If immigrants were not completely assimilated, neither did they remain the same people who had lived on the farms and in the villages of Europe, Asia, Mexico, and the Caribbean. Some like Mary Vik, sought to become full-fledged Americans or at least see that their children did so. Writer Israel Zangwill, an English American Jew, furnished the enduring image of assimilation in his 1908 play The Melting-Pot. Zangwill portrayed people from distinct backgrounds entering the cauldron of American life, mixing together, and emerging as citizens identical to their native-born counterparts.

However, the image of America as a melting pot worked better as an ideal than as a mirror of reality. Immigrants during this period never fully lost the social, cultural, religious, and political identities they had brought with them. Even if all immigrants had sought full assimilation, which they did not, the anti-immigrant sentiment of many native-born Americans reinforced their status as strangers and aliens. The same year that Zangwill’s play was published, Alfred P. Schultz, a New York physician, provided a dim view of the prospects of assimilation in his book Race or Mongrel. Schultz dismissed the melting pot theory that public schools could convert the children of all races into Americans. See Document Project 18: “Melting Pot” or “Vegetable Soup”?

Thus most immigrants faced the dilemma of assimilating while holding on to their heritage. Sociologist W. E. B. Du Bois summed up this predicament for one of the nation’s earliest transported groups. In The Souls of Black Folk (1903), Du Bois wrote that African Americans felt a “two-ness,” an identity carved out of their African heritage together with their lives as slaves and free people in America. This “double-consciousness . . . two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings” also applied to immigrants at the turn of the twentieth century. Immigrants who entered the country after 1880 were more like vegetable soup—an amalgam of distinct parts within a common broth—than a melting pot.

REVIEW & RELATE

What challenges did new immigrants to the United States face?

What steps did immigrants take to meet these challenges?