The relevance of John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath Today. A History of Hostility and Hysteria Toward Immigrants. Is culture a Smelting Pot, Melting Pot or Stew Pot? We have much to Fear from the Fear of Fear Itself.
Burton Weltman
“Well, you and me got sense. Them goddamn Okies got no sense and no feeling. They ain’t human. A human being wouldn’t live like they do. A human being couldn’t stand it to be so dirty and miserable. They ain’t a hell of a lot better than gorillas.”
A gas station attendant in The Grapes of Wrath to his colleague, commenting on the nature of Dust Bowl migrants.
Precis: A Fear of Heterogeneity – Difference as Potentially Dangerous.
How is it that in a nation of immigrants – except for Native Americans, everyone or their ancestors came here from somewhere else – so many people are so susceptible to anti-immigrant sentiment? I think that an expectation of cultural homogeneity is a big part of the answer. The belief that the mantra e pluribus unum, our national motto for most of American history, means that diversity will give way to uniformity and differences will be swallowed up in conformity. I think that belief is wrong, both as an interpretation of the motto and as social policy. I think the motto means that we can be both one and many, unified and diverse, at the same time, what could be called a stew pot culture. And I think that an insistence on cultural homogeneity is a big part of our current political problems.
As I am writing this in April, 2024, the country is in an uproar over immigrants coming from Central America, with xenophobes and racists like Donald Trump and his MAGA followers howling about an invasion of murderous aliens. Vile as this anti-immigrant bigotry is, it is not really new. Hostility to immigrants and fear of alien influences have been recurrent themes in American history. This seems strange for a nation of immigrants but it is, nonetheless, true.
Conventional explanations of anti-immigrant sentiment focus on competition for jobs and cultural conflicts. Historically, businesses have imported low-wage workers from other parts of the world to replace native-born workers and thereby lower their costs. And historically, there have been cultural conflicts between newcomers and native-born Americans, often revolving around religious differences.
But these factors cannot explain anti-immigrant hostility when jobs and religion are not at issue, which has often been the case, and they are not at issue in the present-day case. Central American immigrants today are taking jobs that native-born Americans aren’t filling. We have a labor shortage in this country. In addition, like most Americans, they are mostly Christians. As such, they do not represent any clear and present threat to native-born Americans or American culture. To the contrary, they are needed to fill empty jobs and for the economy to function.
But immigration anxiety persists among many Americans, and it presents an opportunity for Trump and his MAGA gang to stir things up, to make something big out of virtually nothing. What is to be done? The key problem, in my opinion, is not the existence of MAGA bigots. Bigots there have always been and probably always will be. The key problem is the anxiety that persists among ordinary people who are not for the most part bigots but whose anxiety can be played upon by Trump and his cohort.
There is a susceptibility to anti-immigrant sentiment among Americans that exists even without conflicts over jobs or culture. It is seemingly a hostility to newcomers based mainly on their newness. Newness is threatening because it raises the possibility that the new people may turn out to be different, and difference is deemed dangerous if you think that we all must be the same in order to be safe. It is a preemptive fear that immigrants may turn out to be fearful.
The Grapes of Wrath is a story that can both help us understand anti-immigrant hostility and point a way to overcoming it. It is a story of WASP American migrants from Oklahoma being rejected during the 1930’s by the WASP inhabitants of California. WASPs rejecting WASPs. And jobs were not at issue. The Grapes of Wrath is a demonstration, fictional but based on reality, that the mere newness of newcomers may trigger anxiety and hostility.
The United States is currently in the throes of high anxiety about immigrants and immigration. Much of this anxiety is the result of an unreasonable expectation that everyone should be culturally homogeneous, something that has never appertained in the country and never reasonably could. Given this expectation of cultural uniformity, people become anxious any time anyone new comes into the country, even if the newcomers pose no threat to the existing population. It is nuts, but it has happened over and over again in the course of American history.
High Anxiety: Fear of Fear itself.
President Franklin Roosevelt famously said of the Great Depression during the 1930’s that “We have nothing to fear but fear itself.” A corollary to that adage is that we need to be afraid of fear. Fear can lead to distorted decision-making and debilitating defeatism. But it also follows that we have much to fear from the fear of fear. Trying to rid yourself of fear can itself lead to fearful consequences, including unhinged hostility toward the supposed source of your fear.
Fear is a fearsome thing. It can tinge your life with anxiety. Fear of fear can be even worse. It can envelope your life with what could be called high anxiety. Being afraid of being afraid. And high anxiety can leave you susceptible to all sorts of angry feelings, ugly ideas and inhumane influences. We live in an era which is rife with high anxiety, especially with regard to immigrants. We are bombarded with a fear of the fear that immigrants might be fearful.
High anxiety is a contorted but powerful feeling. Fear times fear – irrationality squared – equals high anxiety. As applied to immigrants, it has left many otherwise decent people susceptible to the fearmongering of demagogues like Donald Trump and his MAGA supporters who try to stir up anti-immigrant sentiment for political and financial purposes. How can this be?
I think that John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath can help us understand what may seem like an unfathomable phenomenon. It is a novel about the high anxiety that Californians felt during the 1930’s when an influx of Dust Bowl refugees moved there from Oklahoma. It was not fear of the immigrants per se, but fear of the fear that the immigrants might become fearful. They were afraid they would find cause to become afraid of the immigrants. It was a case of high anxiety.
Like Californians in the 1930’s, we live at a time in which many Americans are not merely afraid of people who are harmful, they are also afraid of people they think might become harmful. It is a preemptive and presumably preventive fear. If you are not one of us, you might be against us. If you are unfamiliar, you might become fearful. It is an expectation of cultural conformity and ethnic homogenization as opposed to an expectation of the diversity that actually pertains in American society.
It is a formula for fear that applies to many sorts of people. Americans are afraid of almost anyone who is different than they are, including most fellow Americans – but since immigrants are inherently unfamiliar, it leads to a presumption of fearfulness about them. Rooted in a fear of difference as dangerous and diversity as divisive, high anxiety is aimed today at immigrants. But it affects and harms us all. We have much to fear from the fear of fear itself.
High Anxiety and The Grapes of Wrath
The Grapes of Wrath is a story about immigrants being viciously vilified and rejected by the residents of an area in which they seek to settle. This is an all-too-common situation in the world today and a recurrent scenario in American history. Native-born Americans have repeatedly been opposed to the immigration of new people, even when their own families came from elsewhere. The present-day hysteria about Central American immigrants is reminiscent of similar anti-immigrant outbursts in the past. Only this one threatens to upend and undermine our democratic system. That makes it a particularly serious state of affairs.
The Grapes of Wrath was written in 1939 in the midst of the migration of Dust Bowl refugees from Oklahoma to California. It is a historical novel. A movie of the book was made in 1940. The novel is widely regarded as one of the best in American history. The movie is similarly regarded. What makes the story and the history in the novelparticularly interesting is that the immigrants in the book are not from a foreign country. And their treatment, or rather mistreatment, flies in the face of most explanations of anti-immigrant hostility.
The conventional explanations of anti-immigrant sentiment generally stress economic factors, such as competition for jobs, and cultural factors, such as racism, chauvinism, nationalism and other cultural differences between the newcomers and their persecutors. But the immigrants in The Grapes of Wrath were not taking jobs away from the residents of California, and they were not ethnically, linguistically, religiously or otherwise culturally different in significant ways from the Californians who were reviling and rejecting them.
The immigrants in The Grapes of Wrath were moving to California to take vacant jobs that Californians weren’t occupying and to do farm work that Californians weren’t doing. They were white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant, native-born Americans, that is WASPs, just like most of the Californians. Nonetheless, the newcomers were repulsed by the inhabitants. WASPs being rejected by WASPs. Without jobs at issue. That doesn’t fit the usual matrix. So, why all the hostility? There must be something involved here that doesn’t fit the usual explanations but that may, in fact, underlie the usual explanations.
I think that something may be high anxiety, the fear of fear itself. As it is portrayed in The Grapes of Wrath, anti-immigrant hostility seems largely to be a product of the fear of newcomers just because they were new. The Okie immigrants were unfamiliar, literally not part of the family, and that made them a potential source of fear. A high anxiety.
The Grapes of Wrath: The Story.
The Grapes of Wrath is a heartrending story of Americans brutalizing Americans because they were from a different part of the United States. It is in its essentials a true story. Steinbeck traveled and lived with Okie immigrants. He portrayed what he saw. Migrants traveling some fifteen hundred miles on short rations in ramshackle vehicles, taking with them all they could pack into a car or pickup truck.
As such, the book is first and foremost a brilliant and moving account of the migration, looking at events from the Okies’ point of view. It is dramatic without being melodramatic, and detailed without being boring. The descriptions of how the migrants maintained their rickety motor vehicles and sustained themselves physically and emotionally are captivating. As readers, we feel as though we are undertaking the migration ourselves.
The storyfollows the Joad family as they lose their farm in Oklahoma and move to California to try to find work and land. As the story begins, the family consists of twelve people, with a thirteenth on the way. Three generations with a fourth in embryo. In addition, an ex-preacher joins the family in their migration. They lose two aged grandparents to death on the way and two adult males to desertion. And the baby is born but then dies.
Ma Joad is the emotional center of the family and the story. She keeps the family together and keeps their hopes alive, and ours as well. The ex-preacher Casy is the moral center of the book and personally lives the “one for all and all for one” ethic that he conceives to be a universal rule and that is the main message of Steinbeck’s novel. Tom Joad is the center of the action in the story and represents a model of pragmatic strength through humility.
The story of the Joads is interwoven with chapters that describe the social and economic situation in the United States during the 1930’s, and especially in Oklahoma and California. The book proceeds in a hopscotch pattern with chapters that describe the social and economic conditions of the time alternating with chapters that portray the doings of the Joad family as they make their way through those conditions.
The book is usually read as a harsh critique of the capitalist economy of the times and as a testament to the courage and strength of people who suffered under it. Which it is. But it is also a book about immigration and Americans’ reactions to immigrants. It illustrates the hostility with which many Americans have responded to newcomers just because they were new. The book portrays what it was like for local people to have immigrants move into their midst. It speaks to us as local people faced with immigrants today.
Immigration History and Hysteria: Déjà vu all over again.
A typical riff on immigrants: They are indigent, indolent, illiterate, ignorant and, worst of all, violent. They are an invasion that threatens public safety, undermines workers’ wages, and degrades American culture. Sound familiar?
Unfortunately, it does. It is the sort of hysterical rant against immigrants, and especially Latin American immigrants, that you hear these days from Donald Trump and his MAGA movement. Trump has recently (I am writing this in early April, 2024) even used near genocidal rhetoric while viciously haranguing against immigrants. Given that the United States is a land of immigrants – everyone except for Native Americans has their roots somewhere else – it might seem strange, even perverse, that this sort of anti-immigrant virulence would be so widespread
It is perverse, but not strange. Complaints that immigrants constitute a blight on the United States have historically been common, even if Trump’s rhetoric today is especially vicious and vile. It was a complaint that native-born colonial Americans made in the eighteenth century against the immigration of Germans to the colonies. It was the same complaint that native-born Americans, including the descendants of those now integrated German immigrants, made against Irish immigrants in the mid-nineteenth century.
The same complaint was made by native-born Americans, including the descendants of those Irish immigrants, against Eastern and Southern European immigrants in the late-nineteenth century. The same complaint was made by northern Whites against Blacks migrating from the South during the early twentieth century.
And in The Grapes of Wrath, we see the same complaint being made against migrants moving from Oklahoma to California during the 1930’s. Several hundred thousand Okies sought jobs and land in California after having been evicted from their homes and farms in Oklahoma. And then they were rejected in California by people most of whose families had immigrated there since the mid-nineteenth century, who were relative newcomers themselves.
The United States has from the start been a country of immigrants and anti-immigrants. In almost every generation, there has been a major immigration of people to America or across America from somewhere else. And each of those cohorts of immigrants has been met with widespread scorn and opposition, even from the previous generation of immigrants now integrated as native-born citizens.
Invading Hordes of Indigent Immigrants? Some facts might help.
We are surrounded today with hysterical fears of invading hordes of immigrants. These fears have repeatedly echoed down the halls of American history to the present day. They are nonsense. In fact, there has never been an invasion of immigrants either in the past or in the present day, and despite the frenzied rhetoric of the anti-immigrants today, the United States is not currently overwhelmed with immigrants.
What is overwhelmed is the inadequate governmental systems for processing immigrants. Understaffed and underfunded, they are badly malfunctioning, albeit not much worse than many times in the past. In any case, the immigrant population today is not particularly large. Immigrants currently make up around 14% of the population of the United States, which is pretty much what it has been for the last one hundred years and considerably less than in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Hysterical fears of immigrants failing to fit in as Americans and wrecking American society have also invariably been false. Each of the maligned immigrant cohorts has eventually been integrated into American society, and the newcomers have made major contributions to the economy and the culture of the country.[1] And that has continued to the present day.
Hysterical fears of immigrants ending up on welfare are also false. Immigrants are not indolent and are, instead, a boon to our economy, not a drag.[2] They come for jobs, not handouts. There is good reason for this. Emigrants from elsewhere are generally among the most active people in their native populations, which is generally why and how they left their homelands. Emigrating has never been easy, and it is usually easier to stay put and endure difficult existing conditions than to strike out to someplace new to start over with your life. Emigrants are literally movers and shakers. Their energy and ambition are reasons that the United States has historically been so successful.
Immigrants to the United States are also generally enthusiastic about democracy. It is one of the attractions of the country. They are often more enthusiastic than native-born Americans who tend to take democracy for granted or even reject democratic principles, as we seem to be seeing in Donald Trump and his MAGA followers.
Contrary to the fearmongering of Trump and the MAGA movement, crime rates for immigrants, particularly for violent crimes, are lower than for native-born Americans, and employment rates among immigrants are higher. Unemployment in the United States is currently at near record lows. American farms and businesses want more workers. They need immigrants.
In turn, immigrants do not require more social services than native-born Americans and they pay their fair share of taxes. Historically, immigrants who have not succeeded here have generally returned to their original countries, about one-third of all immigrants. They have not become an indigent burden on American society.
Logically, Americans should be welcoming immigrants. But as we see in The Grapes of Wrath, logic can fail in the face of high anxiety.[3]
The Grapes of Wrath and the Oklahoma to California Migration System.
The Grapes of Wrath is the story of a family caught up in what could be characterized as an Oklahoma to California immigration system. It was a system that provided large-scale corporate farms in California with cheap and submissive labor during the 1930’s. It was very similar to the systems organized by American manufacturers for recruiting Irish and Eastern and Southern European immigrants during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The goal was abundant cheap and submissive labor. It can also be compared to the immigration system that funnels Latin American immigrants to the Southwestern United States today.
As described in The Grapes of Wrath, the system during the 1930’s began with the eviction of small farmers from their lands and homes in Oklahoma and ended with the former farmers desperately looking for work as fruit and cotton pickers on large corporate farms in California. Not a happy ending for the hardworking and formerly independent farmers.
Oklahoma was settled by small farmers in the latter part of the nineteenth century. In retrospect, it was probably an economic and environmental mistake. Much of the land was only marginally fertile, better suited to bison than farmers, and when rainfall began to decrease, the soil became depleted and crop yields fell short. Eventually the dry soil erupted into huge dust storms that gave the area the name of Dust Bowl. Farmers weren’t able to grow enough to pay their mortgages or sharecropping fees. As a result, they were evicted from their lands and homes. The lands were subsequently combined into large-scale corporate farms that were mechanized and needed few workers, which left the displaced farmers without land or jobs. The fictional Joads among them.
Meanwhile, large corporate farms in California needed workers to pick and plant crops. So, as detailed in The Grapes of Wrath, they advertised that need throughout the Midwest, attracting to California hundreds of thousands of displaced farmers like the Joads looking for work. The corporate farm owners deliberately lured many more workers to California than they needed so that the workers would compete with each other for work and would accept ever lower wages.
The corporate farm owners conspired to keep the workers submissive by denying them any sort of job security, and pitting them against each other so that they wouldn’t organize labor unions. Steinbeck describes heartrending situations in which hungry striking workers are pitted against starving strike breakers so that the owners can lower workers’ wages. The owners also stirred up hostility to the Okie immigrants among local Californians so that the immigrants could not join with local people to improve wages and conditions for the workers which would result in more sales in town stores and redound to the economic benefit of town folks.
Being denied long-term employment contracts and long-term housing, the Okies had to move around the state every few weeks looking for work, essentially becoming permanent migrant workers. It was a desperate situation for most of the immigrants. The Joads, for example, were repeatedly faced with the choice of spending their meagre earnings on food or on gas to get to the next place where they hoped to find work. It was a vicious cycle and a lose/lose situation.
As a consequence of making so little money, the workers could not afford regular housing and had to set up temporary homeless camps on the outskirts of towns, living in tents, makeshift shelters, cardboard boxes, and their cars. Keeping the workers homeless was encouraged by the corporate farm owners. They did not want workers to settle together in permanent housing because that might facilitate their organizing labor unions and otherwise demanding higher wages and better working and living conditions.
Logically, local citizens might have welcomed the immigrants if the workers had been paid decent wages, because that would mean more shoppers with more money to spend at local stores. But local citizens were encouraged to fear the immigrants by the mass media and demagogic politicians who were controlled by the corporate farm owners. Steinbeck describes how the media and politicians spread false rumors that immigrants were going to compete for work with native Californians so that wages would drop and the newcomers would eventually replace the natives, leaving them as homeless migrants in their own state. This scenario was a 1930’s version of what is today called “Replacement Theory” when applied by MAGA demagogues to Latin Americans.
Meanwhile, local townspeople resented having their nice neighborhoods invaded by homeless and penniless immigrants. The net result was that fearful and angry local people, egged on by agents of the corporate farm owners, physically attacked the immigrants and wrecked and burned down their migrant camps. That happened repeatedly to the Joads in the book.
Constantly on the move, camping in unsanitary quarters and living on below-starvation wages, immigrant workers and their families were often chronically hungry and sick. Many did not survive, dying from malnutrition and illnesses brought on or exacerbated by malnutrition. But there were always more immigrants where the dying workers came from.
This was the system of immigration and immiseration, exploitation and brutalization in which the fictional Joads and their fellow real-life Okies were trapped and in which they seemed to be doomed to die. Not too different from the immigration system of today?
The Grapes of Wrath: A Migration of People but also Ideas.
Immigrants like the Joads were recruited for their bodies – they were going to be hired hands – but they also brought their ideas. Fear of the ideas that immigrants might bring with them has been a consistent theme in the history of anti-immigrant hostility. In the early nineteenth century, there was widespread fear of the Catholicism of Irish immigrants among the predominantly Protestant Americans. In the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, there was fear among capitalistic conservatives of the socialistic ideas that European immigrants carried with them.
In the present-day, it is clear that one of the main reasons that Donald Trump and his MAGA colleagues are so opposed to Latin American immigrants is their fear that the immigrants will support the Democratic Party if they become citizens. It is a source of high anxiety for political right-wingers.
The Grapes of Wrath takes place at a time that in retrospect we can see was a changing of political orientations in Oklahoma and California, a change that was helped along by the migration of the Okies. Oklahoma was going from politically progressive to regressive. California was going from conservative to progressive.
During the early twentieth century, Oklahoma was home to the largest percentage of Socialist Party members and voters of any state in the country. Large numbers of hard-up small farmers favored the socialists’ theories and practices of cooperative farming, banking and marketing, along with government control of banks, constraints on foreclosure, and regulation of railroad shipping rates. The Dust Bowl emigrants carried these progressive ideas and a generally progressive ethos with them.
You can see these ideas and ethos in practice in The Grapes of Wrath as the migrants form cooperative associations in the camps they set up along their way to California and as they traveled around looking for work in the state. Most of the migrants in the book seemed to adopt a cooperative attitude toward their emigration, an ethos of “we are all in this together.”
It is an attitude that could be described as socialism of the heart, a cooperative sentiment, which the immigrants in the book carried with them even if they did not all identify as card-carrying Socialists. Hard-up migrants frequentlyhelped each other on the road west, sharing scarce food and other resources, and fixing each other’s cars.
This sort of activity worried the corporate farm owners and the book depicts how they sought to counter the cooperative efforts of the immigrants by keeping them constantly on the move and stirring up the local population against them. With red-baiting and black-listing immigrant leaders, and even murdering the progressive preacher Casey who was traveling with the Joads, the corporate farm owners denounced cooperation as un-American.
But despite the best and worst efforts of defenders of the status quo, emigration and immigration have almost invariably had political effects. In this respect, the migration of Okies during the 1930’s seemingly had a long-term political effect on both Oklahoma and California. Some 500,000 emigrants left Oklahoma, which soon became the economic backwater and politically regressive state that it largely remains today. Meanwhile, Okie immigrants soon made up some 15% of California’s population, and the state’s political orientation went from conservative to progressive, as it remains today.
Demonizing Immigrants: Exclusion and Segregation.
Facts don’t faze fanatics. That immigrants are in fact a win-win proposition for the country can’t alleviate the high anxiety of hard-core haters. They still insist on segregating and excluding immigrants so that they won’t infect our society with baleful influences.
Infection is a key word among anti-immigrants. Speaking of immigrants as though they are diseased or are vermin is common. Donald Trump has recently said that at least some of the immigrants aren’t even human. This is extremely irresponsible and dangerously ominous rhetoric. It sounds as though not merely the exclusion of immigrants but their extermination could be on Trump’s mind, or could be taken as such by some of his violent followers.
Immigrants were subject to exclusion and segregation at various times in American history. Chinese laborers during the mid-nineteenth century, for example, were recruited to work on building railroads in the West, segregated into camps while they were here, and then shipped back to China when the work was done. Likewise, Mexican laborers were recruited during the mid-twentieth century to work on farms and railroad construction, were segregated into camps, and then sent back to Mexico when their work ended.
We can see both the exclusion and segregation of immigrants in The Grapes of Wrath. Okie immigrants were stopped at the California border by state troopers and turned back if they looked too needy or unable to work. California did not want newcomers who might end up as public charges. This was a form of selective exclusion. In turn, those immigrants who were allowed across the border were channeled into migrant labor camps and kept from settling with the native population in the cities, which is a form of segregation.
Excluding and segregating immigrants are literally inhumane practices as they deny our common humanity. They are also costly practices in lives and liberty and are ultimately unsuccessful. The United States is a big country with a border of some four thousand miles, much of it in uninhabited areas. Trying to completely stop immigrants from getting in to the country m would entail enormous resources and require militarizing the country. The same is true of segregation, as we have regrettably seen in American history. That sort of repressive regime is seemingly what Donald Trump and his MAGA supporters want, but it is not what the Founders of the United States wanted or what the Constitution envisions. It is flatly un-American.
Racism and chauvinism from Trump and his MAGA followers are reprehensible but predictable. Bigots are bigots. It is also reprehensible but predictable that demagogic politicians, sensation-seeking mass media and greedy business people might want to stir up and take advantage of anti-immigrant hostility. There are voters, viewers and profits in bigotry. But I don’t think that it is the inveterate haters and their facilitators who are the real danger to this country. The real danger is the otherwise decent people who the demagogues can influence.
The real danger is the people, including many who are not otherwise racists or chauvinists, who may even sympathize with the plight of immigrants escaping from troubled lands, and who may have initially been in favor of integrating immigrants, who end up supporting the anti-immigrant bigotry of Trump and his supporters. How can this be and what can we do about it?
Integrating Immigrants: Smelting Pot, Melting Pot, Stew Pot.
I think that the underlying problem, the root of most high anxiety about immigrants in this country, is an expectation, even an insistence, that the integration of immigrants should lead to homogenization. Different people have different ideas as to what the standardized American should be like, largely a function of their political orientation. At the extreme end of the spectrum, there is the MAGA crowd who exude paranoia that people like them – white, Christian, English-speaking – will be wiped out and replaced by aliens. Their goal is to make America safe for gun-toting archconservative Christians. Freedom, in their view, means the right to carry assault weapons and worship Evangelical Christianity in public schools, and that means anyone who doesn’t fit or support that goal is unfit to be an American.
More liberal groups have more liberal ideas about what is an American, but most Americans still have an idea that we should all be basically the same, irrespective of our backgrounds. Most Americans feel – and it seems to be more of a feeling than a rational belief – that everyone should end up the same, and that no ethnic groups or ethnicities should stand out. As the history and sociology of America show, this is ultimately an unreasonable and unreachable expectation. The problem is that the failure of that expectation can lead to antagonism toward immigrants and high anxiety about immigration. And it leaves people susceptible to the rantings of the extremists.
Even as successive cohorts of immigrants have been acculturated, remnants of ancestral cultures invariably remain. Most Americans still identify with the cultures of their ancestral homelands and adhere to at least some ancestral ideas and customs. Some of these ideas and customs stand out and raise the perennial question of whether the members of a given ethnic group owe more loyalty to their ancestral homeland than to the United States. As a result, many otherwise well-intentioned people founder on an expectation of cultural homogeneity, and end up turning against immigrants when the immigrants don’t just completely blend in with everyone else.
The rantings of xenophobes, racists and chauvinists notwithstanding, cultural homogeneity is not feasible now and never has been. And the ravings of Donald Trump and his MAGA gang notwithstanding, the United States did not begin as a so-called Christian nation or with a homogeneous population. Chauvinists have historically opposed each wave of immigrants on the grounds that the original purity of our society was being polluted, just as Trump and his supporters are doing today with respect to Central American immigrants.
Their claims are false in every respect. America has been a conglomeration of cultures from the landing of the Mayflower – which carried a diverse population and not just Pilgrims – to the present day. It is, however, an unfortunate fact of public life that when demagogues say something loud enough and long enough, their lies can sink into the public consciousness and, even more important, into the public’s unconsciousness.
People end up with preconceptions they aren’t even aware of. And a failure to arrive at cultural homogeneity may lead some people to think that the resulting heterogeneity is a problem, that integration has been a failure, then blame immigrants for that supposed problem, and turn against immigration and integration. This is something we have to get past. The expectation of homogenization has got to be overcome. Our models of integration have to include diversity.
Integration with diversity is not a contradiction in terms. Among the different models of integration, three types can be characterized by the three metaphors of “smelting pot,” “melting pot” and “stew pot.” The first two have cultural homogenization as their goal, and they cannot ultimately succeed. The third aims at pluralism and diversity, and it can work.
“Smelting pot” integration is premised on the idea that the cultural differences and the distinctive characteristics that immigrants bring with them are disruptive. They should for the most part be eliminated so that the newcomers end up becoming the same as the existing population. Intense pressure should be placed on them – turning up the heat so to speak – so that their differences from the existing population will be smelted away.
For most of the period from the founding of the first European colonies in the 1600’s through the early 1900’s, the predominant approach to cultural integration in this country was the smelting pot view. Harkening back to the English origins of the first colonies, this view has generally portrayed White Anglo-Saxon Protestants, or WASPs, as the ideal Americans. Immigrants are welcome, but they have to give up their ancestral cultures and adopt, whole cloth, a WASP culture.
Smelting pot integration was official policy in many places in this country up through the first half of the twentieth century. It was considered a compliment to immigrants that they were deemed capable of adopting all-American ways. But it was a coercive compliment. Early twentieth century immigrants from Eastern and Southern Europe and their American-born children, my father and his father included, were, for example, prohibited from speaking their native languages in school or on the job. Only English was allowed. And immigrants like my grandfather were repeatedly exhorted to Americanize themselves.
There is an oppressive chauvinism built into the smelting pot approach to integration. The expectation of conformity is stifling and prone to provoke violence against recalcitrant immigrants. It was expected of the Okies in The Grapes of Wrath who, despite being WASPs moving in among WASPs, were taunted for their Midwestern accent, clothing and manners.
This smelting pot view is still widely held by people who consider themselves politically and socially conservative. It is not as extreme as the right-wing, hate-filled approach of Donald Trump and his followers, but in its emphasis on cultural homogeneity, it is a view that can warp into anti-immigrant sentiment and spiral into high anxiety if its goals are not met. Which, almost inevitably, they won’t be.
“Melting pot” integration is premised on the idea that most of the distinctive characteristics of immigrants are either helpful or harmless and, in any case, should be mixed in with the mainstream culture of the existing population to make for a new and better homogenized culture. It is a metaphor that was seemingly first used in 1782 by Hector St. John de Crevecoeur to describe the United States. The melting pot view was later popularized during the 1910’s in a play called “The Melting Pot” by Israel Zangweel, a Russian Jewish immigrant.
Melting pot integration is a more tolerant approach to the differences that immigrants bring with them. In this view, most cultural differences don’t make a difference. And they should be either ignored or blended into the existing cultural mix to make a slightly new and better culture. It is a progressive view of differences among people in which social evolution is seen as a good thing. Melting pot integration gradually became the predominant view of self-styled liberals during the course of the twentieth century and especially after World War II.
But it is an approach that is more superficial than substantive. It mainly deals in celebrations rather than ideas and practices of cultural significance. It is the approach that was taken by most schools when I was young. We had, for example, “International Days” in which we would dress in quaint clothes and bring in foods that were characteristic of our ancestral homelands. There were similar community-wide celebrations of people’s ancestral homelands that were open to everyone to join in the fun. In this view, difference was fun for all to enjoy. Everyone, for example, was expected to identify as Irish on St. Patrick’s Day. And Christmas became more of a national celebration than a religious holy day.
But the only acceptable differences were those in which everyone could share and which were fun for everyone. And these differences did not make much of a difference. Bagels versus baguettes was a big competition in my school. The problem with melting pot acculturation is that every time some new peoples show up, you cannot be sure that their differences will be superficial and that they will blend in. Their differences may be too great or too significant.
Given that the melting pot model starts with an expectation of homogenization, there is almost inevitably going to be anxiety about new people. Even if every previous cohort of immigrants fitted in, maybe this new group won’t. Natives will almost inevitably feel anxiety about the anxiety generated by the newcomers. And with anti-immigrant demagogues stirring the pot, tolerance among ordinary people could spiral into high anxiety and anti-immigrant intolerance. This is the situation we are seemingly witnessing today in this country.
What could be called the “stew pot” model of integration was promulgated in the early twentieth century by Horace Kallen, another Russian Jewish immigrant. Stew pot integration is premised on the idea that many important cultural differences among people should not, and in any case cannot, be completely eliminated. Different groups should be expected to retain some of their distinctive ways, blending together enough with the general population and sharing enough important things in common – most importantly a commitment to democracy and the Constitution – so that they can participate in a pluralistic culture.
In the stew pot model, there is an expectation of diversity so that newcomers don’t automatically trigger an anxiety reaction. The expectation of cultural homogeneity that underlies both the smelting pot and melting pot approaches to integration leads them to the brink of anti-immigrant sentiment and high anxiety. The stew pot approach avoids this problem. In this view, a commitment to democracy and the Constitution are the chief commonalities that make all of us Americans. Given that a desire for democracy is one of the things that motivates most immigrants, we have good reason to presume good things from them rather than fearfulness.
A respect for diversity is, in fact, one of the key underpinnings of democracy and our Constitutional system. Democracy can be defined as majority rule with minority rights, the most important of which is the right of a minority to become a majority. It’s the welcoming of diversity that makes democracy. Democracy thus entails tolerance toward the tolerant and intolerance for intolerance. A presumption of heterogeneity, rather than a presumption of homogeneity, is a basic principle of a democratic culture.
Diversity also should be recognized as not only fair but efficient. It provides a variety of resources and perspectives to help solve the social problems we all face together. It derives from a world view in which people are seen as able to recognize and negotiate their differences. The stew pot model has become the view of the multicultural and diversity movement among liberals in recent decades. Respect for diversity was represented by the Joads in The Grapes of Wrath and promoted by Steinbeck in the book.
Finally, diversity should be recognized as not only fair and efficient but inevitable. The stew pot model is not merely an ideal, it is a reality. Despite the best and worst efforts of the proponents of cultural homogeneity, historically the United States has been a cultural stew pot. The country has never even approximated the homogeneity that the smelting pot and melting pot approaches to integration seek to achieve. And yet the country has survived and thrived. Homogeneity is clearly not necessary for the country to flourish.
Throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, for example, at least a score of different languages were spoken in the country. Within whole neighborhoods of big cities, whole towns and agricultural areas, people would speak only some language other than English. Not merely immigrants just off the boat, but their children and grandchildren for several subsequent generations. And the same went for other customs and practices that immigrants brought with them. Where diversity flourished within the democratic and Constitutional system, the country thrived. Where diversity was stifled or enslavement was practiced, those areas degenerated. There never was anything to fear from diversity and no good reason for high anxiety.
The United States is less diverse today. English is almost universal. The mass media and the internet have broadcast a common culture. The educational system has propagated a core cultural curriculum. But for better and for worse, cultural differences exist in different parts of the country. And the worst differences, battles over race and religion, stem mainly from conflicts between WASPs in the North and WASPs in the South. Immigrants are not the problem.
Immigrants are, instead, responsible for most of the best cultural developments over the last century. Blacks migrating from the South have been the major source of jazz, blues and other musical forms that define American music. Jews from Eastern Europe are largely responsible for developing the movie industry and distinctly American comedy. American food tastes are largely a result of Italian influences. And so forth. Cultural diversity is a fact and not a fault in the country. It is probably about time that we Americans learned to live with the situation. And to accept the diversity that already exists and that new immigrants will bring to us.
Based on statistics and my own experience as a professor of young people since the 1960’s, it seems to me that every generation of young people, at least since the 1960’s, has become more open-minded than the last. And not merely more tolerant but more welcoming of diversity. That may be one of the reasons that Donald Trump and his MAGA gang of mainly older people have become so vile and violent in what we can only hope is a spasm of their last gasp desperation. If we survive this wave of old timers’ hate and high anxiety, the country’s future may be brighter.
The title of Steinbeck’s novel The Grapes of Wrath comes from the Biblical Book of Revelations, Chapter 14, Verse 19 through Julia Ward Howe’s Civil War song “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” Both the Bible and the song refer to God crushing grapes, a symbol of the luxury of the rich, in the course of making people free. In the novel, a senile Grandpa Joad fantasizes about crushing grapes all over his body when they get to California, which he imagines as a Promised Land. Grandpa dies before they get to California, which turns out to be anything but a Promised Land for the Joads and the other Dust Bowl immigrants. No grapes for them.
At the end of the story, as all seems lost, Tom is having to light out to escape arrest, and the rest of his family are literally starving, Ma Joad gives Tom a pep talk to try keep hope in him alive, and not let their persecutors get him down. It’s a pep talk that Steinbeck seemed to want give to us readers to help us carry on in whatever may be our desperate times. “Why, Tom,” she says, “us people will go on livin’ when all them people is gone. Why, Tom, we are the people that live. They ain’t gonna wipe us out. Why, we’re the people – we go on.”
BW 4/24
[1] The Uprooted. Oscar Handlin. Grosset & Dunlap Publishers: New York, 1951.
[2] “The Economy is roaring. Immigration is a key reason.” Rachel Siegel, Lauren Kaori Gurley & Meryl Kornfield. The Washington Post. 2/27/24.
“The U.S. Economy Is Surpassing Expectations. Immigration Is One Reason.” Lydia DePillis. The New York Times, 2/27/24.
[3] Keys to Successful Immigration. Thomas Espenshade, ed. The Urban Institute Press: Washington, D.C. 1997.
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