Horace M. KallenDEMOCRACY VERSUS THE MELTING-POTA Study of American NationalityTHE NATION, Feb. 25, 1915Part IIt was, I think, an eminent lawyer who, backed by a ripe experience of inequalities before the law,pronounced our Declaration of Independence to be a collection of "glittering generalities." Yet it cannotbe that the implied slur was deserved. There is hardly room to doubt that the equally eminent gentlemanover whose signatures this orotund synthesis of the social and political philosophy of the eighteenthcentury appears conceived that they were subscribing to anything but the dull and sober truth when theyunderwrote the doctrine that God had created all men equal and had endowed them with certaininalienable rights, among these being life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. That this doctrine didnot describe a condition, that it even contradicted conditions, that many of the signatories owned othermen and bought and sold them, that many were eminent by birth, many by wealth, and only a few bymerit â all this is acknowledged. Indeed, they were aware of these inequalities; they would probablyhave fought their abolition. But they did not regard them as incompatible with the Declaration ofIndependence. For to them the Declaration was neither a pronouncement of abstract principles nor anexercise in formal logic. It was an instrument in a political and economic conflict, a weapon of offenseand defense. The doctrine of "natural rights" which is its essence was formulated to shield social ordersagainst the aggrandizement of persons acting under the doctrine of "divine right": its function was toafford sanction for refusing customary obedience to traditional superiority. Such also was the function ofthe Declaration. Across the water, in England, certain powers had laid claim to the acknowledgment oftheir traditional superiority to the colonists in America. Whereupon the colonists, through theirrepresentatives, the signatories to the Declaration, replied that they were quite as good as their traditionalbetters, and that no one should take from them certain possessions which were theirs.Today the descendants of the colonists are reformulating a declaration of independence. Again, as in1776, Americans of British ancestry find that certain possessions of theirs, which may be lumped underthe word "Americanism," are in jeopardy. This is the situation which Mr. Rossâs book, in common withmany others, describes. The danger comes, once more, from a force across the water, but the force isthis time regarded as superior, but as inferior. The relationships of 1776 are, consequently, reversed. Toconserve the inalienable rights of the colonists of 1776, it was necessary to declare all men equal; toconserve the inalienable rights of their descendants in 1914, it becomes necessary to declare all menunequal. In 1776 all men were as good as their betters; in 1914 men are permanently worse than theirbetters. "A nation may reason," writes Mr. Ross, "why burden ourselves with the rearing of children?Let them perish unborn in the womb of time. The immigrants will keep up the population. A people thathas no more respect for its ancestors and no more pride of race than this deserves the extinction thatsurely awaits it."I.Respect for ancestors, pride of race! Time was when these would have been repudiated as the enemies ofdemocracy, as the antithesis of the fundamentals of our republic, with its belief that "a manâs a man foraâ that." And now they are being invoked in defence of democracy, against the "melting pot," by asociological protagonist of the "democratic idea"! How conscious their invocation is cannot be said. Butthat they have unconsciously colored much of the social and political thinking of this country from thedays of the Cincinnati on, seems to me unquestionable, and even more unquestionable that thisapparently sudden and explicit conscious expression of them is the effect of an actual, felt menace. Mr.Ross, in a word, is no voice crying in a wilderness. He simply utters aloud and in his own peculiarmanner what is felt and spoken wherever Americans of British ancestry congregate thoughtfully. He isthe most recent phase of the operation of these forces in the social and economic history of the UnitedStates; a voice and instrument of theirs. Being so, he has neither taken account of them nor observedthem, but has reacted in terms of them to the social situation which constitutes the theme of his book.The reaction is secondary, the situation is secondary. The standards alone are really primary and,perhaps, ultimate. Fully to understand the place and function of "the old world in the new," and theattitude of the "new world" towards the old, demands an appreciation of the influence of these primaryand ultimate standards upon all the peoples who are citizens of the country.II.In 1776 the mass of white men in the colonies were actually, with respect to one another, rather free andrather equal. I refer, not so much to the absence of great differences in wealth, as to the fact that thewhites were like-minded . They were possessed of ethnic and cultural unity; they were homogenous withrespect to ancestry and ideals. Their century-and-a-half-old tradition as Americans was continuous withtheir immemorially older tradition as Britons. They did not, until the economic-political quarrel with themother country arose, regard themselves as other than Englishmen, sharing Englandâs dangers andEnglandâs glories. When the quarrel came they remembered how they had left the mother country insearch of religious liberty for themselves; how they had left Holland, where they had found this liberty,for fear of losing their ethnic and cultural identity, and what hardships they had borne for the sake ofconserving both the liberty and the identity. Upon these they grafted that political liberty the love ofwhich was innate, perhaps, but the expression of which was occasioned by the economic warfare withthe merchants of England. This grafting was not, of course, conscious. The continuity established itselfrather as a mood than as an articulate idea. The economic situation was only an occasion, and not acause. The cause lay in the homogeneity of the people, their like-mindedness, and in their selfconsciousness.Now, it happens that the preservation and development of any given type of civilization rests upon thesetwo conditions â like-mindedness and self-consciousness. Without them art, literature â culture in any ofits nobler forms â is impossible: and colonial America had a culture â chiefly New England â butrepresentative enough of the whole British-American life of the period. Within the area of what we nowcall the United States this life was not, however, the only life. Similarly animated groups of Frenchmenand Germans, in Louisiana and Pennsylvania, regarded themselves as the cultural peers of the British,and because of their own common ancestry, their like-mindedness and self-consciousness, they haveretained a large measure of their individuality and spiritual autonomy to this day, after generations ofunrestricted and mobile contact and a century of political union with the dominant British populations.In the course of time the state, which began to be with the Declaration of Independence, becamepossessed of all the United States. French and Germans in Louisiana and Pennsylvania remained athome; but the descendants of the British colonists trekked across the continent, leaving tiny selfconscious nuclei of population in their wake, and so established ethnic and cultural standards for thewhole country. Had the increase of these settlements borne the same proportion to the unit of populationthat it bore between 1810 and 1820, the Americans of British stock would have numbered today over100,00,000. The inhabitants of the country do number over 100,000,000; but they are not the children ofthe colonists and the pioneers; they are immigrants and the children of immigrants, and they are notBritish, but of all the other European stocks.First came the Irish, integral to the polity of Great Britain, but ethnically different, Catholic in religion,fleeing from economic and political oppression, and â self-conscious and rebellious. They came seekingfood and freedom, and revenge against the oppressors on the other side. Their area of settlement ischiefly the East. There they were not met with open arms. Historically only semi-alien, their appearancearoused, none the less, both fear and active opposition. Their diversity in religion was outstanding, theirgregarious politics disturbing. Opposition, organized, religious, political, and social, stimulated theirnatural gregariousness into action. They organized, in their turn, religiously and politically. Slowly theymade their way, slowly they came to power, establishing themselves in many modes as potent forces inthe life of America. Mr. Ross thinks that they have their virtue still to prove; how he does not say. Tothe common sense of the country they constitute an approved ethnic unity of the white Americanpopulation.Behind the Irish came the great mass of the Germans, quite diverse in speech and customs, culturallyand economically far better off than the Irish, and self-conscious, as well through oppression andpolitical aspiration as for these other reasons. They settled inland, over a stretch of relatively continuousterritory extending from western New York to the Mississippi, from Buffalo to Minneapolis, and fromMinneapolis to St. Louis. Spiritually, these Germans were more akin to the American settlers than theIrish, and, indeed, although social misprision pursued them also, they were less coldly received and withless difficulty tolerated. As they made their way, greater and greater numbers of the peasant stock joinedthem in the Western nuclei of population, so that between the Great Lakes and the Mississippi Valleythey constitute the dominant ethnic type. Beyond them, in Minnesota, their near neighbors, theScandinavians, prevail, and beyond these, in the mountain and mining regions, the central and easternand southern Europeans â Slavs of various stocks, Magyars, Finns, Italians. Beyond the Rockies, cut offfrom the rest of the country by this natural barrier, a stratum of Americans of British ancestry balancesthe thinnish stratum on the Atlantic sea coast; flanked on the south by Latins and scattering groups ofAsiatics, and on the north by Scandinavians. The distribution of the population upon the two coasts isnot dissimilar; that upon the Atlantic littoral is only less homogenous. There French-Canadians, Irish,Italians, Slavs, and Jews alternate with the American population and each other, while in the West theAmericans lie between and surround the Italians, Asiatics, Germans, and Scandinavians.Now, of all these immigrant peoples the greater part are peasants, vastly illiterate, living their lives atfighting weight, with a minimum of food and a maximum of toil. Mr. Ross thinks that their coming toAmerica was determined by no spiritual urge; only the urge of steamship agencies and economic need orgreed. However generally true this opinion may be, he ignores, curiously enough, three significant andone notable exception to it. The significant exception are the Poles, the Finns, the Bohemians â thesubjugated Slavic nationalities generally. Political and religious and cultural persecution plays no smallrole in the movement of the masses of them. The notable exception is the Jews. The Jews come far morewith the attitude of the earliest settlers than any of the other peoples; for they more than any otherpresent-day immigrant group are in flight from persecution and disaster; in search of economicopportunity, liberty of conscience, civic rights. They have settled chiefly in the Northeast, with NewYork City as the center of greatest concentration. Among them, as among the Puritans, the PennsylvaniaGermans, the French of Louisiana, self-consciousness and like-mindedness are intense and articulate.But they differ from the subjugated Slavic peoples in that the latter look backward and forward toactual, even if enslaved homelands; the Jews, in the mass, have thus far looked to America as theirhome land.In sum, when we consider that portion of our population which has taken root, we see that it has notstippled the country in small units of diverse ethnic groups. It forms rather a series of stripes or layers ofvarying sizes, moving east to west along the central axis of settlement, where towns are thickest; i.e.from New York and Philadelphia, through Chicago and St. Louis, to San Francisco and Seattle.Stippling is absent even in the towns, where the variety of population is generally greater. Probably 90percent of that population is either foreign-born or of foreign stock; yet even so, the towns areaggregations, not units. Broadly divided into the sections inhabited by the poor, this economic divisiondoes not abolish, it only crosses, the ethnic one. There are rich and poor little Italys, Irelands, Hungarys,Germanys, and rich and poor little Ghettoes. The common city life, which depends upon likemindedness, is not inward, corporate, and inevitable, but external, inarticulate, and incidental, a reactionto the need of amusement and the need of protection, not the expression of a unity of heritage, mentalityand interest. Politics and education in our cities thus present the phenomenon of ethic compromises notunknown in Austria-Hungary; concessions and appeals to "the Irish vote," "the Jewish vote," "theGerman vote"; compromise school committees where members represent each ethnic faction, until, as inBoston, one group grows strong enough to dominate the entire situation.South of Mason and Dixonâs line the cities exhibit a greater homogeneity. Outside of certain regions inTexas the descendants of the native white stock, often degenerate and backward, prevail among thewhites, but the whites as a whole constitute a relatively weaker proportion of the population. They liveamong nine million negroes, whose own mode of living tends, by its mere massiveness, to standardizethe "mind" of the proletarian South in speech, manner, and the other values of social organization.III.All the immigrants and their offspring are in the way of becoming "Americanized," if they remain inone place in the country long enough â say, six or seven years. The general notion, "Americanization,"appears to denote the adoption of English speech, of American clothes and manners, of the Americanattitude in politics. It connotes the fusion of the various bloods, and a transmutation by "the miracle ofassimilation" of Jews, Slavs, Poles, Frenchmen, Germans, Hindus, Scandinavians into beings similar inbackground, tradition, outlook, and spirit to the descendants of the British colonists, the Anglo-Saxonstock. Broadly speaking, the elements of Americanism are somewhat external, the effect of environment;largely internal, the effect of heredity. Our economic individualism, our traditional laissez-faire policy,is largely the effect of environment: where nature offers more than enough wealth to go round, there isno immediate need for regulating distribution. What poverty and unemployment exist among us is theresult of unskilled and wasteful social housekeeping, not of any actual natural barrenness. And until thedisparity between our economic resources and our population becomes equalized, so that the countryshall attain an approximate economic equilibrium, this will always be the case. With our individualismgo our optimism and our other "pioneer" virtues: they are purely reactions to our unexploited naturalwealth, and , as such, moods which characterize all societies in which the relation between populationand resource is similar. The predominance of the "new freedom" over the "new nationalism" is a potentpolitical expression of this relationship, and the overwhelming concern of both novelties with theeconomic situation rather than with the cultural or spiritual is a still stronger one. That these last alonejustify or condemn this or that economic condition or program is a commonplace: "by their fruits shallye know the soils and the roots."The fruits in this case are those of New England. Eliminate from our roster Whittier, Longfellow,Lowell, Hawthorne, Emerson, Howells, and what have we left? Outstanding are Poe and Whitman, andthe necromantic mysticism of the former is only a sick-minded version of the naturalistic mysticism ofthe latter, while the general mood of both is that of Emerson, who in his way expresses the culminationof that movement in mysticism from the agonized conscience of colonial and Puritan New England â towhich Hawthorne gives voice â to serene and optimistic assurance. In religion this spirit of Puritan NewEngland non-conformity culminates similarly: in Christian Science when it is superstitious and magical;in Unitarianism when it is rationalistic; in both cases, over against the personal individualism, there isthe cosmic unity. For New England, religious, political, and literary interests remained coordinate andindivisible; and New England gave the tone to and established the standards for the rest of the Americanstate. Save for the very early political writers, the "solid South" remains unexpressed, while the march ofthe pioneer across the continent is permanently marked by Mark Twain for the Middle West, and by BretHarte for the Pacific slope. Both these men carry something of the tone and spirit of New England, andwith the "great tradition" of America, the America of the "Anglo-Saxon," comes to an end. Thereremains nothing large or significant that is unexpressed, and no unmentioned writer who is socompletely representative.The background, tradition, spirit, and outlook of the whole of the America of the "Anglo-Saxon," then,find their spiritual expression in the New England school, Poe, Whitman, Mark Twain, Bret Harte. Theyrealize an individual who has passed from the agonized to the optimistic conscience, a person of thesolid and homely virtues tempered by mystic certainty of his destiny, his election, hence always ready totake risks, and always willing to face dangers. From the agony of Arthur Dimmesdale to the smugindustrial and social rise of Silas Lapham, from the irresponsible kindliness of Huck Finn to the "Luckof Roaring Cam;," the movement is the same, though on different social levels. In regions supernal itscoordinate is the movement from the God of Jonathan Edwards to the Oversoul of Emerson and theDivinity of Mrs. Eddy. It is summed up in the contemporary representative "average" American ofBritish stock â an individualist, English-speaking, interested in getting on, kind, neighborly, not tooscrupulous in business, indulgent to his women, optimistically devoted to laissez-faire in economics andpolitics, very respectable in private life, tending to liberalism and mysticism in religion, and moved,where his economic interests are unaffected, by formulas rather than ideas. He typifies the aristocracy ofAmerica. From among his fellows are recruited her foremost protagonists in politics, religion, art andlearning. He constitutes, by virtue of being heir of the oldest rooted economic settlement and spiritualtradition of the white man in America, the measure and the standard of Americanism that the newcomeris to attain.Other things being equal, a democratic society which should be a realization of the assumptions of theDeclaration of Independence, supposing them to be true, would be a levelling society such that allpersons become alike, either on the lowest or the highest plane. The outcome of free social contactsshould, according to the laws of imitation, establish "equality" on the highest plane; for the imitation isthe higher by the lower, so that the cut of a Paris gown at $1000 becomes imitated in department storesat $17.50, and the play of the rich becomes the vice of the poor. This process of leveling up throughimitation is facilitated by the so-called "standardization" of externals. In these days of ready-madeclothes, factory-made goods, refrigerating plants, it is almost impossible that the mass of the inhabitantsof this country should wear other than uniform clothes, use other than uniform furniture or utensils, oreat anything but the same kind of food. In these days of rapid transit and industrial mobility it mustseem impossible that any stratification of population should be permanent. Hardly anybody seems tohave been born where he lives, or to live where he has been born. The teetering of demand and supplyin industry and commerce keeps large masses of population constantly mobile; so that many people nolonger can be said to have homes. This mobility reinforces the use of English â for a lingua franca,intelligible everywhere, becomes indispensable â by immigrants. And ideals that are felt to belong withthe language tend to become "standardized," widespread, uniform, through the devices of the telegraphand the telephone, the syndication of "literature," the cheap newspaper and the cheap novel, thevaudeville circuit, the "movie," and the star system. Even more significantly, mobility leads to thepropinquity of the different stocks, thus promoting intermarriage and pointing to the coming of a new"American race" â a blend of at least all the European stocks (for there seems to be some difference ofopinion as to whether negroes should constitute an element in this blend) into a newer and better beingwhose qualities and ideals shall be the qualities and ideals of the contemporary American of Britishancestry. Apart from the unintentional impulsion towards this end, of the conditions I have justenumerated, there exists the instrument especially devised for this purpose which we call the publicschool â and to some extent there is the State university. That the end has been and is being attained, wehave the biographical testimony of Jacob Riis, of Steiner, and of Mary Antin â a Dane and two Jews,intermarried, assimilated even in religion, and more excessively self-consciously American than theAmericans. And another Jew, Mr. Isreal Zangwill, of London, profitably promulgates it as a principleand an aspiration, to the admiring approval of American audiences, under the device, "the melting pot."IVAll is not, however, fact, because it is hope; nor is the biography of an individual, particularly of aliterary individual, the history of a group. The Riises and the Steiners and Antins protest too much, theyare too self-conscious and self-centered, their "Americanization" appears too much like an achievement,a tour de force, too little like a growth. As for Zangwill, at best he is the obverse of Dickens, at worst heis a Jew making a special plea. It is the work of the Americanized writers that is really significant, andin that one senses, underneath the excellent writing, a dualism and the strain to overcome it. The samedualism is apparent in different form among the Americans, and the strain to overcome it seems evenstronger. These appear to have been most explicit at the high-water marks of periods of immigration:the Know-Nothing party was one early expression of it; the organization, in the â80s, of the patrioticsocieties â The Sons and the Daughters of the American Revolution, later on of the Colonial Dames,and so on â another. Since the Spanish War it has shown itself in the continual, if uneven, growth of thepolitical conscience, first as a muckraking magazine propoganda, than as a nation-wide attack on thecorruption of politics by plutocracy, finally as the altogether repectable and evangelical progressiveparty, with its slogan of "Human rights against property rights."In this process, however, the non-British American or Continental immigrant has not been afundamental protagonist. He has been an occasion rather than a force. What has been causal has been"American." Consider the personnel and history of the Progressive party by way of demonstration: it iscomposed largely of the professional groups and of the "solid" and "upper" middle class; as a spirit ithas survived in Kansas, which by an historic accident happens to be the one Middle Western Statepredominately Yankee; as a victorious party it has survived in California, one of the few Statesoutstandingly "American" in population. W…