Let’s Debate the Real Melting Pot
In a recent viral video hosted by VICE, a panel of young Asian Americans debated the notions of “model minorities” and “Asian Hate.” During the back-and-forth, one of the progressive panelists vigorously denounced assimilation in the US, linking it with Roosevelt’s internment camps:
“Did you think the Japanese internment was a good thing? Because that was a real assimilation situation… The term assimilation has negative history and facts associated with that word… Japanese internment is a classic example of assimilating Asian Americans”
However extreme and ahistorical that may sound, it is not far from the current mainstream progressive view. Assimilation and the melting pot metaphor are now widely deprecated, with NASA and major universities including the term “melting pot” on a list of “microaggressions.” Even a moderate like Harvard professor Yascha Mounk writes:
“According to the “melting pot” metaphor, immigrants and members of other minority groups should assimilate into their societies without holding on to their original cultures. But this is an unduly homogenizing ideal that does not sufficiently respect the cultural traditions of citizens who hail from different parts of the world.”
Yet this misrepresents the true melting pot ideal that has prevailed for most of US history. One proof of that reality comes in the form of a 75-year-old document shared with me by a friend. After his mother died, he found it among the possessions that she had kept and treasured until the end of her life—the things that had meant the very most to her. The crudely typed and mimeographed document was given to her by the US government when she immigrated from Yugoslavia to the US. The title at the top, “Guide for New Americans,” was in English, but the rest was in German.
The document is a “how-to” guide for new US immigrants, providing tips on all the basics: how to mail letters, use a telephone, and so on. But most interestingly, it outlines America’s relationship with immigrants:
“You may not come to America with great wealth tucked away in your trunks, but you have it in your mind and spirit, the songs of your old homes, folk art, literature, recipes, and customs. America does not want you to forget or deny these things while you struggle to become familiar with your new way of life. On the contrary, America is grateful that you will share your culture with other Americans.”
I managed to find the original English version of this “Guide for New Americans,” carefully preserved among another immigrant’s treasured papers. Published in 1948, the English version matches the German translation closely, differing mainly in its inclusion of a message from President Truman, who bids immigrants a “hearty welcome to your new homeland.” Notably, the book does nothing to advocate the one-way assimilation ideology that ostensibly prevailed during that era. On the contrary, it emphasizes how the contributions of immigrant cultures are the key to America’s strength:
“America has frequently been called a melting pot. It is a land in which every religion and every culture in the world contributed to make it richer and stronger…. Our practices, our laws, our architecture have developed from ideas that have been brought to us from other parts of the world…. America is the fruit of the labors, hopes, and ideals of hundreds of thousands of immigrants of different races, cultures, and creeds whose common bond is a belief in liberty and human dignity.”
With neighborhood smithies being a thing of the distant past, modern Americans may not fully appreciate the nuances of the melting pot metaphor as it was envisioned a century—or two centuries—ago. Of the people I have asked, only a few were able to describe exactly what a melting pot is: a crucible that combines different metals to produce an alloy with beneficial qualities. It might be used, for example, to combine copper and tin to produce bronze. The constituent metals are not melted away or eliminated but are united in a felicitous combination: the melting pot keeps the parts and produces a whole that is greater than the sum of them. It was this sense of melting pot that Hector de Crèvecoeur invoked in his “Letters from an American Farmer” (1783) and that Ralph Waldo Emerson reiterated in his “Journals” (1877). Emerson even uses the example of combining ingredients to produce the mysterious and precious “Corinthian brass.”
If the metallurgical analogy did not sufficiently convey the two-way inclusivity of the melting pot, Israel Zangwill, who penned the 1908 play, “The Melting Pot,” spelled it out, writing that it is not a “simple surrender to the dominant type” but an “all-round give-and-take.” Although the melting pot is often dismissed today as a blending of only white European nationalities, that was not the ideal from the beginning. Emerson envisioned something far more inclusive:
“In this continent—asylum of all nations—the energy of Irish, Germans, Swedes, Poles, and Cossacks, and all the European tribes—of the Africans, and the Polynesians—will construct a new race, a new religion, a new state, a new literature.”
Zangwill echoes this: his melting pot goes beyond western Europe, explicitly including “Celt and Latin, Slav and Teuton, Greek and Syrian—black and yellow.”
If the early promoters of the melting pot believed that immigrants needed to discard anything, it was not their ethnic heritages, but their ethnic prejudices. De Crèvecoeur lauds the “new American” who leaves “behind him all his ancient prejudices and vendettas,” and Zangwill proclaims “A fig for your feuds and vendettas”—because the melting pot will eliminate them. The “Guide for New Americans” weighs in on this too:
“In some communities you may find prejudice against people of certain religious beliefs or races, or even against you as a newcomer. America is striving to combat and exterminate that kind of discrimination. After the experiences you have had, your place should naturally be on the side of tolerance, equality, and better understanding among all Americans.”
There is no question that this inclusive melting pot ideal is one that we have never come close to achieving in the past, and still fall short of today. Not only have various groups—particularly Blacks—faced long periods of persecution and exclusion, there have also been periodic surges of nativist fervor, beginning with the Alien Acts and the Know-Nothings, and continuing to the present day. But we must not lose sight of how the ideal of two-way melting pot integration of other cultures has persisted at the core of our national project—how it is in our national DNA, continually re-asserting itself after nativist backsliding. That began with the Founders who looked outside the Anglo-French Enlightenment for ideas, drawing inspiration from the Iroquois Confederacy, Confucian China, and the Basque Country. It has continued with the ongoing integration of cultural practices from around the world into the American mainstream.
An Iranian reporter, who was perhaps trying to diminish the melting-pot luster of America’s 2022 World Cup soccer team, invidiously needled team captain Tyler Adams about racism in America. Adams responded with poise and conviction: “One thing that I’ve learned, especially from living abroad in the past years, and having to fit in in different cultures, is that in the US, we’re continuing to make progress every single day.” When it comes to the melting pot ideal, history bears this out: one need only look at eighteenth century criticisms of German immigrants (Benjamin Franklin disparaged the “Palatine Boors” before eventually changing his mind) or Thomas Nast caricatures of Irish immigrants to see how far the US has come in accepting and integrating those groups. The progress with many other groups, which immigrated later, started later, but has followed a similar trajectory.
A good, albeit imperfect, measure of two-way melting pot integration is intermarriage rates. German Americans only intermarried at a 2 percent rate in 1900; that increased to 90 percent by 1990. The intermarriage rate for other groups is poised to follow that progress: it is now 39 percent for Latinos, 46 percent for Asians, and 17 percent for Blacks. That integration was highlighted, in full glory, by America’s World Cup soccer team, with team members’ backgrounds including Jewish-Latvian, Native American, Jamaican, Mexican, Guatemalan, Ghanaian, Liberian, and others. Notably, nearly all the players have mixed origins.
One forgets what an exception and a marvel this is, until one considers how different things are in many other parts of the world. For example, Chinese Malaysians, whose ancestors first came to Malaysia over 500 years ago, are still distinguished and effectively segregated from ethnic Malays. The same goes for Sri Lankan Tamils, whose ancestors first came to Sri Lanka over a thousand years ago, and Turks, who have been in Germany for generations. Soccer player Mesut Özil was born and raised in Germany but complains that he is only considered a German when the national team wins the World Cup.
Seventy-five years ago, the “Guide for New Americans” told immigrants:
“You will learn from [other Americans] and you will give to them as you live and work together and America will profit from this sharing. From the time of this country's beginnings, the blending of differences has given it strength and stature and richness.”
This is the long-held melting pot ideal we should be debating, not the straw man of one-way assimilation that critics have erected. The critics’ efforts notwithstanding, it is an ideal toward which we are “continuing to make progress every single day.” Before we cavalierly discard that ideal, we also need to evaluate the alternative—multicultural particularism—as it has played out in reality. Countries like Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia are a good starting point for that evaluation. Their track record is not auspicious.
Jens Heycke is author of “Out of the Melting Pot, Into the Fire: Multiculturalism in the World’s Past and America’s Future” and the forthcoming “Medina Before Islam and Muhammad’s Constitution of Medina.”
