When it comes to discussions about the term “melting pot” our minds seem to be made up. “The point about the melting pot…is that it did not happen,” Glazer and Moynihan conclude in their widely read study, significantly entitledBeyond the Melting Pot(1963). Michael Novak's book with the equally telling titleThe Rise of the Unmeltable Ethnics(1972) agrees that the melting pot “did not exist,” although “meltingpot ideology” according to Novak “has dominated the social sciences for three decades.” Yet, as Philip Gleason has demonstrated, the term “melting-pot” has been met with rebuttals by conservatives and liberals alike, from the time it was popularized by Israel Zangwill's playThe Melting-Pot(1908) to the present. Poetic advocates and sociological opponents of the term, however, shared a certain vagueness in defining themeaningof “melting pot” while embellishing and elaborating the imagery. Attempts to interpret the image in strict social terms range from “Americanization of newcomers” to “constant change and regeneration of Americans through ethnic interaction and/or intermarriage.” Isaac Berkson, Edward Saveth, Milton Gordon, and Andrew Greeley have drawn up elaborate models that distinguish the melting pot “concept” from such alternatives as “Americanization,” “Anglo-Conformity,” “Federation of Nationalities,” or “Cultural Pluralism.” Of course, the meaning of the image has also changed historically from the idealistic concern with an American national identity at the time of the American Revolution to the different practical versions of the melting pot during the period of the New Immigration. Apparently, the opposition to the melting pot is at least as old as the notion itself, and includes such luminaries as Cotton Mather and Benjamin Franklin. In 1785, for example, three years after Crèvecoeur first evoked the melting imagery in defining an American national character, a pseudonymous “Celadon”'sThe Golden Age: or Future Glory of North-Americamapped out the future United States as a confederation of nation-states and specifically listed “Nigrania” and “Savagenia”—a black and an Indian state—in the Southwest as well as the establishment of “a French, a Spanish, a Dutch, an Irish, &c. yea, a Jewish state.”
