1.1 Strategies and processes of adaptation in immigration  (Page 4/11)

The maintenance, extension, and popular diffusion of this vision corresponded to Israel Zangwill, English-Jewish writer who also immigrated to the United States. He was convinced that that country was the great hope for Europe’s poor and oppressed. Zangwill enjoyed enormous success with his drama, The Melting Pot , published in 1908. The protagonist is a young Russian-Jewish musician and immigrant whose dream is to compose a great “American” symphony that expressed his deepest feelings about the United States as a crucible chosen by God so that all the divisions and ethnic conflicts of humanity disappear, while “being fused” in a single group; symbol of the universal brotherhood. The protagonist falls in love with a young beautiful Gentile and the play ends with the execution of the symphony, leaving a glimpse of the marriage commitment between David Quixano and his fiancée, after a few unexpected events and the habitual opposition of both families. In one of the most rhetorical moments, David expresses his feelings: “America is God’s crucible, the great Melting Pot where all the races of Europe are melting and re-forming! ...Germans and Frenchmen, Irishmen and Englishmen, Jews and Russians –into the crucible with you all! God is making the American” Zangwill, 1909). This was Zangwill’s dream.

Several decades later, an investigation on the evolution of marriages between 1870 and 1940 in New Haven, Connecticut showed that, on one hand, the Anglo-Americans, Germans, and Scandinavians tended to intermarry (the Protestant block). The same happened, on the other hand, between the Irish, Italian, and Polish (the Catholic block), while Jews tended to only marry Jews. Was it necessary to speak of a single or a triple melting pot? This question came upon Ruby Jo Reeves Kennedy (1944, pp.331-339), the author of this investigation, upon seeing this tendency toward “religious endogamy” and, although she spoke of the "triple melting-pot" as a new theory of assimilation, it in fact aimed toward the pluralist conception of the society that others developed.

Cultural pluralism or multiculturalism

A few years after the success of Melting Pot , another author of Jewish descent, the Harvard philosopher, Horace Kallen, formulated serious reserves to the theory of "Americanization" (or "Anglo-conformity") as expressed in Melting Pot . Kallen stated his concerns in the newspaper, The Nation, with a two-part article titled, “Democracy versus the Melting-Pot” (February 18 and 25, 1915; see Gordon, 1978: 199). The diverse ethnic groups of immigrants tend to settle down in a certain area or region, Kallen states, to preserve their language, religion, and customs; really, their original culture. On the other hand, they learn English for general communication, and participate in the economic and political life of the country. Therefore, America cannot be conceived as a melting pot, but as a “cooperation of diverse cultures” or a “federation of national cultures” within the framework of a political and administrative entity. This vision, denominated as “cultural pluralism, See prologue of Culture and Democracy in the United States, New York, Boni and Liverright, 1924. ” makes no attempt to defy historical American political principles (as supposed by those in favor of Americanization), but rather to protect the immigrants’ democratic ideals, serving as an antidote against cultural attacks by those who pretended racial superiority, such as Ku Klux Klan.