The Melting Pot Is Still Simmering

By Richard Brookhiser

America thinks of itself as a diverse society -- a "gorgeous mosaic," in the words of New York City Mayor David Dinkins; a quilt of many ethnic and racial patches, in a favorite metaphor of the Rev. Jesse Jackson's. But the figures of the 1990 census, only now crunched, suggest that the demographic surface of life in the U.S. is a lot smoother than one thinks. So is the cultural surface, unless the politicians ruffle it.

Fifty-eight million Americans, out of a total population of 248 million, claim German ancestry. In second place are 38 million who say they are wholly or partly Irish. Those of English ancestry come in third, at 32 million, followed by African Americans, at 23 million.

This lineup of America's major minorities has been extraordinarily stable over the years. The top four ancestry groups of the 1990 census were not only the top four groups of the 1980 census but also the top four of the 1790 census, as far as one can tell from the surnames collected by the founding headcounters. The relative sizes of the big four were different then: English Americans made up almost half the population, while African Americans were one-fifth. But America has been turning up the same ethnic cards for a long time.

The stability is shown by the people Americans have put in the White House. Every U.S. President except for the all-Dutch Martin Van Buren has descended in whole or part from the three largest white demographic groups. In the 1980s the Democrats tried to vary the mix by fielding Norwegian-Italian and Greek- Danish tickets. Last year they reverted to form and managed to replace George Herbert Walker Bush with William Jefferson Clinton.

This is a pretty simple mosaic, at least as far as its biggest pieces are concerned, and the consequences for cultural integrity and social peace have not been complex. The largest ethnic group -- nearly one-quarter of the U.S. population -- turns out to be one of the least visible, a template of assimilation. "I have often thought that the Germans make the best Americans," wrote the critic Karl Shapiro, "though they certainly make the worst Germans." German Americans assimilated partly because of two world wars with the old country, but also because the Germans who came here -- Catholics and Protestants, peasants and city dwellers -- were so diverse. It takes cohesion to stand apart: Germans in America did not have it, and they blended in, leaving only the Katzenjammer Kids behind.

English Americans did not have to worry about the melting pot; they made the pot. African Americans, of course, have been in the frying pan or the fire for more than 300 years, while Irish-American Catholics, because of their religion and their clannishness, found themselves in a variety of brawls (often with Irish-American Protestants). But time has taken down the NO IRISH NEED APPLY signs, and if it doesn't do the same for blacks, it won't be for lack of decades of black and white effort.

Will continuing immigration upset the balance? The totals of various Asian groups, though rising rapidly, are still quite small, and it is hard to think of people who seem to be so successful as being difficult to absorb. The real numbers are coming from south of the border. Mexicans are the seventh largest ancestry group, at 11 million, up from 10th place and 7 million in 1980 -- a big leap. The census predicts that if today's birthrates hold up (a big if), Hispanics will be nearly a fifth of the U.S. population by 2050. Multiculturalism, now on the doorstep, will have moved in.

But as the census was making this forecast, organizers of a huge private study of Hispanic opinion released some surprising results. The Latino National Political Survey found that the very labels "Hispanic" and "Latino" are rejected by those on whom they are pasted. Americans of Latin American origin think of themselves as urban Americans, Mexican Americans or Puerto Ricans whenever they think in ethnic terms. Mostly they think of joining the American mainstream. Huge majorities of all these groups think residents of the U.S. should learn English, while large majorities -- two-thirds or more -- think America is admitting too many immigrants. "Hispanics" are going the way of the Germans. By 2050, burritos will be as all-American as Budweiser.

The assimilation of Hispanics is news because two allied groups of political operators are trying to pretend that it isn't happening. Leaders of ethnic communities fear the success of members of their communities because it makes special favors unnecessary and deprives leaders of their status as favor brokers. Meanwhile, liberal believers in the problem-solving omnicompetent state mourn any group's graduation from maladjustment because it gives them one less thing to do at the office. Both sets of people would protest that they are motivated by idealism and a desire to right wrongs. Always distrust a saint when his charity generates his paychecks.

Talk of mosaics and quilts is both an attempt to describe the way America is headed and an effort to hurry it along. The description is inaccurate, and in a world of ungorgeous mosaics and fraying quilts, the goal is undesirable. The U.S. has had historic success with heavy bursts of immigration, interspersed with decades of digestion, but only because people are asked to check their identity at the door. If the mild-mannered Czechs and Slovaks couldn't hold a multiethnic country together, and if the even milder-mannered Canadians are having trouble, we Americans should have second thoughts about becoming a true mosaic. Fortunately we're not one yet, except at the level of boiler plate. Let's hope we never take our speeches seriously.