590
DWIGHT MACDONALD
aftermath destroyed the New England tradition almost as com–
pletely as the October Revolution broke the continuity of Rus–
sian culture. (Certain disturbing similarities .between present–
day American and Soviet Russian culture and society may be
partly due to these seismic breaks, much more drastic than
anything in European history, including the French Revolu–
tion. ) The New England culture was simply pushed aside by
history, dwindling to provincial gentility, and there was no
other to take its place; it was smothered by the growth of mass
ill-dustry, by westward expansion, and above all by the massive
~igration
from non-English-speaking countries. The great
metaphor of the period was the melting pot; the tragedy was
that it melted so thoroughly. A pluralistic culture might have
developed, enriched by the contributions of Poles, Italians,
Serbs, Greeks, Jews, Finns, Croats, Germans, Swedes, Hun–
garians, and all the other peoples that came here from 1870
to 1910. It is with mixed feelings one reads Emma Lazarus's
lines on the base of the Statue of Liberty:
Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore,
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed, to me:
I lift my lamp beside the golden door.
for indeed these
were
the poor and tempest-tossed, the bottom–
dogs of Europe, and for just this reason they were
all
too
eager to give up their old-world languages and customs, which
they regarded as marks of inferiority. Uprooted from their
own traditions and cultures, offered the dirtiest jobs at thl!
~uv.:est
pay, the masses from Europe were made to feel that
their·only hope of rising was to become "Americanized," which
meant being assimilated at the lowest cultural (as well
liS
economic) level. They were ready-made consumers of
kitsch.
A half century ago, when the issue was still in the balance,
Randolph Bourne wrote:
