Word: crevecoeur
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None of these is uniquely American. All take on a peculiarly American cast. "What, then," asked a visiting Frenchman, Hector St. John de Crevecoeur, back in the 1780s, "is this American, this new man?" The things and images in these pages represent some of the ways in which Americans themselves have created their partial and sometimes contradictory answers to that riddle...
When J. Hector St. John Crevecoeur praised the "strange religious medley" he observed in late 18th century America, he could hardly have imagined the full orchestral symphony of faiths that resounds in the U.S. two centuries later. The world has never seen a nation as religiously diverse as the U.S., which becomes ever more so each year under the impact of new immigrants. In addition to the various mainstream Judeo-Christian faiths that populated the original colonies, America now encompasses 700 to 800 "nonconventional" denominations, according to J. Gordon Melton, who monitors the proliferation for his Encyclopedia of American Religions...
That is all a far cry from the narrow spectrum of mostly Christian believers so celebrated by Crevecoeur, who foresaw "religious indifference" spreading from one end of the continent to the other. Where that would lead, he wondered, "no one can tell; perhaps it may leave a vacuum fit to receive other systems." In America's third century, that vacuum has been filled to overflowing...
What then is the American, this new man?" asked French immigrant Hector St. John de Crevecoeur in 1782. Two hundred ten years later, many Americans answer, "No one." America has always treated its ethnic and racial minorities abominably. The only consolation they have for being shut out of the mainstream is that they should never have wanted to join it in the first place. Happily -- what with multicultural education and bilingualism -- the very concept of a mainstream is being junked...
...John Adams, immigrants will "get assimilated to our customs, measures and laws: in a word, soon become one people." This was the ideal that a century later Israel Zangwill crystallized in the title of his popular 1908 play The Melting Pot. And no institution was more potent in molding / Crevecoeur's "promiscuous breed" into Washington's "one people" than the American public school...