Here is my attempt to address all the issues of shared American identity in less than 1,000 words. It was published in 2013 as follows: Opinion Articles (in Minnesota) Star Tribune newspaper.
“A Metaphor for America: Beyond the Melting Pot”
Timothy Taylor
Melting pot or salad bowl? These two contenders have been vying for decades to be the most appropriate metaphor for how American culture and people come together. But I prefer to think of America as a chocolate fondue.
The popularization of the “melting pot” metaphor is usually attributed to a rustic, sentimental, and very popular play that opened in Washington, D.C. in 1908 by an immigrant named Israel Zangwill. The melting pot metaphor is a way of saying “E pluribus unum” – “out of many, one”. This is an old saying that was adopted into the United States Seal in 1782 (and can also be seen on the back of the one-dollar bill). “E pluribus unum” has also been stamped on U.S. coins since the 18th century.
A traditional critique of melting pot culture has been that what is special about American culture is not its homogeneity but its ability to absorb elements of many different cultures and communicate them to everyone. For example, in his 1958 book A Nation of Immigrants, John F. Kennedy wrote: “One writer has suggested that a ‘typical American menu’ might include some of the following dishes: ‘Irish stew, choux pastry, goulash, chili con carne, ravioli, knockwurst with sauerkraut, Yorkshire pudding, Welsh rarebit, borscht, gefilte fish, Spanish omelette, caviar, mayonnaise, antipasto, baumkuchen, English muffins, gruyere cheese, Danish pastries, Canadian bacon, hot tamales, Wiener schnitzel, petit fours, spumoni, bouillabaisse, mate, scones, Turkish coffee, minestrone, filet mignon.'”
In our multicultural and individualistic age, a common complaint is that Americans must give up their cultural and ethnic identity. This criticism seems exaggerated. Yes, the culture of your country is restrictive. But what is unique about modern America is that these restrictions are loose and the range of choices is wide.
But the smelting-furnace metaphor bothers me because it is a relic of the past, when melting metals together was common practice for many industrial workers. It also bothers me that melting metals together requires a formula to produce the desired result. Bronze is copper and tin. Brass is copper and zinc. When you just throw metals into a smelting furnace, what comes out is not strong or useful, but rather flawed and brittle. When people who advocate the smelting-furnace metaphor start talking, they often have a clear mental formula for what it means to be an American, and mine isn’t always like that.
The idea of America as a salad bowl was probably popularized by the eminent historian Carl Degler, whose book Out of Our Past: The Forces that Shaped Modern America was a widely used textbook from the 1950s through the 1980s. In the 1959 edition, he wrote:[S]Some of the old country habits were not abandoned. In such cases, the children of immigrants retained their differences even in the third and fourth generations. Given this failure to melt and blend, the metaphor of the melting pot is unfortunate and misleading. A more accurate metaphor would be the salad bowl. The salad is a substance, but lettuce is still distinguishable from chicory, and tomatoes from cabbage.”
The salad bowl analogy has a healthy, crunchy “eat your vegetables” feel, but it seems awkward to me. After all, who is the pale, crisp iceberg lettuce? Who is the arugula? Who are the faux bacon bits? Who are the anchovies? Not all salad ingredients are created equal.
Salads are always messed up, and rarely can you get all the ingredients in the right proportions in your mouth at the same time. Imagine a large modern salad bar with a choice of lettuces and vegetables, seeds and nuts, tuna salad, chicken or ham slices, bean salad, boiled eggs, crackers and popcorn, and soup and dessert. To see America as a long buffet of ingredients that we all choose to exclude or include according to our daily appetites is to miss the cohesion and uniqueness of America.
In my personal opinion, America is chocolate fondue. Our different cultural and ethnic backgrounds are strawberries, pineapple, cherries, graham crackers and cookies, pound cake and brownies, rice krispie treats and marshmallows, popcorn and peppermint sticks. Then we are dipped in America. We swim in America. We are coated in America. Americans can and do come from all ethnicities and races, so we all look like Americans.
Of course, chocolate doesn’t always live up to its promises. It can be rough, rancid, burnt, or bitter. Some people don’t like chocolate at all, or are even allergic to it. America has often failed to live up to its promises and ideals. But when I think about all the people who have lived in all places and times around the world, I feel very lucky to live in modern America.
There’s an old story about when heavyweight boxing champion Joe Louis decided to enlist in the U.S. Army in 1942. His friend objected and said, “Joe, it’s a white man’s army, not a black man’s army.” But Joe Louis had seen the Nazi propaganda machine up close as a result of two epic fights with the German Max Schmeling (not a Nazi, but someone the Nazis tried to exploit). So Louis told his friend, “There’s a lot wrong with America, but Hitler’s not going to fix it.”
In that spirit, I would like to say that there is a lot wrong with America, but often the best answer to what is wrong with America is a bigger dose of what is right with America. On the Fourth of July, I choose to sit down with my family and friends and savor the texture and sweetness of our shared American experience.
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Timothy Taylor is editor-in-chief of the Journal of Economic Perspectives at Macalester College. St. Paul.
