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The Lost World of Pennsylvania Pluralism: Immigrants, Regions, and the Early Origins of Pluralist Ideologies in America
RUSSELL A. KAZAL
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IN DECEMBER 1903, a professor from Philadelphia traveled into that city's hinterland to give a talk on local history. Marion Dexter Learned had made a specialty of studying the Pennsylvania German dialect. Now he ventured out to a swath of rural Pennsylvania where many inhabitants—descendants of eighteenth-century German settlers—still spoke that dialect as their first language. There, in the small city of Lebanon, he urged members of a local historical society to help reconstruct the history of what today would be called Pennsylvania's ethnic diversity. |
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"There is no State in the Union where the races of Europe are so promiscuously commingled as in Pennsylvania," Learned told the society's annual meeting. "The Province of Pennsylvania was from the first a refuge for the oppressed and persecuted of all nationalities," he declared, before enumerating a "motley throng of aliens on the muster roll of Pennsylvania's sons from the first settlements to the present day," including American Indians, the English, the Scots Irish, Germans, Poles, Italians, and Russians, among others. "The great problem of the history of the present day," Learned continued, "should be to determine what each of these race elements contributed to the building of this great commonwealth."1 |
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In this out-of-the-way setting, Learned celebrated a Pennsylvania defined in group terms. He used an idiom of "races" and "nationalities" to portray a society founded on ethnic diversity, a diversity that extended down to the present and that only became more intense over time. Learned, that is, took a stance that aligned with what would come to be called "cultural pluralism": the idea that society "ought to sustain rather than diminish a great variety of distinctive cultures carried by ethno-racial groups."2 |
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Learned and people like him fit awkwardly, or not at all, in the historiography of pluralist ideologies in the United States. Depictions of ethnic diversity as a positive, formative, and ongoing American reality are generally not supposed to have existed as of 1903, certainly not when uttered by an old-stock Anglo-American such as Learned. Most accounts of the emergence of ethnic pluralist thought begin with "cultural pluralism" as propounded by a handful of intellectuals during the 1910s. More precisely, they begin with Horace Kallen, who in 1915 portrayed the United States as becoming a federation of nationalities, and Randolph Bourne, who called the following year for a "Trans-National America." Kallen and Bourne's pluralism is commonly cast as a "radically new" departure from mainstream expectations that European immigrants either assimilate to Anglo-American ways or fuse, melting-pot fashion, into a new and singular American type. Commonly, too, cultural pluralism has been depicted as limited in its reach, during and after the 1910s—"a minor movement in the history of the American academic and literary intelligentsia."3 |
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This common portrait has its strengths. Cultural pluralism did come to national notice through essays Kallen and Bourne published in nationally circulated magazines; Kallen himself coined the term "cultural pluralism" in 1924. Moreover, theirs was clearly a radical stance when set against the rising tide of nativism that would culminate during the 1920s in severe restrictions on the immigration of southern and eastern Europeans. Historians have equally, and accurately, recognized the Eurocentrism of Kallen and Bourne's pluralist essays, which were at best unconcerned with the exclusion of Asian immigrants and the marginalization of African Americans and other non-Europeans.4 |
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