American Crucible: Race and Nation in the Twentieth Century
“America is God’s Crucible, where all the races of Europe are melting and reforming!” proclaims the protagonist in Israel Zangwill’s 1908 play, The Melting-Pot. “Germans, Frenchmen, Irishmen and Englishmen, Jews and Russians – into the Crucible with you all! God is making the American.” With these words, Zangwill articulated a central and enduring myth about the American nation – that the United States was a divine land where individuals from every part of the world could leave behind their troubles, start life anew, and forge a proud, accomplished, and unified people. Arthur Schlesinger Jr., writing eighty years later, endorsed the same myth, locating the transformative power of the United States not in God but in the nation’s core political ideals, in the American belief in the fundamental equality of all human beings, in every individual’s inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, and in a democratic government that derives its legitimacy from the people’s consent. These beliefs represent a kind of democratic universalism that can take root anywhere. But because they were enshrined in the American nation’s founding documents, the Declaration of Independence and Constitution, Schlesinger and others have argued that they marked something distinctive about the American people and their polity. In the 1940s Gunnar Myrdal bundled these civic rights and principles together into a political faith that he called the “American Creed.” Although I prefer to use the more generic term “civic nationalism,” which Michael Ignatieff and other students of the contemporary nation employ to denote these beliefs, it is clear that their role in promoting freedom and democracy in American history is indisputable.”
http://www.occidentaldissent.com/2020/10/24/american-crucible/