ext_199690 ([identity profile] lhn.livejournal.com) wrote in [personal profile] muckefuck 2004-07-30 08:55 pm (UTC)

For Americans, that phrase is chilling. You will become one of us. You will be assimilated. Your personal identity will be elminated as you are subsumed into a formless mass.

On the other hand, isn't that the sort of thing that happens in a melting pot?
America is God's Crucible, the great Melting-Pot where all the races of Europe are melting and re-forming! Here you stand, good folk, think I, when I see them at Ellis Island, here you stand [Graphically illustrating it on the table] in your fifty groups, with your fifty languages and histories, and your fifty blood hatreds and rivalries. But you won't be long like that, brothers, for these are the fires of God you've come to-these are the fires of God. A fig for your feuds and vendettas! Germans and Frenchmen, Irishmen and Englishmen, Jews and Russians-into the Crucible with you all! God is making the American.

--Israel Zangwill, The Melting Pot (1908).


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