Beyond Melting Pots, Cultured Pluralism, Ethnicity—or, Déjà Vu All Over Again

1 About five years ago Rudoff Vecoli, a leading historian of American immigrant history, presented to the Immigration History Society his presidential address, which was published shortly thereafter in the Journal Of American Ethnic History. The piece was called "Return to the Melting Pot: Ethnicity in the United States in the Eighties." It was mainly a review of the two decades preceding the address - a time when the melting pot idea, dating from Israel Zangwill's play of that name in 1908, was presumably laid to rest with the work of Nathan Glazer and Daniel Moynihan in their influential 1963 book significantly entitled Beyond the Melting Pot: the Negroes, Puerto Ricans, Jews, Italians and Irish of New York City. The following year, Milton Gordon"s Assimilation in American Life: The Role of Race, Religion and National Origins was published, as well as a host of other work showing how "the melting pot simply didn't happen." Studies of that period showed how ethnic groups persisted in retaining their identity despite numerous predictions of their inevitable demise or diminution under the leveling impact of Americanizing forces such as common schools, the workplace, the media. Vecoli carries the story through the "ethnic revival" of the '70s when, as either a negative reaction to or a positive consequence of the Black consciousness movement of the late '60s and the fragmentation during the Vietnam War period of the previous '50s consensus view of American society, the society's divisions along race, gender, class, generational and ethnic lines became more visible, and a pluralistic view of American reality began to prevail again. With "the violent confrontations" of "that bloody decade," loss of faith in the homogeneity of the Anglo-American establishment and its myths, "the essential pluralism of the society manifested itself. The lid was off..." Vecoli writes. In its positive dimension this period empowered Native Americans, Hispanics, and later so-called white ethnics to affirm their previously repressed or undervalued self-identities (the era of "Kiss me, I'm Polish" or "Ukrainian is Beautiful" bumper stickers began). Vecoli then brings the story up to the late '70s and '80s, when he discerned as he says," a growing chorus of criticism challenging the pluralist paradigm" (15). In the late '70s, a form of backlash occurred among certain historians and culture critics who had earlier been progenitors of the ethnic revival. Thus, Nathan Glazer wondered whether the assimilation model did not have "much to recommend it"; Arthur Mann (the former Smith College and now University of Chicago professor and author of Laguardia) agreed, according to Vecoli, that "the common culture of Americans was much more important than the ethnic differences among them"; and above all others, the doyen of recent American immigrant history, the author of two crucial books in the field, Strangers in the Land and Send These to Me, past-president of the American Historical Association, John Higham, proclaimed in 1982 that "the ethnic revival is over, and an era in ethnic studies has come to an end." Vecoli reports that in a recent paper Higham urged historians to go "beyond pluralism" and address the grand theme of "the making of the people of America" (11). These critics were responding with much unease to manifestations of cultural and especially racial conflict in society. In their anxiety one senses a fear that a Frankenstein monster has been unleashed - the recognition of ethnic diversity in America, and even earlier a general celebration of the richness of the mix, now quails before the spectre of divisive and unbridgeable differences. These scholars were by no means in the camp of Reagan, but they were no doubt responding to some of the same social conditions that empowered his conservatism and versions of neo-nativism. In his 1984 speech to the Republican National Convention when he accepted the nomination for his second term, Reagan observed that the athletes from 140 countries who had come to compete in that year's Olympics in Los Angeles, came to "the one people in all the world whose people carry the bloodlines of all those 140 countries and more. …