What America Is: On Michael C. Steiner's "Horace M. Kallen in the Heartland"
Michael C. Steiner | Horace M. Kallen in the Heartland: The Midwestern Roots of American Pluralism | University Press of Kansas | 2020 | 240 Pages
The debate over nationalism, multiculturalism, and how diversity affects national identity isn’t new. The United States has struggled with expanding its homegrown culture to include non-whites, women, and immigrants many times. Culture, and what America is, has been inevitably tied to place. The past shapes the present, as do newcomers—either Americans moving from one part of the country to another, or immigrants forsaking their homeland for the United States. Looking to the past offers lessons in recurring themes on culture, identity, and the meaning of America.
Michael C. Steiner, professor emeritus of American studies at California State University, Fullerton, captures this in his short biography of a little-known philosopher, Horace M. Kallen in the Heartland: The Midwestern Roots of American Pluralism. In Heartland, Steiner draws out how Kallen’s experiences in Madison and Chicago, and the diversity of immigrants he met across the Midwest, gave him new insights on how a country as vast as the United States could maintain a cohesive identity without destroying its local and regional particularities. He does us a favor by resurrecting an overlooked philosopher whose ideas on American pluralism are still fresh.
Steiner’s subject, Horace Kallen, was a Harvard-educated Jewish American philosopher whose time in Madison, Wisconsin during the 1910s shaped his conception of cultural pluralism. Kallen was influenced by the pragmatism of William James and the secular Zionism of Louis Brandeis. James’s distrust of “faceless nationalism” and “absolute uniformity” pushed Kallen to embrace variety and regionalism. Meanwhile, Brandeis’ appreciation for Jewish history and its secular heritage made Kallen active in Midwestern Zionist circles as he built a vibrant network that connected Jewish thinkers. The philosopher Alain Locke, Father of the Harlem Renaissance, also exerted an influence, though Kallen’s “significant blind spot” on race remained; Locke’s vision of cultural pluralism, which embraced racial, national, and ethnic differences, was decades ahead of Kallen’s.
As Kallen lived and traveled around the Midwest and back home in the Northeast, he worked out his conception of pluralism. He saw cultural pluralism as “the idea that it was perfectly possible to identify as both American and something else,” in Steiner’s words, and that meant celebrating the “United States as a ‘democracy of nationalities,’ a nation of nations.” Steiner argues that Kallen’s concept of cultural pluralism had three core parts:
The immutability of ethnicity as a positive “psycho-physical inheritance” for any given group of people from their ancestors;
The need to picture the United States not as a melting pot, but as a “symphony of civilization,” with each ethnicity and nationality playing its part to harmonize together;
The role of geography and regionalism in sustaining cultural pluralism as bulwarks against a dominating nationalism.
Kallen distanced himself from the immutability of ethnicity by the 1950s, favoring learned “social heritage” rather than the seemingly predetermined narrative of “biological heredity”.
In seeing the U.S. as a symphony of nationalities, Kallen was reacting to the popularity of the “melting pot,” made famous from Israel Zangwill’s play about a Russian Jewish immigrant family who survived the Kishinev pogrom. Zangwill’s conception of the melting pot rejected multiplicity for unity, rather than a patchwork of nationalities and ethnic neighborhoods across the land.
Kallen rejected Zangwill’s idea of giving up an old identity for a new one, even in the service of eliminating conflict and hatred. He didn’t see division and conflict among many people, but many American identities that combined and cooperated in different ways. The variety was a strength for the country, a symphony of melody and harmony never before heard. Where Zangwill saw a land of immigrants as newly born Americans, Kallen saw a role for keeping more of the past and embracing what made those immigrants distinctive.
Kallen’s cultural pluralism is celebratory and affirmative, holding in high regard both ethnic pride and local/regional pride. The rivalries of ethnic neighborhoods preserved cultural practices and social connections. They also served as sources of local and regional vibrancy. Traveling from the Midwest to New England, or from the Pacific Northwest to the South, would showcase significant variety.
But while Zangwill’s “all-destroying melting pot” has lost its luster, Kallen’s cultural pluralism has also lost ground to a new rival; multiculturalism, as Steiner quotes historian Stephen Whitfield, “has spurred a revisionist reading of the American past that emphasizes cruelty, exploitation, even genocide.” While cultural pluralism gives a foundation on which to build, multiculturalism is a critical stance that seeks to destroy or deconstruct the status quo as illegitimate. As ethnic neighborhoods have disappeared and national culture becomes less varied than in Kallen’s day, cultural pluralism’s vitality has suffered and its standard-bearers have disappeared. A multicultural approach has become the default in schools across the country, from K-12 to higher education. The veneration of the past is over—now, the focus is on finding what in the past is problematic. The masses on Twitter who look for problematic tweets, or mobs who tear down statues for being symbols of historic oppression, have been taught to be critical to a fault.
Complicated figures of the past don’t automatically deserve amnesty for their cruel acts, but a cultural outlook obsessed with identity and injustice is sinking sand upon which to build national cohesion. The melting pot may have been too reductionist, too inflexible to accept the many differing types of Americans, but multiculturalism struggles to leave the past in the past and encourages a dangerous nihilism, perpetuating grievances that Zangwill’s melting pot wanted to move beyond.
Here, Kallen’s cultural pluralism offers a useful middle ground: regional differences. “America is Europe with the quarrels left out,” Kallen argued; he saw the country’s vastness and different historical developments as adding “diversity to diversity,” and spurned the nationalism implicit in the melting pot in favor of the already-existing regionalism. The exemplary American, in other words, should be re-imagined as many exemplary Americans: the New Englander as distinct from the Southerner, and the Appalachian as distinct from the Californian. Creating national cohesion begins with recognizing local and regional differences, not forcing everyone to live like a New Yorker.
This pluralist conception of an American also counterbalances a nationalist instinct. The prominence of local and regional attachments over a national one is an implicit rebuke of conformity. It fosters a healthy respect for difference that allows citizens of one state to live as they see fit. It’s an American response to chauvinism and imperialism. It’s also a defense against a critical multiculturalism that cannot give a positive answer to “what is America?” America is the variety of its people, who live different lives, value different parts of the past, and are united in a belief that they have the right to control their destiny and care for the place where they live.
Steiner’s biography of Kallen does a service to the Midwest: as Kallen’s life and ideas remind us, the Midwest is not where culture and thought go to die. The possibilities that came from American expansion meant new cities and states could develop, free of the restrictions of the east. Today, as the Midwest deals with a decades-long population decline and the struggle to rebuild its cities, it’s often portrayed as a barren and fading region. That’s not true today, nor was it true a century ago. Indeed, to understand what American history really is, the Midwest is where we should go for a revival.