gat

1860 and 1871 to 1914) posed a threat to the course of national development that was underway.
The unique American experience of creating a particular New World culture was still too green,
too recent a historical phenomenon to tolerate the sophisticated competition of pluralism. A
cosmopolitan society like that of fifth-century Roman England wasn’t possible for America to
accept without damaging its growth.
The possibilities inherent in a bazaar society were at once exciting and anxiety provoking to
Americans, just as they were to Horace Mann. Yet beneath a sophisticated mask and a veneer of
cosmopolite civility certain factions sought release from their uneasy ambivalence. There was only
one realistic solution to human variability, the solution of the Order of the Star-Spangled Banner
(popularly called "The Know Nothing Party"), "You must be as we are." Those who surrendered
to such pressure, as many newcomers did, were ultimately worse off than those who insulated
themselves in ghettos. 3
Some pages back I referred to the brazenness of our new social arrangements, a sense of vulgar
pushiness the reader senses radiating from various temples of reform. In some crazy way the
ornamentation of the period carries the flavor of its arrogance. It prepares us to understand the
future—that time in which we now live, our own age where "home cooking" means commercially
homogenized food product microwaved, where an entire nation sits down each evening to
commercial entertainment, hears the same processed news, wears the same clothing, takes
direction from the same green road signs, thinks the same media-inculcated thoughts, and
relegates its children and elders to the same scientific care of strangers in schools and "nursing
homes."
A signpost of the times: in 1920, the Henry Ford Publishing Company distributed 2 million free
copies of its recent best seller to all libraries and all schools in the nation. The book: The
International Jew: World’s Foremost Problem. Adolf Hitler was still a poor war hero, living in
Munich with Ernst Hanfstaengel, the half-American Harvard graduate whose mother was one of
the legendary New England Sedgwicks. Hitler had Hanfstaengel read Ford’s book to him. In the
pages of Mein Kampf, Ford is lavishly praised. Of Ford’s other efforts to define the 100 percent
American, at least one more deserves special mention. Speaking and writing English had very
little to do with work on a Ford assembly line, but Ford decided to make English-language classes
compulsory. The first thing foreign-speaking Ford employees learned to say: "I am a good
American."
Ford students were graduated in a musical extravaganza that bears close attention as an indicator
of the American spiritual climate after WWI. A huge black pot took up the middle of a stage,
from which hung a large sign that read "MELTING POT." From backstage an endless procession
of costumed immigrants descended into the pot on a ladder reaching into its bowels. Each wore a
sign identifying his former homeland. Simultaneously, from either side of the pot two other
streams of men emerged, now converted into real Americans, dressed in identical clothing. Each
waved a small American flag while a brass band played "America the Beautiful," fortissimo. Wives
and children cheered wildly when cue cards were flashed.
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