Odnośniki
- Indeks
- 10 Minute Gu
- ANSI ISO C++ Professional Programmer's Handbook
- Broadrick Annette Niebezpieczna znajomośÂ›ć‡
- Cast Kristin Cykl Dom Nocy 02 Zdradzona
- Loius L'Amour Last of the Breed
- le Clezio Jean Marie Powracajć…cy gśÂ‚ód
- Gordon Dickson Forever Man
- Edward Epstein Agency of fear Opiates and politican power in America
- Feather Jane Aksamit
- Diamentowe imperium Roe Paula Ponć™tna asystentka05
- zanotowane.pl
- doc.pisz.pl
- pdf.pisz.pl
- anapro.xlx.pl
the Algonkian Indians to New Age (Chicago, 1990) and the
essays in Perry Miller s Errand into the Wilderness (Cambridge,
Mass., 1956; reprinted 1987), particularly the title essay, which
69
WilfredM. McClay
is one of the most influential short contributions to the lit-
erature of American history, and the essay Nature and the
National Ego.
pluralism
The concept of pluralism proposes that the national culture
of the United States ought to be able to make room for, and
leave as undisturbed as possible, robust and independent
subcultures, usually those based on race, ethnicity, religion,
or country of origin and often all four at once. A commit-
ment to a high degree of cultural pluralism is now thought to
be one of America s defining characteristics. But such an
assertion would have taken the Founders by surprise. They
did not set out to make America a great colossus of cultural
pluralism. Instead, it happened almost entirely without
anyone intending it to. It happened mainly because an
enormous, resource-rich, and thinly populated continent
was eager to procure immigrant labor from anyplace it could
get it, including settlers from non-English-speaking and
non-Protestant countries, and even African laborers who were
enslaved or indentured. Such beginnings virtually ensured
that issues of race, ethnicity, and pluralism would hold a
central and persistent place in American history.
It is no coincidence that the cultural tensions represented
by the interplay of those three terms echo the political ten-
sions flowing from the attempt to form a composition of
nation and federation (see above). By the time the United
States became a nation, it had already acquired many forms of
70
A Student s Guide to U.S. History
internal diversity that it could not possibly have disavowed,
even if it had wanted to. And so it was not for nothing that the
new nation adopted the motto E Pluribus Unum: out of many,
one. Just as a workable U.S. Constitution somehow had to
accommodate itself to the preexisting reality of independent
states, so a workable American society somehow had to accom-
modate racial and ethnic diversity that was already in place.
To be sure, the nation at the time of the Founding was over-
whelmingly British in character, a fact of enormous conse-
quence for the institutional and cultural shape of the new
nation. But so long as it had an abundance of land, a scarcity
of labor, and an appetite for economic growth, the new nation
was likely to find its racial and ethnic makeup becoming pro-
gressively more and more complex. And it did. Thanks to
numerous waves of immigration in the more than two centu-
ries since the Revolution, along with the restless geographical
and social mobility so characteristic of Americans, personal
identity in America has come to be a remarkably multifaceted
thing. To be an American generally means operating on several
different planes at once. A Virginian can be an American, and
also a Southerner, and also a Polish Catholic, and possibly a
Mason too. And he may take a residual loyalty to these things
with him, when he moves to Pennsylvania, and later retires to
Florida. Far from being unusual, such combinations are the
commonest things imaginable.
Pluralism, then, was a social reality long before it became
a normative ideal. Indeed, until fairly recently, the way
Americans thought about their nation s ever-growing ethnic
71
WilfredM. McClay
and racial diversity to the extent that they regarded it as a
positive thing at all, rather than a contamination of Anglo-
Saxon purity was more likely to resemble the ideal of the
melting pot, which assimilated all cultural differences into a
single rich alloy. The image was immortalized in Israel
Zangwill s 1908 play of the same name, but the general
concept is much older. As early as the 1780s, one finds in the
writings of J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur an affirmation of
the American as a new man, whose sturdy character was a
blend of all the nation s various cultural elements. Such a
concept, which made a virtue of necessity, was a thumb in the
eye of racial purists who deplored the mongrel quality of
American culture. It was also, at least theoretically, a challenge
to the ideal of Anglo-Saxon dominance, since everyone, even
the scions of old New England families, was subject to a
meltdown-and-mingling with all other elements, thereby to
be transformed into something new.
So went the theory. But the melting-pot cultural ideal
had three problems. First, it did not accurately describe what
was actually taking place. Immigrants simply were not aban-
doning all of their native characteristics when they came to
America. They did not blend without a trace into the great
American family, at least not in a mere generation or two.
Instead, many of them continued to live, work, eat, play, and
worship as people apart, unmelted, dwelling in their own
ethnic enclaves. Second, even as a theory, the melting-pot
ideal seemed to stop short at the boundaries of racial differ-
ence. For all its seeming inclusiveness, the ideal generally ex-
72
A Student s Guide to U.S. History
cluded African Americans and others whose racial character-
istics were deemed to be too far outside the Anglo-Saxon mold.
The interest in colonization schemes shown by Abraham Lin-
coln and other reformers, plans which would have removed
African Americans from the continent entirely, shows how
ingrained were these prejudices based upon race, and how
limited was the range of human types the ideal was actually
willing to entertain. And third, the assimilation actually be-
ing demanded of immigrants was more of an indoctrination
into mainstream Anglo-Protestant culture than even the most
compassionate observers ever wanted to acknowledge. The rise
of Catholic parochial education, for example, came in response
to a perception that the public schools were, even with a
practice as seemingly innocuous as Bible-reading, inculcating
a kind of soft-core cultural Protestantism that was damaging
to the long-term prospects of American Catholicism.
Not long after the turn of the twentieth century, all of
these misgivings linked up with the revolt of intellectuals
against the constraints of a primarily Anglo-Saxon genteel
tradition, and the result was the rise of anti-assimilationist
doctrines of cultural pluralism or transnationality. As early
as 1915 the German-Jewish immigrant Horace Kallen, the chief
proponent of cultural pluralism, was comparing American
culture to a vast and various symphony orchestra, whose musical
richness was enhanced precisely by the tonal distinctiveness of
each of its members. The melting pot, he felt, even if it worked
as claimed, would destroy that symphonic richness, and sub-
stitute for it a bland and homogeneous unison. There was of
73
WilfredM. McClay
course the need for some kind of national culture, just as there
was a need for a national government. But Kallen and other [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]