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clan, asserted the ascendancy of manners over institutions, or that
he ascribed to personal speech "positively the history of the national
character, almost the history of the people," or that he spoke of the
"ancestral circle" as if kinship were the only means to transmit that
national character and history.
It was as ifjames, who could imagine nearly everything, had in
this instance neglected imagination itself: kinship as construct and
covenant, kinship imagined- and what are institutions if not in–
vented kinship circles: society as contract? In the self-generating
Enlightenment society of the American founding philosophers, it
was uniquely the power of institutions to imagine, to create, kinship
and community. The Constitution, itself a kind of covenant or imagin–
atively established "ancestral circle," created peoplehood out of an
idea, and the public schools, begotten and proliferated by that idea,
implemented the Constitution; and more than the Constitution. They
implemented and transmitted the old cultural mesh. Where there
was so much diversity, the institution substituted for the clan, and
discovered- through a kind of civic magnetism- that it could trans–
mit, almost as effectively as the kinship clan itself, "the very core of
our social heritage."
To name all this the principle of the Melting Pot is not quite
right, and overwhelmingly insufficient. The Melting Pot called for
imitation. Imagination, which is at the heart of institutionalized
covenants, promotes what is intrinsic . I find on my shelves two old
textbooks used widely in the "common schools" James deplored. The
first is
A Practical English Grammar,
dated 1880, the work of one
Albert N. Raub, A.M., Ph.D. ("Author of'Raub's Readers,"Raub's
Arithmetics,' 'Plain Educational Talks, Etc.'"). It is a relentless vol–
ume, thorough, determined, with no loopholes; every permutation
of the language is scrutinized, analyzed, accounted for. It is also a
commonplace book replete with morally instructive quotations,
some splendidly familiar. Each explanatory chapter is followed by
"Remarks," "Cautions," and "Exercises," and every Exercise includes
a high-minded hoard of literary Remarks and Cautions. For in–
stance, under Personal Pronouns:
Though the mills of God grind slowly, yet they
grind exceedingly small;
Though with patience He stands waiting, with
exactness grinds He all.
