The Melting Pot was published in 1909 with a dedication to American President Theodore Roosevelt, “in respectful recognition of his strenuous struggles against the forces that threaten to shipwreck the great republic which carries mankind and its fortunes” (Zangwill v). Zangwill‟s enthusiasm did not go unreciprocated. When Roosevelt saw the play in Washington, D.C. on Oct.
5, 1909, he is known to have leaned over the theatre balcony and shouted his bravo, “That's a great play, Mr. Zangwill, that‟s a great play” (Szuberla 3). He later even went so far as to express that “I don‟t know when I have seen a play that has stirred me as much” (Taubenfeld 14). Such a presidential sanction in public represents more than his deep appreciation for a theatre piece but an active approval for its doctrine that echoes his own political agenda. He is known to have commented, “We Americans are children of the crucible.” As a result, the presidential audience has been taken up by Zangwill as the yardstick against which all subsequent responses were to be measured, since Roosevelt, in his multi-tasking capacity as anything from cowboy to President, was regarded by the dramatist virtually as “the ideal spectator” (Zangwill 201).
Roosevelt‟s father, a patriarch of a Dutch Knickerbocker family which counted as one of the elite “four hundred” in New York,18did everything to
18 The list of “four hundred” prominent New York families was organized by Caroline Astor, as the arbiter of polite society, against the encroachments of the New Money class. Theodore Roosevelt‟s father was one of the patriarchs of the high society.
ensure that the “stern old Dutch blood” coursing through the veins of their Old Money family would be preserved intact in his son (Dalton 1). However, if Theodore Roosevelt managed to elevate his Dutch blood into the blue blood of Presidency, he was also wary of the power of the wealthy clans and even known for being a trust-buster by introducing anti-trust laws, a gesture that exhibited his espousal of the cause of the common people regardless of his own upper-class upbringing.
Despite his own Dutch extraction, Roosevelt advocates complete Americanization stripped of European attachments, as he puts it, “We, by descent from her, become a new race, innocent of all European, and all human origins—a race from the earth . . . but an earth that is made of her” (qtd. in Sollors 79). Roosevelt, a noted historian before his presidency, acknowledges the European descent but puts premium on the complete severance from its origin and the completely new formation of a “new race,” a line of thinking that accords well with David Quxiano‟s rhapsodic vision of the American as the new man.
The shift of emphasis from descent to consent built on the democratic agency of the people marks a paradigm shift in American literature as well, a trend noted by scholar Werner Sollers. However, what is worth considering more than Roosevelt‟s willingness to give priority to consent over descent is his power to dissent. It is not well known that The Melting Pot holds the dubious distinction of being both applauded and censored by an American President. Aside from his highly publicized approval of the play, Roosevelt was actually alarmed and offended by a particular line in the play which suggests that native-born Americans favor divorce by citing Quincy‟s attempted bigamy case, a perspective that Roosevelt finds smacking of anti-Americanism and out of line with his well-flaunted patriotism. Consequently, Roosevelt was said to have demanded Zangwill alter the line, a typical case of the authority as self-appointed author.19
Roosevelt intervenes in script censorship, yet he refrains from intervening in anti-Semitic violence. More than most American Presidents, Theodore Roosevelt was revered by the Jews all over the world, not only for appointing Oscar Strauss Secretary of Commerce and Labor, the first Jewish American
19 The original line reads: “We are not native-born Americans, we hold our troth eternal.” Zangwill changes the line in the published edition to “Not being unemployed millionaires like Mr. Davenport, we hold even our troth eternal” (124). It has been suggested that Roosevelt wanted the line changed to
“No being members of the Four Hundred. . .” an ironic reference to the elite group of New York clans his own family belongs to (Kraus 6).
Cabinet official, but also “for his efforts to halt the persecution of their co-religionists in Russia and Rumania” (Morris xviii), an overstatement more in tune with Morris‟s hagiographic blandishment than historical reality. The truth is though he did play a significant role in protesting the ethnic cleansing in Kishineff by sending a petition to Tsar Nicholas II in 1905, he stopped short of any direct intervention to halt the atrocities.20
Furthermore, Zangwill‟s expectations of Roosevelt to lend a helping hand in his prized Galveston Movement were soon dealt a severe blow, as the project to divert an excess of Jewish immigrants from the East Coast to Texas, initiated in 1907 and concurrent with the writing of the play, fizzled out in just seven years due to local objections and more importantly, lack of official support.21
Not only did Roosevelt show more rhetoric than deed regarding putting an end to anti-Semitic persecution abroad, he also showed more imposition than tolerance when it comes to ethnic assimilation at home. He envisioned America at the time as what Gerstle has defined America during the 1890-1900 decade as a “racialized nation” (14-42), since his advocacy of a creed-based
“civic nationalism” is tempered by the blood-related “racialized nationalism.”
He is even known to have remarked that the Americans should “keep put races which do not rapidly assimilate with our own” (Dyer 129), showing his melting pot endorsement is hardly universal but highly selective, with strong opinions concerning who should stay in the melting pot and how the ethnic pot should be stirred. Before his presidency, Roosevelt‟s ideas about immigration were formulated and entrenched as a historian, outlined in his four-tome Winning of the West (1889-1896), which employed the frontier myth to “lionize the immigrant in American culture” (Dorsey and Harrow 1), an approach that seems to concur with Zangwill‟s concept. However, his support is far from unconditional, resting instead on a specific set of requirements to be met by the immigrants. As early as 1894 in his epochal speech True Americanism, Roosevelt already mapped out the polarity of
20 The Jews were united in their protest against the Russian pogrom but the Jewish groups lobbying for American intervention into Czarist persecution of Russian Jews sprang from two diametrically opposed sources: one was opposed to mass immigration, as represented by German Jews; the other pro-immigration, by Israel Zangwill.
21 The Galveston Movement refers to the immigration project to divert an overflowing flux of immigrants from the overcrowded East Coast to the more sparsely populated port city of Galveston, Texas. Rabbi Henry Cohen is credited with founding the movement and Zangwill was an enthusiastic sponsor.
immigration in highly dramatic terms, contrasting the hero and the villain of immigration as it were in a lurid melodrama:
The mighty tide of immigration to our shores has brought in its train much of good and much of evil; and whether the good or the evil shall predominate depends mainly on whether these newcomers do or do not throw themselves heartily into our national life, cease to be Europeans, and become Americans like the rest of us. (9)
The “rest of us” are obviously the majority who enjoy exclusive say in setting the conditions for latecomers to follow. The us/them line distinctly drawn along the American vs. European boundary gives little room to new immigrants to exercise their general consent as new American citizens. Instead, consent is conferred by the settler majority, deemed as endowed with the right to dictate the new immigrants on how to become Americanized. It is a top-down command, further reinforced by the moral rhetoric of good vs. evil dichotomy, showing that Roosevelt is more enamored of the idea of the melting pot than its reality.
The presidential perspective on how to become an American naturally raises the question: What constitute the grounds on which rests David‟s conviction that America would not fail his expectations about the melting pot?
It amounts to nothing more than a tenuous but tenacious belief that the country he pledges himself to would also keep the end of its bargain, as he puts it, “I keep faith with America. I have faith America will keep faith with us” (98).
Traumatized by the past, David is simply left with no choice but to champion the cause of America, however one-sided his advocacy might seem. In a feeble attempt to cement his faith, he salutes the American flag “in religious rapture,” (98) a gesture that serves only to underscore the embarrassing fact that the allegiance he pays his adopted country is blatantly more unilateral than reciprocated.
Even though Roosevelt‟s hearty response for the play has been dismissed by critics as “stupendous naiveté” (Zangwill 201), his hyperbolic reaction bespeaks more of a cunning politician‟s well-calculated political gambit than any spontaneous gut reaction from an avid theatergoer. His shouts of bravo from the balcony are as much a response to an appreciated performance as a performance gesture itself.
In retrospect, the epithet “stupendous naiveté” seems a more apt description of Zangwill‟s unquestioningly positive response to the president‟s support and his blind trust in Roosevelt‟s sympathy with the Jewish cause at all costs, an enthusiasm that is mirrored by David‟s one-sided optimism in the play.
In light of Roosevelt‟s initial backing and subsequent backpedaling,22 one should reconsider the ethnic paradigm brought up in Werner Sollors‟s influential chapter on the play (66-101): The concept of consent overtaking descent as the dominant mode of thinking American multicultural ethnicity. It is true that consent figures more prominently than descent as the decisive factor in shaping ethnic interaction in America, to the extent that Zangwill “sacralizes loving consent as the abolition of prejudices of descent” (72). However, one risks over-valorizing the agency and efficacy of consent by individuals without taking into account the impact of official consent, whose dissent could create as strong a bias as the “prejudices of descent.”
Therefore, even though the play promotes the “cult of consent” (Sollors 74) or the concept of popular consent rather than authoritarian descent, popular consent is not entirely free of restraint, but conditioned not only on the ultimate consent of higher authority such as the President, whose affirmation could reinforce popular consent but his dissent could just as easily undermine its popularity; it also hinges on the consent of the majority, which often means the dominant ethnic group in a democracy. Despite Mendel‟s claim of “our Russia” (25), and David‟s claim of “my America” (86), both as individuals of the Jewish minority are subject to being defined and identified by the other competing claims from the powerful majority.
Conclusion
Zangwill‟s biographer Joseph H. Udelson, inspired by the title of Zangwill‟s collection of essays on eminent Jews Dreamers of the Ghetto (1898), places him also in the pantheon as another “dreamer of the ghetto,” referring to the utopian idealism evident everywhere in his works. “The dreamer of ghetto” dreams the impossible dream of finding a final shelter for the Wandering Jews, and finds the perfect embodiment in David, whose quixotic
22 Later in 1915 at an address to the Hamilton Club in Chicago, Teddy Roosevelt asserted in a statement that would certainly raise the eyebrows of multi-culturalists today, “There is no room in this country for hyphenated Americanism. . . . The only absolute way of bringing this nation to ruin, of preventing all possibility of its continuing to be a nation at all, would permit it to become a tangle of squabbling nationalities” (qtd. in Parrillo 171, Huntington 306).
pursuit is genetically encoded in his very name Quixano, obviously inspired by the name Don Quixote. His impossible dream of creating a fully integrated ethnic melting pot has been adopted by many since, yet it remains an idealized vision with its complete realization as elusive as ever.
In the afterword to the published play, Zangwill compares his inner vision of the crucible to Blake‟s vision of “the inner reality of the sunrise.”
Though visible only to one‟s mind‟s eye, he argues, the crucible remains “a roaring and flaming actuality” (199). If the crucible is such a glaring “actuality,”
it is because it brews burning issues that clamor to be addressed: melting the flames of Old World blood feud and merging the roaring call of blood fusion in the New World.
His critics dismiss or even scoff at such a Blakean vision, especially when applied to public affairs like immigration, calling it over-exaggerated
“rhapsodizing” (Zangwill 201). The rhapsody, however, realistically depicts the state of ecstatic visions that David experiences when traumatic recurrence of Kishineff massacre sends him into raptures about the urgent necessity of the melting pot, through which bloody vision of blood feud of the Old Europe is transformed into sanguine vision of blood fusion in the New World. As Zangwill argues, those who never “lacked Liberty, nor cowered for days in a cellar in terror of a howling mob,” may find the genuine enthusiasm of the play as mere “theatrical exaggeration” (199), yet through a deeper understanding of the historical backdrop one comes to realize that his vision is grounded on historical necessity. Far-fetched visions in others‟ eyes may be an “actuality”
staring into the face of Zangwill and his fellow East European Jewish immigrants.
However, though the rhapsodies evinced in the play are historically grounded, it should not detract from the fact that Zangwill overplays the idealism of the consenting power exerted by immigrants in the new world. In the preface to his Dreamers of the Ghetto (1898) Zangwill claims, “The Zionist ideal offers one possible re-baptism, but to doubt whether Palestine can support the Jews may be a higher patriotism than to rhapsodize over Zion” (qtd. in Udelson 157). However, though he questions the over-idealistic rhapsodies of Zionism about Palestine, he is not above rhapsodizing over the promises his American melting pot could offer for the Jews. What Zangwill refers to as
“higher patriotism” takes shapes as ex-patriotism; a modified extension of Diaspora with settlement as the ultimate aim. In other words, he is convinced
that his territorialism functions better as an advanced form of Jewish patriotism than any form of nationalism; and in the play America becomes his idealized territory destined to shelter the Jews, which he designates with an urgency that almost decrees that the American melting pot be a success story grounded on consent rather than descent, yet conveniently precluding the potential block of dissent.
Zangwill‟s dream of abandoning the nightmare of descent obviously has no place for the rude awakening of dissent. William Archer, the eminent English drama critic credited for introducing Ibsen to Britain, is most discerning when he contends that The Melting Pot “as a work of art for art‟s sake, the play simply does not exist.” But then he is also acutely aware that Zangwill “would not dream of appealing to such a standard” (Zangwill 201), because his criteria of good theatre are far from the aesthetic, where “art and life have no connection,” as David astutely puts it in the play (172). Instead, his yardstick is unabashedly thematic and pragmatic, if not downright preachy, at least directly relevant to social reality. In the same vein as what Rabbi Stephen Wise has said on the publication of Zangwill‟s novel The Children of the Ghetto,
“it was not a book; it was an event,” because it marked “the first conscious act of self-disclosure” after centuries of Jewish “self-effacement” (Nahshhon 22);
one could conclude by saying that Zangwill‟s The Melting Pot was more than a play, it was also “an event,” not only as an interpretive event that gave rise to a host of definitions about the most enduring metaphor of immigrant assimilation, but also as “an actuality” that tried to engage in the harsh realities facing persecuted Jews who were “dreamers of the ghetto” like Zangwill himself yet rhapsodized about the promises of the American melting pot. “The Great Alchemist that melts and fuses” (185) Old World discord into New World harmony is still in a state of becoming forged, yet one has to be aware that not only discord would be hopefully purified but that cultural diversity could also be purged in the process.
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