Melting Pot

Theoretical Context

Throughout the 19th century, presidents and poets alike echoed the idea of the United States as a unique site for cultural assimilation, as new waves of immigrants sought to put down roots. However, the visual image of foreign assimilation came to the forefront of public culture through Israel Zangwill's popular play, The Melting Pot of 1908, which venerated the assimilation of European immigrants, even “the black and yellow races,” into a universal American culture. Once established, the icon of the melting pot served to legitimize American ideologies of equal opportunity and independence from European nations, as immigrants could recast themselves as Americans by learning English and adapting to American norms.

Early theoretical grounding for the melting pot took root in the Chicago School assimilation theory of the 1910s. Here, human ecologist Robert Park outlined a “race relations cycle” in which new immigrant groups adopted an accommodating stance to the host culture, copying outward customs and norms to allow successful economic interaction. Park and others expressed belief that, over generations, these cultural compromises gradually led to conformity of language, opinion, and belief.

Even contemporary accounts of assimilation theory interpret the idea of the melting pot as a precursor to the assimilationist idea of immigrant incorporation: a complex and multidimensional yet mostly “straight line” adaptation of immigrants into U.S. society. In his classic 1964 account of assimilation theory, Milton Gordon not only observed seven different stages of assimilation—that is, cultural, structural, identity, and so on—but he also reinforced the idea of a “triple melting pot” (Catholic, Jewish, Protestant) originally put forward by Ruby Jo Kennedy in her intermarriage study of New Haven in 1944. Gordon said that immigrants with common Protestant roots followed a direct path of adaptation into the Anglo-Saxon, Protestant [Page 576]core of U.S. society, and Catholics and Jews into their own homogenizations, thus associating the melting pot with a nexus of religious values toward which all others eventually integrated. Gordon further argued that racial discrimination prevented blacks, Asians, Mexican Americans, and some Puerto Ricans from participating meaningfully in either the white Protestant or white Catholic communities. His comments made it clear that structural societal conditions prevented the existence of one homogeneous melting pot; rather there were multiple melting pots, and some groups did not belong to any of them.

Contesting the Term

Gordon's contemporaries Nathan Glazer and Daniel P. Moynihan further demonstrated the problematic aspects of the melting pot idea in their seminal work Beyond the Melting Pot of 1963. They showed that ethnic backgrounds and identities can provide resistance to “melting” and are quite central in structuring the immigrant incorporations. In a later 1970 edition, the authors acknowledge that not only ethnicity plays a role in structuring life and conflict in the city, but economic interests and racism are of equal significance in understanding social patterns.

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