Melting Pot

Few social metaphors have dominated American thought as pervasively as that of the melting pot—a key symbol for the United States. A melting pot is, literally, a vessel in which metals or other materials are melted and mixed; this metaphor compares America's sundry racial, ethnic, and religious groups to foundry-type metals that are transmuted, in the crucible of the American experience, into social gold. This entry charts the origins and ideological trajectory of this defining idea and that of its rival, cultural pluralism.

The verbal trope of melting as a code for Americanness can be traced to J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur (1735–1813), author of Letters From an American Farmer (1782). Here, he likened “Americans” to individuals from all nations being “melted” into a new race. As a full-blown descriptor of the United States, however, the term melting pot made its dramatic debut in Israel Zangwill's (1864–1926) play, The Melting-Pot, which opened in Washington, D.C., in October 1908.

The play's protagonist is David Quixano, a young Jewish immigrant bent on composing the great American symphony. The visionary Quixano heralds America as “God's Crucible, the great Melting-Pot” where “the Great Alchemist” (God) “melts and fuses” those who hail from “all nations and races” in coming to her shores. This prophetic exaltation of America [Page 886]soon captured the public's imagination in New York, when in 1909, it was performed 136 times to popular acclaim, despite critical disdain.

This mythic image of America has had its share of demythologizers. The melting pot is perhaps defined more sharply by its detractors than by its proponents. Indeed, social reality in the United States has arguably belied the myth. The melting pot, for one thing, excluded African Americans. Proverbially, it was “the pot calling the kettle black,” in that Jim Crow segregation was the polar opposite of Quixano's vision of integration. Among the most detailed and well-documented cultural histories of the initial reception of The Melting-Pot and its subsequent impact is that of Philip Gleason, who concluded that among intellectuals, the real challenger to the symbol of the melting pot is the concept of cultural pluralism.