Something of the same view seems to be voiced by John J. Smertenko:
[125]Unless it be the Indian, there is no American type; the future American will be the result of a synthesis of all the people that have poured their life-blood into the veins of our nation. Hence it is impossible for the Jew—and the same principles apply to Irishman, German, Italian, and the others—to become a hundred per cent. American until America is at least three per cent. Jewish.
The Melting Pot theory marks an advance over the Americanization theory in its treatment of the immigrant, not in its conception of the United States. Uniformity, physical or social or both, is taken as the sine qua non of group unity, like-mindedness as its minimum. But many ethnic groups, religious groups and others, wish to maintain their identity in their new home. Democracy would allow them to do so. The group theory of American life—which I have already elaborated historically and in the present, would not merely allow this, but take it as the only normal way in which an over-group of a hundred million people can ever hope to attain the unity of a group mind.
2.
The first form of such a theory is called by Dr. Berkson the “Federation of Nationalities.” It is modelled after the Federal government, which is a union of self-governing states. In the same way, as geographical units grow steadily less important and functional units more important in our national life, the same conception of federation was applied to these. The Soviet government has taken national control as a function of a federation of economic interests; the federation of nationalities view takes it as a federation of ethnic and religious groups. Our greater cities are now beginning to establish this sort of an appearance. They have Italian quarters, Jewish quarters, Negro quarters, even an American quarter, restricted to families whose acceptability can be approved and vouched for. The advocate of this theory holds that races are unchangeable—“a man cannot change his grandfather,” they say—the best that they can do is to live in amity within the same general national boundaries. Now, it is true that groupings based on heredity and on interest are growing increasingly important, as compared with the geographical groupings which once meant so much. Only in the old families, whose associations with a particular state have persisted for generations, is much state sentiment left among us. On the other hand, the Catholic, the Bohemian, the German, the Jew—every national and religious group has enduring loyalties. And the new economic groupings, labor, capital, the commercial class, the trade association, are developing their own group minds more rapidly than we can easily note.
The danger of this theory, however, is as obvious as its partial justification. It would make for the stability of what is actually fluid. All groups take more than they give when they enter a great mass of other groups, such as the United States. Immigrant communities in the United States are changing constantly, due to imitation—the Federation theory would establish them in the fixity of conflict and opposition. It would result, on the one hand, in permanent immigrant groups, with little participation in the general American group mind; on the other, in permanent groups of protest, such as the Ku Klux Klan. Carried to its logical extreme, it would give us the situation of the Levant, where a half dozen different races and religions, represented in the same village, preserve their isolation and their enmity for a thousand years.
3.
Both the old Americans, who insist on American unity, and the newer immigrants, who see and love their own group identity, have taken hold of real elements in the total situation, but neither has envisaged the social process as a whole. It is true that ethnic and religious groups are distinct in America, both racially and socially; on the whole, the Jew refuses to intermarry with the gentile, the white with the Negro, a prohibition that in the Southern states is reinforced by law. Similarly, the Irishman preserves his loyalty and his interest in the struggle for Irish liberty; the Italian and Greek reservists return to their native lands when called for military duty; the Jew raises huge sums for the relief of his fellow-Jews across the seas. But at the same time, all these groups were ready to unite in a common purpose when the United States was at war. Every immigrant group, as every native group, daily sacrifices its own purpose in a crucial problem for the greater welfare of the United States. The double process, which we have traced in the formulation of the Constitution of the United States and in subsequent history, is constantly going on—the entrance of new groups into the United States, and their incorporation into the American group. This is what Dr. Berkson calls the “community” theory, Professor Miller, “proportional loyalty,” and many other thinkers by other terms, a point of view toward which social theory and political thought is constantly tending; one which we may call, in the terms employed in this study, the integration of sub-groups into the American group mind by the sacrifice of their own purpose for that of the United States as a whole.
This theory recognizes the necessary and proper existence of the sub-groups, whether family, religious, racial or ethnic units. Human beings live naturally in comparatively small units, which can be easily recognized and whose loyalty is habitual (some would even claim, instinctive). These groups then join with others into larger units of synthesis, by accepting the common purpose of the whole in place of the conflicting purposes of each. Just as the individual becomes a loyal member of a family, the family of a Protestant church or a Jewish people, so that church or ethnic unit becomes, in turn, a unit in the larger whole of the American people. Group intolerance is thus sacrificed to America in increasing proportion and scope; while group individuality preserves the democratic ideal by which a man is an end in himself. The personal satisfactions and welfare of the immigrants themselves cannot be advanced by compelling them to give up everything they hold dear—instead, the attempt will prove subversive of the hoped-for unity by the usual result of group resistance. But all these values can be retained in a higher synthesis, a gradation of loyalties, an integration of minds in a true group mind.
The traditional Hebrew phrases for the Jewish people are Am Israel, the People of Israel, and Keneseth Israel, the Congregation of Israel—grasping thus both the racial and spiritual elements in one conception. To quote Berkson: