Salad Bowl or Melting Pot? Sydney Williams
http://www.swtotd.blogspot.com
In The Forgotten Founding Father Joshua Kendall wrote: “Recognizing [Noah] Webster’s knack for getting Americans to think of themselves as Americans, [George] Washington relied time and time again on his trusted policy advisor.” We tend to think of colonial Americans as being solely of British heritage, and certainly they dominated. But languages spoken in the American colonies in 1775 included German, Dutch, French, Swedish, Polish and Hebrew, along with numerous dialects and myriad languages of indigenous Americans. From its beginning America was diverse, unlike the more homogenous countries from which immigrants had come. The Founding Fathers wanted the people to become a melting pot.
Noah Webster[1] understood the value of developing the unique character of an American. His spelling books were designed to help people read, write and speak a common language. In the June 29, 2019 issue of the San Diego Union-Tribune, Richard Lederer noted that Webster’s dictionaries had “an array of shiny new American words, among them bullfrog, chowder, handy, hickory, succotash, tomahawk…” Today, in this English-speaking country, those not fluent are disadvantaged, yet not all are encouraged to learn English.
Integration, in this nation of immigrants, was slow, as could be seen in many New York City neighborhoods that remained distinctive into the 20th Century: Little Italy; China Town; Yorkville (for Germans); Spanish Harlem; Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant and Manhattan’s Harlem, home for black Americans, and Lapskaus Boulevard in the Bay Ridge section of Brooklyn where many Norwegians settled. But assimilation became increasingly common in the first and second halves of the 20th Century, first through inter-ethnic marriages and later through interracial marriages.
Change is always slower than we would like. For example, until the 1967 unanimous Supreme Court decision of Loving versus Virginia, interracial marriages were forbidden by law in thirty-one states. According to Pew Research, in 1960 only 3% of marriages in the U.S. were between persons of different races. Yet by 2022, such unions represented 19% of all marriages. Public approval of interracial marriages, according to Wikipedia, was 5% in 1950, but had risen to 94% in 2021. Ancestry.com and 23andMe have increased people’s interest in their ancestry, and many are amazed at the diversity of their heritage – something more common in the United States than in other parts of the world.
The melting pot ideal remains the preferred metaphor for most Americans. We recognize the uniqueness of this country, that it values individual freedom, yet with a government that operates under the rule of law, not men. It stands, most of us believe, as “a shining city on a hill,” as a beacon to the rest of the world. But not all Americans see us that way, including many who consider themselves part of “the elite.” In a recent essay in National Review, British historian Andrew Roberts wrote about D-Day, and its 80th Anniversary to be celebrated in a couple of weeks. He wrote of how yesterday’s heroes might not meet the tests of “today’s masters of inclusivity and sensitivity.” He suggested that there is not today, among the nation’s elites, a sense of “…the superiority of democracy and liberty and the benefits of Western civilization…” He asks if those ideals, “something noble,” are something we now choose to discard? Roberts concludes: Eighty years ago “they knew what was worth fighting and dying for, whereas today we seem to be unsure of everything, even down to the pronouns we should use for one another.”
Washington politicians and their supporters in the media today find it easier to compartmentalize people by identity, including gender, sexual preference, race and ethnicity, rather than embrace the compromises that come from opposing ideas. They divide people into victims and oppressors – if you are of the former you can never succeed without help, and if you are one of the latter you will always have an unfair advantage. For those who practice identity politics, initiative does not count; merit is out, and personal responsibility plays no role. For example, Title IX has been re-written, so that preference is given to all women, transwomen as well as biological women. The consequences, including use of bathrooms and sports competition, cannot be what the authors of the original Title IX intended.
Dividing people into identifiable groups is destructive to the concept of a unified people, as Roberts noted. It breeds distrust and hatred. Ludwig von Mises (1881-1973) – the Austrian free-market economist, born of Jewish parents and who left Vienna in 1934 to avoid Nazi influence (and who well understood the risk of identity politics) – called out in his Theory and History what he termed “the pernicious doctrine of polylogism,” the belief that different groups of people reason in fundamentally different ways – the path down which identity politics leads. Such beliefs result in anarchy, a society with no moral code, no rules as to right or wrong – that there is no one logic or one truth. A society of such “unconstrained imagination[2]” would not have been able to have written our Constitution in 1787.
Of course, a “melting pot” achieved through coercion is antidemocratic, as is one that denies people the right to stay in touch with their heritage. As well, a “melting pot” should never be confused with unity of opinions. Diversity of ideas is essential to democracy. It is why independent thought should be encouraged. It is why we debate issues – to find a consensus. On the other hand, a preference for the “salad bowl” approach where the radishes clash with the tomatoes and the peppers stand aloof of the cucumbers, ignores the need for the people of this nation to discover that consensus and to think of themselves as Americans.
The metaphor of the melting pot best reflects the natural course of a free and open society. It suggests that there are things more important than race or ethnicity. It suggests that opportunity, as David Cameron implied, is available to all, and that individual success is dependent on individual initiative, aspiration and ability. The beauty and uniqueness of America is that the opinions of its citizens – people of all races and nationalities – are reflected in the voting booths. According to the website PoliEngine there are more than 100,000 governments in the United States, employing 519,682 politicians – 96% of those governments are local. So long as Washington’s efforts to divide us fail, those myriad ideas and decisions will reflect the diversity of an increasingly complex melting pot, where the ingredients become inseparable. Let the pot grow in size. But as for diversity of ideas, let the salad bowl flourish.
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