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Dragoş Manea

Professor Bogdan Ştefănescu

The Rhetorical Construction of National Identity

13 January 2012

The Coming Superman: Anarchist Nationalism in

Israel Zangwill’s The Melting Pot

Few texts have had as much impact on the American imaginary, yet remain as

critically neglected in recent times, as Israel Zangwill’s 1908 play The Melting Pot. This

critical indifference can be attributed to reason as sundry as the rise of multiculturalism (at

odds with the play’s avowedly assimilationist and post-ethnic message) or a general shift in

taste away from the play’s bare-faced romantic sentimentalism and melodrama. For the

purpose of this essay, I am for now content to note the decrease in critical interest and delve

no further into the area of reception theory. I will, instead, attempt to offer the play the

academic attention it has sometimes lacked and argue for it as one of the representative texts

of American Anarchist Nationalism, endeavouring to examine the play’s emblematic

metaphor of the crucible, the suggested locus of American identity, as well as to take a

closer look at the way in which the play is emplotted – at its underlying narrative structure.

This essay will primarily draw on Hayden White’s rhetorical/tropological approach to

history (transplanting it, as it were, to the realm of fiction) and on Bogdan Ştefănescu’s

methodological clarification of White’s master tropes, those “hidden mechanisms that

prefigure [the] four basic ideologies […] on which any intellectual construction rests.” (On

the Discrimination of Nationalisms).

Before I begin my analysis proper, it might prove fruitful to linger a while on the

history of the play’s central metaphor – that of the melting pot or crucible – and to look at

its development and at the variegated ways in which it has been used. The metaphor of

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melting together dates at least as far back as of J. Hector St. John de Crèvecœur’s Letters

from an American Farmer (1782), which first imagined the nascent American subject as

[…] either an European, or the descendant of an European, hence that strange mixture of

blood, which you will find in no other country. He is an American, who leaving behind him

all his ancient prejudices and manners, receives new ones from the new mode of life he has

embraced, the new government he obeys, and the new rank he holds. He becomes an

American by being received in the broad lap of our great Alma Mater. Here individuals of all

nations are melted into a new race of men, whose labours and posterity will one day cause

great changes in the world. (55)

For de Crèvecœur, American identity is one of becoming, rather than being, markedly

distinct from that of Europe in that it allows for the creation of an imaginary space where

one national identity can be exchanged for another. While this imaginary space must not be

understood as a site of negotiation in a Bhabhian sense – it implies no give or take,

engenders neither dialogue nor contestation, the European subject merely receives and

internalizes the norms and prejudices of his new land – it is nevertheless crucial in

prefiguring the possibility for such a site, a possibility first given voice to in Israel

Zangwill’s The Melting Pot.1

To get the full picture of what Zangwill was doing we must return the play to its

original context: a time of great social upheaval in America, when new waves of harder to

integrate immigrants such as Jews or Poles were arriving en masse, and an ideology of

American Nativism, centered on WASP values, was fast burgeoning (cf. Kantowicz 453) –

an ideology that threatened to subvert the discourse of assimilation to suit its own needs.

1 It was Ralph Waldo Emerson who came closest to first coining the term, when, under the influence

of the Age of Industry, turned Crèvecœur’s metaphor of melting into the “smelting pot,” although his remark

would remain unpublished until 1912 (cf. Gleeson 23). Frederick Turner, another important 19 th century

American thinker, first coined the “crucible” to describe that other great liminal space: the frontier (cf. 85).

Still, “the melting pot” as such did not go into general usage until shortly after Zangwill’s play (cf. Gleeson

23).

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Zangwill’s play2 breathed new life into metaphor of mixing and melting, reconceptualizing

American identity not as something that is static and received from above, but rather as

something that is in a constant process of transformation and negotiation, in which the

immigrant, and not the native, plays the central part. This, albeit naïve, constructivist

understanding of national identity presages the theories of Benedict Anderson, to name but

one world famous proponent of social constructivism, but has remained, to the best of my

knowledge, curiously unremarked upon in the critical literature.

Proving this thesis requires two things on my part: first, to give ample evidence that

the play actually transmits such a message and, second, to show that the messenger – here,

the play’s main character, a young Jewish-American composer who sermonizes about the

crucible and dreams of writing the great American symphony – is legitimated within the

narrative structure of the play, and not a figure of derision as such characters are often wont

to be. The former, I believe, will comprise the bulk of my textual analysis and will become

quite clear in time, so permit me to start with the latter by drawing on Hayden White’s

conceptualization of the four archetypal story forms or Modes of Emplotment – romance,

tragedy, satire, comedy – each of which structures the events of the story so that their

meaning may be understood in a certain way (which is only one way among many and

depends as much on the events themselves as on the author’s preferred Mode of

Emplotment). The archetypal story form employed by The Melting Pot is the romance,

which Hayden White describes as follows:

2 It should be noted in passing that the play was a massive success at the time of its release, as

audiences in Chicago and New York found themselves entranced by the play’s sentimental sermons and

grandiose outpourings of emotion to such an extent that extemporaneous renditions of the national anthem

often broke out. In the public sphere, debates about its ideological content flared up, as the The Melting Pot

came under scrutiny from Nativist (cf. Zangwill and Nahshon 245) and Cultural Pluralist critics alike (Biale

25).

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The Romance is fundamentally a drama of self-identification symbolized by the hero's

transcendence of the world of experience, his victory over it, and his final liberation from it

— the sort of drama associated with the Grail legend or the story of the resurrection of Christ

in Christian mythology. It is a drama of the triumph of good over evil, of virtue over vice, of

light over darkness, and of the ultimate transcendence of man over the world in which he was

imprisoned by the Fall. […] Romance and Comedy stress the emergence of new forces or

conditions out of processes that appear at first glance either to be changeless in their essence

or to be changing only in their phenomenal forms. (Metahistory 8-9, 11)

Somewhat divorced, perhaps, from narratives as grand as those of Christianity, the play is

nevertheless a story of transcendence, as David Quixano overcomes a series of challenges to

prove both his worth as a man and his vision of the world (inextricably joined in the motif of

the great American symphony); this series of challenges includes overcoming the trauma of

the pogrom of Kishineff (emblematic of Europe, the “fallen” world he must leave behind),

the courting of young Vera Revendal, an idealistic social reformer of Russian descent, who,

unbeknownst to him, is the daughter of the man who led the aforementioned pogrom

(emblematic both of the necessity of inter-ethnic marriage within the melting pot, and of

leaving the past – Europe, again, but also Russian-Jewish ancestral prejudices – behind), a

courting which is further complicated by the appearance of another suitor, Quincy

Davenport, Jr.3, the rich lay-about son of a famous titan of industry and the only character

actually born in America (emblematic of the decadent WASP upper class, enamored with all

things European, whose place immigrants such as David need to take in the machinery of

the crucible). A number of antagonistic relations – governed by the trope of antithesis – are

starting to emerge: Europe-America; Jews-Russians; immigrants-decadent natives, but their

purpose here, I would argue, is not to define a national ethos, but rather to further the

3 One should note that their names – David Quixone and Quincy Davenport – are phonetically similar,

if inversed – an amusing foreshadowing of their later symbolic reversal of roles (the immigrant becoming the

American).

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tension that drives the main plot forward; these antagonistic relations all vanish at the

moment of transcendence: Europe dissolves into America, Jews and Russians kiss and

embrace, the immigrant replaces the native; it is at the moment of transcendence, of Happy

Ending, that David’s speeches are legitimated and the vision of American nationalism

inscribed within becomes, undeniably, also that of the play.

White associates the romance as a Mode of Emplotment with Anarchism as Mode of

Ideological Implication (cf. White 29), and the reason why is not hard to grasp: they both

value transcendence as an end-goal, the identification of the self with the collective (or the

nation) via the power of metaphor; I will now turn to Bogdan Ştefănescu’s “On the

Discrimination of Nationalisms,” as it offers a more cogent analysis of the inter-relation

between archetrope and ideology, especially in the case of rhetorical analysis. For

Ştefănescu, Anarchist Nationalism is a,

type of self-identification [that] is irrational because it works intuitively through empathy and

discontinuous since it configures the uniqueness of a nation and is entirely indifferent to

extraneous social impositions. […] Convinced of the natural harmony and consubstantiality

of the members of a community, the Anarchic Nationalist engages in introspection. He hopes

to discover the unitary essence of a nation in the individual (usually himself) and in atomic

cultural manifestations. […] The fundamental trope of Anarchism and its version of

Nationalism is Metaphor. Through metaphor, Anarchism prefigures a quintessential unity of

the individual and the collective, of the concrete and the abstract, of perception and

conception, of the practical and the contemplative before these pairs could have been

separated into antinomies. (On the Discrimination of Nationalisms)

David Quixano is constructed as the Anarchist Nationalist par excellence, his overt status as

a romantic composer (rejecting both reason and the written word) places him outside the

boundaries of logocentrism and abstract – rational – thinking; it is from this position that he

formulates his grand vision of America,

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[…]America is God's Crucible, the great Melting-Pot where all the races of Europe are

melting and re-forming! Here you stand, good folk, think I, when I see them at Ellis Island,

here you stand

[Graphically illustrating it on the table]

in your fifty groups, with your fifty languages and histories, and your fifty blood hatreds and

rivalries. But you won't be long like that, brothers, for these are the fires of God you've come

to—these are the fires of God. A fig for your feuds and vendettas! Germans and Frenchmen,

Irishmen and Englishmen, Jews and Russians—into the Crucible with you all! God is making

the American.

MENDEL

I should have thought the American was made already—eighty millions of him.

DAVID

[…] No, uncle, the real American has not yet arrived. He is only in the Crucible, I tell you—

he will be the fusion of all races, perhaps the coming superman. (Zangwill and Nahshon 288)

His speech is predicated not on material concerns – on the social dimension of assimilation

or its actual effects – but on the ideal, spiritual dimension (God) that he believes to regulate

the crucible – the locus of American identity. The choice of becoming an American – of

stepping inside the crucible, as it were – is understood as the one prerequisite of American-

ness, a choice that David, for one, has already made. The unitary essence of the nation is

thus discovered both in the individual (David in his role as prophet), and in the grand atomic

cultural manifestation of assimilation, which is supposed to seamlessly incorporate men and

women of different ethnicities, regardless of their past prejudices. Since it is a continuous

process (the real American has, after all, yet to arrive), the assimilated self is forced to

identify not with the result, but with the process itself. The melting pot and America become

inseparable.

Another representative quote for the Anarchist Nationalist mindset is to be found

right before the end of the play, after the protagonist has emerged triumphant and the

rhetoric of the melting pot has thus been legitimated by the narrative structure,

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DAVID

[…] There she lies, the great Melting Pot—listen! Can't you hear the roaring and the

bubbling? There gapes her mouth

[He points east]

—the harbour where a thousand mammoth feeders come from the ends of the world to pour

in their human freight. Ah, what a stirring and a seething! Celt and Latin, Slav and Teuton,

Greek and Syrian,—black and yellow——

VERA [Softly, nestling to him]

Jew and Gentile——

DAVID

Yes, East and West, and North and South, the palm and the pine, the pole and the equator,

the crescent and the cross—how the great Alchemist melts and fuses them with his purging

flame! Here shall they all unite to build the Republic of Man and the Kingdom of God.

The metaphor of the melting pot serves to nullify the antinomies of East and West, North

and South, Christianity and Islam, and return America to a state of near Adamic sanctity4.

Social compliance and cooperation are neither coerced from above, nor rooted in the

systematic redress of societal ills, but rather the result of a deep empathetic/sentimental

bond engendered by the divine process of assimilation. One is reminded of Hayden White’s

description of Anarchists as “inclined to idealize a remote past of natural-human innocence

from which men have fallen into the corrupt "social" state in which they currently find

themselves” (31) – for David Quixano, the melting pot represents exactly such a return to

righteousness.

Looking closely at its hackneyed plot and overwritten prose, it is perhaps a bit hard

to understand why Israel Zangwill’s The Melting Pot has left such an enduring legacy upon

4 Of course, I do not mean to intimate that this search for Adamic purity originates with Zangwill; it

has, in fact, long been a feature of American Anarchist thought, influencing the work of writers such as

Whitman and Emerson (cf. Eliade 100); the ideal of living apart, under God, may very well be traced back to

the puritans.

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American culture, popularizing perhaps the premier term it uses, even today, to describe its

society. The one answer I feel somewhat secure in offering is that it represents, above all

else, an almost perfect rhetorical construction: the narrative structure of romance, the

ideology of Anarchist Nationalism, the archetrope of metaphor, the language of sentiment,

all merge flawlessly together in transmitting its message of merging flawlessly together. It

is, perhaps, one of the few cases where form and content truly overlap.

Works Cited

Biale, David. "The Melting Pot and Beyond: Jews and the Politics of American Identity." In

Insider/outsider: American Jews and Multiculturalism. David Biale, Michael

Galchinsky, and Susannah Heschel, Eds. Berkeley: University of California, 1998.

17-33. Print.

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Eliade, Mircea. The Quest. History and Meaning in Religion. Chicago: University of

Chicago. 1984. Print

Gleason, Philip. "The Melting Pot: Symbol of Fusion or Confusion?" American Quarterly

16.1 (1964): 20-47. JSTOR. Web. 13 Jan. 2013.

Kantowicz, Edward R. "Ethnicity" in Encyclopedia of American Social History. Vol 1.

Mary Kupiec Cayton, Elliot J. Gorn, Peter W. Williams, Eds. New York: Charles

Scribner's Sons, 1993 453-466 (18-31)

Ştefănescu, Bogdan. "On The Discrimination of Nationalisms: The Rhetoric of Identity in

Romanian Culture." Rhetorical Strategies of the Literary/Cultural Discourse on

National Identity. N.p., n.d. Web. 13 Jan. 2013. <http://stefanescu-

optional.blogspot.ro/2009/10/published-in-krytyka-no.html>.

Turner, Frederick Jackson. "The Significance of the Frontier in American History (1893)" in

A Nineteenth-Century American Reader. M. Thomas Inge, Ed. Washington: United

States Information Agency, 1990: 80-85 (47-49)

White, Hayden. Metahistory. Baltimore & London: The Johns Hopkins University Press,

1973;

Zangwill, Israel, and Edna Nahshon. From the Ghetto to the Melting Pot: Israel Zangwill's

Jewish Plays : Three Playscripts. Detroit: Wayne State UP, 2006. Print.