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Ethnocultural Political Analysis: A New Approach to American Ethnic Studies
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 January 2009
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At the seventy-ninth annual meeting of the American Historical Association in 1964, a panel of scholars enlivened one of the sessions with a heated debate over the effects of ethnic assimilation in American culture. The topic of debate, ‘Beyond the Melting Pot: Irish and Jewish Separateness in American Society’, focused on a recent controversial study of ethnic mixture in New York City by Nathan Glazer and Daniel Patrick Moynihan, both sociologists. Glazer and Moynihan in their book Beyond the Melting Pot traced the ‘role of ethnicity’ in the seaboard city. The melting pot ‘did not happen’, they concluded, ‘at least not in New York and, mutatis mutandis, in those parts of America which resemble New York’. This frontal assault on the concept of Americanization, long a cherished ideal in the United States, drew a sharp reaction from several panellists, especially William V. Shannon, editorial writer for die New York Times and author of The American Irish, and Irving Greenberg, professor of history at Yeshiva University. Both Shannon and Greenberg insisted that Irishmen and Jews had indeed been assimilated in American society, either for better or for worse. At this point, the discussion degenerated into the traditional moralistic debate on the merits and demerits of assimilation. Reflecting the divergent views of their colleagues in the history profession, Shannon praised assimilation and Greenberg condemned it.
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References
1 Beyond the Melting Pot: The Negroes, Puerto Ricans, Jews, Italians, and Irish of New York City (Cambridge, 1963).Google Scholar See also Glazer, Nathan, ‘Ethnic Groups in America: From National Culture to Ideology’, in Berger, Morroe et al. , Freedom and Control in Modern Society (New York, 1954), pp. 158–73.Google Scholar
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81 Strangers in the Land, x. In an earlier essay, Higham traced the sordid tale of anti-semitism in the Gilded Age, but likewise concluded that ‘the genial and democratic norms of American life remained basically undisturbed’. Higham, , ‘Anti-Semitism in the Gilded Age: A Reinterpretation’, Mississippi Valley Historical Review, 43 (03 1957), 578.CrossRefGoogle Scholar In a similar vein, Professor Smith suggests that ‘assimilation is a more useful perspective than alienation from which to approach the history of twentieth-century immigration’. Smith, , ‘New Approaches to the History of Immigration’, loc. cit., pp. 1274, 1279.Google Scholar
82 I am indebted to Frederick C. Luebke of the University of Nebraska and Henry Leonard and lohn T. Hubbell of Kent State University for substantive and editorial advice.
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