Lesson
One
You are advised to read
the entire lesson before attempting to answer the discussion questions.
If you do not fully understand the gist of the question contact the instructor.
Your essay should between 500 and 800 words.
The Dilemmas of Multiculturalism
One
of the central issues facing the intellectual and educational community
today is that of multiculturalism. It has come to mean various things to
various people depending on their private agendas. This issue is as good
a place to begin as any.
Throughout this course
you will find that the readings appear at first to have little to do with
the presumed topic. This is because I firmly believe that many problems
can be more clearly seen in a larger, more general, context.
Below are several
quotations on the question of immigration. The application to our question
here is whether a society can function if made of separate parts each of
which has its own assumptions or if a society must have shared values.
The issue for today
is the idea of America being a melting pot. Is it? If it is, is
that good? The idea of melting pot was popularized by a play by Israel
Zangwill (1864-1926) which was produced in New York, 1908 . The following
scene is from the play The Melting Pot.
DAVID
Oh I love going
to Ellis Island to watch the ships coming in from Europe, and to think
that all those weary sea-tossed wanderers are feeling what I felt
when America first stretched out her great mother-hand to me!
VERA
Were you very happy?
DAVID
It was heaven.
You must remember that all my life I had heard of America, everybody in
our town had friends there or was going there or got money orders from
there. The earliest game I played at was selling off my toy furniture and
setting up in America. All my life America was waiting, beckoning, shining--the
place where God would wipe away tears from off all faces.
MENDEL
Now, now, David,
don't get excited.
DAVID
To think that the
same great torch of liberty which threw its light across all the broad
seas and lands into my little garret in Russia, is shining also for all
those other weeping millions of Europe, shining wherever men hunger and
are oppressed.
MENDEL
Yes, yes, David,
Now sit down and.
. .
DAVID
Shining over the
starving villages of Italy and Ireland, over the Swarming stony cities
of Poland and Galicia, over the ruined farms of Romania, over the shambles
of Russia.
MENDEL
David!
DAVID
Oh, Miss Revendal,
when I look at our Statue of Liberty, I just. . .
MENDEL
Don't talk any
more. You know it is bad for you.
DAVID
But Miss Revendal
asked and I want to explain to her what America means to me.
MENDEL
You can explain
it in your American symphony?
VERA
You compose?
DAVID
Oh, uncle, why
did you talk of. . . . .my music is so thin and tinkling. When I am writing
my
American symphony, it seems like thunder crashing through a forest full
of bird songs. But next day. . .oh, next day!
VERA
Music finds inspiration
in America?
DAVID
Yes, in the seething
of the Crucible.
VERA
The Crucible? I
don't understand!
DAVID
Not understand!
You, the Spirit of the Settlement! Not understand that America is God's
Crucible, the great Melting Pot where all the races of Europe are melting
and re-forming. Here you stand, good folk, when I see them at Ellis Island
here you stand in your fifty groups with your fifty languages and histories,
and your fifty blood hatreds and rivalries. But you won't be long like
that, brothers, for these are the fires of God you've come to, there are
the fires of God. Germans and Frenchmen, Irishmen and Englishmen, Jews
and Russians. . . Into the Crucible with you all. God is making the American.
MENDEL
I should have thought
the American was made already—eighty millions of him.
DAVID
No, uncle, the
real American has not yet arrived. He is only in the Crucible, I tell you—he
will be the fusion of all races, the coming superman. . .
VERA
Look, how beautiful
the sunset is after the storm.
DAVID
It is the fires
of God round His Crucible. There she lies, the great Melting Pot. Listen,
Can't you hear the roaring and bubbling! There gapes her mouth, the harbor
where a thousand mammoth feeders come from the ends of the world to pour
in their human freight. Ah, what a stirring and a seething! Celt and Latin,
Slav and Teuton, Greek and Syrian,--black and yellow.
VERA
Jew and Gentile.
. .
DAVID
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 chemist melts and fuses them with his purging
flame! They all unite to build the Republic of Man and the Kingdom of God.
Ah, Vera, what is the glory of Rome and where all nations and races come
to worship and look back, compared with the glory of America, where all
races and nations labor and look forward! Peace, peace, to all ye unborn
millions, fated to fill this giant. The God of our children give you Peace.
Not
everyone agreed with Zangwill. In Lothrop Stoddard’s book of 1920, The
Rising Tide of Color Against White World Supremacy, the author warns against
the melting-pot idea. It is not necessary or even possibly at first
to determine which side is right. For the moment, try to understand the
thinking of both sides.
"Contrary to the
popular belief, nothing is more unstable than the ethnic make-up
of a people. Above all, there is no more absurd fallacy than the shibboleth
of the "melting-pot." As a matter of fact the melting-pot may mix but does
not melt. Each race-type, formed ages ago, and "set" by millenniums of
isolation and inbreeding, is a stubbornly persistent entity. Each type
possesses a special set of characters not merely the physical characters
visible to the naked eye, but moral, intellectual, and spiritual characters
as well. All these characters are transmitted substantially unchanged from
generation to generation.
"Two things are necessary
for the continued existence of a race: it must remain itself, and it must
breed its best. Every race is the result of ages of development which evolves
specialized capacities that make the race what it is and render it capable
of creative achievement. These specialized capacities (which particularly
mark the superior races), being relatively recent developments, are highly
unstable. They are what biologists call "recessive" characters; that is,
they are not nearly so "dominant" as the older, generalized characters
which races inherit from remote ages and which have therefore been more
firmly stamped upon the germ-plasm. Hence, when a highly specialized stock
interbreeds
with a different stock, the newer, less stable, specialized characters
are bred out, the variation, no matter how great its potential value to
human evolution, being irretrievably lost. This occurs even in the mating
of two superior stocks if these stocks are widely dissimilar in character.
The valuable specializations of both breeds cancel out, and the mixed offspring
tend strongly to revert to generalized mediocrity."
The
same sentiment had been expressed by Madison Grant in a 1916 book, The
Passing of the Great Race.
"These new immigrants
were no longer exclusively members of the Nordic race as were the earlier
ones who came of their own impulse to improve their social conditions.
The European governments took the opportunity to unload upon careless,
wealthy and hospitable America the sweepings of their jails and asylums.
The result was that the new immigration contained a large and increasing
number of the weak, the broken and the mentally crippled of all races drawn
from the lowest stratum of the Mediterranean basin and the Balkans, together
with hordes of the wretched, submerged populations of the Polish Ghettos.
Our jails, insane asylums and Almshouses are filled with this human flotsam
and the whole tone of American life, social, moral and political, has been
lowered and vulgarized by them."
"These immigrants
adopt the language of the native American, they wear his clothes, they
steal his name and they are beginning to take his women, but they seldom
adopt his religion or understand his ideals. It is evident that in large
sections of the country the native American will entirely disappear. He
will not intermarry with inferior races and he cannot compete in the sweat
shop and in the street with the newcomers."
Earlier,
however, there had been support for a mixed culture. Consider this article
published in St. Louis, Missouri, (1851) in the Western Journal.
"The poor flock
to our shores to escape from a state of penury, which cannot be relieved
by toil in their own native land. The man of enterprise comes, to avail
himself of the advantages afforded by a wider and more varied field for
the exercise of his industry and talents, and the oppressed of every land,
thirsting for deliverance from the paralyzing effects of unjust institutions,
come to enjoy the blessings of a government which secures life, liberty,
and the pursuit of happiness to all its constituents. Let them come. They
will convert our waste lands into fruitful fields, vineyards, and gardens;
construct works of public improvement; build up and establish manufactures;
and open our rich mines of coal, of iron, of lead, and of copper. And more
than all, they will be the means of augmenting our commerce, and aiding
us in extending the influence of our political, social, and religious institutions
throughout the earth.
"Thus united in the
great cause of civilization, and acting in concert, the influence of our
political and social institutions shall gain strength from increase of
numbers, until the principles of despotism which have enthralled the masses
of the old world shall be eradicated, and the condition of all nations
improved by our example."
Similarly,
the American poet Parke Goodwin in an article for Putnam’s Monthly
wrote in 1855 that
"We that have made
it our song ever since we were born, that here humanity had at last found
a home, that here all the antiquated distinctions of race, nationality,
sect, and caste, were merged in the single distinction of manhood - that
here man was to be finally recognized as man, and not as Jew or Gentile,
as Christian or Mohammedan, as Protestant or Catholic--we, who have made
the world ring with self-glorification of the asylum of the oppressed of
11 creeds and nations, of the city of refuge to all the weary exiles of
freedom, 'whom earth’s proud lords, in rage or fear, drive from their
wasted homes,' we are now asked to erect political barriers, to deal
out political excommunication as narrow, as mean, as selfish, and as unwarrantable
as ever debased the elder governments...."
"The cry is, ‘America
for Americans,’ and we agree to it heartily, and what is America, and who
are Americans? America is the cognomen of a nation of men, and not of a
collection of arable acres; and Americans are not simply the individual
Indians, Negroes, and whites who first saw light between Passamaquoddy
and Pensacola; it is all who are Americans inwardly who are built up on
the American idea, who live in the true sentiment of democracy, whose political
'circumcision
is of the heart, in the spirit and not in the letter, and whose praise
is not of men but of God.' These are the true Americans, wherever they
chanced to be born-whether Turk, Russian, Milesian, or Choctaw."
Those
who are among the many who think our puritan founders were for freedom
of religion and tolerance might reflect on the following bit of arrogance
which was published by the Reverend Nathaniel Ward of Massachusetts in
1645, 25 years after the pilgrims arrived.
"He that is willing
to tolerate any religion, or discrepant way of religion, besides his own,
unless it be in matters merely indifferent, either doubts his own or is
not sincere in it. He that is willing to tolerate any unsound opinion,
that his own may also be tolerated, though never so sound, will for a need
hang Cod’s Bible at the devil's girdle. Every toleration of false religions
or opinions. has as many errors and sins in it as all the false religions
and opinions it tolerates. That state that will give liberty of conscience
in matters of religion must give liberty of conscience and conversation
in their moral laws, or else the fiddle will be out of tune and some of
the string will crack.
Write on only one
of the following discussion questions : Mail,
email, or fax your essay to Professor Leel. Explore the differences
between the idea of a melting pot where all of the cultural variations
produce a new--but within itself--uniform culture and the idea of multiculturalism
where diverse cultures live together in harmony.
2. Are there essential
ingredients in some cultural and religious positions which makes it impossible
the people believing in them to live in harmonious with people of other
positions? Is the saying "I love the person but condemn the things he/she
does" simply an argument that people are not self defined by their beliefs
and actions?