Reimagining the Melting Pot and the golden door: national identity in gilded age and progressive era literature.

In 1883, Emma Lazarus wrote "The New Colossus" to help raise funds for a pedestal upon which would stand the Statue of Liberty. The poem depicts the "Mother of Exiles" offering a "world-wide welcome" (7) to the weary, hungry, and downtrodden. The work's final line is spoken by the hospitable "Lady Liberty" figure: "I lift my lamp beside the golden door" (14). The poem was saluted twenty years later, when it was engraved in bronze and affixed to the very pedestal it had helped construct. Just five years after that, though, Lazarus's golden door metaphor would come to share its status as a national icon with another metaphor. Israel Zangwill's play The Melting Pot opened in Washington, DC, in 1908, crystallizing and celebrating a view of American ethnicity with origins in the eighteenth century) In the finale, the lead character points to New York harbor during a blazing sunset and proclaims it to be "the great Melting Pot." He continues, "Ah, what a stirring and seething! Celt and Latin, Slav and Teuton, Greek and Syrian,--black and yellow.... [H]ow the great Alchemist melts and fuses them with his purging flame! Here shall they all unite to build the Republic of Man and the Kingdom of God" (184-85). Clearly, the golden door and melting pot images glowed with connotations of wide acceptance and mutual ascension.

However, by 1924 these two metaphors came together in a way that showed they had lost their radiance and reverence. That year, Senator Ellison DuRant Smith argued before Congress for a proposal to significantly toughen immigration restriction laws. Smith opened his speech by declaring that "the time has arrived when we should shut the door. We have been called the melting pot of the world. We had an experience just a few years ago, during the Great World War, when it looked as though we had allowed influences to enter our borders that were about to melt the pot in place of us being the melting pot" (80). (2) Coupling the melting pot with the words "shut the door" (and repeating the latter phrase five more times during the speech), Smith reveals how a perceived failure of the melting pot metaphorically stripped the glitter off the golden door, leaving it a door that needed shutting.

The immigrants blamed for this dramatic transformation came from countries such as Italy, Hungary, Lithuania, Poland, and Russia. Like the Chinese who had evoked apprehension before them, these newcomers had little previous representation in the US and stood in stark contrast to most immigrants who had come since the start of European colonization, especially those from Britain, the Netherlands, Ireland, Germany, and Scandinavia. The "old immigrants," as they came to be called, were being eclipsed by the "new immigrants" from Europe's southern and eastern regions. A book from the period uses this old versus new classification to explain that 563,175 old immigrants arrived in 1882, comprising 86.9 percent of that year's overall figures. By 1907, however, 971,608 new immigrants arrived, making up 81 percent of the total (Jenks and Lauck 26). This swing evoked widespread anxiety because of the alleged degradation that would result from admitting so many new immigrants. As early as 1891, The Nation warned that the new immigrants threatened to unbalance the country by introducing too many lower-class workers, too many males, and too many hard-to-assimilate elderly people. The article concludes by saying that the southern and eastern European influx "is not related to us in race or language, but has habits of thought and behavior radically foreign to those which have so far prevailed in the United States" ("The New Immigration" 210). Such sentiments became more pervasive as percentages continued to grow in favor of the new immigrants. (3)

Opposition to new immigrants reached a peak in the early 1920s, resulting in far-reaching restriction laws. While about 900,000 newcomers entered annually from 1900-1910, only a third of that were admitted for all of 1925 through 1930. Furthermore, the legislation employed a quota system to favor old immigrants: British, German, and Irish immigration, which stood at 13 percent of overall immigration during that first decade, climbed to 62 percent after 1924, the year the most stringent restriction quota was introduced (Daniels 140-41). It was during this phase of legislation reform that Senator Smith made his plea to completely bar immigration. "If we may not have that," he bargained, "then I am in favor of putting the quota down to the lowest possible point, with every selective element in it that may be" (82).

Smith's loss of faith in the melting pot and the golden door is reflected in political speeches of the era, but also in its imaginative literature. Fiction, drama, poetry, and song lyrics grew in value as means to express and to sway public opinion regarding immigration. In 1907, an anonymous editor for Scribner's contends that immigrant characters play an insignificant role in American literature and that even Jurgis Rudkus, the protagonist of Upton Sinclair's The Jungle, "dwindles into insignificance as the story is unfolded" ("The Point of View" 635). However, in 1912, an editor for Current Literature introduces a story spotlighting immigrant characters by announcing, "A distinct school of American fiction is gradually growing up among those who already discern the rare opportunities thus presented in the attempts of people from many lands to readjust themselves here to their new environment and to one another" (Introduction 602). By 1923, Henry Seidel Canby could bemoan the "habit" of looking to immigrants for literary inspiration: "A born writer cannot see a booted Russian peasant woman in a subway car without desiring to write a story about her" (366). This "distinct school" ranges from the social reform fiction of works such as Sinclair's The Jungle to the realism and local color of, say, Willa Cather's My Antonia. While Sinclair and Cather exemplify native-born authors portraying immigrant experience, the movement also included immigrant authors as diverse as Anzia Yezierska, Sui Sin Far, and Claude McKay. Select works from this body of literature reveal how disillusion regarding the melting pot ran parallel to--and contributed to--the transformation of the golden door. As we will see, though, writers typically kept melting pot issues separate from those of the golden door. In fact, these national emblems seem to have been thought of as unrelated through most of the twentieth century, and an explanation can be found in how the melting pot in particular has been situated in other immigration discourse. In Theories of Americanization (1920), Isaac B. Berkson places the melting pot not next to issues of admission or restriction but between competing views of the role immigrants should assume after admission to the US. First, he lists the Americanization theory, which required immigrants to abandon their ethnic distinctiveness in favor of complete assimilation to the supposedly superior "Anglo-Saxon" culture. Whereas this grants newcomers "no part in the development of American culture," the Melting Pot theory, the next on his list, "welcomes the contributions that the new racial strains make to American life and looks with favor upon the addition of new cultural elements" (73). Immigrants blend biologically and/or culturally with the native stock to produce a new people, according to this theory, and Berkson refers to Zangwill's play as a major articulation of this idea. He terms his third category the Federation of Nationalities theory, but this has come to be better known as cultural pluralism. Citing Horace Kallen as a prominent founder, Berkson explains that these theorists advocate a federation of ethnic groups, respecting and celebrating cultural heterogeneity rather than the melting pot's ever-evolving homogeneity or the assimilationists' stable homogeneity. Four decades later, these three theories reappear, with similar references to Zangwill and Kallen, in Marion T. Bennett's American Immigration Policies (104-05). One might presume from reading Berkson and Bennett that the golden door is equally relevant or, perhaps, irrelevant to any of these theories, since all of them focus on what happens after ...