The Melting Pot.

"What then is the American, this new man?" asked Michel Guillaume Jean de Crevecoeur (1735-1813), a French immigrant whose Letters from an American Farmer (1782), introduced American folk and folkways to curious readers on both sides of the Atlantic. "I could point out to you a family whose grandfather was an Englishman, whose wife was Dutch, whose son married a French woman, and whose present four sons have now four wives of different nations," Crevecoeur observed. "Here individuals of all nations are melted into a new race of men, whose labours and posterity will one day cause great changes in the world." Crevecoeur's imagery suggested a phrase, melting pot, that gradually passed into public parlance. Yet despite the ideal of the melting pot, barriers to assimilation remained. Racial and ethnic tensions ran particularly high in the United States during...