Assimilation

Assimilation, refers to processes that lead to greater homogeneity in a society.The term commonly describes the weakening of ethnic ties, cultures, and identities among members of an immigrant ethnic group, who in turn forge links to, and adopt the identities and cultural traits of, the larger society or its dominant ethnic group. Assimilation can also describe cases where members of different, nondominant ethnic groups find common ground. Understanding assimilation requires knowledge of what an individual or group is assimilating to.

Americans have discussed assimilation in terms of three main stances toward immigrants. “Anglo‐conformity” was the assumption that newcomers and their children would adopt the culture of the nation's self‐defined “Anglo‐Saxon core.” The “melting pot” stance (the term is from a popular 1908 play by Israel Zangwill) foresaw a mixing of peoples that would produce a new American culture. From the eighteenth century on, the third stance, cultural pluralism, envisaged immigrant groups retaining their separate social worlds within a common political framework. This approach has nineteenth‐century antecedents, but intellectuals such as Randolph Bourne and Horace Kallen (1882–1974), a German‐Jewish immigrant who later taught philosophy at the New School for Social Research in New York City, articulated it most fully in the 1910s. Significantly, until the mid–twentieth century, most European American proponents of these stances envisioned no role for non‐Europeans. European newcomers likewise have historically been the main reference point for most scholarly theories of assimilation; this has hampered understanding of how non‐European immigrants have or have not assimilated.

The first sustained scholarly treatment of assimilation came from University of Chicago sociologists who developed a set of influential concepts in the early twentieth century. One cast migration as a process involving the “disorganization” of peasant communities and their members' journeys to the more individualized world of the city. Another concept broke social interaction into stages running from competition to assimilation. The concept of “ecological succession” depicted immigrant city‐dwellers as moving from ethnic “colonies” through new districts, until they became absorbed into a hazily defined “American” population.

When immigration history became a professional subfield beginning in the 1920s, its practitioners made assimilation a central theme. They also adopted Chicago concepts. The historian Oscar Handlin's The Uprooted (1951), for example, described European immigrants as dislocated peasants who Americanized by becoming individuals. But scholars also began to define more clearly assimilation's social setting. Marcus Lee Hansen, arguing that third‐generation immigrants showed renewed interest in their heritage, suggested in 1937 that ethnic identity might reemerge. Ruby Jo Reeves Kennedy proposed in 1944 that assimilation was occurring along religious lines, within a “triple‐melting‐pot” structure. Writing in 1956, Will Herberg saw these Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish melting pots as stemming from the third generation's discovery of religion as a permissible version of ethnic identity. Sociologist Milton Gordon's Assimilation in American Life (1964) found cultural assimilation to the “core subsociety” of white, middle‐class Protestants, but not structural assimilation into its institutions. The result was a society centered around the “core” but retaining religious subdivisions, unassimilated racial groups, and some European ethnic “vestiges.”

The 1960s saw a rejection of assimilation theory and a stress on ethnic group persistence. This approach, presaged by Gordon, was heralded by Nathan Glazer and Daniel Patrick Moynihan's Beyond the Melting Pot (1963) and Rudolph J. Vecoli's 1964 critique of Handlin's The Uprooted. The decade's turbulent politics fueled the shift, underlining the discrimination historically suffered by non‐Europeans and encouraging a European American “ethnic revival.” Beginning in the early 1980s, however, historians cautiously revisited assimilation. Some depicted a pluralistic America with room for assimilative processes between ethnic groups. Others examined how European ethnics claimed a common “white” identity; how second‐generation Mexican and Japanese immigrants underwent a measure of acculturation even as they contended with racism; and how 1930s unionism brought greater unity to an ethnically divided working class. By the end of the century, assimilation had reemerged as an acknowledged factor in ethnic history.
See also Americanization Movement; Immigration; Labor Movements; Nativist Movement; Religion; Sixties, The; Sociology; and entries on specific immigrant groups: Irish Americans, etc.

Bibliography

Milton M. Gordon , Assimilation in American Life: The Role of Race, Religion, and National Origins, 1964.
Harold J. Abramson , Assimilation and Pluralism, in Harvard Encyclopedia of American Ethnic Groups, ed. Stephan Thernstrom, 1980, pp.150–60.
Philip Gleason , Speaking of Diversity: Language and Ethnicity in Twentieth‐Century America, 1992.
George J. Sánchez , Becoming Mexican American: Ethnicity, Culture, and Identity in Chicano Los Angeles, 1900–1945, 1993.
Ewa Morawska , In Defense of the Assimilation Model, Journal of American Ethnic History 13 (Winter 1994): 76–87.
Russell A. Kazal , Revisiting Assimilation: The Rise, Fall, and Reappraisal of a Concept in American Ethnic History, American Historical Review 100 (April 1995): 437–71.

Russell A. Kazal