Day: July 4, 2018

Here\’s my attempt to resolve all the issues of shared American identity in under 1,000 words. It was published back in 2013 as an opinion piece in the (Minnesota) Star Tribune newspaper.

\”Analogies for America: Beyond the Melting Pot\”
Timothy Taylor

Melting pot or salad bowl? For decades now, these two contestants have been slugging it out in the contest for most appropriate metaphor for how the cultures and ethnicities of America fit together. But my preference is to think of America as chocolate fondue.

The popularization of “the melting pot” metaphor is usually traced to a soppy, sentimental and very popular play of that name by an immigrant named Israel Zangwill that opened in Washington in 1908. The melting pot metaphor is a way of expressing “E pluribus unum” — “Out of many, one” — the already old saying adopted in 1782 for the Great Seal of the United States (and which you can see on the back of the $1 bill). “E pluribus unum” has also been imprinted on U.S. coins since the 18th century.

The traditional criticism about the melting pot was that what is special about American culture isn’t its homogeneity, but rather its ability to absorb the elements of many cultures, then pass them around to everyone. For example, as John F. Kennedy wrote in his 1958 book, “A Nation of Immigrants”: “One writer has suggested that a ‘typical American menu’ might include some of the following dishes: ‘Irish stew, chop suey, goulash, chile con carne, ravioli, knockwurst mit sauerkraut, Yorkshire pudding, Welsh rarebit, borscht, gefilte fish, Spanish omelette, caviar, mayonnaise, antipasto, baumkuchen, English muffins, gruyère cheese, Danish pastry, Canadian bacon, hot tamales, wienerschnitzel, petit fours, spumoni, bouillabaisse, mate, scones, Turkish coffee, minestrone, filet mignon.’ ”

In our multicultural and individualist age, the common complaint is that the metaphor says that Americans should surrender our cultural and ethnic identities. This critique strikes me as overwrought. Yes, the culture of the country where you live is constraining. But what’s distinctive about modern America is the looseness of these constraints, and the array of available choices.

However, it does bother me that the melting pot metaphor is a relic of a bygone time, when melting different metals together was a common for many industrial workers. It also bothers me that melting different metals together produces a desired outcome only if you adhere to a formula. Bronze is copper and tin. Brass is copper and zinc. If you just dump different metals into a melting pot, what comes out is likely to be flawed and brittle, not strong or useful. When supporters of the melting pot metaphor start talking, it often turns out that they have a clear mental formula for what it means to be American — and it isn’t always my formula.

The notion of America as a salad bowl seems to have been popularized by the eminent historian Carl Degler. His book “Out of Our Past: The Forces that Shaped Modern America” was a commonly used textbook from the 1950s up through the 1980s. In the 1959 edition, he wrote: “[S]ome habits from the old country were not discarded; in those instances the children of immigrants even into the third and fourth generations retained their differences. In view of such failure to melt and fuse, the metaphor of the melting pot is unfortunate and misleading. A more accurate analogy would be a salad bowl, for, although the salad is an entity, the lettuce can still be distinguished from the chicory, the tomatoes from the cabbage.”

While the salad bowl metaphor has a healthy, crunchy “eat your vegetables” ring to it, it seems awkward to me as well. After all, who is the pale and crunchy iceberg lettuce? Who is arugula? Who are the artificial bacon bits? Who are anchovies? Salad ingredients are not all created equal.

Salad is always falling apart, and you can almost never get all of the ingredients, in just the right proportions, into your mouth at the same time. Imagine the oversized modern salad bar, with multiple kinds of lettuces and vegetables, but also seeds and nuts, tuna salad, slices of chicken or ham, bean salad, hard-boiled eggs, crackers and popcorn, along with choice of soup and dessert. It misses what is cohesive and distinctive about America to see the country as a long buffet of ingredients, which we all choose to exclude or include according to our transient appetites of day.

My own suggestion is that America is chocolate fondue. Our different cultural and ethnic backgrounds are the strawberries, pineapple, and cherries, the graham crackers and cookies, the pound cake and brownies, the rice crispy treats and marshmallows, the popcorn and the peppermint sticks. Then we are dipped in America. We swim in America. We are coated in America. Because Americans can and do come from all ethnicities and races, we all look like Americans.

Of course, chocolate doesn’t always deliver on its promise. It can become grainy, rancid, burnt and bitter. Some people have no taste for chocolate, or are even allergic to it. America has often not lived up to its promises and ideals. But when I think consider all the human beings who have ever lived, in all the different places and times around the world, I feel profoundly fortunate to be living 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. A friend of his objected, and said: “It’s a white man’s Army, Joe, not a black man’s Army.” But Joe Louis had observed the Nazi propaganda machine close up, as the result of his two epic fights against the German Max Schmeling (who was not a Nazi, but whom the Nazis attempted to exploit). So Louis told his friend: “Lots of things wrong with America, but Hitler ain’t going to fix them.”

In that spirit, I’d say lots of things are wrong with America, but often, the best answers for what’s wrong with America are a bigger dose of what’s right with America. On the Fourth of July, I choose to sit with family and friends, and to savor the textures and sweetness of our shared American experience.

————

Timothy Taylor is managing editor of the Journal of Economic Perspectives, based at ­Macalester College in St. Paul. He blogs at http://conversableeconomist.blogspot.com.

John Quincy Adams, the sixth President of  the United States (and son of the second president John Adams and his wife Abigail) started a diary when he was 12 in 1779, and added to it continuously for almost 70 years. Some days the long entries were more than 5,000 words. There\’s one stretch of 25 years where he didn\’t miss a day. It sums up to more than 14,000 handwritten pages, and the magic of the Internet lets you see images of the 51 volumes here.

In thinking about the July 4 holiday, here\’s a comment from Adams\’s diary on December 27, 1819, about one of the basic questions confronting Americans of that time–and our own time. Thomas Jefferson both wrote the Declaration of Independence, and also was a slave-owner. As Adams writes: \”With the Declaration of Independence on their lips, and the merciless scourge of slavery in their hands, a more flagrant image of human inconsistency can scarcely be conceived …\” Of course, modern Americans and their leaders can sometimes have the Declaration on their lips and injustice in their hands, too.

Facing that contradiction, Adams responded in a way that was both ominous and, at least in my reading, tinged with hope. He wrote: \”The seeds of the Declaration of Independence are yet maturing,\” and that the result would be the \”terrible sublime.\” Here\’s the passage, taken from John Quincy Adams, The Memoirs of John Quincy Adams (volume 4, pp. 492-493) available through the magic of the internet at the HathiTrust Digital library.

\”[Thomas] Jefferson is one of the great men whom this country has produced, one of the men who has contributed largely to the formation of our national character — to much that is good and to not a little that is evil in our sentiments and manners. His Declaration of Independence is an abridged Alcoran of political doctrine, laying open the first foundations of civil society; but he does not appear to have been aware that it also laid open a precipice into which the slave-holding planters of his country sooner or later must fall. With the Declaration of Independence on their lips, and the merciless scourge of slavery in their hands, a more flagrant image of human inconsistency can scarcely be conceived than one of our Southern slave-holding republicans. Jefferson has been himself all his life a slave-holder, but he has published opinions so blasting to the very existence of slavery, that, how ever creditable they may be to his candor and humanity, they speak not much for his prudence or his forecast as a Virginian planter. The seeds of the Declaration of Independence are yet maturing. The harvest will be what West, the painter, calls the terrible sublime.\”

A couple of the references here might bear a bit more explanation. The reference to the \”Alcoran,\” was a common contemporary spelling of what the AP Stylebook now spells as the \”Quran.\” It\’s interesting to see a future US president in 1819 referring to the Quran as a parallel for the Declaration of Independence.

The final sentence refers to the painter Benjamin West, and presumably to paintings like his 1796 \”Death on a Pale Horse.\”

On July 4, I like to think that \”the seeds of the Declaration of Independence are yet maturing,\” with a full recognition that this process will not always provide its positive results through a happy cheerful parade of good feeling, but instead will sometimes be confrontational, wrenching, and difficult.

The British statesman and philosopher Edmund Burke gave a \”Speech on Conciliation with the Colonies\” on March 25, 1775. He sought to explain why those pesky Americans were so strident and obsessive about their love of freedom and liberty. He said:

\”In this character of the Americans, a love of freedom is the predominating feature which marks and distinguishes the whole … This fierce spirit of liberty is stronger in the English colonies probably than in any other people of the earth; and this from a great variety of powerful causes; which, to understand the true temper of their minds, and the direction which this spirit takes, it will not be amiss to lay open somewhat more largely.\”

Burke then proceeded to explain six causes why \”a fierce spirit of liberty has grown up\” in America. Here is my list of his six causes, with some snippets from his speech.

Cause #1: Seeing the power to control one\’s own taxes as as central part of liberty. 

They are therefore not only devoted to liberty, but to liberty according to English ideas, and on English principles. … Liberty inheres in some sensible object; and every nation has formed to itself some favourite point, which by way of eminence becomes the criterion of their happiness. It happened, you know, Sir, that the great contests for freedom in this country were from the earliest times chiefly upon the question of taxing. Most of the contests in the ancient commonwealths turned primarily on the right of election of magistrates; or on the balance among the several orders of the state. The question of money was not with them so immediate. But in England it was otherwise. On this point of taxes the ablest pens, and most eloquent tongues, have been exercised; the greatest spirits have acted and suffered. … The colonies draw from you, as with their life-blood, these ideas and principles. Their love of liberty, as with you, fixed and attached on this specific point of taxing. 

Cause #2: A love of popular representation in government. 

\”Their governments are popular in a high degree; some are merely popular; in all, the popular representative is the most weighty; and this share of the people in their ordinary government never fails to inspire them with lofty sentiments, and with a strong aversion from whatever tends to deprive them of their chief importance.\”

Cause #3: Religious belief, and especially the Protestantism of the northern colonies

\”Religion, always a principle of energy, in this new people is no way worn out or impaired; and their mode of professing it is also one main cause of this free spirit. The people are Protestants; and of that kind which is the most adverse to all implicit submission of mind and opinion. This is a persuasion not only favourable to liberty, but built upon it. … All Protestantism, even the most cold and passive, is a sort of dissent. But the religion most prevalent in our northern colonies is a refinement on the principle of resistance; it is the dissidence of dissent, and the Protestantism of the Protestant religion. This religion, under a variety of denominations agreeing in nothing but in the communion of the spirit of liberty, is predominant in most of the northern provinces; where the Church of England, notwithstanding its legal rights, is in reality no more than a sort of private sect, not composing most probably the tenth of the people. The colonists left England when this spirit was high, and in the emigrants was the highest of all … \”

Cause #4: Those who live with slavery, especially in the southern colonies, tend to see liberty as more noble 

\”It is, that in Virginia and the Carolinas they have a vast multitude of slaves. Where this is the case in any part of the world, those who are free, are by far the most proud and jealous of their freedom. Freedom is to them not only an enjoyment, but a kind of rank and privilege. Not seeing there, that freedom, as in countries where it is a common blessing, and as broad and general as the air, may be united with much abject toil, with great misery, with all the exterior of servitude, liberty looks, amongst them, like something that is more noble and liberal. I do not mean, Sir, to commend the superior morality of this sentiment, which has at least as much pride as virtue in it; but I cannot alter the nature of man. The fact is so; and these people of the southern colonies are much more strongly, and with a higher and more stubborn spirit, attached to liberty, than those to the northward. … In such a people, the haughtiness of domination combines with the spirit of freedom, fortifies it, and renders it invincible.\”

Cause #5: Lots of lawyers, and lawyerly thinking. 

\”In no country perhaps in the world is the law so general a study. The profession itself is numerous and powerful; and in most provinces it takes the lead. The greater number of the deputies sent to the congress were lawyers. But all who read, and most do read, endeavour to obtain some smattering in that science. … This study renders men acute, inquisitive, dexterous, prompt in attack, ready in defence, full of resources. In other countries, the people, more simple, and of a less mercurial cast, judge of an ill principle in government only by an actual grievance; here they anticipate the evil, and judge of the pressure of the grievance by the badness of the principle. They augur misgovernment at a distance; and snuff the approach of tyranny in every tainted breeze.\”

Cause #6: Geographical distance from England encourages thoughts of liberty. 

\”Three thousand miles of ocean lie between you and them. No contrivance can prevent the effect of this distance in weakening government. Seas roll, and months pass, between the order and the execution; and the want of a speedy explanation of a single point is enough to defeat a whole system. …  In large bodies, the circulation of power must be less vigorous at the extremities. Nature has said it.  … Spain, in her provinces, is, perhaps, not so well obeyed as you are in yours. She complies too; she submits; she watches times. This is the immutable condition, the eternal law, of extensive and detached empire.\”

Burke points out that the issue was not whether these arguments were virtuous or moral, or whether the American spirit of liberty was in some way unreasonable or excessive. When faced with the reality of liberty-loving Americans was what to do:

\”I do not mean to commend either the spirit in this excess, or the moral causes which produce it. Perhaps a more smooth and accommodating spirit of freedom in them would be more acceptable to us. Perhaps ideas of liberty might be desired, more reconcilable with an arbitrary and boundless authority. Perhaps we might wish the colonists to be persuaded, that their liberty is more secure when held in trust for them by us (as their guardians during a perpetual minority) than with any part of it in their own hands. The question is, not whether their spirit deserves praise or blame, but–what, in the name of God, shall we do with it?\”

Obviously, Burke\’s six reasons apply to the time and place in which he was writing, but it seems to me that they they have echoes in the American character that persist.

For example, Americans continue to have a intense focus on taxation. The idea of direct representation of people in government is a civic religion (especially when it feels as if it is not being properly accomplished). For many Americans, of all faith traditions, their religion is in some way \”a refinement on the principle of resistance; it is the dissidence of dissent.\” The aftermath of American slavery has made the call of \”freedom\” perhaps even stronger. Public gatherings often involve broad claims about desirability of freedom, and the sense that people are in some way being denied their freedom. The country is full of lawyerly thinkers who are \”acute, inquisitive, dexterous, prompt in attack, ready in defence, full of resources,\” and who \”augur misgovernment at a distance; and snuff the approach of tyranny in every tainted breeze.\” And the geographic location (and sheer size) of the United States means that American liberty is not under threat from neighboring countries in the way that is experienced by people in so much of the world.

On July 4, it\’s worth noting some of these continuities and divergences in the American experience. And in looking ahead, one can do worse that repeat Burke\’s question: The question is, not whether their spirit deserves praise or blame, but–what, in the name of God, shall we do with it?\”