Word: crevecoeur
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...this suggests that the old notion of America as a melting pot was a romantic idea about something that never really happened. "Here individuals of all nations are melted into a new race of men," wrote that perceptive and enthusiastic observer of the American scene, St. John de Crevecoeur, in 1782. Emerson elaborated and sustained the vision, and by 1908, Israel Zangwill, an admiring English Jew, was completely carried away: "America is God's Crucible, the great Melting Pot where all races of Europe are merging and reforming . . . Germans and Frenchmen, Irishmen and Englishmen, Jews and Russians-into...
...Israel Zangwill wrote a play "The Melting Pot" and introduced the phrase into the national vocabulary. Although his words were new, the idea was not. From Crevecoeur on, Americans have embraced the concept of the melting pot to affirm their peculiar destiny and to reassure themselves that despite the diversity of its people the United States is or will be one nation indivisible. In Beyond the Melting Pot Nathan Glazer and Daniel P. Moynihan challenge the very idea of the melting pot through an examination of the Negroes, Puerto Ricans, Jews, Italians and Irish of New York City...