#96, April 12, 2006
From Melting Pot to Vindaloo
ÒBut
State is essentially a concept of power, of competition; it signifies a group
in its aggressive aspects. And we
have the misfortune of being born not only into a country but into a State, and
as we grow up we learn to mingle the two feelings into a hopeless confusion.Ó
–
Randolph S. Bourne, ÒThe State.Ó[1]
In 1908, Israel Zangwill
coined the term Òmelting potÓ to describe the United States. Zangwill, an English Jew, had been
shown around New York City and all its ethnic enclaves by none other than the
muckraking journalist Lincoln Steffens.
On his return to England he wrote the play ÒThe Melting PotÓ about
immigrants to the United States, which, after becoming a hit on Broadway,
continued to shape American self-perceptions as well as the image of United
States held by Europeans.[2] The image projected of immigration was
one that largely corresponded to that drawn by Upton Sinclair in The Jungle, with families and ethnic communities being broken
down and a process of assimilation occurring among the immigrants.[3]
Randolph BourneÕs
perception of immigration was a different one altogether from ZangwillÕs. Where Zangwill saw a process of
assimilation, Bourne, the New York Progressive intellectual, found strong bonds
of ethnic identity remaining among the immigrants.[4] Attracted to German philosophy, like
many other Progressives, he also recognized that its influence in the United
States, along with German culture generally, had been strong, and that Germans
had not been melded down into a bland ethnicity. While the Germans have since come to represent the
archetypal assimilationists, this was very much a post-World War I phenomenon,
and so not apparent to Bourne who died during the flu epidemic of 1918 (though
he would have predicted this development in the kind of onslaught he witnessed
Germans facing in the Ò100-percent AmericanismÓ campaigns undertaken during the
period of American involvement in that war). From such observations, from his special interest in and
attention to Jewish-American culture, and his recognition of the existence of
strong Irish religious, political, and social organizations, Bourne formulated
his ideas about cultural pluralism.[5]
To some extent, American
perceptions about immigration have swung between these two polls (between
assimilation and cultural pluralism) ever since. There have been those who have seen American society
becoming devoid of culture and fundamentally materialist – conforming
either to a modernization school, which tends to celebrate this development, or
(as for Oscar Handlin) the romantic school, which waxes nostalgic about the
world that has been lost.[6] In food terms, since the metaphors seem
to have originated in either food or gardening, immigration has created a
society rather like a pea soup.
There may be some small lumps remaining – the remnants of ÒOld
World cultureÓ – but, by and large, the texture is pretty uniform (and
often not especially attractive).
Other immigration scholars have seen the remains of a great deal of
cultural heritage and, again in food terms, have resorted to the tossed salad
image (when they havenÕt turned to art and ideas relating to mosaics or
tapestries).
Political alignments do
not conform to these two polls, however.
It is possible to describe immigration in accordance with either perception
and remain in opposition to opening doors to immigration into the United
States. An opponent of immigration
might see it as both producing a Òmongrel nationÓ (assimilationist), or
breaking down the core values of a former elite in a sea of hyphenated Americans
(pluralist). Proponents of
immigration, meanwhile, may describe it in assimilationist terms, like Theodore
Roosevelt for example, but will more often now have a cultural pluralist
sensibility.[7]
What is missing from this
dichotomous picture, something to which Randolph Bourne would have been
sensitive, is the influence of power relations in the society into which
immigrants are moving and the degree to which social norms deriving from
historical developments in that society would influence the process of
immigration and acculturation. It
would be safe to assume that the assimilationist model incorporates power more
easily than the pluralist one, as it may well be either the appeal of power or
fear of exclusion from it (and its exercise by others) that drives the
immigrantsÕ move towards assimilation.
It is certainly also true that social historians have tended to shunt
power relations (or the Òbig pictureÓ) off to the margins in their discussion
of immigrant culture. But this
attention to power doesnÕt necessarily make the assimilationist model more
accurate. There is a distinct
possibility that under certain conditions the kinds of power relations that
drive the assimilationist impulse may also promote cultural pluralism.
Here, we are moving into
the terrain that Bourne might have incorporated in his category of the State.[8] For Bourne there was a clear
distinction between a nation, or a country, and its state. The former might be considered Civil
Society, in which the various social groups, the different classes and ethnic
groups interact in order to promote their own self-interest. The state would be embodied most
especially in a nationÕs executiveÕs practice of waging war, but would extend
to evidence among the societyÕs population, for example, of patriotism and flag
worship. So one could see in
peacetime a possibility for democratic interaction between groups as they
negotiate with each other for societyÕs perquisites. But, in wartime, all democracy would be pushed to the
background in the herd mentalityÕs worship of the state (or fear of deviating
from such worship). Thus, one
could see German-Americans and members of the working class, who would, under
normal conditions push, for their rights as minorities or as workers (and who
would be given space to do so), suddenly coming under assault from the policing
power mobilized by the state, and by those who were unwilling to consider
either that the state might not be their exclusive property or that it might
possibly be wrong to engage in a particular war. Indeed, part of the respect Bourne showed for Jews in the
United States derived from his sense that they were more firmly embedded in the
nation because their allegiances lay elsewhere, so that they were less likely
to be susceptible to the wiles of the state in which they lived.[9]
Living through the First
World War, which had such a great impact on the way immigration would be viewed
in American society, Bourne was seduced by the obvious connection between the
state and making war. The phrase,
ÒWar is the health of the state,Ó which he coined, is a clear reflection of
this.[10] But, if we take BourneÕs analysis out
of its wartime context we can see that it still has relevance to analysis of
immigration. Bourne wrote that the
state was a Òmystical conceptionÓ which influenced people to the degree that
those people shared statist idealism (in the Rooseveltian manner, believing in
conformity to a singular purpose – most evident, he felt, among the
elite), or were forced to do so by social convention or desire to conform.[11]
As such, the state in this broader sense can incorporate notions about the
definition of ÒAmericanÓ, which may indeed come from foreign policy (diplomatic
and warlike interactions with other nations), but can also derive from the
conventions of that society. In
this case, I believe it is important to comprehend the degree to which the
state is formed around notions of race and gender that prevail within a
particular society. These notions
are, I would argue, of sufficient weight in American society (and others also)
that they take on the level of significance that war, to which they may be
related, takes in BourneÕs analysis.
To explain this, let us
provide two examples. The first relates
to the issue of race in the aftermath of the Civil War and following the
failure of Reconstruction. The
other is a related issue that speaks to changing notions of masculinity and
femininity. We should view these
in turn.
First, race. The major wave of immigration occurred
in the aftermath of slavery and emancipation. It was to some extent, at least, shaped by the need for
labor among capitalists at a time when they were constrained, at least initially,
in their pursuit of cheap labor.
In other words, it was not just the Southern employer who was
constrained by the need not to replicate a system of slavery; northern
employers, having taken the high ground over the superiority of free labor as
opposed to slave, could not comfortably reduce their laborers to a condition of
emiseration. Of course, this
restraint was short lived. As
workers began to organize and push for improved working conditions in industrial
sites, the commitment of northern capitalists to Reconstruction in the South
began to wane, to the same degree that they wished to crush the northern labor
movements. As David Montgomery
showed so clearly in Beyond Equality, the 1870s witnessed the end of Reconstruction in large part because
the labor strife in the North made it clear to northern capitalists that their
interests lay with the plantation owners and merchants of the South, rather
than the freedpeople.[12]
With the influx of new
immigrants into the United States, brought in both because of the rapid
industrialization increasing demand for labor, and the constant desire of
capitalists to undercut the price of their laborers with the introduction of
(what under strike conditions would be called) scabs, a competitive condition
was created between those on the lowest rung of the economic ladder. Immigrants were forced to live in
conditions that would have been seen as degraded as those slaves lived
under. The new immigrants were
described in racial and gender terms that were reminiscent of slaves. Sometimes, the immigrants were brought
into close physical proximity with African Americans and a more direct system
of competitive race relations developed.
It is within this crucible that the need to create a category of ÒwhiteÓ
encompassing European immigrants, however lowly, and excluding African
Americans, Asians (mainly from China and Japan), and American Indians, was
felt. Without slavery and the
manner in which it was terminated the development of a category of whiteness
would have occurred differently, and the category itself would have been formed
along different lines.[13]
Second, gender. Race is commonly added to the story of
immigration, so that an exception of one sort or another is made for African
Americans. That exception may be
that they came to the United States under forced conditions and so their
experiences differed markedly from the immigrants, or it may be that white
racism kept them apart. But,
whatever it is there will be a common division between the immigrants and
African Americans, and many will feel comfortable keeping them apart, as one
might see perhaps in the common division between ethnic studies and African
American studies programs. But
gender is seldom brought into the analysis, unless it is considered important
to study the lives of immigrant women.
And, even then, it is only certain kinds of gender relations that get
considered, and the way in which gender (seen in overarching, discursive terms,
rather than attached to particular groups of people) shaped immigration is
seldom considered.
In fact, gender and race
intersect quite neatly in the world emancipation made.[14]
The slave was emasculated; so was the wage slave in the north. The immigrant was in danger of seeing,
as Handlin so vividly described it, his power wane and his authority
in the family diminished. In this
regard, the agency that was being stripped from him was his masculinity. He was being reduced to the condition
of dependent, in a culture that, in part because of the presence of slavery (to
the master or to the King), placed a great deal of emphasis on the republican
value of independence.[15] The loss of culture, then, coincided
with a loss of male authority, and the easiest resolution for this predicament
was an attempt to place tighter controls on women (often doing so in the name
of cultural tradition). Thus, the
accentuation of culture, making the group seem distinct (in many instances
creating a bastardized version of the national or ethnic tradition), would be done
in order to create distance from stereotyped perceptions of African Americans,
and would therefore be a key to the process of whitening.
The resulting influence of
these two concepts, which like war itself are in constant conflict with
fundamental notions of democracy and equality, is such that cultural pluralism
is promoted by the desire among immigrants not to be absorbed into a feminized and racially
denigrated lower class. Instead,
they will want either to promote their own ethnic identity when times warrant
doing so, or under different conditions (think GI Bill of Rights and
suburbanization following World War II) absorb themselves into a remasculinized
and white middle class.
ÒAmericaÓ is not a melting
pot; nor is it a stew – itÕs a vindaloo. The ÒthikhatÓ (hotness) comes from imperial spices –
gendered and racialized spices that emerged from the legacy of slavery and the
aftermath of emancipation.