What I took from Myrdal principally was a better understanding of the American creed and of American racism and the too optimistic conclusion that if Americans applied their creed consistently they would overcome racism. What I took from MacIver primarily was the confident belief that racial and immigrant-ethnic group harmony was possible in the U.S., although rarely present elsewhere. The five books I have written on aspects of ethnicity and American unity were shaped in part by my understanding of Myrdal and MacIver. But my confidence in their teachings was shaken by books by three friends and colleagues, all published in 1975.
Warning against the destructive power of ethnic tribalism in The Idols of the Tribe: Group Identity and Political Change, Harold Isaacs challenged the view that ethnic mobilization in the U.S. was compatible with national unity. Isaacs wondered, in his last chapter, whether the ethnic patterns emerging in the 1970s—creating “new conflicts, new dilemmas”—would lead to a new pluralistic system, which, by emphasizing group rights, would destroy the very basis for American nationhood, the idea that “one is American only as an individual” and that “the American individual is free to associate with any kind of group to which he feels he belongs, and each such group is free to exist, to function, to live and to grow according to its own genius and its own vitality. It does so on its own … in the great private domain where every person retains his own individual freedom of choice.” At the end of Idols of the Tribe, Isaacs concluded, “The underlying issue is still: Can human existence be made more human, and if so, how? … How can we live with our differences without, as always heretofore, being driven by them to tear each other limb from limb?”
The same concern was raised in a different way by Nathan Glazer in Affirmative Discrimination. Glazer saw American society drifting away from a pattern in which government generally had abstained from forcing assimilation on newcomers or from attempting to establish some kind of parity among different groups. Of course, that was only one historical pattern of pluralism. There were others, in which government participated in enforcing not parity but inequality between individuals of different groups, usually on the basis of color. Glazer now was worried about the growing tendency to make public policy to compensate members of groups for past injustices to their forebears, a principle that “can be extended indefinitely and make for endless trouble.” Warning that “the gravest political consequence is undoubtedly the increasing resentment and hostility between groups that is fueled by special benefits for some,” Glazer saw a white backlash gaining momentum. “The implications of the new course,” he wrote, “are an increasing consciousness of the significance of group membership, an increasing divisiveness on the basis of race, color and national origin, and a spreading resentment among the disfavored groups against the favored groups.”
John Higham acknowledged the recent surge of ethnic consciousness in Send These to Me: Immigrants in Urban America, but he wrote also of “pluralistic integration,” in which pluralism was “contained within a larger conception of social integration.” Higham believed that the creation of a “decent multi-ethnic society” was, next to elimination of the threat of nuclear war, highest on the list of world problems requiring urgent attention in the 1970s. Believing that American life does not permit “a rigidity of group boundaries and a fixity of group commitment,” Higham nonetheless acknowledged in the last line of his book a concern much like that expressed by Isaacs and Glazer that Americans had a serious problem “in rediscovering what values can bind together a more and more [and here he gave me the title for this book] kaleidoscopic culture.”
Three years later, in 1978, one of my favorite journalists, Theodore H. White, in his autobiography, In Search of History: A Personal Adventure—a book that somewhat undermined his reputation for positive thinking—concluded that American unity was threatened by the 1965 amendments to the Immigration and Nationality Act (which had opened up to American membership immigrants from all over the world) and by what he called “the new Jurisprudence of Civil Rights,” which was “destined to establish new special privileges for American ethnic groups.” Like the others, White insisted that “the polyglot peoples of America had no common heritage but only ideas to bind them together,” and he worried, somewhat more urgently than Higham, with a tone as pessimistic as Isaacs’, that “America would be transformed” into “a gathering of discretely defined and entitled groups, interests and heritages; or whether it would continue to be a nation….” In the last sentence of his book, he wrote that the old political system “was passing away.”
Aspects of the old system were passing away, but they were the parts of the system that were based on the domination of whites over blacks (caste pluralism), of whites over Indians (predatory tribal pluralism), and the restrictions on Asian and Mexican immigrants that kept them from full membership in the civic culture (sojourner pluralism). The system of voluntary pluralism based on individual rights protected by the civic culture was not passing. It flourished because the civic culture itself had become stronger and more inclusive.
I could understand why Harold Isaacs spoke of the 1970s as “a time of confused and chaotic passage,” and why later when he was asked by the Ford Foundation to do a survey of the American ethnic landscape he found it all “hugger-mugger,” as he wrote in a letter to me, a shorthand term for what Higham had called “a multiplication of small audiences, specialized media, local attachments, and partial identities which play into one another in ways we cannot yet understand,” but I did not observe nearly as much confusion and chaos as Harold Isaacs saw, even in 1980 when he wrote his letter.
In my work as a founding member of the Congress of Racial Equality, a member of the advisory board of the Commission on Law and Social Action of the American Jewish Congress in the 1960s, a member of the board of directors of the Mexican-American Legal and Education Defense Fund in the 1970s, and as executive director of the staff of the Select Commission on Immigration and Refugee Policy in the 1980s, I observed that the basic patterns of “pluralistic integration” Higham described were intact and probably stronger than they had ever been.
About six months before the work of the select commission was over in 1981, I read Philip Gleason’s essay “American Identity and Americanization,” prepared for the Harvard Encyclopedia of American Ethnic Groups. Gleason, acknowledging that the American ethnic landscape was changing radically, wondered if any of the older theories of pluralism were adequate to deal with the realities of change. “What the new ethnicity and all the talk of pluralism signify,” he wrote, “is that the perennial problematic issue of American nationality is taking on a new configuration. It is a continuing task to make a reality out of the ideal proposed in the national motto—e pluribus unum. We cannot hope to settle the issue definitively, to finish the task once and for all. But we cannot even begin to do justice to the problem as it is posed in our own time unless we grant the same kind of recognition to the imperative of unity that we give to the reality of diversity.” Ending on a note of concern, like Higham’s, gently expressed, Gleason reiterated the questions put by Isaacs, Glazer, Higham, and White: Could order, community, and unity be discovered in America’s rapidly changing ethnic landscape?
In this book it is my intention to provide an understanding of the historical patterns of ethnicity and the contemporary American ethnic landscape, which Higham said in 1975 “we cannot yet understand” but which became much more comprehensible during the 1980s. I also hope to promote an understanding of the ways in which the American national political culture has evolved to manage the “hugger-mugger” about which Isaacs wrote, and by setting forth what the unum and the pluribus owe to each other to encourage clear