Beyond the Melting Pot has much to teach contemporary readers about how our own diverse society operates. Yet the book is also worth revisiting for what it left out. Since the civil rights revolution and the return of mass immigration, identity categories have changed. Race, distinct from ethnicity, has become increasingly salient. The ethnic model that Glazer and Moynihan document is, in many ways, a more palatable form of identity politics. Sixty years since its publication, the book can instruct us not just how group politics works, but how it could work better.
At a basic level, Beyond the Melting Pot is a collection of essays on five of the six major ethnic groups in New York City: blacks (then “Negroes”), Puerto Ricans, Jews, Italians, and Irish. A potential sixth chapter, on the Germans or Anglo-Saxons, was contemplated but omitted, suggesting that these “old stock” Americans were the background against which the other groups stood out. Each essay investigates the characteristics of a group, combining data available at the time (mostly the 1950 Census) with sociological research, history, and, in many cases, the authors’ own impressions. But Beyond the Melting Pot is not just a series of sketches. It is a book with a thesis: that the melting pot had not transpired as it had been imagined in the early twentieth century.
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