2. In his 1915 essay, “Democracy Versus the Melting Pot” (Document P7-2), the philosopher Horace Kallen wrote, “What is inalienable in the life of mankind is its intrinsic positive quality—its psychophysical inheritance. 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, would have to cease to be. The selfhood which is inalienable in them, and for the realization of which they require ‘inalienable’ liberty, is ancestrally determined, and the happiness which they pursue has its form implied in ancestral endowment. This is what, actually, democracy in operation assumes.” According to this statement, Kallen believed which of the following?
Correct. The answer is b. Kallen believed that ethnicity remained important, even to groups that had been in the United States for a long time. One’s ethnic background, he posited, formed his or her inalienable selfhood and liberty, which a democracy was bound to protect. Kallen believed that a melting pot society would obscure individuals’ fundamental selves, make it impossible for them to pursue happiness, and preclude democracy. Only in a society that accepted and promoted cultural pluralism, he argued, was true democracy possible.
Incorrect. The answer is b. Kallen believed that ethnicity remained important, even to groups that had been in the United States for a long time. One’s ethnic background, he posited, formed his or her inalienable selfhood and liberty, which a democracy was bound to protect. Kallen believed that a melting pot society would obscure individuals’ fundamental selves, make it impossible for them to pursue happiness, and preclude democracy. Only in a society that accepted and promoted cultural pluralism, he argued, was true democracy possible.