How Diverse Should the Citizenry Be?
In a nation created by immigrants, nothing has been more debated than what should be the ideal character of its citizenry. One view is that “multiculturalism,” the preservation of diverse cultural heritage, enriches the country. Some have called for a common citizenry—a “melting pot” where immigrants are assimilated and their traditions are transformed into a homogeneous American culture. Still others challenged diversity by seeking to restrict immigration and exclude certain racial and ethnic groups. These very different positions have greatly impacted the nation’s political debates on economic, foreign, and immigration policy, and education and social welfare programs.
Celebrating Diversity
Presentation Indian moccasins
A delegation of Plains Indians gave these beaded moccasins to President Ulysses S. Grant during an 1870s peace conference in Washington, D.C. The design unites motifs and forms from both cultures as a powerful statement of hopeful coexistence.
Gift of Mr. Chapman Grant
Statue of Liberty Hanukkah menorah
Many immigrants sought to preserve their cultural heritage while at the same time embracing their new identity as Americans. Manfred Anson did so in designing this Hanukkah lamp to mark the centennial of the Statue of Liberty in 1986. Anson, who escaped Nazi Germany as a teenager, later reunited with family who had immigrated to the United States. For this lamp, Anson combined a traditional Polish menorah and figurines cast from a 19th century Statue of Liberty souvenir.
Gift of Aaron Feingold and Mark and Peachy Levy
Armenian American bicentennial banner
Zaven Seraidian, an immigrant from Armenia, created this banner in 1976 to celebrate the bicentennial. According to Seraidian: the Armenian letter for A symbolizes “the beginning” and the letter for B expresses “continuity”; the Armenian cross is a symbol of Christianity brought from the old world to the new; the two American eagles are for strength and victory; and the flag represents independence and liberty from tyrannical oppression.
Gift of Zaven Seraidian
Courting the “Ethnic Vote”
The Melting Pot
Graduation ceremony, 1916
The Ford Motor Company dramatized the ideals of Americanization in its elaborate English school graduation pageants. Workers in foreign dress entered into a giant pot stirred by the school’s teachers and emerged in their best “American” clothes waving United States flags.
Courtesy of Collections of The Henry Ford
Americanize America
From 1880 to 1920 over 20 million people, largely from eastern and southern Europe, came to the United States. In response, the government and industries developed Americanization programs to turn the foreign-born into patriotic citizens by teaching “real American” values and English.
Poster, "Many Peoples One Nation"
This poster, issued by the private National Americanization Committee and distributed by the Department of the Interior’s Bureau of Education, represents the ideals of the Americanization movement through the use of the flag and its symbolic message expressed in verse.
“The Mortar of Assimilation,” Puck, June 26, 1889
Although the ideal of Americanization was to welcome all foreigners, some groups were viewed as too disruptive for the rest of the pot. In this example, Irish radicals were seen as too unruly to mix in.
Gift of Marcia B. Kass in memory of Herbert J. Friedman
A Nation Only for Some
Out of belief or fear, many Americans sought to limit diversity in the United States.
Anti-Chinese cap pistol
In the 19th century, agitation against Asian Americans spread across the country and led to some of the nation’s most restrictive immigration laws.
Gift of Ralph E. Becker Collection of Political Americana
Know-Nothing Party
The American Party, also called the Know-Nothings, was a major national political force in the 1850s. It saw immigrants and Catholics as the greatest threat to self-government and to the nation. Arguing for rule by native-born Protestants, the Know-Nothings ran former President Millard Fillmore as their presidential candidate in the 1856 election. Though James Buchanan won the presidency, Fillmore received over 21 percent of the vote. During the Civil War the movement fractured and largely disappeared, but fear and distrust of new immigrants remained within the core beliefs of many future political movements.
Advertising broadside for The Dollar Weekly Times, an American Party-affiliated newspaper, 1850s
Gift of Ralph E. Becker Collection of Political Americana
Ku Klux Klan
Founded in 1866 in Pulaski, Tennessee, the Ku Klux Klan combated post-Civil War reforms and terrorized freed African Americans in the former Confederacy. Dormant for decades, by the mid-1920s a reconstructed Klan was again a powerful political force in both the South and the North, spreading hatred against African Americans, immigrants, Catholics, and Jews. Klan membership plummeted after a series of scandals involving its leadership. Although never as powerful as it was in the 1920s, Klan organizations rose to oppose the growing civil rights movements of the 1950s and ’60s.
Love It or Leave It
This 1970s bumper sticker was directed at anti-Vietnam War protesters and the counter-culture they represented, but the calls for exclusion of certain groups span the history of the nation. Americans desiring a more homogeneous citizenry did not limit their restrictions to certain ethnic and racial groups, but also sought to exclude those of differing political, social, and economic philosophies, religious beliefs, or sexual orientations.
