America

He might burn a philosopher because he was heterodox; but he must accept a barbarian because he was orthodox. And we see, even in modern times, that the same Church which is blamed for making sages heretics is also blamed for making savages priests. Now in a much vaguer and more evolutionary fashion, there is something of the same idea at the back of the great American experiment; the experiment of a democracy of diverse races which has been compared to a melting-pot. But even that metaphor implies that the pot itself is of a certain shape and a certain substance; a pretty solid substance. The melting-pot must not melt. The original shape was traced on the lines of Jeffersonian democracy; and it will remain in that shape until it becomes shapeless. America invites all men to become citizens; but it implies the dogma that there is such a thing as citizenship. Only, so far as its primary ideal is concerned, its exclusiveness is religious because it is not racial. The missionary can condemn a cannibal, precisely because he cannot condemn a Sandwich Islander. And in something of the same spirit the American.  From the What I saw in America reading. [Pg 9]

                The passage explains the diversity in America due to the America government allowing foreigners from all of the world to become citizens. If they follow the American policies regarding immigration than they can be and American citizens. I thought it was interesting when he stated “the dogma that there is such a thing as citizenship.”  In my opinion that’s true because America has a lot of citizens who were not born here. In fact I wonder do we have the most citizens here out of all the countries who weren’t originally citizens of the country. 

This country stands for freedom and diversity. Therefore America is the perfect country for someone to move to who want a place to call home away from home due to the mixtures of cultures this country has historically. I chose this paragraph because I think it explains the American culture perfectly.  Which leads me to ask what the American culture is?  Because I don’t think we no longer have one even though we stick to the American traditions and holidays.  We might just be the melting pot due to the diversity and the mixing of cultures. The paragraph below I think also explains the new American culture in more detail from the Trans-National America reading.

To face the fact that our aliens are already strong enough to take a share in the direction of their own destiny, and that the strong cultural movements represented by the foreign press, schools, and colonies are a challenge to our facile attempts, is not, however, to admit the failure of Americanization. It is not to fear the failure of democracy. It is rather to urge us to an investigation of what Americanism may rightly mean. It is to ask ourselves whether our ideal has been broad or narrow--whether perhaps the time has not come to assert a higher ideal than the "melting-pot" Surely we cannot be certain of our spiritual democracy when, claiming to melt the nations within us to a comprehension of our free and democratic institutions, we fly into panic at the first sign of their own will and tendency. We act as if we wanted Americanization to take place only on our own terms, and not by the consent of the governed. All our elaborate machinery of settlement and school and union, of social and political naturalization, however, will move with friction just in so far as it neglects to take into account this strong and virile insistence that America shall be what the immigrant will have a hand in making it, and not what a ruling class, descendant of those British stocks which were the first permanent immigrants, decide that America shall be made. This is the condition which confronts us, and which demands a clear and general readjustment of our attitude and our ideal.