F. America as a Gathering of Peoples and Cultures
American ethnic, religious, and cultural diversity are historical facts as old as the first European settlements -- older, if we keep in mind the extraordinary range of cultures among the American Indians. Franklin D. Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy are only two of the leading Americans who have had to remind their compatriots that we are all descendants of immigrants and that the United States is a nation of immigrants, all the stronger for its remarkable cultural, ethnic, racial, and religious diversity protected (at least in theory) by the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and the Fourteenth Amendment.
This theme -- "America as a gathering of peoples and cultures" -- embodies a vitally important and deeply troubling paradox of American history. Immigration always has been the most important way that this gathering of peoples and cultures has taken place. For most of American history, Americans who were already here (except for the American Indians, who viewed the influx of European immigrants with apprehension and skepticism) cheerfully drew on immigration as an essential resource to continue the building of American society and the expansion of the American nation. And yet the celebration of immigration as a general concept has always coexisted uneasily with an often virulent dislike of and distrust for many of the major ethnic, racial, and religious groups that made up the successive waves of immigration. Nativist opposition to immigration is a recurring undercurrent of American political and social history; the groups that have been the focus of hostility, distrust, and persecution include immigrants from Ireland, Italy, Poland, Hungary, Southern and Eastern Europe, China, Japan, Korea, India, Puerto Rico and the Caribbean, and Africa; Catholics, Jews, Hindus, Buddhists, Confucians, believers in Shinto and Santeria; and so forth. Targets of persecution also include, and always have included, the oldest Americans -- American Indians, who (as noted earlier) until our own time were stigmatized as primitive savages incapable of becoming "civilized."
For much of the twentieth century, Americans celebrated the idea of the "melting pot" into which peoples from all over the world leaped, only to be poured out as Americans. In the last two decades, some Americans have suggested that the image of the melting pot be supplanted by that of the American mosaic. In the American mosaic, each ethnic, cultural, religious, or racial group retains its distinctive heritage and identity yet plays a vital part in creating a larger, more comprehensive American nation. The metaphor of the mosaic arguably may be closer to the spirit of the national motto ("E pluribus unum" -- or "out of many, one") than is the metaphor of the melting pot. But it has not yet prevailed in a nation where many Americans (themselves descendants of immigrants) still insist that newer immigrants must submerge themselves in a pre-existing "American" identity. The great challenge that faces the American republic, after more than two centuries of struggling with the challenges and the difficulties of diversity, is to work out a new consensus on the appropriate balance between the claims of different group identities and the goal of identifying an American common ground.