Trans-National America Randolph S. Bourne
To face the fact that our aliens are already strong enough to take a share in the direction of their own destiny, and that the strong cultural movements represented by the foreign press, schools, and colonies are a challenge to our facile attempts, is not, however, to admit the failure of Americanization. It is not to fear the failure of democracy. It is rather to urge us to an investigation of what Americanism may rightly mean. It is to ask ourselves whether our ideal has been broad or narrow -- whether perhaps the time has not come to assert a higher ideal than the 'melting- pot.' Surely we cannot be certain of our spiritual democracy when, claiming to melt the nations within us to a comprehension of our free and democratic institutions, we fly into panic at the first sign of their own will and tendency. We act as if we wanted Americanization to take place only on our own terms, and not by the consent of the governed. All our elaborate machinery of settlement and school and union, of social and political naturalization, however, will move with friction just in so far as it neglects to take into account this strong and virile insistence that America shall be what the immigrant will have a hand in making it, and not what a ruling class, descendant of those British stocks which were the first permanent immigrants, decide that America shall be made. This is the condition which confronts us, and which demands a clear and general readjustment of our attitude and our ideal.
Randolph Bourne discusses the “failure of the ‘melting pot.'” According to Bourne, Americans at the time had been trying to assimilate the cultures of immigrants into their own. America was supposed to be the melting pot, where everyone was allowed to come and “melt” into the large American culture. But they overlooked the fact that not everyone wants to be assimilated, and forcing the issue only makes immigrants’ nationalistic feelings towards their countries of origin more intense.Bourne then states “Americanization,” for he argues that it can no longer mean that the United States is a so called “melting pot” waiting for new people to come and embrace the new, larger culture. Americans, he says, need to account for the wishes of the immigrants: how they want to become part of America, not how we want them to become part of the country. He tells Americans that in all actuality, are they are descendents of immigrants. These people came over not to be part of the Native American culture and adopt all its ways, but in search of freedom. People should regard new immigrants like their ancestors, like people who are searching for freedom instead of new cultural customs to follow.
The Atlantic Monthly; July 1916; Trans-national America; Volume 118, No. 1; pages 86-97.
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