America's Melting Pot Ideal and Horace Kallen.(pioneer of multiculturalism)

Horace M. Kallen, an immigrant rabbi's son, was the first thinker in the United States to challenge seriously the notion of the American melting pot and legitimate the ideal of diversity. One scandal of ethnic studies is that no scholarly (or even unscholarly) biography of Kallen exists, though the influences that shaped him are evident enough - from the polyglot Silesia of his birth, to the Boston of his upbringing (in the wake of the Irish accession to urban power), to the Harvard where he was not alone in his failure to resist the spell of William James. It was Professor Barrett Wendell, an exemplar of Yankee ethnicity, who stirred Kallen's interest in his own ethnic origins, a concern that would draw him to Zionism and to The Menorah Journal; the notion of Jewish culture that Kallen envisaged was termed "Hebraism." A serious effort to theorize resistance to the ideal of assimilation was published early in 1915; the extended two-part article in The Nation, "Democracy versus the Melting Pot," asserted that "men may change their clothes, their politics, their wives, their religions, their philosophies, to a greater or lesser extent; they cannot change their grandfathers. Jews or Poles or Anglo-Saxons, in order to cease being Jews or Poles or Anglo-Saxons, would have to cease to be." With only minor changes, the articles were woven into a book dedicated to Wendell, Culture and Democracy in the United States, …