Whither Melt?

Above is the Schoolhouse Rock video for "The Great American Melting Pot," a lovely ode to immigration & its role in populating America.  It's one of the songs I'll play on tomorrow's Self Help Radio, though I don't think I'll talk about it much.

I still love it, as I love much about Schoolhouse Rock, although this particular one has some troubling elements to think about once you grow older.  (Not as much, thankfully, as the one about manifest destiny.)  For one thing, the rosiness of the song is bittersweet when you take high school American history & learn about nativist movements (not to mention just watching the news today with regards to "illegals" from Mexico).  For another, it completely ignores two important groups (although one of them is mentioned in the "recipe" that Lady Liberty thumbs through during the chorus) & those are the enslaved Africans who didn't want to come here in the first place, & the natives who were already living on the North American continent, & who were killed to make room for the predominantly white Europeans who arrived.

That's a funny thing, isn't it - how children are taught almost-mythic history until the time they can presumably grasp more complicated subjects.  I am reminded about learning about World War I in middle school - we just glossed over it - but it baffled me.  The Germans, like in the easier-to-understand World War II, were the bad guys, but they weren't Nazis yet.  For example, though they sank the Lusitania, they did it because we were supplying their enemies.  I couldn't wrap my head around why America would go to war simply because an Archduke was assassinated a couple of years before.

Chances are, no one had yet been allowed to broach the subject of "imperialism."  Nowadays it's understood that World War I was a war between imperial powers, & America chose sides when it finally (against popular support, & breaking Wilson's campaign pledge) decided to join the fray.  Nothing good came out of it, & it directly led to Hitler coming to power.

I think it's the same thing with the Schoolhouse Rock video.  You want to make children believe that this America was a remarkable place that not only welcomed people looking to make a better life, but also that America regularly celebrated them.  Never mind how the Irish & Germans were treated in the mid-19th century, or the Italians & Russians in the late 19th century, or the Chinese pretty much all the time, or the Vietnamese in the late 1970s, or the Mexicans ever since I can remember.  That'll come later.

It's a lovely little myth that I wish everyone grew up with, because it's certainly colored how I've felt about immigration.  "What good ingredients, liberty & immigrants."  Lynn Ahrens wrote that, & it's a nice (almost) rhyming couplet.

My wife tells me it used to make her happy because the grandmother in the animation has a "Kiss Me, I'm Polish" button, & her parents & she are Polish.  That's the magic of the short - it made people who were already here proud of their country, & people who identified as the children of immigrants proud of their parents.

One of the Youtube comments says that children are now taught that America is less a "melting pot" than a "salad bowl."  I wonder if that's meant to help people preserve their own cultural identity, since the components of a salad are more readily identified singularly; things in a stew do tend to mush together.  I don't know.

Children don't like salads all that much, though.  It seems a metaphor that may have some problems.