Melting pot

thumb|upright=0.9|The image of the United States as a melting pot was popularized by the 1908 play [[The Melting Pot (play)|The Melting Pot.]]

A melting pot is a metaphor for a heterogeneous society becoming more homogeneous, with the different elements "melting together" with a common culture or monoculture; an alternative being a homogeneous society becoming more heterogeneous through the influx of foreign elements with different cultural backgrounds. It can also create a harmonious hybridized society known as cultural amalgamation. In the United States, the term is often used to describe the cultural integration of immigrants to the country. A related concept has been defined as "cultural additivity".

The melting-together metaphor was in use by the 1780s. The exact term "melting pot" came into general usage in the United States after it was used as a metaphor describing a fusion or mixture of nationalities, cultures and ethnicities in Israel Zangwill's 1908 play of the same name.

The desirability of assimilation and the melting pot model has been rejected by proponents of multiculturalism (cultural mosaic), who have suggested alternative metaphors to describe the current American society, such as a salad bowl, or kaleidoscope, in which different cultures mix, but remain distinct in some aspects. The melting pot continues to be used as an assimilation model in vernacular and political discourse along with more inclusive models of assimilation in the academic debates on identity, adaptation and integration of immigrants into various political, social and economic spheres.

United States

Use of the term

The concept of immigrants "melting" into the receiving culture is found in the writings of J. Hector St. John de Crèvecœur. In his Letters from an American Farmer (1782) Crèvecœur writes, in response to his own question, "What then is the American, this new man?" that the American is one who

In this early phase of American history, several comparisons were made between the melting together of ethnicities and Christian ideas of universalism.

In 1845, Ralph Waldo Emerson, alluding to the development of European civilization out of the medieval Dark Ages, wrote in his private journal of America as the Utopian product of a culturally and racially mixed "smelting pot", but only in 1912 were his remarks first published.

A magazine article in 1876 used the metaphor explicitly:

In 1893, historian Frederick Jackson Turner also used the metaphor of immigrants melting into one American culture. In his essay The Significance of the Frontier in American History, he referred to the "composite nationality" of the American people, arguing that the frontier had functioned as a "crucible" where "the immigrants were Americanized, liberated and fused into a mixed race, English in neither nationality nor characteristics".

In his 1905 travel narrative The American Scene, Henry James discusses cultural intermixing in New York City as a "fusion, as of elements in solution in a vast hot pot".

Melting pot "methods"

There were a number of ways that the melting pot is considered to have worked throughout American history. For example, baseball, whose unifying powers were first perceived in the aftermath of the 1860s Civil War, was often said to play a significant role in integrating immigrants in particular. In New York City, where the modern version of baseball began, immigrants invented variations of the game in the streets at the turn of the 20th century in their rush to integrate themselves. In an international context, the sport played a role in some of the United States's early intercultural encounters. Baseball also improved race relations: Jackie Robinson was a major black baseball-playing icon who crossed Major League Baseball's color line by 1947, which helped to reduce racial segregation.

Multiracial influences on culture

White Americans long regarded some elements of African-American culture quintessentially "American", while at the same time treating African Americans as second-class citizens. White appropriation, stereotyping and mimicking of black culture played an important role in the construction of an urban popular culture in which European immigrants could express themselves as Americans, through such traditions as blackface, minstrel shows and later in jazz and in early Hollywood cinema, notably in The Jazz Singer (1927).

Analyzing the "racial masquerade" that was involved in creation of a white "melting pot" culture through the stereotyping and imitation of black and other non-white cultures in the early 20th century, historian Michael Rogin has commented: "Repudiating 1920s nativism, these films Rogin discusses The Jazz Singer, Old San Francisco (1927), Whoopee! (1930), King of Jazz (1930)] celebrate the melting pot. Unlike other racially stigmatized groups, white immigrants can put on and take off their mask of difference. But the freedom promised immigrants to make themselves over points to the vacancy, the violence, the deception, and the melancholy at the core of American self-fashioning".

Olympic Games

Following the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City strongly revived the melting pot image, returning to a bedrock form of American nationalism and patriotism. The reemergence of Olympic melting pot discourse was driven especially by the unprecedented success of African Americans, Mexican Americans, Asian Americans, and Native Americans in events traditionally associated with Europeans and white North Americans such as speed skating and the bobsled. The 2002 Winter Olympics was also a showcase of American religious freedom and cultural tolerance of the history of Utah's large majority population of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, as well as representation of Muslim Americans and other religious groups in the U.S. Olympic team.

Melting pot and cultural pluralism

In Henry Ford's Ford English School (established in 1914), the graduation ceremony for immigrant employees involved symbolically stepping off an immigrant ship and passing through the melting pot, entering at one end in costumes designating their nationality and emerging at the other end in identical suits and waving American flags.

In response to the pressure exerted on immigrants to culturally assimilate and also as a reaction against the denigration of the culture of non-Anglo white immigrants by Nativists, intellectuals on the left, such as Horace Kallen in Democracy Versus the Melting-Pot (1915), and Randolph Bourne in Trans-National America (1916), laid the foundations for the concept of cultural pluralism. This term was coined by Kallen.

In the United States, where the term melting pot is still commonly used, the ideas of cultural pluralism and multiculturalism have, in some circles, taken precedence over the idea of assimilation. Alternate models where immigrants retain their native cultures such as the "salad bowl" or the "symphony"

Since the 1960s, much research in Sociology and History has disregarded the melting pot theory for describing interethnic relations in the United States and other countries.

Use in other regions

Religious cultures

Southeast Asia

The term has been used to describe a number of countries in Southeast Asia. Given the region's location and importance to trade routes between China and the Western world, certain countries in the region have become ethnically diverse. In Vietnam, a relevant phenomenon is "" (lit. "Three spears, one point," idiomatically "three teachers, one lesson"), references the harmonious co-existence and mutually influencing teachings of the nation's three major religious schools, Confucianism, Buddhism, and Taoism, demonstrating a process described as "cultural addivity".

In contrast to the melting pot theory, Malaysia and Singapore promote cultural preservation of their various ethnicities. In Malaysia they say "agama, bangsa, negara" which means "various religions, various ethnicities, one nation." Malaysia is made up of different religions and ethnicities yet all are citizens and everyone should respect one another, join hands, and work together. Each ethnicity should work to preserve their own ethnic identity while at the same time working together to build Malaysia as a national effort, living in peace and harmony.

Western Hemisphere

Caribbean

The Caribbean has a substantial amount of mixing between different ethnic groups, due to the history of various labor groups being imported into the region.

Latin America

thumb|The racial mixing of Spaniards and indigenous Latin Americans

Mexico has had a significant amount of cultural and ethnic fusion among its many groups, with its government pursuing a "mestizo" (mixed heritage) ideal. Civil rights reformers in the United States took inspiration from these ideas.

In popular culture

Animated educational series Schoolhouse Rock! has a song entitled "The Great American Melting Pot".