On Beyond the Melting Pot, Revised

Woof, this is quite a book. I read the second edition, which has a new preface nearly 100 pages long that effectively jettisons a major part of the first edition’s argument. On top of that, there is a 25 page introduction to the first edition.

The primary argument—in both the first and second editions—is that the “melting pot” was a myth. Although it had been discussed as early as Crèvecoeur in his Letters from an American Farmer, the reality is that peoples did not “blend together” and fit into an assimilationist ideal. Instead, ethnicity and the maintenance of ethnicity has been one of the driving forces making “American peoples” rather than one American people. Of course, there is a blending of ethnic identity as people mix together through marriage, community relationships, etc., but the important part is that ethnicity continues. However, Glazer and Moynihan believe that the role of ethnic identity is not something static, and has been changing in the 1960s. These are articulated in three “hypotheses.”

1. Ethnic identities have taken over some of the work done by occupational identities;

2. International events have declined as a source of ethnic identity, except for Jews;

3. Religion has declined as a focus of ethnic identification, especially after Kennedy’s election.

Although ethnicity continued with strength until the time of the first publication of the text in 1963, Glazer and Moynihan did see stirrings that ethnic identity was weakening and was being displaced by two other identities: religion and race. By the second edition, Glazer and Moynihan had come to change their minds, and instead argued that only race was replacing ethnicity. While religiosity did grow throughout the 1950s, it stagnated and began declining during the 1960s. In the wake of the Civil Rights Movement, the assassination of MLK, the assassination of Malcolm X, and the emergence of more militant black power movements, race seemed to rise in import.

However, this leads Glazer and Moynihan to make a really weird, nonsensical argument. Throughout the course of the text, they emphasize that—over time—all immigrant ethnic groups rise in status from generation-to-generation. This was true of the Irish and Germans, this was true of Jews and Italians, and this will be true of Puerto Ricans and African Americans (written here as “Negroes”). In the second edition, Glazer and Moynihan find that Puerto Rican communities also increased in status with the second generation, but black Americans did not experience the same level of upward mobility for the second generation after the Great Migration. They argue that their failure in predicting this had two causes: First, there was faulty data—black Americans did increase in status in the wake of World War II, but declined again after the Korean war. Additionally, there were enormous undercounts of African Americans in the statistics that the authors relied on, and those who were appeared were much better off than those who did not appear. Second, African Americans, as a group, were not being “ethnicized” but “racialized.” At the core of it, this second claim is why black Americans had not experienced the same upward mobility as other groups. On this, they go to bat against intellectuals and the Kerner Commission’s Report, both of which argued that the failure for black Americans to rise in American status was due to white racism. Glazer and Moynihan do not agree with this, and instead claim part of the problem was white racism, but just as important was the fact that black people racialized themselves and that this was a new phenomenon. ????? Black Americans had always been racialized, and refusing to admit that (claiming instead that it happened recently) is ahistorical mumbo-jumbo.

I don’t really know what to make of this book. It’s an interesting look at ethnicity (and race) in New York from the 1950s-70s, especially for a research program that uses social sciences methods over humanistic ones. Yet, there are far too many oversights here for it to be of much value in the 21st century.