By: nicolás bajo santos  (Page 3/11)

J. Héctor St. John Crévecoeur, writer and agronomist of French origin, asked in his book, Letters from an American Farmer (1782): Who is the American? He reflected thusly:

He is either an European, or the descendant of an European, hence that strange mixture blood, which you will find in no other country. I could point out to you a family whose grandfather was an Englishman, whose wife was Dutch, whose son married a French woman, and whose present four sons have now four wives of different nations. 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 (Gordon, 1978, pp. 190-191).

The Open Door Policy, which prevailed in the first three quarters of the 19 ^th century, was a reflection of this faith that “all could be absorbed and all could contribute to the sprouting of a national character ”(Handlin, 1959, p. 146) . However, some reacted firmly in opposition to the nationalist movement against immigration. The writer and poet Ralph W. Emerson wrote in his magazine:

I hate the narrowness of the Native American Party. It is the dog in the manger. It is precisely opposite to all the dictates of love and magnanimity; and therefore, of course, opposite to true wisdom… Man is the most composite of all creatures… Well, as in the old burning of the Temple at Corinth, by the melting and intermixture of silver and gold and other metals a new compound more precious than any, called Corinthian brass, was formed; so in this continent –asylum of all nations— the energy of Irish, Germans, Swedes, Poles, and Cossacks, and all the European tribes –of the Africans and of the Polynesians— will construct a new race, a new religion, a new state, a new literature, which will be as vigorous as the new Europe which came out of the smelting-pot of the Dark Ages, or that which earlier emerged from Pelasgic and Etruscan barbarism . La Nature aime les croisements Nature loves hybrids. (Sherman, 1921, xxxiv).

The idea of melting pot also penetrated the academic world on behalf of Frederick J. Turner and other historians who dared to question the dominant thesis on the Anglo-Saxon origin of the American institutions. In an address presented to the Congress of the American Historical Association (Chicago, 1893), titled The Significance of the Frontier in American History , the young Turner developed the idea that the decisiveness in the configuration of democracy and the American institutions was not in the European inheritance nor in the coastal cities of the east, but in the experiences originated in the western borders, whose challenges acted as the dissolvent of the diverse nationalities involved in the adventure (German, Scottish-Irish of the 18 ^th century, and Scandinavians and Germans of the 19 ^th century) and promoted the formation of a “composed nationality” for the “American town.” “In the crucible of the frontier the immigrants were Americanized, liberated, and fused into a mixed race, English in neither nationality nor characteristics (Turner, 1920, pp. 22-23).” Years later, in an essay on the valley of the Mississippi, he made reference to the "wave of foreign immigration,” so strong that it has created “a composite American people whose amalgamation is destined to produce a new national stock (Turner, 1920, p. 190).”