Melting Pot

The metaphor of America as a “melting pot” remains as salient in the first decade of the 21st century as it did in the early 20th century, when the phrase was used in the title of Israel Zangwill's 1905 play, which extolled the United States as an unparalleled haven for immigrants. America as a “melting pot” is deeply and uncritically entrenched in the popular imagination; its place among social commentators and scholars, on the other hand, is that of a site from which different and oppositional versions of the nation and its people are argued. Few scholars in the present day would assert that the United States is simply a melting pot, a single blend of races, ethnicities, or cultures from any and all parts of the globe. Rather, the image of a salad, or a kaleidoscope, or a symphony orchestra might be more current because of the increasing complexity with which we use concepts of assimilation, acculturation, multiculturalism, pluralism, or multiethnicity to describe the United States. The “melting pot” image, however, is implicitly or explicitly always part of analyses of American ethnic identity.

The idea of America being a country comprising many different cultures and peoples can be found in the writings of the earliest European settlers; they saw the New World as a “crucible” and the New Canaan. Then, most notably, St. John de Crevecoeur, in Letters From an American Farmer (1782), described this “new man” as being descended from the mixing of Scots, French, English, and so on. To de Crevecoeur, the American is not only a new ethnicity, he has willingly left behind, in Europe, hereditary titles and other “prejudices” in order to craft a new social and cultural identity.

The next major contribution to imagining the nation came from Frederick Jackson Turner's 1893 “Frontier Hypothesis,” which located the American “crucible” on the western frontier. The frontier built the essential national characteristics (echoing Emerson's descriptions) of self-reliance, strength, individualism, and so on. Turner also wrote that Americans are a mixed race (European) and not merely English.

The popular idea of America as a melting pot is commonly traced to Israel Zangwill's play The Melting Pot. Set in the seething, urban cauldron of [Page 1435]New York, the play celebrates an America that is able to unite David and Vera, a Russian Jew and the daughter of the officer responsible for killing David's family in a pogrom. Indeed, both David and Vera leave their Old World identities behind when they leave Russia; their union symbolizes the New World as a melting pot. The historical period of the play was that of American cities in the late 19th century rapidly filling up with eastern and southern Europeans, and already established Americans expressing doubt about the ability of these new immigrants to assimilate. Zangwill's play portrays a nation that could absorb and assimilate even the most disparate cultures and individual pasts.

Since then, the melting pot concept has become a touchstone for various social commentators, creative writers, policy analysts, and sociologists to describe and analyze the meaning of “America.” Most notably, the Chicago school of sociologists in the first half of the 20th century began to examine the process that immigrants undergo to become Americanized. Led by Robert Park and Everett Stonequist, these sociologists coined such terms as “culture clash,” the “marginal man,” and “assimilation.” At that time, assimilation was thought to be inevitable and a linear process, going from a marginalized existence and alien identity to one of complete assimilation, indistinguishable from other Americans. The Chicago school's focus on the urban transformation of American cities through the influx of Jews, Poles, and other eastern European ethnicities set the course for several academic disciplines, including sociology, political science, and ethnic and literary studies.

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