Assignment # 2

Based on the Trans-National America by Randolph Bourne article:

“To face the fact that our aliens are already strong enough to take a share in the direction of their own destiny, and that the strong cultural movements represented by the foreign press, schools, and colonies are a challenge to our facile attempts, is not, however, to admit the failure of Americanization. It is not to fear the failure of democracy. It is rather to urge us to an investigation of what Americanism may rightly mean. It is to ask ourselves whether our ideal has been broad or narrow--whether perhaps the time has not come to assert a higher ideal than the "melting-pot" Surely we cannot be certain of our spiritual democracy when, claiming to melt the nations within us to a comprehension of our free and democratic institutions, we fly into panic at the first sign of their own will and tendency. We act as if we wanted Americanization to take place only on our own terms, and not by the consent of the governed. All our elaborate machinery of settlement and school and union, of social and political naturalization, however, will move with friction just in so far as it neglects to take into account this strong and virile insistence that America shall be what the immigrant will have a hand in making it, and not what a ruling class, descendant of those British stocks which were the first permanent immigrants, decide that America shall be made. This is the condition which confronts us, and which demands a clear and general readjustment of our attitude and our ideal.”

I believe Bourne is trying to point out that what was consider the ideal Americanism by the first few immigrants may isn’t the correct view of the Americanization now. Where other immigrants have to assimilate to what was the ideal America way in which the idea was based on the British Empire.  Those immigrants who refused to assimilate into the Anglo-Saxon culture where looked at as “immigrants refusing to be melted.” On the other hand, as generations have changed so have the number of immigrants who migrate to the United States, allowing us to be more open and diverse to different traditions and beliefs. Just because one has different traditions and/or bellies from another doesn’t make them less American then the next. It actually allows America to stand for its freedom. Immigrants are allow to continue with their traditions along with being educated about others traditions and adapting to the diversity within the United States. I believe when there is diversity there is growth. And I don’t not believe that immigrates should be melted or forced to follow the same tradition as others because then there wouldn’t be any diversity or freedom.