David Mannes

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Cultural Pluralism is both a social reality and a social theory that emphasizes the retention of ethnic culture and customs by the diverse ethnic groups making up American society.Cultural pluralists are typically second‐ or third‐generation offspring of immigrants who feel at home speaking English and are comfortable with American economic life and democratic politics yet still wish to retain their ancestral language, religion, and customs as well as an emotional attachment to their ancestral country. As a theory, cultural pluralism was not systematically formulated, or even given a name, until the twentieth century. America's native‐born Anglo‐Saxon intellectuals generally emphasized the importance of homogeneity, unity, and assimilation, leaving the pluralist position to immigrant leaders. German Americans employed a phrase that summed up the cultural pluralism ideal in commonsense fashion: “Germania meine Mutter, Columbia meine Braut” (Germany my mother, America my bride). Just as individuals do not usually renounce allegiance to their parents and ancestral family when they marry, despite occasional friction and tension, the metaphor suggests, so too with ethnic groups.

Horace Kallen (1882–1974), a German‐Jewish philosopher who taught at New York City's New School for Social Research, first used the term “cultural pluralism” in Culture and Democracy in the United States, 1924. While Kallen continued for nearly half a century to champion the notion of dual cultural loyalties, arguing that this would enrich American culture, not endanger it, he also endowed the concept with a rigidity that was absent in the nineteenth‐century, commonsense notion. He often argued polemically that “people cannot change their grandparents,” thereby confusing ethnic or cultural loyalties with biological, genetic, or racial inheritance. Men and women cannot change their grandparents, but they can and do change their language and cultural values. Extreme assertions of diversity, such as Kallen's, imply a kind of racial or ethnic essentialism and separatism, not merely cultural pluralism.

The theory of cultural pluralism remained a defensive, minority position until the later twentieth century. After the African American civil rights movement and the white ethnic revival of the 1960s and 1970s, however, pluralism became the mainstream intellectual position in the United States. It still remained controversial, however. Many argued that dual loyalties could distort American foreign policy, since members of an ethnic group may lobby for policies favoring their ancestral country. Others contended that bilingual education—one by‐product of the cultural‐pluralism ideal—retards the economic progress of immigrant children and weakens the American social fabric. Since the United States remains an immigrant‐receiving country, some form of cultural pluralism will likely continue to describe the American reality, even if the theory is modified or falls out of fashion.
See also Ethnicity; Immigration; Nativist Movement.

Bibliography

John Higham . Send These to Me: Jews and Other Immigrants in Urban America, 1975.
Arthur Mann . The One and the Many: Reflections on the American Identity, 1979.
David A. Hollinger , Postethnic America: Beyond Multiculturalism, 1995.

Edward R. Kantowicz

David Mannes , 1866–1959, American violinist, conductor, and educator, b. New York City. Mannes was violinist in the New York Symphony Orchestra from 1891 and its concertmaster from 1898 to 1912. In 1912 he founded the Music School Settlement for Colored People and in 1916, with his wife, the Mannes Music School, both in New York City. He inaugurated free concerts in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1918. Music Is My Faith (1938) is his autobiography. His wife, Clara Damrosch Mannes, 1870–1948, b. Breslau, the daughter of Leopold Damrosch, was a pianist. A pupil of Busoni, she and her husband toured extensively in joint recitals. She was codirector with him of the Mannes Music School. Their son, Leopold Damrosch Mannes, 1899–1964, b. New York City, studied piano and composition in New York and Paris. He taught composition (1924–31) at the Mannes school and theory (1927–31) at the Institute of Musical Art (now Juilliard School of Music). In 1931 he became a research chemist with the Eastman Kodak Company and made significant contributions to the development of color photography. In 1939 he returned to the Mannes school (after 1953 known as the Mannes College of Music), subsequently becoming its president.

Mannes College of Music. Mus. coll. in NY City founded 1916 as Mannes Mus. Sch. by violinist and cond. David Mannes (b NY, 1866; d NY, 1959) and his wife Clara (1869–1948). Charter 1960. Present dean is Charles Kauffman.