Heated debates concerning the effects of contemporary immigration have not let up since Samuel P. Huntington expressed his worries, nearly two years ago, about what he called “the Hispanization of America.” Nor has this controversy ever been circumscribed in space or time; it hasn’t been just a preoccupation of elite East and West Coast subscribers to Foreign Policy (where Huntington’s analysis first raised a storm in early 2004). Even so, I was astounded recently to receive an indignant communication on the subject from much farther away. This contribution to the discussion came by e-mail from the Reverend Josiah Strong, who died in 1916 and, wherever he may be, is clearly not the sort of “ghost” one expects to encounter on a computer screen.

Strong, having just received some books he had ordered through amazon.cosmos, complains that he has been the victim of gross plagiarism. While admitting readily that this is not the first time someone has stolen his best ideas, he had obviously felt a need in this instance to respond with something more than the traditional graveyard rumbling (which, as he remarks astutely, no one hears anyway). The publication that has Strong thus exercised is Huntington’s Who Are We?, a book that incorporates and expands upon the Foreign Policy article of several months earlier.

Nearly everyone in the American history guild has read Strong’s 1885 best-seller, Our Country. Most of us have assigned parts of it in our courses, though not necessarily the part Strong is upset about. Josiah doesn’t accuse Huntington of mimicking him on the matter of “our country’s” forceful world outreach. He in fact, succumbing to a certain plagiaristic tendency of his own, complains that “this Harvard chap walks too softly and with too small a stick with regard to the need for a beneficent imperialism, and also in his too-casual attitudes toward the horrors of Roman Catholicism and Mormonism.” In such areas Strong finds only some common premises having to do with the rightful normative status of Anglo-Saxon Protestantism in American culture. What he considers suspicious and possibly actionable is Huntington’s discussion of the latest wave of immigration:

The good professor argues that the late-20th-century floodtide of immigration has been unprecedented both in numbers and in the percentage of migrants who have invaded from a single foreign area; in the year 2000, “Mexican immigrants constituted 27.6 percent of the total foreign-born population.” These observations mimic my own warnings about a massive migration, spanning several decades, that I saw as “the most remarkable...of which we have any record,” and that was especially dangerous because such high proportions of the immigrants shared the same language, or the same alien religion, or both. [Editor’s note: In the years 1820-1840, Ireland had supplied well over 40 percent of the immigrants, Germany more than 30 percent.]

Later, Strong reacts to Huntington’s concern that so many Mexican and other Hispanic immigrants lack any real aspiration to become assimilated:

The objects of Huntington’s concern, despite their demonstrated zeal to escape oppressive conditions in the home country, are clearly uninterested in adjusting their language, mores, and folkways to the Anglo-Saxon Protestant “culture” (as you now call it) that has shaped American society and that, I am delighted to learn, still undergirds it. Harboring social assumptions alien to “core American values,” Hispanics have virtually taken over some localities – Hartford, much like Miami, has become “a Latin city” -- where they have boosted the crime rates but also gained political power.

Such observations, he points out, are suspiciously similar to his own pleas –- certainly in substance, but sometimes even in expression.

I gave careful attention to what you might now call “push factors” (I reported that “the Italians are worse fed than any other people in Europe, save the Portuguese”), and I lamented that these seekers after a better life were nonetheless insisting on maintaining “their own language and peculiar customs.” Displaying “an unhappy tendency toward aggregation,” the upstarts had caused the glory to depart “from many a New England village,” and were “building states within a state” like the outrageous, rapidly growing, Swiss settlement of New Glarus in Wisconsin. I pointed out that “certain quarters of many of the cities” were “essentially foreign”; and that, in those quarters at least, people of foreign extraction were “sadly conspicuous in our criminal records.”

The onetime specialist in the evangelism of the American West finds Huntington’s warnings about regional concentration especially alarming, but also strangely familiar:

When Professor Huntington warns that the foreigners are threatening to dominate entire regions, his dependence on my analysis becomes very striking. Disguising this dependence with ethnic and geographical shifts, he expresses alarm about the “Hispanization” of the Southwest. Well, it was I who pointed out, long ago, that 75 percent of the immigrants were “pouring into the formative West,” where they would soon constitute two-thirds of the regional population. I predicted that if we remained complacent about this, our country would cease to be a unitary reality; instead, it would be sundered into so many duchies –- “little Germanies here, little Scandinavias there, little Irelands yonder.” The real Americans, I added as a part of my stirring conclusion, “may well ask –- and with special reference to the West –- whether this in-sweeping immigration is to foreignize us, or we are to Americanize it.”

However indignant about the alleged plagiarism, Strong cannot suppress his admiration for Huntington’s closing reflections:

Quite justly, this Harvard professor worries about the shattering of an “American dream” heretofore validated in “the great American assimilation success story.” He rightly assigns permanent control of what we could call dreaming rights to those born or adopted into the Anglo-Saxon Protestant value system. If that sort of vision is to retain its meaning and prospects, Hispanic Americans must eschew all illusions about what one of them called the “Americano” dream. An Americano dream, as Huntington tells us, does not exist. “There is only the American dream created by an Anglo-Protestant society.” Mexican-Americans –- and presumably others -- will share in that dream and society “only if they dream in English.”

They must dream in English! How exactly right! And how brilliantly stated! This closing line of Professor Huntington’s is perhaps the only one in his chapter that I would, in all modesty, consider more eloquent than my own phrasings.

Although comparisons between Huntington’s and Strong’s jeremiads concerning immigration are compelling, my own purpose is not to accuse Huntington of any lack of originality – let alone to liken his broader convictions about “American identity” to Strong’s 1885 cheerleading (later modified) for worldwide cultural imperialism. My main point is a more appreciative one. Both writers are among the ablest representatives of a venerable, generally very respectable, unitive principle in American public discourse and public policy.

Like the many other votaries of this principle, in particular those of the last half of the twentieth century, they have sought to counter what they see as excessive, often complacent or unthinking, commitments to an ever-widening pluralism. For partisans of the unitive emphasis, going back to some who were already worrying about immigration’s effects when Josiah Strong was in knee-pants, the principal concern and great looming danger has always been national fragmentation, while the standard corrective (again, from well before Strong’s time) has been the process represented in Huntington’s “great American assimilation success story.”

On the opposing team have been those who complain, often just as stridently, about oppressive demands for vanilla-flavored uniformity, and who are highly critical of a melting-pot ideal that in application readily became an arrogantly one-way expectation that “they” will have to melt to “us.” So far as these pluralists are concerned (I should probably be candid and write “we pluralists”), it is downright fortunate that in fundamental ways assimilation has not been a success story. Michael Novak and many others have chronicled the history of “unmeltable ethnics” because they have considered the aspiration toward ethnic meltdown not merely unrealizable but also a less- than-sound approach. As most pluralists see it, unitive rhetoric has very regularly served as a mask for bigotry and exclusion even if one interprets advocates like Strong and Huntington as rejecting those extremes.

In other words, Samuel Huntington’s cry of alarm not only resembles Strong’s; it is the latest entry on one side of a long-persisting conversation. As I tried to show in a recent book on religious and cultural pluralism, “the . . . tension between the One and the Many assumes new forms but does not disappear.” The arguments it engenders, “not settled at any Appomattox of our past, [are] sure to enliven and trouble our future.” And the core questions regarding immigration – whether or not the necessary assimilation is going to happen, and whether or not this assimilation really is necessary – are not going to disappear.

With regard to the first of those questions: Have the frequently-expressed fears about unassimilability proved justified in the past? From the point of view of those who have demanded and expected a virtually complete obliteration of group characteristics, such fears have indeed been justified; to varying degrees, group characteristics and ancestral loyalties have managed to survive. By the kind of standard usually applied, however, such fears have not been realized. Strong, whose views on a number of his 1885 issues changed or were moderated in the following decades, remained highly concerned about obstacles to assimilation. Yet by 1910, remarkably, he was solidly “on the same page” as Franz Boas when the latter published his celebrated scientific paper on the assimilability of immigrant populations. And by that time, the Catholics, Mormons, and some of the other “strange people” whom Strong had found menacing had begun their long trek toward becoming, in some respects, more mainstream than the WASP mainstream. When the sociologist Will Herberg remarked, in the 1950s, that little was left of some immigrant subcultures except spaghetti, frankfurters, borscht, and gefilte fish, he was joking but also making a serious point.

As for Strong’s horrible example of enclave persistence, the New Glarus “colony” in Wisconsin: It is true that, until the 1930s, Sunday morning church services continued to be conducted in German. Yet as early as 1913 the pastor had instituted a whole set of English-speaking alternatives so that young people and others “who could not understand the German service” could be drawn into the church. As for the schools: Although Strong either missed this or declined to mention it, they had begun the teaching of English in 1847; and within a mere ten years after he published his book the New Glarus schools had three teachers offering English nine months of the year, while one poor soul was allowed to teach German over a five month period -- fifteen minutes a day!

It is also of interest that this Swiss community that Strong and others were sure would remain forever in not-so-grand isolation ignored such expectations and, much like the earlier Oneida Community in New York State, was very soon reaching out commercially to the nation and world. (The Oneidans, with their radically nonassimilable value system grounded in “plural marriage,” had become a major producer of silverware for, by and large, highly traditional households.) New Glarus’s best-known manufacturer, the Pet Milk Company, had originally been called the Helvetian Milk Company; but by the second decade of the new century even that sign of loyalty to the old country had become a memory. Not coincidentally, an early historian had testified in the 1870s that in New Glarus “the Fourth of July is celebrated with American fervor.”

At this stage in discussions of the assimilation issue, however, Huntington enters a huge “YES, BUT . . .” YES, assimilation has occurred in or after every previous wave of immigration. BUT, he insists, what is happening now is different. He does not deny that criminality and illiteracy were high in past immigrant populations; nor that those immigrants, too, carried their “different” values and languages into particular cities and regions; nor that critics, then as now, worried about a permanent fragmentation of the country. His point – almost the point – is that this time the traditional machinery is not working. Assimilation is not occurring at a convincing rate. For the first time, therefore, a true national fragmentation is becoming a reality.

Yet here again, somewhat ironically, Huntington resembles preceding Cassandras. Every immigrant wave has been seen by some guardians of “mainstream” values as the most different and most dangerous ever. Doubts about the assimilability of Catholics and their allegedly-monolithic value system were far more pronounced in nineteenth century America than the rather similar misgivings today about the assimilability of Muslims – to say nothing of Buddhists or Catholics.

But Huntington does argue for a set of causative circumstances that he believes are so new as to defy such comparisons; and these arguments deserve to be recognized and responded to. He observes, for example, that the immigrants he is most concerned about – the Mexicans -- are the first to reach the United States not by traversing a great ocean barrier but by finding places to cross a long nearly-unguarded border. A great many are, consequently, illegal immigrants. And he believes that Mexican immigrants, whether legal or illegal, are the first in our history who can feel that a given area of the United States – in this case the Southwest and Far West -- is virtually theirs by historical right. (Although Huntington himself declines to go this far, he reports that a few writers have predicted that serious irredentist claims will be put forward, and perhaps acted upon, during the twenty-first century.) He finds that, partly because of this sense of a natural right of occupancy, Mexicans and Hispanics are disinclined to do what earlier immigrant groups have done -- to become diffused in other regions of the country.

These allegations, however, also deserve closer scrutiny. Strong would be surprised to learn (as he will learn when I reply to his e-mail) that anyone thinks the problems of contiguity and unguarded borders are new phenomena. In 1909, he reported with some satisfaction that idiots, prostitutes, beggars, epileptics, and other unsuitable persons were being excluded at the rate of some 11,000 to 13,000 per year. The “greatest difficulty,” however, one that had not been resolved, related to “the Chinese who come across the Canadian and Mexican borders, eluding the United States officials.” Strong offered no count of these illegal entries from contiguous areas; and, since he normally reveled in statistics, this probably means that no such count was available. The context, however, suggests that the numbers were substantial in relation to the total population and immigration totals of his time.

As for Huntington’s notion that the Mexicans are the first who might harbor irredentist claims, or at least the first who might feel they have some historic right to the contiguous territories they are moving into, that speculation is so wildly inaccurate as to border on the ridiculous. During the 19th century, Canadians came across our northern border – a virtually unguarded frontier vastly longer and more complicated than the border with Mexico – in larger numbers than the Italians and most others who conquered the Atlantic barrier. There were nearly as many Canadian immigrants as English immigrants! The many among them who spoke (and presumably dreamed) in French could well have carried with them, as they crossed the long stretch from Presque Isle to Sault Ste Marie or International Falls, a clear sense that they were entering historically French territory. Yet French or Quebecois cultural persistence has been, on the whole, a local and/or temporary – at any rate a very manageable -- problem.

Huntington might be right if he responded that in sheer intensity – so many in so short a time -- the phenomenon of illegal entry across unguarded borders is something new, even if the “problem” itself is not. But the questions – the really crucial ones – that follow are about what the immigrants, legal or otherwise, do after crossing these borders. Specifically, are the latest mass migrants, as Huntington fears, less able to become assimilated to “us” than their predecessors were? Are they, as he also fears acutely, more inclined to remain physically and culturally isolated -- less interested in becoming assimilated? When it comes to political participation, are they (whether or not one considers this a bad thing) creating significant, ethnically-definable, voting blocs on the national scene?

Huntington , although he acknowledges conflicting evidence relating to such questions, comes down solidly on the side of those who think the available data forecast an ethnically, linguistically, and perhaps religiously bifurcated America. At the rate things are going, “who we are” will rather soon be more like Canada or Belgium or Switzerland than like the unified culture that most Founders contemplated and that the outcome of the Civil War confirmed.

If such predictions, as many of us thought, were overly alarmist when Huntington first offered them, they have come to seem more so since that time. In some ways, to be sure, his feared “Hispanization” may have become more evident, for example in airport signage and recorded telephone communications that offer only one alternative language. But in other respects, on the whole more important ones, the evidence supporting predictions of Hispanic non-assimilation has been eroding.

Most strikingly, recent surveys have been dispelling the idea that Hispanics, unlike nearly all their predecessors, will remain clumped together – resistant to all “mainstreaming,” doggedly carrying a separate language, culture, and “values” unto a third and a fourth generation. Huntington’s observation, heavily emphasized, that Hispanic parents want their children to retain or learn Spanish, is certainly valid, and probably will remain so for some time. The question is whether their offspring will prove any more obedient in this matter than were their German, Swedish, or Italian predecessors who, for example, simply left the churches where the ancestral language was still in use.

Their parents, meanwhile, are voicing at least equal interest in goals that, when actualized, work against even the more modest (and arguably quite worthy) aims of maintaining some homeland memories. When Latinos are asked how important it is for the children of immigrants to learn English, 92% call this “a very important goal.” That figure rises to 96% among the foreign born. Is it vital that these same children obtain a college education? Ninety-five percent of Hispanics think it is, whereas only 78% of Whites give that answer in reference to their own offspring. When parents are asked how often they meet with their children’s teachers, 27% of Whites say that they do this about once a month, but among Latinos the figure is 42%. Eleven percent more Latino parents than White parents help their children with homework “nearly every day.”

And so on. Even if one should suspect that for some reason Hispanics are more prone than others are to lie about such things –- or, more charitably, that their children simply need more help than Black and Anglo children (and how likely is that?) -- still the patterns of aspiration emerging from such surveys would count as significant. That is especially so since there is some evidence that they correlate with behavior. In August 2005, the Los Angeles Times noted that in the border city of Douglas, Texas, which is 90% Latino, most graduates of the public schools have been going on to college.

Some other key indicators show little or no appreciable change from five years ago; but a few important ones throw real doubt on Huntingtonian apprehensions of an emerging bifurcated society. Roberto Suro, Director of the Pew Hispanic Center, thinks the most startling change during the past several years has been an increase not merely in aspirations toward English usage, but in actual usage among both foreign-born and American-born Latinos.

Following not far behind this linguistic measure are statistically-significant changes in patterns of dispersion. For example, although state population estimates released in 2004 still showed 24% of undocumented immigrants living in California, that figure represented an enormous drop from the 45% of 1990. The concentration of such immigrants in Texas, during the same period, had risen by several percentage points, but in New York State it had been cut in half. The percentages for “all other states” – in other words, the proportion of Hispanics now “dispersed” -- had gone from 29% to 55% over the same period.

It seems entirely likely, in other words, that newly- and recently-arrived arrived outsiders are destined to adapt as fully to American “mainstream” values as did preceding immigrant groups, and perhaps more rapidly than, say, those 19 th-century Germans who agitated for separate schools and semi-autonomous states. That possibility, which most observers, I think, would rank as a high probability, needs to be voiced and documented, much as a very similar point was made by Boas in his famous appendix to the Census Report of 1910. In both cases, a widespread apprehension that “they will never adjust,” that “they can never become true Americans,” has required correction, especially insofar as it has embodied questionable assumptions about innate or otherwise ineradicable cultural or (in Boas’s time much more than at present) alleged physical differences.

In our day, however, questions about the assimilability of new immigrant populations, and about the rate at which such adaptation will occur, important though these are, have been rendered less relevant by nearly a century of serious questioning about the Melting Pot model itself. The issue, already in Boas’s time, was not merely whether the immigrants could be Americanized, but whether their cultural traits and ancestral loyalties must be obliterated – melted down – to the extent that, in practice, the Melting Pot model was prescribing.

Whether “who we are” (and thus what newcomers must submit to) is a clearly Anglo-Saxon Protestant culture, rather than a culture of more mixed origins, had been debated very early in the national history – for example in Hector St. Jean de Cr èvecoeur’s warmly and widely celebrated depiction, in the 1780s, of “the American, this new man”:

He is either an European, or the descendant of an European, hence that strange mixture of blood, which you will find in no other country. I could point out to you a family [sic] whose grandfather was an Englishman, whose wife was Dutch, whose son married a French woman, and whose present four sons have now four wives of different nations.

Josiah Strong, who offered, in Our Country, a similarly approving emphasis on the Americans’ “mixed origin,” clearly was conditioning this approval on confidence that assimilation had been and would always be a one-way process. In Strong’s view, the best that could be said for massive immigration was that it would “add value to the amalgam which will constitute the new Anglo-Saxon race of the New World.”

This assumption, that a diversity of peoples and value systems is something best observed in a society’s rear-view mirror, has admittedly been the more common interpretation of what “melting” is all about. It was not, however, what observers like Cr èvecoeur had in mind; there was always a competing emphasis. The enthusiastic American Farmer conducted his reader down a country road whose denizens displayed distinctive ethnic and religious characteristics (Catholic as well as Protestant) that they were not being forced to sacrifice on the altar of societal unity. Nor did all who spoke out, in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, on behalf of migrating ethnic groups and their integration in American society, envision a one-way melting process.

For a large proportion of the social analysts and others who have cared most about issues of “national identity” in any of these various eras, the question has not been whether the Melting Pot has worked. Some analysts, for example Nathan Glazer and Daniel Moynihan in the 1960s, have asserted categorically that the Melting Pot process “did not happen”; but those critics and others have also questioned whether it had ever deserved to happen insofar as it induced neo-WASP responses to queries about “who we are.”

Dissent from WASPish responses to the “Who are we?” question had in fact emerged strongly during the very heyday of Melting Pot enthusiasm. In Israel Zangwill’s 1908 drama that brought the metaphor into prominence, a young composer named David Quixano struggled to compose a symphony that would stand for America as “God’s Crucible . . . where all the races of Europe are melting and re-forming.” David’s strident advice to the immigrants streaming in through Ellis Island was to leave behind their separate identities and throw themselves into the Melting Pot: “These are the fires of God you’ve come to . . . Into the Crucible with you all! God is making the American.” But that sort of language, which led Teddy Roosevelt, on opening night, to shout “a great play, Mr. Zangwill,” struck some others as “romantic claptrap.” And vocal minorities (at the least) in the various immigrant groups wanted none of it. In the opinion of one Zangwill biographer, few in the older Jewish generations, for example, had any enthusiasm for being “melted in the American pot.” The Conservative leader Judah Magnes reflected that view when he asserted that Jewish “accommodationists” and their Gentile supporters tended to misunderstand what America is really about: “[It] is not the melting pot. It is not a Moloch demanding the sacrifice of national individuality.”

Zangwill, stung by direct or implied rebukes along these lines, sought (perhaps disingenuously) to distance himself from his fictive creation. He asserted that any notion of a Jewish ethnic meltdown – as we might now call it – had been David Quixano’s idea, not Israel Zangwill’s. His own view was that the process of American amalgamation “is not assimilation or simple surrender to the dominant type . . . but an all-around give-and-take by which the final type may be enriched or impoverished.”

Fair enough. But what did this mean when it came to specific issues – languages, religions, imbedded cultures – that bear upon the overall concern about national identity? Was one still talking about a Melting Pot – “Into the Crucible with you all!” – but restructuring it as a process marked by mutuality? Was one putting forward a revised assimilative model in which all participants (including, logically, Anglophone Protestants) would sacrifice their distinctive group characteristics?

Usually not. Most of those who have given up on a thoroughgoing assimilationist model have rejected the entire “melting” notion, instead allowing metaphors such as “salad bowl” or “mosaic” to stand for an entity whose constituent parts contribute to the whole while maintaining important elements of distinctiveness. The young philosopher Horace Kallen, in articles for the Nation published a year after Zangwill’s apologia of 1914, outlined his own lastingly influential formula for what he later called cultural pluralism. In doing so, he utilized a symphonic metaphor that, probably not by accident, echoed and altered the one featured in Zangwill’s popular play. Kallen wrote that

as in an orchestra every type of instrument has its special timbre and tonality, founded in its substance and form; as every type has its appropriate theme and melody in the whole symphony, so in society, each ethnic group may be the natural instrument, its temper and culture may be its theme and melody and the harmony and dissonances of them all may make the symphony of civilization.

Nathan Glazer, in a letter to Kallen in the 1950s, underscored the long shelf life and lasting effect of this sort of formulation. Having just re-read Kallen’s Culture and Democracy (1924), in which the 1915 articles appeared as a chapter, Glazer remarked that he had been “amazed to discover how much that I and others had thought and written had been written by you a long time ago.” But of course the questions about how such formulas relate to such concerns as national identity and societal cohesion have also recurred regularly from Kallen’s time to our own. John Dewey told Kallen that “the theory of the Melting Pot always gave me a pang,” and assured him that “I quite agree with your orchestra idea”; but Dewey wanted to be sure that “we really get a symphony and not a lot of different instruments playing simultaneously.”

Kallen’s response to this standard concern was, for one thing, that “the common language of the commonwealth, the language of its great tradition, would be English,” even though each nationality would also have “its own esthetic and intellectual forms.” Beyond that, the political and economic life of the commonwealth would be “a single unit” that in turn would serve as the foundation for the pooling of group resources “in a harmony above them all.”

Who are we? Is present-day American society multicultural in its heritage or fundamentally unicultural? Nearly everyone, Huntington included, acknowledges that it is both. In my own view, the various recent attempts to deny the lasting cultural authority and pervasiveness – the hegemony -- of a powerful Anglo-Saxon Protestant tradition have not been convincing or successful. But to contend, as Huntington does and as predecessors like Strong did also, that the need for a credible “national identity” should lead us to minimize the equal force and importance of America’s multicultural heritage is just as misguided. And just as unnecessary.