New York - a melting pot? - 21 September 1990

Few performances of the American system of government are more impressive, more fascinating to watch than the open hearings of a congressional committee when it’s listening to witnesses whose testimony, pro and con, can decide whether somebody appointed by the president to a national post to be an ambassador, a secretary of state, a justice of the United States Supreme Court, will be accepted, confirmed, or rejected, thrown out.

The recent hearings of the Senate judiciary committee have not produced such high drama as those of the house judiciary committee that forced President Nixon to abdicate. But it was drama nonetheless.

This committee had the job of consenting to or rejecting the president’s appointment of a justice to the United States Supreme Court. There are nine justices or there were, until Mr Justice Brennan at the age of 83 and after 34 years on the court resigned this summer for reasons of ill health.

President Bush nominated a New Englander, a country man, a 51-year-old bachelor from a small town in New Hampshire, to replace him. The man is David Souter and in his last post he was a judge of the New Hampshire Supreme Court.

He came to a Senate chamber last week and for four days, from morning to twilight, sat at a table and responded to exhaustive, penetrating, sometimes merciless questioning about his lifetime’s record in the law, his cases, his life, his habits and, most of the time, his views on all the great issues of the day that will surely come up before the court.

Civil rights, abortion, literacy tests for voters, the limits of police power, racial discrimination, programmes to ameliorate it and on and on and on. Weaving and unweaving the knottiest legal arguments about which rights lie sleeping, perhaps, in the Constitution and which do not.

I spent all the daylight hours of last week watching the hearings and was wrapped up in it. But I don’t want to go into the substance, not anyway until Judge Souter’s fate is know. I have something else in mind and that something else was touched off by a statement the chairman of this Senate committee, Senator Joseph Biden, made shortly after noon last Wednesday.

He’d been probing a lawyer present about his view that Judge Souter had been insensitive in acquitting a man in New Hampshire charged with rape, when Senator Biden looked down at his papers, looked up at the clock and said, "I’ve been asked about our procedure for today. Well, as you know Rosh Hashanah begins at sundown and so we shall not break for lunch, I’ve promised to get through all our witnesses today and obviously if we don’t we shall have to go into recess". He meant until Friday.

I wondered where else, among the democracies of the world outside Tel Aviv, would a government institution suspend its business because of the arrival of the Jewish New Year? Now you notice it was not an original thought, a new notion, it was, as the senator said, obvious. But it illuminated as casually as a man throwing a flashlight on a map the range of peoples that American government has to bear in mind as full members of society.

Senator Biden’s bow to Rosh Hashanah at once called to mind a perhaps forgotten figure – I was going to say of American history, although he was an Englishman who came here on a visit only once I believe – but he has left an indelible footnote to the history of New York by coining a phrase.

He was Israel Zangwill, born in London in the middle of last century to east European immigrant parents, he wrote at great length and in many forms – novels, plays, essays, poems – about Jewish immigrant life in east London. But I can honestly say that none of it entered into my boyhood knowledge of English literature. In England, his work was an interesting sidelight on a part of London.

If he’d been born in New York he mightn’t have been as good a writer as many we could name, but he could well have been as famous as Norman Mailer, or Jerome Weidman, or Budd Schulberg, or S J Perelman here in this capital city of Jewry.

As it is, I suspect that ironically Zangwill is better remembered here among old people than he is in London because he wrote a play about a Jewish section of New York City at the beginning of the century.

It was immensely popular, it played over and over again, it was still being played in the 1930s. By our lights it might now seem sentimental, even maudlin, but it spoke compassionately for the families of Jewish immigrants and their bewilderment, pathetic and painful and comical, in trying to mix in, to become ingredients of the melting pot.

That was the play’s title, that was the phrase that caught on and has passed into the language as the vernacular description of the process by which immigrants become Americans. But not any more. Not only has the phrase faded from speech or writing, it’s more than likely that you’d have a fight on your hands if you condescended to suggest it to the new legions of immigrants.

How new they are I enlarged on recently in contrasting the countries they came from 80, 90 years ago and the very different countries they come from today. You don’t need to consult the statistical abstract of the United States to identify them, all you need is to take a few taxi cabs in New York City for a week or so.

When I came here in the early '30s cab drivers were Irish, German, Italian, and Jews from various countries. I might have been recruited from the Warner brothers stock company that made all those New York films with Jimmy Cagney and Pat O’Brien.

Today their sons and grandsons have long deserted the taxi business, today, well I’ll quickly list my drivers in the past few weeks – Puerto Ricans, Israelis, Romanians, Haitian French, Russians, Colombians, Jamaicans and always blacks.

One black driver said to me, complainingly a week or two ago, “They say we ought to know two languages to get along in this town but they don’t say which two languages, sure as heck English ain’t one of 'em.” That remark can be understood along my remark about the vanished phrase the melting pot.

About, oh, a dozen years ago a present senator from New York, Pat Moynihan, himself a product of a Hell’s Kitchen boyhood and now one of the most effective and scholarly of senators, wrote a book entitled, Beyond the Melting Pot, in which he pointed out that the admixture then of Irish, Jewish, blacks, Italian and Puerto Rican communities were more separate than similar.

Today some of the new communities, Puerto Rican and Cuban and Colombian especially, want to be separate and it is from them that the stiffest opposition comes against the groups that want English to be declared the official language of the United States.

The late Henry Fairlie wrote, “If the melting pot had completed its work there would be no ethnics" and he’s right. We now say, ethnic, where we used to say national origin. Cultural pluralism is the phrase you hear everywhere to express not a fact, but a new ideal, for American society. Or, as somebody put it, the new wave would prefer to think of America more as a salad bowl than a melting pot.

What, then, persuades them to become part of a salad bowl? There are rivalling sociological theories, there’s a new book every month, maybe every week, about the cement that holds them together or ought to.

In my observation there’s one simple slogan more than another, a phrase that comes flashing at us from everyday television commercials, that falls as dependably from the lips of politicians as tears from their eyes. It’s a phrase that has all the force of a national anthem – it is the American Dream.

Some people get a lump in their throat when they hear it, other people swear that if they hear it again, they’ll decamp for New Zealand. What does it mean? It has always meant the chance to be free, speak your mind, and also, to millions of naive arrivals, to have a go at the rags-to-riches routine.

Lately, I notice, it’s used to the point of nausea by politicians and real-estate agents and building societies. The American dream to own your own house. Surely this is a universal dream of Norwegians and Japanese and Africans, Tibetans, all of us, but we are incessantly told that it’s uniquely American.

The more general idea – that this country more than any other holds the promise of liberty, freedom to make your way – may be offensive to all the other democracies that have it, but Americans who, remember, live on a huge island believe that it was God’s unique gift to the United States.

Corny as it may be, dumbly insular as the belief in it, it’s astonishing how many sorts of people think that’s what they’re here for.

I saw an interview the other night with a young Korean of maybe late 30s, one of that lively ethnic group which owns 80% of all the fruit and vegetable stalls in New York City. What he was asked what does the American Dream mean to you, "Well," he said, “Believe me, work hard, go up”.

He gets up at 4am, opens his stall, builds the pyramid of fruits and vegetables out on the sidewalk, works 18 hours. It took him 14 years to save $35,000 dollars to own his own stall. He wants his son to go to college, he specified Harvard or Yale.

But the American Dream, what does it mean to you? “Well”, he said, in barely comprehensible English, "everybody likes money.”

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