The Melting Pot (1908- ) is the idea that people come to the US from all over the world but melt into one people with one culture. The Italians, for example, learn English but give us pizza and spaghetti. The whole becomes greater than the parts, better than any of the old countries that Americans come from.
In 1845 Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote privately in his journal that Europeans, Africans, and Polynesians in North America:
“will construct a new race, a new religion, a new state, a new literature, which will be as vigorous as the new Europe which came out of the smelting-pot of the Dark Ages, …”
American Indians need not apply, apparently.
In 1908 both the name and idea caught on from the play “The Melting Pot”. The Jewish American hero tells his Christian girlfriend, while watching the sun set behind the Statue of Liberty:
“Yes, East and West, and North and South, the palm and the pine, the pole and the equator, the crescent and the cross – how the great Alchemist melts and fuses them with his purging flame! Here shall they all unite to build the Republic of Man and the Kingdom of God.”
In 1916 Madison Grant was less upbeat in “The Passing of the Great Race”:
“We Americans must realize that the altruistic ideals which have controlled our social development during the past century and the maudlin sentimentalism that has made America ‘an asylum for the oppressed,’ are sweeping the nation toward a racial abyss. If the Melting Pot is allowed to boil without control and we continue to follow our national motto [E pluribus unum] and deliberately blind ourselves to all ‘distinctions of race, creed or color,’ the type of native American of Colonial descent will become as extinct as the Athenian of the age of Pericles, and the Viking of the days of Rollo.”
His ideas about racial purity led to the death of millions of Jews.
In 1977 “Schoolhouse Rock!”, on US children’s television, sang of “Lovely Lady Liberty with her book of recipes”:
“America was founded by the English,
But also by the Germans, Dutch, and French. …
You simply melt right in,
It doesn’t matter what your skin,
No matter where you’re from, or your religion,
You jump right into the Great American Melting Pot.”
I can still remember when I first learned about the Melting Pot: the words were coming out of the teacher’s mouth but it was like she could not see the Black half of the class. How in the world could she say Americans were melting into one people when they were mainly divided into Black and White? The Melting Pot seemed to be Whites-only.
White is right: In practice, the Melting Pot has pretty much become a marketing term for assimilation into Anglo-Protestant culture. And because that culture is built on racism, and because most immigrants these days are no longer White, that means most immigrants will never be fully accepted no matter how assimilated.
– Abagond, 2019.
See also:
- Anglo-Protestant culture
- Madison Grant
- The Third Enlargement of American Whiteness – how the Melting Pot works and why it is Whites-only
- Statue of Liberty – aka Lady Liberty
- nation of immigrants
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Fascinating, especially Ralph Waldo Emerson’s quote.
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When i first saw this post, the first thing that popped into my head was the song in the school house rock DVD collection i own.
I actually like the song and the voice of the singer, Lori Lieberman. I like it more for the song itself and the voice of the artist, more than what the song represents.
However, i am conflicted about the ideals of the song and how it’s just another way white culture white washes the social aspect of immigration.
It’s propaganda and nothing more. All lies…. America welcomes you, only if you’re white.
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Of course, non-whites are useful for the melting pot. Who else is going to be used for the firewood?
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hmmm…the idealistic melting pot has been going on despite those of the mind and nature to not like it or try and forbid it. I think it works on a deeper level than what most people try to intellectualize. Nature has the last word and works dynamically through an engine called Love.If you spell it backwards you get. Evol. The driving force of natural dynamics.
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When I was young: “When you are white you are right when you are yellow you are mellow, when you are brown stick around, when you are black get back!”
Today, when black people stop saying “one drop of black blood makes you black” just like those individual who are homosexual are coming out of the closet, the many white people who have black blood will also come out of the closet.
It is the nature of mankind to find some way to belittle someone else. in this nation the ignorant whites form a large group and they continue to struggle to convince blacks that they are inferior.
Blacks must stop believing such crap! On a percentage basis there is probable an equal amount of individuals in all categories of intelligence. Cut the top few rich who acquire their wealth from family or like Bill Gates the right place at the right time with the right money.
Black leader need to encourage other blacks to push forward with all they have and remember a person who retires as a truck driver, or custodian is successful when compared to the whole. Since I first heard that quote blacks have moved upward and are represented in almost all leadership positions in the US.
Since black continue to occupy the deep south in the large numbers, most of the states do not have a means of doing anything about black opportunity. Over 20 states have less then 10 percent black population and most of that population is in one or two cities. See Chart: Sort by the percent column.
https://www.kff.org/other/state-indicator/distribution-by-raceethnicity/?currentTimeframe=0&sortModel=%7B%22colId%22:%22Location%22,%22sort%22:%22asc%22%7D
Stop believing blacks are inferior!
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I love that picture!
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Allen Shaw, take your basic level response to SWPL.
Ababgond, I’m supposed you haven’t done this post years ago.
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We call it multi-culturalism here in Canada.
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America is a melting pot just sounds hollow.
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When I think of the term “Melting Pot” I think of an amalgamation Of cultures and different groups of people coming together. But the way this country is set up under the system of white supremacy black people are not invited to that mixture. Even with interracial dating and marriages, the current administration and the POTUS and his xenophobic rhetoric that is separating the country now just proves that this so called “American Melting Pot” does not include black or Muslim or Brown. Even though a lot of so called people of color harbor anti-black bias.
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1977 was a key year for me on this topic. Maybe it was related to Schoolhouse rock video, but in my high school US history class, I did a report on the Myth of the American Melting Pot. I had heard the term, but then it conflicted with reports I got from people on the street (“Go back to where you came from” “Get out of OUR country”, “I fought in Vietnam so that YOU people would not be here”, etc.) even though I know I had had ancestors who were already in the US at the time of the Revolutionary War (we had just passed the BiCentennial). Even my own grandmother told me that I could never be American either until I had diluted my heathen blood until maybe my grandchildren could possibly be American finally. And since my school had recently been desegregated with a 30% black student body, I did not understand (as a teenager) how could white students could view the black students as not authentically America either, given that many of the white kids had immigrant grandparents. I didn’t join any of the white extracurricular activity groups, and tried to join the black groups, but it was not easy either.
So, I chose that topic for the report, and got hold of the book Beyond the Melting Pot: The Negroes, Puerto Ricans, Jews, Italians, and Irish of New York City by Nathan Glazer and Daniel P. Moynihan. Glazer was a famous scholar on the topic in the 60s-70s and even well into the 90s. Glazer passed away only a few months ago.
I remember that Glazer mentioned that early European immigrants in the 19th century gladly gave up their identities to join the Anglo American community, but ethnic identity among European ethnics was more salient in the 20th century. But, even in the 1970s, I learned that race was a powerful factor preventing Blacks, most Latinos and Asians from ever joining the melting pot and it was already a myth (unlike what the Schoolhouse Rock video suggests).
Glazer’s book was written before the 1965 Immigration law began to take effect, and by the 1990s, he had opined that multiculturalism had replaced melting pot as the model that was operating. In the late 70s, I remember that the term “mixed salad” or “tossed salad” was the term proposed, ie, each ingredient retains its unique characteristics, but they are combined together to create something else.
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@Cherry Boy So you only want to hear what you want to hear. Yo King Cherry, just ignore my poor experience. u b de man!!!
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America was not ‘founded” by any European race, nationality or culture. It was all stolen by all of those very cultures that are mentioned from the Native Americans in the same manner as Africa, Central America, the Caribbean islands, Oceania, the Polynesian islands, and any other place that had resident indigenous people living on said land. They were all stolen by the Europeans and colonized by each country. If the reverse were to have happened none of those European countries would admit to be founded by any people of color. So, why should any of those continents be considered “found, discovered” or any other such term?
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