Cultural Pluralism By Horace Kallen

Americanization was a nativist movement which sought to erase the histories of immigrants and mold them in the image of the original anglo-american elite. The melting pot theory saw difference as an impediment to American greatness and hoped to eliminate the features of immigrants from southern and eastern Europe which did not correspond to traditional protestant ethic. Therefore Americanization was a thinly veiled attempt to impose cultural hegemony and reproduce the ruling order, in addition to eradicating the often populist and radical sentiments of immigrants. Cultural pluralism was an intellectual movement that countered this hegemonic narrative by framing cultural differences as assets to America and essential to its development. Pluralism …show more content…
He begins by demonstrating through census information how the United States was already a multi-national state that encompassed a wide variety of ethnic communities who were actively resisting forces of assimilation. Therefore this resistance demonstrated the incoherence of the idea of Americanization. The forces of assimilation attempted to show that immigrant cultures were inferior and that the adoption of American popular culture and literature was essential to becoming an American. But the problem with this line of thinking was that the cultural and literary traditions of these disparate immigrant cultures was far richer than the popular culture of Americanism. So Kallen identified the project of Americanization as a tool of domination which sought to abolish the immigrant’s former identity not because it was inferior, but simply because it was …show more content…
Against the stagnation of Anglo-Saxon dominance a cosmopolitan identity would mean that Americans would be the first citizens of the world. Through cooperation and symbiosis people of different origins would be unified without being melted down. Therefore Borne more than Kallen understood that what it means to be an American would be a question that’s answer would always lie in the future. Diversity would be the life blood of the American civilization and would make this country worthy of the label