play the issue the other way a few years ago and it exploded in their faces...
...Perhaps no one better embodied the impossibly ambivalent nature of these policies than Theodore Roosevelt—war hero...
...Included in this category were AfricanAmericans and Asians...
...He means a nation capable of generating "only thin loyalty to nationalist ideas" along with "limited ties of feeling and obligation to Americans outside our core identity group...
...He concludes American Crucible with the admonition that we should "labor to strengthen the civic component of our nationhood, even as we recognize that no special providence or manifest destiny will guide our way...
...First, he did not want the U.S...
...At bottom, says Gerstle, Roosevelt and his backers envisioned an America where Europeans would quickly meld into the civic culture and where blacks would play a secondary role or none at all...
...The basic problem was race, of course...
...The immigrant," he said, "must learn to celebrate Washington's birthday rather than that of the Queen or the Kaiser, and the Fourth of July instead of St...
...Gerstle, a historian by profession, has written a fresh and accessible book that fully examines this fundamental American paradox...
...We are not merely a nation among nations...
...Not long after that came the Black Power movement and a separatist mindset that made appeals to racial unity sound like little more than a cheap white trick...
...It centers on Gerstle's ultimate prediction for America's future...
...He left no room for the slightest whiff of Old World nostalgia...
...Second, Roosevelt thought immigrants should repudiate their foreign ways instantly and begin the process of Americanization...
...I have only one bone to pick with this excellent book...
...As it turns out, by doingjust that...
...Atlantic City was the blow that shattered the Freedom Democrats' fragile faith in the redemptive power of the American political system," says Gerstle...
...Suddenly identity politics had seized the stage, and white liberals of many backgrounds were thrown into a terrible confusion...
...How could the United States both genuflect to the melting pot and practice exclusion...
...to greet all groups with open arms...
...Gerstle tells the story of the 1964 Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City...
...America had run out of time...
...kept its melting-pot myth intact, it grew sharply more raceconscious throughout the 1920s...
...At the same time, Republican politicians as diverse as New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani and President George W. Bush—neither of whom is exactly an apologist for American power—have shown strong sympathies for immigrants...
...Even tough old Communists from the 1920s began to Americanize their names...
...Patrick's Day...
...He was certain, too, that a superior American—"the coming superman," to use Zangwill's words—would emerge from the crucible...
...Every now and then we do...
...America is more inclusive than ever...
...But why does he think this...
...He has credibly, and fascinatingly, traced the odd mixture of high ideals and base doubts that shaped race and immigration policy over the last century...
...Then came the 1960s, which blew all notions of unity into a million pieces...
...It's not that we have always honored them...
...All of these programs helped bring Americans together...
...In some sections within the Congress of Industrial Organizations, Gerstle notes, the top jobs always seemed to gravitate to the most Americanized members...
...He thought a good war helped tighten the cultural bonds among ethnic groups and hastened fusion...
...All right, maybe I have one more bone to pick with Gerstle...
...He does not share the idea that a new strong-but-tolerant American civic nation is within reach...
...God is making the American...
...President Lyndon Baines Johnson, who had forced through the Civil Rights Act of 1964, felt he was entitled to a convention free from racial strife...
...Meanwhile, the labor movement successfully pushed for a social safety net that included welfare benefits, unemployment insurance and old-age pensions...
...More likely," the author believes, "the future will witness either the resurgence of a strong, solidaristic and exclusionary national identity of the sort that has existed in the past, or, in the interests of tolerance and diversity, we will continue to opt for a weaker identity...
...Buttressed by an "edifice of race law," Gerstle declares, these essential barriers remained in place until the 1960s...
...And throughout its history America was always more comfortable beckoning white Protestants into the melting pot than Catholics, Jews, Asians, or Slavs...
...As the sense of unity grew, many immigrants felt intensified pressure to fit in with the predominant Nordic culture...
...Above all, the immigrant must learn to talk and think and be United States...
...Zangwill proclaimed in that drama...
...Assimilation still works...
...But they have been there just the same—larger than any of us, like a giant superego—demanding that we measure up...
...LBJ had moved the country unimaginably beyond TR's idea of racial exclusion in a polyglot nation...
...The crosscurrents were complex...
...This brings us to the heart of the dilemma...
...But Roosevelt's catechism contained two caveats...
...To this day, the Democratic Party has not completely recovered from the shock...
...We finally seem to have found an equilibrium between yesterday's racism and the identity politics of the '60s...
...It drafted a Constitution that countenanced African slavery—even as it fashioned a great representative democracy for (mostly) Northern European immigrants...
...They seem to have learned...
...Well, no...
...Just check the rates of intermarriage Asians and Hispanics have with older American groups...
...But he believed that the vast majority of nonwhites would not achieve those levels during his lifetime or several lifetimes thereafter...
...But understandably the Freedom Democrats were in no mood for promises or pleas for patience...
...it didn't matter to him if the huddled masses were Catholic and Jewish...
...Immigrants such as Sicilian-born Frank Capra made movies that relentlessly celebrated core American values—featuring classic Nordic heroes like Jimmy Stewart...
...In truth, he explains, the playwright had articulated "a central and enduring myth about the American nation —that the United States was a divine land where individuals from every part of the world could leave behind their troubles, start life anew, and forge a proud, accomplished and unified people...
...Roosevelt was liberal in his day...
...It had a government that ruthlessly exterminated its indigenous population—even as it celebrated the fusion of a single culture from diverse new arrivals...
...But he continues: "To the contrary, we will continue to be what we have been— a nation among nations, struggling like many other peoples with the complexities, contradictions and burdens of our nationhood...
...That's fine...
...President, and enthusiast for the new hybrid American that immigration would build...
...But never mind the difficult facts...
...It intensified its efforts to keep Eastern and Southern Europeans from Northern Europeans...
...From today's jaded perspective, Zangwill's overwrought dialogue can sound almost comical...
...But the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party—speaking for the civil rights workers who had been risking their lives in the South as they signed up black voters—would hear no excuses...
...From the beginning our ideals, starting with the Declaration of Independence and Bill of Rights, have in fact made us different...
...Although the U.S...
...And guess what...
...The play was a runaway success...
...A fig for your feuds and vendettas...
...Gerstle offers ample proof of that...
...As most educated Americans understand, the United States was schizoid from the very beginning...
...It was nothing personal, Gerstle explains: "In fact, on numerous occasions he passionately defended the political rights of AfricanAmericans and Asians who, to his thinking, had achieved a requisite level of intellectual and moral competence...
...But simultaneously, he points out, Roosevelt's supporters "subscribed to a civic nationalist ideal that welcomed law-abiding residents into the polity and disavowed distinctions based on race...
...Why...
...A nasty fight would only split the party and weaken it in November...
...Germans and Frenchmen, Irishmen and Englishmen, Jews and Russians—into the crucible with you all...
...The unfolding of the New Deal in the 1930s was accompanied by ever louder calls to end discrimination based on ethnicity and race...
...Gary Gerstle offers a hint in his perceptive and illuminating history of racial and immigration issues in the 20th century...
...He loved immigrants who came from Southern and Eastern Europe also...
...Yet a certain kindof national unity was building as well...
...Some people could never meet the requirements of American assimilation, he thought...
Vol. 84 • May 2001 • No. 3
