The Other in the Mirror 13

Immigration is still the greatest form of flattery.

Jack Paar, comedian. attributed

Without other, there can be no self.

Wellman (1993: 244)

The price of admission

When fears about the upswing in immigration began to peak in the
nineteenth century, the metaphor of the melting pot became popular with
journalists. Perhaps the idea of a common, unified, united and unvarying
American culture sold a lot of magazines; certainly it seems that people
took comfort in the idea. All the odd, disruptive, unsettling cultures filing
through Ellis Island and San Francisco would soon be stripped down and
remade into something American. This is the goal of assimilation, where
the less powerful group loses the traits that make it different, including its
language (Dicker 2008: 53). A comparison of political cartoons over space
indicates that regardless of the stigmatized immigrant group, whether
Irish, Guatamalan or Kenyan, the imagery and discourse strategies are
remarkably similar.
Who were these immigrants who held on to their own cultures and
languages so stubbornly? Figure 13.1 is derived from census figures for
the year 1900, and it indicates that the new immigrants – primarily from
Italy, Germany, Great Britain, and Scandinavian – settled primarily in the
cities of the Northeast. More than a hundred years later, many still
consider this concept of one America – an assimilated Anglo-Saxon
America and a linguistic Utopia – as possible and desirable.