1. Glazer, Nathan and Moynihan, Daniel P., Beyond the Melting Pot: The Negroes, Puerto Ricans, Jews, Italians, and Irish of New York City (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1963), p. vGoogle Scholar; 2d ed. (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1970), pp. xcvii, 290. I am indebted to Philip Gleason for sending me a copy of his article “Confusion Compounded: The Melting Pot in the 1960's and 1970's,” Ethnicity, 6 (1979), 10–20Google Scholar, a follow-up study to Gleason's original essay “The Melting Pot: Symbol of Fusion or Confusion,” American Quarterly, 16 (1964), 20–46.Google Scholar The new essay surveys much of the recent, contradictorily hostile literature about the melting pot, including book reviews.

2. Novak, Michael, The Rise of the Unmeltable Ethnics: Politics and Culture in the Seventies (New York: Macmillan, 1972), pp. 257, 138.Google Scholar Quoted by Gleason, , “Confusion Compounded,” p. 14.Google Scholar

3. Berkson, Isaac B., Theories of Americanization: A Critical Study with Special Reference to the Jewish Group (New York: Teachers College, Columbia Univ., 1920), esp. pp. 72–79.Google ScholarSaveth, Edward N., American Historians and European Immigrants, 1875–1925 (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1948), esp. pp. 98–149.Google ScholarGordon, Milton M., Assimilation in American Life: The Role of Race, Religion, and National Origins (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1964), esp. pp. 84–159.Google ScholarGreeley, Andrew M., Ethnicity in the United States: A Preliminary Reconnaissance (New York: John Wiley, 1974), esp. pp. 290–317.Google Scholar

4. Petter, Henri, The Early American Novel (Columbus: Ohio State Univ. Press, 1971), p. 146.Google Scholar For Cotton Mather, see, for example, the sermon “A Pillar of Gratitude” (1700)Google Scholar concerned with the Satanic scheme of sending Irish immigrants to America; for Franklin, Benjamin, his “Observations Concerning the Increase of Mankind” (1751)Google Scholar, fearful of the German-speaking “Palatine Boors” in Pennsylvania.

5. Kallen, Horace, “Democracy Versus the Melting-Pot: A Study of American Nationality,” The Nation, 100 (02 18, 1915), 190–94Google Scholar, and 100 (February 25, 1915), 217–20; quotation on p. 220. See Higham, John, “Ethnic Pluralism in Modern American Thought,” in Send These to Me: Jews and Other Immigrants in Urban America (New York: Atheneum, 1975), pp. 196–230.Google Scholar Cf. also Bourne, Randolph's essays, “Trans-National America,” Atlantic Monthly 118 (07 1916), 86–97Google Scholar, and “The Jew and Trans-National America,” The Menorah Journal 2 (12 1916), 277–84.Google Scholar

6. Zangwill, Israel, The Melting-Pot: Drama in Four Acts (New York: Macmillan, 1911), pp. 37–38.Google Scholar More about Zangwill later; but note the prominence of David's violin in the stage photographs (Fig. 4).

7. Kammen, Michael, People of Paradox: An Inquiry Concerning the Origins of American Civilization (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1972), p. 82.Google Scholar

8. Gleason, , “Confusion Compounded,” pp. 5–6.Google Scholar

9. Ibid., p. 13. Gleason, whose 1964 article was a virtual encyclopedia of melting pot references, reviews a host of new ones in “Confusion Compounded.” Among them are Erickson, Frederick, “Gatekeeping and the Melting Pot: Interaction in Counseling Encounters,” Harvard Educational Review, 45 (02 1975), 44–70CrossRefGoogle Scholar (for mixed metaphors); Petersen, William, The Politics of Population (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday Anchor, 1965), pp. 211–12Google Scholar (denouncing the melting pot as a “gruesome metaphor”); Gene Baroni's scatological puns with “pot” in National Catholic Reporter, 05 6, 1977Google Scholar; Jackson, Jesse and Poussaint, Alvin, “Dialogue on Separatism,” Ebony, 25 (08 1970), 62 ff.Google Scholar; and Greer, Colin's contradictory comments in Saturday Review, 11 15, 1969, pp. 84 ff.Google Scholar, and in Divided Society: The Ethnic Experience in America (New York: Basic Books, 1974), pp. 19, 25 ff.Google Scholar The international response to the notion of the melting pot is equally contrary and contradictory, as Siegfried, André's America Comes of Age: A French Analysis (London: Cape, 1927)Google Scholar easily indicates. To take a more extreme example, the official publishing house of the German Nazi party found it worthwhile to publish a 140-page critique of the American melting pot; in this book, entitled Schmelztiegel Amerika (Berlin: Zentral-verlag der NSDAP, Franz Eher Nachfolger GmbH, 1941)Google Scholar, Franz-Otto Wrede predictably does not go for the idea of the melting pot, but also gloats at the thought that it did not work (esp. pp. 88–89, 116–35).

10. Novak, , Rise of Unmeltable Ethnics, pp. 38, 129.Google Scholar Quoted in Gleason, , “Confusion Compounded,” p. 14.Google Scholar

11. Glazer, and Moynihan, , Beyond the Melting Pot, p. 315.Google Scholar

12. Fiedler, Leslie A., Love and Death in the American Novel, rev. ed. (New York: Stein & Day, 1975), p. 94.Google Scholar

13. Gleason, , “Melting Pot,” p. 45.Google Scholar

14. Gleason, , “Confusion Compounded,” p. 15.Google Scholar

15. Freud, Sigmund, Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious (1905)Google Scholar, in The Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, standard edition, trans, under editorship of James Strachey in cooperation with Anna Freud (London: Hogarth Press, 1960), VIII, 62. The only psychoanalytic contribution to the melting pot discussion (which Gleason lists) is disappointingly “racial” in perspective: Radzinski, J. M., “The American Melting Pot: Its Meaning to Us,” American Journal of Psychiatry, 115 (04 1959), 873–86.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed

16. Nye, Russel, American Literary History: 1607–1830 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1970), p. 157.Google Scholar

17. de Crèvecoeur, Michel-Guillaume-Jean, Letters from an American Farmer (1782) (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1957), p. 39.Google Scholar

18. Kolodny, Annette, The Lay of the Land: Metaphor as Experience and History in American Life and Letters (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1975), p. 54.Google Scholar

19. Pictorial representations of the melting pot are apparently rare in America, and none of the images (which I managed to locate with the help of J. J. Appel, Philip Gleason, and Victor Greene) show female immigrants in the pot. There is something in the melting pot image that compels us to think of the immigrants as male and the vessel of their transformation as female.

20. Ayscough, Samuel, Remarks, p. 7.Google Scholar Further references are given parenthetically in text.

21. Crèvecoeur, , Letters, 1787 edition, II, 286.Google Scholar The “melting” itself: “Ici les individus de toutes les Nations sont fondus dans une nouvelle race.” Crèvecoeur's use of the word “fondus” to indicate the melting process evokes a culinary association of melting pot. Ceres also appears in Crèvecoeur's text; for example, quite explicitly on p. 51 of the first volume of the 1787 edition: “Temple de Ceres.”

22. Rice, Howard C., Le Cultivateur Américain: Etude Sur L'Oeuvre de Saint John de Crevecoeur (Paris: Librairie Ancienne Honoré Champion, 1933), p. 96.Google Scholar In another context, Rice quotes the appropriate comment of the first German translator of Crèvecoeur's Letters, Johann August Ephraim Götze, who wrote in the introduction to the second volume of his version of Briefe eines Amerikanischen Landmanns (Leipzig, 1788)Google Scholar that the children of Europeans were more easily Indianized than those of the Indians were Europeanized and suspected an interesting psychological reason: “Was mag davon die eigentliche Ursache sein? Hier öffnet sich dem Psychologen ein grosses Feld” (II, vi); quoted by Rice, , Cultivateur Americain, p. 136.Google Scholar

23. Fleming, E. McClung, “Symbols of the United States: From Indian Queen to Uncle Sam,” in Browne, Ray B., Crowder, Richard H., Lokke, Virgil L., and Stafford, William T., eds., Frontiers of American Culture (Lafayette, Ind.: Purdue Univ. Studies, 1968), pp. 1–24Google Scholar, with several illustrations of Indian princesses and plumed goddesses.

24. Green, Rayna, “The Pocahontas Perplex: The Image of Indian Women in American Culture,” Massachusetts Review 16 (1975), 698–714, esp. pp. 701–2Google Scholar and illustrations (Green assumes, however, that the Princess is sexually “sacrosanct” in American culture.) The connection of the Indian Princess and the Statue of Liberty also provides a bridge between the Crèvecoeur frontispiece and the images of (usually male) immigrants approaching the statue.

25. Cf. Eliade, Mircea, The Forge and the Crucible, trans. Corrin, Stephen (New York: Harper, 1962), pp. 40–41, 62–78, 98–113, 152–57.Google Scholar

26. Lucretius, , On the Nature of the Universe, trans. Latham, R. E. (Harmondsworth, England: Penguin, 1951, repr. 1977), pp. 79, 77.Google Scholar Lucretius also explains that this Great Mother goddess, often called Ceres or Cybele, is frequently portrayed with armed companions and wearing a battlemented crown, which signifies “that the goddess bids men be ready to defend their native earth staunchly by force of arms and resolve to shield their parents and do them credit” (p. 79). The term “alma mater” occurs in book II, lines 992–93:

denique caelesti sumus omnes semine oriundi, omnibus ille idem pater est, unde alma liquentis umoris guttas mater cum terra recepit, feta parit nitidas fruges arbustaque laeta et genus humanum, parit omnia saecla ferarum, pabula cum praebet, quibus omnes corporapascunt et dulcem ducunt vitam prolemque propagant; quapropter merito maternum nomen adepta est.

(“Lastly, we are all sprung from heavenly seed. All alike have the same father, from whom all-nourishing mother earth receives the showering drops of moisture. Thus fertilized, she gives birth to smiling crops and lusty trees, to mankind and all the breeds of beasts. She it is that yields the food on which they all feed their bodies, lead their joyous lives and renew their race. So she has well earned the name of mother” [p. 89]).

27. Harvey, Paul, ed., The Oxford Companion to Classical Literature (London and New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1966), p. 128.Google Scholar

28. Crane, Hart, The Bridge (1930)Google Scholar, quoted in Young, Philip, “The Mother of Us All: Pocahontas Reconsidered,” Kenyan Review 24, No. 3 (Summer 1962), 408.Google Scholar

29. Lindsay, Vachel, “Our Mother Pocahontas,”Google Scholar quoted in Fiedler, Leslie, The Return of the Vanishing American (London: Paladin, 1968), p. 86.Google Scholar Despite Kallen's and Novak's admonition that men cannot change their grandfathers, Lindsay sets out to establish a substitute genealogy when he writes:

John Rolfe is not our ancestor

We rise from out the soul of her

Held in native wonderland,

While the sun's rays kissed her hand,

In the springtime,

In Virginia,

Our mother, Pocahontas.

30. Young, , “Mother of Us All,” p. 408.Google Scholar

31. Whereas Lucas Cranach's picture transforms old women into young ones, his contemporary Hans Sebald Beham's woodcut with the same title transforms men and women alike. The results of the metamorphosis (games, feasts, and sexual activities of men and women), however, resemble each other. Beham's and other fountains of youth are reproduced and discussed in Hartlaub, G. F., Lucas Cranach d.J., Der Jungbrunnen: Eine Einführung (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1958).Google Scholar

32. Erikson's “Reflections on the American Identity” concern themselves with the creation of a “self-made ego” among immigrant children “in the proverbial melting pot.” Erikson, Erik H., Childhood and Society, 2d ed. (New York: Norton, 1963), p. 294.Google Scholar According to Cunliffe, Marcus, The Nation Takes Shape: 1789–1837 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1956), p. 164Google Scholar, Clay, Henry coined the term “self-made” in 1832.Google Scholar

33. See Stone, Albert E. Jr., “Crèvecoeur's Letters and the Beginnings of American Literature,” Emory University Quarterly, 18 (1962), 197–213.Google Scholar This argument is developed by Christadler, Martin's article, “St. John de Crevecoeurs Letters from an American Farmer und die Anfange des amerikanischen Romans,” in Geschichte und Fiktion: Amerikanische Prosa im 19. Jahrhundert (Gottingen: Vandenhoek & Ruprecht, 1972), pp. 42–63, esp. p. 45.Google Scholar

34. This is the annotation in The Interpreter's Bible, vol. 11 (New York and Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1955), p. 217.Google Scholar Interestingly, American Studies rhetoric often echoes this melting pot idiom, concerned as it is with the waning of the walls of the departmental disciplines and the ascent of the unified “new” redeemer method. See Michael Kramer's comments on the “redeemer discipline” in A Report on American Studies, mimeog. (New York: Columbia University, 1978), p. 5.Google Scholar

35. Clinton, DeWitt, An Introductory Discourse delivered before the Literary and Philosophical Society of New-York on the 4th of May, 1814 (New York: Longworth, 1815), p. 8.Google Scholar Quoted, with slight changes, in Curti, Merle, The Roots of American Loyalty (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1946), pp. 115–16Google Scholar, and in Blanke, Gustav, Amerikanischer Geist: Begriffs- und wortgeschichtliche Untersuchungen (Meisenheim: Hain Verlag, 1956), pp. 34–35.Google Scholar

36. Leftwich, Joseph, Israel Zangwill (New York: Thomas Yoseloff, 1957), p. 255.Google Scholar Contrast this passage with Zangwill's afterword (1915) to The Melting-Pot: “intermarriage … will naturally follow. … There will be neither Jew nor Greek.” (Quoted from the Arno Press reprint of the 1932 edition, p. 209).

37. Zangwill, , The Melting-Pot (note 6 above), pp. 198–200.Google Scholar The use of the Statue of Liberty is very conscious here; and the playscript in the Harvard University Library indicates the direction “Light Statue” as David raises his hands in benediction. This is one of at least a half-dozen popular uses of the Statue of Liberty as a symbol welcoming immigrants—which strongly suggests that Higham, John's argument for “The Transformation of the Statue of Liberty” in Send these to Me: Jews and Other Immigrants in Urban America (New York: Atheneum, 1975), pp. 78–87Google Scholar, is not well taken. As Trachtenberg, Marvin's The Statue of Liberty (New York: Viking Press, 1976)Google Scholar also suggests, the symbolism of the Statue of Liberty was manifold and included the immigrant aspect from the very start. The use of melting pot music in this glorious finale is suggested by the note for the orchestra in Mr. Hotaling's performance (in the Harvard Library).

38. Shumsky, Neil Larry, “Zangwill's The Melting-Pot: Ethnic Tensions on Stage,” American Quarterly, 27 (1975), 40.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

39. Typescript in the Harvard Theater Collection, p. 19. There are a few other, mostly shorter, passages in this version missing from the printed editions, but none seem to justify Roosevelt's censure. For accounts of Roosevelt's suggestions (who after the sentence was taken out proclaimed that The Melting-Pot was “A Great Play, Mr. Zangwill! I don't know when I have seen a play that stirred me as much”—a statement found on several playbills) see New York Times, 10 24, 1908, pp. 614–15Google Scholar, and, slightly at variance, October 10, 1908. In another article in the New York Times of 10 24, 1908Google Scholar, Zangwill describes the creative process that led him, after three years of observation and study, to the act of composing the play: “I shut my eyes one night, and there before me saw in one vivid flash the whole play, just as it should be on the stage” (p. 602).Google Scholar

40. Bushnell, Horace, Sermons for the New Life, 4th ed. (New York: 1859), p. 106.Google Scholar

41. Cummings, Ephraim Chamberlain, Birth and Baptism: Discourses of First Principles (Portland, Me., 1873), pp. 67–69.Google Scholar

42. Davies, Samuel, A.M., Sermons (Philadelphia: Presbyterian Board of Publication, 1864), II, 486.Google Scholar Davies repeatedly rejects the idea that regeneration and baptism are the same and argues that baptism is merely an outward sign of regeneration, which means much more: “You must be born again. … All external forms of religion, whether Jewish or Christian, are of no avail, without this new creation” (p. 497).Google Scholar

43. Bok, Edward, The Americanization of Edward Bok: The Autobiography of a Dutch Boy Fifty Years After, 50th ed. (New York: Scribner's, 1930), p. 445.Google Scholar

44. Bogardus, Emory S., Essentials of Americanization, 3d ed. (Los Angeles: Univ. of Southern California Press, 1923), p. 16.Google Scholar It is interesting that Bogardus argues against what he thinks is the meaning of The Melting-Pot (“a mechanical phenomenon” in which “the immigrant must assume a more or less helpless attitude”) and favors the term “Americanization” (p. 18).Google Scholar In this respect, Bogardus reflects the diction of Horace Kallen, who had similarly opposed Zangwill's “melting-pot” only to argue that “each generation has … to become ‘Americanized’ afresh.” Kallen, , “Democracy Versus Melting-Pot” (note 5 above), p. 194.Google Scholar

45. It might be interesting to trace the motif of “Lot's wife” in American literature in this context. The struggle between the hard fact that you cannot change your grandparents (a topos in the writing on ethnicity) and the dedication to the future is widespread. See, for example, the ending of Chapter 36 in Melville's White-Jacket.

46. See Jung, Carl Gustav, Psychologie und Alchimie (Zurich: Rascher, 1944).Google Scholar To my knowledge, the full relationship of American myths (and especially of the melting pot) and alchemy has never been discussed, though the involvement of, for example, John Winthrop, Jr., in alchemy has been noted. Jung's somewhat amusing article, “Your Indian and Negroid Behavior,” Forum, 83, No. 4 (04 1930), 193–99Google Scholar, argues the achievement of a behavioral melting pot in America—where people with no Indian or black “blood” look “Indian” and walk “Negroid” when seen with European eyes.

47. Meditation 49, second series; cf. Meditation 75, second series. The Poems of Edward Taylor, ed. Stanford, Donald E. (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1977), pp. 169–70, 218–20.Google Scholar

48. For example, Mary Antin, the author of the bestselling ethnic rebirth saga, , The Promised Land (1911)Google Scholar, made the connection between the religious and the ethnic dimensions of the melting pot quite explicit in They Who Knock at Our Gates (1914)Google Scholar, a book she gave the subtitle A Complete Gospel of Immigration. Drawing a complete metaphoric image of America as “the fiery furnace,” Antin continually equates Plymouth Rock and Ellis Island (a parallel Louis Adamic was to continue throughout his endeavors), Mount Sinai and Bunker Hill, the Mayflower and the immigrant ships (which Randolph Bourne elsewhere elaborates as Maiblume, Fleur de Mai, Fior di Maggio. or Majblomst). Though approaching the discussion from a more nativist point of view, Abbott, Lyman's America in the Making (1911)Google Scholar sees the connection between the sermon tradition and the “melting pot” image; the first address, “The America of Today,” quotes Zangwill and Crevecoeur.

49. Orth, Ralph H. and Ferguson, Alfred R., eds. The Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1971), IX (1843–47), 299–300.Google Scholar

50. Parkman, Francis, Our Common Schools (Boston: Distributed by the Citizens' Public School Union, 1890), p. 4Google Scholar, and Turner, Frederick Jackson, The Frontier in American History (New York: Holt, 1920), p. 23.Google Scholar Other melting pots are, of course, listed and discussed in Gleason's articles. Seen in its broader contexts, melting pot rhetoric may also be felt in Poe's whirlpools, in Hawthorne, 's House of the Seven GablesGoogle Scholar (Clifford at the window) and “Earth's Holocaust,” or in Ellison, 's Invisible Man (the paint factory).Google Scholar

51. One possibility of answering the questions of the melting pot might take us back to A.'s truth and include the following speculation: The “new man” symbolically fathers himself by “being received” in the lap of Alma Mater. He goes through the process of alchemical purification in order to be transformed into his new identity in the mother-womb. He has to shed his identity as a son and a grandson in order to become a man and a father of a new race; he has to shed his ancient “prejudices” and symbolically penetrate an adopted mothergoddess in order to become a self-made man. Through this act of rebirth the American has to violate his own ancestral lineage in order to create a new “fused” identity based on futurity. This image may thus function as the symbolic violation of a mother metaphor in order to bring about the rebirth in a womb-pot. Should this be true, the melting pot may function as a taboo denoting the “sacred” image of an American ethnogenesis, which may be recited in sermons and onstage—as if it were a harmless image; on the other hand the melting pot suggests the secret transgression of old prejudices and the symbolic enactment of an incest motif as the prerequisite for a baptismal purification and transformation process.

52. Locke, Alain, The New Negro (1925; Arno Press reprint, 1969), pp. 6–7; see also p. 14.Google Scholar

53. Cahan, Abraham, Yekl and the Imported Bridegroom and Other Stories of the New York Ghetto, intr. Bernard G. Richards (New York: Dover Press, 1970), p. 14.Google Scholar

54. Gold, Michael, “Toward Proletarian Art,” The Mike Gold Reader: A Literary Anthology (New York: International Publishers, 1972), p. 62.Google Scholar For the historical and cultural dimensions of the notion of the “superman,” see Der Übermensch: Eine Diskussion, ed. Benz, Ernst (Stuttgart and Zurich: Rhein-Verlag, 1962), esp. pp. 19–162.Google Scholar

55. The interpretation of Superman as an immigrant saga is not only supported by the fact that the ethnic writer Mario Puzo recently wrote the script for a film version but also by the intriguing relationship of Superman's Old World identity with his excessive conformism as “Anglo-conformity-obsessed” Clark Kent.