The Melting Pot Was a Good Idea and the Salad Bowl Is a Worse One

Somewhere in this country, I would bet, a university committee has met to discuss whether the word "assimilation" can still be used in polite company. There are minutes. There is a subcommittee. A consultant has been hired to produce a glossary, and the glossary has a footnote, and the footnote has a footnote.

Meanwhile, a nine-year-old whose parents arrived from somewhere else is learning the Pledge of Allegiance in a public school, cheering for the home team and arguing with her brother about which pizza topping is correct, and she is assimilating at full speed without a committee. That child is the point of this post. The old American method of turning newcomers into fellow citizens worked, it was generous, and it deserves a better reputation than the academy now gives it.

Terms first

Let me define what I mean, because the word has been loaded with meanings it never had.

Assimilation, as I use it, means learning to share a common civic life: the language of public business, the laws and the principles behind them, the habits of self-government, and loyalty to the country as a political community. It does not mean giving up a faith, a cuisine, a family language at home, a holiday, a song or a surname. The question is not "what do you eat on Sunday?" The question is "do you consider yourself a member of this republic, bound by its laws and committed to its principles?"

The melting pot is the old metaphor for that process: many peoples, one result.

The salad bowl is the newer metaphor: many peoples who stay distinct, sitting side by side, held together by the bowl. It is sometimes called multiculturalism, or cultural pluralism, and there is a serious version and a lazy version. I will deal with both.

Where the metaphor came from

The idea is older than the phrase. In 1782 the French-born farmer and writer Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur published Letters from an American Farmer, in which he asked the famous question "What then is the American, this new man?" and answered that "individuals of all nations are melted into a new race of men." Notice the word new. The American was not an old thing carried over. He was something that did not exist before.

The phrase "melting pot" came to popular use after 1908, when the English-Jewish writer Israel Zangwill's play The Melting Pot opened in the United States. Its hero, a young Russian-Jewish composer named David Quixano, delivers the line that gave the metaphor its life: "America is God's Crucible, the great Melting-Pot where all the races of Europe are melting and re-forming!" The play was a sentimental drama about a young man escaping the old world's hatreds and finding a new identity. It was a hit, and its title became a phrase. The metaphor Zangwill borrowed was about alchemy: take different metals, apply heat, get something new. It is a flattering image of what the country was thought to do to people.

I will be fair to the critics here and note that the play, like its era, used the language of "race" in ways we would not, and that Zangwill's imagery had its limits: it imagined the races of Europe, not the whole world. The metaphor was a reach toward an ideal, not a complete description of any history. But the ideal is worth looking at.

E pluribus unum

Now the Founding part. On June 20, 1782, the Continental Congress adopted the Great Seal of the United States. Charles Thomson, the secretary of Congress, was the main designer of the final version. On the reverse side we have the unfinished pyramid and the phrases Annuit Coeptis and Novus Ordo Seclorum. On the obverse, the eagle holds in its beak a scroll with the motto E pluribus unum: "Out of many, one."

When the motto was first proposed, in 1776, by a committee that included Franklin, Adams and Jefferson, it referred to the union of thirteen colonies into a single country. But the phrase did not stay in that box. It is the nearest thing the American founding has to a motto for how a diverse people becomes a nation. Notice the order of the words: many first, one at the end. The many are the starting point and the one is the result. A republic that stopped at "pluribus" would be a collection. The founders were after "unum."

The founders' own language about citizenship is full of this. Washington's Farewell Address, in 1796, tells the American people that "the name of American, which belongs to you, in your national capacity, must always exalt the just pride of Patriotism, more than any appellation derived from local discriminations." Local discriminations, in the older sense, meant local distinctions. The name of American was to rank first. That is the melting pot in a sentence, a century before Zangwill.

And the naturalization oath makes it explicit. Even today the Oath of Allegiance that new citizens take requires them to "absolutely and entirely renounce and abjure all allegiance and fidelity to any foreign prince, potentate, state, or sovereignty." That language is old, solemn and plain. It does not require anyone to forget his grandmother's language. It requires him to choose a political home, and that is the entire logic of assimilation.

The rise of the salad bowl

For roughly the first six decades of the twentieth century, "melting pot" was a mainstream aspiration. Schools taught English and civics, newspapers in foreign languages thrived next to a shared national press, and fraternal lodges, churches and veterans' organizations mixed the new with the old. Then came a shift.

One early critic was a philosopher named Horace Kallen, who in 1915 published an essay in The Nation called "Democracy Versus the Melting-Pot." Kallen argued that the immigrant groups should not be melted but should retain their own cultures within a federation of nationalities. That is the intellectual ancestor of the salad bowl. The idea gained force across the middle of the century and then arrived with the multicultural movement of the 1970s and 1980s, which reframed assimilation from a gift into a demand, and then from a demand into a kind of loss.

The salad bowl image is appealing for a reason: the vegetables retain their shape, the colors show, nobody is dissolved. And I admit it is a pleasant picture. It is also a worse metaphor for a republic, and here are the reasons, stated as an argument.

1. A salad has no shared fate. The tomato does not care what happens to the lettuce. A republic's members are bound to each other, because they pay the same taxes, are subject to the same laws, send their children to the same schools and may be called to the same defense. A people that has only a bowl in common has nothing to ask of its members, and nothing to promise them.
2. A bowl has no way to settle a dispute. The reason a diverse country can hold together is that its members share a procedure for resolving disagreements: courts, elections, a free press, the rule of law. Those procedures work only if a critical mass of citizens trust and understand them. Civic assimilation is how that understanding is passed on. Without it, every disagreement threatens to become a standoff between communities rather than an argument among citizens.
3. The salad bowl leaves out the newcomer's children. A child of immigrants, raised in the bowl model, is told she is a member of a hyphenated group first and an American second. That is a decision somebody else has made for her. The melting pot, by contrast, offered the child a clean, open claim on full membership: speak the language, learn the history, and you are as American as anyone, including the people whose ancestors came on an earlier boat. In my view that is the more generous offer.
4. Bowls have walls. A group that is encouraged to preserve its separateness has a reason to maintain boundaries against the others, and a reason to see its interests as set against theirs. A civic identity shared by everyone dissolves those boundaries without erasing the culture inside them.

The strongest objection, answered

The best form of the opposing argument deserves a fair statement. It runs like this. One: assimilation was historically demanded of some groups far more harshly than others, and for some, such as people brought here in chains or native peoples, it was an instrument of cruelty. Two: telling people to melt into a single culture implicitly tells them their heritage is a flaw. Three: Americans of every background have contributed to the national culture, from music to food to language, and a country that tries to freeze its culture will lose its vitality. Four: a person can have two loyalties, to the old country's food and the new country's flag, and there is no contradiction.

Points one and three have real force. The history of forced assimilation, for example in the boarding schools that removed native children from their families, is a story of cruelty, and no conservative should defend it. And the American culture is not a museum; it has always been changed by the people who joined it. Jazz is American. So is the hot dog's German parentage, the Irish tradition of civic politics and the Chinese-American kitchen.

Points two and four are where I would answer. The objection assumes that assimilation means erasure of heritage, and that is exactly the confusion I defined away at the start. The better distinction is between civic culture and private tradition.

• Civic culture is what everyone shares because everyone is in the same political community: the English language in public life, the Constitution and the Declaration, the idea that law binds everyone including the rulers, the habit of settling disputes by vote and by court, the willingness to defend the country. This is the part that has to be common.
• Private traditions are what a family or a faith keeps for itself: the language spoken at dinner, the religion, the recipes, the holidays, the music, the stories. This is the part that is free, and nobody should ask anybody to give it up.

The melting pot, properly understood, requires only the first. A child can learn the Pledge at school and her grandmother's lullabies at home, and it takes no effort to hold both. That is, in fact, what the great majority of immigrant families did: kept the private traditions while embracing the civic ones. The St. Patrick's Day parade, the Italian feast, the synagogue and the mosque and the Greek Orthodox church festival all flourished inside an American civic frame, and they flourish because the frame protects them. The First Amendment's guarantee of free exercise is the bowl that holds the private traditions, and it only works because everyone is bound by the same Constitution.

On point four, I agree that a person can have two loves. I would simply say that the political loyalty has to be singular. You can love two countries' cooking; you cannot owe the same allegiance to two sovereigns. Theodore Roosevelt made this point forcefully in 1915, and I discuss his speech in Teddy Roosevelt's 1915 Warning Against Hyphenated Americanism, Read Closely. The hyphen is fine as a descriptive. It becomes a problem only when it is a claim of competing loyalty.

What happens when the melting stops

It is worth thinking about the practical results, because nobody should be allowed to win this debate by metaphor alone.

When civic assimilation works, newcomers and their children have access to the whole economy and the whole of public life. English opens doors to employment, the courts, the school board, the legislature. Our post on English as a Common Language Is a Gift to Newcomers, Not a Barrier makes the case in detail. When assimilation is neglected, the cost lands first on the newcomers themselves. A person who cannot read the ballot, the lease or the contract is a person with fewer options, and a community in which large numbers of people lack a working knowledge of the common language is a community in which a few intermediaries hold the keys.

There is a second cost, to the shared trust a republic requires. A free people can disagree sharply about taxes and abortion and war and still stay together, because they share a belief that the other side is part of the same nation, and that the nation is worth keeping. That belief is built, one generation at a time, in schools, churches, ball fields and ceremonies where citizens of every origin learn the same stories, say the same pledge, and hear the same names of heroes. When those common rituals are neglected or sneered at, the belief erodes. I would argue that a good deal of the political bitterness of our time is partly a symptom of that erosion.

Seen this way, the question is not whether to be a melting pot or a salad bowl. The question is whether a country takes responsibility for making its members into fellow citizens, or leaves it to chance. A country that does is acting on the founders' motto. A country that does not has, I think, mistaken a description of its past for a plan for its future.

A word on the other mischief

I would be giving you half the story if I treated the salad bowl as only a harmless metaphor. It has a version in schools and institutions that turns the metaphor into policy: groups are sorted, assigned identities and trained to see each other mainly through those identities. That is not pluralism. It is a kind of civic dis-integration, and it is worth watching for. Our Language Policing Turns Ordinary Words Into Offences, and It Never Ends post covers one of its symptoms.

Still, I want to be careful. A person who values his heritage and wants his children to know it is not the enemy of anything. The argument is with a theory that makes the civic bond optional, not with the people whose lives are enriched by their traditions. Most of them, I'd wager, would agree that the point of coming here was to join a country.

The case in brief

1. Assimilation, properly defined, means joining a shared civic life (language, law, principles, loyalty), not abandoning private faith, food, family language or tradition.
2. The idea is as old as the Founding: Crèvecoeur's "new race of men" (1782), E pluribus unum on the Great Seal adopted June 20, 1782, and Washington's 1796 claim that the name of American should rank before any local distinction.
3. Israel Zangwill's 1908 play gave the melting pot its name; Horace Kallen's 1915 essay began the intellectual case for the bowl.
4. A salad bowl has no shared fate, no common way to settle disputes, no full claim for the immigrant's child and walls between its parts.
5. The distinction between civic culture, which must be common, and private tradition, which is free, answers the charge that assimilation erases heritage.

What you can do: read the Oath of Allegiance on the civics test page, then volunteer to help a local adult English or citizenship class, or attend a naturalization ceremony open to the public.